Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [120]
The historians had been the most consistently flourishing of the Party’s ‘cultural groups’, and a notably loyal one politically. Why did we – more than the writers, more than the scientists, groggy from the impact of the absurdities of Lysenko and official Soviet ideology – find ourselves in the front line of opposition from the start? Essentially, because we had to confront the situation not only as private individuals and communist militants, but in our professional capacity. The issue of what had been done under Stalin, and why it had been concealed, was literally a question about history. So were the open but undiscussed questions about episodes in our own Party’s history which were directly linked to Moscow decisions in the Stalin era, notably the abandonment of the anti-fascist line in 1939–41. So, indeed, was our own political attitude. As someone said on the day of our first rebellion: ‘Why should we simply approve Khrushchev? We do not know, we can only endorse policy – but historians go by evidence.’8
This accounts for our only collective intervention as a group in the affairs of the Party in 1956. We demanded a serious history of the CP. King Street, which, as I can now see in retrospect, was desperate to conciliate a troublesome bunch of intellectuals whom they nevertheless recognized as an asset, agreed to set up a commission to discuss the matter. Harry Pollitt, Chairman and unquestioned leader of the Party during our lifetime, Palme Dutt, the ideological guru, and James Klugmann, represented the leadership, I as group chairman and Brian Pearce spoke for the historians. (Brian, once a Tudor specialist, now a superb translator from French and Russian, had long been critical of the myths and silences of CP history. He was to leave the Communist Party for one of the Trotskyite groups.)
I recall frustrating meetings. Not that the historians were faced with a single co-ordinated line. Harry had admired Stalin and, like most old-time Party leaders, neither approved nor respected Khrushchev. He was a working-class leader of major stature with more charisma than any Labour Party leader except Bevan and, as an old boiler-maker, far more sense than Bevan of what the trade unions were about. His instincts and long experience made him sceptical of researchers on Party history. As a politician he knew that coroners’ inquests on ancient quarrels, especially among comrades still living, tended to cause trouble. As an old Comintern hand, he realized that a lot of things could not be told and some had better stay untold. None of us could have known then that in 1937 Pollitt had intervened in Moscow in defence of a former Comintern representative in Britain and his wife, who had just been arrested – possibly going up even to Stalin. This extraordinarily brave and honest step had landed him in serious trouble in those days of paranoiac terror. The Comintern considered replacing him as leader of the Party, and the scenario of a possible show trial was sketched out. He had been saved from the worst, with the aid of a British passport, by Dimitrov, and perhaps by the stubborn refusal under torture of the Comintern’s former organizational chief Osip Piatnitsky to make the required ‘confession’ implicating the designated victims.9 Would it have done the movement any good if someone had published this episode in the Party’s history,