Tag: communism

Bob Stewart, Ho Chi Minh and the Tattered Red Flag of the Communards.

L-R: Bob Stewart, Unknown, Nikolai Antipov, Grigory Zinoviev, Kliment Voroshilov, Ho Chi Minh, Unknown.
Partially visible behind L-R: Avel Yenukidze.

One of the benefits of researching a distinctive looking ancestor is that they’re easily recognisable to others studying the same topic. During the summer holidays, Maurice Casey, author of Hotel Lux (out now in paperback!) spotted Bob Stewart’s familiar broken face in a photograph taken in Moscow dating from 1924 when he was the CPGB representative to the Communist International. He could be seen, furthest left, in a group lined up behind a banner proclaiming, “ Long Live the Global Union Of Soviets!” Above them is a flag with a hammer and sickle in the centre of the globe which is framed by sheaves of wheat.  The group look as if they’re in the middle of the chorus of The Internationale, The Red Flag or a similar revolutionary anthem. Bob has a broad smile on his face. Of the others, the only individual I could recognise was Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, essentially my great grandfather’s boss at the time. In his email, Maurice pointed out the figure second from right, “a young delegate of the French Communist Party, originally born in French Indochina: today known as Ho Chi Minh.” Frankly I was stunned. Despite his attendance at Lenin’s funeral, late night consultations in the Kremlin with Stalin and his visit to China in the 1950s where he met Mao Zedong, I had no idea that Bob had ever encountered the man who would become one of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century. Even my teenage son was impressed having studied the Vietnam War in GCSE History. “They named a trail after him!” was his initial reaction. Yes – also an avenue, a square, several monuments across the world and a whole city.

The photograph encapsulated something I’ve grown to love about the communists of the 1920s. The optimism. The hope. The unwavering belief that they would change the existing state of things. Life would be better for millions. A lifelong abstainer from alcohol Bob would nevertheless would find life at the epicentre of this struggle intoxicating. It’s something I marvel at, especially in today’s atmosphere of grim resignation of successive governments that – no –  nothing in society can ever be improved. Here’s more cuts. Here’s more crackdowns. Nothing to be done. The romance of this image of my forebear and his comrades – and it is Romantic – was only heightened when Liz Wood from the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University pointed out on Bluesky where the image had come from. It was taken on the 6th of July during a massive celebration when representatives from the French Communist Party symbolically handed over a tattered red flag which had flown over the Paris Commune in 1871 to be placed in Lenin’s mausoleum which was then under construction.

In an eyewitness account published in the US version of The Daily Worker the journalist Anna Louise Strong describes how a four hundred thousand strong crowd poured into the October Field just outside Moscow. The ceremony took place on the International Day of Co-operation and the first anniversary of the signing of the new Soviet constitution. I imagine it was also organised to rally the workers after an appropriate period of mourning for Lenin after his death in January that year. The solemn grief of the funeral which took place in ice and snow months before was replaced by sunshine and a carnival atmosphere.

The Passing of a Banner to the Moscow Workers by the Communards on Khodynka Field in Moscow by Isaak Brodsky.

The fraying flag perforated by bullet holes had been taken down from the barricades of the Paris Commune over fifty years before and had been passed along various socialist groups in the intervening years in the manner of a religious relic. It had left the French capital with a farewell parade of one hundred thousand workers and was greeted on it’s arrival in the worker’s state by magnificent scenes captured stirringly in an oil painting by the artist I.I. Brodsky. I’m fairly sure Bob is depicted as one of the distant figures on the middle row of the tribune. It’s probably me being sentimental but it does correspond with the photograph.

Yeah, I reckon that’s Bob on the middle platform second left.

Strong’s narrative outlines the speeches, the songs, the performances and the sporting displays of this public holiday but at the centre of events is the handover of the scarlet standard.

“For nearly five hours they were marching 10 abreast into Hodinka field now named the Field of October. A great tribune 70 ft. square, with a pyramid of platforms one above the other, held the delegates of the Communist International, the central executive of Russia and the Moscow city government. Massed around the tribune were hundreds of encircling factory delegates bearing their factory banners of embroidered red silk or velvet topped with metal stars or sickles. Around these was a wide aisle and then came the hundreds of thousands of spectators with eight wide aisles formed through their midst by single lines of soldiers.

A festival spirit pervaded the assembly. Men and girls were raised aloft on the arms and shoulders of their friends, and balanced above the throngs. They led the cheers and salutations and even made speeches.

The worn red banner was borne down one of the aisles by the delegation of French Communists. It was lifted aloft to the highest platform of the tribune, where it was visible for half a mile away. President Kalinin received it.”

The next day a Russian newspaper carried the message, “We will give it back to France when we have carried it throughout the world.” A sentiment which should still make any self-respecting leftist go all husky and brave and, yes, I did find myself welling up. There had been a world to win.  If only we could leave it there. But of course we can’t. When this photograph was taken, capturing my great grandfather full of confidence that a fairer society was just around the corner,  very bad things had already happened. Very bad things were happening at that time. And very, very bad things were going to happen in the future.

Another image from the day. Bob Stewart furthest left.

I’m currently working on the period in Bob’s life where this hopefulness turns to tragedy. The 1930s and 40s. A few enquiries on social media helped identify some of the other figures on the platform. Nikolai Antipov became Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union but during the Great Purge he was arrested, expelled from the Communist Party and sentenced to death.  A similar fate was in store for Avel Yenukidze. Grigory Zinoviev, the Comintern Chairman, was tortured, forced to confess to outlandish crimes during the Trial of the Sixteen and shot in the back of the head. Apart from Bob and Ho Chi Minh, the only other identified person to survive until old age was Marshal Kliment Voroshilov who emerged from Stalin’s maniacal purging of military officers unscathed only because he was an enthusiastic participant in the process having personally signed 185 execution lists.

These names can be added to this list of Bob’s comrades, friends and family I made to try and make sense of the chaos of a few short years:

Aug 1936: Kamenev (and Zinoviev) executed.

January 1937: Karl Radek’s show trial. Murdered in prison in 1939.

February 1937: Sergo Ordzhonikidze kills himself.

March 1937: Arrest of David Petrovsky, a former Comintern liaison with CPGB and friend of many British communists including Bob. Shot in September.

June 1937: Grigory Kaminsky, The People’s Commissar for Health and Bob’s daughters’ brother-in-law was arrested. He was executed in February 1938.

August 1937: Rose Cohen, David Petrovsky’s wife and close family friend of Bob’s arrested. She had given up her British passport and become a Soviet citizen. Shot after a twenty minute trial in a closed court in November.

June 1938: Anatole Kaminsky, Bob’s son-in-law arrested. The family presumed he was dead but he was executed in 1941 as the Nazi forces began their attack on the USSR.

November 1938: Nannie Stewart, Bob’s daughter and Anatole’s wife makes it back to London alive with her baby son Greg.

The madness of it all. Whatever the words I find to relate all this, they will be inadequate.

Alan Stewart.

PS: Thanks (one again) to Maurice Casey and to Liz Wood and to anyone else on Bluesky or Twitter who helped identify Bob’s comrades on the platform. Anna Louise Strong’s account can be read in full here – ‘Tattered Red Flag of Paris Commune Flung to Breeze in Moscow as Workers Cheer’ by Anna Louise Strong from the Daily Worker. Vol. 2 No. 112. July 29, 1924. – Revolution’s Newsstand

‘Hotel Lux’ by Maurice J Casey.

I can’t let the year end without posting something about my favourite book published this year – Maurice Casey’s ‘Hotel Lux’. I’ve no time to write a proper review so these hastily written words will have to do…

One of the least edifying aspects of being a socialist is the tendency of some comrades always having to prove to those present that they are the most left wing person in the room. Last week I achieved this enviable position with practically no effort on my part at all. And me being only slightly to the left of Ed Miliband. The occasion was the presentation of the Biographer’s Club Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize for best proposal for a first time biographer for which I was nominated for my Bob Stewart book. I didn’t win but it was fantastic to be in the running. The event was held at Albany, a large Georgian apartment block in the heart of London’s Piccadilly, the previous residents of which include Wordsworth, Byron and Gladstone.

It’s an exclusive address. Apartments or ‘sets’ rarely become available for sale and, when the occasion arises, you would need to have several million and be able to convince the residents’ association that you were just the right kind of person to have as a neighbour. Families tend to put their names down for a place a few generations before they secure one. As a child of the lower middle classes I was somewhat out of my depth in these surroundings. My hosts could not be faulted, however. My partner and I were made very welcome, wine flowed and I spent the evening chatting to other guests about our biographical obsessions.

The subject of my own work did occasion several wary enquiries as to whether I was a communist myself. It was if they were worried that I was about to requisition the property on behalf of the proletariat or collectivise their Hampshire estates. I reassured anyone who asked that there hadn’t been a Marxist-Leninist in the family since my grandfather died in 1978. Most of the guests were placated but one elderly gentleman in and immaculate Prince of Wales check jacket and a rather fetching bow tie muttered to me, “Communism is a virus!”

I bridled a little at first, taking it personally, a potential family insult, before we both steered the conversation away from the controversial. Encounters such as this do reflect one of the dilemmas of this project. Getting to know my ancestors has been a privilege, I find so much to admire and to celebrate. However, though their beliefs were shaken in 1956, they were staunch defenders of Stalin. This is a hard pill to swallow. I can understand, even when I don’t share it, this gentleman’s reaction. When I began my research this inheritance seemed far too huge for me to do it any justice. The best commentary I’ve read on it has been in ‘Hotel Lux.’

The book’s main focus is the relationship between three revolutionary women who came to Moscow and stayed at the Comintern’s preferred lodgings in the early twentieth century. It’s an immersive read full of fascinating detail. Woven through the narrative are the author’s reflections on being part of the radical left tradition and how one should deal with the ramifications of Stalinism. Early on in his research in Moscow, Casey is asked by a University professor, “So, are you for the Romanovs or the Bolsheviks?” The author fumbles his answer and wishes he could have given the more considered response he came up with after the event.

“The Soviet experiment inaugurated by the Bolsheviks was the culmination of many projects for revolutionary emancipation that arose in 19th century Europe. For better or worse, I consider all those emancipatory projects a part of my political ancestry. This is a messy inheritance, one that includes revolutionaries embracing one another in  enthusiasm for a shared dream and former comrades sentencing one another to death in service to their cause. At the most basic level, the Romanovs did not want the world that I and others like myself desire. The Bolsheviks sought what I seek: equality. Therefore, when presented with this choice and within this context, I am for the Bolsheviks.“

This theme is developed during his research when he comes across that rare but not rare enough figure, a modern day admirer of Stalin.

“For two weeks, I made my way through the Comintern’s personnel files, folders where personal material relating to comrades and enemies of international communism was collated. I struck up an acquaintance with another English speaking researcher who regularly visited Moscow to work with Stalin-era materials. This researcher, I learned over coffee breaks, supported a resolutely hard-line form of communism. This gradually became clear over coffee- break discussions of our research topics. ‘Stalin was a man of great depth,’ he told me as I sat, disconcerted, before a disappointing cappuccino.

With one part of my mind thinking over the steel Memorial plaques I constantly saw on the walls of Moscow residential block,  our conversation turned to 1937 and the Great Terror. For those who saw communism as a dead idea, it was not merely the Great Terror but one of the many inevitable red terrors. Violent oppression was, according to this theory, the unavoidable outgrowth of left wing ideas. They could not be fulfilled without it: radical levelling required violent purging. Such determinist readings, including those made by proponents of a teleological Marxism, always seemed unconvincing to me through their wilful blindness to the extraordinary range of possibilities that exist in the past. In our conversation, my coffee break companion appeared to share with the anti-communists a belief in the inevitability of terror. He differed only in his approach to its desirability. He upheld the orthodox communist line: yes, mistakes were made, but the terror was ultimately necessary to defend socialism: counter-revolution needed to be met with all-encompassing violence

This interpretation of the terror, one I’ve encountered occasionally in left wing circles seemed to render socialism a cruel idea.  Yet I needed to confront how many of those I wrote about and researched people whose lives seemed to me so full of sympathetic moments accepted similarly cold logic. Before coming to Moscow I found it easier to see my people as those who courageously faced the firing squads without renouncing their ideals but now I could see more clearly that our political ancestry is never so neat. This was an admission that I tried to keep central in my mind once I returned to my work. I continued passing through fragments from a time when other paths seemed open, when dreams were not yet vanquished. I was learning to become more comfortable with murky moral complexity of revolutionary lives.“

Similar reflections are woven into the narrative as the book progresses and the protagonists and their families are affected in different ways by Stalinism. It’s an incredible piece of work and I’d encourage anyone to grab themselves a copy as soon as possible. If you’ve already read it buy it for friends and family for Christmas. It’s been invaluable to me as I contemplate the “murky moral complexity of revolutionary lives” of my own family.

Alan Stewart.