Tag: Moscow

To Shape the World Anew.

It’s a week since the founding conference of Your Party and the less said about the mess of factionalism and wasted opportunity the better. However, it did put me in mind of another gathering that attempted to harness the potential of Britain’s left- the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. Here’s an extract of my account of it from the book I’m writing about Bob Stewart.

There’s a photograph in the CPGB archive at the People’s History Museum in Manchester depicting a large gathering outside London’s Cannon Street Hotel in 1920. It resembles the kind of yearly school photo they used to take at the better type of educational establishment during the early part of last century. The passing of a hundred years or so has lent these figures some semblance of respectability – if you didn’t know who they were then it would be hard to identify them as revolutionaries and a threat to the British state. Red flags and ushankas are conspicuous by their absence. The men are all in sober suits and ties and, for the most part, adhere to the code of the time that a gentleman is not fully dressed without a hat. The headgear on display ranges from formal looking homburgs, some egalitarian flat caps and even a couple of jaunty straw boaters. Possibly interlopers from the Fabians. The comparatively few women present look out from under wide brims and give the impression that they do not, under any circumstances, suffer fools gladly. Everyone looks as if they have something extremely important on their mind. Bob is there, instantly recognisable with his broken face, sitting on the cobbles front row, seventh from the left. As ever, he looks more serious and full of intent than anyone else. Everyone looks as if they have something extremely important on their mind. This was the Communist Unity Convention. Over a hundred and fifty delegates from all across the country drawn from over twenty different left wing groups. Although it was formalised the following year in Leeds, this last day of July was essentially the beginning of the  Communist Party of Great Britain. The following day, as the conference continued at a second venue, the International Socialist Club on East Road, Bob was voted onto the Executive Committee and became its Scottish organiser.

It had been two and a half years since the October Revolution. The Red Army was engaged in a brutal civil war repelling counter revolutionary forces aided by Western European allies.  This support stemmed from the worry that the worker’s state would default on loans made to Imperial Russia and that insurrection would spread across continents like a disease. Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, voiced his antipathy in visceral terms. In conversation with the Prime Minister David Lloyd George, he was purported to have said, “One might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks.” Publicly, he announced that the ideology should be “strangled  in its cradle.” Right wing groups such as the British Empire Union  toured the country to “campaign against Bolshevist propaganda.” A photograph in The Daily Mirror shows that this amounted to a small group of portly, middle aged men each resembling the cartoonish stereotype of a bowler hatted capitalist standing dourly in front of a carriage daubed with the slogan, ‘Britain for the British.’ The union flag was unfurled and one of their number meekly held a placard decrying the red menace. The ‘B’ word became the pejorative of the day. More often than not its application was ridiculous. Even Austen Chamberlain, the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer of the coalition government had his 1920 budget described as containing “the seeds of Bolshevism.” Any prospect of the mildest wealth redistribution would draw similar accusations. Appealing for greater harmony between Liberal and Conservative MPs, Lloyd George called for a united front against socialism. He emphasised his commitment to restoring the country through a “fair reward for individual effort” and damned the Labour Party’s commitment to “the doctrine of common ownership” as essentially the same as Lenin’s hated vanguard party. An absurd comparison but thanks to the extension of the franchise, Labour had emerged as the official opposition and so  would inevitably be subject to incessant outlandish claims such as this.

 If it attracted so much invective, what was it that drew some people towards communism in the 1920s? The answer is simple. For many, the shattering experience of The Great War was capitalism’s greatest crisis. As the population attempted to forge some kind of normal life in the years that followed they were assailed by a raft of social problems. What people got in actuality was far from what they thought they had been promised. At the beginning of the 1918 General Election Campaign, the Prime Minister had acknowledged the dire situation for many in the country. The war had been like a “gigantic star shell” illuminating the land. It had lit up “all the dark places […..] that we have never seen before.” The past four years of conflict had shown the “appalling waste of human material” in the nation. If people had been fed and housed properly and had lived in healthy conditions a million more men would have been fit for the services whereas there were millions “below par.” This was to be put right. Children could not be brought up in these conditions. After a death toll of millions in the battlefields of Europe he warned that there were, “more lives being lost and maimed through the atrocious social conditions that prevail, than through the terrors of this war.” The work of the nation was summed up in the memorable line, “What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.” Slums would be cleared, houses built and industry and agriculture revived. Stirred by this rhetoric, the electorate rewarded Lloyd George’s coalition with a landslide victory. The type of victory that, once the fuss has died down, can only ever disappoint and disillusion. Bob’s view was this:

“I came out of gaol in April 1919 and entered an entirely changed world from the one I had left. The heroes had returned from the war to find the golden promises of a land fit for heroes to live in had not materialised. Many were unable to find work. Many, when they found it, got low wages on which they could not adequately provide for their wives and children. The housing shortage became a serious social problem as the soldiers, married during the war, tried to set up house with their war-wives and young children. The landlords, taking advantage of the shortage, found ways and means to raise rents.

The Dundee I came back to had all these problems and more. Lack of work, low wages, unemployment, bad housing and a housing shortage, and to add to the confusion, thousands of war disabled demanding work and maintenance.”

The economy was nosediving and social reforms put in place as an insurance policy against another Petrograd were failing to lift people out of misery. In the light of this, communism offered a compelling vision of the world.

The birth of the CPGB was made possible by the creation of the Communist International. Also known as the Comintern or the Third International it was formed in Moscow in 1919 and it’s raison d’etre  was to advocate for a world revolution. Lenin believed that, unless there was a successful socialist uprising in Europe, all that the Bolsheviks had achieved would be crushed by the military might of its capitalist neighbours. To protect itself it would establish communist parties across the world and provide funding, instruction and training. The parlous economic state of much of the continent and the memories of the war still fresh in people’s minds meant that there was fertile ground for radical militancy. There were many eager to learn from the one band of Marxist revolutionaries who had actually achieved what others spent so much time discussing in smoke filled rooms or shouting about in front of factory gates.

In Britain, those others were the myriad of leftist groups that weren’t the Labour Party or the ILP. Veterans of the trenches and veterans of the anti-war movement. Trade unionists and suffragettes. All haunted by the horrors of recent years and united, in the grand tradition of British radicalism, by an intense distrust of each other. That aside, there was a feeling, which Bob shared that, with things the way they were, there should be more progress politically towards socialism. All had been galvanised by the events of October 1917 and began to hold talks to foster greater cooperation. The Comintern began to court several of these parties and Lenin secretly donated £500, 000 towards setting up the CPGB. A phenomenal sum worth well over £10 million today. As Francis Beckett noted in his history of the CPGB, Enemy Within, “Without Lenin’s continual encouragement, and the careful distribution of Soviet money among groups which had always been starved of funds,  the Communist Party would not have existed.” The Unity Convention, in the Italianate surroundings of a railway hotel, was the first fruition of that investment comprising of representatives from the British Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party, Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation and also from tiny organisations such as the Doncaster Worker’s Committee, Ferndale Socialist Society and Bob’s own band of socialist temperance campaigners. The sun had decided to shine after several days of rain. Things were looking up. The collapse of capitalism was surely imminent.

Amid a fug of pipe smoke, it was clear, when the first resolution was debated, that this new party would be closely modelled on the Russian one. The conference declared for a Soviet system as a means for the working class to achieve power. Lenin’s slogan, “All power to the Soviets!” from the October Revolution still had the capability to thrill or terrify. The term referred to the worker’s councils that had begun in 1905 and proliferated in 1917. Emerging from the factory floor, they were created to fight against the Imperial regime’s control of the workforce through strikes, direct action and also military force. After the Tsar’s abdication, the Petrograd Soviet played a key role in toppling the provisional government during the Bolshevik coup.  Those gathered in the room were convinced something similar could be achieved in Britain and that this would lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat. This concept was also much discussed and Bob admitted to the delegates that he did not know much about it and doubted whether anyone else gathered there did either, an early indication of how impenetrable the language of the CPGB could alienate even the most sympathetic listener. Still,  it was deemed a necessary step in order to achieve the party’s main aims – a society where the means of production would be communally owned and controlled. The conference also declared that they would ally themselves with the Communist International. Bob could not know at this point how this organisation would come to dominate his life.

There was a debate as to whether the Party should follow a Parliamentary route or whether it should be an armed revolutionary movement – the disenchantment many felt regarding the Labour Party’s reformist path was tangible. Not that it would prevent several futile attempts by the CPGB to affiliate with them in the immediate future.  A social revolution could not be delivered through the ballot box alone. And yet, “electoral action [would provide a] valuable means of propaganda and agitation.” Any elected representatives from the CPGB would be considered as having a mandate from the Party rather than the constituency in which they happened to sit. The majority of attendees wanted to get councillors and MPs elected but there were a few who enthusiastically advocated “the use of the gun” to achieve their aims. Given his experiences of the past three years, Bob was not among them. He said he often found the people who wanted to “shoot it out” to be the “worst stayers in the movement” and felt that such people seemed “unable to cope with the hard day to day grind of politics.” Bob rebuked one such comrade with the memorable line, “A great many people talk about guns who would run away when they saw one. I am more interested in folks having brains in their heads.” Bob went on to outline his argument further.

“Whether guns come soon, late or not at all, there will be times when it is far more revolutionary to refuse to have anything to do with guns. I think the provisional executive which is to be set up by the conference will be far wiser to devote themselves to building up such organisation as will make it possible to win the maximum of our party policy with the minimum of violence.”

In his account of the conference, Francis Beckett relates a story about how Bob attempted to get the Communist party to go down the prohibitionist path. The temperance movement had struck a chord with many of the comrades – alcoholism being one consequence of the hardship suffered by the poverty stricken and several saw abstinence as an essential part of their socialism. To Bob, prohibition was a revolutionary tactic.

“After the main resolution was carried, the stout sincere man with a sober moustache walked solemnly to the platform to ask the new Party to come out in favour of suppressing the manufacture of alcoholic drinks. Few thought much of the idea, but they liked Bob Stewart, so they referred it to the executive for action. In seventy-one years no action was ever taken.”

Sadly, this moment was left unrecorded in his memoir, Breaking the Fetters.

Alan Stewart.

RIP Diane Keaton.

Diane Keaton (1946-2025). Forget her superlative performances as Kay Adams in The Godfather movies. Forget Annie Hall. Remember her for her performance as Louise Bryant in Reds. That’s the one. We lost a comrade today.

Alan Stewart.

PS Obviously don’t forget her performances in The Godfather movies and Annie Hall but Reds is her best work and it is an amazing film.

Harry Pollitt and the Chamber of Bastards.

When we started this project on our great grandfather Bob Stewart, my brother and I both agreed that we thought there was much to admire about the man but also much to criticize. Although I’ve tried to steer clear of hagiography in my writing I probably haven’t been as critical on this blog as the subject deserves. Lately I’ve been working on Bob’s life during the Second World War. In my misremembered reading of Francis Beckett’s Enemy Within I had been under the impression that Bob had objected to the CPGB’s acceptance of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact – Stalin’s squalid arrangement with Hitler. Turns out I was wrong. He followed the Stalinist line. So disappointing. Below is part of the first draft of my chapter on this period. Thanks to Katherine Mackinnon from Glasgow, who sent me the material on Bob from About Turn – the transcript of the CPGB’s meeting about the non-aggression pact. I wouldn’t have been able to write about this without her help and you can find out about her work at kmackinnon.org.

Bob Stewart and Harry Pollitt in 1947. Photograph taken by Edith Tudor Hart.

A spectre had been haunting Europe. The spectre of fascism. During the 1930s this new doctrine, fusing myths of noble past eras with a disturbing sense of victimhood, tantalised nations still shattered by The Great War. Many looked to Mussolini’s rise the decade before and sought to emulate his example. It was time for an iron hand. A need for discipline and national pride. Paramilitary uniforms accompanied political violence. Parties with an authoritarian distaste of the masses and enthralled with notions of racial purity flourished across the continent from Portugal to Romania. For a time it seemed unstoppable. Hitler had come to power in 1933, Franco took Spain few years later. In Britain, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists were given a sympathetic hearing in the press for several years and attracted a membership of around 50,000. Reactionaries aghast at liberal advances in society found themselves a natural home.

Anti-fascism was the impulse that caused a new generation to gravitate towards communism. Whereas Bob’s politics had progressed to Marx and Engels via temperance, trade unionism and the anti-war movement, younger comrades viewed the world in which they found themselves with horror. A rising tide of cry bully dictators and the terror they’d bring. Communists were added to the long list of scapegoats that fascists believed were polluting society. Inspired by the Nazis, Mosely often denounced Marx to his followers, in part because of the philosopher’s Jewish heritage. Communists were often at the forefront of disrupting the British Union’s rallies and stopping them marching through Jewish areas to intimidate the populace.  By the middle of the decade the Comintern encouraged communists across Europe to form popular fronts with other anti-fascist parties with the aim of halting the spread of the far right. The CPGB, having exhausted its approach of decrying everyone else on the left as ‘social fascists’ threw itself into this new line. Campaigns to aid republican Spain or to challenge Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Adolf Hitler benefitted from drawing in a wider range of people. The party considered itself the bulwark against fascism. It had to be fought at every opportunity. Socialism or barbarism.  It was a rare edition of The Daily Worker that didn’t highlight the fact that Hitler was the greatest threat to the world.  Right up until the moment that he wasn’t. And everything turned upside down.

The volte -face was the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed on the 23rd August 1939. A treaty of non-aggression, it committed the USSR and Germany to ensure neither country made alliances with an enemy of the other. Russia had been an implacable foe of Nazism; it now supplied the Wehrmacht with fuel and grain. Many made justifications that Stalin was buying time in order to build up his armed forces in order to more readily combat the threat from Hitler but the grubby deal included  not so secret plans to carve up parts of Europe  between them. Germany invaded Poland from the West on the 1st of September causing Britain to declare war. Sixteen days later the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East. The British communists were caught in an unresolvable conundrum. Their opposition to fascism was genuine and strident but the leader they had held up as a paragon of all that was good and true, Joseph Stalin, was now arm in arm with Adolf Hitler.

In the second week of hostilities, the CPGB’s leader, Harry Pollitt, published a pamphlet that laid out his party’s position explicitly:

“The Communist Party supports the war, believing it to be a just war. To stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases while the fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe, would be a betrayal of everything our forebears have fought to achieve in the course of long years of struggle against capitalism…. The prosecution of this war necessitates a struggle on two fronts. First to secure the military victory over fascism, and second, to achieve this, the political victory over the enemies of democracy in Britain.“

On the day these words appeared Pollitt received a telegram from Moscow giving him instructions that the war was to be opposed. Stalin had instructed Georgi Dimitrov, the current head of the Comintern and one of Bob’s travelling companions on his first visit to Russia, that communist parties abroad should condemn their governments’ involvement in the conflict as imperialistic and, to keep Hitler on side, he wanted anti-fascist rhetoric to be minimal. Foreign communist parties were expected to correct their line immediately. Douglas Springhall, the CI’s British representative was on his way back from Moscow to clarify matters. On his return there followed a series of bad tempered meetings of the CPGB’s Central Committee to thrash out what they should do about the change of circumstances. Although Bob was not a member of the committee at this time he was seen as a senior voice in the party and attended the final two sessions.

Against the new line were Pollitt, J.R. Campbell and the party’s only MP, Willie Gallacher, figures who Bob was closely aligned with. Everyone else on the committee favoured following Moscow’s instructions which, as a travel weary Springhall admitted in the first meeting, amounted to the CPGB to not only highlight the imperialist nature of the conflict but to actively work for Britain’s military downfall. Revolutionary defeatism. When pressed on the possibility of fascism being imposed from within or without as a consequence of this Springhall confessed he had raised this question at the Comintern but had received only non-committal answers. A state of affairs which should have made the majority pause but, instead, the lemming like desire to adhere to Stalin’s directive was too strong to resist.

The hardline theoretician Rajani Palme Dutt opened the next meeting on the 2nd of October. He was the main proponent of the Stalinist line and began by fashionably traducing an old comrade – Harry Pollitt. The new policy needed to be accepted by every party member with absolute conviction and those that had misgivings should be mercilessly cleared out. It was “foul slander” that the CPGB was changing because of the Soviet Union. The reversal was necessary because, “our line was the wrong line.” He implied that Pollitt was a half-hearted vacillator and that the crisis had unveiled “dangerous tendencies in our Party.”  The duty of a communist was not to disagree but to accept. Reading the transcript of Dutt’s speech what springs to mind is not a key moment in the liberation of the international working class but, instead,  a badly acted one man fringe theatre production of Animal Farm performed to a minuscule audience in a tatty room in Covent Garden. Which is what it was. Gallacher was outraged. Never before had he listened to a “more unscrupulous and opportunist speech.” Pollitt assured his opponent that he would not be intimidated, “I was in the movement practically before you were born, and will be in the revolutionary movement a long time after some of you are forgotten.”

When Bob spoke up it was to deplore the manner in which the topic was being discussed. He was glad not to have been present at the previous session and, in defence of Pollitt, he was wary of “sledge-hammer demands for whole-hearted convictions and solid and hardened Bolshevism and all this bloody kind of stuff.” Aiming a barb at Dutt, he emphasised that the tone he had struck at the beginning of the meeting was “not a good way to start.” It was a very difficult situation that they were facing and they had to find a way through. Clarity was essential. And he was unequivocal, “I am for the line.” Over eighty years later, I wish his words had been different. He qualified his support – the thesis the CPGB had received from the Comintern had been very short and he anticipated a longer explanation of why this policy was necessary and correct but he was willing to accept it in the meantime. Part of his reasoning stemmed from his background as a conscientious objector. If they could stop the war the communists would, “be doing a service to the people of Europe and the world in general.” He also reflected on Winston Churchill’s address as First Lord of the Admiralty which had been broadcast the previous night. It was a month into the war and the statesman had described Russia as,  “a riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma.” It only acted in its own self-interest. In Churchill’s analysis, this might not be a wholly undesirable trait. He might have wished that the Russian Army had acted as friends and allies of Poland rather than its invader, but the Soviets were standing where they were because it was, “necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.” The invasion from the East had halted Germany’s designs on the Baltic states and Ukraine. A small silver lining. Bob imagined that the situation would bring about a “very definite searching of hearts even amongst the bourgeoisie.” His own contemplation had led him to an overly charitable reading of the situation.

“Is it not the case that in the workshops there is no serious antagonism at all to the Soviet Union having walked into Poland? In the first few hours there was, but after a little bit of thinking and after they saw the newspapers, with the peasants getting their landlords’ land, etc, then a different kind of attitude began to occur in the minds of the workers.”

Tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war were murdered by Stalin’s secret police, 22, 000 in the Katyn massacre alone. The Soviet occupation was marked by mass deportations to Russian Gulags and brutal repression. Bob’s comments, even in these early weeks, were as shameful as they were misguided.

The meeting dragged on until the next day in a belligerent atmosphere  but it was clear the majority were prepared to support the Comintern directive whatever misgivings they may have had. The Second World War was a conflict between old Imperial powers and should be denounced and opposed by communists everywhere. I am thankful that my great grandfather was not a member of the committee and could not participate in the final vote on the resolution the next day. His friends Pollitt, Gallacher and Campbell remained consistent in their anti-fascism and voted against. Bob would have joined sixteen of his comrades in adopting  a position endorsing Stalin and Hitler’s marriage of convenience which spat in the face of all they had campaigned for over the last decade. Once the meeting was over, Pollitt was no longer the leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain though his last act was to ask that the record show that Gallacher had voted with the majority. As the party’s only presence in Parliament he had to be seen to be following the line. Dutt took over as General Secretary in all but name.

Walking out of King Street that evening, mithering over what had just occurred,  Bob would have been greeted by the sight of London’s preparations for war. Barrage balloons beginning to dot the skyline like eerie sentinels. Railway stations crammed with duffle coated school children weighed down with kitbags and boxed gas masks being shepherded onto hissing steam locomotives hauling them away to safety and homesickness. Late afternoon in autumn took on a gloomier aspect with the street lights and neon advertising  extinguished in the blackout. A depressing and maddening day. It would be the last time he’d visit CPGB HQ for months. He’d not been coming in very often for a while. Through the tapped telephones MI5 kept track of people trying to reach him. They were often told that it was no good enquiring for him, that the only way to get hold of him was to visit him at home. He did not come in these days. Was he ill? No. As time went on there seemed to be some confusion over his whereabouts. In November one caller asked whether Bob was in London and received the reply, “I think he is.” Time and time again people were informed he wasn’t in and nor was he likely to be. He was no longer at King Street. Had he washed his hands of the whole lot of them after the rift? Or had he gone to ground?

Harry Pollitt used the free time he had unexpectedly acquired to write his memoirs, Serving My Time. In its pages he described the moments he shared with  my great grandfather in 1924 when, surrounded by snow and ice, they attended Lenin’s funeral in Moscow. The event was of paramount importance to them both.

As Bob Stewart and I stood there, we pledged ourselves and the Communist Party to which we belong  to prove worthy of our trust , and to build up in Britain a revolutionary party of which we could be proud. And Comrade Lenin would desire no greater tribute, no greater memorial , than the building up of a Communist Party in Great Britain that will lead the working class in the age-long fight to smash capitalism and achieve the emancipation of the workers.

How long ago that must have seemed.

Alan Stewart.

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

Comrades: Annie ‘Nan’ Stewart.

L-R Bob, Annie and Margaret Stewart. Photograph probably taken in Moscow around 1924.

Today’s post is about Bob Stewart’s youngest child, his daughter Annie who was my dad’s aunt.

Annie, otherwise known Little Nannie or Nan was born in Dundee on 30th November 1913. Her earliest memories would have been those of her father imprisoned for refusing to fight; her mother bringing up the family with the assistance of a legion of aunts and the contempt in which the general public held conscientious objectors such as Bob. Whether there was sympathy for the family among her neighbours I do not know but the common opinion that ‘conchies’ were cowards and traitors would have been part of the atmosphere that she grew up in. There was talk in the press of banning COs from positions such as teaching lest they contaminate the young and many, many similar stories. A law was even  passed in which they could be disenfranchised. Bob actually lost his vote in 1921, shortly after the Caerphilly by-election, when a jute merchant, John Willison, petitioned for him to be removed from the electoral register on the grounds that he had refused military service. Willison, a prominent Dundee Unionist, stressed that there was no political party behind his application and that he bore no ill will against Mr Stewart, it was simply that men of his ilk were “embittering people against doing their duty” and should face, “the full measure of the law.” So, from the time she was learning to walk to her first years at school Annie would have understood that her family stood for something and that the attacks these principles drew had to be stood up to.

L-R Harry Pollitt, Annie Stewart and Bob Stewart.
L-R Harry Pollitt, Margaret Stewart, Bob Stewart, Annie Stewart and Rose Cohen.

It was an unusual childhood. The Bolshevik revolution took place when she was four and it shaped the rest of her life. How could it not? In his study of CPGB members, Communism in Britain, 1920 – 39: From the Cradle to the Grave, Thomas Linehan points to the idea that the communist upbringing of ‘red diaper’ babies would help them withstand the future demands of capitalism but would also help prepare them physically and mentally to play a future role in the party organisation. It’s difficult not to view Annie as an example of this tendency. Bob went to work for the Comintern in 1923 and took Nan with him. At that time, travelling to the Soviet Union was not an easy task and not entirely legal. Whatever route Bob, Margaret and Annie took to get to their destination they would have risked arrest at certain stages and the journey would have been arduous and uncomfortable. The strangeness of leaving Dundee behind and settling in Moscow at the age of ten must have been overwhelming. In a Henry Sara slide taken at the Pushkin School she looks a little ill at ease and awkward amongst her classmates. However, the experience left her able to speak Russian – a language her parents never managed to learn.

Pushkin School: Nannie Stewart fifth from the right in the front row. Bob and Margaret just about visible in the back row. (Henry Sara Archive, Warwick Modern Records Centre)

The young Annie’s fluency with Russian is the focus of this remarkable news report in the Aberdeen Press and Journal dated 3rd June 1925:

WOMEN COMMUNISTS

Police Raid Glasgow Meeting.

GREETINGS IN SCOTS AND RUSSIAN.

Glasgow police raided yesterday the conference there of women Communists.

A demand for the names of the delegates failed to produce the desired results, and a request that each representative should speak produced remarks in braid Scots, Esperanto and Russian.

GLASGOW, Tuesday. Glasgow police raided the congress of women Communists in St Mungo Hall, Glasgow, to-day, five minutes before the dispersal of the meeting. Forty uniformed and plain-clothes men surrounded the hall, the plain clothes men entering the congress room. The visit of the police was regarded by the women as a comedy.

The plain-clothes men entered by the South York Street door. They swept aside the inner guard, and were confronted by Mr William Gallacher, who objected to the intrusion, and only four detectives and the aliens’ officer entered the congress room.

A Bit of Scots.

Immediately the presence of the police was known the women rose and greeted them by singing the “Internationale.” When quiet was restored, the police demanded the names of all the delegates present. This was refused, and the officers then asked that all the women present speak in turn, the request being made apparently for the purpose of detecting any foreign accent. This caused some hilarity, and Mrs Helen Crawfurd who presided shouted in braid Scots, “It’s a braw, bricht, meen-licht nicht the nicht, pipe clay, up the lum. Camarachanchoo.” Greetings in Esperanto were given by a delegate of Irish birth from Alexandria and an 11 year old girl, Nannie Stewart, daughter of the Communist candidate for Dundee at the last general election addressed the detectives in Russian. With her parents, she lived for some time in Russia and had been a pupil in a Russian school for about a year.

The officers then withdrew. Their search was obviously for the purpose of discovering if any foreign delegates, whose presence had been banned by the Home Office, were in the meeting.

The Girl’s Greeting.

Little Nannie Stewart told the Press that what she had said to the police was, “I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t care.” Asked what the police replied, she said, “I don’t think they understood me, because they never answered.” A remarkable sidelight on the intensity of the Communist instruction of the young was revealed in her remark, “They are a lot of moral cowards, any way.” The statements in Esperanto were interpreted simply as, “I thank you for your visit.”

Some of the women Communists were in terror, and Mrs. Crawfurd remarked, facetiously, that she thought it was a great compliment to the women’s section of the Communist Party that, while four detectives were considered sufficient for the main congress the previous day, over 30 officers were sent to the women’s conference. Others laughingly described the raid as “A rare sporting finish.”

The police refused to make any official statements.

I adore this article. As much as her youthful commitment to Marxist-Leninist revolution is apparent in this encounter, many decades later she became a resolute anti-communist – even going so far as to join the Conservative Party. And, after what she experienced – her husband murdered in Stalin’s purges with her and their baby son escaping by the skin of their teeth – who could blame her?

After Bob, Annie is the most important character in the book I’m writing. It wasn’t until recently that I realised I have never seen a photograph of her as an adult. I will have to do some more digging.

Alan Stewart.

PS – Many thanks, once again, to Maurice J Casey. This time for turning up the photographs of the Stewart family and their friends in Moscow in a newly discovered cache of letters belonging to Rose Cohen. For the upteenth time buy his book Hotel Lux!

Comrades: Rab Stewart.

This was a first draft of a chapter from the biography of Bob Stewart I’m currently writing, tentatively titled Everything You Get Must Be Fought For. Much of the material here will make it in the rewrite but the chapter as a whole is, unlikely to survive. I thought I’d post it here as I loved learning more about my dad’s uncle. Many thanks to Rab’s daughter, Linda – I hope we can meet up again soon. Thanks also to Ros Sitwell who found material on Rab in The Daily Worker – it was enormously helpful.

Bob had named his first child after his father. When his second came along in 1906, he gave him his own name. To avoid the muddle of having two Roberts, two Bobs in the household, the younger son was forever known as Rab. However, as if to add to the confusion, Rab also went on to marry a woman named Margaret.

Rab became active in the trade union movement at the age of 16 when he began working as a printer which, in Dundee, meant working for the press baron DC Thompson. Today, of course, the company he founded is famous for being the publisher of The Beano and The Dandy – something commemorated by statues of cowpie connoisseur Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx situated in the city’s High Street. However, in the 1920s Bob and other communists viewed it as a bastion of the reactionary right wing press- its conservative leaning title The Dundee Courier being particularly critical of their activities. Although, to be fair, as Bob mentioned in his memoirs, the Courier was also pretty vituperative about Winston Churchill during his time as an MP there.

The 1926 General Strike was a turning point. Rab evidently played his part and was victimised for it. Thompson was furious with the strike and the damage it did to newspaper revenues. As a punishment he would only allow those who took industrial action to return if they made a formal apology and presented a document proving that they had left their union. Rab was one of those who lost their jobs. The sacked printers set up their own paper The Dundee Free Press which ran for around a decade. It’s likely that Rab had some involvement with this although in 1927 he came to London and found a job with the The Daily Chronicle and joined the National Society of Operative Printers. He became a shop steward or, as they were termed in the printing trade, a Father of Chapel and throughout the Second World War was an organiser for the Daily Worker League, drumming up funds and support for the CPGB’s paper.

Though our conversations about his family were rare, my dad always spoke of his uncle with great affection. My brother recalls an incident during the 1980s which shows the influence he had. When we were younger our family took both The Observer and The Sunday Times – the latter for balance. This lasted until the Wapping dispute when Dad refused to buy the Murdoch paper ever again in solidarity with striking printworkers. A small act from a man who was vaguely left but not party political.  One afternoon during the summer holidays my brother was working as a pot boy and heard raised voices in the main bar. Dad was in a heated discussion with a holidaymaker from London.

It turned out that he was an electrician working at Wapping, and very pleased with himself he was too. Dad was politely refusing him further service, and the exchange went like this:

Electrician: I can spend my money how I bloody well please!

 Dad: Yes squire, but I don’t have to take it. Goodbye.

As the man left with his family, muttering under his breath and the regulars sat in stunned silence, Dad said out loud, “I don’t mind a man scabbing, we’ve all got to eat, but he was proud of it. My uncle was Father of Chapel.” The bar then returned to its normal sleepy midweek hum, as Dad, now aware that my brother had seen this, told him, “Don’t tell Mum I lost my cool, I shouldn’t have done that.”

However, as well as his lifelong career in the printing trade, Rab, along with the rest of the family,  also dipped his toe into secret work. Letters in various files in the National Archives reveal that in the mid 1930s he was living in Moscow and attending the International Lenin School. The ILS was a Comintern initiative founded in order to shape the outlook of generations of communist leaders from all over the world – in JT Murphy’s words it was to be “a real revolutionary university capable of training revolutionary workers for real Communist leadership.” Its most famous graduate was probably Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito followed by the GDR’s Erich Honecker. The idea was to fashion a revolutionary elite free from the ‘taint’ of social democracy. There was an academic curriculum focussing on subjects such as Philosophy, Politics and Economics although I imagine this was very unlike Oxford University’s PPE as taken by UK Prime Ministers David Cameron and Liz Truss and right wing Labour figures such as Rachel Reeves. There were further courses such as Trade Union Organization and the History of the Russian Communist Party but, most significantly, the school also provided training in practical underground political work.

 Over the years the CPGB sent around 160 comrades to the ILS and, in keeping with the Comintern’s impatience with the British party’s less than stellar record in achieving revolution, the British recruits tended not to impress. Nevertheless, MI5 and MI6 maintained a keen interest in anyone found to have attended the school and letters from Rab during his time at the ILS appear in Bob’s files. First of all, the security operatives were focussed on establishing that the pseudonym Robert Ness written on the envelopes was indeed Rab. All the ILS students had to adopt aliases but the family gossip content of the letters was a fairly good clue as to the true identity. Of course there was little mention of Rab’s activities at the school and scanning them for secret messages turned up nothing. Vague references to old friends and various visitors coming and going were of interest but there was nothing conclusive. However, while Military Intelligence found little to interest them within these pages, to me they provide a glimpse about  Rab’s life and the lives of other British communists in the USSR including his sister who had moved there at around the same time.

In the grand tradition of the British traveller, one of the first things that Rab encountered in a far-off land was a debilitating bout of dysentery. In June 1934 he wrote to his parents warning that there would be a period when there would be no letters from him as he was about to get very busy. His work had suffered as a result of his poor health and he mentioned that he’d lost weight but felt he was on the mend. He noted that he had to be careful of his diet but that it wouldn’t be difficult as most things were “barren” and he stuck to basic foods like rice and fish. Partly due to his illness he hadn’t yet seen “any of our old friends” at that point and was keeping abreast of current affairs as he could get all the newspapers there. He described events in Britain as ‘lively’ but Moscow was, in his view, the opposite apart from the rescue of the Soviet Arctic explorer Otto Schmidt and his team whose vessel, the SS Chelyuskin, had become trapped in polar ice and sunk. A daring air rescue was planned and, after weeks of surviving on the ice floes, the scientists were given a heroes’ welcome along with the rescuers. Unable to join in due to his illness, Rab relayed what he heard about the event from friends and wrote of the “tremendous reception” the explorers were given and the huge parade thrown in their honour.

Rab had rallied enough to attend celebrations for the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in the autumn that year. He mentioned the excitement of watching thousands of people passing through the square and being involved in the various celebrations. He was kept very busy but he did feel a sense of isolation about being so far from his family. In response to a letter from Bob which included a lovely account of my father at one years old –  “ A mouthful of teeth and we toddling legs off which he falls every few steps but he is rather a good-natured kid and seems used to the bumps.” – Rab replied that he loved hearing about “Bill’s kid” but it brought home how much he missed his own daughter, Moira and had written to her in the hope of a reply. In a subsequent letter he writes of his relief to hear from her and her mother.

However, what comes across in Rab’s letters is how much the cultural life of Moscow, such as it was, meant to him. In one letter he laments that, after attending a film festival, there were no new films for him to see. He urged Bob to catch Chapaev as soon as he was able. A war movie by the Vasilyev brothers about a Red Army commander from the Civil War, it became one of the most popular Soviet films of all time. It was well regarded and won prizes abroad in the USA and France.  It is also apparently, Vladimir Putin’s favourite film. Rab also recommended a comedy Jolly Fellows and mentioned that he’d seen Rene Claire’s On the Roof of Paris once again after reminding his father they’d seen it at the Rialto some years previously. He went on to remark that the festival had created tremendous interest abroad and there were great musical and theatrical programmes planned. He mentioned that Paul Robeson had written very favourably about the Moscow theatre and anticipated many more performers coming to the USSR. Rab was very much looking forward to this. Music was his first love – both as a listener and as a performer. Bob had written in a previous letter of Rab and his wife keeping them all entertained singing into the “wee sma’ oors” and his surviving daughter, Linda, recalls a man whose favourite thing was to browse the record stores after work and arrive home with a new LP under his arm. He also had quite a fine voice. In a letter from March 1935 Rab’s sister described him singing the Robeson standards ‘Old Man River’ and ‘Pretty Little Fellah’ – presumably ‘Mighty Like a Rose’ – at a party thrown for a visiting Harry Pollitt. It sounds like quite a raucous evening. Before the party Nan, her husband and Rab had gone to the theatre and saw the first three acts of ‘Eugin Onegin’ before making their way to Pollitt’s bash. According to Nan, Pollitt, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, remarked that Rab’s voice would “make all the women there want to have babies.”

The letters from this time reveal quite a bond between Rab and Nan. It must have been a comfort to have family so close by in a strange place when he could barely speak the language. He called round often, joking that it was mainly to pinch her notepaper. The pair of them tease and gossip about each other in their letters home but ultimately Rab’s time in Moscow was relatively brief. It was Nan who had decided to make her life out there. A decision she would soon come to regret.

Forty Splendid Years

Bob Stewart pictured on a visit to Moscow in 1961.

The following article celebrating forty years of the Communist Party of Great Britain was written by Bob Stewart and appeared in the September 1960 issue of the journal Labour Monthly. At the time Bob was 83 years old and had ‘retired’ from active work three years earlier. The piece is written from the perspective of being one of the last men standing’ from the formation of the CPGB in 1920.

“HISTORY will record that the birth of a Communist Party in Britain was the outstanding event of the 1920’s. The fact that it was nearly three years after the Bolshevik victory of 1917 indicates the difficulties encountered and overcome before it saw the light of day. Small as the event appeared, it was nevertheless the political culmination of more than a hundred years of British working class struggle against the rule of the capitalist class. These years had inscribed indelible victories as well as many defeats on the banners of the oldest working class movement of Europe.

Along the years it built the modern Trade Union movement which despite weakness, sectionalism and betrayal is still a powerful weapon and a training ground for militant workers. It embraced Chartism which meant the intrusion into politics of revolutionary ideas and practices on a mass scale. It eventually cast off the manacles of the Liberal Party even if it is not vet free from their illusions. It gave birth to the Labour Party out of the strange assortment of Fabians, Independent Labour Party, Social Democratic Federation which became the British Socialist Party, the latter becoming a leading component of the Communist Party, and was itself affiliated to the Labour Party. Due to historic circumstances which I have not space to detail, the Labour Party has rejected a scientific outlook. It rejected Marxism, abhorred revolution, and has spent half a century confusing and befuddling the working class with hopes that capitalism would change its spots or at least let the right wing leaders of Labour paint them a different hue.

Necessarily capitalism imputed foreign parentage to the C.P. as it had done to Chartism and to early Socialist or other progressive movements. The mud refused to stick. The C.P. was bone and flesh of the British working class. Of course it had and is proud of its international connections. That also is a fine tradition of our class. The more immediate circumstances attending the birth of the C.P. may be thus described. Prior to 1914-18 and during the First World War there were outside of the official Labour Party many of the most class-conscious and militant workers who were split up amongst a number of more or less Marxist sects, e.g., the Socialist Labour Party, Workers’ Socialist Federation, South Wales Socialist Society, and many lesser bodies in various localities. These were largely concerned about the purity of their gospel. There were also the shop stewards, the workers’ committees and many unattached rebels, New Age readers, Guildsmen, etc. Amongst them were great agitators and strike leaders who had with Tom Mann and others headed the struggles of workers on Merseyside, Clyde and elsewhere before World War I.

August, 1914, saw official Labour, like official Social Democracy, dip their flags of red and appear in the flamboyant colours of the capitalists they were supposed to fight against. A sorry spectacle indeed, relieved if but a little by the few who kept the flag aloft. The course of the war brought hellish experiences to the workers. Along came Military Service Acts, which gave rise to an Anti-Conscription movement, Munitions Acts, Rent Acts, high prices. Out of these struggles the clamant need for unity, discipline and wider understanding was arising here, as in every country.

Then came 1917, and the glorious victory of the Russian workers and peasants. The movement in Britain was reborn out of the fires of war. On July 31 and August 1, 1920, after months of negotiation, a convention was brought together in London by the Joint Provisional Committee of the Communist Unity Conference, representing chiefly British Socialist Party, Communist Unity Group, South Wales Communist Council. (The unification was completed in the early months of 1921. The Leeds Congress in January, 1921, brought in the Scottish Communist Labour Party, whose leading members included William Gallacher and J. R. Campbell; while the left wing of the Independent Labour Party, including Shapurji Saklatvala, came in a month or two afterwards.)

At this founding convention in August, 1920, well-known figures included Bob Williams of the Transport Workers Federation, A. A. Purcell, Colonel Malone, William Mellor, Joe Vaughan, Arthur McManus, Tom Bell, William Paul and Albert Inkpin. Of the Provisional Executive elected I fear I am now alone. Some have done their day and passed on. Others sought other fields and have faded from my memory. The convention was serious and full of zeal, sharply divided on the question of affiliation to the Labour Party, but when Paul and Hodgson had finished debate and affiliation was carried the Conference agreed in unanimity. I recollect that after the convention finished on the Sunday, a group comprising Bill Hewlett of Wales, Bill Jackson of Sheffield, Frank Simpson of Perth, George Anderson of Coatbridge, Fred Douglas and myself from Dundee were steered by Jock Laurie of Aberdeen to what he called the ‘Merble Airch’. Before long we were spectators at a B.S.P. meeting. Jock said, ‘the speaker’s gey cauld’. Off he went and how he managed it I had not time to find out before I was hustled through the crowd and found myself making what I suppose must have been the first report back of the first Party Conference, which was received with great enthusiasm. Then to the train, where fate had delivered a very orthodox clergyman into our carriage, and did we baptise him!

That was our send-off. What have we to show for our Party over the years? Not enough but still a lot. We played our part in pulling capitalism’s hands off Russia. We backed and fought for British Miners when officialdom turned their backs and even their guns on them. We expelled even big Bob Williams for his part in the Triple Alliance betrayal of the miners. The defeat of the miners opened the way for attacks on engineers, textile-workers, seamen, etc. In all of these struggles our members were active. In the heat of these struggles some succumbed and left us for easier paths. We fought the opportunist heritage brought in by local Councillors or personal egoists. The Government of the day soon recognised the new type of Party. Raids were frequent, our General Secretary, Albert Inkpen, was arrested and sentenced, active workers, especially in the minefields, were doing time. Our organisation was still lamentably weak and sectarian. Printers were blackmailed into refusing to print our articles and pamphlets. We started our own printing works. Our editors faced libel and sedition charges, so that we needed a double shift, sometimes a treble one.

By 1924 we had our first taste of Labour Government, rather sourish at that. Johnny Campbell put the cat among the pigeons and very much upset MacDonald & Co. By 1924 we began to put new life into the trade unions through the Minority Movement whose secretary was Harry Pollitt, later Arthur Horner. So 1925 opened new economic battles. Government was compelled to subsidise mineowners and assume emergency powers. To prepare for the next round they arrested twelve of our leading members. They were found guilty of conspiracy to utter seditious libels. Six, with previous convictions, were given twelve months.

Six were offered release if they would forswear their allegiance. But one and all refused and served six months’ sentences. Further attacks on the miners were more than decent workers were prepared to put up with, so came the General Strike and wholesale arrests, office raids. This greatest confrontation of the classes in Britain in our time sent their leaders shivering to sell the pass and leave the miners to their fate. Fierce punishment befell the workers in consequence of this betrayal. Victimisation was common and hard, hard times kept knocking at the door. The miners survived their desperate ordeal. . . .

1929. Once again a Labour government which succumbed to American capitalist pressure. The defection of McDonald, Thomas and Snowden and their descent into a ‘National Government’ did not stop the economic rot. Unemployed relief was cut to the bone. These tested our membership and they withstood the pressure and nobly headed or fought in the ranks of the unemployed, joined in hunger marches, fought the police and won concessions. Meantime the German monopolists had been set on their feet again by American and British investments. But being unable to rule in the old way, they washed out the remnants of democratic practice and forged a rod of iron for Hitler to wield while they cheered him on to the fight against the growing Soviet power. Fascism reared its black flags in Britain too, but the working class showed its strength and routed it. In 1935 we scored a real Parliamentary success by the return of William Gallacher who by his Communist attitude did much to add to his own and the Party’s prestige. We led the fight and formed the British section of the International Brigade which saved the honour of the British working class in the battlefields of Spain. 1939: that fatal year that saw the outbreak of that most vicious war of the centuries. Here also our Party gave freely of its dearest and best to bring the war to a victorious end. When it ended the British workers’ stored-up anger burst through to the defeat of Churchill and placed their hopes on the Labour Government, which shooed them off with meagre reforms and played a sorry second fiddle to American big business so that once again our Party is leading the fight against further war.

Now we have established the Party as a potent factor in British politics. Our numbers have grown. We have lost many brave and able leaders but we have raised able successors. Our camp of Peace grows daily and despite provocation we know that the forces of Peace will prevail. All our efforts are turned in that direction. Our literature is improving daily. Our Daily Worker is known the world over. We are no longer the feeble body of propagandists that we were in 1920 but a strong virile Party worthy of the class we find it an honour to serve.”

Bob Stewart, ‘LABOUR MONTHLY’, September 1960.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 26: Looking Forward.

Portrait of Bob Stewart taken by Edith Tudor-Hart.
Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber's chain has bound us,
Fond memories bring the light,
Of other days around us.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

At the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in Moscow in 1961, I met among others an old man whom I discovered was one of Lenin’s oldest companions, even in the days before the Russian Communist Party was formed. We had a long discussion about politics past and present, and the Communist Parties past and present, with particular emphasis on the difficulties of the days long since gone; and naturally, as old people do, we discussed ages. Petrov, the man with whom I was having the discussion, was then eighty-seven years, and I eighty-four years. In all this welter of reminiscence I said to Petrov, “We must meet at the dawn of Communism.” “All right,” he replied. “We shall meet in Moscow in 1980.” So that’s a date, though I have had doubts of whether Petrov and I will be able to keep it. However, I heard Petrov speak on a radio programme from Moscow in April 1966 and my spirits revived. I certainly have no intention of throwing in life’s sponge at this interesting stage in world politics and so the meeting may yet take place.

Much more certain than the meeting between Petrov and myself is the dawn of communism. In all my political life, since the early days of work in the Dundee jute mills, through all the vicissitudes of political, trade union and social work, I have never lost my faith in the people to change the economic and political system which holds back progress to a full and happy life. Of course there have been the ups and downs. That is life, and it is part of political life as well. But as I look back with a mature eye to the days of the early struggles of the Communist Party, I can see the giant strides that have been taken in Britain.

One of our first tasks on the formation of the party was to get clear what revolution meant. Our political enemies naturally pictured the revolution as a bloody civil war, as a destructive act, neglecting entirely the aim of the revolution, which is to transfer political power from the capitalist class to the working class. It is that transfer of power which constitutes revolution, whether it is accompanied by civil war as it was in Russia and China, or in a different set of circumstances, as it happened in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. In Britain and the countries of Western Europe it seems reasonably certain it will be a peaceful revolution achieved within the present parliamentary system, but changing Parliament from a showpiece into a workshop, legislating in the interests of the people.

We explained our main aim, the transfer of political power, patiently in speech and print; and gradually it became understood if not always accepted. Our second trouble in the early days was to get our own people to accept the idea that revolution in one country cannot be just a carbon copy of revolution in another country. In the early days it was common to find at our meetings five Russian posters to each British poster. Exaggerations took place and in some districts the party looked more Russian than British. There was a Smolny Institute in Sheffield. All this was very well intentioned but certainly wrong in the field of British political work. We soon learned that the major part of our policy and work must be for our own country-which does not exclude, nor can it, the greatest possible interest in the countries outside Britain, and in particular the greatest interest in what was then the only socialist country in the world, Russia. Even to this day there are people who talk of the Communist Party as a foreign or Russian party. Well, this was also said of the early socialist movement. It was falsely accused of being a German importation.

In its forty-six years of existence the Communist Party in Britain, in addition to being effective, active and militant in the workshops, has secured a large following of workers who respect it even if many of them, as yet, have not joined. The party has had great success in education for scientific socialism, in all aspects of Marxist philosophy. In its daily news-paper, the Morning Star (for many years the Daily Worker), in its weekly and monthly publications, in many thousands of pamphlets and books, there has been the necessary explanation of the political events which has been read, appreciated and discussed by millions of people. In the times when the labour movement was in retreat, the political discussion and action arising from these political explanations held the movement together and laid the basis for future advance. It may be idle to speculate where the British socialist movement would have finally landed if it had not been for the work of the Communist Party, but it is a fact of life that many times in the last forty-six years, in government and out of it, the Labour Party has moved far away, very far away, from socialist principle and practice. The criticism of the work of the labour movement by the Communists has many times assisted in bringing the movement back to policy and practice that represented the interests of the working class and condemned capitalism.

This condemnation of the capitalist system is at the centre of working-class politics. Condemnation is needed, not because the individual boss is bad, or a group of bosses treat their workers badly, although this frequently happens. We don’t object to capitalists as good husbands to their wives and good fathers to their children. What we object to is the miserable way they make their living, by exploiting the workers, by making profit out of the labour of the workers. The capitalists are parasitical, yet they get a much better living than the workers. The aim of the Communists in politics is to end capitalism and the capitalists’ parasitical existence. The Communists take a Marxist scientific view of events. We don’t live in the clouds, although it was a member of the Communist Party who first soared into space and it is the Soviet Union which leads the world in space exploration.

We know how and why capitalism came into existence. It was not born overnight. It had to destroy the handicaps and barriers to its progress from the reactionary feudal system which it superseded, and with quite a bloody red hand. There was no nicety about the emergence of capitalism. In many countries kings literally lost their heads. The British capitalists conveniently forgot about King Charles being beheaded when Russian capitalism was overthrown, and they condemned the killing of the Tsar. They forgot they themselves had set an example.

The Communists know that capitalism is not an everlasting system, and that just as it displaced feudalism and mercantilism in order to develop the production processes and meet the needs of the people, so now is socialism necessary to break the capitalist stranglehold on production to meet the needs of the present day. Feudalism became a fetter on production and the capitalist system took the fetter off. Now the people will end the capitalist system which has become a barrier to developing production. Socialism must come to provide a better and more scientific system in which the means of production will be owned by the community and work will become a virtue and not a drudge.

In the early days of the party we had to argue from theory alone. We have now in the course of history reached a stage when theory has become practice. As Lenin said, “Theory is grey but the tree of life is green.” So the green tree is growing, and now in the Soviet Union and China and in the other socialist countries there is the evolution of new industrial techniques to meet the requirements of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first which is not so far away. It was easy in the early days for the capitalists and the Labour leaders to sneer at the size of the Communist Party, to jeer at our utopianism, but great developments have taken place and are continuing to take place in the socialist countries. The opponents of socialism can’t jeer away a new town, vast new industrial automated plants, great new industrial regions, some of which produce more than the entire production of some of the advanced capitalist countries.

For example, the British or United States railwaymen can’t say to the Russian railwaymen “Wait till you catch up with us”, because the Russian railways are now far in advance in all modern railway techniques. This is not because the Russian railwaymen are born better, but because their industry is more modern and because socialist practice in the Soviet Union has electrified more railways than has all the capitalist world put together.

People all over the world can see, if they want to see, the fundamental difference between socialist industry and capitalist industry. In the socialist states the trade union office is in its rightful place, inside the factory, not pleading for a bigger share of the cake, but as an essential part of the running of the factory and taking part in every discussion and decision on production and labour conditions. There are no brass hats in the factory who have the last word on what is to happen to wage increases and hours of labour. In the socialist states the day of the brass hats is over and their obstructing power flung into the dustbin of history.

In 1917 there were 300,000 Communists in Russia. Today there are 12,000,000. Twelve million devoted scientific workers can make a tremendous productive difference in an old economy. As they lead the Russian workers in operating the new modern industrial techniques in the vast new industrial plants, great new production targets are set and broken, set and broken again and again. Production is rising to vast new heights.

I remember vividly my first journey to Russia in 1923, the tremendous thrill I experienced when I crossed the frontier. “Ours!” I said, “a country which the workers own and control.” On that first trip from Riga to Moscow I shared a compartment with Vassili Kolarov, his wife and two young sons. Kolarov, who became head of the People’s Republic in Bulgaria, was the bosom companion of Georgi Dimitrov with whom he worked for many years, sharing the disappointments of the stagnant periods and the joys of the revolutionary periods. Georgi Dimitrov of course became famous after the Reichstag fire trial in Hitler Germany, but at that time, in 1923, he was just “one of the boys” with whom I later had the pleasure of working.

Looking back on the Russia of my first visit, how right I was to be immensely proud of entering a country which was owned and controlled by the workers, in which capitalism had been overthrown! How right I was in my judgment that this land of socialism would transform the lives of the people and in doing so set an example to the workers all over the world!

It is not a question of rivalry between country and country. Progress does not rest on the character of persons or nations. It is a question of science being applied to the most important thing that human beings engage in, that is making a living, and in our day making a living means giant production for giant populations, the elimination of hard labour, using the machine to release the workers from hard toil and to reduce the hours of labour and give the workers more and more leisure time. There are so many things to do, so many things to learn, that no person lives long enough to do and learn even a fraction of them, even the cleverest of us, and most of us are not too clever. At the age of ninety years there are many things I still want to do, still want to learn to do.

On looking back over the many years of work of the British Communist Party we should remember the positive as well as the negative features. Never at any time did we admit the hill was too steep or the mountain too high to climb. Our attitude has always been “How can we overcome?” and by our work we have overcome the one-time hostility of many millions of people who, while in open discussion they will not say too much, nevertheless in private conversation will admit how impressed they are with the work of the Communists and the Communist Party. Millions of people now understand perfectly well that the Communists are not the “troublemakers” the capitalist press, the T.V. and the radio would like to brand them, but honest, sincere people who work for a fundamental political change. This has been a long process.

In the early twenties the Communist Party fought with the miners, tried to mobilise the entire labour movement to the side of the miners. The Communists gave everything they had in support of A. J. Cook in his fight for “Not a minute on the day–Not a penny off the pay’. It was the Communist Party who expelled Bob Williams from their ranks because of the part he played in destroying the triple alliance of miners, railway and transport workers.

In the General Strike we knew more of what was happening than the General Council of the T.U.C. We did not spend our valuable time playing football matches with the police. We gave the striking workers leadership as their militancy developed. This contrasted with the T.U.C. leaders who got diarrhea and went chasing round corners following Lord Samuel and looking for a way to sell out.

After the strike it was the Communist Party who organised to reform the ranks of the working class and the unions for the political and industrial struggles of the 1930s. In the fight against the sell-out of the Labour Government by Ramsay McDonald and his associates, and against the anti-working-class legislation of the National Government that followed, the Communists were always part of the vanguard.

Then came the fight against fascism. I remember well the formation of the British battalion of the International Brigade which went to fight fascism in Spain. At first many ordinary Labour people were hostile to the idea, but as the struggle against fascism deepened and the fight for Spanish democracy against Franco developed, so did the understanding of the necessity of the fight against fascism grow. The International Brigade grew in popularity, and when they were repatriated from Spain under a decision of the United Nations I remember the amazing scenes at Victoria Station in London. Tens of thousands of people filled the station and crowded the surrounding streets to welcome the British soldiers home. Everyone felt that the Brigade had honoured Britain by their fight against fascism and had upheld the good name of the British labour movement.

In the struggle decisive changes take place in people’s thinking, and this leads to further action. The Communists said the war that ravaged Spain would come to Britain if rapacious fascism were allowed to proceed unchecked. We were right, not because we were good astrologers or prophets, but because we were Marxists and could read events better than other political parties.

In my many decades of work I have met, discussed with, worked with, and become friends with some of the finest people who ever breathed. Men and women whose main aim in life was to serve mankind. Men and women who came from many nations and whose skins were of different colours but whose aim in life was the highest of all: to serve. Many of these people are found in the pages of this book. Many younger than myself have died, leaving their mark on politics and political parties. Some of them greatly influenced my thinking and I want to write of a few of them who made a decisive impact on British political life. Not in order of merit: that would be quite impossible because they all had merits of different degrees, and in any case my prejudice, if I have one, favours the men and women who come from the workshops, a bias not entirely separated from my experience of life.

A man who influenced masses of people in Britain was Harry Pollitt, for many years the General Secretary of the Communist Party. An outstanding politician, Harry was virtually born in the working-class movement. His home was a socialist organising agency. His mother was a clear-thinking and capable socialist, and from boyhood Harry was forever on the stump. No doubt this early training was invaluable, because he developed into one of the finest orators in the British political movement. This fact was widely acknowledged by his bitterest political enemies, and remember he spoke from platforms in the days of great orators in other parties, Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan to mention only two.

But Pollitt was not only a very fine speaker. He had organising qualities few possessed. Always for Harry the question was “What is to be done?” Not only did he pose the question but he worked on it and tried to answer it. He applied himself diligently to everything he did and was extremely careful in the preparation of his speeches. This stood Harry in good stead when the shorthand notes of the reporting policeman would be put against his own notes in the Court cases in which he became involved. One thing Harry Pollitt proved beyond all doubt. The speaker who likes to speak has every chance to become a good speaker. Many times I have tired listening to speakers telling me how difficult it was for them to speak. Well, if they found it difficult to speak no doubt their listeners would find it more difficult to listen. The good speaker is one who feels he has something to say, a message to give. Anyone who heard Harry Pollitt in any meeting, big or small, found his speech lucid, powerful and sincere. While speaking of the needs of the present Harry could always paint a picture of how socialism could be won and the joy it would be for the working class. That was his great achievement. In both speech and organisation he brought many thousands into the struggle for socialism in Britain and many into the membership of the Communist Party.

Another man who loved to speak, and who was sometimes impatient of others speaking, was Willie Gallacher. He was an experienced workshop man who, in the period of the First World War, by his forthright stand against sectarianism, did much to weld together the famous shop stewards’ industrial movement which played such an effective role in Glasgow and many of the great industrial centres such as London, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham and other cities. Every. where the name of Gallacher was known as a working-class leader in the industrial and political movement. He was a man without self-interest whose life was devoted to the working-class movement and who made an unrivalled contribution to the work of the British Communist Party.

Internationally Gallacher became a well-known figure. When he met Lenin, he complained because Lenin, while praising his courage, attacked his political ideas. Gallacher told Lenin that he (Gallacher) was an old hand at the game of politics. Lenin’s justified criticism of Gallacher was published in that internationally famous book Left-Wing Communism–an Infantile Disorder. This book was sorely needed in the early 1920s when the young Communist Parties were making so many fundamental political errors. Because of Lenin’s advice, Gallacher discarded his anti-parliamentism and helped many others to do so. The negative attitude that a good socialist could not remain good if he went into parliament was strongly held in the twenties.

One very good characteristic of Gallacher’s was his ability to admit to being wrong on occasions, a characteristic not readily shared by a few of the leading Communists. Gallacher’s parliamentary career stands out as an example to those who believe that Members of Parliament can remain true to socialist principles and fight for them in Parliament. When he first entered Westminster he was portrayed as a revolutionary who wanted the streets to flow with blood. But he proved in his fifteen years in the House of Commons that he was a first-class parliamentarian. In fact he was one of the few who knew the rules of the House sufficiently well to break them and get away with it. His first thought in Parliament during any business before the House was: Will the working class gain? On that he took his stand, and his hundreds of speeches recorded in Hansard from 1935 till 1950 are essential reading for any serious student of British political history.

Harry Pollitt and Willie Gallacher are dead. Many others who gave all their life for the advancement of the working class are also dead. Albert Inkpin, Arthur McManus, Tom Bell, Tommy Jackson, big Jock McBain, the names are countless. All of them great working-class politicians and great companions in the day-to-day struggle.

There are a number like myself who are blessed with long life and are still working hard. R. Palme Dutt was one of my early mentors and mentor to many leading Communists. He comes from a remarkable family of highly educated people and I doubt if anywhere in the world, certainly not in Britain, one could find a political journalist who has made such a regular, consistent contribution to the elucidation of British political problems, particularly in relation to the colonial and ex-colonial countries. There is also that wee pawky Scotsman John Ross Campbell, familiarly known as J.R.C., who was in the early days editor of the Glasgow Worker and became, many years later, editor of the Daily Worker. He is one of the best working-class politicians and economists Scotland has ever produced. His speech is remarkably clear, witty and always down to earth. In those early days his workshop notes in the Glasgow Worker had a very wide readership.

And so I could go on, lists and lists of names, industrial and professional, all of whom made big political contributions to the struggle for socialism. One thing above all these older leading Communists understood was the fundamental Marxist principle: “That which is coming into being and growing is more powerful than that which is ascendant but is already dying away.”

The leading Communists of the past educated, trained and prepared the many thousands of Communists of the present who by their diligent and successful work have been elected to leading positions in the labour movement. This re-creation on an ever increasing scale is the guarantee that the British people will take the road to socialism.

The great world political argument rages. For Socialism. For Capitalism. The Communists understand that the aim of a modern political party must be to end capitalism. Not to keep it on its feet to totter around preventing the introduction of dynamic socialism. Not to agree to sacrifice by the workers in the interests of the bosses, but to end capitalism for all time. The Communists by their scientific analysis know that socialism will finally be victorious, and while in the Western capitalist countries the capitalist fetters may bind the hands of the workers for a few years yet, without doubt the tools are ready, well and truly sharpened to break the bonds.

In little more than a decade the call will change. Then it will be “For Communism!” I am certain, positively certain, that the world will see the dawn of communism, and I will frankly admit, despite having had more than my three-score years and ten, and a full and exciting life, that I hope, fervently hope, I shall be able to accept the invitation of my good comrade Petrov and be there in Moscow to see the Dawn. In any case, whether or not I live till 1980 or sign off sooner, as William Morris wrote:

“The dawn and the day are coming

And forth our banners go.”

Comrades: Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky (Part Two).

The second of two pictures of Anatole Kaminsky in his MI5 file.

Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky married Bob Stewart’s daughter Annie at some point during 1933. This is an overview of what I found in his security file when I visited the National Archives last year and any inaccuracies are my own. This post concerns information the British secret services gathered on him during his brief visits to Britain while the details of his arrest and execution can be found in ‘Comrades: Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky (Part One)’. Ultimately, this is all the information I have found out about Kaminsky but I would love to know more.

Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky first arrived in the United Kingdom on the 10th September 1930. Sailing from the Hook of Holland and docking at Harwich, it’s likely that it was his first visit or, at least, he had never caught the attention of the security services before. His arrival records state that he was 23 years old, a Russian national and that he carried a Soviet passport. His proposed address in the UK was given as “Arcos, London”. Arcos was the All-Russian Co-operative Society – the organisation which oversaw Anglo-Soviet trade. Three years before, its Hampstead headquarters had been raided by the British authorities and evidence of espionage uncovered. The whole affair had been a cause celebre and the relationship between Britain and the Soviet Union, always palpably frosty, had cooled somewhat as a consequence. Kaminsky came in on a six month visa and was employed as a commercial secretary. It’s clear from the outset that the security services were intending to keep an eye on him.

Initial investigations found that Kaminsky was much more than a secretary. In a letter dated 27th March 1930 Captain Guy Liddell, then of Special Branch, wrote to Oswald Allen Harker in MI5 with the following information:

Dear Harker,

 Application was made a short time ago in Moscow for a visa for Anatole Naumovitch KAMINSKI,  born 1907. This man who was then secretary of the Scientific Technical Section of the Society for the Promotion of Cultural Relations with Countries Abroad in Moscow, was coming here as a secretary to Arcos. Preliminary enquiries through SIS show that he is a scientist and is in touch with military scientific men in the “Revoyensoviet”. He has also been working in the Osoaviachim. He is a full member of the VKP (b).

KAMINSKI arrived her on the 10th September and proceeded to 81, Kensington Gardens Square, W.

The involvement with the Osoaviachim was of particular concern as that was the society concerned with the construction of military aircraft and chemical warfare research. There is little else in the file at this point other than establishing links with the director of Arcos Vladimir Belgoff and his wife Sophie. There was a request to intercept all mail at the Belgoff’s address 14 Tenterden Drive in Hendon and it looks like Kaminsky might have been staying with them for a time.

I assume Kaminsky left the UK sometime in March 1931 due to the length of his visa. However, he made a return visit in December of that year as part of The Trade Delegation of the USSR in Great Britain and, this time, he was listed as a “consulting economist”. Shortly after this on the 7th January 1932,  he appeared in a news story in the Daily Mail. Despite the snideness of the journalist remarking on Kaminsky’s “broken English” the economist’s assurances that his activities are strictly business and nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence gathering are spectacularly unconvincing.

Transcript of The Daily Mail article from 1932 Anatole Kaminsky’s MI5 file.

ARCOS IMPUDENCE.

Demands to British Firms.

An impudent letter which British firms have received recently from Arcos is making them wonder what secret object the Soviet trade organisation in this country  is pursuing under the disguise of innocent business relationships.

The letter explains that Arcos is anxious to “tabulate information on industrial and technical lines concerning their production and general characteristics of distinguished British firms, with whom we have commercial relations, to be placed upon record for reference when deciding orders for the forthcoming year.”

It proceeds: “We ask you especially to give technical information in detail such as measurements, size and capacity of machines.” It demands information “in detail” and not “under general headings” and instructs that replies should be sent “in triplicate.”

Then follows a questionnaire, half of which could be filled in from ordinary business books. It includes such questions as dividends paid, if any, from 1926 to 1931 and number of work people employed.

‘Comrade’ A. KAMINSKY, of the economic department of Arcos, is responsible for this piece of effrontery. He had little explanation to offer yesterday when asked by a Daily Mail reporter what was the object of this so-called business inquiry. “Just to assist us in making purchases,” he answered in broken English.

When it was suggested to him that the replies would be useful for the secret archives of Moscow, ‘Comrade’ KAMINSKY gave his favourite answer: “Oh, no, you make big mistake, just business purposes only.”

Kaminsky came to the attention of the security services again in January 1933 when he arrived in the UK on a short term visa only valid for a few months. It stated that he was returning to the same post, however, during this time, it was his personal life rather than the professional which interested MI5. It is likely that this was when he married Bob Stewart’s daughter Annie, my father’s Aunt Nan. There are several enquiries about this and it is confirmed by Superintendent Canning of Special Branch in May of that year.

“In reference to the enquiries which you were recently good enough to have made regarding Annie Walker STEWART (301/MP/2860), it has just been reported from a source which is I think reliable, that this woman is married to a Russian called KAMINSKY.”

Of course the security services were already interested in Bob Stewart for his roles in the covert finance of the CPGB, his time as the British representative to the Comintern and his associations in Ireland. They also clearly considered Annie and her older brothers William and Rab to be persons of interest due to their links to Arcos and it is likely that all three had some involvement, however slight, in Bob’s underground activities.

Although Annie’s marriage to a Soviet official who seemed to be rising  through the ranks would have ensured the security services attention it seems the pair did little to attract it. The next mention of Kaminsky is from March 1934 when the passport office is extending his visa and its confirmed that, “This alien has not come under notice.”

Nevertheless, MI5 still tracked Kaminsky’s  movements and gathered information on him. There’s a record that on March 4th 1934 there was a lecture at the “London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The lecturer was to be A. KAMINSKY, Soviet Economist, of the First Moscow State University, and the subject to be ‘The Second Five Year Plan.’” Also that year MI5 received intelligence that Kaminsky was “the real power behind Arcos” and that he was “either married to or living with Nan STUART, the daughter of the Clydeside Communist.” One hopes the agent who drafted that memo was slightly more knowledgeable about potential threats to the nation than they were about Scottish geography. Bob was a Dundonian – not a Glaswegian.  It’s likely they were confusing Bob with Willie Gallacher.

By October 1935, Anatole and Annie had moved to Moscow although they were in regular contact with the family back in London. Being so far away Annie would have been eager for news from home and, in the files, there is an intercepted letter from Bob dated the 8th October. The security services were mostly interested in the references to Harry Pollitt, the head of the CPGB and his wife Marjorie. However, the letter is largely domestic. Bob’s  wife Margaret is ‘in the tub’ and Bob is taking the opportunity to write to their daughter. There is some news of ‘Bill and family’ –  my grandfather, grandmother  and my dad – baby Robin- who would have been two years old at the time. There’s some gossip about Rab, Bob’s middle child  and his new girlfriend. The anecdote about them singing makes me smile as when I met his daughter Linda for the first time last year she remarked that what her father loved above all else was music. Towards the end there’s some talk of knitting and this is because Annie would have been pregnant at the time with my father’s cousin Greg. Bob and Margaret were eagerly awaiting their second grandchild.

Part of the letter from Bob Stewart to Annie and Anatole. (1935).

Dear N & N again,

Your letter arrived a couple of hours ago and we three enjoyed its contents. So very glad to know that you are both so well. This seems to be washing night. Rab balked and hopped off to bed, mother is now in the tub. While the old man, like the dutiful father he is, sits down to write this letter straight away lest tomorrow he should be too busy in other directions. The new situation is imposing duties that cannot wait as you will readily appreciate. We are well in health. Rab walks fairly comfortably now and is on the hunt for a job. Mother is all right again and of course the old man is the XXXX-XXXX-XXXX or thereby.

We were glad that you remembered our Welsh friends who are really the most excellent comrades. I hope you will be successful in helping them out. Very glad that P____ is going to help you get numbers? Tolia has many things to do and maybe he is modest about his own comfort. We were so glad to get his picture cards from way down South to find that his writing arm was still in good order. I gave Harry your message- he says it’s between you and Marjorie whom I saw a day or two ago. She is looking and feeling very well as is Jean who played merry hell when I couldn’t play with her any longer. We have not seen Bill and family for a fortnight but they are all well and Robin has had more photographs taken. Everyone likes to take his picture and he quite likes it. We have now got a big one of him and all the lady visitors are taking him for a walk -he is so lovely to look at they say.

We have had numbers of visitors recently among them XXXX’s auntie who is much interested in you but more in Rab who needs to help with the printers of whom we have now quite a few. We had Tom Wilson and C____ up for tea and we had a young girlfriend from a distance staying the weekend. She and Rab sang all our favourites till the wee sma’ oors. It was delightful. She reminded mother very much of you although her singing was a vast improvement on yours. She went away home overwhelmed by the kindness of your mother which is not unusual. We also had a visit from one of the numerous Clark family who want me to share with you the joys of the children’s movement at home. I don’t remember his first name he’s got a job in some club or hotel down Leatherhead way – not much of a job but better than idleness. Yes! We read in your XXXX all about the XXXX  expansion of trade and the XXXX values brings to you all. It’s a remarkable achievement and opens the door to new XXXX. It’s a consolidation of brilliance compared to the darkening skies elsewhere. The centre the world’s attention is now on Africa and as you’ll see by the British XXXX there is a lack of confusion and in some cases XXXX XXXX in our movement. It’s an acid test that will reveal much base metal. Probably you will have seen Jane ‘ere you get this. I hope she will benefit from her sojourn in your country. Hope to get some of your orders shipped in the course of the next fortnight if I’m not called away! I notice the knitting needles being used here and no doubt you’ll be pleased with the result – the other fittings may not be so easy to get but will have a good try on the first fine day. I think that’s all I’ve got to say at this time except that the weather is as wet as you have had it. Even as we are all bearing up – always cheered up when your letters come along. All the same I could have sat in on mothers celebration and I think Rab’s teeth were watering when I thought of what he could have done had he been around. I don’t know if I told you that Jimmy B had a XXXX XXXX badly and has been under medical care for three weeks. He seems to have got over the worst but it is a XXXX XXXX blow as he had to cancel all engagements and new ones will not be easy to get. Cheerio- it’s bedtime.

Love from all to you all,

 Dad.

(I’ve used XXXX when I can’t make out the Bob’s handwriting.)

Greg was born in Moscow in early 1936 and, in the summer,  Annie took him to London so that everyone could be introduced to the latest addition to the family. Anatole stayed behind in the Soviet Union but wrote regularly. MI5 intercepted the following letter from him addressed to Annie and their son. The letter has all the hallmarks of the new parent  – concern, pride and love. However, just over a year later Anatole’s brother, Grigory, was arrested and executed in Stalin’s purges, setting in motion his own imprisonment and eventual murder.

Letter from Anatole Kaminsky to Annie Stewart. (1936).

17th June 1936

Dearest Nan and XXXX

Last night I received your long letter and felt very happy that you are managing well. It was nice to hear that calm and sunny weather made your journey bright and not a difficult one.

A few days ago I got your note from the sea and Dad’s ‘epistle’. It makes a pleasant reading to find out that old people and the whole family are taking such a keen interest in our wee sonny. I think he already succeeded to prove that he is a thoroughly good boy and deserves all the love and care bestowed upon him. As to his ??? on the face I think it will go away after some fresh fruit and vegetable diet of his milking cow – (Sorry to use zoo terms!)

Have a complete rest, change over to fruit eats and drinks and don’t take troubles of any kind. I don’t give anymore advice is as you have very good advisers around you with lots of experience gained during a long life. The only remark will be the main thing is to develop regular habits a good regime.

Anatole

According to his file, Anatole made one more visit to the United Kingdom. Beforehand, the Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky wrote to the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to request a visa so Kaminsky could attend trade negotiations.

M. Maisky,  Ambassador of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Great Britain, presents his compliments to His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and has the honour to request a visa for M. Anatole Kaminsky who is a financial expert, and is coming to this country to take part in the financial negotiations which are going on between the Trade Representative of the USSR in London and the Board of Trade.

As his presence here is urgently required, M. Maisky would be obliged if the instructions granting him a visa could be telegraphed to Moscow at the Embassy’s expense.

 11th of July, 1936.

The Rt. Hon. Anthony Eden, MC, MP,

Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

Anatole Naumovich Kaminsky arrived in Britain from Amsterdam by aeroplane on or around the 1st August 1936 and was recorded as an “Economic Advisor to the USSR Trade Delegation.” An unconditional landing was granted. This is the last record I can find of Kaminsky in the MI5 files until 1956 when, after Khruschev’s speech denouncing Stalin,  Annie and her teenage son, Greg found out exactly what had happened to him after his arrest by the NKVD in June 1938.

Alan Stewart.

Breaking the Fetters Chapter 20: Moscow and the Comintern.

“The oppressed peoples of the whole world, under the banner of the Comintern, overthrow imperialism!” Soviet poster by Gustav Klutsis, 1924. Shamelessly nicked from @sovietvisuals.

I went to Moscow early in 1923 as British representative to the Communist International, or the Comintern as it was called more briefly. I was a bit diffident about accepting this job because I regarded myself as an apprentice in Communist Party work. My wife and daughter came with me and I left my two sons with my sister, so the arrangements were quite good. I liked the job very much. I was living in the heart of the revolutionary political world. I was meeting people who knew much better than I the main world political events and could interpret them much better. I was taking part in discussion with leading working-class politicians from all over the world, all with their special problems, and if at times I could not make a contribution at least I could listen and learn.

In the Comintern I did a fair amount of foreign work. Because I had a British passport, I was better able to cross frontiers and move about freely than many of the other foreign representatives. At this time, the Comintern was very much in its formative period and the communist parties of the various countries had serious conflicts of opinion on many political questions. There were many commissions in the work of the Comintern, trying to smooth the way and deal with the problems.

Troubles had grown in the Swedish Communist Party and the Comintern sent a delegation of which I was a member to help to sort things out. In Sweden I was known as Comrade XR (Executive Representative). Half the Swedish party were really right-wing social democrats, both in theory and action.

The party was led by Seth Hoglund, a social democrat who certainly put no R in revolution but had a very good anti war record. The party was split in two; the left-wing section was the more aggressive and was able to retain control of the party paper. Hoglund was a likeable chap, not in any way vicious but a true social democrat and for quiet, steady reform. The leadership afterwards passed to Samuelson and some others, but they too quarrelled and some left the party.

At this time Scandinavia was very important. Politically, despite some setbacks, the left forces were making good progress. There was also another practical reason. The Norwegian party had a good standing among the seamen, which enabled comrades to get across the seas illegally. Bill Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst and a number of others crossed the North Sea in this way. Irish sailors did the same before Eire became a state, ready to smuggle people across on the Irish boats. De Valera was got out of Lincoln Gaol and smuggled across in this way.

Many people with whom I worked and whom I met during my time at the Comintern are now dead. A few are still alive. Some made their political mark, some dropped out of political life in the development of the struggle, because being a Communist in politics is never easy, no matter in which country you are domiciled.

Stalin in the early 1920s- “quiet, painstaking and efficient.”

Naturally the reader will ask what I thought of Stalin. I always speak of people as I find them. I worked with Stalin on a commission on Germany after the defeat of the German party in 1923. I found him a quiet, painstaking and efficient chairman. He chaired the commission which was composed of members from all parties resident in Moscow and from the Russian party, which was represented by Kuibishev, who later became Minister for Planning in the Soviet Union. The discussion in the commission went on for weeks, and one interesting point was that after every session the delegates and their interpreters met singly with Stalin to make sure that if they had not spoken during the discussion, he would be aware of their views. In this way I had several talks with Stalin. I remember that one particular discussion he and I had dealt with the way in which the German party central committee worked. In my opinion there was too much bureaucracy and I said that certain changes in work should be considered. The Comintern could not enforce changes, since the national parties were independent; but the Comintern could, and did, make suggestions. At the end of our tête-a-tête Stalin made a number of pointed remarks and agreed with me on the need for change, but there was a great battle of personalities in the German party at that time. The need for unity was so important that one had to cut the suit according to the cloth and not seek changes that might possibly widen the division.

This commission usually started work about midnight. As a rule I was getting ready for bed when the telephone would ring, and then it was down to the Kremlin for an all-night sitting. They did not rush it, these people. Many of the Kremlin lads were long-distance men. I remember one night Terricini- the delegate from Italy I think his first name was Angelico, but he was certainly no angel -was delivering his point of view in French and doing it very well. He had been at it for over an hour and a half when Stalin intervened to say,

“Tovaritch Terricini, French is a beautiful language to listen to but it is now three o’clock in the morning.” Terricini nodded to show he had heard and then continued with his speech, as if no intervention had been made.

Clara Zetkin

During this German commission discussion, some leading members of the German party went after Clara Zetkin; they baited her unmercifully and this really sickened me. It was an exhibition of political cannibalism that should never be tolerated in working-class politics. Clara Zetkin may have had some weaknesses and faults we all have but she had many decades of selfless working-class struggle behind her and a great reputation both in the international communist movement and in Germany. I protested vigorously against the manner in which some of the German comrades were acting and, with several other delegates supporting me, Stalin said, “We hold a high opinion of Clara Zetkin, our Russian women have learned much from her work, and we will not permit this type of vilification.”

Radek was another member of the Comintern with whom I worked in close association When the first Labour Government was formed in January 1924, Radek, Theodore Roth-stein, Clara Zetkin, some others and myself, worked on a manifesto to be published in Britain in the name of the Communist International. Radek was the most remarkable reader I have ever come across. He had an insatiable appetite for newspapers and had a wide and fundamental knowledge of world politics. Lenin’s criticism of Radek was that he read too many bourgeois newspapers and I think he inferred that Radek was influenced by them. But Radek was most helpful to me. He was also a humorist with a ready answer to any question. He wore long side-whiskers, like the Ancient Mariner, but one day when I met him they were shaved off. “Oh, what’s happened to the growth?” I asked. “Got to go to Germany so I must have a disguise,” he replied. Another time when I was having a difference of opinion with Walton Newbold, who was once Communist M.P. for Motherwell, and was lamenting about it, he said, “Never mind Newbold, Bob, he not only sits on his arse, he sits on his brains as well.”

Kamenev, Zinoviev and other leaders of the Soviet party, Dimitrov from Bulgaria, Pieck from Germany and many others from other countries, I met both at work and socially, but as a rule the discussion was mainly political. I never found it easy or even practicable to discuss everyday “common-place” happenings through an interpreter. Language to me was always a great barrier and I am sure it is for everyone.

Radek was the one who spoke all languages. I heard him speak and communicate with ease with people of many nationalities. I never knew how many languages he spoke. He was a Pole by birth. He once said to me, “Bob, there are good Jews and bad Jews, and the worst of the bad Jews are Polish Jews and I am one of them.” I don’t think the part about Polish Jews is right, nor in my contact with Radek was it true of him. In Moscow, in all his work with me, he was a most able and helpful member of the Comintern.

Photographs by Henry Sara from Bob’s time in Moscow including some from the school he mentions here. See the ‘Comrades: Henry Sara’ post for more information.

Naturally, apart from the leading comrades I got to know in the course of my work, I also met the ordinary Russian people. A group of Russians I got to know fairly well consisted of teachers. This happened somewhat accidentally. One day my wife and I were having a walk in the suburbs, and as we passed a school the children were coming out. Some of the children, observing by our dress that we were foreigners, asked us questions. When they found out that we were British, a number of them had to try out their English on us. Because of this incident we became very well acquainted with the school and the teachers. I took any English delegations that came to Moscow to the school, and through this the pupils became the proud possessors of footballs, boots, sweaters and other sports equipment. I found the children most friendly and com-paniable, with no sullen shyness, and the teachers were born to their jobs aunties and uncles they were called. The school owned a huge boar, a real Goliath. One day I said to one of the children,

“Big boar.” “Da, bolshoi -bolshoi Curzon!”

(Lord Curzon was the most notorious anti-Russian British statesman of the period, the originator of the attempt to enforce the Curzon line).

Another school I used to visit was a school for musically gifted girls. The teacher was the first flautist of the Bolshoi Orchestra. The children gathered round in the most natural way and sang and played spontaneously, everything from folk drama to grand opera. Watching these girls, I began to realise the inborn musical understanding and appreciation of the Russian people, which has endured for centuries.

I remember the first time in my life I heard community singing. It was at the Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow in 1924 I was wandering around with Jim Larkin, the leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, and we saw some people congregating near some seats. We strolled over to see what was happening. Out comes a fellow with a corduroy jacket and a pair of high boots curled up like a concertina. He stepped on to a small platform and started to sing, and away went the audience in wonderful community sing-ing. I couldn’t follow the words but there was no mistaking the real genuine feeling and natural musical ability of the crowd.

For the citizens of Moscow, however, it was not all singing and playing. Moscow was a political city, everyone talked politics. Even in the armed forces, the aim was to have politically understanding soldiers, sailors and airmen. Our party was a patron of some Russian regiments, and so got to know the officers and men. It was this political consciousness on the part of the Soviet soldiers, brought about by intense political discussions of day-to-day events, that created the understanding of the necessity to fight for the independence of the Soviet Union and the determination to crush the Nazi invaders in World War Two.

On the political side, I naturally attended conferences and meetings of the Russian Communist Party, and met with Russians from Stalin downwards. What struck me from the beginning was the business sense of the Russian political workers, very few of whom were business men. In these early days of Soviet rule, blacksmiths, mechanics, textile and other workers were pitchforked into top political jobs and had to adapt themselves to new work, sometimes dealing with old managements in production and, more important, themselves forming new managements in the big new factories. I remember Milnechesneski, who was an ordinary worker, telling me one day he was the biggest textile owner in the world -he had just been put in charge of the cotton textile industry.

In the countryside, many of the peasants were illiterate but, of course, while illiteracy is a great disadvantage, it does not mean lack of intelligence. The Russian peasant, who was intelligent enough to revolt against -and end serfdom, was also intelligent enough to combine with the Russian working class to end capitalism and also to end illiteracy among the peasant masses in the Soviet Union.

It was during my time in Moscow that a great tragedy befell the international working-class movement.

Lenin died in January 1924. I remember this well because I was then a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern which was summoned immediately: firstly, to hear the announcement of Lenin’s death and also to make all the necessary arrangements for the funeral.

Harry Pollitt came over immediately from Britain to represent the British Communist Party at the funeral. It was desperately cold and both Harry and I felt it very much. It was forty degrees below zero. Fires were kindled in the streets and I remember seeing the militiamen’s horses going over and sticking their noses in the fire to melt the icicles. We were as cold as the horses but at least we could pull down our fur caps and peer out occasionally to see where we were going.

I was one of the delegation of the Comintern chosen to go to Gorky, where Lenin had died, to accompany his body back to Moscow. We left by train from Moscow at about 5am and then travelled by peasant sleigh from Gorky Station to Lenin’s house. From the station you could see the house down in the valley, but the road to it so twisted and turned that even by sleigh it took us a long time to reach it. At the house Lenin was laid on a bed wearing an ordinary Red Army man’s uniform with the Order of Lenin pinned to his breast. The house was full of people: leading members of the Russian Communist Party, of the Comintern, delegates from the factories and the professions, and amongst them all wandered a big black cat who had been a very great favourite with Lenin.

Lenin’s body being taken to Gorky station en route to Moscow.

The body was placed in the coffin and carried to the station en route for Moscow. Leading men from the party and the factories took turns to carry the coffin. On the journey, at every station, on the way, thousands of people waited to see the train pass. I do not think I ever saw so many tear-stained faces in my life. It was a very moving demonstration of the love the ordinary people for this great man.

When we got to Moscow I realised for the first time in my life what a mass demonstration really meant. Not a demonstration that was called, but one that came. Every conceivable foot of space was occupied. A great mass of people followed the coffin as it was borne from the station to the Dom Soyus (Hall of the Trade Unions), and from every side street and opening, mass upon mass of people converged with the main stream or waited their turn to do so. At the same time the digging was proceeding on the site of the mausoleum, so there was blasting and picking going on. All these streets were crowded with sad-eyed mourners. Every shop and hotel and all central places were ordered to keep open twenty-four hours a day so that people overcome by the cold could go in and thaw out.

Crowds at Lenin’s funeral. January 1924.

Moscow has witnessed many varied scenes in her many centuries of troubled history; her ancient records must be filled with historic incidents, but never had such scenes been witnessed as during the days of Lenin’s lying in state and funeral. The Dom Soyus, a former palace of nobility, once the setting for the glitter and pomp of the aristocratic Tsarist circles, was the place where Lenin lay. Here his own people, the working masses of Russia, could pay their last tribute to the mighty leader of the Russian working class and the world proletariat. “Our Comrade Lenin” everyone said, as if he were a father or a brother.

For four days and nights, for mile after mile, people queued four abreast to pass the bier on which Lenin lay. Along with Harry Pollitt I took a turn on the guard of honour. I remember I was with Chicherin. The bier was surrounded by wreaths of flowers of every description, sent from all over Russia and indeed from all over the world. The magnificent hall with its white marble walls was a blaze of light, contrasting with the deep varied hues of the flowers, and on the balcony the band of the Red Guards played music befitting such a solemn occasion.

Delegations from all over Russia streamed into Moscow, joined the endless queues, and placed their wreaths as they passed the bier. But there were no kings or queens, no aristocrats and their ladies, no great admirals or field marshals with glittering medals. Only the endless stream of workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors with their wives and families. The queues never seemed to get less. Over a million had passed the bier and still the queues remained. It had been decided that on Saturday the doors must close at 12 noon. But on Saturday afternoon there were still hundreds of thousands of people waiting with banners and wreaths, still train after train arrived, pouring the delegations into Moscow from north, south, east and west. Every minute messages from all over the world came, telling the world-wide grief at the passing of this great working-class leader. Certainly, no king, no emperor, no bloody tsar has been honoured as Lenin, the leader of the world working class.

At 7am on Sunday came the final parting. Around the coffin stood the leaders of the Russian Communist Party and the Communist International, and with them, keeping her last vigil, was Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and constant companion during thirty years of struggle. Lenin’s body was borne to the Red Square. As the coffin was raised the orchestra wailed the funeral march. After this a moment’s silence, then the International burst out, strongly and boldly sung. I thought then, this is the answer to the enemies of Leninism whose death was rekindling the hopes of new triumphs for imperialism. this is the answer of Lenin’s pupils, the Russian workers and peasants.

As the coffin was carried into the streets, crowds formed behind it. Leaders of the Party and trade unions took turns to shoulder the coffin along the Kremlin walls to the centre of the Red Square where the raised tribune was placed. The people filed past in millions until 4pm. Then silence just before the cannons crashed out the salute with a roar which could be heard in every corner of the world; factory sirens in every Russian city and village took up the salute; men, women and children stood still in silent homage. In every country throughout the world the workers paid their last respects to a great leader, who from small groups of Marxists had led the Russian workers forward to the formation of a mighty Communist Party and a mighty workers’ Republic and had laid the foundation by his leadership for a mighty Communist International.

The coffin was carried into the Mausoleum, Lenin’s final resting place. Queues formed again to pass the bier. It went on all night, all the next day and every day since. the years have passed and still the Russian workers and peasants and the visitors to Moscow from foreign lands pass the bier to pay homage to Lenin, the great working-class leader whose genius guided the people of downtrodden Russia and millions far beyond it, to break their chains and march to the not-so-distant communist society