Tag: politics

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.

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

‘Hotel Lux’ by Maurice J Casey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Stewart.