Paul Flewers

... 2 See, for example, Dudley Collard, Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others (London: Gollancz, 1937); William Coates and Zelda Coates, From ... Brailsford and other socialists in Brussels.9 It was pointed out that the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen, at which Holtzman, a key ...

This article investigates how Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ was received in Britain. It looks firstly at analyses of the Soviet Union that were current at the time of Stalin’s death: the Cold War school that effectively precluded the possibility of any serious reforms being implemented, and the school of thought that was expecting, especially after Stalin’s death, the implementation of a programme of far-reaching reforms. It then looks at the press coverage of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and the subsequent emergence of the ‘Secret Speech’. It shows the way that the differing schools of thought dealt with the speech and the changes announced at the congress, noting how they attempted to fit them into their theoretical schemas. It also deals with the response of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s leadership to the congress and speech and the way that this triggered a wave of criticism within the party membership. Finally, it concludes that the Cold War school greatly underestimated the capacity of the Soviet leadership to implement liberalising reforms, that those expecting far-reaching reforms were to be disappointed by their limited nature, and that the ‘Secret Speech’ and other events of 1956 were gradually to change the previously uncritical attitude of the Communist Party towards the Soviet Union.

This article investigates how Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ was received in Britain. It looks firstly at analyses of the Soviet Union that were current at the time of Stalin’s death: the Cold War school that effectively precluded the possibility of any serious reforms being implemented, and the school of thought that was expecting, especially after Stalin’s death, the implementation of a programme of far-reaching reforms. It then looks at the press coverage of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and the subsequent emergence of the ‘Secret Speech’. It shows the way that the differing schools of thought dealt with the speech and the changes announced at the congress, noting how they attempted to fit them into their theoretical schemas. It also deals with the response of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s leadership to the congress and speech and the way that this triggered a wave of criticism within the party membership. Finally, it concludes that the Cold War school greatly underestimated the capacity of the Soviet leadership to implement liberalising reforms, that those expecting far-reaching reforms were to be disappointed by their limited nature, and that the ‘Secret Speech’ and other events of 1956 were gradually to change the previously uncritical attitude of the Communist Party towards the Soviet Union.

This paper investigates Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy, concentrating upon the examples of Trotsky's ideas and actions in which Trotsky was centrally involved of which Deutscher presented a critical assessment and for which he provided differing perspectives. These are i) Trotsky's ideas concerning substitutionism; ii) his theory of Permanent Revolution; iii) the assumption by the Bolsheviks of a political monopoly after the October Revolution; iv) the substitution by the Bolsheviks of the rule of their party for the rule of the working class; and v) the chances of success for the Left Opposition, what remained of the October Revolution under Stalinism, and the possibility of political change within Stalinist society. This paper considers that although Deutscher's perspective of the democratic self-regeneration of Soviet society was wildly optimistic and caused him, if reluctantly, to accept the victory of Stalinism, it also permitted him to show the problematic features of Bolshevism in power in greater detail than Trotsky was willing to do.

This paper investigates Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy, concentrating upon the examples of Trotsky's ideas and actions in which Trotsky was centrally involved of which Deutscher presented a critical assessment and for which he provided differing perspectives. These are i) Trotsky's ideas concerning substitutionism; ii) his theory of Permanent Revolution; iii) the assumption by the Bolsheviks of a political monopoly after the October Revolution; iv) the substitution by the Bolsheviks of the rule of their party for the rule of the working class; and v) the chances of success for the Left Opposition, what remained of the October Revolution under Stalinism, and the possibility of political change within Stalinist society. This paper considers that although Deutscher's perspective of the democratic self-regeneration of Soviet society was wildly optimistic and caused him, if reluctantly, to accept the victory of Stalinism, it also permitted him to show the problematic features of Bolshevism in power in greater detail than Trotsky was willing to do.

Article published in New Interventions, Volume 7, no 2, Spring 1996, on James Klugmann's notorious book From Trotsky to Tito, concentrating upon the significance of the book in respect of the internal regime of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Key words — Stalinism, Communist Party of Great Britain, show trials, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia.

This article investigates E P Thompson’s writings on the topic of Stalinism, from his first comments in the immediate aftermath of Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ in 1956, through his articles in The Reasoner, the New Reasoner and the New Left Review and his polemical exchanges with Leszek Kołakowski and Louis Althusser in the 1970s, to the theory of ‘exterminism’ that he promoted within the campaigns against nuclear weapons during the 1980s and 1990s. It argues that Thompson never developed a coherent theoretical account of either the rise or the nature of Stalinism, and his extensive writings on the topic were thus tentative, inchoate and at times contradictory.

This essay looks at the impact upon Western Ukraine of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, with particular reference to the commonplace assertion that the invading Nazi troops were welcomed by the Ukrainian population of the area.

Between June 1917, when the Ukrainian Rada issued its first Universal, and 1920, when the third Soviet government in Ukraine was set up, there was a series of short-lived governments in Ukraine, including one in Galicia, and times when there appeared to be no central governmental apparatus at all. This essay aims to explain why no enduring government was established in Ukraine during this period.

This essay outlines the Russian, Ukrainian and Soviet historiographies of the Kievan Rus in the light of recent analysis of the elaboration and use of national historiographical myths. It considers that the historiography of Ukraine has often revolved around the fraught and highly emotive issue of the relationship between that country and Russia, rather than being discussed as a matter of disinterested study.

This article investigates the policy of War Communism that was pursued by the Soviet government during 1918-21. It starts by looking at differing interpretations of War Communism by historians, then investigates the reasons why the policy was adopted and whether other policy choices were possible or desirable, what it entailed, and what impact it had upon agriculture and the peasantry and upon industry and the working class.

This article looks at the response in Britain to the Soviet invasion of Finland in late 1939, with particular reference to the Labour Party and the rise of a broad anti-Soviet consensus that prefigured the anti-communist atmosphere of the Cold War.

The first part of this paper investigates the relationship between Soviet foreign policy and the policies of the Communist International, with the objective of attempting to explain the development of the tendencies which led to the bifurcation in September 1939 between the policy requirements of the Communist International which flowed from the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the pro-war stance of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The second part investigates the policies and activities of the CPGB during the period of the Soviet-German alliance. The third part takes a brief look at the responses of other organisations and currents within the British labour movement to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the CPGB during this period, and concludes by situating the events of this period within the overall political trajectory of the official communist movement.

This essay investigates George Orwell’s conception of totalitarianism, starting with his initial writings on the Soviet Union and Stalinism in the late 1930s, and finishing with his two most popular novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It shows that his views on the topic were influenced by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, his attention to events in the Soviet Union and wartime Britain, and his observations of left-wing intellectuals and the ambiguous attitude of some of them towards the question of individual freedom and independent thinking. The essay concludes that Orwell was able to provide vivid descriptions of political and social phenomena but was hindered by his inability to offer an explanation of what he described, which enabled his last two novels to be used by his political enemies as propaganda weapons against the idea of socialism.

This article investigates the rise of idealism within the Russian intelligentsia in the early twentieth century and then gives a conspectus of Vekhi, the journal in which seven former prominent Russian radicals expressed their newly-adopted idealist outlook. It then looks at the responses to the journal, and concludes by considering the validity of Vekhi’s critique of radicalism in the light of the course of Russian history.

This article investigates how three longstanding critics of Bolshevism became deeply enamoured with the Soviet Union during the 1930s and, in the case of the Webbs, produced a major work that became a popular authority on Soviet society. It looks at the issues which drove them drastically to revise their views on the topic. It notes how pro-Soviet reviewers used their writings to bolster their views on the subject, and how hostile critics viewed their writings as apologies for Stalinism. It also notes that neither Pares nor the Webbs were totally uncritical of the Soviet Union, and indicates where they demurred from Stalinist orthodoxy.

This article investigates how the Trotskyist movement in Britain dealt with the Communist Party of Great Britain after it adopted an anti-war orientation in October 1939. It shows how the Trotskyists dealt with the growing domestic patriotism of the CPGB in the late 1930s, the party’s dramatic shift in respect of the war, the pro-German tinge to some of the CPGB’s statements, the seeming similarity between the CPGB’s anti-war propaganda and that of the Trotskyists, and the Trotskyists’ intervention in the CPGB’s major campaign of this period, the People’s Convention. It also looks at the differences amongst the Trotskyists in respect of their estimations of the damage that the anti-war line had inflicted upon the CPGB, the attitude to take towards anti-war candidates in by-elections, and the controversial Proletarian Military Policy.