Whiplash

  August 1939 was the beginning of the end of the intellectuals’ dalliance with communism. Not because they felt betrayed by Stalin, but because they were exposed, for the first time, to the wild oscillations in communist policy. The CPGB, following the line imposed upon it by the Comintern, no longer professed the defence of democracy against fascism, but embraced a tactic of revolutionary defeatism. There was nothing to choose, the Party claimed, between the rival imperialisms – democracy and Nazism – and defeat in war would be the springboard for communist revolution. It was the same belief that had animated the German Communist Party right up until the Gestapo threw its members into concentration camps: ‘After Hitler, us.’

W.H. Auden, a contributor to Christianity and the Social Revolution, branded the 1930s a ‘low dishonest decade’. Gollancz shared that feeling. In his pamphlet of May 1940, Where are you Going? An open letter to Communists, he described reading the Daily Worker – which had begun to quote Hitler approvingly and blamed British aggression for the German invasion of Norway – with ‘a sense of almost intolerable shame’. He had ‘realised the danger inherent in even a mild, common-sense, acceptance of the dictum “The end justifies the means”, and to what an abyss, and how quickly, men can descend, if they once begin to depart from the truth.’

In France, Heinrich Mann’s reaction was similar. The German émigré was able to credit Stalin’s ‘wisdom’ in holding aloof from the conflict. But he had, in Lenin’s phrase, voted with his feet by fleeing Germany and developed an affection for the democracy which had sheltered him from Nazism. Stalin could be excused, but the French Communist Party, which distributed defeatist propaganda in the factories, could not.

In early 1941, the CPGB convened a People’s Convention, which made a series of impossible demands and encouraged strikes if they were not acceded to. It was the sordid limit for the LBC selectors, who collaborated with Orwell on The Betrayal of the Left: an examination and refutation of Communist policy. Interestingly, each of them (excluding Orwell) made a point of offering a charitable interpretation of the conduct of Stalin and the Soviet Union. But by returning to the conspiratorial and anti democratic methods of its past – ‘preaching’, as Orwell put it, ‘the doctrines of Machiavelli in the jargon of Lawrence and Wishart’ – British communism had permanently alienated its one-time sympathisers.