DESPITE ITS DESCENT into barbarism and catastrophic political failure, official Communism constituted one of the major social movements of the 20th century. It remains of engrossing interest to historians, particularly to scholars who, despite everything that has happened since 1917, still aspire to understand and learn with an eye to the troubled future of human emancipation. In both Europe and North America, studies of Communist parties flourish and their relationship with the USSR and the Communist International (Comintern) – the subject of this paper – remains a major historiographical issue. In itself an important historical problem, it touches on issues at the heart of comprehending Communism. Interrogation of centre and periphery, dependence and autonomy, can enrich our understanding of discipline and democracy in international ideology and organization as well as desired outcomes, the replication of the USSR across the globe or more democratic national variants, political responsibility, the complicity or otherwise of foreign Communists in the crimes of Stalinism, and the relationship Comintern affiliates had to their national polity and national cultures.

      The literature is extensive, burgeoning, and contested. It is most developed in the USA. From the 1950s, the work of "the traditionalists" (among which the studies by Theodore Draper, and Irving Howe and Lewis Coser are of enduring interest) depicted the American party as undemocratic, subordinated to Stalinism, and incapable of relating creatively to American society. Exploiting the opening of the archives in Moscow, Harvey Klehr and his colleagues vigorously affirmed Russian domination. ¹ In contrast, from the 1980s, "revisionists" sought to transcend the institutional frame of earlier work. Utilizing social history they presented a homespun Communism aligned with a positive view of the work of activists in community, trade union, and cultural struggles in studies that often decentred Stalinism and the Soviet connection. Among notable work is Maurice Isserman’s account of the party 1939-46, Mark Naison’s study of Communists in Harlem, and Edward Johanningsmeier’s biography of party leader William Z. Foster. ²

      In Canada, there has been less polarization and polemic. The traditional approach is represented by William Rodney’s study of the first decade of Canadian Communism which follows Draper in its "top down" treatment of a party brought to heel by the Comintern, Stalinized by 1930, and thereafter "a mere satellite in the orbit of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]." ³ Neither Ian Angus in his Trotskyist-inflected examination of the early years of the party, nor Ivan Avakumovic substantially dissented. The focus of these studies was on the party leadership and high politics, and both emphasized Comintern control over party policy. Norman Penner’s Canadian Communism took the story into the 1980s but did not transcend these parameters. ⁴ There has been some reaction, as researchers such as Ruth Frager, Mercedes Steedman, and John Manley have repaired the absence of party activists and their struggles from broader histories, but without challenging their political conclusions. ⁵

      There have been similar tendencies in Britain. More than 40 years ago, Eric Hobsbawm chided partisan party historians for diminishing the role Moscow played in British Communism. ⁶ His insistence on the need to balance international and indigenous factors was echoed by Perry Anderson. Anderson emphasized that membership of the Comintern, a world party strikingly more centralist than democratic, entailed compliance with its directives: each national branch "lacked ultimate political autonomy in its major strategic orientations." Latter day celebrations of national identities ensured that "some of the official histories have been tempted to play down massive interventions by the Soviet bloc in the early life histories of these parties." Conversely, some Cold War monographs presented each party as if it were "just a puppet whose limbs were manipulated mechanically by strings pulled in Moscow." ⁷

      As in Canada and the USA, the early academic work focused upon the formal policy of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and demonstrated its subordination to Russian imperatives. ⁸ Later work shifted to "history from below" and the social and cultural aspects of Communist activity. ⁹ As in Canada and the USA, compartmentalization and relative lack of synthesis is noteworthy. If early work neglected the experience of "ordinary" members, later work tended to neglect the broader context, the politics on which activism was based, and the supervisory role of a leadership committed to those politics. What is different in Britain is that the latest work largely eschews "history from below" in favour of revisionist political history. It returns to an examination of "the line" and reinterprets its provenance. Unlike social history approaches which, through focus on local narratives and individual biography, avoid or downplay Moscow control, this is a distinctive project which explicitly confronts and revises the relationship of Moscow and London through the prism of formal policy.

      In a series of papers, an edited collection, and a monograph, Andrew Thorpe asserts that the opening of the Moscow archives justifies revision of existing accounts. It permits "a clearer focus on the exact relationship between these bodies" and reveals an alternative to the orthodox conclusion that Moscow’s politics were the decisive influence on CPGB policy. Thorpe’s central thesis is that the "Comintern’s influence over the development of British Communist politics has been exaggerated by most observers." Rather, "the party was, to a large extent, the master of its own fate." The conventional picture is mistaken. The Comintern "did not hinder [the CPGB] too much, most of the time, in providing its own solutions to the problems it faced." ¹⁰

      Matthew Worley endorses Thorpe’s political analysis and conclusions: "International policy was regularly adapted to suit national conditions and for the most part the CPGB was indeed ‘the master of its own fate.’" Worley’s main concern is with the Third Period, between 1928 and 1934, when the Comintern broke from the United Front and espoused predictions of capitalist crisis, impending revolution, and ultra-left politics. Almost all historians in Europe and North America have seen this as a disastrous imposition by Moscow. Worley, in contrast, emphasizes its indigenous roots and its relative success, portraying the Comintern as "sensitive to national circumstances." ¹¹ Thorpe in turn echoes Worley: the new line was ratified by British considerations, it was far from a disaster, and "would probably have come about … regardless of ‘orders from Moscow.’" ¹²

      The value of this work lies in its rehabilitation of the primacy of politics in analyzing a political party and its deployment of new evidence. Failing to adequately appreciate existing research, it undervalues and at times caricatures its conclusions. Consequently, its own interpretations and judgements are flawed. Any analysis of "centre-periphery" relationships must accord due emphasis to domestic factors, particularly in the implementation of policy if it is to provide a nuanced account. In these studies, the nuances, the adaptations, and the impediments to realization of Comintern policy are inflated, the big picture, the dominance of the Comintern, blurred. The evidence presented fails to justify revision of conventional verdicts. Critique of this literature is essential if we are to properly comprehend Communism; it also provides a cautionary study in revisionist methods.

      The following account should be of interest to students of Communism in Canada, the USA, and other countries where similar historiographical trends prevail. Because of the importance of providing a detailed, properly furnished critique, it is restricted to examination of the first ten years of British Communism. It is divided into four sections. The first provides an overview of existing literature. This is followed by critical examination of the new revisionism’s estimation of the literature and a critique of its model of the relationship between the Comintern and the CPGB. A third section discusses that relationship between 1920 and 1930. A brief conclusion provides an overall assessment.

In August 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s secret speech, the invasion of Hungary, and turmoil in the CPGB, the Soviet athletics team withdrew from the White City Games in London in protest against the detention of Nina Ponomareva, a Russian discus thrower. She had been arrested for stealing hats from a store in Oxford Street. In a path-breaking verdict, the Daily Worker condemned the decision to withdraw from the games as "regrettable." It was the first time the paper had ever editorially criticized a Soviet action. Hobsbawm complained in relation to the party crisis: "We tell them that we do not give the USSR ‘uncritical support,’ but when they ask us when we disagreed with its policy, all we can point to is Nina Ponomareva’s hats." ¹³

      The conclusion that the CPGB only ever differed from the Russians on the minor and the inessential characterized the first wave of writing about British Communism. Henry Pelling’s pioneering work, published in 1958, reflected its time and its author’s values. In a "top down" engagement with Communist politics, Pelling conceived the CPGB’s acceptance of international democratic centralism as the decisive factor in its policies. Accepting that decisions of the Comintern were binding, "the British party gave up its political initiative to the International." As Russian dominance of the Comintern became institutionalized, "blind loyalty" to the socialist fatherland and the party which had created it ensured willing compliance in every change of line. Each new strategic phase of policy, from United Front, to Third Period, to Popular Front, was initiated in Moscow and accepted in London, regardless of its application to British problems. Pelling registers differing degrees of Comintern intervention in different periods, although he concludes that by 1930 the CPGB "was reduced to an almost slavish submission to Moscow." ¹⁴

      At times Pelling’s emphasis on political subservience leads to excess, as when he writes of the CPGB’s "transformation into a military apparatus of the USSR," or when, striving to assert the party’s foreignness, he exaggerates the cosmopolitanism of its founding cadre. He wrote as a political historian and social democrat, and within firm constraints as to primary sources. To describe him simply as a "Cold War historian" is to overlook both the troubling complexities of the Cold War and the enduring democratic critique of the CPGB espoused on both the left and right of the British labour movement. Against the suggestions of at times intemperate criticism, which rarely burdens itself with citation or quotation, his healthy suspicion of Stalinism falls within the bounds of historical probity. ¹⁵

      Pelling’s account is not without nuance. He notes the difference between establishment of policy by the Russians, its transmission to the party leadership, and its problematic implementation so remarked upon by later writers: "instructions were passed down but they were not effectively obeyed." ¹⁶ He registers internal dissent. He observes in relation to the Third Period: "there was opposition among the British leadership to the line of the Comintern," and he documents the heresy of the Miners’ leader Arthur Horner. Pelling also touches on the mechanisms of Comintern control. It is mistaken to state that he ignores the raison d’êtres of British Communists, however unsatisfactory his explanation of their motivations. He places responsibility for failure not in Moscow but in Britain: "the major responsibility must rest with those who, though actually facing objective circumstances which had no comparison with those in Russia, still attempted to impose on those circumstances an alien code of political action." ¹⁷

      The main problem with Pelling is his one-sidedness. His emphasis is almost completely on formal policy and the leadership: the membership is reproduced, as Leslie Macfarlane remarked, one-dimensionally, as simply soldiers in the service of Stalinism. This leaves out their struggles against British capitalism, struggles with which many ordinary socialists could identify. But, Macfarlane’s examination of the CPGB in the 1920s does not disturb Pelling’s estimate of subordination: where there was significant disagreement, the British party was "required to conform." But he insightfully emphasizes that the majority of members did not perceive the Comintern as a foreign, external controller. They conceived it as a wise, experienced guide whose decisions were "in the main accepted by the British party without question." ¹⁸ The Comintern relied on authority not coercion. Macfarlane expands Pelling’s canvas, chronicling the interaction of the Comintern and the CPGB and problems in applying Communist policies in the unions and the Labour Party. He demonstrates empathy with CPGB members, who were, he believes, neither puppets nor dupes. Workers joined the party for the same reasons they joined the Chartists. Many of their struggles were exemplary and kept alive the spirit of anti-capitalism. Nonetheless, his verdict is unequivocally negative. By 1924, an initially relatively relaxed if ultimately dominant Comintern was becoming more directive. The Third Period reflected Stalinism in Russia and Stalinized the CPGB. By 1929, "the direction of the Communist International’s policies was largely determined by the internal needs of the Soviet state." The "tragedy of the Communist Party" was that while it stimulated struggle, it "misdirected" it. ¹⁹

      This was emphatically the position of Walter Kendall, who painstakingly documented the role the Comintern played in terms of prestige, ideology, and money in establishing the CPGB and developing its politics. There is no need to accept Kendall’s conclusions as to the potential of the pre-CPGB revolutionary tradition nor his belief that the destiny of the party was determined in 1921 to agree, as his sharpest critics have, that the Comintern was decisive in realizing British revolutionaries’ desire for a Communist Party. ²⁰

      Other historians turned towards the application of Communist strategy in the trade unions. In his study of the CPGB-sponsored Minority Movement (MM), Roderick Martin evoked the tensions inherent in collaboration between Communist and non-Communist activists, and the problems party members experienced when union responsibilities conflicted with political goals. But, he concluded that "ideological, organizational and emotional pressures were strong enough to enforce Communist conformity to the Comintern policy ...." ²¹ Writing from a Trotskyist perspective, James Hinton and Richard Hyman corrected earlier work in this vein. They demonstrated the extent to which the CPGB’s application of United Front tactics in the mid-1920s veered to the right of Comintern prescriptions and, in contrast to Pelling and Macfarlane, they questioned the efficacy of Comintern policy from a revolutionary perspective. ²²

      Stuart McIntyre’s studies of revolutionary autodidacts, Marxist philosophy and pedagogy, and the development of local Communist strongholds reflected the impact of "history from below." Within the constraints of conventional political history and party orthodoxy, Noreen Branson’s third volume of the official history of the CPGB represented an advance on James Klugmann’s earlier volumes. Where Klugmann downplayed the political impact of the Comintern, it was a major, if fleeting, presence in Branson’s work. Its primary and deleterious influence in the Third Period was given full weight; but once the Popular Front liberates indigenous factors, it receded, re-emerging only in 1939. ²³

      Without questioning the formal domination of Comintern politics, Kevin Morgan insists on going beyond official pronouncements to integrate orthodox political history and "history from below." Scrutinizing the period 1939-41, he usefully documents the reticences, evasions, and silences of CPGB activists in implementing the anti-war line and depicts the concessions made to economism, pacifism, and populism. Morgan observes that "the broad lines of Communist policy were determined not by a rational appraisal of what was possible in British conditions but by the erratic directives of the distant heads of world Communism who could not have cared less about the British working class ...." He provides a formally balanced view of international and national pressures: "if the CP [Communist Party] was unquestionably a genuine British working-class party responsive to the British political situation, it was also, from another aspect, an ‘agent’ of Soviet foreign policy: possibly the main problem in writing Communist Party history is to comprehend the sometimes complex relationships between the two." ²⁴

      Allowing for complexity, the fundamental, if difficult, historical question remains and is evaded here: which was primary in the party’s policies, the national or the Russian? The extent to which the CPGB could be a genuine British party and respond effectively and authentically to the situation in Britain was restricted by Comintern hegemony of its politics: deviations from policy in practice were never sufficient to challenge that judgement. The changes in line which Morgan chronicles are explained by pressure from Moscow, not pressure from British workers. What unified the national and international moments of British Communism and resolved the tensions between defence of the "workers’ state" and the struggle for its extension to Britain was, as Macfarlane demonstrated, the legitimacy of the Russian leadership as the final arbiter. The record discloses that, at every conjuncture, Russian considerations came first. This was appreciated by contemporary workers if not modern academics. It generated the CPGB’s justified reputation as the "zig zag party," the "picture palace party" (where the programme changed twice weekly) and "not a party of the left." ²⁵

      Limited refusal by members to implement party policy was an impediment on policy, not a positive alternative to it. Morgan is documenting fragmented resistances, not principled political opposition to the Comintern line. The CPGB’s acceptance of Moscow’s insistence that it oppose the war in 1939-1941 is more remarkable than the fact that, given its unpopularity, some activists failed to implement it. Yet without reaching any explicit resolution of the tensions between Comintern and national pressures, Morgan emphasizes the latter. Where Macfarlane connected admirable struggles with their ultimate subordination to the Russian state and returned a negative verdict, Morgan, neglecting to adumbrate the criteria he is utilizing, passes a positive judgement: the Stalinized CPGB, which enthusiastically responded to every disturbing twist and turn of Soviet policy, is favourably contrasted with the rest of the British left. ²⁶

      A similar emphasis on indigenous factors pervades much of Nina Fishman’s study of the CPGB and the unions between 1933 and 1945. Against the weight of evidence, British leaders are depicted as steering the CPGB away from the excesses of the Third Period, espoused only by a coterie of zealots, and empowering the native pragmatism of the party cadre. Once the Third Period is negotiated, the Comintern and even the party become peripheral actors: the Moscow trials, the Gulag, and the Hitler-Stalin pact, cast no shadow. The emphasis is on autonomous activists whose primary loyalty is to trade unionism. There are few connections or tensions in this text between the Comintern, the party, and the unions. Relying heavily on testimony from participants, the book purveys a novel, cosy, and very British "model of democratic centralism ... highly derivative of working-class non-conformism. It relied on individual consciences to interpret the real world." ²⁷ Real sources of motive and constraint, the class-struggle in workplace and union, the temptations of economism, are highlighted. But other significant sources of motive and constraint – the Stalinist party, its discipline, its leadership, and its policies – are under-investigated and under-emphasized. The Popular Front period permitted a relative flowering of "national Communism;" but there were always limits.

      Predilection for the Popular Front and emphasis on the relative autonomy of party activists imbues Willie Thompson’s The Good Old Cause, its title assimilating the CPGB to the British republicans of the seventeenth century. Thompson writes political history, but the party’s politics are at their healthiest the further they travel from the original revolutionary imperatives and the more they adapt to the national terrain. The Comintern is viewed in Thompson’s text as an episodically intrusive and usually malign influence on the politics of British Communism. The CPGB’s dramatic moves to the left, at Moscow’s behest and in Moscow’s interests, as in 1928 and 1947, are portrayed as "reversals" of the party’s natural trajectory towards the mainstream of bourgeois politics in Britain. ²⁸

      In contrast, McDermott and Agnew’s The Comintern, the first work by British historians to explore the newly opened archives, corroborates the primacy of Moscow while taking cognisance of the impact of "history from below." The Comintern, they conclude, was transformed into "a bureaucratic mouthpiece for the Soviet state" and after 1929 "whoever controlled the Russian party apparatus controlled the Comintern." Over the Comintern’s history "the tension felt by foreign Communists attempting to balance fealty to Moscow with responsiveness to indigenous realities was invariably resolved in favour of the former." ²⁹ A weakness of social history is its "propensity to underestimate the mechanisms of control employed by the Comintern ... and by the party leaderships at national level." After 1929, "Stalinist discipline demanded that members loyally fulfil the party line, deviations were rarely tolerated for long and space for debate and discussion was severely restricted. While scope for regional, local or industrial initiative and adaptation did exist and should be recognized, it must be treated with a fair degree of circumspection." ³⁰ Overall, the Comintern has to be evaluated negatively in relation to the Third Period, "social fascism," the Stalinist terror, and the Nazi-Soviet pact.

      On the whole, the literature affirms, although it expands and nuances, Pelling’s judgement that the CPGB surrendered its political initiative to the International. To emphasize local struggles and committed lives in particular countries, divorced from the political framework which governed them, and on this one-sided basis, to treat the movement with approbation, is to write Communist history with the Communism left out. ³¹ There were conflicting interpretations of the line propounded by the Comintern. The strategic axes determined in Moscow required adaptation when inserted into the different political formations of Canada, China, the USA, and Britain, or even the different Labour parties in Manchester or Glasgow, the miners’ union in Wales, and the engineering union in Liverpool. It is commonplace and commonsense that there was debate and dissension. What remains striking is the enduring conformity of the CPGB to Comintern directives, despite differences in the degree of intervention in different periods. It is important to document national adaptations inherent in the nature of an international project. To suggest that such secondary factors equalled political autonomy or qualified loyalty to the Russians is to trivialize politics and fail to do justice to Communists’ grievously mistaken commitment to internationalism.

      The literature demonstrates that the CPGB was always subordinate and that control sharpened in the Third Period. Even when the Comintern was at its most extreme, after 1928 and in 1939-41, there was only fleeting, individual defiance. There was no sustained political opposition of any scale and the evanescent individual resistances of Arthur Horner, 1929-1931, and the party leaders Harry Pollitt, J.R. Campbell, and Willie Gallacher in 1939, were swiftly followed by recantation and self criticism. In sharp contrast with other Comintern affiliates, in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Canada, or the USA, – and this point is often evaded – this was, from the beginning, a distinctively conformist party: there was no factionalism with the solitary exception of the tiny Trotskyist Balham group. All we can find is a handful of protests like the CPGB’s criticism of the Colonial Thesis at the Comintern’s 1928 World Congress "which could not be maintained once the decision had been taken." ³² If the socio-historical approach enriches our knowledge of how Communists thought and worked, and suggests the limits of a not very democratic centralism and the problems the CPGB confronted in implementing agreed policies, it does not change this assessment. Finally, although the criteria for judgements are sometimes unclear, the majority verdict is that with some differences over the early period 1920-23, the Comintern exercised a detrimental impact upon British revolutionary politics.

With different emphases and qualifications, this verdict has hitherto gone unchallenged, although some have urged that greater weight be accorded to the social and cultural aspects of CPGB activities in view of its political weaknesses. ³³ Thorpe, whose approach is commended by Worley, has now sought to categorize British historiography, following the American example, as justification de texte in respecifying the relationship of the Comintern to the CPGB. He delineates "three main schools." The first, "associated particularly with Henry Pelling," argues that the CPGB "rapidly became the slaves of Moscow." It is peopled by Cold War warriors and Trotskyists, but, apart from Pelling, the only other author cited is Hugo Dewar. The second school, "the revisionists," are influenced by the "new labour history" and end up "dismissing the importance of what might be called the ‘high politics’ of the International and its parties." The only British scholar cited as revisionist is Macintyre. The third school, the "post-revisionists," are defined with imprecision as rejecting on the one hand, the idea that British Communists were "slaves of Moscow" and, on the other, the view that they were "utterly unaffected by the Comintern and the leaders of their national parties." ³⁴ Despite the fact that most would commend this proposition, if question its crippling inexactitude, no British writer is cited as a member, although Thorpe clearly sees his own work as governed by this rubric.

      This categorization is artificial, yet it pervades Thorpe’s work, much of which is dominated by a synthetic contest with the "slaves school." The idea "that a flick of the lever in the Kremlin led to immediate and complete changes" in CPGB policy, he tells us, is the product of "myths and legends." At the Congress which established the CPGB, "the mood was not slavish." In 1921 the party was not "cravenly submissive"; by 1923 "the party was not slavish to Moscow’s every whim"; Communists were not "marionettes being manipulated by a Kremlin puppet master"; "the characterization of British Communists as ‘slaves of Moscow’ during this period is utterly misleading." ³⁵

      This contestation is a central organizing device for Thorpe’s analysis. Yet it is based on caricature as the absence of citation suggests. He claims, in prose parading as precise but which is in fact parodic, that this school posits a model "whereby an order was made in Moscow; was then transmitted with total clarity; and was then followed with complete obedience by the party leadership. The latter, in turn, transmitted the order to its members, again with total clarity; it was then followed, again with complete obedience, by party members." ³⁶ Such exact characterization surely merits specific reference to the work of those so characterized, particularly in the case of Pelling who, as we have seen, recognized the problems of implementing Comintern directives. Yet in Thorpe’s extensive oeuvre there is only a single quotation from Pelling, his reference to Comintern control in the Third Period assuming a "quasi-military character." ³⁷ At the highest, this is metaphoric exaggeration. It is relevant that Thorpe nowhere quotes Pelling on slavery, for in the almost 200 pages of Pelling’s book there is only one such reference. Pelling writes that at the zenith of the Third Period, the CPGB was "reduced to an almost slavish submission to Moscow." Pelling’s image, which impressionistically but effectively evokes one facet of the CPGB’s predicament, is translated by Thorpe so that "almost slavish" becomes "the epitome of slavishness." ³⁸ There is a difference and an infidelity to the sources being criticized. If in the most rigorous terms, "almost slavish" still smacks too much of coercion when the CPGB’s subordination was self-willed. Thorpe is constructing and demolishing a straw man based on one sentence in a pioneering text 40 year’s old, a text long supplemented by other work which vindicated its message of Comintern domination of the CPGB.

      "Many historians," Thorpe insists, "have seen the British party as the epitome of slavishness to Moscow." ³⁹ The only one of the "many" he mentions in addition to Pelling is Dewar. But, if we read Dewar we find no reference to "slaves of Moscow," "marionettes," or the rest of the paraphernalia of automaticity. Dewar insists upon the hegemony of the Comintern while distinguishing different degrees of intrusiveness from Moscow at different times: "The rein may have at first not been tight, not even felt by the members but it was nonetheless there." ⁴⁰ Until the Third Period, Dewar stresses, the Comintern took account of indigenous factors and problems of implementation. In the early years "there was exhaustive discussion" and "national peculiarities were recognized and tactical flexibility accepted within the framework of the strategic ‘general line.’" ⁴¹ Both Pelling and Dewar suffer from imperfections but they deserve considered criticism not caricature.

      Similar weaknesses inform Thorpe’s construction of the revisionist school. The one British writer who has explicitly aligned herself with American revisionism, Fishman, is not included. Instead the burden falls completely on Macintyre. Yet if, as Thorpe suggests, "the new labour historians have suggested that we should not get interested in this relationship [between the Comintern and the CPGB]: it made no real difference to what Communists did in their daily lives," then Macintyre is an unlikely and unwitting revisionist, for he has nowhere asserted this. When Thorpe inveighs against revisionists: "it will simply not do to argue that we can take the politics out of political history,"he is ascribing to Macintyre arguments the latter has never made. ⁴² The work Thorpe refers to is focused on CPGB ideas and activists: it nowhere dismisses the importance of "high politics." Macintyre seeks to go beyond political history, not replace it; he is extending and supplementing political history, not rejecting it. His analysis of the transformations in Marxist thought in Britain, for example, takes full account of the influence of "official Communism" and the CPGB’s active attempts to impose a new order in revolutionary philosophy and pedagogy. Macintyre, moreover, has written elsewhere, and in some detail, about the institutional politics of Communism and the relationship between the Australian party and the Comintern. ⁴³

      Thorpe’s final category, "the post-revisionists," is embarrassed by the absence of a single British historian. The only exemplar cited is Maurice Isserman, conventionally considered a leading light of American revisionism. This categorization of the literature is brittle. It provides a fragile basis for the re-examination of issues. If Thorpe’s work is to proceed on this flabby basis – "the CPGB was not a slave of Moscow; but neither was Moscow completely irrelevant" – and is to assert its novelty by its distance from two parodic "slaves" and "anti-politics" schools, one approaches it with trepidation. Moreover, while the only basis for a serious post-revisionism is the very difficult project of a total history, which yokes together history from above and history from below, Thorpe is resolutely wedded to "high politics."

      Nevertheless, he states that he wants not only to add detail to existing knowledge but "to do much more than that … to address the nature of the relationship between the CPGB and the Comintern" and "explain how power was negotiated and shared out in the Communist movement during the Comintern period." ⁴⁴ This would suggest the need for explicit formulation of the factors involved, of the power, interests and motivations of the parties, their goals when pursuing key issues, an account of outcomes, what influenced them, and how they changed in different periods. It would benefit from some comparisons between the relationship of the Comintern and the CPGB and that which Moscow enjoyed with other parties. Yet despite his dissatisfaction with existing work and ambitious desire for greater exactitude, Thorpe elaborates no alternative model. On the contrary, his account of relationships is narrative, empirical, and impressionistic.

      Characterization of the institutional relationship between the Comintern and its constituents is an essential beginning in determining how power was shared out. For it demonstrates that, formally, the CPGB was not independent. Through 250 pages of his monograph, Thorpe makes only two brief references to this. He tells us, somewhat haltingly, that the CPGB was "part of a worldwide network of Communist parties; indeed the CI [Comintern] was conceived as a world party of which the national parties were only branches." Twenty pages later, he briefly rehearses the 21 conditions of membership which subordinated the CPGB to the Comintern. ⁴⁵ Thorpe’s lack of emphasis contrasts with that of the CPGB itself, which stressed proudly and publicly, at least before 1935, that it was a subsidiary unit in an international party. Throughout his book, moreover, there is no analysis of the decreasing democracy in the Comintern and the increasing formal powers of its executive (ECCI) which by the end of the 1920s had the right to ensure that its decisions were "promptly and strictly" carried out by all sections, cancel or change national decisions, dissolve national parties, expel their members, even fix their contributions. By that time, the practice and culture of the Comintern was rigidly centralist, not democratic centralist. ⁴⁶

      In terms of formal legitimacy, this is important to the negotiation of power. But it is subsidiary to the actors’ ability to mobilize resources, sanctions, and ideology. Here we must add to the calculus the overwhelming resources the Russians could deploy in Comintern transactions. From 1920, the Russian party’s wielding of state power, its prestige as maker of the revolution which eluded other parties, and its relative monopoly of material resources, ensured an undemocratic disequilibrium within the Comintern. This must surely qualify Thorpe’s idea of negotiation, certainly if the term carries connotations of even a rough balance of bargaining power. If it suggests, rather, dependence on the part of the national branches, then the increased tempo of "Bolshevization" from 1924 sealed the fate of the ECCI as an instrument of the Russian party. Reviews of the literature conclude that even in the early 1920s "any major decision" was taken by the Bolshevik leadership: "The ruling would be communicated to the Russian party delegation to the ECCI which then ensured its passage through the Comintern executive. This practice evolved under Lenin, was consolidated during the interregnum and became set in stone under Stalin." ⁴⁷

      The assimilation of the Comintern into the Russian state decisively aligned Comintern directives with Russian foreign policy. This is central to any assessment of the centre-periphery relationship. It is simultaneously an essential explanatory device for understanding Comintern decisions, an important qualification of the idea of negotiation, and an indispensable starting point for assessing "how power was shared out in the Communist movement." Yet these developments are scarcely touched upon: in the whole of Thorpe’s lengthy monograph, there are only a handful of scattered and superficial references to political changes in Russia. Thorpe provides no explicit assessment or periodization of the Comintern, apart from vague references to intervention in national parties being greater in one period than another. The rich literature, which, for example, in one strand distinguishes a primitive period, 1920-23; the Zinoviev period, 1924-27; the increased tempo of intervention in the Third Period; and the more controversial changes from 1935, is not deployed. ⁴⁸

      Rather than inserting the CPGB into this kind of analytical framework, Thorpe opts for a relentlessly British approach. His unstated but pervasive model focuses largely and empirically on the CPGB and its responses to Comintern decisions. He has little to say about CPGB initiatives on issues outside its own province of Britain and the colonies. That these were negligible, even in comparison with other national parties, is very clear. By the end of 1924, the CPGB was being lectured: "The Communist Party of Great Britain should follow actively and discuss systematically the problems of the Communist International and of brother parties. Previously that had not been done in a satisfactory manner." ⁴⁹ Zinoviev’s subsequent commendation of the CPGB’s position on the controversy in the Russian party is well known. It is also instructive that Comintern representatives found party leaders’ understanding of the issues questionable and were directly involved in drafting the CPGB resolution condemning the Russian Opposition. ⁵⁰ The CPGB’s neglect of the, admittedly and increasingly circumscribed, democratic moment in world democratic centralism, the fact that even in the 1920s its positive input into Comintern decision making was derisory, bespeaks insularity and deference: it therefore requires registering.

      Instead, Thorpe concentrates upon assessing dependence and independence through the prism of decision making inside the CPGB. If he dispenses with the essential Comintern context, his analytical framework is also devoid of criteria of measurement. He provides not even a rudimentary means of ranking political issues and their significance to the two parties. He provides no criteria at all for distinguishing the depth and quality of disagreements or failures by the CPGB to meet Comintern imperatives. Yet we need to weigh very differently a vote against an issue at a Congress and sustained opposition by the party leadership to the Comintern position. We need to discriminate between a simple omission to raise something in a union branch through lack of conviction or fear of criticism and, further up the line, protest and the formation of a faction. We need to differentiate refusal to send a delegate to a not particularly important Comintern meeting through lack of funds, at one extreme, from opposition to a new strategic line, motivated by political disagreement, at the other, if we are to arrive at a sharper estimation of the relationship. We need to know how, in whose favour, disputed issues were resolved. In the absence of such yardsticks, conflation of a wide range of issues and disagreements can lead to judgements that magnify independence, even though in reality it is matters such as Nina Ponomareva’s hats that are contested while important issues such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary are accepted.

      So, for example, Thorpe asserts sweepingly, "British Communists’ approaches to politics varied to such an extent that the idea of party members simply following ‘orders from Moscow’ is untenable. At every turn of the line there was dissent and this did not disappear once the line had been changed." ⁵¹ We have to ask: what was the nature, quality, and depth of the "dissent" to each major strategic orientation, how many people were involved, who were they, how long did their disagreement last and how were matters concluded? Thorpe provides four examples of dissent: when the embryonic party moved towards parliamentary action and affiliation to the Labour Party, at the inception of the United Front, during the move to the Third Period, and during the Popular Front. In the first case, Thorpe provides no evidence. There was vocal opposition over these issues but it was defused by the Comintern and really belongs to the party’s pre-history. While problems continued – several branches in Glasgow left the CPGB in 1922 over the decision to withdraw Communist candidates, an incident Thorpe omits to mention – opposition was transitory and small scale.

      The only evidence produced for dissent over the United Front and the Popular Front is that in the first case twenty per cent of the votes at the 1922 Congress were cast against it; and in the second case that Pollitt had to stress that, in espousing the Popular Front, the party was not rejecting socialism. ⁵² (We deal with the Third Period later.) Twenty per cent of delegates voting against the United Front as part of the policy process in the party’s second year is mild dissent. No organized opposition emerged and the strategy was strongly supported, despite differences over tactics, until 1927. Thorpe’s evidence for his assertion of differences over the Popular Front raises fundamental questions as to his methodology. He cites only one example of dissidence without quotation or paraphrase. The conscientious student who follows up this solitary reference – it is to the London District Congress of 1938 – will find only a bare statement from Pollitt that the Popular Front represented no retreat from socialism. There is no reference to dissent. There is no evidence in the report that Pollitt made this statement because he was facing opposition. Thorpe imaginatively, but in terms of historical method, illegitimately, infers discord. In this specific case, Thorpe’s data is non-existent. ⁵³ Overall, he inflates minor into major disagreement and provides slender and superficial evidence for his sweeping revisionist conclusions.

      Demonstrating similar lack of proportion, he cites a number of minor omissions by the CPGB to carry out Comintern directives: such as failure to donate £50 to Inprecorr, or send a delegate to a farmworkers’ conference, as well as a "strongly worded" protest over Comintern criticism. On this tenuous basis he again concludes sweepingly: "The party clearly believed that CI decisions were negotiable, therefore." ⁵⁴ The distinctions between a farmworkers’ conference and the strategic political line, between protest and opposition, between major and minor, are dissolved by a non sequitur. Thorpe goes on to assert "[the party] extended this even so far as to call for Radek’s inclusion in the British Commission at the time of the fifth world congress despite the fact that he was now falling out of favour in Moscow." ⁵⁵ His unwitting juxtaposition of this respectful request to overlook Radek’s political unreliability, given his knowledge of Britain (written at a time when the CPGB failed to understand the seriousness of the factional struggle in Russia), with "on the other hand, the party and Moscow were at one over Trotsky" highlights the problems with Thorpe’s lack of discrimination between issues. The Radek letter, a relatively minor entreaty, is conflated with what for Zinoviev and the Russian leadership of the Comintern was a life and death issue of primary significance. ⁵⁶

      Analytical promiscuity can only produce inexact and unbalanced judgement, a problem emphasized by the absence of international comparisons in Thorpe’s work. Yet, such comparison over an issue such as the factional struggle in Russia can provide the beginnings for developing at least a rough and ready calculus of conformity and independence. The CPGB in 1924-25 – Thorpe tells us there were "a handful of expulsions," when there were none, might be usefully contrasted with other national parties. The Belgian party, where the leadership carried on a sustained opposition to the Comintern, might be fruitfully compared with the Polish party, where the leadership sought to intervene to support Trotsky but were quickly and coercively quashed; and both might be usefully compared with the French party, where prominent leadership figures were expelled; and with the Canadian party which refused to condemn Trotsky; and finally with the CPGB where, if we dispense with the magnifying glass, dissent from the leadership’s loyal support for the Comintern anathema was negligible. ⁵⁷

      Finally, in suggesting the limits of the Comintern’s dominance of the CPGB, Thorpe provides a list of alternative influences: "Pressure from below, factional and individual rivalries, the stance of the State, the Labour Party and the trade unions, and working class responses, all played their part in determining party strategy." ⁵⁸ Once again this is evasive. It unhelpfully conflates different kinds of factors, and different orders of explanation as well as strategy and its tactical adaptation. Moreover, Thorpe once more fails to provide even a rudimentary ranking of these factors. Is he arguing that the policies of the British state or "pressure from below" took precedence over Comintern policy in determining CPGB strategy? How do we rank "pressure from below" against the policy of the state and the Labour Party? Thorpe does not even begin to separate out and assess the influence of different factors from Comintern policy to trade union pressures and to differentiate the primary from the secondary. His only essay in asserting the predominance of indigenous factors relates to the Third Period to which we return below.

Any model seeking to transcend existing literature would elaborate the factors in the relationship between the Comintern and the CPGB making for unity and consensus on the one hand and dissension and conflict on the other: disparities between the imperatives of Soviet foreign policy and the requirements of class struggle in Britain are obvious examples. Thorpe does not explore this theme but he does examine a range of "control mechanisms" intended to overcome "severe obstacles" and "keep foreign Communists on the right lines." Obstacles listed are the legality of the CPGB which diminished dependence on Moscow; the British state’s curtailment of the activities of Comintern agents and problems in using coercion against CPGB members; the distance London lay from Moscow and difficulties of travel and communication. In the face of these obstacles, ideology and identification with the USSR were "not deemed sufficient to keep foreign Communists on the right lines." ⁵⁹ Thorpe, therefore, starts from an unelaborated but commonsensical nationalist model where political differentiation rather than political identification between the Comintern leaders and the CPGB is inherent and assumed; for the nature and wellsprings of potential conflict are left unexplored. In accordance with this inexplicit differentiation, he assumes a reluctance on the part of British Communists to accept Comintern directives and a need for the Comintern to impose policies on the CPGB through the use of "control mechanisms."

      The mechanisms are "surveillance and supervision," monitoring of CPGB documents, reports from members of other parties, surveillance of British visitors to Moscow, maintenance of a Comintern representative in Britain, and a CPGB representative in Moscow. A second set of mechanisms are termed "concrete assistance," notably financial subsidies and deployment of foreign Communists in Britain. A third avenue was the provision of propaganda material, though the scale of this varied and was greatest 1924-1935. The Comintern could also sponsor individuals and factions, manipulate the youth movement, privilege students returning from the Comintern’s International Lenin School (ILS) in Moscow, and, finally and rarely, fall back on "coercion and intimidation." Thorpe concludes that external compulsion was "not sufficiently powerful to force the CPGB, over sustained periods, to do what it did not itself wish to do." ⁶⁰ This is important because the failure of mechanisms of control provides, in Thorpe’s analysis, the guarantee of the party’s autonomy from Moscow.

      The fundamental problem with this is that there were no "sustained periods" when the CPGB had to be "forced" by the Comintern "to do what it did not itself wish to do." The CPGB typically wanted to do what the Comintern wanted it to do. There were occasional doubts and at times grumbling and whingeing. There were periods, such as 1928 or 1939, when there was some resistance. These were largely, although not completely, resolved by the large degree of consensus between London and Moscow, and the legitimacy London accorded to the Comintern as the ultimate arbiter of Communist truth, not by "control" or coercion. That legitimacy was the preponderant and ultimate factor cementing the CPGB to the Comintern. Thorpe’s cursory treatment of the CPGB’s identification with the USSR leads him to underestimate the party’s essential identification with the politics of "the workers’ state" and the Comintern. Contrary to Thorpe, this allegiance was primary in explaining Comintern domination. Comintern hegemony was largely forged in Britain not Moscow. It was largely the product of a voluntary impulse on the part of British Communists. In the end, compliance stemmed from the beliefs and values of party members projected onto the Comintern and the USSR. It was freely chosen, not coerced; control mechanisms were important but they were secondary, reinforcing factors, more relevant to British comprehension of Comintern policy and the supervision of its implementation than to its acceptance or rejection.

      Thorpe’s scrutiny of this fundamental, defining issue runs to a brace of quotations about Russia from CPGB leaders prefacing peremptory rejection of the view that identification with the USSR adequately bonded the CPGB to the Comintern. This is to underestimate the internationalism of British Communists and their blending of the socialist fatherland, the Russian party, and the Comintern to constitute the fulcrum of that internationalism. It was not simply the belief that Russia, not Britain, was "the workers’ country:" a choice most decisively affirmed in the winter of 1939; or that to criticize the USSR was "to sin against the Holy Ghost;" or even the CPGB’s self-declared "implicit faith in the Communist Party of Russia and the Executive Committee of the Communist International" (Emphasis added). ⁶¹ Faith and emotion were melded with scientific Marxism and the pivotal belief that:

a sufficient degree of homogeneity pertained in the international workers’ movement to admit of its central direction. The logical corollary of this – which outsiders could never understand –was the conviction that the right tactic to adopt locally was determined by international considerations. This was internationalism – so grievously lacking in August 1914 – and its organisational expression was subordination of the national sections to the centre. ⁶²

This was the ABC of the CPGB. Its first leader, Arthur MacManus, responded to accusations of foreign domination: "The social forces are worldwide. They know no nationality." ⁶³ Cadres like Palme Dutt were perplexed that comrades could consider pushing dissidence so far as to attract the wrath of the Comintern: there was no salvation outside it. Far from conceiving of the Comintern as some external controller, the CPGB cadre regarded it as "our party", "our leaders." ⁶⁴ This was expressed by Macfarlane long ago: "The most important point of all to grasp is that the ordinary party member did not see the relationship in terms of ‘outside control’ and ‘Moscow gold’. He saw himself as a member of a great working-class international movement guided by outstanding Marxist revolutionaries who were making Russia into a land of socialism." ⁶⁵ For such party members, the Comintern and its politics were internal and immanent.

      The documents are replete with statements from CPGB leaders, such as: "The Communist International must give the Party its best political assistance and help in coping with the big tasks that lie before the Party." ⁶⁶ The CPGB attempted to instil the spirit of Comintern membership at all levels. The syllabus of party schools announced: "Task of the course: To understand, absorb and correctly put into practice the general line of the CPGB and the Comintern." ⁶⁷ The leadership urged that "every Party speaker do his utmost to carry out the instructions of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist International.... If every one of our speakers carries through this instruction they will be a living part of the Communist International’s worldwide May Day Campaign." ⁶⁸ Pollitt expatiated: "The biggest lesson of the whole of this discussion to me is the value of being a section of an international party," and asserted against internal pressure: "The Comintern represents the leadership of revolutionary struggle and its criticisms were stronger than London or Tyneside." ⁶⁹ J.T. Murphy recorded: "Many times I heard the remark, ‘We are getting living proof of the value and importance of belonging to the CI.’" And he pronounced: "We dread to think what would have happened had we not belonged to the International and received their guidance and authority." ⁷⁰ Members felt that in a crisis: "The International was a tower of strength and sound judgement." In all eventualities, "the Party must have a leadership which gives the guarantee to the membership and the CI that the line will be carried out." ⁷¹

      In terms of theory, the CPGB had a clear conception of its dependence on the Comintern: "We have a good practical leadership in the British Party but none of us with the exception of Dutt can make much claim of theoretical Marxism," Gallacher informed the Russians. ⁷² Reports to Moscow reminded the Comintern of "the general theoretical backwardness of our membership" and noted that "our Party workers have not always the time to read." ⁷³ In comparison with the Belgians, the Canadians, the French, the Germans, the Spanish, the CPGB stood out in the 1920s as one of the parties most politically dependent upon the Comintern. One historian sympathetic to the party concluded that, by the 1950s: "Intellectually undistinguished and bereft of even the capacity for independent Marxist thinking, the entire British party leadership had for more than three decades demonstrated uncritical deference to the Soviets." ⁷⁴

      If all this was fundamental and necessary to Comintern domination and CPGB compliance, it was not sufficient. Despite the shared commonality of politics, it is inherent in Marxism, as a method of analysis, that analysts can reach very different conclusions as to the nature of a conjuncture and the strategy required in it. It is natural and inevitable that in Marxist organizations there will be differences of opinion; despite their "implicit faith" in the Comintern, this was true of the CPGB. ⁷⁵ This is where control mechanisms did play a part, although here again Thorpe’s touch is uncertain. It is typified by his treatment of the vexed problem of financial subsidies. Kendall’s conclusions on the important role Moscow gold played in the party’s formation have stood the test of time. It is now clear that significant subsidies continued through the 1920s and 1930s. The newly opened archives disclose substantial allocations running from at least £60,000 in 1921-22 to £45,000 for 1927 and £36,000 for 1928. They paid for almost all aspects of CPGB activity: between 1920 and 1922, membership subscriptions constituted less than three per cent of total income. In 1924 Inkpin told the Comintern – we cannot, of course, completely discount an element of self-interested exaggeration – that the CPGB’s own income was approximately £1000 and its liabilities £400. Thorpe himself calculates that by 1927, Comintern subsidy to the CPGB (with a membership of less than 7,000) was equal to two-thirds of the income of the mass-membership Labour Party. It is therefore difficult to accept his summation: "The extent of the Russian subsidies can also be exaggerated." ⁷⁶

      Thorpe goes on to claim that it is "plausible to argue that the money, while gratefully received, made little real difference." ⁷⁷ This is unsustainable: without the subsidy the CPGB in all probability would have ceased to exist at some point in the 1920s, like Sylvia Pankhurst’s organization, or at best been consigned to the shadowy existence of the Socialist Labour Party and its successors. This was the considered view of Murphy, intimately involved with the subsidies from their inception: without them the party would "have probably gone out of existence within a year or two of formation." ⁷⁸ Keeping the CPGB alive, subsidies enabled it to build its organization and compete with rivals in a fashion quite out of proportion to its membership: by 1931, it financed 41 full-time staff, representing one full-timer for every 165 members. ⁷⁹

      As early as 1921, the CPGB decided that Politbureau members should be paid £5 a week, other functionaries £4 a week. This was referred to as "the trade union rate," but was more than most trade unionists and CPGB members earned. The general secretary, Albert Inkpin, insisted that party staff "must be guaranteed a livelihood," but this was a generous livelihood when at times the majority of party members were unemployed. These salaries could not be paid without Comintern subsidies and, not surprisingly, the documents suggest that a return to the factory or the dole was regarded with something short of enthusiasm. There were further benefits such as trips abroad and opportunities for journalism: a Comintern representative explained to Dutt, who received a salary direct from Moscow, that the Russian press paid 80 gold roubles for long articles, 15-20 for short pieces, and that 4 or 5 articles could be placed each month. Moreover, a range of employment was offered and was sometimes seen as attracting the inefficient and politically undesirable: "Willie McLaine, another incompetent is living on the Famine Fund. Whitehead, with his wicked associations with women and wine in Berlin is worse than incompetent, is also living on the Famine Fund. When Comrade T. A. Jackson is proved incompetent as Editor of The Communist, a position must be found for him in the Information Bureau." ⁸⁰

      Comintern subsidy permeated key aspects of party organization in the 1920s. When the Comintern agent Borodin, despatched to secure the reorganization of the CPGB, was arrested in Glasgow in August 1922 and asked for his passport: "he slapped his trouser pocket and said that ‘this – meaning money – had been his passport.’" Some party leaders, it seems, had to be literally bought: after Murphy’s expulsion in 1932, Gallacher recalled how Murphy had quit the CPGB ten years earlier because his salary was stopped, returning only after he was assured of its restoration. Quite apart from the institutionalized annual allocations, when the CPGB encountered difficulties, whether over wages, in by-elections, in the Fife miners’ union, in the United Mineworkers of Scotland or in the Clothing Workers’ Union, its reflex was to ask Moscow for more money. Requests for special funds to bale out the party-controlled Clothing Workers’ Union, led by CPGB member Sam Elsbury, were headed in the interests of secrecy but with some justification in view of the organization’s remorseless search for customers and hard cash: "Sam’s Business." The organization of party education was inextricably bound up with securing Russian money to resource it. Disputes over the party’s national school were resolved in the Comintern’s favour, but it had to pay a price, being landed with a bill of £700, including £5 a week wages for the tutors. When Moscow purged the party leadership in 1929, wages, so important at the start of the decade, once again became a bone of contention. The response of full-timers dismissed their employment was to appeal against the party to the cornucopian Comintern; several solicited paid employment for their families in Moscow. ⁸¹

      Asserting naively that: "Clearly, such levels of financial support cannot have been without an impact. Yet it is difficult to see precisely what the impact was," Thorpe fails to confront how subsidy was utilized as a "control mechanism." ⁸² Between 1920 and 1923, dispensation of largesse, relatively uncontrolled by the Russians provided a control mechanism for the CPGB leadership. Mikhail Borodin, then Comintern representative in Britain, paid tribute to the influence money could exert when he informed his superiors in 1922:

Any authority which has heretofore been exercised was due not to the quality of the Centre but to the fact that the means which we allocated to the Party were all at the disposal of one or more individuals who thus had economic power rather than the power derived from organization and efficient leadership. Naturally, the moment such financial means were withdrawn or became scanty, there came an end to the economic power wielded by the individuals and the whole business began to crumble and disintegrate.