From E.S. Hillman

[p035] E. S. Hillman 158 Genuine Mistakes? JOSEPH REDMAN is doing a useful service to the whole movement in digging out the facts about the General Strike period which the official ‘historians’ have for so long either neglected or hidden. We find this information of great help, in explaining to workers still in the Communist Party both that their troubles did not start just in the spring of 1956 and that they need not despair of finding out what has been wrong with the King Street clique. But in these discussions we run up against a difficulty which so far Joseph Redman has not helped us to solve. The Communist Party members answer: ‘All that you say may well be true, but perhaps these were just genuine mistakes.’ If we want to explain how Stalinism got itself into the crisis of 1956 we have got to explain, in the same honest historical way, why the Communist Party leaders took a ‘Right’ turn just before the General Strike and why they turned to ‘ultra-Leftism’ in the 1928-33 period and then back again to seeking alliances with capitalists after 1933. I would suggest to Joseph Redman that the leaders of the Communist Party have in reality always taken their lead from the Kremlin. That raises the question why the Kremlin should dictate to them in this country policies which have proved in- capable of building a revolutionary party. These policies seem to me to be the consequence of the foreign policies of the Kremlin, and to spring from a general tendency to seek the defence of the USSR through alliances with forces in the world other than those of the working class itself. The struggle for peace in the period before the General Strike appears to have been seen by the Kremlin as a struggle to ‘neutralize’ the aggressive aims of British capitalism by seeking an alliance with the so-called ‘Lefts’ on the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. The struggle for peace in the next period (1928-34) appears to have been seen by them as a struggle to win the support of the German bourgeoisie against France and Britain, and against the Labour leaders whom they regarded as the main supporters of the League of Nations, the international committee of the powers that won the first world war and whose victory was expressed in the treaty of Ver- sailles. In 1933, Hitler’s destruction of the German Communist Party and his anti-Soviet harangues gave the Kremlin a shock. Consequently, at the same time as Stalin was renewing the German-Soviet treaty of friendship after Hitler’s accession to power, Radek wrote in Labour Monthly (June 1933), under the title of ‘The Revision of the Versailles Treaty’: ‘The path of revision of the robbers’ peace of Versailles is the path to the new world war.’ This appears to me to be a complete reversal of the previous attitude of condemning the Versailles treaty and supporting the struggle of the German bourgeoisie for its revision. Two years later Stalin signed the pact with Laval and made the public statement that he understood and fully approved the rearmament of French capitalism under a re- actionary government. Redman could help us greatly if he could trace the deeper causes of the changes in policy for which he has produced the unassailable evidence. Gloucester