From Edwin Heath

[p027] Edwin Heath [These letters are selected from a number of similar ones expressing different views on Peter Fryer’s article. We asked Edward Thompson to reply in Labour Review but he writes to say that he prefers to reply to both Fryer and Hanson in a future issue of the New Reasoner. Meanwhile Labour Review and, no doubt, The New Reasoner, would welcome more letters on this important subject—Editors]. The Stalinist ‘Turns’ T. MARSHALL and Joseph Redman have suggested a key to the explanation of the great ‘turns’ of Stalinist policy—the foreign policy of the ruling élite. I think that this is a useful line of approach. There were, as Redman points out, three major ‘turns’, that from Leninism to the Right in 1925-27, expressed in the Anglo-Russian Com- mittee and the political support for Chiang Kai-shek, that to the ‘Third Period’, and that to the ‘Popular Front’. The first may have been opportunistic seeking for allies against the major imperialist power of the old world, Britain. The second may have been a rapprochement with German nation- alism against the Versailles settlement, its main beneficiaries, French and British imperialism and its main political sup- porters—social-democracy and the pacifists. The third, pretiy clearly, was a turn away from Germany after Hitler’s coup in 1933 towards seeking alliance with the ‘democracies’. Naturally Stalin could not expect a pact of protection without paying for it: hence the subordination of the Communist Parties to bourgeois-soctalist coalitions in France and Spain;. hence the Moscow trials to draw a trail of blood between his régime and the old Bolsheviks; hence the savage hounding of his revolutionary critics, the true communists of their day. a But how could such gigantic manoeuvres be carried through? The members of the Communist Parties were not all blind idiots. The situation may have been more complex than Marshall suggests. Certainly the theoretical training of communists was defective; they were insulated from reading Opposition literature and anything by Trotsky. Certainly the apparatus-men of the Communist Parties were even in 1925 being hand-picked for ‘loyalty’. Communist Party members may themselves be the best source of information about the mechanics of putting such turns through. On each occasion there must have been people in the Communist Parties who were feeling frustrated and who seized on the new line in the hope that it would solve difficulties for them. This was especially true in 1934-36, when the ‘Popular Front’ line made it far easier to approach the people and recruit than during the sectarian ‘Third Period’, when all non-communists were condemned as either fascists or social-fascists. At certain times it is possible to build up large movements based simply on demagogic phraseology; the social-democrats and Hitler have both done it. Such movements do not last. Perhaps it is the wrong basis on which the big movements of 1935-39 were built which explains the rapid decline, and the panic of the intellectuals when the Stalin-Hitler pact burst over their heads. Their previous indoctrination had not pre- pared them for what was essentially the old policy turned inside out! Here and there in the documents of every period of Stalinism we find ‘saving formulas’. Even in the wildest ravings of the ‘Third Period’ we find phrases about ‘unity’. Even at the height of the super-patriotism of 1941-45 we find phrases about the class war. Consequently, in each period, the possibilities of a future ‘new line’ were latent. Not only Stalin but his henchmen too could never be wrong; the appropriate face-saving quotation could always be found. In the language of Leninism this 183 kind of document is called ‘eclectic’. No wonder this broke the hearts of the Communist Party ‘critics’; it is to be wondered that any of them evolved politically. Why are things different now? Primarily, I think, because the world is. different. The colonial revolution, the advance of the Soviet working class and the frustrations of the working class in the advanced countries: these all shake and upset whatever bargains the Kremlin rulers may be able to make:;for ‘peaceful co- existence’. The Communist Party members themselves are no longer mentally imprisoned by the choice between im- perialism and stone-bottomed Stalinism. Perhaps Redman and Marshall can put some more flesh on the bones of their analysis of the ‘turns’ of Stalinist policy. Birmingham