There Are Two Johnny Gollans

I: is always a strange experience to switch on TV and see a person you know. As a rule people pretend to be much nicer than they are; conscious sweetness flows like treacle from the actress wha is a bitch in private.

But this pretence was reversed when John Gollan, general secretary of the Communist Party. appeared in the B.B.C. programme “Give and Take’. For Gollan is @ man whom I know to be, in private, good and kind.

In public he appeared as a callous politician. waving aside the slaughter of thousands. or trying to balance it against the slaughter of more thousands somewhere else.

EXPLAINING THINGS AWAY. The man I have known as endlessly patient in explanation was here not concerned to explain things, but to explain them away.

Three people were questioning him—Peter Calvocoressi, Denis Healey, MP, and the BBC’s ‘anonymous’ psychiatrist. whose name is Dr. Stafford Clark.

Whenever the questions asked by one of these became awkward, Gollan turned gracefully to a less awkward discussion with another.

He began by denying that British communist policy was ‘the Soviet Union right or wrong’.

So Denis Healey asked him when his party had ever disagreed with the Soviet Union.

“But what.’ asked Gollan with an air of astonished candour, ‘do you want us to disagree with the Soviet Union about?’

Dr. Stafford Clark reminded him of the party's sudden change of line in 1939, when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler and then invaded Poland.

THEIR BREATH BACK. ‘Russia never invaded Poland, said Gollan, and succeeded in exnlaining about the Curzon Line before any of his questioners had got their breath back.

‘We never opposed the war effort’ was his reply to the next obvious question. “Our members who were called up went and fought as well or as badly as anybody else.”

It was lucky for Gollan that his questioners did not recall Pollitts TV interview last year. For Pollitt then admitted that from October 1939 to June 1941 the party had opposed the war. that he had voted against this policy, and that he still thought the policy had been wrong.

But instead of pressing the point they started asking Gollan about spies, with special reference to the late D._F, Springhall. Gollan parried that one easily by pointing out that the party had expelled Springhall for his activities.

Denis Healey asked about somersaults in the Party’s policy. ‘I am delighted to talk about somersaults,” said Gollan. He was glad the Labour Party had somersaulted, from supporting the making and testing of the H-bomb to opposing it.

He was asked how it was that his own somersaults always coincided with those of the Soviet Union.

“You defended every act and word of Stalin—until after he was dead.

‘There are many things done by Stalin which we still support’ said Gollan. “There were other things of which we had no knowledge .. . If we did not know these things about Stalin, how could we protest?’

Denis Healey asked incredulously if he really had not known that in the purges of 1937-41 Stalin shot 80 per cent of all the generals in the Red Army. and that of all the Politburo members of Lenin’s time. only Stalin himself was left.

‘Published in Pravda. said Healey, when Gollan asked him where he got his facts. They hadn't been. of course, as Gollan pointed out. (This was a lucky quibble: the Khrushéhey speech was never published in Pravda, and not even the speech gives exact figures.)

Gollan went on to account for Stalin's excesses by his war-time experiences; the Soviet Union had suffered more than any other country. and ‘it tore the guts out of the Nazi Army’.

‘An interesting phrase. showing hate. murmured the psychiatrist. ho annarently did not know that the phrase was Churchill’s.

HIS MASS MURDERS. When it was put to him that Stalin’s wartime experiences did not account for his mass murders in the thirties. Gollan said: ‘I dispute that these killings took place to the extent you say. He went on to talk about the 1,035 executions in Kenya.

“But why does that make it all right anywhere else?’ asked the psychiatrist.

Brought back from Kenya. Malaya and Cyprus to the subject of Stalin's murders, Gollan said: “When we knew about these killings. of course we denounced them.”

‘After the Russians had done so. said Denis Healey.

“Of course. after the Russians themselves had supplied the facts,’ returned Gollan calmly.

There was another quibble when Healey said that Professor Hyman Levy had found ‘rampant antiSemitism’ in the Soviet Union. Gollan said that Levy's report did not say that. (It does not. in fact. use that phrase.)

INNOCENT THOUSANDS RELEASED: But he did not quibble when Healey quoted the reports from the Polish papers that thousands of ordinary people had been released from prison, having been kept there for no crime.

Gollan asked his questioners to look at the record of the past forty years as a whole. Communism had raised countries from the dust. It had given the land to ‘he peasant. It had not launched wars of aggression. (In the background someone repeatedly asked: “Wasnt Finland a war of aggression?’ but Gollan ignored this.)

_ The communist system, he went on, possessed within itself all the forces needed to put its own abuses right.

‘Communism,’ he concluded “brings happiness.’

As the discussion faded out-we saw Dr. Stafford Clark, not arguing. but simply studying Gollan, with a look of are professional interest. He might have been quoting ‘ope.

“Who would not laugh, if such a man there be? Who would not weep. if Atticus were he?’

LLL S LILIA LL ILL. :