23 FEBRUARY 1991, Page 30

Two wrongs don't make a left

Stephen Spender

ABOUT TURN edited by Francis King and George Matthews

Lawrence &Wishart, £34.95, pp. 318

This is the transcript of the highly acrimonious debate which took place from 24 September until 3 October 1939 be- tween members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain, after they had received the directive from the Comintern (ie Stalin) as to what should be their attitude towards the war, following on the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, which had been signed a month previously, on 23 August. The edict stated that the Communists should now oppose the war as unjust and imperialist, adding that 'the division of states into fascist and democratic has lost its meaning.'

To understand the enormity of the change demanded, one has to go back to the 1930s. To destroy Communism had been, in Germany, the declared aim of the Nazis, whom the Communists regarded as their chief enemies. When, during the Spanish Civil War, the Russians intervened on the side of the Republic, and the Nazis on the side of Franco, Communists and other anti-Fascists from all over the world, particularly those who had been victimised by Fascist regimes, found themselves allies in the struggle against Fascism.

Fascism had been in one respect God's gift to Communism. It was so evil that to be anti-Fascist was to be virtuous. Since, during the Spanish Civil War, the Com- munists seemed to spearhead anti-Fascism, the distinction between Communists and other anti-Fascists became blurred in the luminous aura of shared virtue. In all the democracies there was an unprecedented increase in Communist Party membership.

Although the German-Soviet non- aggression pact had the effect of alienating many anti-Fascists, it could, after the initial shock, be given an anti-Fascist interpreta- tion. It would be seen as Stalin's tactic to protect the Russian citadel of Communism from being attacked by the Nazis, with the democracies standing by as spectators, happy to see Communism destroyed at its centre. Moreover, the Chamberlain gov- ernment could be blamed for Russia's deal with Germany, on account of its haggling throughout the summer of 1939 over the conditions for an Anglo-French defensive alliance, together with the Soviet Union, against Nazi Germany. In accordance with this view, Communists outside Russia could, English and French communisants argued, continue to be anti-Fascist while Russia remained uninvaded, triumphant even in having acquired Polish and other territories for Communism. The Nazi- Soviet pact could be viewed as a victory of Stalin over Hitler.

But the directive of 9 September 1939 made nonsense of all this. Now, on Stalin's instructions, the Communist Parties were told that Communists must not fight the Nazis, but oppose their own governments in the Democracies that were fighting Hitler's Germany.

The ultimate 'truth' of the situation by which all members of the British Central Committee of the Communist Party were tested in this debate — with the result that at the end of ten days even the most recalcitrant voted in support of the direc- tion from Moscow — was the word of Stalin. As the ideologue Maurice Corn- forth, citing remarks made by Harry Pol- litt, the British Communist Party's general secretary, on a previous occasion, put it, 'the Soviet Union can do no wrong . . . This is what we have to stick to, these are the reasons why personally I commenced to turn political somersaults.'

Nonetheless, in the course of the debate, Harry Pollitt, William Gallacher (the sole Communist MP), J. R Campbell and a few others refused to accept the following arguments put forward principally by the singularly unattractive top Party ideologue Palm Dutt: that there was suddenly no- thing to choose from between Nazi Ger- many and English and French democracy in what had become an imperialist war; that the Soviet-German Pact signified a great victory for Russia which would soon lead to a workers' revolution in a greatly weakened Germany; and that a photograph of Stalin shaking hands with Ribbentrop should be interpreted as signifying 'the Soviet army shaking hands with the Polish peasants'. William Gallacher commented on Palm Dutt: 'I have never at this Central Commit- tee listened to a more unscrupulous and opportunist speech'; whilst J. R. Campbell made a brilliant speech analysing the aims of Nazi Germany, part of which, as some delegates pointed out, might have come from the mouth of Churchill. During the debate several members expressed views for which they might well have been shot if this had been a meeting of the Soviet Central Committee, held in Moscow.

In the end, the meeting voted unani- mously in favour of accepting the Comin- tern Party Line. The reason for their attaining such unity was secular-religious: that for all the comrades the High Priest in the shrine that was the Kremlin repre- sented Truth beyond all Reason without which no true believer could live.

This book provides an invaluable case history of the effects of dogmatic authorita- rian political doctrine on its believers. Bernard Levin has pointed out in the Times that it is abominably written. But it seems more important to point out the terrifying distortions of language that occur under authoritarian Party leadership than simply to dismiss the language as beneath consideration.

In these pages the use of the word 'democracy' exemplifies this. Speakers here apply it indiscriminately as an OK phrase, according to the immediate re- quirements of their rhetoric, either to describe countries like England or France which have parliamentary governments and freedom of the press or, equally, to approve the abolition of all such freedoms in the name of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. One might say that, linguisti- cally, the significance of the debate re- corded here was the withdrawal of the epithet 'democratic' from countries with parliamentary governments and its restric- tion solely to Stalin's Comintern. That is the sense in which 'the division of states into fascist and democratic had lost its former meaning'.