I WAS A COMMUNIST NAIF

Alfred Sherman, later associated with

the Thatcher revolution, recalls an earlier revolutionary cause 60 years ago

IN THE summer of 1937, I was aged 17 and studying science at Chelsea Polytech- nic. A scientist was what I then wanted to be. There, I joined the Young Communist League.

It was the time of Hitler, of unemploy- ment and all those other bad things associ- ated with the 1930s. To someone of 17, communism seemed to be the answer. But there was another reason why I became a communist. I was a Jew — a Briton only of the first generation. My parents came here from Russia. Russian was the language of our house. To be such a Jew in 1930s Britain was to be alienated. The world pro- letariat offered us a homeland. So another reason why I became a communist was to belong.

By word of mouth, volunteers were being recruited to fight in the communist- dominated International Brigades on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, which had broken out the previous year. We had read Byron and Shelley — partic- ularly the Byron of the Greek struggle. Spain was our poetic cause. I volunteered. We crossed the Channel and went by train via Paris, Lyon, Narbonne and Beziers to the Pyrenees — being led into Spain over the mountains by a guide at night.

After basic infantry training at a repub- lican barracks, we were sent to the Aragon front. Our over-optimistic mission was to capture Saragossa, which we did not. I eventually found myself in command of a light machine-gun, and two men. Another of my duties was to translate the orders of our Red Army instructor from Russian into English, French (at first, the Interna- tional Brigades' lingua franca) and Spanish — which latter I had learned at my East London grammar school, Hackney Downs. After a year and half, we found ourselves ambushed by Franco's Italian allies on the banks of the Ebro. I slipped away, only to be invited in Italian to put my hands up, which I did — assuming that I would short- ly be shot. I remember being not particu- larly dismayed about that prospect. We were still full of dreams of Byronic glory. Being shot would be part of it. Instead, we were sent to a camp; thence back to Britain. We still owe the Foreign Office £4, but at a reception in our honour at the British Embassy, the ambassador agreed to remit it.

Shortly afterwards, it was time to serve in another war. I did so with the British army in the Middle East. After that war, I was no longer a communist or indeed a socialist. In due course, I became the original Thatcherite. I still wanted justice, freedom and prosperity for all. I simply did not believe that the overweening state was the way to bring them about.

This month I returned to Madrid for the 60th anniversary commemorations of the founding of the International Brigades and their defence of that city. It was a great spectacle in which ghosts marched side by side with the living. We were several hun- dred survivors of the tens of thousands who gave the Republican army its cutting edge. `Some of the others had died in French, German and Soviet concentration camps — taboos on discussing it have been lifted — some had died in battle, most at the hands of the grim reaper.

Elderly men, some with sticks or in wheelchairs, some with carers and rela- tions, might have seemed anti-climatic. But we were not, because our event was the star, and we beat Helmut Kohl's visit for coverage. Welcoming speeches came from across the political spectrum; after all, the vote of the Cortes (the Spanish parliament) to grant us Spanish citizenship was unani- mous. The unreconstructed Left was the noisiest in welcoming us, for their own ends. But the Centre was confidently con- vincing.

Spain is now a free country, a prosperous part of Europe, capable of accommodating its social and ethnic conflicts peacefully. Hopes of a final settlement with ETA the last open scar of the civil war — coin- cided with our visit, and pre-empted the attention of the Prime Minister. (The King was away in Chile at a major meeting of Ibero-American heads of state.) Large crowds attended our meetings with local and regional authorities, universities and unions. The decision to give us citizen- ship reflected an overwhelming consensus that today's Spain is the Republic's legacy, not Franco's innovation. Even more mov- ing were the many unsolicited salutations and thanks from people of all ages in the street.

History never stops reworking its materi- als. Was the Spanish civil war really the first battle in the second world war? Or was it a sideshow in which an anachronistic His- panic pronunciamento became caught up with Axis ambitions, Stalin's manoeuvres and Western tergiversations, only to become detached again, while Spain caught up with Europe in its own time?

The communists' role calls for coherent assessment. Many of my erstwhile com- rades in arms at the ceremonies were still caught in the time-warp, or did not wish to break it openly; clenched fists and the singing of the 'Internationale', sancta sim- plicitas. But Spanish participants, for example the speaker of the Assembly of the Generalitat de Catalunya, made it clear: all totalitarianism was and still is the enemy.

I was a communist naif at the time; we saw ourselves as heroes, and initially were widely seen as that. In those early months, we saved Madrid and stopped a Franco walkover. Yet in the longer term, the com- munist leadership helped lose the civil war. From the perspective of 60 years, it is easi- er to see how and why.

There is still residual reluctance to come to terms with the extent to which Stalin was personally responsible for this. In ret- rospect, during the first 20 years of Stalin's effective rule, relations with Germany were the key. Rapallo (the 1922 treaty between Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union) set the tone. Thanks to it Germany was able to defy the Versailles prohibition on recreating an army. Von Seeckt's army in Russia trained to a level where in 1936 it could re-enter the Rhineland and face down the Anglo-French.

Stalin's decision in the 1928 and 1933 elections to support Hitler against the German social democrats, the largest party (whom the German communists denoun- ced as 'social fascists' and the main threat to the German working class), in the avowed belief that the Anglo-French and German social democrats were the main threat, made sense. The German hard Right was more reliable an ally than the German soft Left in overthrowing Ver- sailles. For this, Stalin was ready to sacri- fice the German communists, and more. His Comintern line in 1928-32 ratified his earlier decision at Rapallo and pointed the way to the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939. It was Hitler who used and betrayed Stalin, not vice versa. Stalin asked for it, we paid part of the price.

The Spanish war cut across this pattern in 1936. The small Spanish Communist Party had warned about a military upris- ing, but had been largely ignored inside Spain. Without the Party, and the Interna- tional Brigades whistled up in months, Madrid would have fallen, and much else besides. Stalin sent arms — mostly of first- world-war variety, but welcome for all that — planes, tanks and some good officers.

So long as the Spanish communists pushed from the back of the scrum, they became deservedly popular. Whose deci- sion it was that they should try to take over the Republic, I cannot say. But naturally this met with increasing resistance from their allies, and helped lose the civil war. Was the takeover impossible from the out- set? It worked in a third of the world. It worked in Grenada, Cuba and Nicaragua and almost worked in El Salvador, though the tide is turning there too.

When Stalin saw in good time that the takeover would not work in Spain, that the balance of forces was against him, he returned to his main objective, a deal with Hitler. The withdrawal of the Internation- al Brigades was the writing on the wall, which few read, one of the first steps towards the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Hitler could have Spain if he could digest it, which he could not; Spain slipped off the world map for a time.

Whereas walking through Moscow streets is sad, Spanish towns give off an air of cheerfulness. Of course, there is pover- ty. Spain is undercapitalised, but it no longer feels poor; it has too many cars and students, not too few; there is a choice of well-written newspapers, national and local. The civil war is something which affected parents and grandparents, it is much less close in some ways than the Revolution, collectivisation and the purges are to Russians today.

Spaniards enjoy one luxury of the rich: they feel very strongly the fate of less well- off countries. A bien pensant issue in the United Kingdom, it is a mass issue in Spain. The death of three Spanish Marist monks in Central Africa led the news and evoked pages of print.

Spain remains an integral part of the Hispanic world in a way which has no equivalent in our relations with the English-speaking world. This is much more real for Spaniards than membership of the European Union, a marriage of conve- nience, less debatable precisely because it is seen to count for less, though it will force Spain into hard choices in due course. But by then our ghosts will have been exor- cised.

My sense of satisfaction as the crowds applauded us was heightened by recollection of a snide comment made to Michael White of the Guardian by a Tory enemy (as distinct from a Labour opponent) in early 1974. when I had just set up the Centre for Policy Studies with Keith Joseph to challenge Tory post-war orthodoxies: 'Sherman was on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War and will be on the losing side in the British civil war.' In Britain, we did better than expected. But in Spain history has revised its verdict and given us the victory on points. For the time being, given the unanimous vote in the Cortes, there is no appeal.

In Britain, it is another matter.

Sir Alfred Sherman was an adviser to Lady Thatcher when she became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 .