CLIVE TURNBULL reviews the Socialist Register for 1976, edited by Ralph Miliband and John Saville (Merlin Press, £2.50 — available from Red Books).
THE BULK of this year's Socialist Register contains articles marking the 20th anniversary of Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
The significance of these articles is that they deal with the impact of the 1956 events within the Communist Parties outside Eastern Europe. Most of the authors were party members in 1956.
BOMBSHELL
The 20th Congress revelations in February 1956, coming from a central leader of the CPSU, exploded like a bombshell throughout the Communist Parties. Krushchev's speech was delivered in a secret session from which delegates from other CPs were excluded, and details of the report leaked only slowly.
Articles reporting the Congress by British party leaders contained only hints of what had been said. It was not until April that two articles by Harry Pollitt (then CP general secretary) summarised the speech.
As John Saville reveals, even this summary omitted 'specific details that made the impact of Khrushchev's speech so shattering: the fact, for instance, that 1,108 delegates to the Soviet Party Congress of 1934 — out of a total of 1,966, including Central Committee members — had been arrested by 1938 (and almost all of them done to death, it could be added).'
The reaction of the CP leadership was summed up by R. Palme Dutt in the May 1956 issue of Labour Monthly: 'That there should be spots on any sun would only startle an inveterate Mithras-worshipper.' The full text of the speech only appeared in June — not in the CP press, but in the Observer, which devoted a whole issue to it.
One article in Socialist Register contains interviews with leading members of the French and Italian Communist Parties in 1956, and shows that Khrushchev's speech was part of the struggle for the CPSU leadership.
Jean Pronteau, a member of the PCF Central Committee in 1956, recalls confronting Maurice Thorez, its general secretary, after learning of the secret speech on a trip to Poland.
'He looked at me expressionless: "The report? What report?" I replied: "The report Khrushchev made in closed session, the secret report."
'I started to get worked up, and took out of my briefcase the notes I had taken in Poland. At that point Thorez said to me: "Oh! So you've got it. You should have said so straight away."
'And he added in a pontifical manner: "Anyway, just remember one thing. This report doesn't exist. Besides, soon it will never have existed. We must pay no attention to it."'
Thorez's position throws light on the possible motives of the quiet pleasure he showed, when the "anti-Party group" almost managed to seize power and overthrow Khrushchev.
'It was a near thing. Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovitch had a majority in the Praesidium. If it hadn't been for Zhukov's tanks, Khrushchev would have been beaten.'
Thorez' position throws light on the possible motives of the CP leaders in Britain in suppressing debate in the party. John Saville describes the fight he and other CP members waged in trying to raise questions about the 20th Congress in the party press.
Finding the official organs — the Daily Worker and World News — closed to debate, Saville and Edward Thompson produced their own journal, The Reasoner. In the course of the year leading up to the special CP Congress in April 1957, the CPGB lost 7,000 members, a fifth of its total.
The Socialist Register articles also raise a question which has been ignored, not surprisingly, in the debate among CP leaders on 'Socialist Democracy — Some Problems', in Marxism Today this year. This is the complicity of the CPGB leadership in the crimes of the Soviet bureaucracy.
CASE
Malcolm McEwen relates the case of Edith Bone, a British CP member and Daily Worker correspondent who was released after seven years imprisonment in Hungary, following the return of Nagy as Prime Minister.
'...it rapidly became known, and was admitted by Campbell and Pollitt at the EC, that during Edith Bone's disappearance they had several times "inquired" about her, and had received no satisfaction whatever from the Hungarian Party, or Rakosi its general secretary... It was all very well for Pollitt to say that "unity" must be defended at all costs, but the costs had to be borne by the Edith Bones, not by the Pollitts who enjoyed innumerable trips and holidays in Eastern Europe.'
It has taken Gollan twenty years to produce criticisms which he fought to suppress in 1956. An article by Ralph Miliband in this Socialist Register accurately describes Gollan's article in Marxism Today (January 1976 issue, now available as a pamphlet):
'It is in fact a lamentable document, written in the familiar wooden style associated by long usage with such productions, mealy-mouthed, full of careful ambiguities and euphemisms, and generally content most commonplace formulas in the Communist movement concerning Stalinism and its consequences.'
Despite its limitations, Gollan's article and the fact that the CPGB Political Committee sanctioned its publication reflects a shift since 1956. Now there are at least the restricted outlets of the Morning Star letters column, Comment and Marxism Today. But as Miliband notes, discussion in the CP is still limited to branch level and the 'sacrosanct "ban on factions"' ensures that no nationally organised opposition to the leadership can develop.
TURN
The 'mealy-mouthed' criticism that the CPGB is now prepared to make of the CPSU is not the result of a shift towards Trotskyism. Rather it is part of the general turn by a number of European CPs to distance themselves from the CPSU.
This has been a reaction to the repugnance of workers coming into the struggle over the recent period to the bureaucratic practices of the Soviet bureaucracy. It has also been a reaction to the pressure from the European social democratic parties which have sought to shift the relation of forces in the working class in their favour through defence of democracy in the workers states.
Nevertheless it turns the spotlight on questions of extreme importance for revolutionary Marxists. We will therefore be taking up [the printed text breaks off here, at the foot of the column]