Labour And The Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left

CONTENTS

Title Page

Preface

Map

Foreword

Part I – Revolution!

Chapter 1 – ‘The Red Flag Waves’

Chapter 2 – Poland and the Crisis of 1920

Chapter 3 – ‘Hang Churchill’

Chapter 4 – Labour Socialism and the Russian Revolution

Chapter 5 – ‘Parliament and Revolution’

Chapter 6 – The ‘Great Game’ Continues (1921–23)

Chapter 7 – The Rise and Swift Fall of The First Labour Government (1924)

Chapter 8 – Labour’s Road Back to Power (1927–29)

Chapter 9 – Gun-Running and Money Laundering: the Labour Connection

Part II – Russia: ‘Bloodsuckers’ and ‘Parasites’

Chapter 10 – War on the Countryside: the Liquidation of the Kulaks

Chapter 11 – The Samilenko Story: an Eyewitness Account

Chapter 12 – Opium of the Masses: Socialist Morality and Religion in Russia

Chapter 13 – Labour: More Methodism than Marx?

Chapter 14 – The Persecution of the Russian Church

Part III – Persecution (May 1929–July 1930)

Chapter 15 – The Anti-Persecution Campaign Begins (May–December 1929)

Chapter 16 – The Foreign Office (June 1929 – March 1930)

Chapter 17 – The Protests Go National (January 1930)

Chapter 18 – The Cabinet Decides… to Do Nothing

Chapter 19 – Ovey’s Secret Report (March 1930)

Chapter 20 – Empire Protest

Chapter 21 – Counter-Attack: Disinformation and Propaganda (February–June 1930)

Chapter 22 – Archbishop Lang and the House of Lords

Chapter 23 – ‘Soviet Abates War on Religion’

Part IV – Slave Labour (July 1930–October 1931)

Chapter 24 – Opening Salvoes

Chapter 25 – The Affair Goes Public (December 1930–January 1931)

Chapter 26 – The ‘Blue Book’ Debate (5 February 1931)

Chapter 27 – The Cabinet Admits the Truth… and Does Nothing (11 February 1931)

Chapter 28 – ‘Economic War!’

Chapter 29 – ‘Let the Experiment Continue’: the Only Commons Debate (25 March 1931)

Chapter 30 – Prisoner in the Timber Gulag: the Story of George Kitchin

Chapter 31 – The Anti-Slavery Society Investigation

Chapter 32 – The Last Act: Lord Phillimore’s Bill (May–July 1931)

Chapter 33 – The Bishop’s Nemesis: the Fall of the Labour Government (July–October 1931)

Part V –Fellow Travellers

Chapter 34 – Defeat

Chapter 35 – Labour and the Metropolitan-Vickers Trial (1933)

Chapter 36 – Fabians (I): Sidney And Beatrice Webb

Chapter 37 – Fabians (II): George Bernard Shaw

Chapter 38 – Shaw, the Webbs and the Fate of Freda Utley’s Husband

Chapter 39 – ‘Guards of the Revolution’: the Next Generation: Cripps, Cole and Laski

Chapter 40 – Realism: Attlee and Bevin

Conclusion

Postscript

Appendices

Appendix 1 – The Fate of the Ussr’s British Trade Officials and Diplomats

Appendix 2 – The Manchester Guardian’ s Flawed Witnesses

Appendix 3 – The Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee, 1924– c . 1961

Appendix 4 – Stowaways and Sailors: Witnesses to the Anti-Slavery Society Inquiry, 1931

Appendix 5 – Memorandum from the Russian National Committee, Paris (July 1927)

Appendix 6 – ‘Persecution of Religion in Russia Must Cease’ (January 1930)

Appendix 7 – False Atrocity Stories: an Appeal on the ‘Campaign against Russia’ (March 1930)

Appendix 8 –  Social Conditions in Russia (March 1933)

Appendix 9 – Malcolm Muggeridge to James Maxton Mp (letter of 8 April 1933)

Appendix 10 – Countess Tolstoy’s Appeal (January 1933)

Appendix 11 – Interview with Dr Nicholas Arseniev and His Sister (May 1934)

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

PREFACE

This book began ten years ago as one that was very different. I was researching the history of the labour camps in Norilsk, a city so high in the Siberian Arctic that it experiences six weeks of total darkness each winter and temperatures that fall as low as -50°C (-58°F). It is so isolated that the nearest road system is 800 miles south and the only way in for the prisoners was a 1,200-mile journey north on the river Yenisei in the summer months when the river was not icebound. Because of the rich mineral wealth that lies deep beneath its permafrost, the city began life as one of the most notorious of the Stalin-era gulag camps. It was a prison city. My intention was to tell the back-story of the 300,000 prisoners who passed through the camps, and the different nations and groups from which they came, each with its own testimony of suffering and oppression.

Many of the first Norilsk prisoners had been transferred from the White Sea labour camps on the Solovetsky Islands in anticipation of the outbreak of the war. Solovki, as they were collectively known, was the prototype Soviet concentration camp group. Solzhenitsyn likened it to the original cancer tumour which metastasised to become the Gulag Archipelago, the title of his famous trilogy.

The White Sea region’s only resource was timber, which, I discovered, was imported into Britain in vast quantities in the early 1930s. In 1930, the total value was over £9 million, equivalent to more than £530 million today, and it amounted to well over a million tons each year. It was cut by hundreds of thousands of gulag slave labourers, working in terrible conditions, and as a consequence, an extraordinary campaign arose to persuade the British Labour government to halt the trade and protest to the Soviets about the slave labour that generated it. To my astonishment, I found that Labour had persistently refused to do so – and had even blocked attempts to launch an inquiry into the conditions in the camps.

I assumed that other historians would have noticed these events and written about them. I was surprised to find that no such writings existed. With the exception of passing mentions of just a few pages in one or two other works on the period, at least one of which was full of mistakes, there was nothing. This was a totally new, untold story. It had to be written. My original project was put to one side, to be taken up at another time, and the result is this book.

Because of my background in gulag research I came to this part of British political history from a completely different direction to those of most other historians of the period. I am not, and do not pretend to be, a historian of the Labour Party or of British Communism, unlike the academics who form the vast majority of those who have written about British inter-war politics. Instead I came with an intimate knowledge, gleaned from countless prisoner memoirs, of the actual experience of those who suffered under Soviet oppression.

I knew what really happened to those hundreds of thousands in Russia whose plight so many in the British Labour movement had casually dismissed. I had followed the route on which some of those early prisoners were taken, sailing for almost a thousand miles on one of the last river ferries going north before the winter freeze set in. I had seen for myself the vast expanse of the Siberian wilderness, and as my ferry had moored at small riverside villages along the way, I knew the stories of those who were sent as exiles to those villages, those who, even though they had escaped the fate of the prisoners sent to the camps further north, had still experienced devastating trauma. Many did not survive to return to their homes in the post-Stalin thaw. Little physical evidence remains of their stories, but in Norilsk, where the permafrost is like concrete and graves dug by weakened inmates were sometimes sunk too shallow, seasonal ground movement still brings bones to the surface. Others lie deeper, their remains mummified beneath the ice. Tens of thousands died in Norilsk alone.

I had stood in a gulag punishment block, the inner prison of a punishment camp to which prisoners from ‘normal’ labour camps were sentenced, sometimes for the most minor of infringements. It was the very worst of the worst and only by some miracle it was still standing; even today the authorities prefer such things not to be known. I had seen the refinement of cruelty with which the cells had been designed: the ‘dark’ isolation cell, scarcely longer than a man’s height, sealed with double doors and no window, so neither light nor sound would penetrate; ‘open’ cells with no roof, where prisoners were exposed to the elements and in the Arctic winter would quickly succumb. The metal sheet which lined the inside of these cell doors was studded all over with multiple piercings, a grim addition which meant that those who, in their final despair, tried to bang on the doors to be let out, would only shred their hands. I had seen what became of the gulag system in this, its pinnacle, even though eminent British Labour figures had praised Russian prisons as being more humane than our own and turned a blind eye to appeals on behalf of the thousands who were consigned to them.

I had walked in Bykivnia Forest just outside Kiev, in Ukraine, among trees planted by the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, to hide the mass graves of over 100,000 of its victims. Kept secret until the fall of Communism, the forest now holds a sacred place in Ukrainian national memory. Just one of many sites that form the Soviet killing fields – some known, others still to be found – Bykivnia keeps alive the story of suffering, even as the photos of the dead, pinned to trees by surviving relatives, begin to fade. And yet, in the 1920s, George Bernard Shaw, less known today than he was then as one of Labour’s most charismatic public speakers, commended the Soviet executions that filled mass graves such as these as a necessary ‘weeding of the garden’.

In spite of all this, I have tried to remain as objective as possible, though at times that has been hard. To those readers who feel that my passion still intrudes too much, I apologise. Eighty years ago a large proportion of Britain’s political intelligentsia closed their ears to appeals on behalf of these people. Those appeals still demand a hearing.

The structure of the book

The structure of the book follows a chronological pattern but still needs some explanation. It became apparent in dealing with the events of 1929–31 that they could not be discussed without regard for the earlier context from which they arose. Additionally, they provoke many questions. How could all of this have come about? What was the emotional connection between British inter-war Socialism and communist Russia? For that matter, what was Labour Socialism in those days? What was Communism? Were the excesses of Soviet Communism the product of Stalin’s later corruption of Lenin, or were they present from the start, for all those who were prepared to look, to see?

From a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to the British political movement which sprang from compassion for the poor and the marginalised, further specific questions arise: Was Labour’s apparent callousness an aberration? Did Labour’s Soviet enthusiasts form only a minority of the party, an extreme fringe? Perhaps there really was so little information available that they could not have known what was happening in Russia. Was this why they were so silent? If they did not respond when appeals were made on behalf of those in the camps, when did they wake up to what was going on in Soviet Russia? What did they do then?

And what of attitudes at the time to religion, the plight of whose Russian adherents first inspired the British protests? Marx was bitterly hostile towards it, as was Lenin. What was the Labour movement’s actual attitude towards religious belief at a time when it expressed so much admiration for Marx? Did that colour its reaction to the protests? Could residual prejudice against religious belief be one of the reasons for which historians of the period appear to have neglected these events even though, at one point, the protests involved over a million people around the globe?¹

The need for these questions to be addressed widened the scope of the book, which grew to include a study of the impact of British Labour attitudes towards Soviet Communism throughout the whole of the inter-war period. While the central events of 1929–31 are covered by Parts III and IV, Parts I and II examine the context from which they emerged.

Part I therefore reviews the tumultuous years in Britain and Europe after 1917, when revolutions and attempted coups shook European capitals and, as public calls for a British socialist revolution grew and clandestine plans were drawn up for the formation of a revolutionary British Red Army, even the future of parliamentary government in Britain appeared to be under threat. It looks at the founding of the Labour Party and the political philosophy which directed the two figures who tower over its early history, Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald (whose reputation then was very different from the one that it became after 1931), examining the extent to which their enthusiastic endorsement of Marx’s analysis of history convinced them of the inevitability of the coming world Socialist revolution. Both men fully intended that Labour would bring about such a revolution in Britain. It continues with an account of British radical sentiment and Soviet enthusiasm in the Labour Party and trades union movement through the General Strike of 1926 and the Arcos Raid of 1927. In passing it covers the lesser known story behind the infamous Zinoviev letter and fall of the 1924 Labour government – showing that the government’s fall came because of an act of deliberate political suicide by Ramsay MacDonald, so that the government’s interference to halt the prosecution of a communist agitator would remain hidden. Finally, this first part also reveals the previously untold story of a leading Labour MP’s links to Soviet money laundering and Stalin-supported IRA gun-running.

Part II moves to Russia and Stalin’s war against the twin ‘dark forces’ of the kulak peasant smallholders on the one hand, and religious believers on the other. It describes the deportation of the kulaks, when 30,000 were shot and over a million more were taken off their land and shipped north and east in cattle trucks. In the Russian north, where the kulaks were put to work cutting timber for the export market, conditions were appalling: over 20,000 children died in the first year, even as Labour hailed the Soviet ‘economic experiment’ that had caused those deaths. The book then turns to the plight of religious believers, rounded up alongside the kulaks, and traces the persecution of the Russian Church from 1917 to 1929 when churches were closed or destroyed, priests shot or forced into hiding, and even parishioners who tried to protect their churches and mosques were sent to the camps. Because the British Labour movement seemed impervious to their plight, the book considers in greater detail the attitudes of Soviet Communism and Labour towards religious belief and believers. Marx, Lenin and Stalin were all deeply hostile to religious belief, and the Soviets’ ‘socialist morality’ treated with contempt the principles which Western European morality had derived from its Judaeo-Christian heritage. Having considered the philosophical foundations of Soviet Communist anti-religious sentiment, this part then considers the extent to which Labour’s admiration for Marxian Socialism led it to share that hostility and either downplay or sympathise with the Soviet suppression of religion. The oft-repeated insistence that inter-war Labour was ‘more Methodism than Marx’ is examined and found to be wanting.

Parts III and IV deal with the years 1929 to 1931, when Labour was in government under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. They form the central part of the story. Part III spans the period from when Labour took office in the spring of 1929 to the summer of 1930. After considering the role of the Christian Protest Movement, little-known today but so important then that ministers feared its protests might bring the government down, the book turns to a detailed examination of the conduct of the Cabinet and the Foreign Office, drawing upon the original documentary record in Cabinet minutes, Hansard and diplomatic dispatches. These records reveal that, while believing themselves to be objective, an underlying sympathy with Soviet Communism led Labour ministers to manipulate diplomatic appointments to the Moscow embassy and to deny reports from elsewhere which did not fit with their preconceptions. The widespread acceptance of Soviet propaganda by British left-wing commentators served to reinforce ministers’ misconceptions and bolster the Labour movement in its rejection of the protesters’ appeals. Further material is drawn from the papers of Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury. These form one of the most important archives on Soviet persecution in this period and confirm that, in spite of Labour denials, it was possible, based on reports available in the West at the time, to obtain an accurate assessment of the true and harrowing state of affairs in Russia.

Part IV continues until the fall of the Labour Government in the crisis of August 1931. It begins at the point when the initial protests over the widespread arrest and persecution of religious believers broadened into protests about the timber gulag and attempts to halt the import of timber cut by its inmates. In reality these were not two protests, but one, the first condemning the only arrests known about until the summer of 1930 (those of religious believers), and the second coming as news emerged of the deportation, and incarceration, of an even larger number of kulaks. These had been arrested at the same time as the religious believers, but their fate had not been known in the West until then. This part develops the theme begun in Part III of the unwillingness of the Cabinet to act and the studied refusal of the British Left to believe that the stories of human rights abuses were anything other than a Tory fabrication, invented in an attempt to bring down the government. As the narrative develops, we see civil servants begin to voice their unease with Labour’s stance, even as the Cabinet refused to hold an inquiry into the camps in the fear that this would confirm evidence of Soviet brutality, thus forcing them to ban gulag-cut timber. The role of the leading British timber traders, many of whom discounted the accounts of conditions in the camps and continued to trade with Russia, is then also examined.

The historical narrative is interrupted at this point to include detailed eyewitness testimony from an inmate of the timber camps who saw the events discussed in Britain at first hand. Serving as a clerk with access to regional camp returns, he records that in his area the rate of mortality among the prisoners in 1929–30 was 22 per cent per annum.

In the months leading up to the final collapse of the Labour government in August 1931, evidence continued to emerge to contradict Labour denials. Most important was a special inquiry by the Anti-Slavery Society; the society’s report and Labour’s refusal to acknowledge its contents are discussed in some detail.

Part V, ‘Fellow Travellers’, follows the course of events, in so far as they relate to Labour attitudes towards Russia, from the disaster of the 1931 election through to the late 1930s, when light finally began to dawn that Soviet Russia was a terror state. It traces how the Labour Party, as well as the Independent Labour Party which split from Labour in 1932, both shifted still further to the left, adopting policies so radical that even Philip Snowden, the former Labour Chancellor, dubbed them ‘Bolshevism gone mad’. The remaining chapters then go deeper into the pro-Soviet attitudes and writings of some of Labour’s major pre-war figures than was possible to do earlier in the book without breaking the flow of the historical narrative. These six individuals, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, G. D. H. Cole and, to a lesser extent, Stafford Cripps, while representative of a much larger number of Labour figures, represent some of the key opinion formers and political theorists of the period. The Webbs’ influential Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? has become infamous for its uncritical adoption of Soviet propaganda, but most critics have gone no deeper than a few quotations. The book is so intellectually flawed that it merits a much fuller treatment. Shaw’s writings on Socialism and Soviet Communism, which included proposals for British labour camps, the invention of poisonous gas to execute economic ‘exploiters’ (capitalists) and the state confiscation of the children of religious parents, are so shocking and unbelievable that they too deserve a more detailed consideration – as does the point that Shaw was looked on as a superstar of the British inter-war Left rather than as an extreme, embittered eccentric. Cole and Cripps both advocated the suspension of Parliament, a British dictatorship of the proletariat, and Cole stated that Stalin would be preferable as the ruler of the United Kingdom (even with Soviet repression, which Cole freely acknowledged) than a return to the pre-war status quo. Laski was Professor of Political Science at the LSE for twenty-five years, but his influence went far beyond British shores: Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan wrote that wherever he went in the world he was ‘bound to meet a distinguished academic, administrator, or politician who would boast that he had been taught by Laski’. A committed supporter of the Soviet Union for most of that time, Laski was still praising the Russian Revolution in 1947 as the ‘greatest’ and ‘most beneficent’ event in modern history since the French Revolution, even as the Labour Party itself was finally beginning to move away from such a position.

Finally, the book closes with the complete reversal in Labour attitudes towards Soviet Communism, a change pioneered in the late 1940s by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, whose confidential memoranda to the Attlee Labour Cabinet more closely reflected the position of his pre-war Conservative predecessor Lord Curzon than that of his own party at the same time.

I do not expect this book to go unchallenged. It reveals things about a British political party whose supporters have long claimed the moral high ground (and, it has to be said, not always without good cause). It contains some less than complimentary revelations about figures who are revered for their part in that party’s history – a history that, the book asserts, may not be quite as glorious as some have taken it to be. People need a cause to rally behind and, once committed to it, are not easily shaken in their faith. In the 1920s Labour supporters believed so passionately that Soviet Russia was the new utopia that they would not hear any ill of it. Some who have invested their belief as passionately in ‘Labour’ today (however they interpret that concept) will also find it hard to hear ill of their party. They may prefer to shoot the messenger rather than to consider the message seriously. Perhaps the truth is not so much that one party is right and another wrong as that there are many more greys in politics – and life – than the blacks and whites we would prefer there to be.

In relation to this, I must therefore add some further comments. First, there are some matters I have left out for lack of space or personal expertise. Any detailed discussion of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and its leading figures has been deliberately avoided. CPGB history has been exhaustively examined by numerous scholars at a depth which I could not possibly equal. I also have no need to do so: membership of the CPGB was much smaller than Labour’s, and it was a minority party that slavishly followed Moscow’s line, and had little impact upon government. I do mention individual CPGB members where they were part of the leadership of the trade union movement or where they were at some time also members of the Labour Party or Independent Labour Party.

I also have gone ‘light’ on the wider domestic issues which preoccupied the MacDonald government – the crash of 1929, the unemployment crisis that followed, and all that that entailed. I believe that I have covered these adequately enough to give some understanding of the atmosphere in which the Cabinet found itself. But in any book you have to stop somewhere: there are other and better histories of the second MacDonald government. This does not need to be one.

Secondly, a word needs to be said about the number and length of the quotations which appear throughout the book. An often valid criticism of quotations used to ‘prove’ a point is that they are used selectively, out of context, or even inaccurately reported. It is my firm belief that none of mine have been. It may be that, in spite of my intensive checking, I can be pulled up on the detail of one or two and I will happily correct any mistakes that are found in any subsequent editions. But the vast majority will stand. I make no apology for the extent of the documentary material presented here. It forms the basis on which every conclusion in the book is drawn. Without so many examples taken from contemporary sources, my conclusions would merely be a matter of opinion and rightly contestable for that.

‘Gulag’ – The Bolsheviks used concentration camps from the very beginning. As early as 1918, Lenin issued orders for the regime’s opponents to be sent to work in the mines. Within five years, there were over 300 such camps, containing as many as 70,000 inmates.² Collectively, the Soviet prison system begun by Lenin and Trotsky has become known as ‘the gulag’ even though the state organisation ‘The Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies’, the Russian acronym of which (GULAG) gave the system its name, was not founded until 1929 under Stalin. The sense in which the term is used in this book (and in its title) is the former – the penal system that existed from 1917 right through the period covered by this book. It includes every variety of prison camp, from the most severe ‘corrective labour camps’ to the kulak ‘colonies’, as well as the more conventional prisons such as Butyrka in Moscow. In each case, they were places where inmates were taken, held against their will under armed guard, and punished if they tried to escape.

‘Russia’ and ‘Russian’ – From 1917 to 1922, ‘Russia’ denoted the ‘Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic’ (RSFSR) and, from 1922, on its founding, one component of the USSR. For much of the USSR’s existence (1922–91) it was commonly referred to in the West as ‘Russia’ and where ‘Russia’ is used in this book it is used in that sense. The choice of the word ‘Russian’ to describe the nationality of those believers and citizens referred to in this book also requires some explanation. ‘Soviet’ is not always accurate because the persecutions began in 1917 before the Soviet Union was established. ‘Russian’ is used in the sense that it includes all those who lived within the borders of the Russian Empire as it existed at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, excluding Finland and Poland, or alternatively those who would have been described as ‘Soviet’ after 1922 when Russia was just one part of the USSR. Citizens of today’s independent nations of Belarus and Ukraine might rightly feel that being described as ‘Russian’ is at best misleading and at worst insulting. The most accurate description of these people would be the phrase ‘Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian’ but that is clearly too unwieldy. Shortening that to ‘BUR’ is out of the question as that was the Russian name for the punishment block in a gulag camp!

‘Labour’ – The Labour Party was itself a federation founded by three different groups – the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society, and the Trade Unions. The ‘Labour movement’ comprised all three.

Currency values – Where modern equivalents are shown they have been calculated by reference to the Bank of England online calculator.³

I have looked forward to the opportunity to thank those who have in some way, either by concrete assistance or simple encouragement, helped me in the process of writing this book. I am delighted to be able to express my gratitude to:

David Aikman, Jonathan Aitken, Charlie Arbuthnot, Claire Berlinski, Jenny Boughton, Revd. Canon Michael Bourdeaux, Vladimir Bukovsky, Lady Margaret Bullard, Miranda Carter, Nicholas Chance, Julian Dee, Xenia Dennen, Martin Dewhirst, Dr Dominic Erdzoain, Kim and Masha Eremenko, Prof. Anthony Glees, Lord (Brian) Griffiths of Fforestfach, Prof. Paul Gregory, Mark Kessler, Zhenya Koslova, Tim Lawson-Cruttenden, Al Lewis, Dr Victor Madeira, Prof. David Northrup, Cristina Odone, Andrey O., Melanie Phillips, Katerina Porter, Ann and John Pugh-Smith, Simon Marquess of Reading, Marina and Pavel S., Ayda and Colin Scott, Andrew Selous MP, Pavel Stroilov, John Sweeney, Count Nikolai Tolstoy, Hon. Michael Trend, Rev. Dr Kevin Tyson, Prof. Lynne Viola, Fr George Volkovinsky, Diane Walker, Dr David Wilmot and Michael Wright. My thanks to those mentioned above in no way implies their responsibility for its contents, for which I alone am to blame. I welcome information about mistakes of fact which I will be happy to correct in any future edition.

Olivia Beattie, Bernadette Marron, Namkwan Cho, and Gillian Pink at Biteback Publishing have gone to extraordinary lengths to wrestle with my manuscript, improving the text, spotting inconsistencies and alerting me to errors. Their contribution has been invaluable.

Malcolm Muggeridge’s letter to James Maxton, the illustration of the Albert Hall ‘Slavery in Russia’ rally, and A. T. Cholerton’s notes on William MacDonald are reproduced with the kind permission of Rev. Sally Muggeridge, Sir Richard Paget and Mrs Katerina Porter. I would also like to express my thanks to Lady Margaret Bullard for permission to view the full typescript of Reader Bullard’s Russian diaries, which form one of the most fascinating and complete insights into life in Leningrad in the early 1930s.

This book would not have been possible without the generous and kind support of Sir Paul Marshall.

My greatest debt of thanks is reserved for my wife Sheila and our children Rebecca, Philippa, Benjamin, Daniel and Samuel. Their patience, encouragement and support over the many years it has taken to write this book have been immeasurable. Without their partnership it would not have seen the light of day.

Giles Udy

January 2017

Notes

1 The three leading writers on this period of Labour foreign policy devote no more than a few paragraphs to the whole affair. Jonathan Davis in ‘Labour and the Kremlin’, in John Shepherd, Jonathan Davis and Chris Wrigley, (eds), The Second Labour Government 1929–1931: a reappraisal , (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 150–69 gives four paragraphs to the persecution affair, but makes no mention of the timber camps; Andrew Williams in Labour and Russia: The Attitude of the Labour Party and the USSR , 1924–34, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) also gives four paragraphs to the persecution affair, dismissing the timber camps in twenty-nine lines. Williams’s book, which is referenced as a source by Davis, contains some startling inaccuracies – such as referring a number of times to ‘PQs’ (the acronym for parliamentary questions) as ‘propaganda questions’. He also asserts that ‘the notion of fellow travelling in the Party [in this period] is nonsense.’ David Carlton in MacDonald Versus Henderson, Macmillan 1970 devotes just thirty-four lines to both. He dismissed the protesters’ claims as dubious and insists that the newspaper reports attesting to the existence of the camps and persecution were unreliable.

2 For more detail, see Richard Pipes, ‘Lenin’s Gulag’, International Journal of Political Science and Development, 2:6 (2014), 140–6.

3 < http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/resources/inflationtools/calculator/default.aspx >

North-west Russia, 1930

FOREWORD

THE PHIAL OF TYPHOID

Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.

No sooner did Lenin arrive than … he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world, of which he was the high priest and chief.

With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian state and nation depended. Russia was laid low. Russia had to be laid low. She was laid low to the dust.

W

INSTON

C

HURCHILL

, H

OUSE OF

C

OMMONS

, N

OVEMBER

1919¹

In the late afternoon of Easter Monday 9 April 1917, two officers of the German Imperial Army stood on the solitary platform of the little railway station at Gottmadingen, a small town which lies just inside the German-Swiss border. They were waiting for a train to arrive from Zurich. It was the hope of General von Ludendorff, the Chief of Staff on the Eastern Front, who had personally briefed them for this mission, that this train would change the course of the war.

Europe had just seen one of the severest winters in living memory. In the trenches of the Western Front the bitter cold had sapped morale. The replacement of the French commander-in-chief, Joffre, by General Robert Nivelle, had done nothing to turn the fortunes of the allied armies. Nivelle’s new offensive had come to nothing. In the French ranks there was talk of mutiny.

At home, governments on both sides were struggling to maintain the war effort. Joffre had been dismissed on 3 December 1916. On 7 December, amidst much criticism of his handling of the war, Herbert Asquith, the British Prime Minister, was forced to stand down, and his place as leader of the wartime coalition was taken by David Lloyd George. Only a few days later in St Petersburg, a group of nobles led by Prince Felix Yusupov, despairing at Rasputin’s influence over the royal family, had assassinated the Siberian monk. Disenchantment was growing throughout Europe.

Over that winter the Germans had dug a vast new network of trenches and defensive fortifications, the Hindenburg Line, to the rear of their existing positions. Thirty miles shorter than the current front, it needed fewer troops to defend, and a tactical withdrawal behind the Line began on 15 March 1917, freeing thirteen army divisions for service elsewhere. Five days later, the British began the initial bombardment that was the buildup to a major new assault – the Battle of Arras. In keeping with accepted military wisdom they began with a massive bombardment spread over a number of days. The bombardment was followed by a ‘creeping barrage’, a rain of shellfire that moved slowly ahead of a ferocious infantry attack against what, it was hoped, would by then be a demoralised and confused enemy. The attack was scheduled for Sunday 8 April, Easter Day, but delays by the French meant that it was postponed until 5.30 a.m. on the next day.

The contrast between Arras and the peaceful foothills of the Swiss Alps could not have been greater. On the afternoon of Easter Monday, as the German officers, Hauptman von Planetz and Leutnant von Burhing, were waiting alone in the quiet of Gottmadingen station, the Canadian army, 320 miles to the north west, was taking Vimy Ridge, one of their greatest battle honours. The assault cost the lives of 11,000 Canadians but crowned a day which saw some of the greatest gains of the war so far. There were to be a further 300,000 casualties and over 2.6 million more artillery shells fired before the war was over.

Events in the East had brought about the circumstances whereby the two officers were waiting on the station platform that day. From the beginning, the Germans had tried to avoid fighting a war on two fronts – against the Allies in the West and the Russians in the East. Their efforts had failed. And yet they had hopes that political and military disintegration inside Russia might be forthcoming and achieve what their campaign so far had not – the removal of Russia from the war.

By the autumn of 1916, the Russian army had lost a million men. More than three million more had been taken prisoner. The Germans halted their offensive as the signs grew that political unrest was destabilising the country. In February 1917, strikes in St Petersburg were followed by rioting, anarchy, and looting. Troops sent to quell the riots deserted and, on 2 March, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. This first of two Russian revolutions in 1917 did not, however, bring the end to the war on the Eastern Front that the Germans had hoped for. To the relief of the Allies, the new Russian government, an alliance of liberals and socialists headed at first by an aristocrat, Prince Georgy Lvov, and then by the more bourgeois Alexander Kerensky, a brilliant orator and the son of a school headmaster, announced its intention of continuing the war against Germany.

In Switzerland, the news of the February Revolution was greeted with enthusiasm by the community of Russian refugees and exiles who had sought sanctuary there from the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. But in at least one of them, Vladimir Ulyanov, now better known by his revolutionary pseudonym Lenin, enthusiasm quickly turned into anger and frustration as rumours emerged that his fellow Bolsheviks in St Petersburg were about to reach an accommodation with some of the other parties involved in the new Provisional Government. Lenin was purist, a revolutionary to whom such compromises were anathema. He had to return to Russia to restore revolutionary discipline in the party he had helped to found. But how?

Lenin considered his options carefully. Germany was at war with Russia, and he would have to travel far to go round enemy territory. His idea of travelling through Germany disguised as a Swede was instantly dismissed by Nadezhda Krupskaya, his wife, on the grounds that as he spoke no Swedish the pretence would soon be discovered. One option was to go back through England, but the British were only too well aware of the danger posed by returning revolutionaries who considered that the war was a capitalist affair that was no concern of theirs: on the matter of the war, if on little else, Lenin was a pacifist. If the Bolsheviks were successful in taking Russia out of the war, the Germans would be able to concentrate all their forces on the Western Front, with potentially disastrous results. Stories of British obstruction of other Russians seeking to return home had filtered through to Switzerland. He had to find another route.

About this time, Lenin realised that if the British thought that their return to Russia might endanger the Allied war effort, the Germans might have reached the same conclusion. Would they be willing to grant him and his companions safe passage home? Accordingly, with the help of a Swiss communist, Fritz Platten, Lenin approached the German legation in Berne and asked for help to get back to Russia.

The German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, had only been in his job since November but he was working hard to promote his country’s cause. Alarmed by the prospect of America joining the war, he had already secretly offered the Mexican government financial support to launch an attack against the United States to reclaim territory in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona.* To Zimmermann, the international schemer, the prospect of removing Russia from the war altogether was even more enticing.

Lenin knew that he was running a risk. Travel through Germany was tantamount to high treason. He had to appear to be innocent of colluding with the enemy and he needed guarantees that the party would be safe. He therefore set out a number of conditions, which Platten passed on to the German Foreign Ministry: there was to be no examination of passports or questioning of the travellers, whose names would not be revealed; the Russians would pay for their own railway tickets, a gesture which was devised to counter any later accusation that their return had been financed by the Germans; the train carriage was to be treated as if it were ‘sealed’, having a quasi-diplomatic status of foreign territory which no German national could enter. The Foreign Ministry agreed to all his demands and cabled its approval to the Berne Legation on 5 April. That same day, the British ambassador received reports of the negotiations from his agents and passed these on to London, where developing events were watched with increasing alarm.

As word went out to Bolsheviks across Switzerland to join Lenin and his wife for the return home, pleas to exiles from other opposition parties to join the expedition, to bolster its claim to legitimacy, were declined. When the party finally left Zurich, delayed by their unsuccessful efforts to recruit more passengers, those Russians remaining behind descended upon the station to voice their disapproval, banging on the railway carriages with sticks and jeering at the occupants. Lenin would not forget the slight.

Three quarters of an hour’s travel from Zurich, the party of thirty-two men, women and children, reached the border. After sparring with the Swiss customs, which confiscated much of their food (there was wartime rationing and the export of food from Switzerland was forbidden), the train finally crossed the border and steamed round the bend into Gottmadingen, where von Planetz and von Burhing were waiting. At Gottmadingen the party transferred to a single German rail car, their baggage in a small wagon at the rear. Scrupulous in their observance of the agreement, the Germans took the last compartment and drew a chalk line on the floor corridor. Only Fritz Platten, as intermediary, was permitted to cross the line.

After travelling another 600 miles, the party reached the coast. They crossed by ferry to Sweden and thence by rail to Finland. At that time, Finland was part of the Russian Empire and, by agreement with its allies, Great Britain was assisting Russia with its border control. So it was British officers who greeted the party as they assembled at the border. Hostile though they were, they could hardly prevent Russians from entering their own country. Lenin had been away for almost ten years. Russia’s suffering had already been immense; it was about to increase.

Notes

1 Hansard, HC Deb, 5 November 1919, vol. 120, col. 1633.

* The offer was to backfire spectacularly. The coded telegram, dated 19 January 1917, was intercepted by British cryptanalysts, decoded, and passed to President Wilson. It was revealed to a stunned American public on 1 March and played a major part in drawing America into the war a month later.

PART I

REVOLUTION!

We are perishing! The coming dawn of liberation is not yet in sight. Many of us are no longer capable of passing on to posterity the terrible experiences we have been through.

Learn the truth about us, write of it, you who are free, that the eyes of this present generation and those that are to come may be opened.

Do this – and it will be easier for us to die.

If our voice beyond the grave is heard by you, we bid you listen, read and ponder what we say. You will then follow the line laid down by our great author – L.N. Tolstoy – who in his own time cried out to the world: ‘I cannot be silent’.

‘T

O

T

HE

W

RITERS

O

F

T

HE

W

ORLD

’

L

ETTER FROM A GROUP OF

R

USSIAN WRITERS

, 1927¹

Notes

1 For the full text of this appeal, see Appendix [0000].

Red wins – but the game is not yet over. Punch cartoon, January 1920. Bolshevik intrigue and violence threatened the stability of many European governments.

CHAPTER 1

‘THE RED FLAG WAVES’

Peace! Thrones are everywhere crashing and the men of property everywhere secretly trembling. How soon will the tide of revolution catch up with the tide of victory? That is the question which is exercising Whitehall and Buckingham Palace and causing anxiety even among the more thoughtful democrats.¹

(B

EATRICE

W

EBB

, A

RMISTICE

D

AY

, 11 N

OVEMBER

1918)

In Europe we are now faced with very serious conditions. Russia has gone almost completely over to Bolshevism. Even in Germany prospects are very black. Bavaria is already in chaos, and the same fate might await Prussia. Spain seems to be on the edge of upheaval. In a short time we might have three quarters of Europe converted to Bolshevism. None would be left but France and Great Britain.²

(D

AVID

L

LOYD

G

EORGE

, M

ARCH

1919)

Even after six decades, there were memories that 76-year-old Alexander Chernykh could not erase. It had been the winter of 1930 in Kotlas, a small town deep in the far north-western forests of Russia. Young Alexander was on his school holidays, but in those bleak years after the Revolution there was little time for leisure. He and some teenage schoolfellows were conscripted to work on the local farm. In those days in that region, where the winter temperature falls below -20°C (-4°F) and the snow lies on the ground for many months, the most common form of transport was the horse-drawn sleigh. One day, Alexander was ordered to report with his sleigh to the local railway station. When he got there, he found a detachment of soldiers waiting for a train. After an interminable wait, long after dark, the silence of the night was finally broken by the distant sound of an approaching steam train. As it drew alongside the platform, soldiers rushed forward to the doors of its freight wagons. When they were unbolted and the wagons spilled their contents onto the platform, Alexander saw to his surprise that they had been filled with people – men, women, and children, of all ages. Many wore only the lightest clothes, as if dressed for summer. These were kulaks, peasant small-holders from Ukraine and the surrounding regions, some of the hundreds of thousands of unfortunates summarily thrown out of their homes on Stalin’s orders and dispatched to labour camps.

On the platform there was pandemonium: guards were shouting, babies were crying, old women were weeping. Eventually the women and children were loaded onto sleighs, the men formed into a column and the party headed out into the snowy night. Ten miles and many hours later they reached a small village. There, the exhausted group was finally allowed to rest. But there was no lodging prepared for them and they were forced to find shelter wherever they could – in doorways, barns, anywhere which gave some relief from the bitter cold. The next day the column reformed and pressed on deeper into the forest, where it finally reached an isolated group of barrack huts. They had reached a labour camp.

It was not that harrowing journey which still haunted the old man as he told his story many years later. It was what he encountered on his way back home. On the outward journey, with soldiers as his passengers, he had not seen the stragglers at the rear of the column and had little idea of the toll which the march had taken on the exiles, already weakened by many days locked in freight cars on their journey north. As he reached the place where they had spent their first night, Alexander saw a terrible sight. Coming towards him was a sleigh laden with corpses. Every so often, the sleigh driver would stop, stoop down and pick up another body from the side of the road, and sling it ‘like a tree log’ on top of the others. ‘There were so many bodies,’ he later recalled, remembering that day. The surviving marchers, lacking warm clothes of their own, had stripped the dead and dying even as they fell. It only added to the horror. ‘Some were completely naked, others had only their outer clothing removed. So many people had perished from hunger and cold at that place where we had stopped.’ It did not end there. The weakest had succumbed on that first night’s march before they even reached the village. All the way back along the road home, the scene was repeated: ‘On both sides of the sleigh there were corpses, corpses, corpses…’³

Although the gulag, the Soviet prison system, gets its name from the administrative body which was set up by Stalin in 1930,⁴ its foundations were laid in the early days of the Revolution by Lenin, his predecessor, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka. Both Lenin and Dzerzhinsky had few qualms about taking the most ruthless action against their enemies. ‘There is nothing more effective than a bullet in the head to shut people up’, Dzerzhinsky had written to a subordinate in May 1918.⁵ Lenin ordered the same punishment for ‘speculators’.⁶ The future was still bleak for those whose lives were spared. For them there was mass arrest and imprisonment. In August 1918, writing to regional Bolsheviks, Lenin ordered the internment of ‘kulaks, priests, White Guards, and other doubtful elements in a concentration camp’.⁷ Both Dzerzhinsky and Trotsky had called for similar action only a few days earlier.⁸ And, by September 1918, the process of setting up labour camps to intern counter-revolutionaries was well advanced. The Cheka ordered

the arrest, as hostages, of prominent representatives of the bourgeoisie, landlords, factory owners, merchants, counter-revolutionary priests, all officers hostile to the Soviet government, and to confine this entire public in concentration camps, having set up the most reliable guard, compelling these gentlemen to work under escort. In the event of any attempt to organize, to rebel, to assault the guard – execute [the offender] at once.⁹

From that point, the early gulag expanded fast. In May 1919, every provincial city was ordered to establish a concentration camp that could hold a minimum of 300 inmates.¹⁰ By October 1923, there were over 350 camps in existence, holding around 70,000 prisoners, many women and children among them. Conditions for inmates were terrible, especially in the famine years of 1921–22 when cholera and typhus were rampant. At its height, the mortality rate was running at 15–20 per cent a month.¹¹ In a few camps it was even higher, though in those cases it was by design rather than accident. At Kholmogory, not far from Arkhangelsk (Archangel) on the White Sea, the requisitioned monastery became a death camp. Between 1919 and 1922, over 25,400 of its inmates were shot.¹²

In November 1918, the Great War drew to a close, but the end of hostilities did not signal peace. Europe was in turmoil. In Berlin, on 15 January 1919, Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were lynched by right-wing paramilitaries. Communists under Béla Kun took power briefly in Hungary between March and August. A further Communist revolution in Bavaria was put down in May 1919. Communist uprisings broke out elsewhere too – in Alsace, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Saxony, Bessarabia, Persia, Galicia, and Czechoslovakia.

British soldiers, back from the front and marked by their experiences, were emboldened in their own demands for social change. For some, the Russian Revolution had set an inspiring precedent and strikes and civil unrest spread in Britain too. On Thursday 13 January 1919, a columnist in The Times, writing of the Communist ‘revolutionary movement’ centred on the Clyde in Glasgow, described it as ‘a powder magazine’ where there was ‘more explosive material than in any other area in the country’.¹³ A fortnight later the spark was set. A strike for shorter working hours began and, by the end of the week, 100,000 Clydesiders were on strike. Demands were made for government intervention with the employers, accompanied by threats of ‘non-constitutional’ action if the demands were not met. On Friday 31 January, 10,000 of them descended upon the centre of Glasgow to hear the government’s reply. When they discovered that their demands had been turned down, there was mayhem. Bottles were thrown, shops looted and the police made baton charges to dispel the crowds. A red flag was run up on the city flagpole.¹⁴ The strike leaders were arrested and charged with inciting a riot. One, the communist William Gallacher, was additionally charged with assaulting a policeman. The Secretary of State for Scotland, Sir Robert Munro, told the Cabinet that ‘it was a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike – it was a Bolshevist rising’.¹⁵ Tanks and troops were sent north; by Monday morning thousands of soldiers were patrolling the streets.

In Belfast, shipyard workers formed their own ‘Soviet’, or workers’ committee, to run their strike. It even issued permits to allow local traders to continue to operate. In London, a strike was threatened on the Underground. On the railways 400,000 members of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), 40,000 engineers and 70,000 railways clerks threatened walkouts. Industrial unrest was reported among London and Welsh ship repairers, West Lothian and Lanarkshire miners, power station workers (including those of Chelsea Power Station), dairy workers, hotel and restaurant employees, Goole boilermakers and shipwrights, and Manchester engineers. In Calais, there was further trouble among returning soldiers awaiting demobilisation.

Talk of revolution was spreading. On 20 January the press reported that a secret conference of ‘Bolshevists’ arranged by the ‘Hands Off Russia’ Committee had taken place in Farringdon Street in London, and the possibility of engineering a general strike ‘as the first definite step towards the Revolution’ had been discussed. Handbills distributed at the meeting declared:

…the Red Flag waves intermittently in Berlin, in Budapest, and Vienna. And ere long, perchance, it will float from the clock tower at Westminster, and from the flag staff at Windsor Castle. To the strains of ‘The International’ as the movement pushes ever westward the only flag that matters will be raised successively in Dublin, in New York, in San Francisco, and maybe at no distant date in Tokyo and in Peking, in Delhi, and in Teheran. The revolutionary movement initiated in Petrograd during November 1917 will circle the world. The Workers International shall be the human race.¹⁶

‘Hands Off Russia’ was to become a familiar refrain. When the Bolsheviks* took Russia out of the war with Germany in March 1918, a million German troops, freed from the Eastern Front, transferred to the West to launch a vigorous new offensive against the Allies. Already reeling from the military consequences of the Russian capitulation, the British Government and Royal family were deeply shocked when the tsar, King George V’s cousin, and his family were shot in July 1918. To prevent the Allied military supplies which had been sent to the Eastern Front from falling into the hands of the Germans, and to support the beleaguered Russians, Allied troops were landed in Archangel in August 1918. For the British Left, this was an assault upon Russian workers, struggling to be free from Tsarist oppression. From then on, the withdrawal of British troops from Russia became a unifying cause for socialists across all parties of the left, rallying under the cry of ‘Hands Off Russia’, the slogan which became the name of their campaign.

At that time, the dividing line between the Labour Party and British Communists was far from clear. Many British socialists moved freely between the Labour Party (founded 1900), the Independent Labour Party (ILP, founded 1893), from which it sprang, the British Socialist Party (BSP, founded 1911), which included a number of former ILPers, and the BSP’s post-1920 incarnation, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It was the BSP and the new ‘Hands Off Russia’ Committee which took the Royal Albert Hall, one of the largest and most prestigious concert halls in the country, with a capacity of over 5,000, in February 1919 to protest against British intervention in Russia and to demand the withdrawal of the Allied troops. Messages expressing sympathy with the object of the meeting were read from men who were or would be eminent Labour Party members – Bertrand Russell†, the future Labour minister and peer Arthur Ponsonby, and George Bernard Shaw. Neil Maclean, who sat as a Labour Member of Parliament from 1918 to 1950, first for the ILP, then for the Labour Party, spoke from the platform, as did John Maclean, the ‘Bolshevist Consul in Glasgow’. When, as a result of his speech that night, one of the other speakers, William Foster Watson, was imprisoned for six months for sedition (his words were said to have included the call ‘arm yourselves’¹⁷), George Lansbury, already one of the most popular figures in the party and future party leader, appeared in court to speak in Watson’s defence. Ponsonby, Shaw, Maclean and Lansbury were all to be outspoken supporters of the Soviet Union‡ in the years to come. Although these rallies were called with the British withdrawal from Russia as their ostensible object, the agenda was wider; the protesters were concerned to defend the Russian Revolution as much as they were to achieve peace between the nations.

Labour Party support for the ‘Hands Off Russia’ protests was made unambiguously clear by the party secretary Arthur Henderson at the Labour Party conference later that year, in June 1919. Henderson was already a senior party figure, having served two terms as party leader (1908–10 and 1914–17). He was to become Foreign Secretary in the 1929–31 Cabinet and party leader for the third time from 1931–32. Addressing the conference, his speech was a clear statement of Labour’s support, not only for the withdrawal of British troops, but for the Revolution and its underlying political aims:

The working-class … welcomes the revolutions which have destroyed the old order in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and elsewhere, and declares that the association of the Governments now engaged for hostilities against and in equipping with arms and munitions the leaders of the counter-revolutions in these countries will, if successful, wrest from the working-classes the social and political gains won by these revolutions, and are inspired by the interests of capitalism and monarchy.

… It is the duty of the working-classes in every country to demand that military operations against socialist republics of Europe should be stopped … they should be left free from interference to settle for themselves the forms of government which they wish to adopt and which should then be recognized by the other Governments. To this end it is the further duty of the working-class movement to demand action in the various Parliaments and to bring whatever pressure it can command in view of its national circumstances upon the governing authorities of the various countries.¹⁸

The conference then passed a motion calling for strike action. To the consternation of those who feared the spread of revolution to Britain, it was not for the purposes of bettering the work conditions of its members, but for the explicit purpose of enforcing its will on British foreign policy:

[Delegates] have considered the situation and declared a general working-class demonstration should be made as an evidence of their determination to prevent the Governments adopting a reactionary policy … The working-class must protest in particular against the help given to the reactionary elements in their attempts to triumph over the revolutions and over the new democracies.

This conference … denounces the assistance given by the Allies to reactionary bodies in Russia as being a continuation of the war in the interests of financial capitalism which aims at the destruction of the Russian Socialist Republic and as being a denial of the rights of peoples to self-determination and it instructs the National Executive to consult with the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress with a view to effective action being taken to enforce these demands by the unreserved use