The Communist Party Historians and 1956

The news of Khrushchev's secret speech caused great anxiety to the leaders of British Communism. How were Communists expected to choose between Khrushchev and Stalin? It was not clear to them how long de-Stalinisation would continue; nor indeed how deeply it would go. Would Stalin's murder of several million non-Communists be acknowledged? What about the murders of Stalin's rivals, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and even Trotsky? Writing in Labour Monthly, the British party's leading Kremlinologist backed the old guard. Rajani Palme Dutt refused to acknowledge Stalin's long campaign of murder: 'What are the essential themes of the Great Debate? Not about Stalin. That there are spots on any sun would only startle an inveterate Mithra-worshipper. Not about the now recognised abuses of the security organs in a period of hectic ordeal and achievement of the Soviet Union. To imagine that a great revolution can develop without a million cross-currents, hardships, injustices and excesses would be a delusion fit only for ivory tower dwellers in fairyland'.[i] Yet many other members of the party realised that something profound had changed. Party Secretary Harry Pollitt resigned. Rajani Palme Dutt was heckled at party meetings, with one District Committee, the East Midlands, voting 15 to 3 to condemn his 'serious error'.[ii] Another veteran of the crisis, Jim Higgins would later describe the events of 1956 as 'A brick to the midriff' of the party.[iii]

British plans for the re-occupation of Egypt, and the rise of the anti-war movement marked by great demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, made nothing easier for the Communists. War in Egypt was accompanied by an uprising against Russian domination of Hungary. The Party sent journalist Peter Fryer to report on events in Budapest. To the embarrassment of his comrades, Fryer's reports took the side of the workers against the invader. Fryer's reports were first edited and then censored. The Daily Worker insisted on portraying the Russian intervention as being in some sense necessary. Rank-and-file Communists began to protest.

The activist and historian John Saville had a letter published in the 19 May 1956 issue of the Communist Party's international publication World News, and there was an article by another historian Edward Thompson in the same publication at the end of June.[iv] Both demanded that British Communists act on Khrushchev's revelations.[v] Protesting against the refusal to allow any sustained discussion of the problems in their party, Saville and Thompson also began publication of a duplicated journal, the Reasoner, with three issues appearing, in July, September, and November 1956. In a later article, John Saville would argue that the Reasoner was conceived as a journal of Communist reform. 'One of the original sins for Communist Party members was to publish criticisms of the Party outside the Party press, and in this context journals such as Tribune or the New Statesman were no different from any other periodical. We therefore conceived our own independent journal as in no way disruptive of the Party to which we had belonged, or to be more accurate, to which we had dedicated ourselves.'[vi]

The Russian invasion of Hungary forced the discussions into the open. Between 4 November and a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party in mid-December some 219 resolutions were sent to the EC on Hungary, most of them critical. The leaders of the Communist Party attempted to answer criticism by establishing a Commission on Inner Party Democracy (ten of whose seventeen members were employees of the party),[vii] and by opening up the columns of the Daily Worker, briefly, to a range of perspectives. The report of the Committee on Inner Party Democracy was debated at a special congress in Easter 1957. The report turned out to be a tame affair. A Minority Report was also published, but heavily defeated.

Membership of the Communist Party fell by a third between February 1956 and February 1958. Former Communists provided the audience for new publications, including the Reasoner and later the New Reasoner, which merged in 1960 with Universities and Left Review to form the New Left Review. Given that two Marxist historians E. P. Thompson and John Saville were the first editors of the Reasoner, and that a third historian Raph Samuel was a key player in Universities and Left Review, it is not surprising that much attention has been given to the role of the CP historians. Among the party dissidents, why were they able to play such a prominent role?

One answer is that the group had been long nurtured in a relatively open culture of wide discussion and mutual respect, which militated against the sorts of unthinking loyalism that the party machine demanded. I will develop this point below: if such a culture did exist, then a key role in its formation was played by an earlier 1940 controversy over the causes of the English revolution. John Saville, it should be noted, has a rather different, more modest explanation. The party historians, he suggests simply had more time and access to wider sources. They were not more naturally dissidents, simply fortunate. 'Most members of the British Party were not in my own privileged position, with access to good libraries, time to read, and a group of acquaintances within the Party, with similar advantages, and with whom I exchanged facts and ideas. Who in the British Party, for example, knew that on 14th April the American Daily Worker reported its acceptance of the facts about the destruction of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union after 1948, and the deaths of many Soviet Jewish intellectuals? ... And even if some of the evidence had become known, how did one put the jigsaw together? The British Party Press provided very few facts and offered no clues.'[viii]

Having said all this, it would be an exaggeration to treat the historians as a single, coherent bloc. Phrases such as the title of Harvey Kaye's book The British Marxist Historians add to the sense of a united generation.[ix] Instinctive dissidents, the historians resigned from their party, it is often and wrongly assumed, as a group in winter 1956. To give one example of this common mistake: one web encyclopaedia claims that in 1956 Eric Hobsbawm, 'spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and left the British Communist Party to join its Italian equivalent.'[x] Hobsbawm did no such thing. We can leave aside the questions of whether the Italian party would have welcomed into membership a hypothetical critic of the Russian invasion, or whether indeed the PCI allowed full membership to people living in England, to note that more sophisticated observers have also made similar mistakes. The socialist historian Geoff Eley, for example, a member of a younger generation than Thompson or even Samuel, writes in his recent memoir of the 'disbandment' of the Communist Party historians' group in 1956-7, when in fact the group limped on to survive its parent.[xi] Indeed a modest successor organisation continues to meet even today.

          We need to say something first about the group's own origins. The starting common influence on the members of the group was the Communist Party's turn to Popular Front politics in 1935.[xii] Populism necessitated the search for a British set of heroes, from Wat Tyler to the dock strikers of 1889, with more equivocal figures such as Oliver Cromwell being invited in to join the pantheon. Published by the Left Book Club, A. L. Morton's People's History of England was a first, serious attempt to write a Popular Front history of Britain. It was from a postwar conference to celebrate a new edition of Morton's People's History that in 1946 the historians' group was launched.[xiii] With over one hundred members at its peak, the Communist Party Historians' Group comprised professional and amateur historians, teachers and party full-timers, organised into the periods in which each member was supposed to specialise. Some members of the group would later devote their lives to writing. Many never published a single piece.

Beyond the publication of A People's History, the second key moment in the formation of the group was a wartime controversy, which ostensibly seemed to concern a relatively narrow question of Marxist theory: whether the English Civil War of the 1640s and the execution of King Charles in 1649 should be seen as a social revolution on the same scale as the French Revolution of 1789. The argument's followed the publication of Christopher Hill's pamphlet, 1640: The English Revolution.[xiv] Bill Schwarz explains: 'It was the publication of his The English Revolution in 1940 which provoked 'PF' (who it appears was Jürgen Kuczynski) to attack wholesale the claim that the 1640s in England witnessed a social revolution commensurate with the great French or Russian Revolutions. The gist of Kuczynski's critique was that the breakthrough to capitalism had been achieved in the early sixteenth century, with the clear implication that the 1640s should be understood as a counter-revolution. After a good deal of discussion this controversy was dropped in 1941, and only taken up again much later.'[xv]

Schwarz's account tends if anything to under-play the drama of the debate. Jürgen Kuczynski was a leading member of the Communist International. He possessed far more authority in the movement than the leaders of the Communist Party, let alone a junior writer like Hill. In later life Kuczynski would go on to become a leading figure in the East German state. Christopher Hill's eventual victory was by no means assured. Had he lost, then Hill expulsion from the party was the least that he could have expected.[xvi] Hill attended meetings at Communist Party headquarters on King Street to defend himself. Serving in the British army, he attended meetings in uniform. Faced with many critics, he did not buckle, but continued to argue his case. The historians would later tell many stories to explain Hill's victory, in one it was claimed that Hill quoted from the Russian Encyclopaedia to prove that his views were in fact studiously orthodox. A less romantic explanation may suffice. Hill won the discrete backing of several senior British Communists, including Dona Torr, a founder member of the party and a close friend of Harry Pollitt, then in exile. After 1946, Torr would continue to act as a sort of patron to the historians' group.

Dona Torr was later to write of her fondness for Hill: 'We have certainly achieved something since the almost incredibly difficult struggles of 1940 to get anything in the [Labour Monthly] disagreeing with JF [Kuczynski] and the refusal to publish anything on the testimony of the Eng revolution of 1640 or to accept it in the category of bourg[eois] Rev[olution]. Among the other failures of the chair was that of omitting to pay a tribute to Christopher for his pioneer work in this sphere. We all owe it to him in the first place and [his stance in 1940] was a victory for politics as well as theory.'[xvii]

Already by 1956, then, the historians had enjoyed one taste of freedom. While other groups of Communists existed, including notable writers' and scientists' fractions, they lacked this memory of successful revolt. Thus Saville wrote to Thompson in November 1956, 'It is significant, I think that of all the intellectual groups in the Communist Party, the historians have come out best in the discussions of the past nine months ... The interesting thing is that the writers as a group have been much more confused – a quite different situation from the Eastern countries – and it is precisely the creative writers who should have seen so much more closely to the heart of things. Of what otherwise does their "creativeness" consist?'[xviii]

A short trip to the National Museum of Labour History reveals the following records of a Communist Party Historians' group meeting on 8 April 1956. 'A discussion opened by J Kl (AL M in the Chair) was held on the implications for historians of the 20th Congress CPSU, most contributions relating to the implications for the Br. Pty generally. Resolutions were passed expressing profound dissatisfaction with the 24th Congress of the Br. Party for is failure to discuss publicly the implications for the Br. Party of the 20th Congress CPSU [the group was told in reply that the Congress decided its own procedure] and with the failure of the Pty leadership to make a public statement of regret for the Br. Party's past uncritical endorsement of all Soviet policies and views, the meeting calling upon it to make one as soon as possible, as well as to initiate the widest possible public discussion of all the problems involved for the Br. Party in the present situation.'[xix]

The minutes are undoubtedly bureaucratic, but they are one of the first signs of a revolt in the British left. Such motions had not been common up till then in any committee of the party. The date is revealing. The discussion in April long preceded the public campaign to make the Communist Party acknowledge its mistakes. It preceded by four weeks Dutt's 'spots in sun' article for Labour Monthly. It even anticipated by another month the publication of the full text of Khrushchev's speech in the Observer of 10 June 1956, when, as John Saville records, the paper gave over its entire issue to the speech, 'to the fury or many regular readers, who missed on Sunday their book reviews, bridge and gardening columns.'[xx]

We do not know how many people were at the meeting. Only two people are recorded, and both by their initials. 'AL M' could only be the writer A. L. Morton, but who was 'J Kl'? The next meeting of the Committee at the end of May made hardly any mention of the previous meeting's discussion other than to say that the minutes were agreed. The members were concerned by May rather to note the visit of Professor Kosminsky to Britain, plans for meetings with French and Italian Communist historians, suggestions that the historians should contribute to another CP-run title, Modern Quarterly. The minutes do list some other members of the group as being in attendance: 'EH (chair)', presumably Eric Hobsbawm, 'B R', perhaps the ultra-loyalist Betty Reid, another colleague 'E W', 'AL M', presumably Morton, 'M C', perhaps the philosopher Maurice Cornforth, 'D StJ', most likely the group's secretary Diana St. John, and 'EP', presumably E. P. Thompson.[xxi] If the discussion of the party's failures went quiet, of course, after April this does not mean that the issues had gone away. It may show that people had been leaned on; or that objections were not minuted. It may show only that the dissidents recognised that their arguments with the party centre could not be resolved in the historians' meetings alone.

In his memoir, Interesting Times, Eric Hobsbawm argues that the members of the historians' group were never interested in confronting the problems of the lack of inner-party democracy, nor indeed the invasion of Hungary, but demanded only 'a serious history of the CP'. This argument was taken to a commission comprising Harry Pollitt, Palme Dutt and James Klugmann. He spoke for the proposal, along with another member of the group Brian Pearce. 'I recall frustrating meetings', Hobsbawm writes.[xxii] The demand for a proper history went deeper, however, than Hobsbawm makes it seem. In December 1956, Christopher Hill, Maurice Dobb and Eric Hobsbawm sent a letter to the editors of the New Statesman criticising the Russian invasion of Hungary, and joining together the two issues. 'We feel that the uncritical support', the authors wrote, 'given by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party to the Soviet action in Hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, and failure by British Communists to think out political problems for themselves ... If the left-wing and Marxist trend in our Labour movement is to win support, as it must for the achievement of socialism, this past must be utterly repudiated.'[xxiii]

          We can trace the effects of the discussions on different CP historians. The best way to treat them is by grouping people according to the politics choices they made. The usual approach is to assume that all the historians left in 1956, then joining up with Saville and Thompson in a New Left milieu. Yet only a few match this trajectory, as we shall show. Even Saville and Thompson responded to the events differently, with others leaving not in 1956, but two or three years later, and several not leaving at all.

          Among those who joined the New Left, Edward Thompson was the dominant personality. For Thompson, Hungary was a question not of politics but of principle. Opposed to Stalinism was 'socialist humanism', the shared slogan of British opposition and of the Budapest uprising. Thompson's later memories treated the politics of 1956 as clear-cut. This, for example, is the introduction to his book The Poverty of Theory: 'I commenced to reason in my thirty-third year, and despite my best efforts, I have never been able to shake the habit off. I first acquired the habit in 1956, when, with John Saville and others, I was involved in producing a duplicated journal of discussion within the Communist Party, the Reasoner. Reasoning was disliked by the leadership of the Party, and the editors were suspended from membership. Since this suspension coincided with the repression of the Hungarian revolution – and the exodus of some 10,000 members from the British Communist Party – it was decided that our offensive activities might best be continued outside that structure.'[xxiv] Such a narrative is curiously flat. The decision to leave the Party is portrayed as an easy choice, evidently right in retrospect, which is indeed all that needs to be said about it.

          It is possible, I suppose, that such positions might only represent a certain rationalisation of the positions that Thompson had in fact taken in 1956. The evidence of his correspondence, however, assumes that within weeks of Khrushchev's speech, a dissident intelligence was already at work. This, for example, were the opening sections of Thompson's first letter to Saville, dated 4 April, following an initial, cautious letter from Saville indicating that he thought something was wrong. 'Thank God for your letter. Never have I known such a wet flatfish slapped on the face as our 24th [Party Congress]. It is the biggest Confidence Trick in our Party's history. Not one bloody concession as yet to our feelings and integrity: no apology to the rank and file, no self-criticism, no apology to the British People.'[xxv] This tone of simple and uncomplicated outrage was to remain Thompson's consistent voice throughout the year: with Budapest it found only its release.

          Who else can be placed with Edward Thompson? His wife, Dorothy Thompson left with E. P. and later made her name as a distinguished historian of Chartism.[xxvi] Another labour historian Raph Samuel followed at similar times, although his politics were also shaped by his presence in a different, student milieu. The mediaevalist Rodney Hilton also left the Communist Party in 1956.[xxvii] He was the only member of the group beyond Saville and Thompson to contribute to the Reasoner.[xxviii] Hilton remained a Marxist, and continued to write on such topics the condition of the peasantry under late feudalism, the transition to capitalism and the revolt of 1381.[xxix] The list of Thompson's historian allies, it will be noted, is a brief one.

Even John Saville seems to have experience the process differently. Thompson's preferred model was 'socialist humanism', activism with or without the party. Saville, by contrast, seems to have treated the issues as ones of tactics rather than principle. We can see this influence in Saville's activist choices. Hearing the news of Khrushchev's speech, Saville reports, he held back from protest. It was only when it became clear that the party would not open up its publications to the dissidents that Saville agreed to the publication of the Reasoner. Key to Saville's strategy was the idea that the Reasoner was a Communist Party publication. In his subsequent obituary for Thompson, for example, Saville identified his strategy in 1956 as having been to promote 'criticism, open, flexible, internal and external criticism'. By his account it was a deliberately moderate strategy, to avoid 'the translation of opposing views into recriminations'.[xxx]

By late summer 1956, Saville and Thompson had published a first issue of The Reasoner. They had received some 300 letters of support, the great majority supporting the initiative. The machine fought back. Both John Saville and E. P. Thompson were then living in Yorkshire and a special Sub-Committee of the Yorkshire District of the Communist Party was convened for 10 August. The dominant personality was Bert Ramelson, later the Party's national Industrial Organiser. Saville and Thompson drafted a letter explaining why they published: 'We believed that – before we published – there was a crisis developing in the Party which was not being reflected in the Party press or in the statements and actions of the leadership. We know now, from the dozens of letters that we have received in response to our first number, that we had judged correctly. There is a ferment in the Party that reaches out to its four corners. Nor is the alleged division between intellectuals and industrial comrades borne out by our experience. One of the most interesting and significant aspects of the support we have received has been the positive welcome that industrial comrades have expressed.'[xxxi]

On 18 August, the sub-Committee voted 19 to 1 with one abstention to ask Thompson and Saville to cease publication of The Reasoner. Without guarantees of free discussion, they refused. The Yorkshire Committee reaffirmed its original vote, not asking but demanding that publication be stopped. The mater was referred to the party's national executive. Further warnings were made, but Saville and Thompson published a second and then a third issue of the magazine. Saville's intention in this period seems to have been to persuade Thompson that they should cease publication of the Reasoner, and wait to see how the issues were treated. By doing so, they could remain in the party. By doing so, they would have the chance to take the issues to a vote. In his memoirs, Saville defends this strategy. 'Our concern was the democratisation of the Party relationships between the elected leadership and the ordinary members ... At the same time, and I am now offering my personal position, there were growing misgivings concerning the nature of the communist political structure ... by the end of August 1956, and following our meetings with the Political Committee, which had greatly shocked me, I was beginning to consider more seriously than ever before the intellectual rigidities of the members of the Political Committee.'[xxxii]

The most striking aspect of this passage is its tone, the sense that Saville records of growing unease, his uncertainty as to whether problems were individual or systemic. The problem of the Party, Saville goes on to argue, was an old one. The struggle for socialism demands revolutionary politics and disciplined organisation. But centralism cannot be allowed to crush democracy. 'When we began the Reasoner the idea of resigning from the Party was not in our minds and it was only in the months that followed that we recognised, with both reluctance and dismay, the basic conservatism not only of the leadership but of many of the rank and file.'[xxxiii] Prior to the Russian invasion of Hungary, Saville's intention was to remain within his party. When the invasion took place, The Reasoner responded with condemnation, criticising the leaders of the British party in particular for choosing Russian tanks over Hungarian workers. Following the publication of this third issue, John Saville and Edward Thompson were suspended from membership of the Communist Party. In response, they resigned.

'The central political problem', John Saville writes in his memoir, certainly for me, and I have no doubt for Edward, was the recognition that the achievement of socialism was never going to come about without a seriously organised opposition, the members of which must accept a tighter discipline than that of the Labour Party.'[xxxiv] Saville considered allying with Gerry Healy, but found the would-be Trotskyist guru 'three-faced'. He refrained.[xxxv] Despite such setbacks, as late as 1970, Saville would continue to argue that some sort of Marxist party was needed in Britain.[xxxvi] Strikingly, he uses the final pages of his recently published memoir to declare his support for anti-war politics and his contempt for Tony Blair, 'The acceptance of US policy on Iraq, and the war that it has brought about, will not be forgiven, and Blair will very properly be damned by history.'[xxxvii]

Various members of the group left the Communist Party in 1957, 1958 or 1959. Christopher Hill had joined the party as long ago as the mid-1930s. In 1952, Hill had helped to found the journal Past and Present, whose editorial board also included Hobsbawm, Hilton, Dobb and one long-time fellow-traveller, the archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe.[xxxviii] Hill was another casualty of the crisis, departing after the 1957 Special Congress. 'Along with many in the CP', one obituarist Martin Kettle records, 'Hill had become disenchanted with the party's lack of democracy and its reluctance to criticise the Soviet Union. Both issues came to a head in the late weeks of 1956, though his own break did not come until the following year. He was appointed to a Communist Party review of inner-party democracy, but the rejection of the critical minority report, written by Hill (with Peter Cadogan and Malcolm MacEwen), precipitated his final departure.'[xxxix]

Another member of the group Victor Kiernan contributed to the New Reasoner and his successor Socialist Register; although he only left the Communist Party in 1959. Kiernan has continued to write histories of Empire. His latest book is an account of the imperialist history of America.[xl] It also seems that George Rudé left in 1959 or 1960; the difficulty in fixing a precise date is that Rudé left the party 'quietly', in Eric Hobsbawm's phrase, 'not wishing to advertise the fact'.[xli] He remained a Marxist, of course, and continue to publish books on the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century: The Crowd in the French Revolution, Wilkes and Liberty, Ideology and Popular Protest, and (with Eric Hobsbawm) Captain Swing.[xlii]

          Members of a second mini-generation, did not just side with the New Left, but went further and even briefly joined the Trotskyists. One such member of the CP history group, Peter Cadogan had joined the Communist Party in 1946, on his demobilisation from the RAF. For the next ten years he was a loyal and active member of the CP. In 1956, Peter Cadogan was invited to sit on the Commission on Inner Party Democracy, along with another member of the historians' group, Christopher Hill. His choice for this position tells us more than anything about how Cadogan was seen at this point. There was no point filling the group only with loyalists, some minor dissidents were required, if the Commission was to have any credibility. The historians' group was an obvious place to look for candidates. On the other hand, there was no way that the Commission was going to be allowed to say anything that would change too radically the structures of the party. Even if Cadogan was picked as one of the 'awkward squad', he cannot have been regarded as a definite troublemaker. But independence of mind was an on-going process. Peter Cadogan, Christopher Hill and Malcolm MacEwen[xliii] produced the Commission's minority report, defeated at the Special Congress in spring 1957, after which Cadogan left the party.[xliv] Thereafter, he would remain active for many years in the anti-war movement. In 1958, Cadogan helped to organise a demonstration against the nuclear base at Mepal, near Ely. Cadogan also came under the influence of Gerry Healy's group, the Club, and by 1959 was a dissident there too. He supported the Stamford Hill faction, best known for having eased the path for another ex-CPer Jim Higgins from Healy's SLL into the Socialist Review Group.[xlv]

The historian and translator Brian Pearce left the Communist Party, joining Gerry Healy's Trotskyist Group and then the Socialist Labour League. Of all the historians of his generation, Pearce was the only one to take seriously the project of writing the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain. His analysis of the first decade of British Communism was published twenty years later, and remains a key text.[xlvi]

          A third cohort is composed of those were not members of the historians' group, although they are often assumed to have been. This group includes those who had already left the CP by 1956 or who never joined. One member of the Communist Party Historians' Group, Edmund Dell, had already quit the party prior to 1956.[xlvii] A lecturer in postwar Oxford, Dell had worked with Christopher Hill on the publication of The Good Old Cause, a book of documentary sources, which was later described by Paul Foot as the 'high point' of Dell's life.[xlviii] In 1951 or 1952, Dell came into conflict with Dona Torr, the mentor of the historians' group.[xlix] Torr insisted on Edmund Dell's expulsion, participating in his removal with all full vigour, and terrifying those such as Victor Kiernan who had hoped that a compromise might be reached.[l] By 1953, Dell had joined the Labour Party, and was rapidly promoted. He was a councillor in Manchester and by 1955 a Labour Parliamentary candidate. Dell became a minister under Callaghan. He later quit Labour to the right, joining the SDP and then the Liberal Democrats. He was later the chairman of Channel Four and then the Prison Reform Trust.[li]

Dell's politics were increasingly those of the establishment. At the opposite end of the spectrum stand Royden Harrison and Brian Manning. Harrison had not left the CP prior to 1956, but was already profoundly suspicious of the leaders of his party; a lecturer in history working for the Department of Extramural Studies at Sheffield University, he chose not to join the historians' group, judging it to be dominated by the party's full-time employees. Harrison was later an active member of the Labour Party. Consistently on the left, he was even briefly on Labour's NEC.[lii] As for Brian Manning, a young student of Hill's, and an occasional member of the editorial board of Past and Present, Manning too is often assumed falsely to have been a member of the Communist Party historians' group. He never in fact joined either the group or even the party, and was thus liberated from having to decide whether or not to leave in 1956. Through his life, Manning continued to publish studies of the seventeenth century revolution. He was a member of the Labour Party and CND. From the 1980s, he was a regular contributor to the Marxism summer events run by the British SWP.[liii]

          A fourth group comprised those who witnessed the CP crisis and chose to remain. One factor was age. We have already seen, in a different context, how a difference of generation helped to shape the modest but real political distance between Saville and Thompson. Having joined the CP not during the War, but several years beforehand, Saville had made a greater emotional investment in his party, had endorsed more of its previous turns, and had more to lose by siding with the dissidents. The point can be extended. Those whose membership of the CP predated Saville's tended to remain.

          One such CP loyalist of the older generation was James Klugmann.[liv] A contemporary of Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and John Cornford at Cambridge in the 1930s, Klugmann had served with the Special Operations Executive in Cairo, being promoted to the rank of Major. Returning to civilian life and full-time work for the Communist Party, Klugmann made no effort to shed his previous military training in habits of command and obedience. The most famous instance came with regard to the Yugoslav government of Marshal Tito. In 1946, Klugmann had described Tito as a 'Communist leader and Zagreb metal worker'. His army, Klugmann described as 'truly representative of the people'.[lv] By 1951, however, and Tito's break with Stalin, Klugmann could claim that 'Under the rule of the Titoites, Yugoslavia has returned to capitalism, but not to capitalist democracy. Yugoslavia today is a semi-colonial country ruled over by a reactionary caste operating a police state of a fascist type.'[lvi] Klugmann's 1951 book From Tito to Trotsky was widely assumed by contemporaries on the left to have been written with Russian material and Russian editors.

Assuming that the 'JK' of the group's minutes was James Klugmann, some explanation is required. Why was he willing at first to back the critics of the CP leadership, when everything in his past suggests that Klugmann was more likely to remain loyal? Was he simply persuaded by sheer weight of numbers, that it was best, first, to accept the rebukes? Or was Klugmann playing a longer game: could he have known of the British victims of Stalin's purges, including Rosa Rust and Rose Cohen?[lvii] Could his experience of power politics in Cairo have equipped him to see that once de-Stalinisation had begun, it would not easily be halted? Nothing in the archives provides answers. We only have scraps of anecdote: for example Dorothy Thompson recalls James Klugman before a talk to the historians' group in spring 1956, asking her what she thought he should address, adding, 'Surely the historians don't want to talk about all this Joe business.'[lviii]

We do know that Klugmann remained a member of the Communist Party. He chaired the Commission to which Hobsbawm refers, on the history of the CP. There, Hobsbawm writes, Klugmann 'said nothing. He knew we were right. If we did not produce a history of our Party, including the problematic bits, they would not go away ... He knew what was right, but shied away from saying it in public.'[lix] The decision was taken to publish some sort of party history. Klugmann was chosen for the task.[lx] Ian Birchall has described the resulting text as 'a work of considerable dishonesty, aiming at preserving the party's honour against all comers.'[lxi]

The most controversial figure in 1956 was Eric Hobsbawm, at first a dissident, and later the most prominent of the historians to remain in the Party. In later accounts, Hobsbawm has claimed to have been on the verge of leaving the party only to have decided finally to remain. The Polish Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher was one, Hobsbawm claims, who help to persuade him not to leave. 'I let myself be expelled in 1932 and have regretted it ever since', Deutscher is supposed to have said. Hobsbawm also insists that he had greater emotional ties to the party than others of his generation. He writes in his memoir 'I did not come into communism as a young Briton in England but as a central European in the collapsing Weimar Republic.'[lxii] Being a Jew who had lived in pre-war Vienna and survived, there was more to his Communism Hobsbawm insists than attachment to the left wing of the Labour movement. Perry Anderson responds: 'This is surely the plain biographical truth, well stated. But if both the emergency and the hope that brought him into the Communist movement were more intense than was typical of his English contemporaries, it is less clear that the chronological contrast would have been more significant than the geographical, as he goes on to suggest. Was the October Revolution peripheral for Christopher Hill, who joined the Party in the mid-1930s, learned Russian - as Hobsbawm explains he never did - and wrote a book on Lenin? At all events, in spelling out what he takes to be the larger difference, of time rather than space, Hobsbawm offers another illuminating remark about himself. 'Politically', he says, having joined the Communist Party in 1936, he belongs to the era of the Popular Front, committed to an alliance between capital and labour, which has determined his strategic thinking to this day; 'emotionally', however, as a teenage convert in the Berlin of 1932, he remained tied to the original revolutionary agenda of Bolshevism.' 'This', Anderson concludes, 'is a dichotomy with more than one bearing on his work as a whole.'[lxiii]

Twenty years ago, Norah Carlin and Ian Birchall reproduced several letters that Hobsbawm published in the Communist press in 1956. Unlike the one for the New Statesman, to which he was only a co-signatory, Hobsbawm's own correspondence tended to endorse the Russian invasion. His tone was equivocal. 'While approving with a heavy heart of what is now happening in Hungary', one letter ran, 'we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country.' In a similar fashion, Hobsbawm seems to have supported modest party reforms, at least until the defeat of the Minority at the 1957 Congress.[lxiv]

After 1957, Eric Hobsbawm rare supported Thompson or the politics of the New Left. He did contribute one article to the first issue of the New Reasoner. Elsewhere, he wrote what he liked, very often in the non-Communist press, and had no fear of party discipline. One notable act of dissidence was Hobsbawm's review of James Klugmann's party history, which Hobsbawm dismissed in polite but uncompromising terms. 'This extremely able and lucid man is clearly capable of writing a satisfactory history of the Communist Party, and where he feels unconstrained, he does so. Thus he provides the best and clearest account of the formation of the party at present available. Unfortunately he is paralyzed by the impossibility of being both a good historian and a loyal functionary.[lxv] Hobsbawm also played a key part in the evolution of Marxism Today in the 1980s: a trend that made nothing easier for any healthy current on the left.

          A. L. Morton remained a member of the Communist Party until his death, three decades later. The surviving rump of Communist Party Historians published Morton's last pamphlet posthumously in 1988, and the Communist Party publishers Lawrence and Wishart brought out a volume of Morton's selected writings in 1990.[lxvi] Another longstanding member of the party, Maurice Dobb was employed as an economist, not as a historian, but attended meetings of the CP historians' group. He too remained a member of the Party.[lxvii] He also continued to lecture at Cambridge. His later books include one for Lawrence and Wishart on growth in the developing world.[lxviii]

          Another member of the group, Dona Torr, had been a founding member of the Communist Party in 1919. By 1956, she was already invalided by the illness that would kill her. A close friend of Party secretary Harry Pollitt, Torr's instincts would undoubtedly have been to defend her party, even at the expense of the very historians whose independence she had nurtured through the previous two decades. She died early in 1957.[lxix]

          Dona Torr's last book, Tom Mann and his Times was published in the middle of the crisis.[lxx] It was supposed to be a multi-volume history of the British working-class movement. Second and third volumes were discussed through Torr's last years, and some of the manuscript was entrusted to E. P. Thompson. With Torr dead and Thompson outside the party, the remaining members of the group were left in some difficulty. Should the renegade be allowed to complete Torr's work? In December 1957, another member of the group and brief dissident James Klugmann wrote to John Gollan, the new Secretary of the party, confirming that Thompson would not be asked to contribute and that Torr's papers had been taken back form him.[lxxi]

          In this incident lies the fate of a generation. Contrary to the idea of a British Marxist generation, by no means all the Communist Party historians quit the party in 1956 and 1957. Many, perhaps even most, stayed in. From those who did leave the Communist Party, many traditions were born. The most acute political discussion of the politics of 1956 belongs to the work of John Saville, but while others seem to have shared at least some of Saville's continuing belief in a structured, revolutionary Marxism, few sensed the dilemmas of their situation as clearly as him. Among those who remained, Eric Hobsbawm excepted, few later works of any interest can be found.