The Hungarian Uprising and a Young British Communist

    ‘Do you think nothing is true because something may be false?’

        Mrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere, 1888

I joined the Communist Party aged eighteen in the spring of 1955, a few months before I was due to go to the University of St Andrews, and I left a year and a half later, weeks after Soviet tanks had crushed the Hungarian uprising. I was part of the early exodus of 10,000 Communist Party members – not all of them ‘bloody intellectuals’ as King Street, HQ of the British Communist Party, officials often called the non-proletarian members of the Party. Unlike some of my friends I didn't wait to see whether the British Party, at its emergency Congress in 1957, would declare an end to its forty-year dependence on the Soviet Union's ideological carapace. I was so appalled at the sight and sounds of unarmed students and miners being killed and brutally dispersed by the Soviet army – the mighty army, or in this case air force, I had, as a small child, sung praises to at my mother's knee,

Fly higher and higher and higher, our emblem the Soviet star

And every propeller is roaring, defending the USSR.

I was born a Communist as one might be born a Christian or a Muslim. My parents joined the Party (as it was always called, as if there were no other) in the early 1930s. They had turned away from the Puritan traditions of their families and the failed parliamentary gradualism of 1931 Labourism – not finding in either of them adequate solutions to the wars, the poverty, the mass unemployment and the adamantine class system they had experienced at first hand. There was an innocence about that Communist generation – they lived their lives believing in a utopia on earth, not perfect of course, but building a better future, a nobler more humane society, the opposite of the Fascist and Nazi regimes establishing themselves in Europe which they despised and feared.

My father's family came from Scottish Presbyterianism merging into the strong radical Independent Labour Party (ILP) Glasgow political tradition (his father worked on the Clyde steamers and was often out of work); whereas my mother came from a mixture of Plymouth Brethren on her mother's side and a South Wales mining background. Her father worked at the Six Bells colliery, near Abergavenny, until he joined up to fight in the First World War. He died young, some time after but as a result of the war, and her mother, still a young woman with two small children, died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. I remember my mother telling me that she had a favourite aunt who had joined the Party at its foundation in the 1920s. I never heard her talk about her father's politics, but it's hard to believe he wasn't caught up in the Left Labourism from which Nye Bevan came, and the beginnings of the Communist Party of Great Britain alternative which thrived in the Welsh mining valleys at that time.

My parents met in North London in the early 1930s: he, down from Glasgow, a young actor in repertory theatre, was taking elocution lessons to rid himself of his Scottish accent; she was working in a nursery for deprived children up the Holloway Road. My mother always said she was converted to socialism by Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism [1928] which she saw one day in a bookshop near the nursery. They both joined the Holborn Communist Party cell and, as Party members did, spent their spare time demonstrating against Mosley, campaigning for intervention in the Spanish Civil War, helping to run a film society showing early Soviet films and teaching me as a very young child to sing trade-union, labour and Party songs – a singing library full of stuff I can still find at the back of my head.

By the end of the Second World War, during which my father had been away in the Navy for five years, my parents had divorced and my mother had left the Communist Party and joined the local Labour Party in Holborn and St Pancras, then full of far left ex-Party members and fellow-travellers.

My father stayed in the Party and stayed loyal not only to the Soviet Union – as the first workers’ state on its way to establishing Socialism and then Communism – but to the rest of the Communist world then spreading, it seemed inexorably, from Eastern Europe to the Far East. ‘The Socialist World has now increased from a sixth of to a third of the world’, I remember him saying at breakfast one day over the top of his Daily Worker. His new wife, Honor Arundel, was the Daily Worker film and theatre critic for many years and remained as loyal to the Party as he did.

He was often away on cultural delegations visiting his theatrical counterparts in China, the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, always returning with stories of how magnificent were the conditions for cultural workers there compared with Britain or other capitalist countries. He was by then a famous radio actor, and faced a relatively mild form of McCarthyism which meant he had to choose between his further career in radio as a reporter on current affairs and his Party membership. He chose the Party and stayed a member until it disbanded.

So, from the spring of 1955 until the spring of 1956 when Khrushchev's Secret Speech was published in the Observer I was learning to be ‘a Good Communist’, to use the expression Raphael (or as he wanted to be called then, Ralph) Samuel taught me, which meant being an exemplary student as well as a dedicated and tireless recruiting-officer for the Party. ‘There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment’, wrote Mary Augusta Ward. I think this phrase does apply to Raphael at that time. He was a brilliant student and he wouldn't take no for an answer when arguing with potential Party recruits. In the year before 1956 he had recruited the eccentric ex-Anglican scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, Peter Sedgwick (Peter sent me the complete works of Joseph Stalin for my birthday that year) and the ex-wool-sorter from Bradford, Denis Butt, an adult student of immense charm and intelligence also at Balliol. They both became close friends of mine until they died, all of us having left the Party by the summer of 1957.

Raphael, Peter, and Denis went on to found, with others, the Universities and Left Review, the Partisan Coffee House in Soho, and the New Left Clubs around the country. I became the first Secretary of the Scottish New Left Clubs. Many of these friends became distinguished scholars, activists, writers and academics, several of them founders of this journal, but at that time they were to me just my group of friends and comrades, some of whom I had love affairs with, or nearly did, and most of whom I stayed close to in the decades to come. Raphael and I became engaged in the summer of 1955 and travelled up and down between St Andrews and Oxford until the events of 1956 overwhelmed us and shut out any thought of a private life.

I was always in admiration of Raphael's indefatigability and yet, as a quiet doubter, I found the language of the Party journals, and the education courses I had to attend once I had joined up, wooden and impenetrable. I remember arguing with Raphael, as usual not very effectively, on a long hitchhike to Scotland, that the use of weird phrases such as ‘the lackeys of Fleet Street’ or ‘the hyenas of Wall Street’ put people off reading Soviet publications (the particular journal we were arguing about was called For a Lasting Peace and a People's Democracy; it was printed on horrible yellowey paper with hideous layout and long hard-to-read diatribes). An old friend of Raphael's recently wrote me an angry letter about my support for Blair and my general renegade political stance, recalling that he remembered me reading this Soviet newspaper (and wondered where my loyalties had gone since then) and that I had found it hard to persuade the students I wanted to recruit to read them. Raphael's reply had been that this use of language was an essential part of the Soviet tradition of argument which Lenin and Stalin and the rest of the Bolsheviks had inherited from their struggles against Czarist oppression.

I was silenced by the response: Raphael just knew so much, but I still didn't see why the Party over here had to be so alienating in its use of language. The imperative for our small band of communists was always to ‘be positive’ and live in a ‘spirit of Hope’, both of which I found hard and still do. My pessimism, which I preferred to call realism, was a child's sadness at how wrong things had gone in my own life, and however much my parents, lovers and friends called on me to be positive and hopeful, I somehow never acquired that protective coat of theirs.

As I see it now, I was living, as I suppose was not unusual in that last gasp of the Age of Deference, among Giants. Membership of the Party introduced me, not only to Raphael's family and Oxford friends – including the wonderfully alluring Stuart Hall and the witty and cuddly Gabriel Pearson – but also, after the explosion of Khrushchev's Secret Speech in the early part of 1956 – to Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Ken Alexander, Lawrence Daly, Dorothy and Jo Greenald, Ron and Dorly Meek, Dorothy Wedderburn, Royden Harrison, Michael Barratt Brown: the group around The Reasoner and then the New Reasoner who promised a renewal of socialist politics and theory (what Edward called Socialist Humanism), free from the Soviet Union's revolutionary and ideological dominance but also free from the compromises of parliamentary socialism.

I could listen to them and read their articles but I was silenced and in awe of their knowledge and experience. ‘NO BAD THING' Edward teased me after an evening of intense discussion in which I said nothing, at Votti, the Thompsons’ remote Penrhyndeudraeth cottage to which Raphael and I had gone during that summer of 1956. Apart from my youthful mutism, my other unforgettable memory of the Thompsons on holiday that year was sitting round the open fire in the evenings, Edward reading aloud from his favourite poets – Blake, Yeats, William Morris and Wordsworth.

Khrushchev's Secret Speech (from the horse's mouth as it were, so that it couldn't be dismissed as Capitalist or Trotskyist propaganda) was published in the Observer in March 1956, and seemed to promise a new dawn in Soviet honesty and openness about the notorious trials of ‘dissidents’ and ‘the Cult of the Personality’ of the Stalin period.

The Hungarian Uprising eight months later, its crushing by Soviet tanks and the muddled reaction of the British Party, confirmed for me personally all my earlier doubts and pessimism. The Daily Worker's correspondent in Budapest, Peter Fryer, initially reported frankly what he saw – workers and students on the streets in revolution calling for an end to Soviet domination and the Hungarian Party's subservience to it. It was thrilling to read his reports which were so obviously truthful to what he was witnessing. We were soon aware, however, that he was to be replaced, as was the interpretation of what he had reported. The alleged role of the CIA and the demand of the ‘revisionist’ Nagy government to leave the Warsaw Pact became the explanation and the meaning of the events Fryer had reported so vividly. What he had interpreted as a revolution by workers and students, as potent and symbolic as the October Revolution by the Bolsheviks in 1917, was replaced by an interpretation of counter-revolution and US imperialist interference with the post-1945 settlement, exactly the explanation my father and other loyal Party members had been looking for.

We stayed up all night, or it seemed that way, for the whole of 1956–7, constantly reeling from unbearable revelations, eye-witness accounts, and new tragic stories of wrongful persecution inside the Soviet Union, including, horrifyingly, loyal Party members. A typical story from years later that I remember was of a Czech communist friend of my father's telling us that he had been what was called, unbelievably, ‘a premature anti-fascist’ – that is, he had volunteered to fight in an International Brigade in Spain in the late 1930s, had witnessed first-hand the darker side of Soviet interference that Orwell exposed in Homage to Catalonia – and after the Second World War, in which he had fought with the Free Czech Air Force, on his return to help build Socialism in his native country, the Czech Communist Party had accused him of disloyalty to the Soviet Union along with other vague accusations for which they removed him from his teaching post at the University, forcing him to work as a road-sweeper for years before rehabilitating him in the final months of his life.

Not even this tragic story however prompted my father to tear up his Party card. We quarrelled only once about our different reactions to the Hungarian Uprising and my decision to leave the Party. His main criticism of my position was that I lacked a ‘class perspective’ and ‘an internationalist understanding of the contribution of the Soviet Union to the peace movement’. As I was member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, I think he thought the last point would be more relevant to me. I was too young to understand fully what he meant then and anyway I soon became disillusioned with the Soviet line on nuclear disarmament, but because we loved each other, we didn't fall out seriously until much later in our lives – oddly not until the miners’ strike of the mid 1980s.

It wasn't easy psychologically for me to leave the Party, even with the events of 1956 as my solid reason. I had heard my father say often that people who left the Party were weak and neurotic bourgeois individualists who usually ‘ended up’ needing Freudian psycho-analysis – another bête noire to communists of that generation. I seem to remember Doris Lessing being put in this category after she left. Everything was political. Personal private life was of no consequence compared to the collective comradeship of the fight for the future world revolution. Uniquely, a friend of my father's, the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid who had been expelled from the Party before the war, for, I think, ‘Scottish Nationalist deviationism’, actually announced his decision to rejoin at the time of the Hungarian Uprising. ‘Scottish anti-syzygy’ he loved to announce when queried.

I never regretted leaving the Party. When many of my friends went into Trotskyist groups in the years that followed I always resisted the temptation to join any other small righteous sect, preferring the muddle of being a member of the Labour Party and arguing within it for the ideas I later came to embrace – support for Castro and African socialism, the women's liberation movement, parliamentary socialism. I was amazed and still am that several friends of mine went into the revamped 1970s Communist Party, in the wake of 1968, Eurocommunism, Marxism Today and the women's liberation movement, as if Hungary and what it meant had been forgotten. For me, the shock of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 confirmed for ever my youthful scepticism, realism and desire to be free from the hold that 1917 had had on our and my parents’ generation.

My mother, to the end of her life, when asked about living through the 1930s as a young communist, used to quote Wordsworth's poem, ‘The French Revolution, As it Appeared to Enthusiasts’ (1809):

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive

But to be young was very heaven.

I would now answer her and my father and maybe all those Giants of my youth with the later Wordsworth:

Not in Utopia – subterranean fields, –

Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world

Of all of us, – the place where, in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all.