Labour haunted by ghosts of Soviet past
Features The furore over Jeremy Corbyn’s meetings with an alleged spy will do little to shake the Left’s image problem, writes Giles Udy
As of this month, the Berlin Wall has been down for longer than it ever stood. Built almost overnight in August 1961, the 96-mile-long stretch of barbed wire put paid to free passage around the city for decades, and left West Berlin a democratic oasis within communist-administered East Germany.
During the 27 years that the heavily fortified barrier stood firm, dozens perished trying to breach it. A byword for division in post-war Europe, the wall came to symbolise the perversity of a political system that dubbed it an “anti-fascist defence”, one that required more than 90,000 people to be employed by a secret police force, the Stasi. Yet all this appears to have little troubled Jeremy Corbyn. As a young, radical British Left-winger in 1979, the leader of the Labour Party chose East Germany for a motorcycling holiday with Diane Abbott, now his shadow home secretary.
Little is known about what happened on that trip but if they met party officials while they were there, those details would now be in their Stasi files.
Questions about the British Left, its closeness to the Soviet state and the judgment of Labour’s current leadership continue to surface and last week it was revealed how, at the height of the Cold War, Corbyn – by now an MP – twice met a Communist “agent” from the Czech security services in the House of Commons, and warned him of a clampdown by British intelligence. Jan Sarkocy has claimed that Corbyn knew he was a spy, accusing him on Friday of “conscious co-operation”, though the Labour leader’s spokesman has denied this. Following the revelations, contained in secret documents held by Czech security services, Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, accused Corbyn of having “betrayed” Britain, and said the incidents prove the Labour leader “cannot be trusted”. If Corbyn cannot be trusted, similar doubts must also surround his inner circle.
Seumas Milne, Labour’s strategy director, is on the record having defended North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons; Andrew Murray, Corbyn’s long-term Stop the War colleague who was brought in to run Labour’s 2017 election campaign, has also expressed solidarity with North Korea and praised the “successes” of the Soviet Union.
The East German regime was undeniably repellent and oppressive, but enthusiasm for the German socialist republic was shared by many of Corbyn’s Left-wing contemporaries back in the Seventies. Trade union leader Jack Jones, one of the most powerful men in Britain at the height of the industrial unrest of the late Seventies, declared East Germany was a “workers’ state” worthy of support.
Jones has been accused of being a paid Soviet agent. He was by no means the only one: others, well-known in their day but since forgotten, were either in the pay of Moscow or freely working on the Kremlin’s behalf.
Ron Hayward, Labour’s general secretary from 1972 to 1982, had secret meetings in the Soviet embassy with KGB officers to discuss the takeover of the party by pro-Soviet elements. In one of these, to the background noise of a jamming machine switched on to prevent their conversation from being bugged, Hayward confided his intention of eclipsing the Parliamentary Labour Party and vesting power instead in the National Executive Committee (which he chaired), so that he could become “the first Labour leader in history who is not afraid to come out alongside communists with the same agenda”.
From the days of the 1917 Russian Revolution, conviction in the underlying benevolence of Soviet communism and communist regimes has been pervasive in Labour circles.
You don’t have to look far to find evidence for it – from Stafford Cripps, Labour’s solicitor general in 1930, defending the Soviet death penalty as “just” (shortly after 30,000 Russian farmers were shot for being the wrong class), to its trade minister William Graham referring to the gulag labour camp system as “a vast and very remarkable economic experiment”.
“Let the experiment continue,” he told Parliament. “Let us give all the cooperation we can.”
It has been claimed that Soviet enthusiasts in Labour’s earliest administrations did not really know what was going on in Russia. But this is not true. Sufficient information was in the public domain, but they chose to look the other way, to label uncomfortable facts as “smears” or reinterpret them in a positive light. Some would say that the reaction of the Labour Left to the situation in Venezuela today is no different. As George Lansbury, Labour leader in the early Thirties, said: “The colossal task set themselves by the Russian socialists is one which should be supported by all lovers of the race. We are not called upon to judge or accept all the means they adopt to attain their ends.”
A consistent pattern has emerged over the years: the end goal of socialism or communism (the terms were often used interchangeably) was so morally worthy that it justified all means to achieve it. This perhaps goes some way to explain why Corbyn would have had few qualms about meeting a Czech “diplomat”. That Sarkocy (then operating under his spy name, Jan Dymic) was later expelled from Britain with three other diplomats for espionage by prime minister Margaret Thatcher in Corbyn’s fuzzy logic may merely have reinforced his sense of righteousness.
But it is ingenuous to suggest, as some younger Corbynites are doing, that in the Eighties their hero would have been ignorant of the likely destination of the information he allegedly shared. Nor would he be the first Labour statesman to plead ignorance after the event.
In 2001, radical Left-winger Tony Benn admitted that the British Communist Party had made a mistake when it opposed Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war against Germany, only changing its policy when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. “But,” he added, “the charge that it uncritically supported all the excesses during the Stalinist period ignores the fact that those excesses were not widely known, even in the Soviet Union, until Khrushchev’s famous [1956] speech which disclosed them.”
This is completely untrue; the excesses were widely known. In fact, reports of Soviet oppression and brutality in the years following the Russian Revolution were frequent and, where they related to the mass imprisonment and execution of non-Bolshevik socialists, were accepted as authentic by the British Left.
But, then, the British Left has long believed that some of the foreign powers identified by the British security services as hostile to United Kingdom interests are friends of international socialism and, therefore, deserving of their support. To them, the real enemy is our capitalist Nato ally, the United States of America.
“History repeats itself,” joked the poet Steve Turner. “Has to. No one listens.” This time, they must.
If Corbyn cannot be trusted, doubts must also surround his inner circle
Labour and the Gulag by Giles Udy is published by Biteback (£30). To order your copy for £24.99 with free p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk