Return of Labour's USEFUL IDIOTS
For decades, many on the Left were so in thrall to Soviet Russia they turned a blind eye to its murderous evils. But with their hero worship of Marx, Corbyn and his comrades are as wickedly naive today
THERE are none so blind about socialism as those who choose what not to see — as poor, misguided Freda Utley found out to her personal cost and deep sorrow back in 1930s Britain.
She was a passionate and committed Left-wing intellectual, moving in a circle of Labour luminaries and Soviet Union sympathisers that included great beacons of the movement, such as the writer George Bernard Shaw and economists and social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
Like them, she was an uncritical disciple of Karl Marx with a romantic view of post-Revolution Russia, where — as she ( and they) saw it — a brilliant new world of equality and human dignity was emerging under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin.
Until, that is, she married a Russian and went to live there.
Arkadi Berdichevsky, her husband, was a Soviet trade official — a creature of the Kremlin — who in 1932 was sent on official business to Ukraine.
As a timely new book, Labour And The Gulag: Russia And The Seduction Of The British Left by historian Giles Udy, reveals, Berdichevsky returned to Moscow shattered by what he had seen there: women and children dying in the streets from starvation, peasants being forced into cattle trucks and moved to concentration camps.
The horrific reality of what Communism actually meant was brought home to Freda and her husband.
‘Terror, regimented sadism, hunger, cold and wretchedness and the nauseating cant and hypocrisy of Soviet life’ were the descriptions she confided to herself but dared not speak openly about in that totalitarian regime.
Meanwhile, her Lefty London friends were enjoying rigorously chaperoned propaganda tours of the Soviet Union, breakfasting on caviar and returning home with ludicrous tales of plenty. Famine? What famine? If they suspected that they were being duped, they didn’t care.
In 1936, Arkadi Berdichevsky was arrested. On what specific charge, nobody ever knew — but under that regime it hardly mattered. He disappeared into a labour camp in Vorkuta, in the Arctic Circle.
FREDA managed to flee Moscow before the secret police could come for her, too, and escaped to England with their toddler son, Jon. She never saw her husband again.
Back in London, she expected her experience to carry weight among her old friends. These were clever, informed people; an intellectual elite. Surely they would listen to her.
Instead, her attempts to draw attention to the truth about the Soviet Union were dismissed by the Left-wing cognoscenti. The Webbs snubbed her as deluded, and Shaw — a man who defended mass executions in Russia as a necessary ‘ weeding of the garden’ — made the preposterous claim that Arkadi was bound to be all right because prison in the USSR was ‘not as bad as it is’ in Britain.
Years later, she would discover that her husband had been summarily shot, like hundreds of thousands of other Russians, during what became known as the Great Terror — at the height of which 10,000 executions took place each week.
Yet the ‘useful idiots’ in the West continued to praise the Soviet Union and Comrade Stalin, even as the gulags were witnessing mass murder of so- called ‘ class traitors’ on a scale that would rival Hitler and the Nazis.
They ignored the famines and the deportations, the firing squads and the labour camps. With their red-tinted glasses firmly on, they stuck to their belief that the world was a better place because of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
The story of Freda Utley is one of many related in Udy’s book, which details how, for decades after 1917, the Left in Britain, including substantial numbers of Labour MPs and leading party figures, threw in their lot with Bolshevism, and, either deliberately or naively, glossed over the horrors and the wholesale destruction that went with it.
Such a conclusion could well be considered merely academic, an insight into politics a long time ago.
Except that, nearly a century on, militant sections of the Labour Party are still hero-worshipping the same monsters as the likes of Shaw and the Webbs did.
At a May Day rally this year, chanting comrades marched behind banners portraying Lenin’s face and even Stalin’s, the butcher of millions, to Trafalgar Square, where they were addressed by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.
In TV interviews last weekend, McDonnell returned to the theme, doffing his cap to the memory of Marx, whose Das Kapital was the revolutionaries’ bible and who sanctioned violence as a legitimate means to an end.
A day later, Jeremy Corbyn, who so gustily sings The Red Flag at the drop of a hat, extolling how ‘ blood dyed [ the flag’s] every fold’, acclaimed Marx as a ‘great economist’ who influenced the world.
But has the Labour leader ever acknowledged that most of the blood spilled in the Soviet Union was not from ‘martyrs’ for the cause, but from countless innocents caught in the paranoid politics of a vicious dictatorship?
It seems unlikely, given that Seumas Milne, his strategy and communications director, once declared the number of Stalin’s victims to have been wildly over- exaggerated for ideological reasons.
He went on that ‘for all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment’.
Left-wing intellectuals have always flirted with the idea that the Bolsheviks weren’t so bad after all, with the likes of Eric Hobsbawm in the Sixties and Seventies notorious for defending what the rest of us would consider the indefensible.
Corbyn’s hard-Left party is doing the same, eagerly embracing its revolutionary socialist heritage.
As if to find some intellectual validation there, they trot out the iconic names in Labour’s history — Keir Hardie, George Lansbury, Aneurin Bevan and so on — as socialist saints.
BUT the heritage that Corbyn and his supporters extol with such enthusiasm was a sickening one, full of hypocrisy, violence and double- dealing as much as high ideals.
If they appeal to history for their inspiration and their claim to the moral high ground, they cannot be allowed to cherry-pick the good bits and turn a blind eye to the evils.
Labour And The Gulag, Udy’s book, is a chilling exposition of those evils.
It is also a damning indictment of how, from 1917, the British Left was seduced by the communist USSR to the point of becoming complicit in its oppression.
‘ The Labour Party,’ Udy writes, ‘was founded to protect the poor and oppressed. It ended up defending Soviet totalitarianism and abandoning its victims.’ He focuses on the
plight of the richer peasants — the kulaks — turned off their privatelyowned land between 1929 and 1931 by Stalin’s sheer vindictiveness and paranoia that they were a potential threat to his iron control.
Thirty-five million were forced to join collective farms, while close to two million were deported to Siberia and other wastelands.
Hundreds of thousands ended up in slave labour camps in isolated forest regions in the far north of Russia. They arrived in mid-winter and had to build their own scant shelters in the snow. In the first year alone, 20,000 children died from exposure, frostbite, disease and malnutrition.
In these conditions, prisoners were set to work cutting timber for the Soviet export market, whose biggest customer, taking more than a million tons a year at a knockdown price, was Britain.
The grim facts of how this wood was obtained so cheaply began to emerge, originally in a letter printed in the Daily Mail in 1930, from a ship’s officer who was horrified by the sight of slave labourers loading timber at the Russian port of Archangel.
A campaign was mounted to persuade Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government to halt the trade and protest to the Soviet government. But it persistently refused to do so, with its supporters dismissing stories of human rights abuse as fabrications by nasty Tories bent on causing harm to the Soviet Union.
Some gullible Labour MPs argued that, on the contrary, the Soviet penal system was a fair and humane one. This deception was supported by guided tours they had taken around special ‘showcase’ Russian prisons, where inmates told their gullible listeners that they were so content with their conditions that they actually wanted to stay in jail at the end of their sentences!
Shaw and a number of leading MPs and trade union leaders wrote to the Manchester Guardian decrying the ‘false atrocity stories’.
Udy writes: ‘They clung to their beliefs with a conviction which disregarded all evidence to the contrary for long past the time when intelligent men and women would normally be expected to have accepted it.’
If Britain had stopped the trade in timber, many camps would have had to close. By refusing, Labour was in effect subsidising Stalin’s gulags by keeping them going.
Not even a damning report to the U.S. Congress swayed them. It denounced ‘under-nourishment, uninterrupted toil, misery and blood’ in the production of timber from Russia.
The report continued: ‘Hundreds of thousands of aristocrats, former professional and businessmen, army officers, kulaks, social democrats and other anti-revolutionaries have disappeared into the forests without leaving any trace.’
As a result, the Americans did ban Soviet timber imports. But for three years in government and in opposition afterwards, the Labour Cabinet and the British Labour movement as a whole denied the stories, even though — shockingly — they knew the truth.
In the House of Lords and the Commons, the government put up a smokescreen, claiming there was no conclusive proof of slave labour.
WILLIAM Graham, the Board of Trade minister, denied any evidence existed, despite having been briefed by civil servants that there was. As a good socialist, he just didn’t want to know.
And nor did the rest of his colleagues. They weren’t going to rock the boat when it came to relations with Soviet Russia, or jeopardise the social experiment going on there. So eyewitness accounts were rejected, dispatches from our diplomats in Moscow ignored, and Soviet denials that anything untoward was going on repeated as fact.
Excuses were dredged up. In the Left-wing journal, the New States- man, the editor, Kingsley Martin, argued that even on the off-chance that some repressive and even cruel things were happening in Russia, they weren’t a patch on the suffering workers had endured in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. So there!
And so the blood-soaked timber trade continued unhindered — as did the Left-wing defence of events in the Soviet Union, despite them worsening and the body count mounting year by year.
Udy is utterly scathing about Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government of 1929–31.
‘It led one of the most powerful nations on the planet, and millions of people looked to it for leadership and protection. It had a moral obligation to govern with integrity. In its abandonment of the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children suffering under Soviet oppression, it failed.’
Meanwhile, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their ilk continued in their cloud-cuckoo-land.
As self- righteous and selfappointed experts, they wrote a much- lauded book, Soviet Communism, A New Civilisation? ( the ‘?’ was dropped in later editions), which presented a glowing portrait of Stalin, whitewashed the kulak deportations and flatly denied the famine of 1932-33 which killed millions. In reality, sayssay Udy, it was ‘ ‘a a combination of fiction, denial, dissemblance and halftruths’. But nothing could deflect them from their conviction that the USSR was a nation founded upon principles of justice and integrity.
It was, they declared, ‘the most inclusive and equalised democracy in the world’.
And the Labour Party adored the Webbs for it, with Labour prime minister Clement Attlee fulsome in his praise for them when their ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey — resting place of the nation’s greatest statesmen, artists, generals and the like — in 1947.
Attlee similarly praised Shaw as a ‘ social revolutionary and prophet’, despite the great author and thinker having advocated the use of gas chambers to exterminate anyone failing to make a useful contribution to the socialist state and therefore ‘not fit to live’.
Another influential Labour intellectual,i t ll t l th the economisti t GDH Cole — who taught future Labour prime minister Harold Wilson at Oxford — was prepared to forgive Stalin his bloodletting.
‘Men cannot make a new civilisation without growing pains or liquidate an ancient tyranny without suffering,’ he declared. ‘Much better be ruled by Stalin than by the restrictive and monopolistic cliques which dominate Western capitalism.’
It is a sentiment I suspect some of the class warriors who have taken over today’s Labour Party might well endorse.
AS FOR those who persist in seeing Marxism as a benign philosophy promoting the good of all mankind, Udy, who has spent 15 years researching Soviet communism in Russian and British archives, and travelled thousands of miles retracing the steps of the prisoners transported to the gulag camps, has this grave warning:
‘As memories of the Soviet Union fade, Marx is being rehabilitated. Ten years ago, a BBC poll voted him the greatest philosopher of all time. His popularity in the newly Left-leaning Labour Party is growing.
‘But Marxism has dark elements within it. It promotes the supremacy of one class, the proletariat, and the irredeemability of other classes, in exactly the same way that Nazism taught the supremacy of the Aryan race over others.
‘Marxism declares that it is the unquestioned right of the working class to rule over the other classes. Marx and his Leninist followers in Russia believed that class war was not only inevitable but that it was the duty of the proletariat to embrace and, even, to provoke it.
‘And Marx made it clear that violence and terror were inevitable if the proletarian revolution was to be successful. Not all British socialists would have verbalised that sentiment, but it remained a pervasive part of Labour’s inter-war culture — as it does in almost every hard-Left splinter group today.’
It’s a timely pointer from history that needs heeding — as freda Utley’s bitter personal experience shows. In 1939, she left England, a country still reluctant to face up to the realities of Stalinism, for the United States. There she became a writer and expressed her disgust for communism in a book she called pointedly, and with good reason, The Dream We Lost.
If she were alive today, she would no doubt be on her knees begging for the nightmare not to return.
Labour and The Gulag: russia and The Seduction of The british Left by Giles udy is published by biteback at £30. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid until May 20; p&p free) visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640.