The Spy Who Came In From the Co-op by Burke David

Author:Burke, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2013-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

‘The Russian Danger Is Our Danger’

The agreement between the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler at Munich in September 1938, which led to the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, was arrived at without the participation of the Soviet Union, and led Stalin to conclude that Britain and France were leaving Germany a free hand against the USSR. Whether Stalin was right to draw this conclusion is a question that need not detain us; suffice it to say that he was wrong, because Hitler’s intention was to attack first in the west. Nevertheless, Stalin, who had been involved in secret negotiations with Hitler since 1936, was convinced that Chamberlain, supported by the French government, was encouraging Germany to turn eastwards. Two days after the collapse of military talks between the USSR, France and Great Britain, Stalin and Hitler signed the Nazi–Soviet pact on 23 August 1939.

The signing of the pact demanded an intellectual leap on the part of the world communist movement, from one of outright opposition to fascism to one of open opposition to Western imperialism. On 24 August Moscow Centre withdrew its secret agents from Germany, and severed radio links with German nationals working for Soviet intelligence inside the Third Reich. The following day the German Communist Party issued a statement calling on communists to ‘support the peace policy of the Soviet Union’:

The German working people, and especially the German workers, must support the peace policy of the Soviet Union, must place themselves at the side of all peoples which are oppressed and threatened by the Nazis, and must now take up the fight as never before to ensure that peace pacts in the spirit of the pact which has just been concluded between the Soviet Union and Germany are also made with Poland and Romania, with France and England, and with all peoples which have reason to feel themselves threatened by Hitler’s policy of aggression.1

On 7 September Stalin told the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, general secretary of the Comintern, what he expected of foreign Communist parties. ‘They should denounce their governments’ war plans as imperialistic and reduce anti-Fascist propaganda.’ On the eleventh, with the war barely a week old, the Communist Party of the United States declared the war to be a conflict between ‘imperialist’ nations. On the 14th a broadcast from Soviet Russia announced that the war was an ‘imperialist’ one, and a ‘predatory’ conflict pursued by two aggressor nations.2 On the 18th the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Harry ­Pollitt, published a pamphlet entitled How to Win the War. On the same day he received a Moscow press telegram with instructions that the war must be opposed. Under considerable pressure to conform to the new line he handed his responsibilities to a secretariat – a ‘troika’ – made up of the ­editor of the party’s theoretical journal Labour Monthly, Rajani Palme Dutt, the new editor of the Daily Worker, William Rust, and David Springhall, the national party organizer.3 At this

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