Party Animals by David Aaronovitch

Author:David Aaronovitch
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House

Though Lavender soon changed her mind, the invasion opened up a split in the Party that was to last for the next two decades. On the one side there were the ‘tankies’, the diehard pro-Soviet loyalists who hated the increasingly independent position the leadership began to adopt. In the middle was the mass of party members who would, in the end, go with what the leadership advised. And on the other side was a younger and intellectually vigorous group of Party members, often second generation and not infrequently arrogant, who were arguing for more ‘communism with a human face’.

The same thing happened throughout the wider world of Communist parties. Parties became ‘hard-line’ or ‘revisionist’. The US Communist Party, one of the smallest, joined the South African Communist Party in loyalty to Russia, putting such international heroes as Angela Davis and Joe Slovo on the other side. The West German, Israeli, Chilean and Portuguese parties joined them, as did the Cypriot party, AKEL, which had many members in Britain. In opposition were the Italian, French, Swedish, Dutch and (clandestine) Spanish parties. Fidel Castro managed to say that such interventions were always wrong, but in this case necessary. The pro-Chinese Albanians pulled out of the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia’s Tito condemned the intervention.

That veteran member of Sam and Lavender’s branch, Andrew Rothstein, when he wasn’t perambulating in his homburg, wrote articles for the semi-party magazine, Labour Monthly. One, penned as the crisis approached, was headlined ‘Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and the Cold War Ghouls’. It began, ‘It is time to look at the genuine problems with a little balance and understanding’ and ended up ‘balancing’ right over towards supporting the Soviet Union in whatever it felt it had to do. Andrew was by no means alone. Falber writes of John Gollan coming back from a meeting in Hackney where there were a number of Jewish members, having faced a dusty reception for the leadership line. Gollan apparently said to Falber without irony, ‘I suppose a Jew who stayed in the party after the 1956 revelations will put up with almost anything the Soviet Union does.’ ‘Needless to say,’ Falber continues, ‘I thanked him for the compliment.’

Meanwhile the impossible happened. At the Young Communist League Congress that year in Scarborough, when the fraternal delegates from the Soviet Union were announced, they were booed. From then on, although loyalists and tankies could co-operate within the Party, there was always an undermining suspicion between them. More important, perhaps, it was an end to certainty. We were out there sailing our tiny boat, alone, in sometimes hostile but (what was worse) more often apathetic sea.

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