13

The socialist sixth of the world

The Australian party’s veneration of its leaders was modelled on the Soviet adulation of Stalin, and this reached new extremes as the CPSU general secretary consolidated his domination over every aspect of Russian life. Stalin’s decisive influence on the policies of the Communist International has already been noted. He determined the turn to the extreme policies of Class Against Class at its Sixth Congress in 1928, and then the belated turn back to the anti-fascist front in 1935; he imposed the party rules that turned democratic centralism into centralised control, and enforced a regimen of unquestioning obedience, self-criticism and expulsions. In 1939 he would cynically abandon the anti-fascist alliance for an accommodation with Hitler; in 1941 the German invasion of the Soviet Union would result in unprecedented slaughter; in 1943 Stalin would dissolve the Communist International as an empty token of goodwill towards his capitalist allies. Only after his death in 1953 could his successor Khrushchev reveal his crimes, and even then many Australian communists refused to believe them. Stalin’s dark shadow falls as a curse across the entire history of communism, and all attempts to lift that curse have failed.

The coinage of the term ‘Stalinism’ was an attempt to exorcise it. Originally employed by Leon Trotsky and others driven out of the communist movement by Stalin, ‘Stalinist’ is a recurrent epithet in the reflections of those Australian communists whose testimony informs this history, as they looked back in old age on the ruined cause they had served so ardently. In identifying Stalinism as the source of error they refer to a combination of attitudes and habits derived, by compulsion or emulation, from the Soviet leader that vitiated their endeavours: manipulativeness, mendacity, suspicion, intolerance, ruthlessness. Trotskyist and other left critics would go further and apply the attribution to the whole of the communist movement Stalin directed, one that put party before class, expediency before principle, the deformation of socialism as practised in the Soviet Union over revolutionary ideals. This emphasis on a single individual sits ill with the Marxist method of historical materialism. It makes Stalin the scapegoat for consequences that have emerged repeatedly in communist regimes. It disregards the recurrent tendency for the communist parties of other countries to throw up their own leaders who practised the same lethal megalomania: Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Nicolae Ceausescu, Pol Pot. Most contentiously, it exonerates Lenin from the enormities of Marxism-Leninism.

Lenin played no part in the construction of the couplet. That was a project supervised by Stalin, just as the preservation of Lenin’s embalmed body in a mausoleum in Red Square served as a relic for the posthumous cult that Stalin fostered as Lenin’s heir. Nor would Lenin have recognised Stalin’s codification of The Foundations of Leninism, with its reduction of fluid, contingent arguments into a closed system in which every component had a single, fixed meaning. Like the other leading Bolsheviks, Lenin underestimated the crafty Stalin until it was too late to dislodge him from the post of party secretary. A cosmopolitan intellectual immersed in world affairs, Lenin regarded the provincial zealot as a useful functionary. His own party name, Lenin, was taken from the river Lena; Stalin’s was a boast, the man of steel. Lenin seized power in the expectation of world revolution and then had to improvise support for a vast and impoverished federation of pre-capitalist peoples; Stalin captured control over the Communist International and made it into a tool of Great Russian interests.

The overwhelming difficulty facing the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of their revolution was backwardness. The civil war had destroyed industry and reduced agriculture to starvation levels. The temporary solution they adopted in the early 1920s was to encourage private production of food by peasants on smallholdings, but this began to break down because of the inability of factories to produce sufficient manufactured goods to entice rural producers to sell their agricultural goods in the cities. Stalin’s solution when he came to power at the end of the decade was to embark on breakneck industrialisation and collectivise agriculture. Under the Five Year Plan introduced in 1929 he conscripted labour into vast construction projects. Coalmines, steel furnaces and mills, power plants and engineering works were created almost from scratch, while in the countryside 25 million peasant holdings were gathered into just 200 000 collective farms. Every unit in this centralised economy had to meet its production quota, and all that was left over from subsistence levels of consumption was directed back into further growth. Such a system was primitive, inefficient and always prey to corruption. Established at the expense of immense disruption and acute famine, it achieved its rapid growth by constant driving and speed-ups, which in turn were obtained by a combination of exhortation and terror. The Third Period of Class Against Class augmented the Soviet fear of enemies without and within. Extension of the class war into the countryside unleashed mass killing of the kulaks. Yet this breakneck economic transformation was accompanied by a cultural revolution that exalted the heroic capacity of the people, and there is unmistakable evidence of a genuine popular support for Stalin’s leadership. He demanded long toil for low pay, but he offered a job, food, clothing, subsidised housing, education, and hope for a better future. He oppressed workers and he exalted them, ignored their privations and yet ruled in their name.

By the mid-1930s the worst rigours of collectivisation and enforced industrialisation were easing, and with them passed the last vestiges of revolutionary egalitarianism. Stalin now waged war on the dreamers with show trials of Old Bolsheviks and mass purges that reached far down into the party. The new Soviet constitution he introduced in 1936, with its sham democratic provisions and guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly, ‘only in accordance with the interest of the workers and for purposes of strengthening the socialist system’, abandoned any lingering expectation that the communist state would wither away to a stateless society. Stalinism meant a powerful, unlimited state, with centralised bureaucratic planning and enforced unanimity; it abolished civil society, allowed no genuinely representative institutions, no intermediary between the rulers and the ruled. Like its creator and namesake, it was both triumphal in its patriotism and intensely suspicious in its constant vigilance. An officer of the dreaded security police boasted during the height of the terror that ‘If Marx fell into our hands, within a week we would have him admit to being an agent of Bismarck’.1

The Soviet Union had served as both model and guide to the Australian party during the 1920s, but for most members it still remained a distant presence. During the 1930s the gap closed. Organisations such as Friends of the Soviet Union propagated more systematically the achievements of the socialist sixth of the world, which stood in stark contrast to the capitalist heartlands. These were faltering, beset by crisis, racked by conflict; it was advancing, unified and triumphant. This Soviet utopia was eminently practical, dominated by the realisation of great plans, the construction of gargantuan buildings, factories, dams, monuments in steel and concrete to a new kind of civilisation. New media, such as Soviet cinema and shortwave radio broadcasts from Moscow, brought heroic images and celebratory reportage of this prodigious success to sympathetic Australian audiences. More Australians travelled to the Soviet Union and participated in a carefully controlled itinerary of political tourism. As the Communist International exercised a more regular supervision of the Australian party, so Soviet communism pressed more heavily on the loyalty of its members.²

As befitted an important party auxiliary, the post of national organiser of the FOSU was entrusted to leading comrades. Jack Morrison, later manager of the International Bookshop in Melbourne, was the first, followed by Ted Tripp after he returned from the Soviet Union late in 1930, then by Sam Aarons, and then Bill Thomas, the veteran party journalist. To its monthly publication, Soviets To-Day, were added the news weekly Moscow News and the glossy USSR in Construction, a colour pictorial of colossal engineering triumphs and sturdy pulchritude. Local branches of the FOSU organised lectures and socials, marked key anniversaries and events in the Soviet Union’s revolutionary history and generally promoted its benefits.

Membership of the FOSU fluctuated according to the efforts of organisers. It was never a mass organisation, but formal membership mattered less than friendship. Sympathy and support for the Soviet Union might lead to recruitment to the Communist Party of Australia, but that too was a secondary objective. Rather, the FOSU sought to break down the popular antagonism, the strategic alliances and economic blockades that threatened and isolated the Soviet Union, as well as the torrent of adverse publicity that discredited it. Especially after Stalin achieved supremacy, it responded to the fear of attack with an insistently affirmative message. Insofar as it offered a critique of capitalism, it did so by presenting the Soviet Union as an exemplar of progress that others might follow. In the circumstances of the Depression this meant stressing the benefits of a planned economy over the anarchy of capitalist markets, as in the 1932 pamphlet Contrasts published by the FOSU in Adelaide, which set out the advantages of production for public benefit rather than private profit, work for all instead of mass unemployment, good working conditions instead of wage cuts and sweating, systematic public welfare rather than the dole. Written by a recent party recruit in response to a local anti-communist jeremiad, it projected a complete solution to local ills onto a distant workers’ paradise.3

The FOSU also organised tours of the Soviet Union. Earlier visits by Australian union leaders had occurred under the auspices of the Red International of Labor Unions and the Pan-Pacific Trade Union, but from the early 1930s a regular routine became established.⁴ A contingent consisting principally of union representatives would arrive in the northern spring and depart several months later seized with enthusiasm for what they were shown. The first such delegation set off from Australia in March 1932. To prepare its members for what they would find, Itzhak Gust accompanied them on the voyage and taught them Russian history as well as a few words of the language. To coach them in their intended roles of proselytisers of communist achievement, the Soviet hosts asked them before they returned to prepare a report of their impressions. The guests duly set down what would become a standard inventory of attractions: good working conditions, excellent schools and hospitals, a high standard of cultural and social life, emancipation of women from domestic drudgery, freedom for national minorities, the impressive evidence of construction and ‘the faith of the people in the leadership of the Communist Party’. There was one dissident who contrasted the enthusiasm of the people with the long food queues, and concluded from the trains full of impoverished peasant families that the pace of collectivisation had been too rapid, but his reservations were brushed aside.5 The chief controversy arose instead when, upon return to Australia, one of the delegates was barred from returning to his job in the Victorian Railways and another, Beatrice Taylor, was sacked from the New South Wales teaching service for her public praise of the Soviet accomplishment. This became a regular hazard for subsequent delegates, in addition to the difficulty of obtaining passports for travel to Russia and the seizure by Australian customs officers of literature, slides and film that the delegates brought back to Australia.⁶

These trips generated a considerable volume of books, pamphlets and articles over the course of the decade. At once travel writing and tract, the literature reveals some common themes and instructive variations. Trade union delegates characteristically judged the Soviet Union against the conditions with which they were most familiar. Thus Red Cargo, the report of a 1934 visit by Jim Healy and another wharfie, gave a detailed account of port operations in Odessa and Leningrad, praised the provision of clothing, canteens and clinics, the participation of women in the industry, and the management consultation with the union. The Australians did not ignore Soviet weaknesses—both the ports they inspected required greater mechanisation—but laid particular emphasis on permanency of employment in the Soviet Union, in contrast to the chronic insecurity of the Australian workforce, and on the gains in productivity that went with the better working conditions. From this detailed consideration of their own area of interest, the authors worked outwards to the general amenities of Soviet life: the provision of housing, education, health care, sporting and cultural facilities. ‘It only remains with the workers of Australia’, they concluded, ‘to do all that lies in their power to prevent any attack on this great country, the first workers’ country’. Healy joined the party upon his return to Australia. In similar vein the Melbourne tramworker, who was one of eight miners and transport workers to visit in 1935, emphasised the rapid strides in urban public transport in his glowing account of the new Russia. Another, a north Queensland worker, found the fact that there was ‘no crawling for tips’ as remarkable as the new Moscow underground. He also lent authenticity to his testimony with some parochial touches: ‘There is something they call black bread. I call it poison.’ A Wonthaggi delegate perhaps strained credulity with his claim that ‘the drink problem was being tackled in the right spirit’ with the provision of mineral water.7

Jim Healy and Ben Scott reported their impressions of the Soviet Union in the pamphlet Red Cargo, published by the Friends of the Soviet Union in 1935. The two were representatives of the Mackay and Sydney branches of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, and their report concentrated on the maritime industry. The design and typography contribute to the tone of triumphant modernity. (Source: National Library of Australia)

For the party faithful the pilgrimage to the Soviet Union possessed an augmented significance. Here was the word made real, the vindication of their own embattled status and the augury of their future success. Their reports paid greater attention to the legendary sites of revolutionary history in Leningrad and Moscow, the Winter Palace, Lenin’s mausoleum, Red Square. A highlight of the tour was the May Day parade, a mass choreography of Soviet power as an endless procession of workers, peasants, troops, artillery and tanks passed before the party leaders. ‘At six o’clock in the evening’, wrote Prichard, ‘they were still moving in dense dark streams with their scarlet banners flying, along the river banks, white with snow’. The spectacle moved one Australian who in 1934 witnessed this ‘kaleidoscope’ of ‘the achievements of seventeen years of Soviet power’ to wonder ‘how long it will be before we will be witnessing a similar spectacle—from the GPO steps in Martin Place’. Tony McGillick, who became FOSU organiser in 1938, wrote similarly of his visit in that year. ‘The Soviet people, clear-eyed, strong in body and mind, proudly march on from victory to victory.’ Sam Aarons’s mother Jane returned in 1934 from her second tour of the Soviet Union to a poem that contrasted Russian achievement with the tawdry trappings of Victoria’s sesquicentennial celebrations:

You’ve returned to us from Russia

Where life is sane and whole,

And not one Worker’s unemployed

And no-one’s on the dole.

You’ve returned to us from Russia

And your coming’s a rebuke,

For all we have to show you

Is a warboat and a Duke.

And lollysticks and pylons

And Union Jacks as well,

You’ve left an earthly paradise

To come back to a Hell.8

A third category of visitor was the fellow-traveller, a term that came into vogue during the period of the popular front to describe those who shrank from joining the Communist Party and all that membership entailed, yet sympathised with its apparent ideals. Such sympathisers were important for at least two reasons. First, they provided independent corroboration of communist claims. Second, they were more likely to reach a wider audience than party members, whose own testimony generally went unreported in the mass media. (Katharine Susannah Prichard did arrange for serialisation in the Melbourne Herald of an account of The Real Russia, but Keith Murdoch terminated the arrangement midway through her ‘provocative’ reports.)9 The Soviet Union lent itself to the yearnings of progressives, who saw it as a demonstration of the efficacy of state planning, as well as to idealists, who could project upon it their schemes for the regeneration of humanity. Neill Greenwood, the professor of metallurgy at the University of Melbourne, attended a conference at Kharkov late in 1932 and contrasted the scientific advances there with the neglect of science in the West. The crucial difference was the alignment of Soviet science with popular needs and aspirations:

Having passed through Canada, USA and England on the way to Russia, and having seen in those countries helplessness and despair—just the same as had been left behind in Australia—the unparalleled enthusiasm and optimism of Russia came as a refreshing change.

Harold Woodruff, head of the bacteriology department at the same university, spoke similarly of his visit a year later: ‘Their educational system, medical services and housing arrangements were irreplaceable’.¹⁰

The prominent feminist, Jessie Street, found the same validation of her expectations when she travelled to the USSR for the first time in 1938. On the morning after her train crossed the Polish border, she awoke and pulled up the blind to rejoice at the sight of women working alongside men on track maintenance. Then followed inspections of creches, factory nurseries, maternity clinics, and the discovery that gender equality brought ‘a completely different set of moral values’. She returned ‘convinced that the new way of life which they were developing in the USSR would put an end to the exploitation of man by man, and of women by men as well’.¹¹

The glowing reports of Greenwood and Street are similar to those of celebrated European and American visitors to the Soviet Union during the 1930s. George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, H. G. Wells, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, a whole gallery of non-communist intellectuals wrote glowing accounts of Stalin and his achievements. The question that arises out of this mass of testimony is how the evils of the regime can have escaped the visitors. For some Western critics, the fellow-travellers were gullible dupes, flattered by the attention paid to them, mesmerised by power, allowing their impatience with human imperfection to exalt an odious despot. For some post-Soviet Russians who have read their apologias, the fellow-travellers were deliberate falsifiers. These charges imply that the evils of Stalin’s Russia were clearly visible. In fact, the visitors inspected a carefully chosen set of showplaces. They did not speak the language and were reliant on translators. Their access to people was restricted. They knew little Russian history and took the evidence of fresh construction, modern amenities and naive enthusiasm as indices of progress. Furthermore, they were profoundly unfamiliar with the politics of communism and had little interest in acquiring an understanding. Neither Greenwood nor Street, nor the other Australians who extolled the achievements of the Soviet Union, were interested in the works of Marx or Lenin, much less in joining the Communist Party of Australia.12

The Soviet miracle culminated in the prodigious achievements of a Donbas coalminer, Alexi Stakhanov. Inspired by a speech of Comrade Stalin on the need to apply socialist zeal to practical tasks, Stakhanov applied himself to the improvement of coal production. As he explained to the All-Soviet Union Central Council of Trade Unions, meeting at the Moscow Palace of Labour in 1934, ‘I was always a good worker, and used to produce 14 tons of coal in a day. However, on the day on which I descended the shaft to operate the new methods, I produced 102 tons of coal.’ Stakhanov’s achievement was extolled by Stalin, his methods were taken up by whole detachments of Stakhanovites and applied throughout Soviet industry. These methods, which applied indomitable enthusiasm to the performance of simplified, repetitive tasks, were well suited to the management of a command economy as it built up heavy industry and drilled an inexperienced workforce in the techniques of mass production. More than this, they provided the template for a socialist work ethic that would produce ‘a people of a new and special type’, people who would find joy in labour. Stalin told the same assembly that heard Stakhanov, ‘It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone’. In the schema that now guided communist policy, socialism was a higher stage of historical development than capitalism because it superseded the antagonism between the owner of capital and the seller of labour. As the first socialist society, the Soviet Union would necessarily triumph over its enemies by outproducing them. Stakhanov provided the model ‘hero of labour’ who would ensure this victory.¹³

The Australian party’s celebration of Stakhanov sat awkwardly with its fierce opposition to the introduction of similar methods to Australian industry. After all, Orr and Nelson’s campaign against mechanisation of the coal industry had singled out for criticism the very techniques that Stakhanovites employed: the simplification of the work process at the expense of craft skills, the application of new technology to intensify the tempo of work, the setting of higher quotas and extension of shift work, the payment of bonuses for results. If these methods were dangerous in Australian pits, were they not equally dangerous in the Donbas ones? If the drive for greater efficiency increased the exploitation of Australian workers, did not the same process oppress their Soviet counterparts? Party leaders sought to rebut such comparisons by emphasising the different provenance of the Stakhanov movement. It was not a capitalist speed-up but a ‘grand upsurge of socialist initiative, bursting all the bonds and limitations imposed in class society’. It was not exploitative but a ‘sane and rational’ augmentation of productive capacity that demonstrated socialism was ‘immeasurably superior’ to capitalism. J. B. King, the former Wobbly who had led resistance to the efficiency experts in Australia during the First World War, returned from several years as a mine engineer in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s to lecture on the achievements of the Stakhanovite movement. The Australian party adopted the same methods of ‘shock work’, and ‘socialist competition’ in its own work, as one branch challenged another to recruitment contests or newspaper sales drives.14

A persistent theme in Australian reportage of the Soviet regime was the enthusiasm of its people. For party members and fellow travellers alike, it was this manifestation of popular support that validated the communist experiment. Professor Greenwood contrasted the ‘unparalleled enthusiasm and optimism’ of people from all walks of life in the USSR with the ‘helplessness and despair’ of those in capitalist countries. Katharine Susannah Prichard was struck most of all with the energy of those she met during her trip in 1934: ‘… how people work and study and amuse themselves so indefatigably was a mystery to me’.¹⁵ These claims—and almost every visitor of the 1930s offered variations upon them—challenge the image of Soviet life that is now dominant, one of long-suffering victims of a brutal dictatorship which squeezed out all initiative and spontaneity, and left only cynicism and passive conformity. However, such imagery is reinforced by the final collapse of the Soviet Union, when a generation who had known nothing else but economic inefficiency, obsolescent technology, corruption and indifference finally turned their backs on the sterile state ideology that no one, not even the nomenklatura, could any longer believe. That outcome, in turn, shapes a historical literature that has always been subject to partisan considerations. Those opponents who allowed the Stalinist dictatorship no redeeming virtues, for so long confounded by the persistence of the Soviet regime, now triumphantly deride the revisionists who insisted that it had enjoyed a measure of popular support.16

Then as now, critic and supporter alike place undue weight on this aspect of the Soviet regime. Each treats democracy as the inseparable companion of liberty. The opponent of communism sees its denial of even the most basic freedoms manifested in the absence of popular support, while the defender takes popular enthusiasm as indicative of a liberatory dimension. Yet the history of the twentieth century has surely weakened the common nexus the disputants assume. In the Nazi stronghold of Nuremberg in the 1930s, the countryside of China during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, the Iranian capital of Tehran a decade later, we surely see variant forms of popular tyranny. As the product of an intensely ideological movement that allowed no alternative to its claim to interpret the will of the people, the Russian Revolution is prototypical of such mass mobilisations. Above all, it came first. Leaving aside the French Revolution of 1789, to which argument by analogy repeatedly returned, there were no modern precedents to guide discussion of the paradoxical trail it blazed. Libertarian in its goals, authoritarian in its methods, it plunged a backward society into civil war and then forced it into rapid modernisation. International in its scope, increasingly national in its calculations, it resolved its contradictions by inflaming passions and inculcating terror. The purges of the party’s ranks, the Great Terror that carried off real and imagined opponents, and the show trials that paraded former leaders to confess their treachery, these were something more than measures of repression whereby the Soviet leadership consolidated its supremacy. Rather, they involved the population at large as active participants.

Australians who spent long enough in the Soviet Union to experience this regimen were troubled by its contradictions. As foreign residents they enjoyed certain privileges, but they entered more fully into Soviet life than could the members of the delegations who were escorted around selected showplaces. Stan Moran and Ernie Campbell enjoyed far better food than the ordinary Muscovite while students at the Lenin School in 1934, but they still found the diet extremely hard. Almost by definition, such longer-term residents were politically trustworthy. Even a non-party member such as Betty Roland, who accompanied Guido Baracchi to the Soviet Union in 1933, felt she was ‘participating in a great historical event’. They lived in Moscow and Leningrad for more than a year, he as a translator, she as a journalist then a typist, and Roland’s diary recorded the ‘contrast between the optimism here and the pessimism of the outside world’. The diary also expressed the contrast between privilege and hardship, the cynicism of party notables and the kindly, warmhearted, patient Russian people. She witnessed a local form of political purging, the chistka, and observed that ‘the all-powerful Party has its terrifying aspects and even Guido seems a little shocked by this ruthless treatment of a loyal member’. She befriended an English communist, Freda Utley, whose Russian Communist Party husband fell under suspicion and would perish in a labour camp; and she observed that Katharine Susannah Prichard, who visited them in 1933, was beset by misgivings. Prichard’s subsequent account of that trip, written after she returned to Australia to find her husband had taken his life, gave no hint of any such doubt. For that matter, Roland joined the Communist Party after she returned to Australia.17

Another Australian resident was Audrey Blake, who lived in Moscow with her husband Jack from 1937 to 1938, when he was the Australian party representative and she worked for the youth section of the Communist International. This was at the height of the terror, when, besides the millions who were summarily arrested, convicted and executed or simply disappeared, the remaining Old Bolsheviks were made to confess their crimes in show trials. In August 1936 Zinoviev and Kamenev had been tried, along with fourteen others, and executed for their self-confessed crimes against the the revolution. Radek and sixteen others were similarly found guilty in January 1937 (though Radek himself was temporarily spared to denounce others), and in March 1938 Bukharin followed with twenty more. Audrey Blake’s retrospective vignette evokes the ‘strange atmosphere’ in which she lived and worked. At the Hotel Lux on Gorky Street, where the foreign communists resided, one after another of the rooms was sealed after its occupant disappeared. The very official who warned her not to mix with the Russians was himself arrested as an enemy agent a week later. She claims to have felt no sense of personal danger—indeed she and her husband ‘felt safer than we did at home where we were unceasingly proclaimed “the enemy” ‘—and suggests that all the ‘big tragedies’ of the Stalinist era were enacted ‘silently, outside our purview’, yet the papers of the time were dominated by the trials of the Old Bolsheviks. With her faith in the revolution and the party unshaken by her own brushes with authority, she insists that ‘we didn’t feel in danger since we knew we weren’t spies or agents’.18

Jack Blake’s memories have a similar quality. He would eventually become one of the most thoroughgoing critics of Stalinism, a phenomenon he came to appreciate was lodged deep in the communist project. Furthermore, he was one of the few Australians to learn Russian and undoubtedly appreciated the nightmare quality of the purges. As his and Audrey’s neighbours in the Hotel Lux disappeared, he recalled that he believed they ‘must have been agents and spies’ and that ‘I didn’t worry because I knew I wasn’t’. Yet at the back of his mind was the knowledge that ‘if I’d been snatched away’, only Audrey would have known of his innocence. ‘In Australia, if word had got back that Blake was arrested because he was a spy or whatever, people would have accepted that he must have been.’ Upon his return to Australia he cited the courtroom confessions of the Old Bolsheviks as conclusive evidence of their guilt. There was no terror in the Soviet Union but rather a ‘spirit of freedom, joy and happiness’, not sympathy for the Trotskyite ‘agents of fascism’ but relief they had been unmasked, no personality cult but rather love and admiration for the ‘genius’ of Stalin.¹⁹ Another party member celebrated him in verse:

They fear him, the silent one, the unscrupulous one.

For he is no vain scribbler, no vain talker, no senseless screecher,

He is more powerful than they.

He, the big-hearted one, the inviolable will of the Party,

Has mastered their weapons, has excelled …20

The evils of the Stalinist terror weighed like a nightmare on the minds of the survivors. Its effects fatally impaired communism’s claims to be a movement of liberation, and resisted every effort to explain or justify them, including Khrushchev’s official apology in 1956. Frank Hardy’s novel But the Dead Are Many, written nearly 40 years after the terror, relates the personal and political disintegration of two ageing Australian cadres, each obsessed with the fate of Nikolai Buratakov, whose own confession for the sake of the party to the crimes he did not commit infects one and then the other with guilt and morbid despair. The character of Buratakov is based on Nikolai Bukharin, whose trial Jack Blake had attended (and when the novelist quizzed this eyewitness, it puzzled Blake that Hardy was most interested in Bukharin’s appearance). The first of the Australian cadres is based loosely on the party organiser Paul Mortier, who was only nineteen when Bukharin was executed, but became deeply troubled by Khrushchev’s revelations and eventually took his own life. The second allows Hardy himself to offer a retrospective penance. Hardy came late to such an acknowledgement of Stalin’s murderous legacy, but every Australian communist had to make her or his own accommodation with it.²¹

For those prepared to attend to it, there was no lack of evidence. Foreign correspondents reported the mass arrests, reputable independent commentators cast doubt on the show trials. The problem was that the admirers of the Soviet Union were so habituated to anti-communist slanders that they usually ignored the contradictions and dismissed the objections. Nettie Palmer thought the similarity of the confessions offered by the accused had a ‘sinister sound’, but Ralph Gibson attributed her doubts to ‘Trotskyist tendencies’. Gibson’s own pamphlet Freedom in the Soviet Union, written before the trials, established a framework in which the apparent freedom of the capitalist West was illusory, the supposed lack of freedom in the Soviet Union in fact the basis of a fuller freedom. Thus comforted, Baracchi could describe the Australian press’s reportage of Radek’s downfall as an ‘excretion of anti-Soviet filth’. Having crossed swords with Radek during the 1920s, he had no doubt that the impudent intriguer was guilty of the crimes of which he was accused. It was a ‘tragic irony of history’ that such ‘social scum’ rose to the surface ‘just at the moment when the working people of the Soviet Union have written their socialist conquests into the most democratic constitution in the world’. Evident here also was the need of middle-class intellectuals such as Baracchi to affirm their own reliability: he could readily understand the process whereby such figures could end ‘on the wrong side of the class struggle, since I have experienced its initial stages in my own person’. Is there perhaps also a wrestling with doubts sown during his recent experiences in the Soviet Union? On his own subsequent admission, he was deeply disturbed by a letter Freda Utley sent him after her husband was taken by the NKVD, and he had taken that letter straight to Richard Dixon ‘and told him that it troubled me’. Such frankness can hardly have eased Utley’s plight.22

In the earlier period of Class Against Class there was an acknowledgement of resistance to communism in the Soviet Union. The Australian party justified the ‘repressive measures’ that accompanied forced collectivisation in the early 1930s as ‘necessary for the successful carrying out of the tasks of the proletariat’. Thus the introduction of an internal pass system was aimed at exercising a ‘better control over anti-social, criminal, kulak and similar elements’ whose ‘social parasitism’ weakened ‘labour discipline’.²³ This ruthless rationalisation of class warfare yielded in the changed climate of the popular front to claims of socialist triumph and complete unanimity of purpose marred only by the treachery of leading Old Bolsheviks. The allegations against Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin and other veterans mindful of Stalin’s own modest role in the Russian Revolution, as well as his debasement of its principles, distracted attention from the scale of his purge of the party ranks. Under the direction of the head of security, N. I. Yezhov, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were arrested, executed or despatched to labour camps in Siberia during the later 1930s in a process so indiscriminate that it coined the term yezhovschina.

The Australian party avoided mention of the yezhovschina. Not once did it question the guilt of those subjected to the show trials or express the slightest reservation about Stalin’s murderous regime. In response to an article in a Sydney newspaper on the terror, Jack Blake’s predecessor as Australian party representative in Moscow claimed that the population were at ‘fever heat’ against Zinoviev, Kamenev and their gang of Trotskyist wreckers. On the eve of Bukharin’s trial, the Workers’ Weekly assured its readers that ‘the world will hear the story of the guilt of these mad monsters from their own lips’. ‘Shoot the mad dogs’, it quoted Lenin’s widow, who was herself under threat of Stalin’s vengeance. This brutal language of exposure, liquidation and annihilation had been introduced in the period of Class Against Class, along with the practice of self-criticism that seemed to authenticate the confessions of the Soviet victims. Initially the words functioned as political hyperbole; ultimately they desensitised those who used them to the atrocities they licensed. Just as some of Stalin’s former colleagues were so habituated to the rhetoric of vilification that they expected to the last to be spared the executioner’s bullet, so Australian communists seemed oblivious of the enormity of the regime they lauded and the brutalities they imitated.24

Jack Blake was questioned closely in 1937 by the ECCI about party members’ attitude to the Moscow trials. He advised that ‘some of the rank and file’ did not ‘understand’ them. ‘That is, they read from press publicity in the capitalist press to the effect that two old Bolsheviks [Zinoviev and Kamenev] were being edged out.’ More than once the Communist International had to instruct the Australian party that it was giving insufficient coverage to the trials. The Australian central committee in turn had to instruct the districts to explain the traitorous role of the defendants, and to link their crimes to Trotsky. The Australian politbureau had to instruct the party press that ‘much more Soviet feature material’ had to be produced. The reluctance of Australian communists to discuss the trials, let alone acknowledge the yezhovschina, was essentially pragmatic. There is no evidence of disagreement or opposition; rather, members shied away from a subject that most Australians found deeply disturbing, one that confirmed their worst fears of communist dictatorship. Jack Miles’s caveat when arranging for an announcement of expulsion of a party miscreant in 1937 has a chilling quality. ‘We realise that the statement must be careful. We are not yet in the USSR and not yet the ruling party and cannot handle this the way they handle the trial of Trotskyists in the Soviet Union.’²⁵

A principal means of instilling proper appreciation of these events was through the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Prepared under the personal supervision of Stalin and issued in Russia in 1938 to replace an earlier history, it became the standard textbook for party classes.26 Through it party members learned the rudiments of Marxism-Leninism, and came to understand that Stalin had stood at Lenin’s shoulder during the long preparation for the Russian Revolution. With shameless effrontery, it then cast Stalin as the constant guide through subsequent travails as one after another traitor sought to derail the building of a socialist society. The subtitles of the last chapter, covering the years from 1935 to 1937, marked out the seeming completion of this goal: ‘Second Five Year Plan Fulfilled Ahead of Time. Reconstruction of Agriculture and Completion of Collectivization … Stakhanov Movement … Rising Standard of Welfare. Rising Cultural Standard … Eighth Congress. Adoption of the New Constitution … Liquidation of the Remnants of the Bukharin–Trotsky Gang of Spies, Wreckers and Traitors to the Country … Broad Inner-Party Democracy.’ But there was one discordant element. Under the subtitle ‘Beginning of the Second Imperialist War’, the History noted that ‘the fascist ruling circles of Germany, Italy and Japan’ had already opened their ‘brutal war of unmitigated conquest at the expense of the poorly-defended peoples of Abyssinia, Spain and China’. This was but a preparation for their drive against the capitalist democracies, which was likely to bring them into armed conflict with the ruling circles of Britain, France and the United States. ‘Clearly, the USSR could not shut its eyes to such a turn in the international situation …’ The prediction was scarcely made than it was fulfilled, ending the period of the popular front and plunging the Australian party once more into crisis.²⁷