Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

Through the 1930s, then, Pollitt had charted the course of British communism. Aided by the more arid, theoretical abilities of Rajani Palme Dutt, the party’s senior ideologist, he spearheaded an impressive rise in communist fortunes in Britain, skillfully exploiting the economic and social woes of the age and showing a natural capacity for leadership. Pollitt was especially passionate about events in Spain, which he would visit regularly in the late 1930s to galvanize British volunteer battalions. As one of his later biographers would suggest, his antifascism was not mere communist orthodoxy; it stemmed from a deep emotional commitment, derived largely from the Spanish Civil War. Yet, by the summer of 1939, the ideological clarity of that bipolar world of communist versus fascist seemed to be fading. Pollitt did not yet realize it, but he was approaching something of a personal and political watershed.

Initially, the events of the first week of September 1939 had appeared to conform to the old, comfortable idea of a Left-Right conflict. Pollitt had not been unduly perturbed by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact a week previously, contriving to see that agreement as “a victory for peace and socialism” and as damning proof of the unwillingness of Britain’s ruling class to deal fairly with the USSR. The German invasion of Poland on September 1 and the British declaration of war two days later had then surprised many on the left; they had expected to see some sort of accommodation reached between the semifascist government of Neville Chamberlain, as they saw it, and the überfascist government of Hitler. Nonetheless, a new “party line” had quickly crystallized, sanctioned by the Comintern and penned by Pollitt himself, calling for a “two-front war” against Hitler abroad and Chamberlain at home.

To clarify this rather complex position, Pollitt resolved to write his pamphlet, titled “How to Win the War.” In thirty-two closely typed pages, he laid out the British Communist Party’s position on the war then beginning. In one memorable passage, he proclaimed that “to stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases, while the fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe, would be a betrayal of everything our forebears have fought to achieve in the course of long years of struggle against capitalism.” Just as the Abyssinians had been right to fight the Italians, he wrote, and just as the Spanish had been right to take up arms against Italian and German invaders, so “the Polish people are right to fight against the Nazi invasion that is now taking place.” Although Pollitt reiterated the policy of a “two-front” conflict to combat Chamberlain politically and Hitler militarily, he was nonetheless absolutely unequivocal: “The Communist Party supports the war,” he wrote, “believing it to be a just war which should be supported by the whole working class and all friends of democracy in Britain.” Priced at one penny, with a rather unappealing portrait of its author on the cover, “How to Win the War” was published on September 14, with a print run of 50,000 copies.

The reception among the party’s rank and file was mixed. As good Marxists, they had interpreted the travails of the 1930s as the death throes of capitalism, with fascism seen as the purest expression of that demise. So the sight of Stalin cozying up to Hitler would have been rather disquieting—an apparent refutation of the entire political constellation as they had previously understood it. Of course, to the hardened communists among them, this was not a problem. True to their convictions, they were unperturbed, safe in the knowledge that the Soviet Union knew best how to protect the communist experiment. As party member Douglas Hyde explained, “The Soviet leaders had a responsibility to the working-class of the world to defend the USSR and could, if necessary, for this reason make an alliance with the devil himself.”

Others, however, were more perplexed, and for them Pollitt’s pamphlet restored a modicum of clarity, providing a line that they could defend both to the wider world and to themselves. As the future Labour minister Kenneth Robinson recalled, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was “a bombshell: We just did not know what to do. But I remember that we all welcomed a statement by Harry Pollitt that we must now fight a war on two fronts—one against Nazi Germany, and one against the Establishment.” Even Pollitt’s comrade Dutt was enthused, describing the pamphlet as “one of the finest things” that the leader had ever produced, “so clearly and simply presented.”

Yet Pollitt’s problems began almost as soon as the pamphlet was published. That same day, a telegram arrived from Moscow explaining the new line on the war to be adopted by all fraternal communist parties and made known to every member. “The present war,” it proclaimed, “is an imperialist and unjust war for which the bourgeoisie of all belligerent states bear equal responsibility. In no country can the working class or the Communist Parties support the war.” “Tactics must be changed,” it went on; “under no conditions may the international working class defend fascist Poland.” The telegram added that in the light of the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, “the division into fascist and democratic states has now lost its former sense.” The message ended with an ominous warning: “Communist Parties which acted contrary to these tactics must now correct their policy.”

Pollitt must have been dismayed, and his first instinct was to suppress the telegram in the hope, perhaps, that he could ride out the crisis. But he couldn’t. Dutt had also got wind of the new line from Moscow, and he was too much of an opportunist and a loyal Stalinist to allow the matter to go unchallenged. He asked that the party’s Political Bureau reconvene to reconsider its position. Pollitt tried to resist, holding out for his line, but when Dave Springhall—the party’s representative at the Communist International in Moscow—returned in late September with specific instructions, he was doomed. Consequently, the Central Committee was convened to resolve the issue on October 2.

At the meeting, called at the party’s Covent Garden headquarters that morning, Dutt was ruthless in espousing the revised line from Moscow and advocating its acceptance. The party had “failed to understand” the “new period” that the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the outbreak of war had signified, and in that “new situation,” it was necessary to “adjust our perspective” and “face, frankly and openly, that our line was a wrong line.” Citing Lenin and numerous theoretical concepts and “isms” that must have impressed his listeners, he went on to explain, with less than perfect clarity, why the new Muscovite line was correct. In closing, he warned that “the Party is now on trial as it has never been since the beginning of its history. We are going to need all forces in the conditions that we have to face, and in the fight that we have before us we want no half-hearted supporters, no vacillators, no faint-hearts. Every responsible position in the Party must be occupied by a determined fighter for the line.” For those still in doubt as to their fraternal responsibility, he added that “the duty of the communist is not to disagree but to accept” and warned that “any member who deserts from active work for the Party will be branded for his political life.” It was not difficult to determine at whom that closing threat was aimed.

Pollitt was not the first to respond; that task fell to Willie Gallacher, a firebrand Scot and the party’s only member of Parliament (MP). He was scathing toward Dutt, retorting that he had never listened to a “more unscrupulous and opportunist speech” or known “anything so rotten, so mean, so despicable, so dirty.” But for all his righteous indignation, Gallacher was very much in a minority. Member after member of the Central Committee stood up to voice undimmed “faith in the Soviet Union” and agreement with “Comrade Dutt’s position.” Then Pollitt finally had the floor.