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

Although he must have harbored the distinct impression that the party he had led for a decade was measuring him for a coffin, Harry Pollitt was initially conciliatory, stating that it would be easy for him “to say I accept and let us kiss and be friends and everything in the garden would be lovely.” But, he said, that would be dishonest to his convictions. Reiterating his visceral antifascism—his desire, as he put it, to “smash the fascist bastards”—he expressed his dismay at the fact that the “fight against fascism” had disappeared and that, due to its pact with the Soviet Union, fascism now seemed to have taken on a “progressive role” and was no longer to be considered as the main enemy of the communist movement. “May I say without offence,” he went on, doubtless offending many in the room, “that I don’t envy the comrades who can so lightly in the space of a week, and sometimes in the space of a day, go from one political conviction to another.”

Pollitt also had a personal response for Rajani Palme Dutt, whose oblique threats must have raised his ire. “Please remember, Comrade Dutt,” he said, “you won’t intimidate me. I was in this movement practically before you were born and will be in the revolutionary movement a long time after some of you are forgotten.” If he could not trump Dutt on his loyalty to Moscow, Pollitt could at least pull rank. He ended on a note of sadness rather than anger, explaining how he felt “ashamed at the lack of feeling that the struggle of the Polish people has aroused in our leadership.” His comrades were deceiving themselves if they thought that the pact with a country they hated did not “leave a nasty taste in the mouth.” As far as Pollitt was concerned, the party’s honor was now at stake, and it was impossible for him to continue as leader in the circumstances. So he declared his resignation. His eloquent defense failed to move his comrades, however. The committee voted 21–3 to accept the new line outlined by Dutt, with the only dissenters being Pollitt, Gallacher, and Daily Worker editor Johnny Campbell.

Ten days later, the Times reported that Pollitt had been “relieved of his office” as “the policy of the British Communist Party was found to be altogether out of step with Moscow’s.” A revised manifesto, composed on October 7, was declared to correct the previous policy espoused by Pollitt on the outbreak of war. At the end of the month, a new pamphlet, penned by Rajani Palme Dutt and titled “Why This War?,” gave the communist argument for neutrality. Pollitt’s pamphlet was quietly withdrawn.

IN LINE WITH ITS UNIVERSALIST PRETENSIONS, SOVIET COMMUNISM boasted an international organization known as the Communist International, or Comintern. Founded in 1919 and based in Moscow, the Comintern spearheaded the international class struggle against the bourgeoisie and promoted communism and the Soviet system to the world, acting in effect as the Soviet Union’s unofficial foreign policy agent—the handmaiden of global revolution. Through the Comintern all affiliated communist and revolutionary socialist parties would be guided in their political mission, advised of how to interpret events, and informed of the line they were required to take. To the loyal communist, then, the Comintern’s word was law.

So it was in 1939, when the international communist movement was faced with the profound challenge of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. However, the first problem for loyal communists was that the Comintern itself had been blindsided by events and was not up to date with Stalin’s strategic thinking. Consequently the first directive it sent out in early September echoed the prewar antifascist line, parroting the old slogans that warned of the dangers posed by German fascism. Only with Stalin’s direct intervention did the line then change: Germany’s opponents were now to be targeted, the fight against fascism abandoned. Now, the bourgeoisies of the belligerent states were blamed for the war, and it became the duty of every Communist Party to oppose the war against Hitler.

This shift had reverberations across the world. Every affiliated party was required to toe the new Muscovite line, and, as Harry Pollitt found to his cost, local perspectives—however honorable, logical, or well intentioned—counted for little against the brute political force of a Comintern directive. The result could be an uncomfortable standoff, and the apparent conflict between ideology and realpolitik caused many to question their communist faith. For some, the malaise had a troubling moral aspect. Communism, for many of its followers, boasted a self-proclaimed moral superiority, espousing “progressive values”, concern for one’s fellow man, and a principled defiance of fascist aggression. The sight of Molotov and Ribbentrop smiling together in the Kremlin undermined all that, sullying world communism’s image of itself.

The British socialist George Orwell, ever the perspicacious critic, diagnosed the problem accurately. “The Russo-German Pact,” he wrote in early 1941, “brought the Stalinists and the near-Stalinists into the pro-Hitler position,” thereby at a stroke undermining not only communism’s primary “antifascist” appeal but also its primary complaint against the status quo. Where communists had once damned their bourgeois governments for appeasing Hitler with their shabby deal making, they were now obliged to defend Moscow for doing the very same. The result, Orwell wrote, was the “complete destruction of left-wing orthodoxy.”

The fascists faced similar difficulties. Hitler, who had made a career of combating communism and had once claimed that alliance with Russia “would be the end of Germany,” now had to explain an embarrassing volte-face that potentially undermined much of what Nazism, as well as the wider fascist movement, had stood for. To complicate matters, both sides, communists and Nazis, saw themselves as tainted by association with one another. Their respective regimes, therefore—which had revolutionized the use of propaganda, news manipulation, and what Hitler once cynically called the “big lie”—faced a public relations challenge of the first order: selling the agreement between the two to their skeptical followers. As well as unleashing war in the autumn of 1939, the Nazi-Soviet Pact plunged both the communist and fascist movements into an existential crisis.

On the British left, at least, at one remove from continental troubles, the reaction to that crisis spanned the spectrum. For some, their faith in communism was undimmed. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, then a young Cambridge graduate, found the ideological somersaults easier to perform than most. He was unfazed by the speed of developments as war erupted in the late summer of 1939, despite the fact that the war was “not the war we had expected”; nor was it the war “for which the Party had prepared us.” What he laconically called the “line change” also bothered him little, despite the fact that, as he later confessed, the idea “that Britain and France were as bad as Nazi Germany made little emotional or intellectual sense.” Nonetheless, as an obedient communist, he accepted the line with “no reservations.” After all, he added airily, “was it not the essence of ‘democratic centralism’ to stop arguing once a decision had been reached, whether or not you were personally in agreement?”

Others were more conflicted. The veteran socialist Beatrice Webb, for instance, was appalled by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. As someone who had spent her life promoting socialism and famously proclaimed the USSR to be “a new civilization,” she found Stalin’s accord with Hitler to be a “holy horror” and a “great disaster” for everything that she had stood for. “Knocked senseless” by the pact, she described it in her diary in the most damning terms, as “dishonorable,” “disgraceful,” and a “terrible collapse of good faith and integrity.” Within a few days, however—her equilibrium at least partially restored—she was again looking for the positives, seeking as ever to provide an optimistic commentary for Soviet actions. “No wonder Stalin prefers to keep his 170 million out of the battlefield,” she wrote, “whilst the anti-Comintern Axis and the Western capitalist democracies destroy each other.” Although “disreputable,” she wrote, Stalin’s policy was nonetheless “a miracle of successful statesmanship.”