The Image of the Russian Purges in the Daily Herald and the New Statesman Author(s): Peter Deli

Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 20, No. 2, Working-Class and Left-Wing Politics (Apr., 1985), pp. 261-282 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/260534 . Accessed: 15/03/2013 21:57
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Peter Deli

The Image of the Russian Purges in the Daily Herald and the New Statesman

An examination of the image of the Russian purges in two of the main papers of the British left is of especial interest. The 1930s was an era of intense political involvement for the left. A state of latent class conflict existed in France and even Britain, conflict that erupted into open civil war in Spain during the years of the purges in the Soviet Union. The nazis in Germany menaced the values and heritage of the western Enlightenment and represented a disruptive force diplomatically, a threat to the whole balance of power in Europe. It is in this context that the position of Soviet Russia and international communism became extremely important. To many on the left, the Soviet Union appeared to be an essential counterweight to the military threat of nazi Germany, to be aiding the forces of progress in Spain and to be leading the Popular Front against fascism. Yet it was during the years 1936- 38, the very years of the Civil War in Spain, of the Anschluss and of Munich, that the great terror in the Soviet Union erupted on an unprecedented scale, both in its tremendous scope and in the intensity of the macabre dramas at the Moscow court room. Two immediate problems faced the left in Britain in their reactions to the purges and the Moscow Treason Trials. There was the moral dilemma of recognizing and condoning or condemning injustice committed by an ally in the struggleagainst fascism. The spectacle of broken old revolutionariespublicly degradedwas profoundly disturbing. There was also the problem of analysis and interpretation; what was the significance of the purges in Soviet history; were they a temporary or permanent phenomenon? For the left there were difficulties in reconciling the scope of Yezhovization terror with Bolshevik claims that they were implementing 'Marxism'in the Soviet
Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills and New Delhi), Vol. 20 (1985), 261- 282

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Union. Could Russia still be considered a socialist state? In a broader perspective would the left in Britain view Stalin's terror as an assault on the values and civilization of the west, comparable to that taking place in Hitler's Germany at the same time? The image of the purges in the Daily Herald and the New Statesman throws light on the problems and dilemmas that developments in the Soviet Union posed for the western left. The Daily Herald was the official newspaper of the British Labour movement with a circulation of over two million. The New Statesman, edited by Kingsley Martin, was the weekly journal of the intellectual left in England. Some of the differences between the two papers can be seen in their attitudes to the Popular Front and the New Soviet Constitution; two issues intimately related to the purges and their impact on British left-wing opinion. Both papers initially welcomed the announcement of the New Soviet Constitution. As the purges progressed, however, Kingsley Martin in the New Statesman editorials expressed his unease about tendencies in Russia, but nevertheless continued to advocate a Popular Front with the British communists while attempting to implement friendly criticism of the Soviet Union. The Daily Herald, on the other hand, consistently displayed the Britishright-wingtradeunionists' distrustof communist revolutionary tactics and constant changes of the official line. The purges and terror in the Soviet Union confirmed Francis Williams' suspicions about the authenticity of the New Constitution and strengthened his determination to use the editorial columns of the Daily Herald to resist proposals for a United Front with the British communists. His stand against the Popular Front was unequivocal. In an editorial entitled 'Blood Lust' he wrote bitterly denouncing the British communists:
Under orders they pose as democrats. Under orders they suddenly drop this mask.... For they are pleading for admission to the Labour Party. If they get it, we shall one day have them screaming from Labour Platforms 'Shoot the Reptiles' when some others of their comrades are decreed by their members to have become reptiles.

The first of the Daily Herald editorials on the great Treason Trials appeared on 24 August 1936, immediately after death sentences on Zinoviev, Kamenev and the other defendants had been announced. There was little attempt at analysis; the tone of the editorial was primarily one of shock and horror and the editor stressed that the

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reputation of the Soviet Union was not improved by these trials:

If the charges and the evidence are faked and the confessions extorted, then the Soviet Government has committed an act of terrorism worthy of ranking with the supreme achievement of fascism. But, if the evidence is genuine, then all who once held high hopes of the Russian Revolution will be not less sick at heart.

In this first editorialthere was an implicit assumption that the accused may have been guilty, but the editor was primarily concerned with condemning the whole Soviet system. A sorry picture is presented of communism in its eighteenth year with the old revolutionariessplit into two groups, each attemptingto exterminatethe other. The editor managed to combine his moral condemnation with an attempt at social analysis:
Let it be soberly noted that this is the price and the cost of dictatorship whether communist or fascist. It drives opponents of the Government to terrorismbecause it allows them no opportunity of securing any but violent change of government .. .it drives the Government to defend itself by great extermination trials.

The Moscow correspondent had been continually sending in reports of fresh arrests and by the end of August the editor was convinced that the purges and terror of 1936 were far more widespread than in 1918. In 1918 the regime was fighting for its life, but in 1936 the editor could see little reason for a renewal of the terror:
Until this storm broke it was generally thought that the Soviet Union, now that the great economic change was completed and that the regime was entirely stable, was evolving rapidly towards a new freedom.2

The editor, after expressing his surprise at the present purge, speculated about the future by reverting to the dilemma formulated in the previous editorial. If there was a widespread conspiracy permeating Russia, then there was something wrong with the entire Soviet system. He concluded with a question:
Is this the opening of a new phase, the 'whiff of grapeshot' which ends Bolshevism and the Bolsheviks and which precludes the growth, not of a new freedom, but of a new Bonapartism? Russia becomes again a gigantic question mark.

The editorial of 2 September 1936 was especially interesting.

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Francis Williams did not try to answer the questions posed in the previous editorials, but he did outline the attitude of the British Labour movement to the Russian experiment over the last twenty years, placing the shock at the renewed terror in a broader context:
It is the enemies of the Soviet Union who are delighted, its friends who are dismayed by the new terror. For nearly twenty years now the British Labour movement has seen with warm sympathy the efforts of the Soviet leaders, in the face of appalling difficulties, to build new socialist order on the ruins of tsarism.

This sympathy was not lessened by the realization that ruthless methods had been employed to make the necessary changes:
It was realised also that a regime emerging with a narrow victory from a desperate struggle for existence... could not rightly be judged by the standards of ordered and settled communities.

Williams pointed to the widespread belief in the British Labour ranks that the Soviet dictatorship was a necessary but temporary evil. The formal abolition of the powers of the GPU and the New Constitution appeared to herald a new phase. However, the ruthlessness and the extent of the purges made it plain, that the Soviet Union was
moving not from dictatorship towards democracy, but from one kind of dictatorship to another. And this dictatorshipis not 'of the proletariat'nor is it communist.

The subservience to and adulation of Stalin were also seen as symptoms of disappointing and disturbing changes. In January 1937 a new batch of victims appeared in the second major Show Trial. The editor saw this trial as following the same pattern as that of the previous August; the charges were similar and the Moscow press had condemned the accused in advance. Yet Francis Williams on this occasion displayed far more doubt about the charges and the nature of the evidence. In referring back to the August trial he wrote:
No evidence was then offered save the extraordinary confessions of the accused which read like briefs prepared by the prosecution and recited by the accused, because they were told that the alternative was to be shot.3

A few days later the editor, after expressing horror at the verdict of the second trial, returned to a discussion of the main charges.

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He admitted the likelihood that the condemned men had opposed Stalin, but doubted whether they had repudiated socialism, engaged in acts of sabotage, or worked for the overthrow of communism and the establishment of fascism in the Soviet Union. Once again Francis Williams condemned the entire Soviet system for forcing its opposition underground:
Truly the Revolution is devouring its own children. And it is doing so because it is a dictatorship, because the Moscow Trials are essential to dictatorship. Had Russia been a democracy, Stalin's opponents would have formed a peaceful opposition working for their conception of socialism.4

The summary of a very interesting interview with Dr. Friedrich Adler, the Secretary of the Labour and Socialist International, was published in the 2 February 1937 edition of the Daily Herald. Adler threw more doubt on the authenticity of the charges by referring to the Menshevik trial of 1931:
Everything which happened before the court in Moscow last week had taken place there in exactly the same way six years before. There were the same accusations; the parts were cast in the same manner - the only difference is in a few names.

The editorials increasinglybegan to reflect the reports of the Moscow correspondent, R. T. Miller, particularly in relation to the extent and the escalation of the purges. On 21 May 1937, for example, in a leader entitled 'What's Wrong?' the editor wrote:
In the last year, Commissars and leaders of heavy industry, chiefs of the Red Army and trade union leaders, national figures and local leaders, have been condemned as traitors on the evidence of the Government itself. Democratic Socialists cannot be expected to take this kind of thing silently. What is wrong in Russia, when, after 20 years of communism, the country, if we are to believe the Government, is more thickly riddled with treachery in high places than any other country in the world?

The purge of the eight Red Army generals hit the front page of the Daily Herald on Thursday, 10 June 1937 under the title 'Soviet Riddle Sets Europe Guessing'. It was here that the effect of the purges on Russian military strength was felt to be of extreme importance, and this article devoted some space to the reactions of the British and FrenchForeignOffices and GeneralStaffs to these latest developments in the Soviet Union. By this stage the Diplomatic Correspondent of the Daily Herald was very dubious about the charges:

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The story of a political, military and economic organisation in which countless big jobs are in the hands of crooks and traitorsis too fantastic. It is like Chesterton's 'Man who was Thursday', where all the policemen are anarchists and all the anarchists are policemen. 5

The first editorial on the purge of the Red Army generals stressed that there was no adequate explanation for that reign of terror and certainly no adequate justification in any of the Soviet statements. The editorial tried to analyse the Soviet dictatorship along the lines of the permanent purge theory:
Dictatorshipsdo not pass; they grow more stubbornand unjust as they grow older.6

Opposition is driven undergroundand with a growth of power comes a growth of fear. The editorial pointed to the permanent anxiety of the dictators, terror only provided temporary relief:
There comes a time - it seems that it has arrived in Russia - where only in the cutting-off of many heads is there appeasement of anxiety. And that appeasement is only temporary. That is the lesson of these latest executions.

On Thursday, 8 July 1937, the communist MP Willi Gallacherwas allowed to put forward his point of view in the pages of the Daily Herald. Above his article was a little paragraph stating that it was the policy of the Daily Herald to extend freedom of speech, even to those who did not believe in it. Gallacher attributed the conspiracies to Trotskyists and other traitors who, outraged by the successes of Stalin and the Soviet system and the failure of their own prophecies and policies, resorted to treason and espionage in the face of a hostile public. Gallacher also stressed Stalin's mercy and generosity in dealing with such perennial offenders as Zinoviev and Kamenev. Francis Williams devoted a full page to his reply. His article was entitled, 'If it happened here, would you believe it?' and at the top of his article he published a very long list of the more important victims of the purges. This Soviet casualty list was skilfully translated into an English equivalent in order to reveal the tremendous extent of the purges and arrests amongst the prominent figures of public life.7 The editorial of Saturday, 7 August 1937 represented an attack on the whole principle of the trials coupled with a condemnation of the atmosphere within the Soviet Union:

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There is something at once childish and horrible about the mass meetings in the Soviet Union at which crowds are reported to demand the death penalty for men who were their trusted comrades and leaders the day before... these crowds have not heard anything that could be called evidence. They have not heard of any defence. The resolutions are not verdicts. They are demands for blood.

The last of the Great Show Trials coincided with Hitler's occupation of Austria and it is significant that an editorial of a leftwing paper could link these two events:
All eyes these days are on Vienna. But the thing that has happened in Moscow cannot be overlooked or forgotten.8

The editor was still grasping for an explanation:

Like its predecessors this latest of Soviet treason trials defies rational explanation. Belief in the charges, the evidence, the confessions is impossible to the sane mind. Yet blind disbelief provides no reasonable interpretation either.

Once again the editor expressed amazement at the elimination of Lenin's closest collaborators and the escalation of the purges to swallow up the Stalinists themselves. The editor's mystification was again put in the form of a question:
Was Lenin, has Stalin been, either so vicious, or so incompetent that each, over long years gave confidence and power to 'vermin and reptiles' who all the time were plotting against Russia and the regime? The mind boggles at the answer.

The editorial concluded sadly:

Understandingis impossible. There remainshorrorat the deed, pity for the victims, and dismay at the condition of the Soviet Union after 20 years of Soviet rule.

Kingsley Martin's initial reaction to the Treason Trials was one of relative scepticism. On 22 August 1936 he wrote in his editorial in the New Statesman:
The confessions of Zinoviev and Kamenev are too abject to be convincing.

He believed that a plot to assassinate Stalin and replace him by Trotsky was unlikely on two counts; Stalin was popular and enjoyed

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the support of the mass of Russian citizens, and the GPU was efficient enough to foil any opposition plots before they reached dangerous proportions. However, in any dictatorship there are intrigues and he felt that:
the murder of Kirov was a reminder that Stalin is not immune from the ordinary risks of dictatorship. Since that murder, every element of discontent in Russia has been described as Trotskyist and linked in the minds of the rulers of Russia with the strong Trotskyist movement outside Russia.

Once again, however, Martindoubted whetherZinoviev and Kamenev

could possibly have been conspiring with these revolutionaries abroad.

In the most interesting part of the editorial, Kingsley Martin tentatively presented an explanation of the purges which revealed a total lack of comprehension of the nature of Russian society, the role of the police and their connection with Stalin. The GPU was pictured as almost totally independent of Stalin:
The real puzzle is why the GPU, which has long been preparing this trial, should have been permitted to hold it at the present juncture. A commonly advocated and not impossible reason is that they wished to show their importance and activity before the introduction of the new constitution which may curb their power.

In the following week, the editorial reported the execution of the sixteen prisoners and commented on the extent of the purges throughout Russia. Kingsley Martin remained sceptical:
The trial, if we may trust the available reports, was wholly unconvincing.9

Kingsley Martin found the court procedure unsatisfactory: the only evidence put forward was the confessions themselves. He telieved that it was possible that the ex-Trotskyist opposition groups may have continued to plot but found it difficult to accept the charges of terrorism, assassination and conspiracy with the nazi Gestapo. Once again he referred to the possibility
that the Soviet Political Police vamped up this conspiracy to perpetuate its power on the eve of the adoption of a quasi democratic constitution.

The editorial concluded that whilst the truth was unknown, the methods employed in this trial reflected

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at least as much upon the State which employs them as upon the victims it condemns.

The editorial of 5 September 1936 is worth summarizing in detail. Its tone was in complete contrast to anything in the Daily Herald and was even out of keeping with the first two editorials of the New Statesman quoted above. Its obvious mystification at the confessions and the demand of the victims for their own death sentences, sparked off a serious controversy in the correspondence columns. The editorial itself embodied all the confusion of some sections of the British left in defining their attitude towards Russian communism; in its attempt to provide an explanation for the confessions it vacillated from partial acceptance to partial disbelief. A whole batch of evolving attitudes and contradictions was contained in this one editorial. It opened with a statement defining the significance of the purges:
Historically, the new Bolshevik purge is more important than former mass executions in Russia. It marks the end of the Bolshevik Party; only Stalin survives from the Old Guard. It marks too the final triumph of Stalin's nationalist policy.

The question of evidence worried Kingsley Martin:

We did not deny then, and we do not deny now that the confessions may have contained the substantialtruth. We complain because in the absence of independent witnesses there is no way of knowing.

The confessions of the accused and their demands for the death sentence constituted the mystery:
If they had no hope of acquittal, why confess? If they were guilty of trying to murder Stalin and knew they would be shot in any case, why cringe and crawl instead of defiantly justifying their plot on revolutionary grounds? We should be very glad to hear the explanation.

In this editorial, Kingsley Martin once again stressed the tendency of the GPU to regard all criticism as Trotskyism, but was decidedly less sceptical towards the idea of a plot:
Nazi agents have been more active in the Soviet Union than elsewhere, and it would be surprising if they had found no discontent to exploit.

When such important people as Radek were involved,

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We are compelled to wonder whether there may be more serious discontent in the Soviet Union, than was generally believed.

Surprisingly, Kingsley Martin then suddenly launched into an attack on the critics of the Soviet Union. He described these trials as grist to the mill of enemies of Soviet Russia, such as the Tories. He also condemned the British Labour Party for exploiting this proof of difficulties in the Soviet Union and using it as an argument against a Popular Front in Britain. The editor then attempted to place the purges in the broader context of Soviet history:
Let us see this matter in perspective. A social revolution is accompanied both by violence and by idealism. Its success must be judged primarily by the permanent achievement of its economic aims .... We fear... some idealistic people, finding few secure investments for their spiritual capital, have staked their all on Soviet Russia and may feel spirituallybankruptwhen the dividendis beneath expectations. We believe that it is bad tactics as well as bad morals to meet their disillusionment with a fanatical pretence that nothing can be amiss in Soviet Russia. The right reply is honestly to admit that there is a great deal amiss and that political liberty has a long battle to fight before it becomes a reality in Soviet Russia. But that makes no difference to the essential fact that Russia is a socialist country with an overwhelming desire for peace.

The theory was elaborated. The Russian Revolution was seen as the greatest achievement of its generation. Comparisons were made with the French Revolution to show that:
It always takes a totally disproportionate amount of steam to accomplish an obviously necessary social change.

Kingsley Martin then justified the Soviet experiment through comparison:

In exactly the same way the essential economic change of our generation has been carried out in Russia and in Russia only, and the power of the GPU and the excessive and increasingcontrol of the Soviet bureaucracyare historically speaking of secondary importance.

He finally whitewashed Russia by referring to the threat of fascism:

Much that is disappointing in Russia today is due to the fear of invasion and the vast military preparations which follow from such a fear.

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The contrast between Kingsley Martin's editorial and Leonard Woolf's review of the works of Gide and Adler was very marked. Kingsley Martin was a product of the post-war generation and his dissenterand nonconformist origins accounted for much of his indignation and sense of involvement so typical of left-wing intellectuals in the thirties. Leonard Woolf, on the other hand, was active in Bloomsbury before the first world war. The Great War marked the end of an era for Woolf; in post-war Europe, culture and justice were completely on the defensive against an onslaught of barbarism and nihilism, an onslaught that cut across the right-left ideological conflicts. In December 1936, when reviewing Gide's Retour de L'URSS, Woolf wrote:
There is nothing in socialism or communism which requires that a socialist state should turn itself into a church, complete with Pope and Inquisition, or that public ownership of the means of production should be extended to the public ownership of thought. I suppose it will take the communists as long to learn this as it took the Christiansto learn that there is nothing in Christianitywhich requiresa Christian to burn heresies. '

In his discussion of Adler's article, 'The WitchcraftTrial in Moscow', Woolf was almost alone amongst the writers for the Daily Herald and the New Statesman in attempting to provide a convincing explanation for the confessions. He commented on the fact that many of the trial victims had confessed to the impossible as well as to the improbable and discussed the famous 'Holtzman-Trotsky' meeting at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in 1932. Holtzman confessed to a meeting that.could never have taken place, as Trotsky had not been in Copenhagen and the Hotel Bristol no longer existed. Woolf concluded:
Adler is, I think, on the right track when he compares these trials to the witchcraft trials of the 15th and 16th centuries. "

He then described and condemned the mass hysteria induced at these trials, where even the victims were convinced of their own guilt, and confessed to the impossible. Finally, Woolf, like Adler, made explicit the comparison between the two eras:
Today, Europe has reverted to the same psychology, except that the heresy hunting, the absolute truths, the salvation and damnation, are political instead

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of religious. The witch hunters' God has become Stalin or Hitler; his devil, Trotsky or a communist. Hence the mass trials in Russia and Germany and hence the pathological psychology of the confessions.

The Treason Trial of January 1937 elicited two editorials, both displaying considerable mystification and consternation over the purges. The first editorial on 30 January 1937 was appropriately entitled 'Will Stalin Explain?'
The present trials in Moscow remain incomprehensible. There are two mysteries; the mystery of the confessions, which are equally mysterious whether we accept them as true or not, and the even greater mystery of why such trials should be publicly staged and such confessions broadcast.

The behaviour of the prisoners in the dock also received some attention, although there was no attempt made to resolve the mystery of the confessions:
In the last trial when the prisoners grovelled in the dirt and declared themselves miserable sinners, we were told this strange behaviour was the product of Russian masochistic psychology.... On this occasion, however, the prisonersdo not grovel nor do they boast. Most of them confess almost with a smile. Radek even goes so far as to joke about the coming execution.

In considering the second and politically more important mystery of why Stalin should have permitted a trial so damaging to the interests of his country, Kingsley Martin failed to provide any convincing replies to his own questions. Instead, he concluded the editorial by stating the old dilemma so often postulated by Francis Williams in the Daily Herald:
To doubt the truth of the confessions is to accuse the Soviet government of a disregard for the most elementary principles of justice. But to accept them as they stand is to draw a picture of a regime divided amongst itself, a regime in which the leaders are at a deadly feud with each other, a regime in which the only way to express discontent is in conspiracy and the only way to suppress conspiracy, mass execution. If there is an escape from this dilemma Stalin should tell us what it is.

It is interestingto note that this editorial sparked off a controversy in the correspondence columns of the New Statesman. Dudley Collard,12 a socialist lawyer and communist sympathizer who had personally attended the trial, was convinced of the guilt of the

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defendants. He believed that they had been forced to intrigue against Stalin because they had no public support and once they had begun to conspire, they found it impossible to stop. Another correspondent, Roy Pascal, at the time also a communist sympathizer, echoed these sentiments. They both viewed the situation in terms of a conspiracy of a small and alienated minority, ratherthan that of a regime divided through and through. The very fact that the government held this second trial at a time when it could damage foreign policy, was proof to them of the seriousness of the charges and conspiracy.13 The following issue of the New Statesman contained a letter attacking the views of Dudley Collard and signed 'Marxist'. 'Marxist' pointed to the incongruity of Jews confessing to be Gestapo agents. Above all he condemned the communist device of branding all their opponents as 'Trotskyite fascists' and referred to the fate of the POUM in Spain as well as to events in Britain. Skilfully he cast doubt on the Moscow court procedures by paralleling the charges in the trials with Soviet reactions to criticism from abroad:
The other day, because the Manchester Guardian kept its open forum, the Pravda alleged that the Manchester Guardian had become a 'Fascist speaking strumpet' and 'that the pages of the Manchester Guardian are open to the Gestapo for the glorification of its hired murderers, wreckers and Trotskyist spies'. If Stalin's assistants can make such charges against the ManchesterGuardian, what treatment can his political enemies in the Communist Party expect? 14

On 10 April 1937, the New Statesman published as its leading article an account of Trotsky being interviewed in exile by Kingsley Martin himself. In the course of the interview, Martin expressed his amazement at the confessions. Trotsky replied with a description of GPU methods, outlining how they put pressure on their victims and extracted confessions from friends and relatives of the accused. When Kingsley Martin, who was still mystified by the confessions, mentioned Dimitritov, the protagonist of Goering in the Reichstag Fire trial, Trotsky became very excited. He maintained that the prisoners did not know they were going to die and that
he was completely convinced that there had been an understanding from the beginning between Radek and Stalin. Radek knew he was to be reprieved.

Trotsky also asserted that Dimitritov had the world press on his side, whilst in Russia foreign correspondents such as Pritt and Duranty were 'all paid prostitutes of Moscow'.

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Kingsley Martin's impressions of the interview are extremely revealing. He seemed to have become more convinced that the charges had some foundation of truth:
I came away from our talk rather less inclined to scout the possibility of Trotsky's complicity than I had been before, because his judgement appeared to me so unstable, and therefore the possibility of his embarking on a crazy plot more credible.

Radek's behaviour in court also influenced Kingsley Martin:

Radek's testimony goes a long way towards convincing me that part at least of the evidence is true. The story that Radek tells of the stages in which he became implicated and the reasons that led him to withdraw read to me like the truth.

However, Kingsley Martin still found some of the other evidence difficult to accept and stressed that he could not become a partisan in the controversy over the veracity of the charges until he had seen all the evidence, especially that produced by the Dewey Commission of Inquiry into Trotsky's case. In his review of Andre Gide's book, Retour de L'URSS, Kingsley Martin took a tougher line. He agreed with Gide's indictment of the conformity and uniformity of thought within Russia and wrote:
He sees, though he does not clearly formulate, what I regardas the greatest menace of all to socialism in Russia, the coincidence of economic advantage and political power, the danger that the ruling bureaucracy will have not only a political but also an economic interest in maintaining their position. 5

Kingsley Martin also believed that since the murder of Kirov,

The USSR seems to be moving not towards more socialism and more freedom, but towards more uniformity and less socialism.

Above all, he stressed the right of socialists to criticize developments in the Soviet Union:
Much may be justified by necessity. Socialists abroad are prepared to wait patiently and hopefully. But if the direction is wrong, it is our duty, as it was Gide's to raise doubts, and we have the right to expect more than conventional abuse in reply.

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A leading article on 19 June 1937 entitled 'The European Nightmare' discussed the execution of the eight leading Red Army generals after a secret trial:
The latest batch of executions in Russia is likely to have far more serious international repercussions than any that have preceded them. Those who look to the USSR for militaryassistanceare not much perturbedwhen old revolutionaries are put out of the way, and may shrug their shoulders at the execution of officials and industrialists. But when eight of the foremost military experts in the USSR are put to death at one stroke serious misgivings inevitably arise about the stability of the regime and the reliability of the war machine.

This article accepted both the existence of widespread intrigue in the Soviet Union and the fact that the purges could have claimed many innocent victims. For the author, foreign policy, however, was of predominant importance and the impact of this latest purge on the Franco-Soviet Pact was considered. The article concluded pessimistically:
The executions stengthen the position of all those who wish to isolate Russia and make friends with nazi Germany.

The authenticityof a memoranduminvolving the purge of the eight Red Army generals created a furious debate in the pages of the New Statesman between such prominent personalities as Kingsley Martin, Palme Dutt, a leading British communist, the Independent Socialist Brailsford, and Leonard Woolf. Whilst it is not intended to summarize the contents of this debate, there are some very revealing quotations which illustratethe bitternessof the split within the British left under the traumatic impact of the Russian purges. Palme Dutt in a letter to the editor wrote:
'Critic' is incorrect when he states that Brailsford has always been a good friend to the revolutionary working class and to the USSR in the past. 16

After discussing an attack by Brailsford on Lenin in 1917, he concluded:

In general, it will be found that those who denounce Stalin today are much the same as those who denounced Lenin while Lenin lived. Since then they have found that Lenin was a great man. No doubt in 50 years time if their type survives till then, they will be vowing their unalterable loyalty to the great revolutionary traditions of Stalin which are being so shamefully betrayed by his successors.

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Brailsford wrote an angry reply:

I will confess that one of Mr. Dutt's numerous judgements on my character and record stung me. He denied that I had been a good friend to Soviet Russia. I might remind him that I was sentenced to imprisonment and a fine for an early effort to help the Russian Revolution, but he was then in the nursery. I might call on the former representatives of the Soviet Union in London to speak for me but one has been sentenced to death, and the others exiled and disgraced. It consoles me somewhat that Lenin once thanked me for a service I had the good fortune to render. But I can call no witnesses. Several of his lieutenants heard what he said and echoed it, but Mr. Dutt's friends have 'liquidated' them to the last man. 7

In his reply Dutt was placed in the difficult position of arguing with an opponent on the left whilst still endeavouring to retain the atmosphere of the Popular Front. His letter was thus an interesting mixture of praise and vituperation:
We all honour Mr. Brailsford's services to the liberal-democratic fight and to the socialist idea; alike in my letter to you and in my article criticizing his attack on the Soviet Union, I paid tribute to them and will always do so. But cannot he see that these services, so far from mitigating the danger when he comes out from time to time on the enemy side, can only make an attack all the more serious?... Mr. Brailsford claims that Lenin once thanked him for a service. There exists on record a letter in which Lenin thanks Ramsay MacDonald for a service. No-one wishes to compare Mr. Brailsford with Ramsay MacDonald. But he should not use this kind of argument. 8

Leonard Woolf joined in the debate launching an attack on Palme Dutt centred around an analogy comparing the French Revolution with developments in Russia. Once again Woolf clearly demonstrated the glaring inconsistencies in the arguments of those who wished to defend the terror in the Soviet Union and those who unquestioningly accepted Moscow doctrines at every turn:
There are still a few people who are just socialists with a knowledge of history... Mr. Dutt, owing to his black and white alternativesoffers no satisfactory explanation of the fact that all these statesmen, administrators and generals whose heads have had to be regretfully cut off as the blackest of bad Girondist goats by the whitest of good communist sheep, were themselves according to Mr. Dutt and the highest communist authorities, only a few months ago held up to us as the whitest of good Jacobin sheep. I know nothing in the history of the French Revolution or of any other period of history which seems to me analagous to the wholesale conversion of sheep into goats or of Jacobinsinto Girondins. PerhapsMr. Dutt, who is obviously far more competent than I am to interpret history will continue his exposition of the French Revolution by giving his attention to this unimportant point. 9

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On 6 November 1937, Kingsley Martin reviewed works by the Webbs, Gide and the PreliminaryCommission of Inquiryon the Case of Leon Trotsky. The last paragraph of this article constituted an almost complete summary of Martin's position and his attitudes to the Soviet Union. He believed in the ultimate success of 'socialism' in the Soviet Union but felt very strongly the need to criticize as in some respects the Revolution appeared to be deviating from what he felt was its right path. This mixture of genuine horror at the Soviet purges and a desire to defend the broad doctrines of 'socialism' in Russia explains many of Martin's vacillations in his previous articles and editorials:
The more closely I follow the present controversies about the USSR, the more convinced I am that the only honest attitude for a socialist is to give general, but criticial, support to the one country in the world which has adopted a planned socialist economy. But a legislative change may be misleading unless the actual administrativetendenciesin the regime are constantly and criticallywatched. Russia is not made perfect or even good merely by the adoption of a socialist constitution. Socialism gives the promise and possibility of greater happiness and greater economic sanity than is possible under capitalism. But there can be no greater disservice to the cause of socialism than to assume that an edict is the same thing as a fact and a critic the same as an enemy. The socialist's duty is to watch the tendencies at work in the USSR with the closest and most critical attention and to be outspoken when they appear to be directed away from the ideals that the USSR set out to realise.

Reviewing 'The Commission of Inquiry of the Trotsky Case', Kingsley Martin still attempted to maintain his position of relative impartiality, to avoid committing himself too strongly to the controversy over the veracity of the Moscow charges against Trotsky:
I do not know what conclusions the Committee of Inquiry that examined Trotsky will reach in their second volume, but I doubt if after hearing Trotsky's statement they are really in a better position to reach a fair conclusion than were the Russian judges who condemned him. The one court heard only the case for the prosecution, the other court listened only to the defence.

This provoked a very spirited reply from Charles Sumner, secretary of the British Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky. Sumner insisted that the Dewey Commission would be in a better position than the Moscow court to reach a fair conclusion precisely because it had at its disposal all the evidence submitted to the Moscow court, plus all the evidence submitted by Trotsky, Sedov and other witnesses. He concluded:

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It is difficult to see how Mr. Martin can have made so obvious an error.20

In his comments on the Show Trial of March 1938, Kingsley Martin reverted to a position of increased scepticism towards the charges against the accused. Once again he was horrified by the macabre spectacle in the Moscow court room:
There is nothing fresh to be said about the Soviet trials. They are like others but even more appalling. The most curious features of this trial are the character and eminence of the accused, the incredibilityof the chargesand the Kremlin'sapparent lack of concern about the devastating effect of such a trial on public opinion just at a time when Russia is supposed to be desperately in need of the co-operation of her friends abroad.21

For Kingsley Martin, Yagoda, the old head of the GPU, was the most interestingvictim because he was now in the position of accuser, accused. Kingsley Martin reminded the Stalinists that a few months ago it would have been heresy to suggest that Yagoda was corrupt. The fact that Yagoda was now on trial cast doubt on the evidence in the preceding trials:
If logic and justice count for anything, some of these 'traitors' for whose death Yagoda was responsible, will be posthumously reinstated as martyrs struck down by the machinations of the GPU. They cannot have it both ways. If Yagoda is as bad as I am told, we cannot believe the evidence in the trials he organised.

To conclude this analysis of the New Statesman on the Russian purges, it is interestingto quote from an articleKingsleyMartinwrote almost thirty years afterwards:
I was critical of Russia because it seemed to me that after so many years the Soviet Union ought to have been able to rid itself of the political police... But I never thought that a primitive country in its revolutionary period could be judged by the same standards as the western democracies, and I often took the Soviet side just because it was so misrepresented by the capitalist newspapers.... It was not, however, until the great purges that I became outspoken in my criticism of Stalin, not until 1937 or 38 that I remember being denounced as a Trotskyite by Harry Pollitt, in Trafalgar Square.22

By presenting the image of the Russian purges in the Daily Herald and the New Statesman in such detail, it should have become clear that these two papers gave a peculiarly British slant to the purges.

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On the most immediate level both papers were concerned with the impact of the purges on British foreign and domestic affairs. In the field of foreign policy, this was revealed by the alarm that the purge of the eight Red Army generals created; the fear that the FrancoSoviet Pact would be weakened, and nazi aggression stimulated. In domestic policy, the question of the Popular Front, of cooperation with the British communists became increasingly important between 1936 and 1939, the years of the Spanish Civil War. Although the two editors differed in the extent of their criticism of developments in Russia, and their reactions to the idea of a Popular Front in Britain, they both attacked the British Communist Party for following the Moscow line unreservedly.This leads on to the question of the genuine shock and horror that the purges elicited in nearly all the British papers, including the two main papers of the British left. The spectacle of the leading Bolsheviks publicly degrading themselves in court, of Zinoviev and Kamenev begging for the death sentence deeply shocked both Francis Williams and Kingsley Martin, and their articles reflected a constant preoccupation with the terms 'liberty' and 'justice'. Both papers, for example, continually pointed to the contradiction between the provisions of the New Soviet Constitution and the reign of terror and lack of liberty in Russia. The two papers reacted to the moral and analytical problems posed by the purges in different ways. It is interesting to note, however, that in their attempts to come to terms with and understanddevelopments in Russia they relied, with the exception of the Daily Herald's Moscow correspondent and Kingsley Martin's interview with Trotsky, almost exclusively on British sources, unlike the Manchester Guardian, which opened its correspondence columns to Mensheviks and social revolutionary exiles, as well as to communist defectors. In spite of the fact that both editors were deeply depressed and disturbed by the purges and Treason Trials, there were important differences in their reactions and interpretations of them. Part of the explanation for this lies in the different nature of the two papers. The Daily Herald followed the official Labour Party line of distrust and distaste for communism. The New Statesman, on the other hand, was the forum of the intellectual left. As is well known, many intellectuals were alienated from British society in the 1930s and felt drawn by a strong attractiontowards the Soviet Union. This could be seen in the activities of the Left Book Club and the memoirs of writers like Spender and Isherwood. Others looked back to older traditions of English liberalism and Guild socialism. Some intellectuals were

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Marxist but felt no love for the Soviet Union, others supported Trotsky rather than Stalin. Something of the intensity of the split within the left was revealed in the controversies between Palme Dutt, Brailsford and Leonard Woolf. This debate within the left was played out, not only in the correspondence columns of the New Statesman, but in the mind of Kingsley Martin himself. Kingsley Martin felt the same moral repugnance towards the extermination of the old Bolsheviks as did Francis Williams and he also often stated in his editorials that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship. Yet whilst the views of Francis Williams remained firm, Kingsley Martin could never quite make up his mind on the question of the guilt or innocence of the accused. The first two editorials of August 1936 and that of March 1938 reveal a Kingsley Martin who was very sceptical of the charges. Yet the editorial of 5 September 1936 and also his interview with Trotsky indicate that he was by no means convinced of the innocence of the accused. The basic difference in the views of the two editors and the cause of much of Kingsley Martin's hesitations and vacillations lay in his belief that the Soviet regime was a special sort of dictatorship. A socialist regime where the state controlled the means of production should, in his view, receive special consideration. His assumption that the Russian state representedthe forces of progesss made it very difficult for him to adopt a consistent line or provide a convincing explanation of the purges. Francis Williams readily admitted that something had gone wrong with the Soviet Union, but while condemning dictatorships in general, he did not attempt to provide a more sophisticated explanation. At least he was consistent. Kingsley Martin, on the other hand, whilst groping for an explanation, was caught up in his own prejudices. His view that the Russian Revolution represented'the greatest achievement of our century' and that 'it always takes a totally disproportionate amount of steam to accomplish an obviously necessary social change' accounted for the confusions and inconsistencies that permeated the editorial columns of the New Statesman. Kingsley Martin's attempt to reach a compromise between his revulsion against the terror and his ultimate respect for the Soviet social system was typical of the confusion affecting a large section of the British left. His lumping together of moral issues with Marxist doctrines and indeed his belief that the communists were implementing Marx's doctrines were also indicative of confusion among many British left-wingers. Indeed, the evil of the purges as a menace to

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the values of the west, comparable to that taking place in Germany at the same time, was made worse by the inability of so many British intellectuals to appreciate the dimensions of that threat. It is interesting, however, to note some basic similarities between the two papers. Both pictured the Treason Trials as the highlight of the purges and both editors were completely baffled by the confessions. There was no attempt in either paper really to analyze the confessions and the speeches of accused and prosecutor in the Moscow court room. Neither paper attempted to distinguishbetween the pleas of Zinoviev and Kamenevwho degradedthemselves, broken by months of confinement and who were perhaps partiallymotivated by a desire to render a last serviceto the regime, and those like Radek or Bukharin who over-confessed or made many of the charges appear ridiculous. The papers made little attempt to understand the mentality of the accused or to examine the different personalities of the leading Bolsheviks in order to determine their motivation in court. It was not thought necessary to look in any real detail into the faction fighting of the 1920s for the origins of some of the events of the Moscow trials and no attempt was made to see the confessions as the end-product of a long train of earlier retractions and recantations. The emphasis on the confessions tended to restrictthe editors' view of the purges. The courtroom procedure definitely created an image of two rival factions, of a fall-out between Stalin and the other Old Bolsheviks. Both editors did stress the fact that dictatorships, by restricting freedom, tended to channel discontent into active opposition. Yet this view of Soviet Russia diverted attention away from far more significant questions pertainingto the function of the purge. Was the purge necessary, merely to eliminate Stalin's political opponents, or did it have wider implications?Did the purge represent a temporary aberration on the part of Stalin or was it an integral part of the Soviet system? Did the purge have its own inner logic and spontaneity; how much in control of developments were Stalin, the party and the GPU? And how extensive was the scope of the purges? Who were the main victims of the unprecedentedterror that ravaged the Soviet Union, consumed an entire revolutionary generation and swallowed up so many different sections of the population? The Daily Herald was content to condemn the Soviet system as a dictatorship, whilst the New Statesman made some allowances in terms of Russian traditions for the peculiar problems facing the Soviet leaders in carrying out 'the essential economic change of our

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generation'. Neither displayed a sophisticated understanding of the purges and neither attempted to look behind the confessions and the Show Trials to see what was going on deep within Russian society. Finally, the lack of comprehension of what was happening in the Soviet Union, displayed by Kingsley Martin in particular, and also some of the other contributors to the New Statesman, was partly due to their tendency to identify Soviet communism with Marxism. They failed to see the difficulties involved in reconciling the purges as a manifestation of state irrationalismon a hitherto unprecedented scale, with Marxist theories.

Notes
1. The Daily Herald, 25 August 1936, 8. 2. The Daily Herald, 31 August 1936, 8. 3. The Daily Herald, 23 January 1937, 8. 4. The Daily Herald, 30 January 1937, 8. 5. The Daily Herald, 10 June 1937, 2. 6. The Daily Herald, 14 June 1937, 10. 7. The Daily Herald, 10 July 1937, 8. 8. The Daily Herald, 14 March 1938, 10. 9. The New Statesman, vol. XII, no. 288, 29 August 1936, 273-74. 10. The New Statesman, vol. XII, no. 305, 26 December 1936, 1054 - 55. 11. Ibid. 12. Dudley Collard was the author of Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others. 13. The New Statesman, vol. XIII, no. 311, 6 February 1937, 199. 14. The New Statesman, vol. XIII, no. 312, 13 February 1937, 239. 15. The New Statesman, vol. XIII, no. 323, 1 May 1937, 739. 16. The New Statesman, vol. XIV, no. 333, 10 July 1937, 69. 17. The New Statesman, vol. XIV, no. 334, 17 July 1937, 106-07. 18. The New Statesman, vol. XIV, no. 335, 24 July 1937, 144-45. 19. The New Statesman, vol. XIV, no. 336, 31 July 1937, 181 - 82. 20. The New Statesman, vol. XIV, no. 351, 13 November 1937, 790. 21. The New Statesman, vol. XV, no. 367, 5 March 1938, 359. 22. 'Arguing with Keynes', a Memoir by Kingsley Martin published in Encounter, vol. XXIV, no. 2 (February 1965), 76.

Peter Deli is a lecturer in History at the University of Hong Kong. Previously he worked on problems of international communism in Paris and at St. Antony's College, Oxford. He has contributed articles to Survey and is the author of De Budapest a Prague: les sursauts de la gauche francaise (1981).

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