215-614: Harry Pollitt (22 November 1890 – 27 June 1960) was a British communist who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from July 1929 to September 1939 and again from 1941 until his death in 1960. Pollitt spent most of his life advocating communism. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist , Pollitt was an adherent particularly of Joseph Stalin even after Stalin's death and disavowal by Nikita Khrushchev . Pollitt's acts included opposition to
430-622: A Corsier conference they agreed to launch the paper from Munich , where Lenin relocated in September. Containing contributions from prominent European Marxists, Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country's most successful underground publication since 1850s. He first adopted the pseudonym Lenin in December 1901, possibly based on the Siberian River Lena ; he often used the fuller pseudonym of N. Lenin, and while
645-436: A Lutheran by upbringing, was largely indifferent to Christianity , a view that influenced her children. Ilya Ulyanov was from a family of former serfs ; Ilya's father's ethnicity remains unclear, with suggestions that he was of Russian , Chuvash , Mordvin , or Kalmyk ancestry. Despite a lower-class background, he had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan University before teaching at
860-598: A cerebral haemorrhage while returning on the SS Orion from a speaking tour of Australia on 27 June 1960. The liner had departed from Adelaide en route to Fremantle , when, at 2 a.m., Pollitt suffered a stroke. He was cremated at Golders Green on 9 July, and was survived by his wife and two children, Brian and Jean. The Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People's History Museum in Manchester holds
1075-521: A one-party state under the Communist Party . Ideologically a Marxist , his developments to the ideology are called Leninism . Born into a middle-class family in Simbirsk , Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother 's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Tsarist government , he devoted the following years to
1290-528: A one-party state . Within the party, a Political Bureau (Politburo) and Organisation Bureau (Orgburo) were established to accompany the existing Central Committee ; decisions of these bodies had to be adopted by Sovnarkom and the Council of Labour and Defence . Lenin was the most significant figure in this governance structure, being Chairman of Sovnarkom and sitting on the Council of Labour and Defence,
1505-606: A "Trotskyist" and "British spy", though Osip Piatnitsky had refused to confirm these accusations when arrested by the NKVD in 1937. Twenty years after Cohen's death, Pollitt requested information from Moscow about whether she was still alive, stating, untruthfully, that there was press interest in Britain about her whereabouts. In contrast to Pollitt's concern over Rose Cohen, when CPGB member Freda Utley tried to get Pollitt to intercede with Moscow on behalf of her Russian husband, who
1720-949: A "bourgeoisie-democratic revolution" of the middle classes had to take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution. In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in Saint Petersburg, renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the First World War, as industrial workers went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions. The unrest spread to other parts of Russia, and fearing that he would be violently overthrown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The State Duma took over control of
1935-683: A Marxist interpretation of societal development and counter the claims of the Narodniks. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought . In late 1893, Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg . There, he worked as a barrister's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell that called itself the Social-Democrats after the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany . Championing Marxism within
2150-518: A Russian language translation of Marx and Friedrich Engels 's 1848 political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto . He began to read the works of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov , agreeing with Plekhanov's argument that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat , or urban working class, rather than the peasantry. This Marxist perspective contrasted with
2365-540: A bomb. Before the attack could take place, the conspirators were arrested and tried, and Alexander was executed by hanging in May 1887. Despite the emotional trauma of his father's and brother's deaths, Lenin continued studying, graduated from school at the top of his class with a gold medal for exceptional performance, and decided to study law at Kazan University. Upon entering Kazan University in August 1887, Lenin moved into
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#17327974850222580-704: A coalition government with other socialist parties. Though Sovnarkom refused a coalition with the Mensheviks or Socialist-Revolutionaries, it allowed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries five cabinet posts in December 1917. This coalition lasted only until March 1918, when the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries left the government over disagreements about the Bolsheviks' approach to ending the First World War. At their 7th Congress in March 1918,
2795-611: A combination of the names of Stalin ("man of steel" in Russian) and Harry Pollitt. The group around Straight Left exerted considerable influence in the trade union movement, CND , the Anti-Apartheid Movement and amongst some Labour MPs. Under the influence of Eric Hobsbawm on the opposing wing of the party, Martin Jacques became the editor of the party's theoretical journal Marxism Today and rapidly made it
3010-510: A country controlled by the workers and power to the Soviets. Lenin and many other Bolsheviks expected proletariat revolution to sweep across Europe in days or months. The Provisional Government had planned for a Constituent Assembly to be elected in November 1917; despite Lenin's objections, Sovnarkom allowed the vote as scheduled. In the election , the Bolsheviks gained about a quarter of
3225-539: A country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast , in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. He had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the house as a summer home. In September 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to the city of Samara , where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko 's socialist discussion circle. There, Lenin fully embraced Marxism and produced
3440-467: A crisis in 1968 when Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia . The CPGB, with memories of 1956 in mind, responded with some very mild criticism of Moscow, refusing to call it an invasion, preferring "intervention". Three days after the invasion, John Gollan said "we completely understand the concern of the Soviet Union about the security of the socialist camp ... we speak as true friends of
3655-666: A culturally Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire , he used Jagiellonian University 's library to conduct research. He stayed in close contact with the RSDLP, which was operating in the Russian Empire, convincing the Duma's Bolshevik members to split from their parliamentary alliance with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, Stalin, whom Lenin referred to as the "wonderful Georgian", visited him, and they discussed
3870-492: A family life with Nadya's mother Elizaveta Vasilyevna, in Shushenskoye the couple translated English socialist literature into Russian. There, Lenin wrote A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats to criticise German Marxist revisionists like Eduard Bernstein who advocated a peaceful, electoral path to socialism. He also finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), his longest book to date, which criticised
4085-670: A federation of left-wing bodies, only having allowed individual membership since 1918. However, despite the support of James Maxton , the Independent Labour Party leader, the Labour Party decided against the affiliation of the Communist Party. Even while pursuing affiliation and seeking to influence Labour Party members, however, the CPGB promoted candidates of its own at parliamentary elections. Following
4300-528: A job in Nizhny Novgorod , rising to become Director of Primary Schools in the Simbirsk district six years later. Five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. In January 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir , which bestowed on him
4515-523: A key blue-collar union. In addition, much of the Labour Party left was strongly influenced by the party. Dissidents were few, perhaps the most notable being Eric Heffer , the future Labour MP who left the party in the late 1940s. In 1954, the party solidified its opposition to British racial segregation , with the publication of A Man's a Man: A Study of the Colour Bar in Birmingham . Although
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#17327974850224730-548: A law degree before relocating to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and becoming a prominent Marxist activist. In 1897, Lenin was arrested for sedition and exiled to Siberia for three years. He then moved to Western Europe, where he became a key figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party . In the party's 1903 schism, he led his Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov 's Mensheviks . Lenin briefly returned to Russia during
4945-725: A meeting in Bermondsey which Mann and Pollitt were due to attend that was to be the culmination of the 1934 Hunger March. Pollitt travelled again to Moscow in 1935. Whilst there he was invited to make a broadcast on the BBC radio programme The Citizen and His Government , commenting on the difference between the UK and the USSR. However, the invitation was withdrawn after opposition from the Foreign Office. He would not appear on BBC radio until
5160-581: A meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 October, where he again argued that the party should lead an armed insurrection to topple the Provisional Government. This time the argument won with ten votes against two. Critics of the plan, Zinoviev and Kamenev, argued that Russian workers would not support a violent coup against the regime and that there was no clear evidence for Lenin's assertion that all of Europe
5375-594: A multi-party Constituent Assembly , but by 1918 centralised power in the new Communist Party. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror , and tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. Responding to devastation, famine , and popular uprisings, Lenin reversed his policy of war communism in 1921, and encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy . His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in
5590-400: A nearby flat. There, he joined a zemlyachestvo , a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. This group elected him as its representative to the university's zemlyachestvo council, and he took part in a December demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested Lenin and accused him of being a ringleader in
5805-474: A news sheet, Rabochee delo ( Workers' Cause ), he was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition. Refused legal representation or bail, Lenin denied all charges against him but remained imprisoned for a year before sentencing. He spent this time theorising and writing. In this work he noted that the rise of industrial capitalism in Russia had caused large numbers of peasants to move to
6020-544: A number of other ships laden with arms for Poland, including the Danish steamer Neptune on 1 May 1920, and two Belgian barges. In August 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was founded by an agreement unifying various left-wing bodies, including the British Socialist Party , of which Pollitt was a member in addition to his WSF membership. Pollitt, thus a founding member of the party, attended
6235-578: A number of parliamentary elections, but did not win any. His first electoral outing was in the Durham, Seaham constituency in 1929, where he received 1,431 votes (2.9% of the total vote). He then contested the London East End Stepney, Whitechapel, and St. George 's constituency in 1930, where he received 2,106 votes (9.6% of votes). He contested the same constituency again in 1931 and received 2,658 votes (11.2% of vote). In 1933 he contested
6450-645: A part of the Meerut Conspiracy Case . Their trial helped to raise British public awareness of British colonialism in India , and caused massive public outrage over their treatment. At the same time, Asian and African delegates to the Comintern such as Ho Chi Minh , M. N. Roy , and Sen Katayama criticized the GBCP for neglecting colonial issues in India and Ireland . But this support built during
6665-556: A passage for them through Germany, with which Russia was then at war. Recognising that these dissidents could cause problems for their Russian enemies, the German government agreed to permit 32 Russian citizens to travel by train through their territory, among them Lenin and his wife. For political reasons, Lenin and the Germans agreed to a cover story that Lenin had travelled by sealed train carriage through German territory, but in fact
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6880-454: A programme, The British Road to Socialism (officially adopted at the 22nd Congress in April 1952), which explicitly advocated the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism – but only after it had been personally approved by Joseph Stalin himself, according to some historians. The BRS would remain the programme of the CPGB until its dissolution in 1991 albeit in amended form and today
7095-480: A pure communist society . He began arguing for a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection to topple the government, but at a clandestine meeting of the party's central committee this idea was rejected. Lenin then headed by train and by foot to Finland, arriving at Helsinki on 10 August, where he hid away in safe houses belonging to Bolshevik sympathisers. In August 1917, while Lenin was in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov ,
7310-474: A revolutionary government which took steps towards socialism, while his critics accuse him of establishing a dictatorship which oversaw mass killings and political repression . Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in Streletskaya Ulitsa, Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk , on 22 April 1870, and baptised six days later; as a child, he was known as Volodya the common nickname variant of Vladimir. He
7525-409: A scandal." Pollitt also tasked Gray, whose class background would make her less conspicuous aboard an ocean liner than the CPGB's mostly working-class membership, with delivering money, instructions, and a questionnaire to a contact in India. The strain of this mission caused Gray to resign as Pollitt's secretary, though she remained in touch with Percy Glading, and in 1937 provided evidence that led to
7740-424: A series of Petrograd safe houses. Fearing that he would be killed, Lenin and fellow senior Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev escaped Petrograd in disguise, relocating to Razliv . There, Lenin began work on the book that became The State and Revolution , an exposition on how he believed the socialist state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on the state would gradually wither away, leaving
7955-553: A significant publication for Eurocommunist opinions in the party, and eventually for revisionist tendencies in the wider liberal-left , in particular for the soft left around Neil Kinnock in the Labour Party. Although the circulation of the magazine rose it was still a drain on the finances of the small party. Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [ O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin ,
8170-464: A sinking ship. According to the Party's official historian , this period was marked by a growing division between the practitioners of cultural politics – heavily inspired by the writings of Antonio Gramsci and party's powerful industrial department which advocated a policy of militant labourism . The cultural politics wing had dominated the party's youth wing in the 1960s and was also powerful in
8385-425: A speech to Bolshevik supporters condemning the Provisional Government and again calling for a continent-wide European proletarian revolution. Over the following days, he spoke at Bolshevik meetings, lambasting those who wanted reconciliation with the Mensheviks and revealing his " April Theses ", an outline of his plans for the Bolsheviks, which he had written on the journey from Switzerland. He publicly condemned both
8600-630: A spy, Roman Malinovsky , to act as a vocal Lenin supporter within the party. Various Bolsheviks expressed their suspicions about Malinovsky to Lenin, although it is unclear if the latter was aware of the spy's duplicity; it is possible that he used Malinovsky to feed false information to the Okhrana. In August 1910, Lenin attended the 8th Congress of the Second International , an international meeting of socialists, in Copenhagen as
8815-416: Is also commemorated in the song "The Ballad of Harry Pollitt", which was originally written during his lifetime, and hence inaccurately describes his murder. The American folk band The Limeliters included the song on their 1961 album The Slightly Fabulous Limeliters . The song was heavily criticised in the April 1972 edition of Marxism Today , the official journal of the CPGB, as "sickening" and "full of
Harry Pollitt - Misplaced Pages Continue
9030-605: Is the programme of the breakaway Communist Party of Britain . From the war years to 1956 the CPGB was at the height of its influence in the labour movement with many union officials who were members. Not only did it have immense influence in the National Union of Mineworkers but it was extremely influential in the Electrical Trade Union and in the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers ,
9245-674: The 1945 election . When Pollitt's personal friend Rose Cohen , to whom he had proposed marriage on a number of occasions, was put on trial in Moscow in 1937 during Stalin's Great Purge , the CPGB opposed efforts by the British government to get Cohen released, describing her arrest as an internal affair of the Soviet Union. Pollitt privately tried to intervene on her behalf, but by the time he did so she had already been shot. Pollitt placed himself at risk by questioning Cohen's arrest in this fashion, as Béla Kun had, under torture, identified him as
9460-482: The 1950 general election . The Party was keen to demonstrate its loyalty to Britain's industrial competitiveness as a stepping point towards socialism. At the 19th Congress, Harry Pollitt asked rhetorically, "Why do we need to increase production?" He answered: "To pay for what we are compelled to import. To retain our independence as a nation." The party's membership peaked during 1943, reaching around 60,000. Despite boasting some leading intellectuals, especially among
9675-705: The British Fascists , were acquitted by the jury following testimony that characterised the "kidnapping" as unserious and a denial from the head of the Liverpool branch of the fascist party that they had authorised any kidnapping of Pollitt. The Labour party conference that year passed a motion condemning the acquittal by the jury of those accused of kidnapping Pollitt as an example of class-prejudice , and calling for representation of workers on juries. On 10 October 1925, Pollitt married Marjorie Brewer at Caxton Hall , Westminster. Marjorie Edna Brewer (1902–1991)
9890-550: The Communist International was committed to implementing the decisions of the higher body to which it was subordinate. This proved to be a mixed blessing in the General Strike of 1926 immediately prior to which much of the central leadership of the CPGB was imprisoned. Twelve were charged with " seditious conspiracy ". Five were jailed for a year and the others for six months. Another major problem for
10105-566: The Communist Party Historians Group , the party was still tiny compared to its continental European counterparts. The French Communist Party for instance had 800,000 members, and the Italian Communist Party had 1.7 million members, before Benito Mussolini outlawed it in 1926. The Party tried, unsuccessfully, to affiliate to the Labour Party in 1935, 1943 and 1946. In 1951, the party issued
10320-637: The Communist Party of Britain , which still exists today. The Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in 1920 after the Third International decided that greater attempts should be made to establish communist parties across the world. The CPGB was formed by the merger of several smaller Marxist parties, including the British Socialist Party , the Communist Unity Group of the Socialist Labour Party and
10535-702: The Derbyshire, Clay Cross constituency and received 3,434 votes (10.6% of the vote). In a 1940 by-election in the Silvertown division of West Ham he received only 966 votes (6.2% of the vote) to the Labour candidate's 14,343. He stood as the CPGB candidate for election in Rhondda East in South Wales three times. In 1935, he lost to the Labour candidate 61.8% to 38.2%, with a margin of 8,433 votes. In
10750-833: The French Communist Party , which had supported conscription in France. During the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War Pollitt visited the country five times, each time giving speeches to the British Battalion that was part of one of the International Brigades supporting the Republican side . Pollitt also played a role in approving or vetoing applications from British volunteers to join the International Brigades. One such veto
10965-500: The Hungarian Revolution of November 1956 made the CPGB crisis worse, particularly as the party had taken the position that the Eastern Bloc countries, of which Hungary was one, were allowed to do what they pleased. Pollitt supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary, stating that it had "saved Hungary from fascism". Most of the party's intellectual figures, including Doris Lessing and E. P. Thompson , and many ordinary members resigned. Others, for example Eric Hobsbawm , chose to stay in
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#173279748502211180-399: The July Days , took place while Lenin was away, but upon learning that demonstrators had violently clashed with government forces, he returned to Petrograd and called for calm. Responding to the violence, the government ordered the arrest of Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks, raiding their offices, and publicly alleging that he was a German agent provocateur . Evading arrest, Lenin hid in
11395-412: The Liberal Party introducing a motion to establish an inquiry into the Labour government, which led to its resignation. The affair of the forged Zinoviev Letter occurred during the subsequent general election late October 1924. Intended to suggest that the Communist Party in Britain was engaged in subversive activities among the British Armed Forces and elsewhere, the forgery's aim was to promote
11610-422: The Marshall Plan , calling it a war plan, and called for Ernest Bevin , the then Foreign Secretary, to be fired over what he described as the deliberate prolongation of the talks on the Marshall Plan and the economic impact of Bevin's policies. In 1951 the CPGB adopted The British Road To Socialism as their party programme, replacing For Soviet Britain . The programme, which was championed by Pollitt, committed
11825-408: The Member of Parliament Cecil L'Estrange Malone joined the CPGB. A few days after the founding conference the new party published the first issue of its weekly newspaper, which was called the Communist and edited by Raymond Postgate . In January 1921, the CPGB was refounded after the majorities of Sylvia Pankhurst 's group the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) , and
12040-468: The N did not stand for anything, a popular misconception later arose that it represented Nikolai . Under this pseudonym, in 1902 he published his most influential publication to date, the pamphlet What Is to Be Done? , which outlined his thoughts on the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution. Nadya joined Lenin in Munich and became his secretary. They continued their political agitation, as Lenin wrote for Iskra and drafted
12255-445: The October Revolution , in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the regime. Lenin's government redistributed land to the peasantry, issued a number of legislative decrees , nationalised banks and industry, withdrew from the war by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers , and promoted world revolution through the Communist International . It initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and allowed
12470-462: The Paris Commune of 1871 , which he considered an early prototype for a proletarian government. Financed by his mother, he stayed in a Swiss health spa before travelling to Berlin , where he studied for six weeks at the Staatsbibliothek and met the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht . Returning to Russia with a stash of illegal revolutionary publications, he travelled to various cities distributing literature to striking workers. While involved in producing
12685-445: The Penza Institute for the Nobility . In mid-1863, Ilya married Maria, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy Swedish Lutheran mother and a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician. According to historian Petrovsky-Shtern , it is likely that Lenin was unaware of his mother's half-Jewish ancestry, which was only discovered by Anna after his death. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained
12900-505: The Port of London . Whilst there, Pollitt helped convince London dock workers not to load the freighter SS Jolly George on 10 May 1920, as she was bound with munitions for Poland , which at that time was fighting against Soviet Russia in the Polish–Soviet War . With support from Ernest Bevin , then a senior official in the dockers' union, the ship's owners were forced by the dockers to unload her cargo of munitions, and she sailed on 15 May 1920 without them. Pollitt failed to prevent
13115-419: The South Wales Socialist Society . The party also gained the support of the Guild Communists faction of the National Guilds League , assorted shop stewards ' and workers' committees, socialist clubs and individuals and many former members of the Hands Off Russia campaign. Several branches and many individual members of the Independent Labour Party also affiliated. As a member of the British Socialist Party,
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#173279748502213330-422: The TUC's policy of opposing the Industrial Relations Act . In the view of their opponents on the cultural or Eurocommunist wing, they were out of touch with the real changes in working people's lives and attitudes. As the seventies progressed and as industrial militancy declined in the face of high unemployment, the tensions in the party rose even as its membership continued to decline. By 1977, debate around
13545-405: The Vietnam War . In 1984, the leader of the CPGB's youth wing, Mark Ashton , founded Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners . From 1956 until the late 1970s, the party was funded by the Soviet Union . After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the party's Eurocommunist leadership disbanded the party, establishing the Democratic Left . In 1988 the anti-Eurocommunist faction launched
13760-432: The independence of colonies was emphasised. In the 1945 general election , the Communist Party received 103,000 votes, and two Communists were elected as members of parliament : Willie Gallacher was returned, and Phil Piratin was newly elected as the MP for Mile End in London's East End . Harry Pollitt failed by only 972 votes to take the Rhondda East constituency. Both Communist MPs, however, lost their seats in
13975-425: The streets the party members played a leading role in the struggle against the British Union of Fascists , led by Sir Oswald Mosley whose Blackshirts tried to emulate the Nazis in anti-Semitic actions in London and other major British cities. The Communist Party's Oxford branch under the leadership of Abraham Lazarus managed to successfully contain and defeat the rise of fascism in the city of Oxford, forcing
14190-431: The "Class-against-Class" policy. In 1929 the CPGB elected Pollitt General Secretary with Joseph Stalin's personal approval. Pollitt replaced Albert Inkpin , who had attracted disapproval from the Comintern by opposing the "Class-against-Class" policy and perceived softness towards others on the left. On his appointment, Stalin told him, "You have taken a difficult job on, but I believe you will tackle it all right". Pollitt
14405-426: The "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats ; around 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894. Hoping to cement connections between his Social-Democrats and Emancipation of Labour , a group of Russian Marxists based in Switzerland , Lenin visited the country to meet group members Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod . He proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and to research
14620-405: The 1923 Labour Party Conference . In 1923, the party renamed its newspaper as the Workers Weekly . In 1923, the Workers' Weekly published a letter by J. R. Campbell urging British Army soldiers not to fire on striking workers. The Labour government of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald prosecuted him under the Incitement to Disaffection Act but withdrew the charges upon review. This led to
14835-426: The 1945 general election he came within a thousand votes of winning the seat from the Labour candidate, with 15,761 votes (45.5% of the vote) compared to the Labour candidate's 16,733 votes (48.4% of the vote). In 1950 he suffered a heavy defeat, receiving only 4,463 votes (12.7% of the vote) compared to the Labour candidate's 26,645 votes (75.9% of the vote). After years of worsening health, Pollitt died at age 69 of
15050-457: The Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and Polish–Soviet War , support for the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War , both support for and opposition to the war against Nazi Germany , defence of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia , and support for the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary . He contested a number of parliamentary elections, but never won, despite coming close in 1945. Throughout his time as leader of CPGB, he
15265-403: The Blackshirts to retreat from the town and into the relative safety of Oxford University after the Battle of Carfax . With the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the CPGB initially continued to support the struggle on two fronts (against Chamberlain at home and Nazi fascism abroad). Following the Molotov–Ribbentrop nonaggression pact on 23 August between the Soviet Union and Germany,
15480-514: The Bolshevik Centre to Paris; although Lenin disagreed, he moved to the city in December 1908. Lenin disliked Paris, lambasting it as "a foul hole", and while there he sued a motorist who knocked him off his bike. Lenin became very critical of Bogdanov's view that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture to become a successful revolutionary vehicle. Instead, Lenin favoured a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia who would lead
15695-743: The Bolshevik faction between his and Bogdanov's followers, accusing the latter of deviating from Marxism. In May 1908, Lenin lived briefly in London, where he used the British Museum Reading Room to write Materialism and Empirio-criticism , an attack on what he described as the "bourgeois-reactionary falsehood" of Bogdanov's relativism. Lenin's factionalism began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including his former close supporters Alexei Rykov and Lev Kamenev . The Okhrana exploited his factionalist attitude by sending
15910-550: The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda , and giving public speeches in Petrograd aimed at converting workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants to his cause. Sensing growing frustration among Bolshevik supporters, Lenin suggested an armed political demonstration in Petrograd to test the government's response. Amid deteriorating health, he left the city to recuperate in the Finnish village of Neivola. The Bolsheviks' armed demonstration,
16125-729: The Bolsheviks changed their name from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the Russian Communist Party, as Lenin wanted to distance his group from the increasingly reformist German Social Democratic Party and emphasize its goal of a communist society. Although ultimate power officially rested with Sovnarkom and the Executive Committee (VTSIK) elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (ARCS),
16340-685: The Bolsheviks regained dominance of the RSDLP at its Fifth Congress , held in London in May 1907. As the Tsarist government cracked down on opposition, both by disbanding Russia's legislative assembly, the Second Duma , and by ordering its secret police, the Okhrana , to arrest revolutionaries, Lenin fled Finland for Switzerland. There, he tried to exchange those banknotes stolen in Tiflis that had identifiable serial numbers on them. Alexander Bogdanov and other prominent Bolsheviks decided to relocate
16555-576: The Bolsheviks split completely with the Mensheviks; many Bolsheviks refused, and both groups attended the Third RSDLP Congress , held in London in April 1905. Lenin presented many of his ideas in the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution , published in August 1905. Here, he predicted that Russia's liberal bourgeoisie would be sated by a transition to constitutional monarchy and thus betray
16770-485: The Bolsheviks to return to the open political arena. Fearing a counter-revolution from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet had been instrumental in pressuring the government to normalise relations with the Bolsheviks. Both the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their affiliation with
16985-592: The Bolsheviks' activities, Lenin endorsed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Under the lead of Leonid Krasin , a group of Bolsheviks began carrying out such criminal actions, the best-known taking place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks acting under the leadership of Joseph Stalin committed an armed robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis , Georgia. Although he briefly supported
17200-612: The British Bureau as "not an organisation of unions, but only of revolutionary minorities of unions". On the founding of the National Minority Movement (NMM) in 1924, the British Bureau was folded into it and Pollitt was made its national secretary, a position he remained in until 1929. As secretary of the NMM, Pollitt opposed trying to form new communist-oriented unions aimed at replacing established unions under
17415-603: The CPGB by 1963. McCreery himself died in New Zealand in 1965. Later a more significant group formed around Reg Birch , an engineering union official, established the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) . Initially, this group supported the position of the Chinese Communist Party during the Sino-Soviet split. Divisions in the CPGB concerning the autonomy of the party from Moscow reached
17630-470: The CPGB should abandon its "United Front" policy and campaign as widely as possible at the next election, even where the CPGB stood no chance of winning and would draw votes away from the Labour candidate, thus allowing the Conservatives to win. This policy of attacking other left-wing organisations was known as the "Class-against-Class" policy, and remained in place until 1932 when, as leader, Pollitt
17845-564: The CPGB to independence from Moscow, and a constitutional or parliamentary (as opposed to revolutionary) path to power. Additionally, it stated that the CPGB was committed to decision-making through internal party democracy. In spite of these commitments, the programme had actually been personally dictated to Pollitt by Stalin in a series of secret meetings in the Kremlin. On the death of Stalin , Pollitt wrote that he had been "the greatest man of our time". He went on to say that "[n]ever before in
18060-542: The CPGB was forced to recant these attacks. Pollitt faced another crisis when Khrushchev, in his 1956 Secret Speech , attacked the legacy of Stalin. Pollitt's embarrassment was heightened by the fact that he had been present in Moscow for the party congress at which the speech took place, but along with the other foreign delegates had been excluded from the session at which it had been given. Pollitt, suffering from worsening health in his final years, resigned as General Secretary in May 1956, with John Gollan succeeding him, and
18275-475: The CPGB was very active in supporting strikes and in denouncing the government for its pursuit of the war. However, when in 1941 the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany , the CPGB came out in support of the war on the grounds of defense of the Soviet Union against fascism. Pollitt was restored to his former position as Party Secretary. The party then launched a campaign for a Second Front in order to support
18490-471: The CPGB with the Labour Party. On instructions from Georgi Dimitrov in Moscow, Pollitt was retained in a six-member political bureau after his removal. He was reinstated as the leader of the CPGB after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 , again in response to instructions received from Moscow. Moscow also overturned Dutt's previous position of criticising the Churchill government and characterising
18705-486: The CPGB's "code holder". Contact ceased when he resigned as leader of the CPGB, and the secret code used to communicate with him was changed, though it was re-established in 1941. From 1931, Olga Gray , an MI5 agent, infiltrated the party, and was for a time Pollitt's personal secretary. In Operation MASK (1934–1937), John Tiltman and his colleagues of the Government Code and Cypher School were able to crack
18920-466: The CPGB's founding "Utility Convention". The following year Pollitt visited the Soviet Union. During his visit, he met and shook hands with Vladimir Lenin , an experience he later described as the greatest day of his life. According to the October 1921 issue of Freedom , on his return Pollitt stated that he had seen evidence that Russian anarchists were plotting to restore Tsarism and spoke approvingly of
19135-584: The CPGB's only representative in Parliament was in the House of Lords , gained when Wogan Philipps , the son of a ship-owner and a long-standing member of the CPGB inherited the title of Lord Milford when his father died in 1963. The Daily Worker was renamed the Morning Star in 1966. At the same time, the party became increasingly polarised between those who sought to maintain close relations with
19350-747: The Central Committee, and the Politburo. The only individual with comparable influence was Lenin's right-hand man, Yakov Sverdlov , who died in March 1919 as a result of the Spanish flu pandemic. In November 1917, Lenin and his wife took a two-room flat within the Smolny Institute; the following month, they went on a brief holiday in Halila, Finland. In January 1918, he survived an assassination attempt in Petrograd; Fritz Platten , who
19565-506: The Comintern changed its position, describing the war as the product of imperialism on both sides, in which the working class had no side to take. The CPGB central committee followed the directive, changing to an anti-war stance. This change was opposed by Harry Pollitt and J. R. Campbell , the editor of the Daily Worker , and both were relieved of their duties in October 1939. Pollitt was replaced by Palme Dutt . From 1939 until 1941
19780-451: The Comintern line received from Moscow on 14 September, and reiterated by the CPGB's Comintern representative on 24 September (as Rajani Palme Dutt , who succeeded him as General Secretary, had warned him it would be), he was forced to resign. By November 1939, Pollitt had disavowed his previous pro-war position, saying that by supporting the war he had "played into the hands of the class enemy". During 1940–41, under instructions from Moscow,
19995-469: The Communist Party was de facto in control of Russia, as acknowledged by its members at the time. By 1918, Sovnarkom began acting unilaterally, citing a need for expediency, with the ARCS and VTSIK becoming increasingly marginalized, so the soviets no longer had a role in governing Russia. During 1918 and 1919, the government expelled Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets. Russia had become
20210-531: The Communists had always opposed both racial segregation and British colonialism, this publication made clearer the party's position, and also had an enduring influence on British anti-racist politics outside the party. The death of Stalin in 1953, and the uprising in East Germany the same year had little direct influence on the CPGB, but they were harbingers of what was to come. Of more importance
20425-533: The Highest Stage of Capitalism , which argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism , as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that war between the imperialist powers would continue until they were overthrown by proletariat revolution and socialism established. He spent much of this time reading
20640-600: The Labour Party and even with forces to the right of Labour. In the 1935 general election Willie Gallacher was elected as the Communist Party's first MP in six years, and their first MP elected against Labour opposition. Gallacher sat for West Fife in Scotland , a coal mining region in which it had considerable support. During the 1930s the CPGB opposed the National Government 's European policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy . On
20855-467: The Labour Party did not reciprocate. As a result, rather than putting up 50 candidates as had been proposed, the CPGB put up candidates in only 21 seats, of whom only two were returned. Pollitt supported the 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia , characterising it as the work of "millions of lads" who were "led by their Shop stewards " to overthrow capitalism. During 1948 Pollitt also condemned
21070-547: The Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat. Enraged at the Mensheviks, Lenin resigned from the Iskra editorial board and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back . The stress made Lenin ill, and to recuperate he holidayed in Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by spring 1905, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded
21285-503: The Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet , for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. Considering the government to be just as imperialist as the Tsarist regime, he advocated immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, rule by soviets , the nationalisation of industry and banks, and the state expropriation of land, all with
21500-501: The National Women's Advisory Committee. Martin Jacques , on the executive committee since 1967, replaced James Klugmann as editor of Marxism Today in 1977. Its turn to Eurocommunism was prefigured by what Andrews describes as Sarah Benton's "radical and heretical" stint as editor of the fortnightly review Comment . Critics from the past, like Eric Hobsbawm and Monty Johnstone, also gained influence. The Euro-Communists in
21715-408: The Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet. In September, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the workers' sections of both the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets. Recognising that the situation was safer for him, Lenin returned to Petrograd. There he attended
21930-801: The RSDLP programme, attacking ideological dissenters and external critics, particularly the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), a Narodnik agrarian-socialist group founded in 1901. Despite remaining a Marxist, he accepted the Narodnik view on the revolutionary power of the Russian peasantry, accordingly, penning the 1903 pamphlet To the Village Poor . To evade Bavarian police, Lenin moved to London with Iskra in April 1902, where he befriended fellow Russian-Ukrainian Marxist Leon Trotsky . Lenin fell ill with erysipelas and
22145-748: The RSDLP's representative, following this with a holiday in Stockholm with his mother. With his wife and sisters, he then moved to France, settling first in Bombon and then Paris. Here, he became a close friend to the French Bolshevik Inessa Armand ; some biographers suggest that they had an extra-marital affair from 1910 to 1912. Meanwhile, at a Paris meeting in June 1911, the RSDLP Central Committee decided to move their focus of operations back to Russia, ordering
22360-526: The Russian Civil War, after which several non-Russian nations that had broken away from the empire after 1917 were re-united in the new Soviet Union in 1922; others, notably Poland, gained independence. Lenin suffered three debilitating strokes in 1922 and 1923 before his death in 1924, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government. Widely considered one of
22575-761: The Russian Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic . The government also switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar , aligning Russia with Europe. In November 1917, Sovnarkom abolished Russia's legal system, replacing it with "revolutionary conscience". Courts were replaced by Revolutionary Tribunals for counter-revolutionary crimes, and People's Courts for civil and criminal cases, instructed to follow Sovnarkom decrees and
22790-703: The Scottish Communist Labour Party agreed to unity. The party benefited from a period of increased political radicalism in Britain just after the First World War and the Russian Revolution of October 1917 , and was also represented in Britain by the Red Clydeside movement. During the negotiations leading to the initiation of the party, a number of issues were hotly contested. Among the most contentious were
23005-515: The Soviet Union and those who sought to convert the party into a force independent of Moscow. The Sino-Soviet split in 1961 led to divisions within many Communist Parties but there was little pro-Beijing sympathy in the relatively small British Party. Perhaps the best known of the tiny minority of CPGB members who opposed the Moscow line was Michael McCreery, who formed the Committee to Defeat Revisionism, for Communist Unity . This tiny group left
23220-576: The Soviet Union and to CPSU General Secretary Joseph Stalin. He was a defender of the Moscow Trials , in which Stalin murdered or otherwise disposed of his political and military opponents. In the Daily Worker of 12 March 1936 Pollitt told the world that "the trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress". The article was illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov , whose likeness would be retouched out of
23435-530: The Soviet Union". Even this response provoked a small localised split by the so-called Appeal Group which was in many respects a precursor of the 1977 split which formed the New Communist Party . From this time onwards, the most traditionally-minded elements in the CPGB were referred to as ' Tankies ' by their internal opponents, due to their support of the Warsaw Pact forces. Others within
23650-548: The Soviet Union. One 1936 coded instruction advised Pollitt to publicise the plight of Ernst Thälmann , a German Communist leader who had been arrested by the Nazis and who later died at Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Pollitt replied that he was "having difficulties" getting British statesmen to make public declarations supporting Thälmann but that they promised they would speak privately with German officials in London . In one of
23865-548: The USSR and speed the defeat of the Axis powers . In industry, they now opposed strike action and supported the Joint Production Committees, which aimed to increase productivity, and supported the National Government that was led by Winston Churchill (Conservative) and Clement Attlee (Labour). At the same time, given the influence of Rajani Palme Dutt in the Party, the issue of Indian independence and
24080-606: The Welsh miners, fought off attempts to found a similar union on his patch. But even if the Third Period was by all conventional standards a total political failure it was the 'heroic' period of British communism and one of its campaigns did have impact beyond its ranks. This was the National Unemployed Workers' Movement led by Wal Hannington . Increasing unemployment had caused a substantial increase in
24295-754: The agrarian-socialists and promoted a Marxist analysis of Russian economic development. Published under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilin, upon publication it received predominantly poor reviews. After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900. There, he began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra ( Spark ), a new organ of the Russian Marxist party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In July 1900, Lenin left Russia for Western Europe; in Switzerland he met other Russian Marxists, and at
24510-488: The bosses out for the hardships that she suffered". Pollitt later became a boilermaker and metal craftsman. During the First World War , Pollitt was exempt from conscription as a skilled worker. Pollitt gained experience leading a strike in Southampton in 1915 and later described being inspired by the 1917 October Revolution , saying it showed that "workers like me ... had defeated the boss class". By this time Pollitt
24725-446: The cities, where they formed a proletariat. From his Marxist perspective, Lenin argued that this Russian proletariat would develop class consciousness , which would in turn lead them to violently overthrow Tsarism , the aristocracy , and the bourgeoisie and to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat that would move toward socialism. In February 1897, Lenin was sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia. He
24940-558: The city of Kazan , but not the university. On his return, he joined Nikolai Fedoseev 's revolutionary circle, through which he discovered Karl Marx 's 1867 book Capital . This sparked his interest in Marxism , a socio-political theory that argued that society developed in stages, that this development resulted from class struggle , and that capitalist society would ultimately give way to socialist society and then communist society . Wary of his political views, Lenin's mother bought
25155-656: The civil war for freedom is blazing up. Moscow and the South, the Caucasus and Poland are ready to join the proletariat of St. Petersburg. The slogan of the workers has become: Death or Freedom! — Lenin on the Revolution of 1905 In response to the revolution of 1905, which had failed to overthrow the government, Tsar Nicholas II accepted a series of liberal reforms in his October Manifesto . In this climate, Lenin felt it safe to return to Saint Petersburg. Joining
25370-582: The closure of the Bolshevik Centre and its newspaper, Proletari . Seeking to rebuild his influence in the party, Lenin arranged for a party conference to be held in Prague in January 1912, and although 16 of the 18 attendants were Bolsheviks, he was heavily criticised for his factionalist tendencies and failed to boost his status within the party. Moving to Kraków in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria ,
25585-681: The coalfields, certain industrial cities such as Glasgow and in Jewish East London . Indeed, Maerdy in the Rhondda Valley along with Chopwell in Tyne and Wear were two of a number of communities known as Little Moscow for their Communist tendencies. During the 1920s, the CPGB clandestinely worked to train the future leaders of India's first communist party. Some of the key activists charged with this task, Philip Spratt and Ben Bradley , were later arrested and convicted as
25800-583: The code and decrypt radio messages between Moscow and some of its foreign parties, such as the CPGB. They revealed the Comintern 's close supervision of the Communist Party and Pollitt, as well as the substantial financial support the CPGB received from Moscow. Among other things, Pollitt was instructed to refute news leaks about a Stalinist purge. Some messages were addressed to code names, while others were signed by Pollitt himself. In his transmissions to Moscow, Pollitt regularly pleaded for more funding from
26015-489: The collection of the Communist Party of Great Britain . This collection includes the papers of Pollitt, which covers the years 1920 to 1960. In 1971, a Soviet-operated, East German-built Type 17 merchant ship was named after Pollitt. The ship was renamed Natalie in 1996 and scrapped the next year. A plaque dedicated to the memory of Pollitt was unveiled by the Mayor of Tameside on 22 March 1995 outside Droylsden Library. He
26230-478: The commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Premier Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members, for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend the city. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd, but the events had allowed
26445-408: The continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In July 1916, Lenin's mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. Her death deeply affected him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution. In September 1917, Lenin published Imperialism,
26660-554: The conviction of Glading on spying charges. CPGB members, including Harry Pollitt, were the subject of continual monitoring efforts by the British security services throughout the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. These included the planting of a listening device in their King Street offices in 1942. MI5 also had an unidentified source close to Percy Glading who regularly reported Pollitt's doings to them (including Pollitt's dissatisfaction with Reg Birch ), whilst both MI5 and Special Branch had sources at Pollitt's 60th birthday celebrations. With
26875-559: The country, establishing the Russian Provisional Government and converting the Empire into a new Russian Republic . When Lenin learned of this from his base in Switzerland, he celebrated with other dissidents. He decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict. He organised a plan with other dissidents to negotiate
27090-416: The demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate. There, he read voraciously, becoming enamoured with Nikolay Chernyshevsky 's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done? Lenin's mother was concerned by her son's radicalisation, and was instrumental in convincing the Interior Ministry to allow him to return to
27305-404: The dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943 to apply again to affiliate with the Labour Party. However, this was again rejected by Labour's central committee, who again cited the CPGB's previous opposition to the war against Nazi Germany. At the 1945 general election, Politt's CPGB pursued a "Progressive Majority" strategy, and sought to coordinate its electoral strategy with the Labour Party, though
27520-446: The editorial board of Novaya Zhizn ( New Life ), a radical legal newspaper run by Maria Andreyeva , he used it to discuss issues facing the RSDLP. He encouraged the party to seek out a much wider membership, and advocated the continual escalation of violent confrontation, believing both to be necessary for a successful revolution. Recognising that membership fees and donations from a few wealthy sympathisers were insufficient to finance
27735-452: The electoral chances of the Conservative Party in the general election of 29 October; it was probably the work of SIS (MI6) or White Russian counter-revolutionaries . After Labour lost to the Conservative Party in the election, it blamed the Zinoviev Letter for its defeat. In the aftermath of the Campbell Case and the Zinoviev letter, Labour expelled Communist Party members and banned them from running as its parliamentary candidates in
27950-426: The existing organisations of the working class. Lenin argued that if such organisations gained power, they would demonstrate that they were not really on the side of the working class, thus workers would become disillusioned and come over to supporting the Communist Party. Lenin's opinion prevailed eventually. Initially, therefore, the CPGB attempted to work within the Labour Party, which at this time operated mainly as
28165-406: The failed Revolution of 1905 , and during the First World War campaigned for its transformation into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution , which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the end of capitalism and the rise of socialism . After the February Revolution of 1917 ousted Tsar Nicholas II and established a Provisional Government , Lenin returned to Russia and played a leading role in
28380-400: The five leading members of the battalion involved in the dispute (Tapsell, Cunningham, Aitken, Copeman, and Williams) to Britain. Copeman and Tapsell, who had been critical of Spanish Republican forces and tactics, were ordered to return to Spain, whilst Cunningham, Williams, and Aitken were ordered to remain in Britain. From 1933 until November 1939, Pollitt was in radio contact with Moscow as
28595-413: The future of non-Russian ethnic groups in the Empire. Due to the ailing health of both Lenin and his wife, they moved to the rural town of Biały Dunajec , before heading to Bern for Nadya to have surgery on her goitre . The [First World] war is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out–and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of
28810-416: The future. After the 1926 British general strike , it also disbanded 26 Constituency Labour Parties which resisted the ruling or were otherwise deemed too sympathetic to the Communist Party. Throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s, the CPGB decided to maintain the doctrine that a communist party should consist of revolutionary cadres and not be open to all applicants. The CPGB as the British section of
29025-474: The government in the Winter Palace and overcame it and arrested its ministers after the cruiser Aurora , controlled by Bolshevik seamen, fired a blank shot to signal the start of the revolution. During the insurrection, Lenin gave a speech to the Petrograd Soviet announcing that the Provisional Government had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks declared the formation of a new government, the Council of People's Commissars , or Sovnarkom. Lenin initially turned down
29240-483: The grounds that communists should not work with 'reformist' Social Democratic parties. These Left Communist positions enjoyed considerable support, being supported by Sylvia Pankhurst and Willie Gallacher among others. However, the Russian Communist Party took the opposing view. In 1920, Vladimir Lenin argued in his essay "Left Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder that the CPs should work with reformist trade unions and social democratic parties because these were
29455-454: The history of humanity ha[d] there been such universal grief" as the people of the world "mourned him with tears in their eyes and with deep uncontrollable sorrow". Pollitt was also a member of the guard of honour at Stalin's funeral. The advent of Nikita Khrushchev presented the CPGB with problems. The CPGB had followed the Moscow line to attack Tito 's neutralist government in Yugoslavia ; however, when Khrushchev visited Belgrade in 1955,
29670-420: The idea of reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin's advocacy of violence and robbery was condemned by the Mensheviks at the Fourth RSDLP Congress , held in Stockholm in April 1906. After Lenin escaped to Finland from Russia, he was involved in setting up a Bolshevik Centre in Kuokkala , Grand Duchy of Finland , which was at the time an autonomous state controlled by the Russian Empire, before
29885-420: The industrial department as "a party within a party", and Marxism Today editor James Klugmann would routinely defer to Industrial Organiser Bert Ramelson on matters of policy. The party's orientation, though, was to the left union officers, not the rank and file. Historian Geoff Andrews explains "it was the role of the shop stewards in organising the Broad Lefts and influencing trade union leaders that were
30100-413: The intention of establishing a proletariat government and pushing toward a socialist society. By contrast, the Mensheviks believed that Russia was insufficiently developed to transition to socialism and accused Lenin of trying to plunge the new Republic into civil war. Over the coming months Lenin campaigned for his policies, attending the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee, prolifically writing for
30315-473: The involvement of the USSR. By the end of World War II, CPGB membership had nearly tripled and the party reached the height of its popularity. Many key CPGB members served as leaders of Britain's trade union movement, including most notably Jessie Eden , David Ivon Jones , Abraham Lazarus , Ken Gill , Clem Beckett , GCT Giles , Mike Hicks , and Thora Silverthorne . The CPGB's position on racial equality and anti-colonialism attracted many black activists to
30530-412: The key rather than organising the rank and file in defiance of leaderships", and so the party withdrew from rank-and-file organisations like the Building Workers' Charter and attacked " Trotskyist " tactics at the Pilkington Glass dispute in 1970. Still the party's efforts to establish an electoral base repeatedly failed. They retained a handful of seats in local councils scattered around Britain, but
30745-493: The leading position of Chairman , suggesting Trotsky for the job, but other Bolsheviks insisted and ultimately Lenin relented. Lenin and other Bolsheviks then attended the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 and 27 October and announced the creation of the new government. Menshevik attendees condemned the illegitimate seizure of power and the risk of civil war. In the early days of the regime, Lenin adjusted his rhetoric so as not to alienate Russia's population, and spoke about having
30960-400: The more amusing dispatches, Pollitt (1936) informed his Soviet contact about a recent visit to France to make campaign appearances for candidates from the French Communist Party . "At great inconvenience went to Paris to speak in the election campaign". Pollitt went on to complain that he "kept sitting two days and comrades refused to allow me to speak. Such treatment as I received in Paris is
31175-428: The most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. Under Stalin, he became an ideological figurehead of Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement . A controversial and highly divisive figure, Lenin is praised by his supporters for establishing
31390-470: The need for a strong leadership with complete control over the party. Lenin's supporters were in the majority, and he termed them the "majoritarians" ( bol'sheviki in Russian; Bolsheviks ); in response, Martov termed his followers the "minoritarians" ( men'sheviki ; Mensheviks ). Arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks continued after the conference; the Bolsheviks accused their rivals of being opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while
31605-410: The new draft of the British Road to Socialism brought the party to breaking point. Many of the anti-Eurocommunists decided that they needed to form their own anti-revisionist Communist party. Some speculated at the time that they would receive the backing of Moscow, but such support appears not to have materialised. The New Communist Party of Britain was formed under the leadership of Sid French , who
31820-535: The newspaper Vperyod ( Forward ). In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparked a spate of civil unrest in the Russian Empire known as the Revolution of 1905 . Lenin urged Bolsheviks to take a greater role in the events, encouraging violent insurrection. In doing so, he adopted SR slogans regarding "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "the expropriation of gentry land", resulting in Menshevik accusations that he had deviated from orthodox Marxism. In turn, he insisted that
32035-466: The number of CP members, especially those drawn from engineering, lacking work. This cadre of which Hannington and Harry MacShane in Scotland were emblematic, found a purpose in building the NUWM which resulted in a number of marches on the unemployment issue during the 1930s. Although born in the Third Period during the Great Depression , the NUWM was a major campaigning body throughout the Popular Front period too, only being dissolved in 1941. After
32250-403: The old parties to become devoted to reformism because it had encouraged them to place more importance on winning votes than on working for socialism , that it encouraged opportunists and place-seekers into the ranks of the movement and that it constituted an acceptance of the legitimacy of the existing governing institutions of capitalism . Similarly, affiliation to the Labour Party was opposed on
32465-429: The outbreak of war between the UK and Nazi Germany in early September 1939, despite the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact , Pollitt welcomed the British declaration of war on Nazi Germany , calling for a "struggle on two fronts", involving the "military defeat of Hitler and the political defeat of Chamberlain " in his pamphlet How To Win The War , which was also ambivalent about rearmament. When this turned out to be contrary to
32680-418: The party also affected the credibility of its leadership, as formerly senior and influential members left its ranks. In 1976, three of its top engineering cadres resigned. Jimmy Reid , Cyril Morton and John Tocher had all been members of the Political Committee, playing a crucial role in determining the direction of the party. Like another engineer, Bernard Panter, who left a few months before them, they jumped
32895-518: The party apparatus were starting to challenge the authority of the trade union organisers. At the 1975 Congress, economist Dave Purdy proposed that "the labour movement should declare its willingness to accept voluntary pay restraint as a contribution to the success of the programme and a way of easing the transition to a socialist economy" – a challenge to the Industrial Department's policy of "free collective bargaining". An argument he reiterated in print in The Leveller in 1979. The growing crisis in
33110-401: The party followed a policy of "revolutionary defeatism". This was a strategy that assumed that the goals of the Communist Party could be accelerated by quickening the defeat of Britain in the war against Nazi Germany. Douglas Hyde stated that the attitude of those advocating this policy was to regard "the almost inevitable defeat of Britain [...] as a magnificent opportunity". Pollitt criticised
33325-515: The party in mining areas increased greatly through 1926 and 1927. Much of these gains would be lost during the Third Period but the influence was developed in certain areas that would continue until the party's demise decades later. The CPGB did succeed in creating a layer of militants very committed to the party and its policies, although this support was concentrated in particular trades, specifically in heavy engineering, textiles and mining, and in addition, tended to be concentrated regionally too in
33540-535: The party leaned increasingly towards the position of Eurocommunism , which was the leading tendency within the important Communist parties of Italy and, later, Spain. In the late-1960s, and probably much earlier, MI5 had hidden surveillance microphones in the CPGB's headquarters, which MI5 regarded as "very productive". The last strong electoral performance of the CPGB was in the February 1974 General Election in Dunbartonshire Central , where candidate Jimmy Reid won almost 6,000 votes. However, this strong result
33755-462: The party to try to reform it. In 1959, when British communist journalist Alan Winnington (whom Pollitt had recruited to the CPGB) became disillusioned with Chinese politics, Pollitt arranged for him to travel from China to East Germany , where Winnington spent the remainder of his life as an author and film actor. Winnington was extremely grateful, and after Pollitt's death he described him as "the greatest Englishman I have known." Pollitt contested
33970-414: The party was its policy of abnegating its own role and calling upon the General Council of the Trades Union Congress to play a revolutionary role. Nonetheless, during the strike itself and during the long drawn-out agony of the following Miners' Strike the members of the CPGB were to the fore in defending the strike and in attempting to develope solidarity with the miners. The result was that membership of
34185-410: The party were present at the Battle of Cable Street , helping organise resistance against the British Union of Fascists . In the Spanish Civil War , the CPGB worked with the USSR to create the British Battalion of the International Brigades , which party activist Bill Alexander commanded. In World War II , the CPGB followed the Comintern position, opposing or supporting the war in line with
34400-487: The party". Dave Cook became National Organiser in 1975 and Sue Slipman was appointed to the executive committee and to the Marxism Today editorial board. Jon Bloomfield, former Student Organiser became the West Midlands District Secretary. Pete Carter prominent in UCATT , had been gaining influence since the late 60s and was appointed National Industrial Organiser in 1982. Beatrix Campbell (a contributor, with Slipman, to Red Rag ) and Judith Hunt became active in
34615-440: The party's first elected officer (Deputy General Secretary of DATA, later TASS ) in 1968 and former party member Hugh Scanlon was elected president of the AEU with Broad Left support – defeating Reg Birch , the Maoist ex-party candidate. The Broad Left went on to help elect Ray Buckton ( ASLEF ), Ken Cameron ( FBU ), Alan Sapper ( ACTT ) and Jack Jones ( TGWU ) in 1969. Gerry Pocock, Assistant Industrial Organiser described
34830-493: The party's first years was imperilled during the Third Period from 1929 to 1932, the Third Period being the so-called period of renewed revolutionary advance as it was dubbed by the (now Stalinised ) leadership of the Comintern . The result of this "class against class" policy was that the Social Democratic and Labourite parties were seen as just as much a threat as the fascist parties and were therefore described as being social-fascist . Any kind of alliance with "social-fascists"
35045-425: The party, including Trevor Carter , Charlie Hutchison , Dorothy Kuya , Billy Strachan , Peter Blackman , George Powe , Henry Gunter , Len Johnson , and Claudia Jones , who founded London's Notting Hill Carnival . In 1956, the CPGB experienced a significant loss of members due to its support of the Soviet military intervention in Hungary . In the 1960s, CPGB activists supported Vietnamese communists fighting in
35260-403: The photograph following his 1940 fall from favour and subsequent execution. In 1934 Pollitt and Tom Mann , then-treasurer of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM), were summonsed on charges of sedition in relation to speeches they gave in Trealaw and Ferndale in Wales. Pollitt and Mann were both acquitted of all charges by Swansea assizes. The arrests took place on the eve of
35475-440: The questions of " parliamentarism " and the attitude of the Communist Party to the Labour Party . "Parliamentarism" referred to a strategy of contesting elections and working through existing parliaments. It was a strategy associated with the parties of the Second International and it was partly for this reason that it was opposed by those who wanted to break with Social Democracy . Critics contended that parliamentarism had caused
35690-467: The refusal of their affiliation, the CPGB encouraged its members to join the Labour Party individually and to seek Labour Party endorsement or help for any candidatures. Several Communists thus became Labour Party candidates, and in the 1922 general election , Shapurji Saklatvala and Walton Newbold were both elected. As late as 1923 the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party endorsed Communist parliamentary candidates, and 38 Communists attended
35905-421: The revolution; instead, he argued that the proletariat would have to build an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish the "provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry". The uprising has begun. Force against Force. Street fighting is raging, barricades are being thrown up, rifles are cracking, guns are booming. Rivers of blood are flowing,
36120-443: The right of self-determination ... Long live the revolution! — Lenin's political programme, October 1917 Upon taking power, Lenin's regime issued several decrees. The first was the Decree on Land , nationalizing the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church for redistribution to peasants by local governments. This contrasted with Lenin's preference for agricultural collectivisation but acknowledged
36335-415: The right to secede and form independent nation-states. Many declared independence ( Finland , Lithuania in December 1917, Latvia and Ukraine in January 1918, Estonia in February 1918, Transcaucasia in April 1918, and Poland in November 1918). The Bolsheviks then promoted communist parties in these new states, while at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in July 1918, a constitution reformed
36550-404: The socialist movement, he encouraged the founding of revolutionary cells in Russia's industrial centres. By late 1894, he was leading a Marxist workers' circle, and meticulously covered his tracks to evade police spies. He began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya , a Marxist school teacher. He also authored a political tract criticising the Narodnik agrarian-socialists, What
36765-431: The status of hereditary nobleman . Both of Lenin's parents were monarchists and liberal conservatives , being committed to the emancipation reform of 1861 introduced by the reformist Tsar Alexander II ; they avoided political radicals and there is no evidence that the police ever put them under surveillance for subversive thought. Every summer they holidayed at a rural manor in Kokushkino . Among his siblings, Lenin
36980-551: The stories were spiked. On his return to Britain Fryer resigned from the Daily Worker and was expelled from the party. After the calamitous events of 1956, the party increasingly functioned as a pressure group, seeking to use its well-organised base in the trade union movement to push the Labour Party leftwards. Trade unionists in the party in 1968 included John Tocher , George Wake, Dick Etheridge and Cyril Morton ( AEU ); Mick McGahey , Arthur True and Sammy Moore ( NUM ); Lou Lewis ( UCATT ) and Max Morris ( NUT ). Ken Gill became
37195-437: The student section. As such many of its members were academics or professional intellectuals (or in the view of their opponents, out of touch and middle class). They were influenced by the environmental and especially the feminist movement. The other wing was powerful in senior levels of the trade union movement (though few actually reached the very top in the unions) and despite the party's decline in numbers were able to drive
37410-400: The suppression of anarchism in Russia. Pollitt was involved in a criminal case against five men he accused of kidnapping him in March 1925 whilst he was on his way to address a meeting of communists in Liverpool. According to Pollitt, he had been taken off a train and held in Wales over a weekend in order to prevent him reaching Liverpool, though treated mildly. The men, who were all members of
37625-572: The thieves in order to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an unconscionable bourgeois lie. — Lenin on his interpretation of the First World War Lenin was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. The war pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, Lenin was arrested and briefly imprisoned until his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife returned to Bern, before relocating to Zürich in February 1916. Lenin
37840-414: The time, Lenin's elder brother Alexander, whom he affectionately knew as Sasha, was studying at Saint Petersburg University . Involved in political agitation against the absolute monarchy of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III , Alexander studied the writings of banned leftists and organised anti-government protests. He joined a revolutionary cell bent on assassinating the Tsar and was selected to construct
38055-417: The train was not truly sealed, and the passengers were allowed to disembark to, for example, spend the night in Frankfurt. The group travelled by train from Zürich to Sassnitz , proceeding by ferry to Trelleborg , Sweden, and from there to the Haparanda – Tornio border crossing and then to Helsinki before taking the final train to Petrograd. Arriving at Petrograd's Finland Station in April, Lenin gave
38270-469: The transfer without compensation of all land—landlord, imperial, and monastery—to the peasants' committees; it will defend the soldiers' rights, introducing a complete democratisation of the army; it will establish workers' control over industry; it will ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the date set; it will supply the cities with bread and the villages with articles of first necessity; and it will secure to all nationalities inhabiting Russia
38485-422: The victory of Adolf Hitler in Germany , the Third Period was dropped by all Communist Parties as they switched to the policy of the Popular Front . This policy argued that as fascism was the main danger to the workers' movement, it needed to ally itself with all anti-fascist forces including right-wing democratic parties. In Britain, this policy expressed itself in the efforts of the CPGB to forge an alliance with
38700-562: The view of the agrarian-socialist Narodnik movement, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby bypassing capitalism. This Narodnik view developed in the 1860s with the People's Freedom Party and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument but was influenced by agrarian-socialists like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev and befriended several Narodniks. In May 1890, Maria, who retained societal influence as
38915-441: The vilest insults against the memory of Harry Pollitt". Communist Party of Great Britain The Communist Party of Great Britain ( CPGB ) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike . In 1930, the CPGB founded the Daily Worker (renamed the Morning Star in 1966). In 1936, members of
39130-470: The vote, losing to the agrarian-focused Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin argued that the election did not reflect the people's will, claiming the electorate was unaware of the Bolsheviks' programme, and that candidacy lists were outdated, having been drawn up before the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split from the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the newly elected Russian Constituent Assembly convened in Petrograd in January 1918. Sovnarkom claimed it
39345-441: The war as a struggle for socialism, instead endorsing Pollitt's position of offering full support to the Churchill government and avoiding inflaming anti-socialist opinion. Dimitrov, however, had doubts about Pollitt's reliability, and in 1942 questioned what he saw as Pollitt's "strange behaviour" in allowing what he believed to be the penetration of the CPGB by the British security services, saying that he did not know whether Pollitt
39560-404: The war policies of the Chamberlain government, describing them as seeking to exploit the war against "Hitler's fascism" to "impose certain aspects of that same fascism on the workers". The anti-war position of the CPGB during 1939-41 was later cited by J. S. Middleton , along with the CPGB's perceived lack of independence from Moscow, as a reason for refusing Harry Pollitt's application to affiliate
39775-408: The war, Pollitt was opposed to it as it would damage the war effort. Pollitt's adherence to an electoral truce unilaterally called by the CPGB after Operation Barbarossa led to instances of CPGB campaigning in favour of Conservative candidates in wartime by-elections. As the CPGB's membership of the Comintern had been a barrier to affiliation with the Labour Party, Pollitt took the opportunity given by
39990-451: The widespread peasant land seizures that had already taken place. In November 1917, the government issued the Decree on the Press, closing opposition media outlets deemed counter-revolutionary. Although claimed to be temporary, the decree faced criticism, including from Bolsheviks, for undermining freedom of the press . In November 1917, Lenin issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia , granting non-Russian ethnic groups
40205-645: The widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he obtained the equivalent of a first-class degree with honours. The graduation celebrations were marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid . Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer. He devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, Lenin collected data on Russian society, using it to support
40420-405: The working-classes in revolution. Furthermore, Bogdanov, influenced by Ernst Mach , believed that all concepts of the world were relative, whereas Lenin stuck to the orthodox Marxist view that there was an objective reality independent of human observation. Bogdanov and Lenin holidayed together at Maxim Gorky 's villa in Capri in April 1908; on returning to Paris, Lenin encouraged a split within
40635-529: The works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Ludwig Feuerbach , and Aristotle , all of whom had been key influences on Marx. This changed Lenin's interpretation of Marxism; whereas he once believed that policies could be developed based on predetermined scientific principles, he concluded that the only test of whether a policy was correct was its practice. He still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, but he began to diverge from some of Marx's predictions about societal development; whereas Marx had believed that
40850-406: Was Nikita Khrushchev 's " Secret Speech " at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , in which he denounced Stalin. According to George Matthews , Khrushchev made a deal with the CPGB to provide a secret annual donation to the party of more than £100,000 in used notes. The Poznań protests of 1956 disrupted not only the CPGB, but many other Communist Parties as well. The CPGB
41065-425: Was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist who was the founder and first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. The founder and leader of the Bolsheviks , Lenin led the October Revolution which established the world's first socialist state . His government won the Russian Civil War and consolidated power in
41280-409: Was a communist schoolteacher ; the marriage eventually produced a son and a daughter. His best man and witness was fellow CPGB activist and organiser Percy Glading , who would later be convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and imprisoned. A week later, Pollitt was one of 12 members of the Communist Party convicted at the Old Bailey on charges of seditious libel and incitement to mutiny. Pollitt
41495-561: Was a member of the Independent Labour Party before joining the Communist party when it was formed in 1920. Three of his siblings died in infancy. The death of his younger sister Winifred particularly affected Pollitt, who said that he would "pay God out. Pay everybody out for making my sister suffer". Pollitt began work at the age of 12, alongside his mother. The suffering of his mother, who regularly worked standing in water wearing only wooden clogs, also particularly affected Pollitt, who later said that he "swore that when I grew up I would pay
41710-478: Was able to get it relaxed for trade unions , though it remained in place for other parts of the left. In addition to his role in the CPGB, from the early 1920s Pollitt served as national secretary of the British Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions (AKA Profintern), an organisation aimed at countering the Amsterdam International and rallying militant trade unionists within existing unions to win those unions over to communism. The Comintern characterised
41925-426: Was against George Orwell , who Pollitt believed to be politically unreliable. Pollitt was also tasked with writing letters of condolence to the families of British communists killed in Spain. In August 1937, Pollitt intervened in a dispute between the leadership of the British Battalion regarding tactics, the reliability of Spanish Republican troops that had fought alongside the battalion, and other issues. He recalled
42140-413: Was already a member of Sylvia Pankhurst 's Workers' Socialist Federation and had gained experience with public speaking. In September 1919, Pollitt was appointed full-time national organiser of the Hands Off Russia campaign to protest against Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War , for which Pankhurst had obtained funding from Moscow. Pollitt tired of his desk-bound job and went back to work in
42355-399: Was angry that the German Social Democratic Party was supporting the German war effort, which was a direct contravention of the Second International's Stuttgart resolution that socialist parties would oppose the conflict and saw the Second International as defunct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across
42570-425: Was appointed CP Chairman. When Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin was formally made public the following month, Pollitt stated that he was "too old to go into reverse and denigrate a man he had admired above all others for more than a quarter of a century". Pollitt also refused to take down a portrait of Stalin that hung in his living room, saying that "He's staying there as long as I'm alive". The Soviet repression of
42785-480: Was arrested and died in a labour camp in 1938, Pollitt refused. Pollitt also failed to intervene to help George Fles and his wife, Arcadi Berdichevsky and his wife, nor a number of other British communists who were arrested by the NKVD and tortured, shot, or imprisoned in the Gulag during Stalin's purge. Pollitt defied Moscow by opposing the introduction of conscription in Britain when it was introduced in 1939. Pollitt's opposition to conscription led to protests from
43000-517: Was closest to his sister Olga , whom he often bossed around; he had an extremely competitive nature and could be destructive, but usually admitted his misbehaviour. A keen sportsman, he spent much of his free time outdoors or playing chess, and excelled at school, the disciplinarian and conservative Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium. In January 1886, when Lenin was 15, his father died of a brain haemorrhage. Subsequently, his behaviour became erratic and confrontational, and he renounced his belief in God. At
43215-408: Was counter-revolutionary because it sought to remove power from the soviets, but the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks denied this. The Bolsheviks presented a motion to strip the Assembly of most of its legal powers; when the Assembly rejected this, Sovnarkom declared it counter-revolutionary and forcibly disbanded it. Lenin rejected repeated calls, including from some Bolsheviks, to establish
43430-417: Was doing this "deliberately" or if "English intelligence is taking advantage of his lack of vigilance". After Operation Barbarossa , Harry Pollitt became a strong supporter of the opening of a second front in Europe against Nazi Germany by the Western Allies. Pollitt also urged Jawaharlal Nehru to moderate his demands for Indian independence for the duration of the war. When strike action was proposed during
43645-520: Was given a 12-month sentence as a previous offender, which he served in Wandsworth prison . Historian C. L. Mowat described the trial as "the chief instance of a purely political trial in the interwar years". Pollitt travelled again to Moscow in October 1927, and attended a meeting at which the CPGB was roundly criticised for its failure to criticise the British labour movement. During the same visit, Pollitt met privately with Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin , who, over Pollitt's protests, ordered that
43860-441: Was granted a few days in Saint Petersburg to put his affairs in order and used this time to meet with the Social-Democrats, who had renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class . His journey to eastern Siberia took 11 weeks, for much of which he was accompanied by his mother and sisters. Deemed only a minor threat to the government, he was exiled to Shushenskoye , Minusinsky District , where he
44075-438: Was in direct secret radio contact with Moscow as CPGB's "Code Holder", and was monitored by the British security services. Pollitt was born on 22 November 1890 in Droylsden , Lancashire. He was the second of six children of Samuel Pollitt (1863–1933), a blacksmith's striker , and his wife, Mary Louisa (1868–1939), a cotton spinner , daughter of William Charlesworth, a joiner . Pollitt's parents were socialists , and his mother
44290-476: Was kept under police surveillance; he was nevertheless able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him, and permitted to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and to hunt duck and snipe . In May 1898, Nadya joined him in exile, having been arrested in August 1896 for organising a strike. She was initially posted to Ufa , but persuaded the authorities to move her to Shushenskoye, where she and Lenin married on 10 July 1898. Settling into
44505-410: Was obviously to be prohibited. The Third Period also meant that the CPGB sought to develope revolutionary trade unions in rivalry to the established Trades Union Congress affiliated unions. They met with an almost total lack of success although a tiny handful of "red" unions were formed, amongst them a miners union in Scotland and tailoring union in East London. Arthur Horner , the Communist leader of
44720-533: Was on the verge of proletarian revolution. The party began plans to organise the offensive, holding a final meeting at the Smolny Institute on 24 October. This was the base of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), an armed militia largely loyal to the Bolsheviks that had been established by the Petrograd Soviet during Kornilov's alleged coup. In October, the MRC was ordered to take control of Petrograd's key transport, communication, printing and utilities hubs, and did so without bloodshed. Bolsheviks besieged
44935-561: Was primarily a personal vote for Reid, who was a prominent local trade union leader and gained much support because of his prominent role in the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in , which had taken place a few years earlier and was seen as having saved local jobs. Nationally the party's vote continued its decline: according to a contemporary joke, the CPGB at this time pursued the British Road to Lost Deposits . According to historian Geoff Andrews, "The mid-1970s saw Gramscians " (otherwise known as Euro-Communists ) "take leading positions within
45150-499: Was selected as he had impressed people both within the CPGB and in Moscow as a Comintern loyalist and effective organiser, particularly when representing the Comintern at a meeting of the Communist Party USA in March 1929. Pollitt stated that he saw his role as defending the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) "through thick and thin". Unlike Inkpin, Pollitt was willing to criticise the Labour party as "social-fascists". Pollitt made clear in his public statements his loyalties to
45365-465: Was the secretary of the important Surrey District CP, which had a strong base in engineering. Another grouping, led by Fergus Nicholson, remained in the party and launched the paper Straight Left . This served as an outlet for their views as well as an organising tool in their work within the Labour Party. Nicholson had earlier taken part in establishing a faction known as "Clause Four" within Labour's student movement . Nicholson wrote as "Harry Steel",
45580-447: Was the third of eight children, having two older siblings, Anna (born 1864) and Alexander (born 1866). They were followed by three more children, Olga (born 1871), Dmitry (born 1874), and Maria (born 1878). Two later siblings died in infancy. His father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov , was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although his mother, Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (née Blank),
45795-402: Was to experience its greatest ever loss of membership as a result of the Warsaw Pact 's crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution . "[T]he events of 1956 ... saw the loss of between one-quarter and one-third of Party members, including many leading intellectuals." This event was initially covered in the CPGB-sponsored Daily Worker , by correspondent Peter Fryer , but as events unfolded
46010-434: Was unable to take such a leading role on the Iskra editorial board; in his absence, the board moved its base of operations to Geneva . The second RSDLP Congress was held in London in July 1903. At the conference, a schism emerged between Lenin's supporters and those of Julius Martov . Martov argued that party members should be able to express themselves independently of the party leadership; Lenin disagreed, emphasising
46225-489: Was with Lenin at the time, shielded him and was injured by a bullet. Concerned by Petrograd's vulnerability to German attack, Sovnarkom began relocating to Moscow in March 1918. Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders moved into the Kremlin . He survived another assassination attempt in August 1918. To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants. The Soviet authority will at once propose a democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will safeguard
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