I invited David Turner to begin writing a regular column for Lobster. He agreed then rang to tell me his computer had been attacked by a virus and could not meet my deadline. (He is the second contributor to this issue to have been virused recently.) But I had on file this splendid polemic written at the time of the latest outbreak of spy mania to hit this country. Turner’s column proper will begin in the next issue.
It must surely rank as one of the silliest ‘silly season’ stories of all time. The most important KGB defector ever unmasks the ‘spy of the century’ — and it turns out to be a little old lady from suburban Bexleyheath who sells the Morning Star, drinks tea from a Che Guevara mug and makes jam for Labour Party bazaars. Ironically, the octogenarian Tankie in question, Mrs Letty Norwood, is just about the only person to emerge from the whole sorry tale with any kind of credibility.
The much-feted KGB defector, Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, far from being the high-minded ‘dissident’ he seeks to pass himself off as, seems to be yet another plodding Stalinist functionary reinventing himself as an opportunist on the make following the collapse of the system to which he devoted his working life. If his motive was to expose the crimes of Stalinism, why would he wait seven years after his retirement, until the Soviet Union was dead and buried, before defecting away from an ‘Evil Empire’ that had ceased to exist? The answer, surely, is that his stash of stolen information (smuggled out of the Lubyanka in his socks and buried in the garden of his dacha) was his insurance policy and he was waiting to see which way the wind blew before he cashed it in.
A disingenuous creep
Instead of putting Mitrokhin’s material where it belongs — in the Public Record Office where we can all study it — they gave it to a tame historian, hoping to bask in lots of favourable publicity while helping Mitrokhin to supplement his MI6 pension. The spooks’ chosen ghost-writer, Christopher Andrew, is a disingenuous creep who has sold out his academic integrity to slavishly toe the secret state’s party line in return for celebrity and book sales. (He is also vain and insufferably smug — he smirks, as someone once remarked, not like the cat that has got the cream, but like the cat that has just bought a controlling interest in United Dairies.)
Now, because Mitrokhin and Andrew have, quite predictably, over-egged the pudding for commercial reasons, the spooks find their plans have gone awry. The right-wing press, who should be their biggest fans, accuse them of being incompetent and soft on traitors; and Jack Straw, having spent the last two years fronting for the spooks at every available opportunity and assuring us of their utter probity, has found out that they’re really just as unaccountable as ever. Ironically, while MI6 is keen for us to know what’s in the KGB’s historical files, its own records, right back to 1909, remain under ‘blanket’ closure (although privileged access is occasionally granted to writers whose faces fit), with the approval of that reformed spook-baiter Robin Cook.
Hysterical morons, illiterates
As for journalists, they have, with a few honourable exceptions, been shown to be crass, hysterical morons, historical and political illiterates unable to see beyond the simplistic bipolar mind set of a conflict that ended a decade ago. Working themselves into a foam-flecked apoplexy, they have charged like a lynch-mob after a silly old Tankie, whose ‘betrayal’ turns out to have been negligible, ludicrously equating her with Nazi war criminals and demanding, effectively, a political show-trial. At the same time they have hypocritically called for the release of a real mass-murderer, General Pinochet. Disappointingly, the exiled MI5 whistle-blower, David Shayler, has added his tuppenyworth to the tabloid calls to ‘string ‘er up’, prompting the suspicion that he is more like Peter Wright (a bitter-and-twisted reactionary criticising MI5 from the right) than a principled whistle-blower such as Cathy Massiter.
In truth, Letty Norwood did not give Stalin the bomb because she was never in any position to do so (although she does appear to have briefly had access to some collateral information). The people who gave away atomic secrets were scientists working on the Manhattan Project in the USA, men without whom there would have been no bomb in the first place. They did so because they realised that the world would be a much more dangerous place if the West had the bomb and the Soviet Union didn’t. By ensuring that a ‘balance of terror’ existed between East and West from 1949 they undoubtedly did the world a huge favour. Had they not done so, the chances are that the advocates of ‘roll-back’ would have been lobbing atom bombs around with reckless abandon by the time of the Korean War.
There was no Soviet grand plan
There was no Soviet grand plan for the invasion of Britain and world domination; and nothing in Mitrokhin’s packet of revelations proves that there was. Even if the ultra-conservative Soviet bureaucracy had wanted to conquer the world, the creaking and sclerotic Soviet system was hardly up to it.
The Cold War was never as simple as ‘freedom versus tyranny’ or ‘good versus evil’. The supposed ‘moral superiority’ of the West is a myth. The Western powers showed no compunction about supporting tyrannical and murderous dictatorships, from Jakarta to Santiago, when it suited their purposes. And there’s no doubt that, had the Left and the Labour movement ever seriously challenged the power of the ruling class in Britain, the British state would have put its carefully laid ‘counter-insurgency’ plans into operation with the same brutality it employed in colonial contexts.
The Liberal Democratic Holocaust
Of course Stalinism was a murderous system; but the British Empire, which so repelled Communists of Letty Norwood’s generation, has a few mountains of corpses to its credit, too. The Bengal Famine of 1943-4, as avoidable and as man-made as the famine that Stalin caused, killed up to 5 million people. In the First World War 2.5 million working-class Britons and Empire citizens died in an insanely futile conflict; 3,080 of them were judicially murdered by their own side for the ‘crime’ of battle fatigue. Without this Liberal-Democratic Holocaust’ (which altogether cost 17 million lives) there would have been no Russian Revolution, no Communist International and no Stalinism. Nor would there have been the fascist regimes in Western Europe, which took power with the connivance of big business, and a good deal of sympathy in the ruling circles of the Liberal Democracies, in order to put down the Left and the Labour movement.
The Communist Party of Great Britain wasn’t part of a Soviet plot to ‘enslave’ or ‘sabotage’ Britain. It was an organisation of sincere anti-imperialists, anti-militarists, anti-fascists, the unemployed, militant trade-unionists and the like. Most of them were self-sacrificing idealist fighters, as Letty Norwood appears to be (although she is perhaps rather more disarmingly guileless than some CPers).
Tragic mistake and betrayal
They saw through the cant and hypocrisy of capitalism and imperialism, and had a clear vision of a different, better society. Yet they made the tragic mistake of seeing the incarnation of that alternative society in a tyrannical and backward Stalinist Russia. Unwittingly, they helped ultimately to bring about the present situation, in which the very notion of socialism is almost universally discredited. That, surely, was what their true betrayal.
The author recently completed a PhD thesis on the history of the CPGB in the Medway Towns area of Kent.