Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  At the time, the Pact proved difficult for many communists and their fellow travelers to swallow, since they had expended a great deal of energy arguing that “fascists” were the undying enemies of socialists everywhere—that had been the basis of their extensive propaganda campaign over the Spanish Civil War. Now it was no longer clear what the correct Party line was. Charlotte Haldane was with Hans Kahle in London when the news broke, an “intimate, personal, friendship” having developed. “For him, of course, as a German Communist, the shock was personally greater than for me. We dutifully spent the week-end working out the new Soviet line. No doubt we were slow in the uptake, politically weak, owing to our respective bourgeois backgrounds.”9

  The British Communist Party completely misread Moscow’s intent. Harry Pollitt rushed out a pamphlet arguing for a two-front war, one front being Germany, the other being fascism at home. Moscow rapidly shot Pollitt down. There was to be no anti-German campaign now, the pamphlet had to be withdrawn, and Pollitt was promptly replaced as Party leader by Rajani Palme Dutt, a suppler thinker by far. Now it was back to a “War on One Front,” against Western bourgeois democracy. The majority of the Party accepted this correction without public protest. As Charlotte confessed, “party discipline and loyalty prevailed” for both herself and Hans. But Douglas Hyde—who, like Charlotte, later defected from the Party—recalled that things became difficult to explain to the working class. “I was sharing a flat with a leading communist shop steward, one of the Party’s most active factory members. I learned the news from the Sunday papers, took them home and showed him the headlines: ‘Russia Invades Poland’. On the face of things, for any communist, the news was devastating. His reactions were typically violent. ‘Bugger Uncle Joe, bugger Molotov, bugger the whole bloody lot of them,’ he cursed.”10

  None of this stymied the far more powerful mental machinery of JBS, who was able to adopt the new Party line at once. In a letter to the New Statesman, where harsh words had been said about the Pact, Haldane patiently explained that it was not a new Soviet policy at all, just an application of the old one! “I cannot understand how an intelligent person can find its policy in any way inconsistent. On the contrary it appears to be almost fantastically consistent.”11 Soviet policy was “based on an objection to two things, capitalism and wars,” since one led to the other. Capitalism needed wars to solve the problem of unemployment, but the Soviet Union had no unemployment problem, so war was not in its interests—“the Soviet Union is the only nation which can make no economic gains from war.” There would be no point in conquering other countries, since Soviet “production per man and their population are both increasing faster than those of any other country.” As for the Soviet invasion of Poland—a curious admission, given the foregoing proofs—Haldane was confident that the Byelo-Russian and Ukrainian-speaking parts would have voted to join the USSR anyway. In the Polish-speaking parts, Stalin, being a “specialist in the problem of nationalities,” would know how to accommodate national sentiment, even though the Poles “have not always respected that of other peoples.” This accommodation, he was willing to concede, “will be the most searching test of Soviet policy.” Those Poles who didn’t like their new borders—likely “only a small part of the occupied territory”—would “very probably be given back to a free Poland.” The Soviets would not deport Poles into forced labor camps, and if “the land is given to the peasants, as seems likely, the Russians will soon have millions of friends.” The end result could be a “reconstituted” Poland that would be “ill-disposed to the Third Reich, though not to a peaceful Germany.”

  The last qualification is significant, as Haldane dismisses the idea that Stalin ought to prefer Britain and France to Germany because of their more liberal treatment of trade unions, etc. “Do you mean Britain or the British Empire, France or the French Empire? I would sooner be a Jew in Berlin than a Kaffir in Johannesburg or a negro in French Equatorial Africa. If the Czechs are treated as an inferior race, do Indians or Annamites enjoy complete equality?” Indeed, the Soviets were sitting out the war on behalf of the “coloured peoples.” “The British and French people may prepare to fight their battles under the leadership of the men of Munich with the firm resolve to preserve their rule over the coloured peoples of their own empires. But if so they can hardly complain that the Soviet Union remains neutral in the struggle, and occupies itself in stemming Hitler’s advance and abolishing feudalism in Eastern Europe.” Haldane closed with the issue of the Baltic States annexed by the USSR. There he was confident that the inhabitants “welcome Soviet protection.” A “leading Lett,” not a communist, with whom he had dinner in London, assured him so. Stalin, since he was a Georgian, would never impose Russification. And anyway, the harbor in Ventspils was too big for Latvian needs.

  At this point one might be forgiven for speculating that this letter was not really written by Haldane at all, but rather by, say, a cunning intelligence service, and planted in the New Statesman to make him look craven to his contemporaries and odious to posterity. However, a handwritten copy can be found in his archive of papers at University College London. That is the text used here—a full transcript with erasures appears in Appendix 2.

  Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s mild-mannered husband, had bolted from the fellow-traveling crowd by then. Haldane flew into a rage when Victor Gollancz’s previously dependable Left Book Club issued Woolf’s Barbarians at the Gate, with its equation of Soviets to Nazis, in late 1939. In a review for the Daily Worker, Haldane hoped that the venerable Left Book Club would stop issuing titles with such deplorable attitudes.12 A vain hope, since even the stalwart Victor Gollancz now found it impossible to defend the Pact.13 As events unfolded, Haldane had his work cut out.14 That same day, November 30, 1939, Finland was invaded by the USSR, which was surprisingly unhampered by its lack of a domestic unemployment problem and its advertised gains in productivity. The invasion was very unpopular with the British public. Douglas Hyde remembered,

  In our demonstrations we had sung the Soviet Airmen’s song: ‘We drop them leaflets whilst we bomb their houses,’ but when the raids began on Helsinki we saw just how optimistic and unreal those words had become. . . . Sellers of the Daily Worker, women as well as men, were spat upon and assaulted on the streets; canvassing, they had doors slammed in their faces, even chamberpots emptied on their heads from upstairs windows. Often, out selling papers or pamphlets, we would have housewives shouting vituperations at us until we disappeared from their street. It was a testing time, and most Party members rose to it and gloried in their martyrdom. There were, of course, the weak ones, and the Party was glad enough to be purged of them.15

  Haldane’s own faith was not of the weak kind, but a series of embarrassing defeats with heavy losses for the Red Army, at the hands of the tiny but well-organized Finnish army, was hard to deal with. Explanations involving “timber” were forthcoming.

  Speaking to a meeting in Kingsway Hall in December, held to celebrate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Haldane told a meeting of 1,000 people that the Soviet Union was only protecting itself by “fighting fascism” in Finland. The timber exporters and financiers who governed Finland were to blame for the war, not to mention the Finnish leader Carl Mannerheim, in reality the tool of the timber-men.16 In January 1940, Haldane evolved this theme at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, identifying the culprits as nickel mine investors and paper and cellulose manufacturers; he called on the workers to “agitate for peace” before millions were killed. At St. Andrews later that month, he pinned the blame for the whole war on “the capitalists” and requested the working class to neutralize this by appealing to their fellow workers in Germany over Hitler’s head—here he was straying a little from the new, post-Pollitt, Party line. He assured a meeting at Liverpool Grove in Walworth Road on January 21 that he was opposed to the current war and ready to go to prison for his beliefs—in December 1939 he had told a Peace Council in Edinburgh that he had joined up in the First World War only bec
ause he had been deceived.17 On March 5, 1940, the Daily Worker reported that Haldane had signed a petition that warned of the “grave and imminent danger” that Britain and France might attack the Soviet Union. The point was that invariably “the British ruling class have allied themselves with German militarism to crush democracy when it suited them.”18 In parallel, Haldane continued to develop his ARP line of talk, first introduced in 1938, which was designed to show that the government didn’t really care about the working class and was happy to sacrifice them to Nazi bombs.

  The culmination of Communist Party efforts to influence the public along these defeatist lines was the People’s Convention of January 1941, which they organized at a discreet distance. By design, the Convention ignored ways in which the war might actually be won, and aimed instead to stir up discontent about its likely beneficiaries, effects on the working classes, and general conditions in the country. As the Blitz raged on outside the convention hall, the speakers inside called for higher wages, more and deeper bomb shelters, “friendship” with the USSR, nationalization of banks, ending of the partition in Ireland, independence for India, and so on. Douglas Hyde summed it up in retrospect:

  The campaign for the People’s Convention was, I suppose, the most effective and, from the Government’s point of view, potentially dangerous thing we had done. As a communist tactic it was perfect. It united a reasonably wide and varied number of people and organisations on limited, short-term political and economic demands which deliberately did not include direct opposition to the war. Yet had those demands been won, they would have crippled the war effort—as they were intended to do. And the campaign for those demands was unhelpful in the extreme and was calculated to weaken public morale. Into the campaign were drawn people and organisations far removed from Marxism; pacifists whom we had for years fought and derided became our allies; non-communist musicians, literary people, university professors and other well-known figures were prevailed upon to add their names to the hard core of Left-wing trade union leaders whom we had managed to entangle. The deep longing for peace which everyone instinctively felt was carefully worked on for revolutionary-defeatist ends.19

  The Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress banned attendance in advance and quickly expelled anyone who participated in it. It was said that more than 2,200 delegates attended. The press in the USSR was enthusiastic. Haldane was instrumental in organizing the convention and tried to rope in as many intellectuals as possible, with a premium placed on those not openly communist. J. B. Priestley received an appeal to attend. Getting Michael Redgrave, an old friend from “Chatty’s addled salon” at Cambridge, was easier. Others who attended included D. N. Pritt, Indira Nehru (later Indira Gandhi), Olaf Stapledon, Beatrix Lehmann, and Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean” of Canterbury. Leaflets were issued explaining that “society women” were being shampooed with rationed eggs, and that canteen food was not up to standard. Housewives, it was said, would no longer put up with conditions.20

  The only concrete result of this attempted undermining of public morale was the banning of the Daily Worker ten days later. Nominally, the People’s Convention continued to meet until May 5, 1942. Haldane was absent then, but still on the committee, which seems to have disposed of its funds to other front organizations and dissolved. Once the USSR was invaded in July 1941, and the Party immediately switched its line back to winning the war, the Convention had lost its usefulness. In the meantime, Haldane worked hard to get the Daily Worker unbanned; he eventually succeeded in early 1942, but only after pledging to support the war effort from then on.

  Haldane had been wholly absorbed into the Party, in much the same way that other cults envelop and isolate their members, supplanting their families and friends. Almost all of the people that he had voluntary dealings with were Party members. Even his secretary had to be a member, vetted both for political reliability and to his own standard, a requirement that gave the Party some trouble (the position regularly fell vacant). Charlotte had been replaced by Dr. Helen Spurway, who was also within the Party. Constantly producing and assimilating corrupting propaganda added to this sympatric isolation. The extent to which all this screened Haldane and his new companion from reality can be judged from Spurway’s reaction to the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. After hearing the news at her parents’ house, she immediately set off for the Rothamsted Research Station to find JBS, expecting him to be locked up at once when the British government joined up with the Nazis to destroy the USSR.21

  6. IVOR MONTAGU AND THE X GROUP

  In 1985 a former MI5 man named Peter Wright caused a sensation by publishing his reminiscences in a book he called Spycatcher. Hoping to evade the Official Secrets Act, he published it abroad, in Australia. The British government forlornly tried to suppress it even there, but only managed to get it more publicity; the book was subsequently published in the United States anyway. Buried within its pages, but unmentioned in its index, were startling claims about the mysterious VENONA program. Decoded intercepts from the Soviets apparently showed that “J. B. S. Haldane . . . who was working in the Admiralty’s submarine experimental station at Haslar, researching into deep diving techniques, was supplying details of the programs to the CPGB, who were passing it on to the GRU in London.” Moreover “the Honourable Owen1 Montagu . . . was used by the Russians to collect political intelligence in the Labour Party, and to a lesser degree the CPGB.”2

  At least, these claims ought to have startled someone, but if they did nothing much appeared in print—a conclusion that can now be made with the full confidence of Google Books and digitally searchable newspaper archives.3 The trouble was that, while Wright made a great many claims, not all of them proved accurate. Here his memory was faulty in at least one respect: it was Ivor Montagu, not his brother Ewen; the VENONA intercepts certainly showed that Ivor headed an espionage ring called the X Group.

  Soviet embassies abroad communicated back to Moscow through diplomatic pouches, but during the war this process was extremely slow. More urgent material was transmitted either by commercial telegraph, which was the practice in the Washington Embassy, or by radio broadcasts, the method used by the London Embassy with British consent. The communications were encrypted using a system called the one-time pad that was highly secure in theory. Even though the communications were recorded by the U.S., British, and other governments, they could not be read without a significant investment in cryptanalysis. Before 1942, the only serious attempt to make sense of the Soviet code was made by the Finns, with some limited success.

  Despite this initial lack of interest, there were intelligence riches to be had in the intercepts. The Soviets ran an extensive espionage system, with networks run out of their embassies through “illegal residents,” by both the NKVD/KGB and the GRU (military intelligence, with its own network). These networks received extensive assistance from the Communist parties operating in each jurisdiction, and had penetrated deep into the state institutions in both the United States and the UK, as well as elsewhere. They were greatly assisted by politically sympathetic intellectuals, who rose rapidly and exerted pervasive influence in state circles. By 1942, having seen the benefits of British success in cracking the German Ultra code, the United States turned its attention to the trove of messages they were accumulating from their Soviet ally, whose intentions they had come to distrust (at least in military circles).

  The Soviet code was a two-step process. First, characters were encoded as groups into numbers, which was something like a dictionary lookup for most common words, but a little harder for unusual ones. Then the resulting groups of numbers were encrypted by using a one-time pad of random numbers, which were added to them. Decryption involved subtraction of these numbers and then reversing the code lookups. That required both sides to work off the same sheet from the pad, which had a serial number to allow it to be referenced in the message and matched. The pads had to be created in the Soviet Union and then distributed abroad for use. If it was used as int
ended, the system was highly secure, especially given the lack of computing power at the time. The weakness proved to be a manufacturing deficiency. As with so much else in the Soviet state, a shortage of pads developed; to make up production quotas, sheets were reused, though they were spread over multiple pads to make it harder to find duplicate uses in intercepted traffic from individual stations.

  The US program to decrypt the intercepts went on for many years, under various code names, eventually becoming known as VENONA. The Finns had supplied useful initial groupings of cables by patient cryptanalysis, and eventually the duplicate uses were detected by collating cables from multiple international sources. A partially burned codebook—for the first stage of translating characters to letters—had been captured by the Finns, though inexplicably other codebooks captured from German territory in 1944 were returned to the Russians at the request of the White House. No copies were kept! Nevertheless, by 1947 the first messages from the Washington Embassy were being decoded, and soon the emergence of the first mechanical computers allowed the pace to pick up. These messages immediately paid off, showing that the US Manhattan Project and the State Department had been penetrated. Though cover names were commonly used in the cables, detective work easily identified Klaus Fuchs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, and others. Analysis went on until as late as 1980. There were several hundred cover names in play, even though only a small percentage of the recorded traffic was ever successfully decoded. Many of the cover names remain unidentified today.