We have commented before on the fixation of mind which reigned over the Left in the UK during the forties and fifties. Nowhere is this more evident than in the UK Communist Party. It spent most of twenty years singing paeans of praise to Koba the Dread (otherwise known as Joseph Stalin) and the glorious success of Communism in the USSR.
In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev began to tear the lid off Stalin's coffin and expose the malodorous rot within. Stalin's successor began to speak out against the horrors of Joe's totalitarian rule. Within Britain, this was not the first expose of the dictator. People such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Arthur Koestler, and Kingsley Amis had tolled the bell, revealing the horrors of Uncle Joe. By and large, however, the self-styled intelligentsia of the Left refused to believe that the world's first communist utopia could remotely resemble the depredations catalogued by Muggeridge and others.
But then Khrushchev--from within the bowels of the regime--began to speak out.
"The whole press (all over the world) is full of the accounts of Khrushchev's speech (or speeches) attacking Stalin and his memory," noted Macmillan on 19 March . . . "He seems to have accused him of almost every known crime. This amounts to the biggest 'volte-face' since the Stalin-Ribbentrop pact in 1939." It was indeed a momentous development, with reports being leaked of Nikita Khrushchev's "secret" speech on 25 February (1956) at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, acknowledging and exposing something of the reality of Stalinism. [David Kynaston, Family Britain 1951-1957 (New York: Walker and Co., 2009), p. 619.]This proved a bridge too far for the British Communist Party. No iconoclast--even from within the regime--was going to besmirch the glory of Uncle Joe.
