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'Who and What Is Peter Petroff The University of Manchester Research In and out of the swamp Document Version Accepted author manuscript Link to publication record in Manchester Research Explorer Citation for published version (APA): Morgan, K. (2013). In and out of the swamp: the unpublished autobiography of Peter Petroff. Scottish Labour History, 48, 23-51. Published in: Scottish Labour History Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on Manchester Research Explorer is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Proof version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Explorer are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Takedown policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please refer to the University of Manchester’s Takedown Procedures [http://man.ac.uk/04Y6Bo] or contact [email protected] providing relevant details, so we can investigate your claim. Download date:01. Oct. 2021 In and out of the swamp: the unpublished autobiography of Peter Petroff1 Kevin Morgan ‘Who and what is Peter Petroff?’ The question infamously put by the pro-war socialist paper Justice in December 1915 has only ever been partly answered. As the editors of Justice well knew, Petroff (1884-1947) was a leading figure on the internationalist wing of the British Socialist Party (BSP) whom John Maclean had recently invited to Glasgow on behalf of the party’s Glasgow district council. With Clydeside in a state of ferment and the authorities wielding emergency powers, Petroff had been made a second Glasgow BSP organiser and was seen as covering for Maclean in the event of his own enforced removal from the scene. It was a curious choice. As a Russian refugee, Petroff was more exposed than most to arbitrary state action, and the attack upon him in Justice coincided with his arrest en route for a miners’ meeting in Fife, ostensibly for having failed to register under the Aliens Restriction Order of 1914. He had a long and unimpeachable record of socialist activism, and the imputations of supposed party comrades were vigorously rebutted. Despite these campaigns, disavowal by the organ of his own party must have encouraged if not actually incited the authorities to action against him, and Petroff’s original sentence was extended into indefinite internment. This ended only with his return to Russia following the Bolshevik revolution. It was Leon Trotsky, heading the new People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (or Narkomindel), who brought pressure to bear on his behalf. Famously, it was Petroff himself who then proposed Maclean’s appointment as Soviet Consul for Scotland.2 His relationship with Maclean was to lead to further scurrilous innuendo from another source. In his first instalment of autobiography, published shortly after his election as MP for West Fife in 1935, the communist William Gallacher depicted Petroff as an alien presence in Britain, not just politically but physically and even racially. A sidling, conspiratorial figure with a hissing whisper, he appears as the ‘revolutionary of melodrama’ whose stereotypes Gallacher himself now reproduced. ‘A sharp, dark face with black restless eyes, hooked nose, small dark moustache covering a short upper lip, which, continually receding from a set of white gleaming teeth, gave the impression of a perpetual grin.’3 The image crops up again in Gallacher’s Last Memoirs, published some three decades later, where Petroff’s hair- raising stories about spies and agents-provocateurs are again presented as a sinister influence on Maclean and the key to his alleged mental instability.4 In histories of Maclean and wartime Clydeside, these calumnies have gradually been put right. Keith Middlemas in 1965 simply paraphrased Gallacher in describing Petroff as a figure of farce.5 However, four years later Walter Kendall provided the first serious evaluation of Petroff’s role within the BSP, and in 1984 there followed Murdoch Rodgers and James J. Smyth’s carefully documented reconstruction of Petroff’s wider activities in Britain.6 This was supplemented in 2000 by Maclean’s co-biographer John McHugh, who was able to draw on Petroff’s Home Office file for fuller details of his internment years.7 The Maclean connection has always been central, and though he spent just a few months in Scotland it was in a dictionary of Scottish labour leaders and the journal of the Scottish Labour History Society that Petroff belatedly was given his due.8 As Rodgers and Smyth observed, the ‘vast bulk’ of his life history nevertheless remained to be written. Of Petroff’s earlier activities in the Russian revolutionary movement, and of his responsibilities under the early Soviet regime, 1 only the barest details were recorded.9 The same was true of the twelve years Petroff spent in Germany before returning to Britain after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. Even in respect of his first British sojourn, Petroff’s regular contributions to Russian émigré papers do not appear to have been consulted in this connection. As an exile successively from tsarism, Bolshevism and Hitlerism, whose writings must be consulted in Russian and German as well as English, a biography like Petroff’s underlines the importance of a transnational labour history and cannot be restricted to a British or Scottish canvas. On the other hand, it also illustrates the challenges such an approach can pose in respect of language skills, travel budgets and a familiarity with multiple state and political archives. For those interested in the who and what of Peter Petroff there is nevertheless a remarkable resource in the form of an unpublished autobiography hitherto inaccessible to researchers. As Scottish labour historians know better than most, it is not exactly unprecedented for an activist to devote some part of their later life to the recounting of their personal history in the movement. Nevertheless, Petroff’s narrative of some 1100 typescript pages – over a quarter of a million words – is of a scope and level of detail that few such accounts can match. Though the manuscript carries neither date nor title, internal evidence suggests that it was undertaken within a year or so of Petroff’s re-entry into Britain from Germany and completed in the late 1930s. By the end of 1934 he had completed three or four chapters, and by the start of 1936 some twelve or thirteen – which, if these were produced in sequence, would have covered the period to his deportation back to Russia in 1918.10 However, while Petroff undertook to provide his own English text, it appears that the chapters at this stage still required translating.11 Though Oxford University Press had asked for first refusal on the completed version, there is seemingly no trace of this ever having been submitted.12 A decided anti-Stalinist, latterly adhering to the Labour Party, Petroff’s contemporaneous commentaries on Soviet communism were among the most incisive to appear under Labour’s auspices, and touch directly on themes and personalities also figuring in the autobiography.13 This may therefore be regarded as a testament of disillusionment in communism, of the sort that subsequently circulated widely, but of a scope and authoritativeness that possibly no other British-based author could at that time have matched. Even in Britain, Petroff believed himself the victim of ‘persecution and petty annoyance’ aimed at preventing his recollections ever getting into print.14 Intriguingly, a note on the manuscript indicates that chapters on the early Comintern were ‘taken out’ at just the time that Stalin dissolved that body in May 1943. This may indicate some intention that they be put to some more timely use, while correspondence of Petroff with the anarchist Rudolf Rocker suggests that by 1946 the manuscript had again been prepared for possible publication.15 All was unavailing, however, and by the time of Petroff’s death the following year no substantial part of his story appears to have seeped into the public domain. ‘Habent et sua fata libelli’, Marx used to say: books also have their destinies.16 As the manuscript tells, Petroff had since 1913 shared his every personal and political fortune with his German-born partner and collaborator Irma Gellrich-Petroff. The one real interruption, much resented by them, was their internment in separate locations in southern England in 1916-18. Rodgers and Smyth rightly suggest that Irma deserves consideration in her own right, and there is much in her husband’s autobiography to assist with this. Surviving Peter by some twenty-one years, by the time of her death in 1968 Irma had nevertheless joined the British Communist Party, as he surely never could have. Relations with her two daughters were not easy, and Irma consequently 2 entrusted her husband’s manuscript to a friend and fellow communist, Lavender Aaronovitch, from whom it passed to Lavender’s son, the journalist David Aaronovitch. The manuscript is now to be deposited in the International Institute of Social History and it is hoped also to make it accessible in digitised form. The summary provided here is of necessity hugely compressed and partial in character. It may nevertheless serve as introduction to what the reader may hope to find in the manuscript itself. The presentation focuses on Petroff’s political trajectory, and it is in this connection that previous assumptions have most of all to be reconsidered. Few subjects have been as subject to factional readings as the origins and early years of the communist movement.
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