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In and out of the swamp

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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 In and out of the swamp: the unpublished autobiography of Peter Petroff.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.

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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 Oct. 2021 In and out of the swamp: the unpublished autobiography of Peter Petroff1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. Petroff himself has been assimilated to a relatively straightforward stalinisation narrative that distinguishes sharply between the revolutionary promise of the Lenin years and the degeneration that set in with Lenin’s passing from the scene through illness and early death. For Rodgers and Smyth, Petroff’s significance in a British context was that he sought with Maclean to change the BSP into ‘a more disciplined and politically relevant party … what might be called a “Leninist” party’. His arrival in Germany in 1921 was implicitly linked with the furtherance of the world revolution, and his resignation from the Russian Communist Party (RCP) four years later with ‘the death of Lenin and the move against the Left Opposition’.17 Kendall did not share the positive view of Lenin’s influence. Nevertheless, Kendall’s view of relations between the Russian and British lefts as a sort of one-way traffic from the east was even more strongly accentuated. He too, less approvingly, thus also held that Petroff’s notions of the party already in 1913 ‘directly anticipated the conceptions of the Communist Party seven years later’.18 William Knox referred to it as ‘a British variant of what was later to be known as marxist-leninism’.19 As with any new source of information, matters of factual detail may now be clarified. But the value of a life-history method, and thus of a personal document so copiously narrated as Petroff’s, is that it gets us beyond the generic assumptions as to chronology and political allegiance on which accounts framed by more partisan categories may typically depend.20 As Petroff’s own account makes clear, he neither adhered to the party as a Leninist before 1917, nor broke with it as a Leninist in 1925, and cannot reasonably be regarded as a conduit for Lenin’s ideas in Britain. Petroff’s early activity in the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) is rightly stressed in all accounts; that he ‘knew both Lenin and Trotsky personally’ apparently places him politically within it.21 The RSDLP, however, comprised both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and those like Trotsky who moved between them. The apparently unambiguous evidence of Petroff’s autobiography is that he was fundamentally a Menshevik and that he actively supported Menshevik causes until the outbreak of war in 1914.22 Indeed, a poisonous but factually accurate attack in the communist Daily Worker was to describe him precisely as an ‘ex-Menshevik’, but has hitherto been disregarded – presumably because of understandable misgivings regarding the source.23 The moral of Petroff’s story of therefore slightly different from what might have been expected. Though in 1918 he embraced the Bolsheviks as the party of the revolution, he did so with a continuing critical reserve, of the sort that in Trotsky’s case was extinguished almost entirely. If in one aspect Petroff brought the lessons of his Russian experience into Britain, he also upheld an avowedly European conception of the workers’ struggle in Russia itself. Even a Menshevik had a stronger sense of party than the average British socialist, and it was this that Petroff voiced when he

3 came to Britain. But what his autobiography also shows is how he drew on his knowledge and experience of western labour movements in contesting the organisational logic of Leninism in Russia itself. An autobiography is not an irrefragable testimony against which other accounts must be judged. The authenticity of Petroff’s disillusionment in Bolshevism is not to be doubted. On the other hand, like the Chartists-turned-Liberals who struggled to do justice to their tempestuous youths, his recollections of past events must also bear the imprint of the time and political environment in which they were written, and in which they must be imagined as an intended intervention.24 The account’s consistency with other sources for British labour history inspires a confidence in Petroff’s basic veracity which may reasonably be extended to the episodes in Russian history in which he had a greater part. On the other hand, the inclusion of long passages of verbatim dialogue, recollected at a distance of twenty or thirty years, also suggests some element of imaginative reconstruction in the interests of impact and readability. No corroboration or extended critical reading is attempted here, and the three-part structure that follows itself derives from Petroff’s original manuscript, borrowing headings from his individual chapter titles. Not every sentence carries the caveat ‘according to Petroff’; but except where otherwise stated this is true of all the information provided. The typescript is a fair copy with some handwritten corrections. Most are of typographical errors or unfamiliar English usages, though some indicate updating at some point after 1945. In several chapters there are partly filled pages or inconsistencies of pagination suggesting excisions from an original manuscript now inaccessible. For example, in the chapter ‘In the Ranks of British Labour’ there are two large excisions and an overall discrepancy of sixteen pages. Elsewhere, description of the RSDLP congress in 1907 seems to indicate an ellipsis; another page has been cut where it introduces the Iskra group; other pages have been retyped and re-inserted on a different paper from those around them.25 There is no indication of when these changes were made, or by whom. The same is true of the issue of translation. Petroff’s other books were co-authored with Irma, and this one too includes recollections that she must have contributed and examples of her poetry in the original German. It is indeed inconceivable that she would not have been intimately involved in what often amounts to the reconstruction of the couple’s joint experiences. One can only speculate as to whether this gave her some sense of ownership in the text that seemed to permit further adjustments after Petroff’s death.26 Intriguingly, another annotation suggests that chapters relating to Russia were consulted or perhaps corrected in March 1956 – the month after the CPSU Twentieth Congress, when already the Stalin controversy was taking off in the British communist press. The history of the text now available to us must to some extent remain conjectural. Where it is clearly a redacted text, it is the amended version that is followed here. Direct citations thus incorporate amendments and changes of pagination rather than follow the original, noting only where the difference seems a significant one. I have also silently corrected any remaining idiosyncrasies of grammar, spelling or punctuation.

In the illegal movement (1901-7)

4 Except where the author’s family background is itself politicised, childhood and immediate domestic environment feature only fleetingly in many labour memoirs. Petroff had a possible model for a fuller narrative in the trilogy of his older contemporary and fellow social democrat Maxim Gorky.27 Nevertheless, a personal history of this type was not his object, and the opening years of his life are dealt with in a perfunctory opening chapter. Even his birthplace – Novotorzhsk in the southern Ukraine – and date of birth – 1 May 1884 – have to be gleaned from elsewhere in the text or from other sources. Petroff’s father was a tiler by trade who died when he was eleven. Of his mother he writes with warm affection, but he cannot actually recall whether or not she could read. He was the youngest of a large family and relations may not have been close. Nevertheless, his mother supported him in what Petroff described as at once an undefined longing ‘to “learn something”’ and an ‘urge for the distant’ beyond his small-town environment.28 It was with her encouragement that at the age of fourteen he made his way to the nearest large city, Odessa. Here his life begins as if anew. Odessa had a large Jewish community which suffered dreadful pogroms, one of them a savage settling of scores with the 1905 revolution.29 The Menshevik Julius Martov, who far more than Lenin was Petroff’s political cynosure, referred to the ‘saving hatred’ which remained with him from such events.30 Petroff, by contrast, has little to say about his own Jewishness, or of the political allure of the Bund, and he refers to the divide-and-rule deception of anti- semitism in a general way that any social democrat might have.31 How far his was a religious upbringing is also not recorded, though his father’s employment as a synagogue caretaker suggests that formal observances were maintained.32 In any case, it is to the radical and intellectual circles who took him under their wing in Odessa that Petroff ascribes the widening of his educational horizons and his introduction to socialist ideas. Informally attending university classes, he organised his first workers’ study circle and in the autumn of 1901 joined the RSDLP. The party, as a source of authority and identity, was henceforth at the centre of his political world-view. Labour movement activities of the western type were proscribed. Though the RSDLP was also illegal, its forms of organisation were adapted to this environment and its role as focal point and co-ordinating force was clearly attested in Petroff’s later contributions to the British socialist press. Indeed, Rodgers and Smyth held that these described a concept of party organisation originating in Lenin’s founding text of vanguardism, What Is To Be Done? (1902).33 It is true that Petroff in these articles drew largely on his Russian experience. It was nevertheless as a self-described ‘Continental’ that he commented on the disorganised state of British socialism, and it was the German SPD that he cited as the ne plus ultra of party organisation.34 His socialist commitment predated the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and when this was effected over precisely these questions Petroff unhesitatingly took his stand with the latter.35 Indeed, inhis autobiography he ascribed the root fault of ‘the whole Communist ideology’ to the ‘fallacious, un-Marxist theory’ of What Is To Be Done? – a formulation apparently so sweeping that it has been heavily inked out, perhaps by Irma after her reconciliation with official communism. It is one of the few obviously political alterations to the manuscript that can be identified in this way.36 It was not until the Fifth RSDLP Congress in London in 1907 that Petroff witnessed these rival conceptions of the party expounded by Martov and Lenin at first hand. The account he provides offers a revealing insight into his underlying loyalties, at least as these appeared to him following his break with Bolshevism:

5 Both men were perfectly sincere … but they differed widely in their methods, habits and notions. While Martov was an absolute European, a typical Bohemian, a brilliant publicist, witty in his speeches (though no great orator), disdaining demagogy, always taking a wide view, fair and honest towards friend and foe – Lenin, on the contrary, was a typical Russian, pedantic in his personal habits, convincing by his iron logic in his powerful speeches and in his brilliant writings which were effective though of a peculiarly heavy style, an iron character always heading straight for a fixed goal, at times not over-scrupulous in the choice of his means, inscrutable for friend and foe.

Martov as primus inter pares relied on strength of argument, and Petroff saw the Mensheviks a republic of free spirits. Lenin, on the other hand, he likened to a pope at the head of his church seeking blindly following adherents.37 On tactical issues like participation in the first Duma elections, conceded by the regime during the 1905 revolution, Petroff also adopted a position that he presents as definitely opposed to the Bolsheviks’.38 Wal Hannington suggests that those who later knew the Russian émigrés in Britain were well aware of the differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In fact, it would have taken an unusually well-informed British socialist to have registered these distinctions.39 Following the setback of 1905, there was as yet no final dividing line of state and revolution within the RSDLP, but a tangling of alignments which it took the European war and fall of Tsarism to order on more familiar lines. By comparison with the propagandist traditions which Petroff railed against in Britain, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as he had known them espoused a form of mass agitational politics under the active direction of party cadres. This also required a level of commitment that stood out in a British context. There is no suggestion in the manuscript that Petroff was wounded in the 1905 revolution or sent to Siberia, as was previously understood.40 Nevertheless, his involvement in illegal work, described in detail in his manuscript, meant frequent movement from one centre to another and periods spent in prison, internal exile and even an army disciplinary battalion. It was not until he left Russia that Petroff found in Irma the comrade who would share his travails, or perhaps that he allowed himself the opportunity for such a relationship. In these early chapters he thus evokes a sense of exclusion from the ‘little joys’ of domesticity, in the accents of the revolutionary by vocation who renounces present comforts for the promise of a better future. ‘Was it possible … to think only of one’s own self instead of taking up the fight against the fundamental evil, against the system founded on social and political oppression?’, he asks rhetorically. Prepared to ‘empty the cup to the dregs’ in the certainty of future victory, he expounds his credo in a recollected fragment of conversation: ‘Who is not prepared to sacrifice everything usually sacrifices nothing’.41 Petroff did not therefore underestimate the role of the party as such. Not only did he emphasise its particular responsibilities in a country like Russia, ‘devoid of political liberties and … Trade Unions in the European sense’.42 He also extolled the active elements on whose presently minority status Martov and Lenin were both agreed. Petroff’s consignment to a disciplinary battalion followed an abortive attempt at escape after he was arrested in Kiev on May Day 1904, and subsequently transferred to Novograd-Volynsk. He described the sentence as distinctly more punitive than penal servitude, though personally he enjoyed a relatively privileged position in charge of a company school. As mass agitations swept across Russia over the course of 1905, it was impossible to insulate the battalion from these movements,

6 and among the ‘passive element’ of peasant soldiers there was sufficient leaven of more independent spirits to encourage Petroff in heading an insurrection. On 18 November this headed towards the regional capital of Voronezh where, encountering military resistance, the ‘motley crowd’ for the most part dispersed to enjoy their new- found liberty. Here, then, was a first lesson for the young revolutionary: that it was only the ‘more or less conscious elements’ who at this point stood out for some larger conception of emancipation.43 A second lesson came with the failure of the revolutionary actions that followed the Moscow rising in early December. These actions occurred in all the principal cities of south-west Russia, and Petroff himself was involved in armed demonstrations in Kharkov. Each, however, was in the nature of spontaneous outbreak; nothing was organised on a national scale; nobody, Petroff reflected, gave thought to the discontented army units in Siberia. ‘Had there been an efficient organisation it would have been easy to bring these forces to Russia and utilise them in the interest of the Revolution … But on our side there was no farseeing military leadership … and many an important factor favourable to our cause was not utilised’.44 Petroff therefore knew quite well that an open social-democratic politics of the western type was presently unfeasible in Russia. Indeed, his admitted severity regarding ‘conspirative precautions’ was already giving rise to what he conceded would prove frequent violent quarrels.45 This was not therefore the cause of his objections to Lenin’s influence within the RSDLP. He did however reject the formative external agency of the intelligentsia, without whom, Lenin had suggested, workers could attain only a form of trade-union consciousness. Describing this as intellectuals playing the role of nursemaid, Petroff recalled invoking Marx against a conception of the party which he regarded as a regression to the utopian socialists of a century earlier.46 There are echoes here of Trotsky’s attack on ‘substitutism’ in his pamphlet Our Political Tasks (1904), and Petroff’s orientation to class-based activism is also linked in his memoir with a repugance for dogmatism, political nepotism and the affectation of superiority towards immediate forms of struggle. In one passage he refers to the Kiev representative of Lenin’s central committee as ‘the type of “revolutionary” in quotation marks’ who handed out orders on no other basis than Lenin’s patronage.47 In another he describes establishing an effective soldiers’ organisation while disapproving intellectuals on the Odessa party committee discountenanced the focus on immediate demands and thrashed out the issue of democratic centralism.48 Gallacher’s depiction of Petroff, whom he first met in 1912, was of a figure obsessed by spies, agents-provocateurs and the nefarious manoeuvres of the authorities. Compared to the average British labour biography, conspiratorial methods do certainly loom large in his account. There is also an undercurrent of violence, not just at moments of insurgency, but in the case of suspected informers – like the one whom Petroff saw pounded to a jelly ‘so thoroughly that I dislocated my arm’.49 His second arrest, on 10 July 1906, would not have allayed his suspicious disposition. The previous day the Tsar had dissolved the Duma; Petroff, who had been building up his secret military organisation, believed that he had only to have given the word and the garrison at Odessa would have risen in revolt. His arrest at this point is attributed to a ‘foul betrayal’.50 There is, however, no suggestion of the obsessiveness which Gallacher alleged. Petroff described the Odessa prison in which he spent five months as a modern building in which there survived ‘a last whiff of the “liberal era”’.51 Although the impact of the Stolypin reaction was increasingly being felt, there were apparently

7 ample opportunities for political study and discussion, while outside communications were sufficiently relaxed to permit what proved to be a successful stratagem for Petroff’s release under a false identity. Of particular note is the absence in the memoir of any mention of food-poisoning. In Gallacher’s accounts, this was the idée fixe with which Petroff infected Maclean, whose belief that his food was drugged was taken as a sign of mental instability.52 Petroff’s acquaintance with Maclean was, as we shall see, in any case of no such duration as seems consistent with so malignant an influence. Moreover, the only evidence of such misgivings in his own testimony relates to a later period, when it was the communists themselves whom he suspected of wanting to poison him. Perhaps this suggests a motive for Gallacher’s smearing, for had he got wind of these allegations it must have been Petroff himself whose derangement he was most concerned to demonstrate. Were it not to dismiss as fantastical possible stories concerning the Cheka or GPU, it is difficult otherwise to see how a communist in 1936 could so disparage experiences of the Tsarist Okhrana as to present the victim himself as if the villain. Whether as Leninist paragon or Conradian intriguer, the exoticism of Petroff’s politics should in any case not be exaggerated. If Menshevism can be regarded as a westernising current within Russian social democracy, then Petroff, in coming to Britain, met up with a form of labour movement activity which circumstance rather than inclination had hitherto prevented him from adopting. He had first been drawn towards socialism by writings on the British and French working classes, and on the German socialist Lassalle.53 Imprisoned in Kiev fortress, his cell-neighbour was the Menshevik Kolokolnikov, later historian of the Russian trade unions, whose dislike for phrase-mongering and ‘screaming’ slogans like Lenin’s Petroff remembered favourably.54 Again while imprisoned in Odessa, Petroff studied anarchist and syndicalist literature and the history of the French labour movement.55 He was thus exposed to disparate socialist currents that were not necessarily confined within national boundaries. The positing in this period of a simple ‘Russian’ influence, whether for good or evil, is too teleological by far to be convincing. Initially making his way to Geneva, it was in April 1907 that Petroff first set foot in London for the congress of RSDLP. ‘I had read a great deal about England’, he recalled. ‘Its strong, developed working class movement which nevertheless was said not to be revolutionary seemed to be a fascinating riddle; its huge demonstrations and labour struggles attracted me.’ The riddle was redoubled when, on his first morning in London, he stumbled across the statue of the regicide Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament. ‘A country where monuments are erected to revolutionaries? A warm feeling for this strange land and its still totally unknown to me inhabitants rose up in my breast.’ 56 Though so poorly reciprocated, it was apparently to remain.

Life and struggles in exile (1907-17)

Through his association with Maclean, Petroff is best known as one of the BSP radicals who upheld the principles of international socialism throughout the First World War. It was thus that he incurred the ire of Justice and the British Home Office. It was as an internationalist too that in January 1918 he, along with Irma and Georgi Chicherin, was repatriated to Russia under pressure from the new Bolshevik regime. Petroff’s last article before internment had warned against pious hopes of a reborn international embracing those who had sunk into a ‘patriotic blackguardism’.57 His surviving correspondence with Irma confirms that they rallied to the revolution as

8 a matter of basic socialist instinct.58 Arriving in Petrograd, the returnees were immediately found responsible positions at Narkomindel. It is nevertheless arguable that Petroff, through his experience in Britain, returned to Russia even less of a Leninist than when he left it. Open labour movement activity for the Mensheviks was an ideal if not an immediate practical possibility. Once the opportunity presented itself to Petroff, he had seized it with both hands. Initially in Geneva he observed how few of the Russian émigrés had maintained their political focus through participation in the local labour movement.59 Moving then to Paris, he recoiled from the ‘eternal hairsplitting quarrels between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks that always bored me’, and from the demoralising tendencies within the two groups that he identified respectively with god-builders and liquidationists.60 Following the excitements of 1905, a mood of ‘post-revolutionary decadence’ was felt among many of the exiles.61 Through grassroots activity in Britain, Petroff nevertheless managed to keep his political bearings amidst what Lenin’s wife Krupskaya called ‘the dead sea of émigré life, that drags one to the bottom’.62 The transition was made easier by his discovery in East London of the multifarious Jewish radicalism later evoked in the writings of Bill Fishman.63 Discerning a new sense of hope beneath the surface impression of filth and poverty, Petroff found that the émigrés he encountered were no longer the ‘hopeless, downtrodden, always trembling in fear of pogroms’ of the East European ghetto districts, but a population ‘of increasing self-respect, in the process of rapid cultural advancement’. 64 This pulsating cultural life, so different from that of the English, was expressed through Jewish unions, theatres, clubs and libraries. The presiding spirits were not social democrats at all but figures like Rudolf Rocker, doyen of London anarchism, a ‘brilliant speaker, gifted publicist and honest fighter’, and Aron Zundelevich, veteran of the terrorist Narodnaya Volya.65 It was Zundelevich, whom he recalled exuding a ‘radiant all-embracing kindliness and tolerance’, who found Petroff digs in the house he lived in just behind Euston station.66 Zundelevich also introduced Petroff to the Communist Club in Charlotte Street which functioned as the central rendezvous of the capital’s foreign socialists. Here the representatives of older political formations could be found ‘preserved … as in a refrigerator’, while modern social democrats were evidently in a distinct minority.67 The same was true of the Herzen-Circle, an ‘inter-party centre’ of the Russian émigrés in which ‘Liberals, Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, Syndicalists and Anarchists gathered, crossing their swords in animated discussion or uniting in friendly tea parties’.68 For the clandestine activist unused to such easy exchanges, it must have been a hugely stimulating environment. Petroff quotes with evident approval the anarchist Kropotkin’s message to the RSDLP that the party flag mattered less than the revolutionary goal.69 But one must also record how he subsequently likened the ‘fine differentiations between Rightists, Leftists, Half- and Threequarter- Centrists’ within the early Comintern to these London refugee groups, from which he sought escape into the ‘living though “untheoretical” British Labour movement’.70 Petroff had not therefore made his way to London through Leith and Glasgow, as has previously been understood. Nor was it Maclean who taught him English, which he ‘seriously took to learning’ in the East End and describes speaking fluently before ever setting foot in Glasgow.71 Petroff’s first visit to Scotland came through the veteran Social Revolutionary Tieploff, nicknamed the ‘Governor-General of the East End’, who presided over the émigrés with a singular freedom from ‘partisan narrowmindedness’. With the construction in Barrow of a new Russian flagship, the Rurik, Tieploff approached Petroff to carry out political work among the four hundred

9 Russian sailors stationed with it, evidently some time towards the end of 1907.72 Petroff then moved with ship and crew to Glasgow-Clydebank, establishing an effective social-democratic organisation for which responsibility was subsequently taken over by the RSDLP’s Paris bureau. 73 Petroff describes the support of ‘British comrades’ as indispensable in this work. Nationally he highlights the contribution of Robert Blatchford and the Clarion newspaper. In Glasgow itself he linked up with the strongly organised Social Democratic Party, as the erstwhile SDF had now become, and singles out Laurie Anderson, Robert Inglis and Maclean as harbouring and feeding him with a proper regard for the rules of conspiracy. Petroff gives the names in just this order, with a perfunctory reference to Maclean that may be contrasted with his vivid portraits of figures like Blatchford, Zundelevich and H.M. Hyndman. In fairness to Anderson and Inglis, one may also note the contrast with biographies of Maclean, whose personal responsibility for Petroff’s welfare is stressed to the exclusion of his wider party circle.74 There is no playing down of Maclean’s role in Petroff’s later chapters, where he is presented as a heroic, indomitable figure and the ‘only real revolutionary whom the British working class movement has produced in post-Chartist times’.75 Though the earlier text has clearly been redacted, it is difficult to see why this should have been at the expense of Maclean.76 Petroff’s account thus offers strong support for Ripley and McHugh’s view that his political connections with Maclean at this point have been considerably overstated.77 After a further interlude in Paris, Petroff settled once more in London and joined the Kentish Town branch of the SDP. This was one of the party’s largest, liveliest and most radical branches, and its two hundred members included other exiled Russians like the Bolshevik Litvinov and the Menshevik Chicherin. Adapting to local ways, Petroff eventually had his go at the type of street-corner meeting – what he referred to as ‘sun, moon and cobblestones’ – with which he made such sport in his organisational proposals for the party. He also evokes with affection and respect the now mostly forgotten activists who cast their pearls before uncomprehending passers- by or else were active in their unions or the branch’s lively Socialist Sunday School and ‘Young Socialist Citizen Scouts’. That Petroff, more perhaps than Maclean, understood the value of these activities is evident in his encomiums to Blatchford’s Clarion movement.78 Nevertheless, it was the relation, or lack of it, with the passers- by that most preoccupied him. Whether on the basis of his local experiences, or in wanting to move beyond them, Petroff’s first real clash with the SDP executive was over his concern to grow from ‘sect’ into ‘party’, one that would ‘illuminate the daily struggles of the working class’ on the basis of its socialist principles.79 It is on this basis that Petroff has been depicted as a proto-Leninist, or even a Leninist tout court. If western Europe began with the Mensheviks, as Radek later put it, it is nevertheless clear that Petroff was a thorough Menshevik.80 After a brief spell working in the piano trade, he now made his living through journalism and translations. This allowed him scope for the study of the labour movement in the British Museum, where he describes his friendly encounter with the German historian of Chartism, Hermann Schlüter. Petroff also assisted in union activities, and living with a railway worker in St Pancras felt ‘particularly at home among the railwaymen’, participating in an unofficial strike committee during the rail strike of 1911.81 In the period 1910-15 Petroff was a delegate at all but one of his party’s national conferences. The exception was the unity conference of 1911 which gave rise to the BSP. On this occasion, he records, he declined the mandate because ‘a real Socialist unity could be brought about only by uniting with the ILP and … this would

10 be possible only inside the Labour Party’.82 In general, one may note how positive are Petroff’s various references to the ILP’s leading parliamentarian, Ramsay MacDonald.83 Within the SDP/BSP, on the other hand, there were already clashes with Hyndman as the party’s de facto leader. The first was over Hyndman’s sceptical attitude to the unions. Again in 1913, it was on active involvement in union issues that Petroff’s conception of party over sect was premised. Petroff adds that Justice suppressed all mention of these debates, and that its censorship was maintained in Lee and Archbold’s history of the SDP/BSP, published in 1935. ‘Falsifications of history have not originated from Stalin, the Hyndmanites knew already at that time how to play that trick, and … they have even posthumously perfected their skill’.84 Petroff’s ‘“English” and “Russian” work and studies’, as he put it, thus each claimed their fair share of his time and energy.85 On the one hand, he wrote in Justice of the ‘Russian revolution and counter-revolution’ and contributed regularly to Lucien Wolf’s weekly Darkest Russia. On the other hand, he lectured to Russian audiences on ‘New tendencies in British trade unionism’, in which he took his distance from the Webbs, and contributed on similar themes as London correspondent of the St Petersburg weeklies Nasha Zarya and Luch.86 Petroff describes these papers simply as social-democratic. In fact, both were Menshevik organs and Nasha Zarya represented the ‘practical men’ whose preoccupation with legal work in the unions and co- operatives drew censure even from Martov.87 Their only disadvantage, Petroff said, was that they did not pay. This confirms that he was moved by very different considerations from the ‘small but regular income’ he drew as contributor to the liberal Russkoe Slovo.88 Was this a Russian influence on the British or the reverse? When Theodore Rothstein reported on the BSP’s formation in the Bolshevik paper Prosvieshchenie, Petroff felt prompted to cover the same issue in Nasha Zarya. While in general terms he commended Lenin’s political astuteness, he felt that the British labour movement remained to the Bolshevik leader as ‘a book with seven seals’.89 Of the collapse of the International in 1914, Petroff notes how the old political dividing lines were obliterated. Radical marxists rallied to the flag; erstwhile moderates – he mentions MacDonald and Bernstein as well as Hardie and Jaurès – came out as decided opponents of the war. Petroff also draws the further distinction between pacifist and revolutionary opponents of the war, and includes Martov among the latter as well as Lenin and Maclean.90 It is indeed at this point that Maclean for the first time features centrally in Petroff’s account. Adopting common positions to some extent independently, their collaboration was effected through Maclean’s new paper Vanguard, and through his invitation to Petroff to join the paper’s editorial board in Glasgow and assist in Maclean’s education classes. Staying with Maclean in his ‘comfortable’ family home in Pollokshaws, Petroff discovered there a centre for the movement and ‘headquarters of a manifold activity’.91 Petroff’s chapter on his Scottish activities and subsequent internment is the longest of the twenty-nine. As a glimpse of radical Clydeside much of it is familiar, and his public notoriety at this point allows him to quote extensively from contemporary printed sources. There is a vivid eye-witness account of the famous Lloyd George meeting at St Andrew’s Hall, and of Petroff’s impressions of the rents agitation and the militant temper of the Fife and Lanarkshire coalfields. Petroff also offers insights into the tensions between Maclean and those who went on to form the British Communist Party. Gallacher, a figure ‘wobbling between anarchism and SLP dogmatism’, is described demanding Petroff’s exclusion from the Clyde Workers’ Committee as a foreigner.92 This may be compared with Gallacher’s own, rather different story, not that he expressed anti-foreigner prejudice, but that he

11 was accused of doing so. A more sinister impression is given of the ‘little demagogue’ Arthur MacManus, later the CP’s first chairman, who is recalled intimating some terrorist action against Lloyd George. Petroff refers to this as an attempt at ‘annihilation of our movement by provocation’, and records how he drew on his Russian experience in urging Maclean and James MacDougall to permanent vigilance against the agent-provocateur.93 Petroff also appears to link MacManus with the unfortunate prosecution of Alice Wheeldon, which he saw as enactment of the ‘curare tragedy’ already threatened in Glasgow, and when later he encountered him through the Comintern he remained convinced that MacManus was an unprincipled adventurer.94 Conceivably these were the suspicions that in Gallacher’s mind were connected with Maclean’s excessive concern with possible conspiracies. But ironically, within the context of the early Communist Party nobody was more critical of MacManus’s irresponsibility than Gallacher himself.95 Transferred from Edinburgh Castle to the Cornwallis Road internment camp in Islington, Petroff found the conditions there less intolerable than the fact of being cut off from the outside world and subject to arbitrary restrictions on his visitors and correspondence. He particularly resented the interruption of communications with Irma, who was interned at Aylesbury and appears to have suffered worse conditions. Significantly, Petroff also mentions as an additional psychological difficulty the fact that he did not feel towards his democratic jailers the ‘same wild, strength instilling hatred’ he had felt towards the Tsar’s. Again there is no mention of the fear of poisoning he is supposed to have instilled in Maclean, only concern at the lack of vitamins, which Chicherin put right by weekly fruit deliveries.96 What Petroff did fear was deportation back to Russia, ‘to seal with my blood the friendship of the British bourgeoisie with the Tsar’.97 Instead it was the Tsar himself whose blood sealed the workers’ victory of which Petroff and those around him had dreamt so long. Following the February revolution of 1917 there were intensified campaigns for the Petroffs’ release, and a marked deterioration of the conditions under which they were kept. Only with the October revolution was a more compelling pressure from afar exercised on their behalf. For the moment at least, Petroff’s personal emancipation and that of his country seemed as one.

Disillusioned … (1918-29)

According to the Daily Worker, Petroff did a variety of jobs when he returned to Russia, none of them very well.98 The first part of the statement is certainly accurate. Trotsky had resigned as head of Narkomindel rather than take responsibility for an annexationist Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany. Despite his Menshevik past, it was Chicherin who replaced him, while Petroff as assistant commissar oversaw the treaty’s ratification in Berlin. Irma meanwhile did propaganda work among German prisoners of war, briefly editing the papers Die Völkerfriede (where she succeeded Radek) and Weltrevolution.99 Petroff, who did not long remain at Narkomindel, also played some part in this work, and subsequently exercised state or party responsibilities in the Volga, White Russian and Siberian regions. Earlier interests were revived in socialist education and in the rail unions, and Petroff claims to have given over a hundred lectures at the party school in Omsk.100 His reappearance in London as Soviet envoy had been blocked by the British authorities, and he declined to return as emissary of the Comintern.101 He was however on the reception committee for the British Labour delegation that arrived in Russia in May 1920.102 He

12 was also present as observer at some of the decisive moments in the foundation of the Comintern, and at the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in September 1920. Though he spent less than four years back in Russia, these take up over half of Petroff’s manuscript and it is here, drawn with increasing explicitness, that the political moral of his story chiefly lies. Petroff’s communist career trajectory was essentially one from centre to periphery, and eventually out of Russia entirely. From his initial refusal to work at Narkomindel with Lev Karakhan, whom he manifestly distrusted, he describes this at every stage as a process of progressive self-exclusion. If initially this was held in check by loyalty to the revolution, the sense of constraint diminished as both the force and the precariousness of the revolution also diminished. By the time that the Third Comintern Congress met in June-July 1921, Petroff’s characterisation of the regime is recalled in a conversation with the Swedish communist Zeth Höglund: ‘Economically – State capitalism. Politically – barbarian Asiatic police dictatorship in red slogan sauce’.103 The latter, not the former, was the key to Petroff’s disillusionment. ‘State capitalism’ meant the New Economic Policy, introduced earlier that year and the occasion, according to Petroff, for justified relief among the population at large. Petroff’s resumption of activities in Russia had more or less coincided with the ‘food dictatorship’ of war communism, and its arbitrary exactions and criminalisation of basic survival instincts occasion some of the most scathing passages in his entire manuscript. ‘We had lived abroad and had participated in the Socialist and Trade Union Movement of highly developed countries’, he wrote.

We had analysed and criticised … the economic system of those countries striving to replace the classical capitalist system by the higher Socialist system. Thus in Russia everything seemed to us primitive and antediluvian; we laughed or were indignant when this red tarnished backwardness was presented to us as ‘Socialism’.104

Petroff was to remain a supporter of NEP even as his links with the communists were being severed. It was therefore from the ‘Asiatic’ party dictatorship that he felt a more profound sense of alienation, but from this same perspective of socialist and trade union values as upheld internationally.105 The broader criticisms that he makes are ones familiar from other sources, and in a document of 1930s it is difficult to extricate Petroff’s immediate reactions to the regime from his subsequent reading and reflection. As the revolution’s initial ‘fanaticism of equality’ was quickly dissipated, he describes the differentiation of a privileged bureaucratic stratum, and, within this new ruling elite, the further differentiation of a ‘new master class’ that dominated the ruling party itself.106 Though Petroff accepted the necessity and inevitability of revolutionary violence, he condemns the institutionalisation of an apparatus of terror, and takes particular exception to the persecution of intellectuals.107 His accounts reads as that of a figure with sufficient authority to challenge abuses by the Cheka and the deterioration of both party and soviet democracy, though ultimately, of course, his interventions were of only temporary and local effect. Himself a member of the government of the White Russian soviet republic, Petroff describes it as a gang of robbers and murderers with whom one could do little short of shooting them – which, for better or for worse, was not within his capacity.108 ‘The heaven-assailing revolutionaries of 1917’, he writes in more general terms, ‘had been transformed into a ruling class … used to imposing

13 their will on passive masses’. The state was becoming a ‘centralised machine of oppression’ and the party itself its ‘militarised organ of domination’.109 From the Hungarian adventurer Béla Kun to the White Russian party chief Alexander Miasnikian, key revolutionary personalities are evoked in anything but sympathetic terms. However, it is a strength of Petroff’s account that the representation of leading actors recognises the complexity of the political choices with which they were confronted. Blatchford and Hyndman are among the British socialists who benefit from such a treatment. Among the Bolsheviks, Trotsky and the first Soviet president Sverdlov are depicted as honest but misdirected, and even Stalin’s future sidekick Manuilsky exudes a rough bonhomie that he was not to extend to vacillating elements in the Comintern.110 It is Lenin, however, who is the key to Petroff’s ambivalence regarding Bolshevism in power. Petroff several times alludes to the good personal relations they enjoyed and in the text as it stands the later references to Lenin are generally friendlier than those within the context of pre-war RSDLP. Indeed, the recollection of Lenin’s attempted assassination by Fanny Kaplan in August 1918 is positively eulogistic in character. ‘The thought that Lenin might be taken from us … was almost unbearable’, Petroff writes:

Amongst the other leaders there was not one who reached up to Lenin’s knees or who could have replaced him. The popularity of his name, his influence on the masses, his flexibility, his ability to settle disputes, to separate warring chiefs and groups made Lenin irreplaceable.111

With Lenin’s actual passing some years later, the point is again made that he stood head-and-shoulders above any possible successor, and Petroff cites at length from the panegyric he published at the time.112 Superficially, these assessments seems hard to square with his reasoning in an earlier context that it is not the leader like Lenin who makes the revolution, but the reverse.113 Without knowing the order in which the chapters were written, it is difficult to know how far, if at all, this reflects a shifting assessment of Lenin over time. Nevertheless, even as he most extols Lenin’s statesmanship and theoretical acumen, Petroff not only qualifies this with reference to his ‘peculiar Asiatic limitation’ but suggests that the latter made him the born leader of the Russians.114 Petroff was not simply a Menshevik caught up in the revolution. By his own account he was at this time an ardent Bolshevik, one whose opposition, such as it was, was unconscious, and who suffered political estrangement from Martov.115 With a clarity of insight that must have sharpened over time, it is nevertheless as a critical history of Bolshevism from the standpoint avowedly of European socialism that Petroff’s autobiography is best made sense of politically. Economically, we thus encounter him putting the classically Menshevik position that the industrialised west was arguably closer to socialism than the Russians because, while yet to achieve the revolution, it had at least achieved the technical basis on which socialism could alone be constructed.116 Politically, it is revealing that he should emphasise his differences with Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917). For those contesting the inevitability of Bolshevism’s degeneration into Stalinism, Lenin’s exposition of the ‘commune state’ in this key text has been seen as expressive of the unfulfilled emancipatory potential of the revolution.117 Petroff, however, regarded it as a deviation from Marx’s democratic conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and he viewed with apprehension the use and abuse of practices of indirect

14 or demonstrative election. He strongly affirms what Lenin would have called ‘opposition for the sake of opposition’, and extends this principle to groups like the Workers’ Opposition, with whose positions he did not himself necessarily agree.118 The nature of his differences with them is itself illuminating. In the context of the trade union controversies of 1920-1, Petroff excoriates Trotsky over the militarisation of labour, and he saw unions subordinated to the state as the sheep’s clothing in which the ‘Communist wolf’ sought to inveigle the workers. However, he was also opposed to the syndicalist-style ‘trade unionisation of the State’ which he identified with the Workers’ Opposition. His position was thus closest to what he rightly characterised as the ‘“Menshevist deviations”’ of trade union independence. This, he said, meant ‘real trade unions in the European sense’, or, invoking his British experience more directly, in the ‘English’ sense which he held to represent a higher form of organisation than Bolshevik dictatorship.119 There is something in common here with the Maclean who had looked askance at ideas of workers’ control. However, there are also obvious differences with Maclean. Notably, Petroff is dismissive of the ‘revived “revolutionary” principle of small nationalities’ with which Maclean’s rediscovery of Scottish nationhood may reasonably be associated, and he holds that Lenin had derived this principle from Louis Napoleon via Gladstone.120 In the Volga region, he claims with Irma the credit for the idea of an autonomous republic of the long-established Volga Germans, successfully proposed to Stalin and entrusted to Ernst Reuter.121 Characteristically, he also discerns in the region’s smoother, freer and less arbitrary administration the predominance of ‘experienced German Social Democrats’ as opposed to ‘new- hatched Russian Communists’.122 Nevertheless, for the Jewish socialist who has barely a word for the Bund, there is no general affirmation of the national principle, and Petroff disparages the ‘dialect-mania’ and linguistic particularism whose influence on Soviet education policy he finds particularly regrettable.123 He even has a curious allusion to the ‘polyglot claptrap’ of the early Comintern.124 In September 1920 Petroff travelled to Baku for the Congress of the Peoples of the East which best represented the Bolsheviks’ commitment to movements of national liberation. From the enthusiasm with which the delegates were greeted, he noted cynically, ‘one could at once conclude that the Soviet regime had not existed here for any length of time’.125 Though impressed by the signs of emancipation, particularly of the women delegates and supporters, Petroff confessed that he had never believed in decolonisation as a general principle irrespective of circumstances:

What I was striving for was democratic self-government, social and cultural and development of all colonial peoples, and I held that immediate complete independence was not always desirable since in many cases the native workers – for whom I desired the right of forming Trade Unions and protection by social legislation – would suffer more from a native caste of exploiters than from the exploitation by a progressive European country with an influential working class movement. And to me the criterion always has been the liberty and welfare of the working class not the interests of the budding nationalist colonial bourgeoisie.126

As he recalls putting it to the Comintern president Zinoviev at this time, ‘we are looking towards the West and you towards Asia’.127 Though Petroff describes these as heretical views, they had much in common with Menshevik criticisms of the Baku congress. Through his informal influence on delegates, he even claims some credit for

15 the thwarting of Zinoviev’s plan to have the congress addressed by the pan-Islamist Enver Pasha.128 The contrast with Maclean’s perspective of the break-up of the British empire may again be noted. The State and Revolution was not just an abstract statement of principle. It has also been seen as the culmination of a ‘remorseless polemic’ against social democracy, to which the Bolsheviks gave institutional expression through single-party rule and the splitting of the workers’ movement internationally.129 Identification with the European labour movement was therefore not just a matter of alternative values by which to measure the Bolsheviks’ record in government. It also represented an independent principle of organisation under challenge from Bolshevism both from within and from without. This is certainly a key motif in Petroff’s account. It was not socialism in one country that disillusioned him, but socialism of one party, or after the model of one party, and that party one that in so many ways was not the best placed to provide it. Petroff’s first major responsibility for the Bolsheviks was the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. This does not register in standard histories like E.H. Carr’s and its entrustment to a secondary figure like Petroff may not entirely bear out his contention that there remained important issues that he was best placed to deal with. An alternative explanation might be that nobody else who could avoid it wanted to be associated with so damaging a settlement. Petroff nevertheless claimed to have secured a ‘hard won peace protocol containing many important concessions torn from the teeth of the Germans’, notably the restriction to four provinces of the Ukrainian territories ceded to the Germans.130 What is more relevant to the present discussion is the role which he ascribed to the centrist social democrats of the Independent Social Democratic Party or USPD. Set up at Easter 1917, the USPD ranged from figures like Bernstein and Kautsky on the right to the Spartacists on the left, in this respect resembling the original RSDLP before it split. With Luxemburg and Liebknecht in prison, and Franz Mehring seriously ill, the only Spartacist Petroff got to meet was the publicist Julian Borchardt. A little unfairly, as Borchardt had no connection with the movement after 1918, he described him as ‘the type of the overbearing, officious little commissar that later on in Russia turned into a universal plague’.131 Instead, it was the centrists with whom Petroff established a close relationship: in particular, Karl and Luise Kautsky and the left centrist Hugo Haase, who advised him on matters of law. It was like a reminder of some buried discourse of socialist internationalism. As an opponent of the war, Petroff had strongly criticised the Second International and he thought it now ‘as dead as a door nail’.132 In his ten days in Germany, he nevertheless had no sense of being in an ‘enemy country’ or of the ‘terrible gulf’ that had divided the workers on national lines – ‘just as in the old days I faced comrades who were striving towards the same ideals as I had’.133 Even the pro-war majority socialists seemed less violently jingoistic than British equivalents like Hyndman and Ben Tillett.134 Reporting back to Lenin, Petroff notes how the suggestions that a revolutionary situation was developing in Germany acted ‘like a tonic’ on the leading Bolsheviks.135 That may be contrasted with Richard Pipes’s claim, on the scantiest pevidence, that Lenin in the months that followed ‘shared the optimism of the German High Command’ regarding the coming German victory.136 Lenin would not have reacted so positively to plaudits to the ‘renegade’ Kautsky.137 In Russia itself, any residual Bolshevik instinct of socialist unity was also extinguished. Petroff frequently alludes to the suppression of oppositional currents, as expressed either in the commitment to independent unions or some social-democratic line of criticism of the authorities. He ascribes a particular significance to the

16 exclusion from the soviets of the Mensheviks, along with the Right Social Revolutionaries, on 14 June 1918. Followed by ‘abusive howling’, the retiring Mensheviks were led by Martov, whom Petroff describes as ‘undoubtedly … the noblest character whom the revolutionary movement of Russia has produced in the twentieth century’. Despite such treatment, Martov declared his continuing support for the revolution, and the Mensheviks remained as a constitutional if much circumscribed opposition until definitively suppressed in 1920-1. Nevertheless, it was their initial ejection from the soviets, which he and Irma had witnessed from the gallery, that Petroff describes as producing ‘a feeling of deepest shame [that] all but suffocated us, for the first time we felt really ashamed of our party’.138 One may perhaps wonder whether the significance of the episode had become clearer to Petroff over time, and whether there was not also some feeling of personal guilt which as yet he did nothing to act upon. Looking beyond Russia, Petroff accepted the principle of a new workers’ international, and thought it natural that the initiative should come from Moscow.139 Nevertheless, his account of the early Comintern reveals an ambivalence if not inconsistency that may again owe something to the complexities of its construction as a text. When a ‘preliminary conference’ of the new international was held at Narkomindel on 6 February 1918, Petroff records that he thought it futile to set up a ‘sectarian International’ from which centrists and even the currently ‘war-mad majority’ were excluded. 140 When the founding Comintern congress was held a year later, he declined to assume a spurious BSP mandate and was not impressed by the credentials of other so-called consultative delegates.141 The Second Comintern Congress of July-August 1920 was incomparably more representative in character. Even this Petroff nevertheless describes as ‘reeking’ with impostors. ‘Looking into the conference hall’ – he had no actual role in the proceedings – he is reminded of ‘a carp pond at feeding time … their mouths open to catch morsels of food thrown at them’.142 Surprisingly, Petroff has no mention of Gallacher’s appearance in Moscow, and his account of the Second Congress does not suggest a close involvement in the proceedings. Among the Comintern’s adventurers he identifies the SLPers MacManus and J.T. Murphy, neither of whom attended the congress, while Sylvia Pankhurst and the BSP’s Tom Quelch, who did, are described as representing ‘real organised left trends’.143 Again there are parallels with Maclean, who commended Petroff to Lenin as an informant on British affairs, and who also made much of corruption in the early CPGB. Within the visiting British Labour delegation, Petroff similarly distinguished between the majority of members ‘honestly striving to get at the truth’ and the uncritical pro-Bolsheviks A.A. Purcell and Robert Williams. His greatest animus was against the ILPer Clifford Allen, then comporting himself as a ‘two hundred per cent Communist’ and afterwards one of Ramsay MacDonald staunchest camp-followers.144 Petroff’s closest affinity seems to have been with the ‘honest seeking Minority- Socialists’ whom the Comintern’s famous ‘twenty-one conditions’ were specifically devised to exclude. An ‘obedient foreign police spy’, he concluded cynically, was ‘already looked upon with more favour … than an honest Social Democrat who had a mind of his own’; and he particularly regretted the splitting of the USPD at Halle in October 1920.145 That Petroff also describes bring pressurised by Zinoviev to take up Comintern work with the ‘English section’ suggests that he may not have been so outspoken at the time.146

17 Petroff’s twenty-sixth chapter ‘The proletariat in revolt’ culminates with the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt naval mutiny in March 1921. The following chapter ‘Disillusionment …’ begins with the further deterioration of Soviet democracy as manifested in bogus elections to the Moscow the following month. It was at this point that the Petroffs formalised their hitherto free marriage to secure their legal status in the event of leaving Russia. The Third Comintern Congress, which followed in the summer of 1921, is described by Petroff as the zenith of international communism, but equally as occasion for still more shameless displays of corruption and corruptibility. Hard-pressed Muscovites wondered at the rows of cars that stood outside the Hotel Lux to save the delegates the short walk to the Kremlin.147 Within the congress hall, meanwhile, controversy centred on the ‘March Action’ in Germany, which Petroff came to see as a ‘mad putsch’ in which Béla Kun again played a deplorable role.148 Petroff describes as if it were the final straw Lenin’s brazen attempt to play down the looming Volga famine, as if no outside assistance were required.149 As the sometime Comintern secretary Angelica Balabanov was then discovering, getting out of Russia by this time was becoming as difficult as getting in. With Chicherin at the head of Narkomindel and an old Breslau contact of Irma’s, Paul Loebe, now social- democratic president of the Reichstag, the Petroffs nevertheless had friends in high places. A month or two before Balabanov, they succeeded in leaving Russia on a German visa in September 1921.150 The break with communism was protracted. Encountering German social democrats, the Petroffs quickly realised that the Bolsheviks had no monopoly over the movement’s ‘evil elements’.151 Nor were they ready to adopt the anti-Soviet positions of old associates like Zundelevich.152 In any case their employment depended on the Russian trade delegation. Here they oversaw the economic journal Aus der Volkswirtschaft der RSFSR and in 1924 published their first book, on Russia’s regeneration under NEP. Despite the tension between promotion of the regime and the provision of accurate data, this was apparently congenial work. Even after relinquishing their other editorial responsibilities, the Petroffs thus undertook a larger work on the Soviet economy, published after eighteen months of concentrated effort in 1926. Intended for a European readership, and eschewing overt political commentary, the presentation of comparative economic data provided an unambiguously positive view of Soviet development.153 Petroff’s observations on the leaders of German communism are almost invariably critical. He describes his particular dismay at the misconceived ‘German October’ of 1923 and at Karl Radek’s promotion of a form of ‘National Bolshevism’. He also recounts a series of conflicts within the party nucleus at the trade delegation, on whose bureau Petroff sat. It was in Berlin that Petroff had re-established contact with Martov and discovered how much they once more had in common. Martov is in many respects the hero of his manuscript, a figure described as impossible not to love and as one of Russia’s greatest sons. That the Bolsheviks had forced Martov into exile is offered as indictment of the regime. That in 1923 they sent ‘common spies’ to mingle at his funeral has Petroff almost overpowered by a sense of loathing.154 Even so, it was another two years before he and Irma left the Russian Communist Party. Lenin’s death the previous year was a contributory factor. Trotsky and Zinoviev were among the surviving ‘small infallibles’ in whom Petroff had little real faith. Trotsky, in converting to the cause of inner-party democracy, is depicted as one who saw only too late where his own policies were leading. Nevertheless, it was Stalin who now carried through to its nightmarish denouement the centralising logic

18 of the dictatorship. Already in 1925 the Leninist device of the purge was increasingly being employed as an instrument of centralised discipline. Petroff describes in detail the purging of the Berlin trade delegation, with the ominous inclusion of Zinoviev’s unoffending sister, as Stalin made his opening moves against those who later perished in the terror. The Petroffs themselves attracted hostile notice through their association with Loebe. Very much an SPD moderate, Loebe is warmly recalled by Petroff as a born labour leader, unspoilt by office (‘“Loebe for one has not turned commissar”, Irma whispered to me’) and tolerant and broadminded ‘like an Englishman’. Loebe is also described as having openly referred to information that he received from the Petroffs, and it was thus that they were confronted with the issue of their ‘friendly relations with Social Democrats’.155 Whatever the details of the issue, it was at this point that the Petroffs resigned their membership of the RCP, and subsequently declined to return to Russia. Petroff described their predicament as one of political homelessness. On the one hand, he was ‘not a “Leninist”’ and went further than the opposition communists in his rejection of the one-party state. On the other hand, he said that no bridge could lead them back to the Mensheviks who opposed the October revolution ‘as such’.156 The Gemeinschaft proletarischer Freidenker (Society of Proletarian Freethinkers) offered a meeting place for independent spirits and ran a school which reminded Petroff of Maclean’s economic class. Nevertheless, the school fell foul of the ‘narrow party-hatreds’ so characteristic of the German left, and was closed down through the pressure of the communists.157 Through contacts at the Trade Delegation the Petroffs continued to assist with translations, economic memoranda, even the organisation of technical advisers to work in Russia. Successful according to his own account, Petroff was apparently approached in the late 1920s to rejoin the party and resume a position of high responsibility within it. Continuing political differences were one objection. An instinct of self- preservation would certainly have been another. Petroff, for example, mentions the case of the left communist Miasnikov, whose return to Russia was secured by the arrest of his family.158 One also wonders how he might have fared in the show trial of Menshevik specialists in March 1931. At the same time, Petroff seems to have felt almost as vulnerable in Germany. It is at this stage of his story that he first mentions the fears of poisoning with which Gallacher was to associate him, but poisoning as threatened or perpetrated by Cheka agents. The Leipzig ‘Cheka trials’ of 1925 had generated an enormous publicity, and Petroff not only upholds the allegations made of violence and political assassination but suggests that such activities were becoming more extensive.159 His own experiences, as recounted in his final chapters, included being shadowed, having neighbours act as informers, having a spy planted as nurse to his children and having letters and other papers stolen. He also implies the death from unnatural causes of a former colleague Orlov.160 Whatever the substance of such allegations, on which German historians continue to be divided, it is at this point that the Petroff of Gallacher’s imagining can at last be identified. ‘War was declared’, he concludes his story, ‘and we were under no illusions what was in store for us. We understood than an omnipresent international machine, having at its command enormous sums, and being completely free from all scruples as to the means it employs, will so long as we live regard it as one of its many objects to destroy both us and our children economically, politically and physically.’161 The manuscript ends a few lines later with Bakunin’s words: ‘You cannot dry up a swamp by jumping into it.’162 It is a telling irony that Petroff’s personal history of marxian social democracy should conclude with one of its most decided opponents.

19 He entitled his final chapter ‘Without a country’, but it was the lack of the ‘spiritual home’ of a party which he described as a worse predicament.163 The sequel by which he found one in the British Labour Party might have provided a sense of resolution. That it did not entirely do so, or else provoked some otherwise unsignalled difference between the couple, is suggested by Irma’s subsequent adherence to the Communist Party. It is to this lack of any overriding party identity that the value of Petroff’s account must nevertheless in large part be ascribed. His depiction of his own role in events is certainly not understated. If Trotsky’s My Life, as he alleges, is ‘entirely devoid of self-criticism’, it is one characteristic at least that the two ex-Mensheviks shared.164 Moreover, while Petroff may have referred to Bakunin and Kropotkin, it is surprising that he had not more to say about his anarchist contemporaries Berkman and Goldman, whose Russian experiences had paralleled his own, and had already given rise to testimonies of disillusionment which he failed to mention.165 Despite such oversights, the British section of Petroff’s manuscript nevertheless reveals no such obvious errors and distortions as are easily established in an account like Gallacher’s. In respect of Soviet history, what Petroff described as systematic falsification and the manufacturing of faked revolutionary pedigrees was obviously far more prevalent still.166 Peter Petroff had good reason to be concerned that the political honesty of his story meant that some wished it never to see the light of day. It is all the more reason why it should be consulted now.

1 My thanks are due first of all to David Aaronovitch for entrusting me with temporary custodianship of Petroff’s manuscript; to Mike Jones, Francis King and John McHugh for comments and information; to Fiona Miller, granddaughter of Petroff, for clarification of family and personal details; and in particular to Scott Reeve, who is writing a biography of Petroff to be published next year by Socialist Platform, and who has generously shared information from his own research in commenting on a draft version of the article. Responsibility for the reading of Petroff’s text presented here is of course mine alone. It has no pretensions beyond providing a summary report and commentary on the manuscript which will certainly require revision on the basis of more extensive research. 2 See John McHugh, ‘Peter Petroff: the view from the Home Office file’, Scottish Labour History, 35, 2000, pp. 25-32; also J. McHugh and B.J. Ripley, ‘Russian political internees in First World War Britain: the cases of George Chicherin and Peter Petroff’, Historical Journal, 28, 3, 1985, pp. 727-38. 3 Gallacher, Revolt on the Clyde, London, 1936, pp. 59-60, 122. 4 Gallacher, Last Memoirs, London, 1966, pp. 72-3. 5 Robert Keith Middlemas, The Clydesiders. A left wing struggle for parliamentary power, London, 1965, p. 62. 6 Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21, London, 1969; Rodgers and Smyth entry on Petroff in William Knox, ed., Scottish Labour Leaders 1918-1939. A biographical dictionary, Edinburgh, 1984, pp. 224-30. 7 McHugh, ‘Peter Petroff’; also B.J. Ripley and J. McHugh, John Maclean, Manchester, 1989; McHugh and Ripley, ‘Russian political internees’. 8 But see also Rodgers and Smyth, ‘Peter Petroff and the socialist movement in Britain 1907-1918’ in J. Slatter, ed., From the Other Shore. Russian political emigrants in Britain 188-1917, London, 1984. 9 The latter is however the focus of a chapter in Vladimir Genis, Nevernye slugi rezhima. Pervye sovetskie nevozvrashchentsy (1920-1933) (‘Unfaithful servants of the regime. The first Soviet non- returners 1920-33’), Moscow, 2 vols, 2009. 10 In early chapters there are references in the present tense both to the Nazi regime and to the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, who died in June 1936. In the section on his Clydeside activities, Petroff takes issue with George Lansbury’s memoirs, published in 1928, and Lloyd George’s War Memoirs, of which the first volume appeared in 1933, but not with his own malicious depiction in William Gallacher’s Revolt on the Clyde, published in the summer of 1936. In the final section there is a reference to ‘the sixteen Old Guard Bolsheviks whom Stalin slaughtered in August 1936’ (ch. 14, p. 6),

20 suggesting that this may have been written some time before the second show trial in January 1937. If that is the case, then a reference to this second trial two chapters later (ch. 16, p. 51) might suggest a fairly precise indication of the time of writing. 11 Correspondence between William Gillies and Humphrey Milford, December 1934 and January- February 1935 in Labour Party archives (Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester) WG/RUS/245-57. 12 Information from Dr Martin Maw, archivist to Oxford University Press. 13 For example ‘The plight of the honest left-winger’, Labour, September 1935, p. 15 (for reminiscences of the early Comintern) and ‘George Tchitcherin’, Labour, August 1936, p. 306. Petroff was also giving talks on similar themes to local labour movement bodies (see Daily Worker, 21 September 1934 and 9 February 1935). 14 Gillies to Milford, 31 January 1936. 15 My thanks to Scott Reeve for this information. 16 As cited by Monty Johnstone, ‘Introduction’ in Francis King and George Matthews, eds, About Turn. The Communist Party and the outbreak of the Second World War, London, 1990, p. 44. 17 Rodgers and Smyth, entry on Petroff, pp. 229-30. 18 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 60. 19 Knox, entry on John Maclean in Knox, Scottish Labour Leaders, pp. 181-2. 20 On this, see Kevin Morgan, ‘Parts of people and communist lives’ in John McIlroy, Kevin Morgan and Alan Campbell, eds, Party People, Communist Lives, London, 2001, pp. 9-29 21 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 54. 22 Research of the Russian historian Vladimir Genis (see note 9 above) confirms that Petroff was until 1914 a member of the Menshevik group in London (with thanks to Scott Reeve for this information). 23 ‘Worker’s notebook’, Daily Worker, 15 September 1934; also McHugh, ‘Petroff’, p. 31, from which I originally discovered this reference. 24 Compare for example the Chartist William Aitken as discussed in Robert G. Hall, Visions of the People. Democracy and Chartist political identity 1830-1870, London, 2007, pp. 140-58. 25 Petroff autobiography, ch. 8, pp. 18 and 22; ch. 10, pp. 4 and 8. Unless otherwise stated, all further chapter and page references are to this document. 26 Fiona Miller informs me that her mother, the Petroffs’ daughter Dianne, had assisted in putting the manuscript into good English but had later become somewhat estranged from Irma. 27 Gorky’s My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities were first published in Russian between 1913 and 1921. 28 Ch. 1, p. 6. 29 Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919, London, 1990, p. 46. 30 Israel Getzler, Martov. A political biography of a Russian social democrat, Cambridge, 1967, p. 4. 31 Ch. 5, pp. 11-14. 32 I am again grateful to Fiona Miller for the information that her great grandmother, Petroff’s mother, was of mixed Ukrainian, Georgian and Armenian blood and became part of the Jewish community on marrying Petroff’s father. She also informs me that the family name was Bichevsy. 33 Rodgers and Smyth, entry on Petroff, p. 225. This is consistent with references to Petroff in writings on Maclean, for example, Nan Milton, ed., John Maclean: In the Rapids of Revolution. Essays, articles and letters 1902-23, London, 1978, pp. 72-3; also John Broom, John Maclean, Loanhead, 1973. 34 Petroff, ‘Some comparisons of methods of organisation’, SDP News, July and August 1911. 35 Ch. 2, pp. 40-2. 36 Ch. 2, pp. 18-20. Elsewhere (ch. 9, p. 16) there is a reference to the idea that a ‘minority with initiative’ can organise a revolution with a parenthesis now deleted: ‘a theory now taken over by the Communists!’ Despite the deletion, there has been no attempt to efface the original text. 37 Ch. 8, p. 19. 38 Ch. 6, pp. 5-6, 17-18. 39 Hannington, Never on Our Knees, London, 1967, pp. 36, 49, 54. Hannington was a member of the Kentish Town branch of the BSP (for which see below) of which the Menshevik Chicherin and Bolshevik Litvinov were also members. Hannington does not elaborate further or explain the differences between them. He also offers no support for the hostile characterisation of Petroff by his fellow communist Gallacher. 40 Kendall, Revolutionary Movement, p. 54. 41 Ch. 4, pp. 4-5, 48-9, ch. 5, p. 10. 42 Ch. 2, p. 21. 43 Ch. 4 is devoted to the disciplinary battalion and and the insurrection.

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44 Ch. 5, p. 18. 45 Ch. 2, pp. 5-6. 46 Ch. 2, pp. 18-20. 47 Ch. 2, pp. 29-30. 48 Ch 6, p. 10, also p. 23. 49 Ch. 4, pp. 16-17. 50 Ch. 6, p. 38. 51 Ch. 7, p. 1. 52 Ripley and McHugh, John Maclean, pp. 96-103. 53 Ch. 1, p. 13. 54 Ch 3, p. 16, also ch. 10, p. 6. 55 Ch. 7, p. 3. 56 Ch. 8, p. 13-14. 57 Petroff, ‘Rebuilding the International’, Vanguard, December 1915, pp. 5-6. 58 See the correspondence between them at www.marxists.org/archive/petroff/1918/letters.htm. 59 Ch. 8, p. 8. 60 Ch. 8, p. 13. 61 Ch. 10, p. 9. 62 Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, London, 1942 edn, p. 38. 63 William J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914, London, 1975. Scott Reeve informs me that two of Petroff’s brothers lived in the East End with their families, but these family connections have little part in Petroff’s story. 64 Ch. 8, pp. 14-15. 65 Ch. 8, p. 14. 66 Ch. 10, pp. 1-2. 67 Ch. 10, p. 2. 68 Ch. 10, pp. 16-17. 69 Ch. 8, p. 23. 70 Ch 27, pp. 14-15. 71 Ch. 8, p. 24. 72 Petroff says 1908, but I am again grateful to Scott Reeve for researches in contemporary sources which suggest that he must have misremembered the date. Petroff’s account of the Rurik is the focus of his ninth chapter. 73 Ch. 9, p. 1. 74 E.g. John Broom, John Maclean, Loanhead, 1973, p. 28. Anderson is mentioned by Gallacher as a rough-and-ready shipwright (Last Memoirs, p. 60), and Inglis by H.W. Lee as ‘one of the best literature sellers and librarians that a Socialist organisation could have’ (Lee and Archbold, Social Democracy in Britain, London, 1935, p. 142). But, like so many unsung activists, they do not figure very prominently in any published account. 75 Ch. 13, pp. 45-6. 76 Four pages have at this point been retyped on different paper and nearly a quarter of the text lost. 77 Ripley and McHugh, John Maclean, p. 30. 78 Ch. 9, pp. 11-13. 79 Ch. 11, pp. 12-13. 80 Radek cited E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, vol . 1, Harmondsworth, 1966 edn, p. 52. 81 Ch. 11, p. 13. 82 Ch. 11, pp. 12, 25. 83 E.g. ch . 8, p. 22, ch. 10, p. 15. 84 Ch. 11, p. 24. 85 Ch. 10, p. 14. 86 Ch. 10, pp. 17-19. 87 Getzler, Martov, pp. 134-5, 142. 88 Ch. 12, pp. 18-19. 89 Ch. 11, pp. 25-6. 90 Ch. 12, pp. 5-6. 91 Ch. 13, p. 2. 92 Ch. 13, p. 16. 93 Ch. 13, pp. 15-17.

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94 For the Wheeldon case see Sheila Rowbotham, Friends of Alice Wheeldon, London, 1976. 95 See Kevin Morgan, Labour Legends and Russian Gold: Bolshevism and the British Left part 1, London, 2006, pp. 45-6. 96 Ch. 13, 50-1. 97 Ch. 13, pp. 34-5. 98 Daily Worker, 21 September 1934. 99 Ch. 14, pp. 31-2, ch. 16, pp. 5-6. 100 Ch. 24, p. 25. 101 Ch. 14, pp. 56-7; also McHugh, ‘Peter Petroff’, p. 29. 102 See also the recollection of the Petroffs of then SLPer James Clunie in his The Voice of Labour. The autobiography of a Dunfermline house painter, Dunfermline, 1958, pp. 43-4. 103 Ch 27, p. 21. 104 Ch. 22, p. 1. This chapter provides the fullest exposition of Petroff’s hostile view of war communism, but see also ch. 20, p. 6 for his attempts to mitigate the food dictatorship as a political commissar in Minsk. 105 Ch. 16, p. 21. 106 Ch. 14, p. 27; ch. 26, p. 1. 107 Ch. 16, pp. 35-6; ch. 24, p. 1. 108 Ch. 20, p. 23. 109 Ch. 26, p. 25. 110 For Sverdlov, ch. 20, pp. 9-11; for Trotsky, ch. 16, pp. 1-2, 52; ch. 17 (for his role in the civil war), ch. 26, pp. 26-7 (for the trade union debate of 1920-1); for Manuilsky, ch. 19. p. 11. 111 Ch. 17, p. 47. 112 Ch. 27, pp. 47-8, also 28-31, 113 Ch. 6, pp. 39-40. 114 Ch. 17, pp. 47-8. 115 Ch. 28, pp. 8, 26; ch. 15, p. 18; ch. 16, p. 21. 116 Ch. 26, p. 8. 117 See for example Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought. Theory and practice in the democratic and socialist revolutions, London, 1983 edn, vol. 2, pp. 118-41. 118 Ch. 14, p. 54; ch. 26, pp. 11-12; Lenin cited Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, London, 1980 edn, p. 294. Petroff this records his disagreement on this issue even with a figure like David Riazanov, to whom he otherwise paid such fulsome and well-merited tribute. 119 Ch 24, pp. 18-20; ch. 26, pp. 24-30. 120 Ch. 20, pp. 1-2. 121 Ch. 16, pp. 8-9 122 Ch. 22, pp. 18-19. 123 Ch. 20, p. 8. 124 Ch. 25, p. 3. 125 Ch. 25, p. 12. 126 Ch. 25, p. 15. 127 Ch. 25, p. 10. 128 Ch. 25, p. 15. 129 Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, vol. 2, p. 140. 130 Ch. 15, p. 16. 131 Ch. 15, p. 24; Jean-François Fayet, Karl Radek (1885-1939). Biographie politique, Bern, 2004, p. 775. 132 Ch. 21, p. 2. 133 Ch. 15, p. 13. 134 Ch. 15, pp. 27-8. 135 Ch. 15, p. 36. 136 Pipes, Russian Revolution, pp. 603-4. Pipes’s cites a single Izvestiia article by Leonid Krasin, whom Petroff regarded as ‘the pseudo-Bolshevik confidant of the German industrialists’ (ch. 16, p. 55). Concern at pro-German machinations figures prominently in Petroff’s account of Russia in 1918. 137 Lenin’s Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky was written later that year and Petroff refers to its unfortunate influence on Soviet perceptions of Kautsky, ch. 23, pp. 25-6. 138 Ch. 16, pp. 37-9. 139 Ch. 21, p. 2.

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140 Ch. 14, pp. 7-8. See also E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923 vol. 3, Harmondsworth, 1966 edn, p. 124. 141 Ch. 21. Joe Fineberg, another returning émigré, attended in a consultative capacity, but Petroff only as a guest who did not participate in the formal discussions. 142 Ch. 25, pp. 1-4. 143 Ch. 25, p. 4. Maclean apparently did not see Quelch in this way (see his’Open letter to Lenin’ in In the Rapids of Revolution, pp. 226-9). For the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), the most recent reassessment is in Ian Bullock, Romancing the Revolution. The myth of Soviet democracy and the British left, Edmonton, Alberta, 2011, chs 1 and 10. 144 Ch. 24, pp. 24-34. 145 Ch. 25, p. 9. 146 Ch. 25, pp. 9-10. 147 Ch. 27, pp. 12-13. 148 Ch. 27, pp. 15-19. 149 Ch. 27, p. 22. 150 Ch. 28 includes a long account. For Balabanov, see her My Life As a Rebel, Bloomington & London, 1973 edn, ch. 22. 151 Ch. 28, pp. 5-6. 152 Ch. 28, pp. 6-7. 153 Peter and Irma Petroff, Die wirtschaftliche Entwickelung der Sowjet-Union, Berlin, 1926 ; also ch. 28, p. 59. 154 Ch. 28, pp. 26-7. 155 Ch. 28, pp. 3-4, 46-7, 64-73;also ch. 29, pp. 13-14. 156 Ch. 29, pp. 6, 26-7 157 Ch. 29, pp. 13-14. 158 Ch. 28, pp. 22-5. 159 Ch. 28, pp. 59-64, ch. 29, pp. 6-13. 160 Ch. 28, pp. 17-18. 161 Ch. 29, pp. 29-30. 162 Ch. 29, p. 30. 163 Ch. 29, p. 4. 164 Ch. 16, pp. 1-2. 165 Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, New York, 1925; Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, London, 1925. 166 Ch. 28, pp. 49, 58.

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