“Who ARE these guys?!” Politics, Passions, Peculiarities, and Polemics in the Historiography of British Communism
Reading John McIlroy’s and Alan Campbell’s dissection of recent writings on the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) by Kevin Morgan, Nina Fishman, Andrew Thorpe, Matthew Worley, and others reminds me of a scene in a cinematic classic, one of a handful of Hollywood’s last unique and great ‘‘Westerns,’’ Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As Newman and Redford, train robbers with a conscience and a populist sense of the poor’s right to the ample and ill-gotten gains of the rich, try to elude those who want them captured and brought to bourgeois justice, they are pursued, relentlessly, throughout the western hemisphere. In spite of some imaginative efforts and a willingness to seek out escapes to what must have appeared to them ‘‘the ends of the earth’’, Newman and Redford cannot shake those who are ‘‘on their trial.’’ Looking down from a mountainous perch, and seeing once again that they are being meticulously ‘‘tracked,’’ Newman turns to Redford and says in exasperation, ‘‘Who ARE these guys?!’’ Morgan, Fishman, Thorpe, and Worley must ask themselves the same question. The team of McIlroy and Campbell have turned from being their collaborators in the writing of Communist history into something of a nemesis. The historiographic impasse that has developed in Britain parallels that which has long exercised an influence in the United States, pitting so-called ‘traditionalists’ (liberal anti-Communists who accent the institutional history of the Party and understand its politics, determined in Moscow and narrowly conceived, to be the prime consideration in their commentary) against seeming ‘revisionists’ (New Left-inspired advocates of the relative autonomy
The Historiography of American Communism: An Unsettled Field
Scholarly treatment of American Communism began in the late 1950s and 1960s. The ‘traditionalists’ argued that the Communist Party, USA, was subordinate to the Soviet Union, possessed a totalitarian ideology, and had no legitimate place on the democratic left. In the 1970s and 1980s a wave of ‘revisionist’ scholars presented a benign view of American Communism as a progressive force, stressed locally-oriented social histories, placed the movement in the traditions of native American radicalism, and minimized the importance of Soviet ties. The opening of the Russian archives in the 1990s reinvigorated the traditionalist approach and inserted CPUSA cooperation with Soviet espionage into the debate. Today the field is unsettled and debate vigorous. Revisionists are on the defensive while traditionalists increasingly control the argument.
Notes from underground
Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is the only translation that counts. They are the only translators who succeed in making Dostoevsky accessible to a 21st century audience, thanks to their ruthless attention to detail at the expense of alterations which can dilute Dostoevsky's unique and flowing style of writing. The great appeal this book retains even today is in part due to Pevear and Volokhonsky, as well as to Dostoevsky himself. Furthermore, Richard Pevear's substantial introduction is essential reading. It explains the purpose of the book and the historical significance of its ideas. Dostoevsky was writing at a time when Russia had reason to be optimistic, but the warning signs in his fiction perhaps leave us clues as to why Russia still has social problems today - and why, less than 40 years after Dostoevsky's death, Russia embraced Communism and destroyed the society in which Dostoevsky had lived