Medida peri´odica de la distribuci´on de kerma aire del tom´ografo

and under no circumstances had to be published’. T h i s was more than a week after Dennis Ogden had heard the speech on the first Friday in March. Pollitt, however, emphasised his ignorance, reminding delegates that ‘the Communist International was dissolved in 1942 and no facilities for connections between Communist Parties existed’. He reminded delegates that their ‘own closed session ...should not be given any outside publicity’. Following a summary of Khruschev’s speech, he asked ‘What lessons have we to draw from this re-assessment of Stalin?’. He stressed that ‘we have to be strong and resolute...and defeat the efforts of the capitalists and elements like Gaitskell, who seek to exploit the situation in their campaign against Communism’. Pollitt asked delegates to avoid underestimating ‘the confusion and doubt about the policy of the CPSU and of our own Party’. He also warned against refusing ‘to face it or to understand why it has taken place, and...why it has been necessary to make this new assessment of Stalin’s role’. Pollitt mitigated this, however, warning the Party against going ‘to the other extreme’ and not recognising ‘the positive contribution which Stalin has made to the developments in the Soviet Union’.

Two themes dominated the leadership’s arguments at the congress and throughout 1956. One was to refer consistently to the Soviet Union’s industrialisation in terms of socialist advance’. The other was to justify Stalin’s mistakes’ in terms of the historical circumstances under which he had been forced to operate. Dutt, for example, just a month before his notorious ‘spots on the sun’ blunder in Labour Monthly, suggested that Stalin’s abuses were ‘perfectly understandable’ due to the fact that he had ‘been brought up in a harsh school, a school of revolutionary struggle’, a ‘training’ which apparently led him ‘to see enemies everywhere’. H e also talked of ‘the direction of socialism’ pitched against ‘capitalist critics’ and echoed Pollitt as he called for ‘just a little humility when we see how much...the Soviet Union has done’.^^® He concluded that ‘in the bounds of history that achievement of theirs a hundred times outweighs the costs - however heavy those costs accompanying it’.^^^ J.R. Campbell reiterated this, saying I want to shout...don’t forget that capitalism has vanished...that the Soviet Union...is now the second greatest industrial power, without capitalists and

H. Pollitt, ‘Report to Closed Session of the 24**’ Congress C P G B ’ (1 April 1956), Manchester, CP/Cent/Cong/09/09. [Subsequent speeches to ‘Closed Session’: Manchester, CP/Cent/Cong/09/09]. Sam Russell declined to be interviewed.

H. Pollitt, ‘Report to Closed Session of 24**’ Congress’. R.P. Dutt, Speech to Closed Session of 24*^ Congress’, no.8. ^^®lbid.

landlords’.M a u r ic e Cornforth agreed that, for all his mistakes, Stalin appeared to have presided over the development of socialism. He began by admitting an extraordinary state of affairs, not allowed for in any of the books...that it became possible for the workers’ power under which socialism was to be built to be distorted into a quite different sort of dictatorship’.^^® Despite this distortion, however, under this system, socialism was built, the first socialist country did become a great world power.’ How this contradictory situation had developed was, said Cornforth, ‘something which calls for a great deal of new thought as a problem of contemporary history’.

Pollitt dealt with another aspect of the deviation from Marxism Leninism’, for which he blamed ‘Beria and his men’.^^^ This was the schism between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1948. Pollitt admitted that ‘we too, in the Executive Committee of the British Communist Party, supported the resolutions of the Communist Information Bureau, and have, therefore, to take our share of the blame’. T h e CPGB leadership, added Pollitt, ‘unreservedly withdraw all the statements and books which contained unjust accusations, including the statement made by Harry Pollitt at the London membership meeting in 1948 and, with his full agreement, the book of James Klugmann’.

Pollitt concluded by stressing that, for British Communism, The Soviet Union is and remains the greatest Socialist power in the world...[where]...the exploitation of man by man has been abolished’. H e asked finally, ‘are we ashamed of the fact that we defended the Soviet Union?’ and answered ‘No - this was the essential basis of the victories of Socialism’. The task for the British Party was to ‘develop our theoretical basis - applied in British terms and conditions’.^^®

Discontent, both with the British and Soviet leaderships, did emerge during the debate, however. Speakers expressing unease and criticism were, in general, from the branches and were called alternately with those from the leadership. Derek Robinson, a branch delegate, referred to the ‘blind acceptance of theoretical ideas from the Soviet Union’. H e complained that ‘no discussion is allowed to take place on an extended scale in the Daily Worker’ and asked ‘do our members

J.R. Campbell, ‘Speech to Closed Session’, no. 12. M. Cornforth, Speech to Closed Session’, no.5.