Storm in a samovar

[Paul Rigby]

I received an avalanche of email in response to the posting above. I apologise for my tardiness in responding, but I shall now endeavour to answer it.

Why, a Mr C. Andrew enquired, are you so ill-disposed to Mr Robert Surplice, the outstanding British historian of the Soviet era? Are you, by any chance, a maladjusted fellow-traveller in urgent need of an MI5 scalpel?

Yes, I must be, I replied, because Surplice is guilty of judgements that are disgusting and absurd, ones, moreover, which have nothing to do with accurate history, and everything to do with vindicating the policies of Britain’s ghastly spooks. Let me show you what I mean.

In the Review section of Saturday’s Grauniad, Ian Pindar offered a brief but fulsome review of Surplices’ widely acclaimed Trotsky: The Four-Eyed Sex Case (Ampersand). According to the reviewer, “Trotskyites who like to compare their man favourably to the murderous Stalin will probably be disappointed by this bold and balanced biography. As Surplice observes:

“If ever Trotsky had been paramount leader instead of Stalin, the risks of a bloodbath on Europe would have been drastically increased.”

Au contraire, Mr Pindar, any one with a brain will be disappointed. That Olympian judgement is purest balls, for it invites us to thank God for Stalin’s abominable reign; and forget the casualties of a small matter called WWII. The very best one could truthfully argue in this instance is that Trotsky would have brought forward the carnage that ensued in the years 1924-1941; and thereafter in WWII. Anything else is nonsense.

But something more is going on here.

In asking us to forget, however momentarily, the humanitarian joys of the Stalin years, Surplice is also asking us to celebrate something he can’t quite bring himself to articulate. What is that something? The far-sightedness of the MI6 policy, as represented by the forged Zinoviev letter, which boosted Stalin and his policy of socialism in one state, against the advocates – Trotsky to the fore, and many of them Jews – of world revolution.

This is not an isolated instance of bizarre judgements, seemingly inexplicable slants, and/or wanton hypocrisy: British Sovietology is riddled with it. And the greater portion of it is designed to hymn establishment/spook sagacity; or else whitewash the British establishment’s succession of murderous & catastrophic stratagems.