It would be hard to overstate just how much the politics of the tiny Irish Communist Party were shaped through the course of its history by its loyalty to the old Soviet Union, the state fashioned by Joseph Stalin. Difficult, too, to exaggerate the extent to which its eager subservience damaged its own prospects.
In his new biography of Sean Murray, one of Ireland’s most prominent communist leaders and life-long devotee of Stalin’s Russia, Sean Byers manages to avoid exaggeration by going to the other extreme: he grossly understates the Irish party’s acquiescence. Utilising new archive material, Byers challenges the view that Murray simply mouthed Soviet dogma. Instead, we learn that Murray often took issue with directives from the Comintern – the Moscow-centred organisation that laid down the line for communist parties.
But despite the wealth of information about Murray’s misgivings, Byers fails to convince.
Although he succeeds in showing that Murray disagreed more often than was previously appreciated, his claim to have uncovered a “vast gulf between Comintern policy . . . and Irish practice” suggests he has missed the wood for the trees.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever claimed that Comintern policies were implemented without debate and disagreement.
Liquidated Moreover, all strategic policy issues originated with the Comintern. The Irish comrades could argue about implementation, and Moscow was quite tolerant of
refinement, but what they could never do was advocate different policies. Anyone who tried was expelled – if not liquidated.
Byers acknowledges that the Comintern made mistakes in some of its policies, but there is an unspoken assumption that it was genuinely concerned with socialism – a contentious notion that requires more consideration than Byers gives it.
When Stalin consolidated his grip on the Soviet Union he signalled that international working-class revolution, on which the Soviet Union previously pinned its hopes, was no longer desirable. Paramount now was the defence of Soviet state interests.
This led to some disastrous twists and turns in Comintern policies from the late 1920s, all of them supported by Ireland’s communists. So when Byers tells us that they were “not immune” to Stalinisation, and that Murray had been “deferential”, he is radically understating the case.
As fascism advanced in Europe, the Comintern labelled social democratic labour parties as “social fascists” and the“principal enemy” of communists. Murray’s Communist Party vigorously pursued this ultra-left line, with dire consequences.
Byers, however, focuses on the “more than one occasion” when the Irish communists appeared to defy Moscow by calling on reformists to help them resist repression. But this misses the point: the communists failed to attract help, precisely because those they denounced as social fascists would have nothing to do with them. The result was isolation and defeat.
The same policies when applied in Germany helped Hitler to power. Facing this new threat, Stalin ditched ultra-leftism to woo the French and British governments. As proof of his new-found “respectability”, Stalin ordered that the struggle against fascism in Spain be limited to defending capitalist democracy, not fighting for socialism, and dispatched his agents to murder hundreds of Spanish socialists and anarchists.
The Irish communists gave unquestioning support to Soviet treachery which they justified by claiming that Spain’s revolutionary workers were led by crypto-fascists who got what they deserved. Byers describes Stalin’s policy in Spain as “legitimate”, and the mass murder of socialists simply as “overly zealous”. The Irish Communist Party gets a meaningless slap on the wrist for showing “a degree of immaturity”.
As for the subsequent slaughter of tens of thousands of supposed dissidents in Stalin’s great purges, Byers explains the ICP’s failure to criticise by asserting it was “unlikely” they knew the full extent of the bloodletting. When they found out, he says, they “signalled a break with Stalin’s legacy”. This is disingenuous.
The CPI and Murray were cheerleaders for Stalin and two decades passed before Khrushchev revealed the horror of his “crimes”. The Irish communists, however, rallied to Stalin’s defence. He “may have made a few mistakes”, they said, but “his huge contribution to socialism was unquestioned”.
During the second World War, Irish subservience to Soviet foreign policy led the party first to advocate war against Hitler, then denounce the war as imperialist and call for peace on Hitler’s terms, before finally supporting it as a war for democracy. Byers’ critique of this period is typically vague. He talks of an initial “cloud of ambiguity” which was superseded by a “blinkered approach”, before morphing into “greater sophistication”. But the consequences for communist politics were again disastrous with the party dissolving itself in the neutral South and warmly embracing unionism in the North.
Deficiencies Yet for his ultimate verdict, Byers quotes fellow revisionist Emmet O’Connor, who maintains that “the impact of the Comintern on Irish communist organisation and policy was fundamental and largely positive”, a view that Byers says “correct[s] the deficiencies of previous analyses of the CPI”. So Stalinism, after all, did more good than harm.
Why does any of this matter today?
Living as we are in the depths of a prolonged capitalist crisis, with the poorest compelled to pay most to save the system, one might wonder why those offering a socialist alternative haven’t yet made the breakthrough. Looming large among the reasons is the popular conception that socialism has already been tried and failed, by which of course is meant Stalin and the Soviet Union.
If the profoundly oppressive, top-down police state that Stalin and his successors presided over in Russia was socialism, then the game is indeed up. But if socialism means the oppressed and exploited liberating themselves, then maybe there’s still hope. That’s why Stalin’s legacy still has to be confronted. Minimising it, for whatever reason, helps only those who want nothing to change.
Mike Milotte is the author of Communism in Modern Ireland: The Pursuit of the Workers' Republic Since 1916
