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Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study of British Stalinism, by John Callaghan. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. Paper, 19.99. Pp. 304. Harry Pollitt, by Kevin Morgan. Lives of the Left series. Manchester, England and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993. 45.00; paper, 12.99. Pp. ix, 210.
These two books mark a new stage in the historiography of British communism. They draw on sources, including the archives of the CPGB, that have only recently become accessible. They are untrammelled by the partisan strictures that marked earlier accounts written when British communism still remained an active force. They deal with its two most significant figures Harry Pollitt, the public leader of the Party for more than 30 years, and Rajani Palme Dutt, the shadowy pontiff-in a manner that until recently would have been impossible.
Both the lives and the biographies are complementary. Few men could have been so dissimilar in background and temperament as Pollitt, a skilled workman deeply rooted in the forms and traditions of the English labor movement, gregarious, warm and impulsive; and Dutt, the Oxford-educated intellectual of exotic origins, austere, aloof and dogmatic. Yet from 1922 when they came together to reform the tiny British Communist Party, their fortunes were linked. Close friendship yielded to disagreement and resentment, yet neither could escape the other and together these two studies disclose the personal and political ties that bound them to the fate of the cause they served.
When the two biographers chose their subjects,John Callaghan surely drew the short straw. Of all the British Communists, Dutt is surely the most unattractive, the least redeemed by human qualities. Callaghan's book is subtitled aA Study in British Stalinism" and the life he relates is one of hardening dogmatism, '"withering intellectual arrogance," ruthlessness and "messianic sectarianism." Dutt's treatment of rivals and adversaries was merciless, and he inspired an unusual hostility: when the much-loved Party veteran T. A. Jackson was put out to grass, he named a rose bush outside his retirement cottage after Dutt and each morning would go out to piss on his despised nemesis.
Callaghan opens his biography with an Indian epigram:
The Ghoshes are high caste, The Boses are generous, The Mitras are cunning But the Dutts are scoundrels.
Yet the branch of the Dutt family...