The British communist party (aláírt példány) [antikvár]

This book is being reissued after an interval of seventeen years. When it appeared in 1958 it was the first serious attempt from outside the party to examine its role in the politics of the preceding half-century. I have not tried to bring the story up-to-date: the work should, in my view, be left as it was- a critical study formulated in the immediate aftermath of the Krushchev revelations about Stalin and the Red Army's suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. What I have done, however, has been to correct a number of factual errors or misprints, and in this brief introduction, to take up some of the criticisms of the work offered by reviewers, to give some idea of the more recent history of the party, and to list the major publications which have appeared since 1958 on the same topic. * * * As may be imagined, the book did not receive a friendly reception from the party itself. Mr Palme Dutt, the editor of the Labour Monthly, devoted his usual monthly notes in May 1959 to a scathing criticism, in which, from his superior vantage-point of inside knowledge, he could easily indicate a few detailed mistakes in the narrative as well as display his general hostility. His principal point of disagreement appeared to be my implication that in its early years the party owed more to financial assistance and directions from Moscow than to any indigenous support from the left-wing elements: He repeats all the stories about 'Russian gold', and then merely remarks on the odd fact that, despite the 'Russian gold', 'the members remained individually on the verge of destitution'. If facts do not fit a theory, so much the worse for the facts. Since then, perhaps partly as a result of his retirement from the leadership at the end of 1965, Mr Dutt has changed his tune. In May 1966 he revealed, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, that in 1923 he and others opposed the financial subsidies from Moscow, and tried to get them stopped. He also said that 'the ix