The Labour Party's Attitude to the Soviet Union, 1927—35

The least that can be said of the relationship between the Labour Party and the Soviet Union during the period bounded by the end of the Anglo-Russian Joint Advisory Committee (ARJAC) experiment and the end of Lansbury's leadership is that it was complex and often contradictory. It is not enough to say, as Bill Jones does in The Russia Complex that the 'typical member of the Labour Party might have described Soviet Russia in glowing terms ... as the hope of the world ... [that] for thirty years or so after 1917 the Labour Party had a love affair with the Soviet Union'.' The oversimplification of this viewpoint has been fully demonstrated by recent scholarship.2 Even by dividing off the Labour Party from the broader labour movement, a perilous undertaking as we all know, a very great ambivalence of opinion can be found about the USSR in all its manifestations, often in the political psyche of the same individual. For example, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who have been the butt of much ridicule for their worship of Stalin, only came gradually to their point of maximum adoration and even then with severe periods of doubt.3 It therefore seems necessary to attempt a new analysis of the Russian/Labour Party relationship during years that are often considered somewhat uneventful one reason, perhaps, why so little has been written on the subject. The necessity for this analysis goes beyond the level of the purely academic, in that we are in the midst of a period of increasing east/west tensions that are created by the same kind of mutual misunderstanding as existed in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It is impossible in an essay of this length to deal with all the different levels of the relationship. This article will attempt to isolate some major fields for discussion and to demonstrate some of the mechanisms of the Labour Party's thinking about the USSR

Economic growth · Economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Soviet union · Unemployment · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Soviet and Russian History · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact

• Canada and Anglo‐Soviet relations

  Andrew D Williams, Andrew Williams•Diplomacy and Statecraft•1990

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