Communists in Britain

Reds under the bed

A memoir of mid-20th-century London

Jan 30th 2016 | From the print edition

Party Animals: My Family and Other
Communists. By David Aaronovitch. Jonathan
Cape; 309 pages; 17.99.
WERE those post-war Britons who kept faith in
communism, despite the horrors of Stalinism,
simply useful idiots? In this engaging, witty and
beautifully written book, the epithet, usually
attributed to Lenin, never occurs. Yet David Aaronovitch must surely have been tempted to apply
it to his parents, Sam and Lavender, and their friends, almost all of them fellow-members of the
Communist Party.
Mr Aaronovitch, who ditched the gospel of Marxism years ago and is now a columnist for the
Times, obviously has first-hand experience of the cultlike loyalty of the party animals in the
1950s and 1960s: The facts of existence, the assumptions about how the globe turned that we
imbibed were not the same asand often the opposite ofwhat everyone else deemed normal
There were things that other people did that we didnt do. We didnt believe in God, pray, go to
church, stand up for the queen in the cinema when they played the national anthem (which in
any case, wasnt our anthem, our anthem being the Internationale). Is there a parallel today?
Perhaps there are children of very devout Muslims or evangelicals who will read this and nod
along.
But Mr Aaronovitchs memoir is no glib rant against the delusions of sincere party members.
Instead, he acknowledges the power of the message from Moscow (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
was explained away as a delaying tactic to allow Russia to prepare for its heroic role in defeating
Hitler). For the true believers, almost anything could be justified, even the evils of Stalinism, the
repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As with

any cult, some devotees will never break away.

Yet most of all, Mr Aaronovitchs book is a sensitive analysis of his own familythe Jewish Sam,
an autodidact from Londons impoverished East End, and the genteel Lavender, rebelling against
her middle-class roots in the countryside. Sams passion for learning takes him in middle age to
Balliol College, Oxford (he later became an economics lecturer at a London polytechnic);
Lavenders passion for the party leads her to overlook not just the flawsso evident to any
outsiderin Soviet behaviour, but also Sams energetic womanising. Meanwhile, the young
David joins in the party entertainment: marching and demonstrating against any perceived
capitalist illbut willing by 1987 to abandon his parents faith in order to work for the BBC.
As the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s, Roger Scruton, a conservative British
philosopher, called for Westerners who had promoted and apologised for Soviet communism
to face their day of reckoning in the court of public opinion. Mr Aaronovichs riposte to the
Scrutons, as a class that had benefited from the British empire, should hit home: If it was
criminal to have been a believer in communism and an apologist for Russia, then why was it less
criminal to have been a believer in colonialism and an apologist for racism? As for Lavender and
Sam, She was a party member through thick and thin because it was a kind of family. He was a
party member despite everything because it was his bigger world.

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