The Anglo-Soviet Alliance: Comrades & Allies During WW2

By Colin Turbett

Considers the inter-war and wartime relationship between Britain and the USSR and its impact on the attitudes of ordinary citizens.

From the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Britain enjoyed an ambiguous relationship with the USSR and its people. All inter-war governments were concerned about the communist ideals of the new state and the threat they presented to British interests at home and abroad, and this was inevitably reflected amongst the general population. However there was a well-established British Communist Party whose fortunes were tied to the Soviet Union’s successes and failures. The wartime alliance offered the Communists an opportunity to extend their influence and win electoral support. Or did it? There were influences at work stemming from both sides that sought to put the importance of allied victory above competing ideology, with agreement over the need for a strong and unconditional anti-Fascist alliance. Compromises were made and relationships formed that would have seemed strange indeed to the pre-war observer. There were, however, tensions throughout the period of the war. By mid-1945, the alliance was threatened by differences that reflected original ideologies that had been glossed over for the duration of the conflict: these led to a Cold War for the next 45 years. This book, using both contemporary sources as well as post-war analyses, examines these matters alongside images that take us back to the period and help us understand its intricacies. It will start with a look at Britain’s opposition to the Bolshevik Revolution and the consolidation of the Soviet State under Lenin and then Stalin. The main body of the book goes on to give detail of the Wartime Alliance and the various forms through which it was expressed – from Government led Lend-Lease of equipment, to voluntary 'Aid for Russia. t ends with the War’s aftermath and the division of the world between the influences of capitalism on the one hand, and the “really existing socialism” of the Soviet Union and its satellites on the other. Tensions and expectations resulted, amongst other great social events, in the launch of the Welfare State, the demise of the British Empire, the nuclear arms race and, ultimately, the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526776594

Colin Turbett

A keen motorcyclist and social historian, Colin Turbett is the author of Motorcycles and Motorcycling in the USSR 1939-1990 (Veloce) and Playing with the Boys – Olga Kevelos Motorcycle Sportswoman. During his career as a social worker and frontline manager he had a number of academic papers published alongside two books: Rural Social Work Practice in Scotland (Venture Press 2010) and Doing Radical Social Work (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). He has long held an interest in the history of the Soviet Union and its people. This is his first book for Pen and Sword.

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Introduction

Early twentieth-century history was characterized by global conflict, and a shared capitalist ideology that justified competition between nations for resources and the amassing of concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. Standing out against that were the emergence of socialist and communist ideas that sought to organize global co-operation on a different basis – that of sharing power and wealth amongst the mass of the people and running society for common benefit. Crisis, as the First World War led to stalemate and continuing mass slaughter, saw the emergence in Russia of a group of revolutionaries who were able to seize power in 1917 with enough popular support to withstand internal and external attempts to overthrow them, and establish a regime that they hoped and planned would lead to the nirvana of communism. Thus, the Bolsheviks, led by a hitherto tiny group of professional revolutionaries scattered in exile, were launched onto an international stage with a clear agenda that threatened the established order throughout the developed world. Their early commitment to spreading their revolution presented a danger that could only be dealt with by vigorous opposition to their ideology. The legacy of the Russian empire meant that the new regime (the USSR – or Soviet Union) was established across a huge geographical area of the world, more or less bordering on all the powers and would-be powers in the northern hemisphere from Europe to Asia and the Far East.

Meeting Over Berlin, from Spirit of the Soviet Union, 1941. (Author’s collection)

In the UK, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was met with horror by the establishment, but some sympathy amongst the working population that its supporters sought to build upon. British troops were involved in attempts to unseat the Bolshevik government and, when that failed, communist ideology was opposed by less openly aggressive means both at home and abroad. By the end of the 1930s the international situation was in crisis again and war loomed. The forces by that time that most threatened the established order internationally were centred on far-right ideologies that were the antithesis of everything that communists and socialists stood for. Nazi Germany’s aggression in the face of disunited and economically weak neighbours in Europe was underpinned by its leader Hitler’s determination at some point to mount an assault on the USSR. Whilst his ideological justification lay in wanting to preserve European values and racial purity, this was openly driven too by a wish to grab the Soviet Union’s natural resources. The scene was set for a new world war but quite who this might involve, in terms of sides and alliances, had yet to be determined.

When war came in 1939, the USSR staved off immediate involvement (although few thought this was not eventually inevitable) by agreement with their arch enemy, Nazi Germany. By the autumn of 1940 Hitler’s armies had successfully overrun most of Europe, defeating its armies, and now threatening invasion of the UK. For the inhabitants of Britain’s cities, ‘phoney war’ changed to awful reality as bombs fell and invasion threatened. By this stage it was clear that only further alliances with the remaining free great powers of the world could prevent Britain’s defeat and the imposition of fascism. Germany’s invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941 therefore brought immediate and unhesitating Anglo-Soviet alliance as in the obvious interests of both, ideological differences were pragmatically set to one side. By the end of the year the die was set when Hitler declared war on the United States who promptly joined the alliance against him, an alliance that was already enjoying practical American support. The three powers of the Grand Alliance from then on worked together with the common aim of defeating fascism. In the meantime the war began very gradually to turn in the Allies’ favour: through its determination as it stood alone in 1940, Britain was able to act as a military base for the eventual defeat of Hitler’s armies in the West, whilst in the East, at enormous cost, the Red Army fought continuously and relentlessly to throw back the invasion: total war was embarked upon through a combination of early British courage and tenacity, American dollars, and, most of all, Soviet blood on the battlefield. Underlying tensions and machinations ensured that the alliance would crumble once Hitler’s defeat was secured in 1945.

Against this background, this book looks at the Anglo-Soviet alliance, and, in particular, at its impact at the level of the ordinary British citizen. The common people were the target of propaganda from successive UK governments about the threats presented by communism from 1917, and also from agitation by members of the British wing of the international Communist movement who wished to see revolutionary change at home. These competing influences combined in alliance between 1941 and 1945, but not without somersaults in policy that would have amazed the pre-war observer of British politics. The Soviet people lived in a world that was closed off to the West, so the wartime alliance brought some limited interaction between ordinary citizens of the USSR and the UK. All this ended in 1945 and it was back to mutual suspicion and the characterizations associated with competing ideology that were maintained throughout the Cold War, with echoes today. However, the experience of war for those fighting in the armed services was one of collective endeavour that brought people from various backgrounds together, leading to inevitable discussion about what type of country they were fighting for: radical ideas were popular and, together with those who experienced hardship on the home front, the British people elected a Labour government in 1945 committed to socialist transformation.

The seventy-fifth anniversary of the victory of the alliance over fascism in 1945, was the rightful cause of celebrations in 2020. However, there are few monuments in the UK to the Soviet Union’s enormous and decisive contribution to our freedom, and little popular understanding of the history that lies behind it. That story includes a genuine feeling of solidarity and international friendship in the face of adversity. The generation that did have some direct knowledge, ranging from the popular Aid for Russia fundraising throughout the UK, to the highly dangerous and often fatal contribution of seamen on the Arctic convoys, is now passing. The purpose of this book is to lend some understanding to the period in the hope that its history of international co-operation to overcome an overwhelming threat to humanity, reflected in activity both at government and institutional, as well at a very local level, can teach us something about how we might engage and organize to take on the dangers to the world that we face today. Many contemporary histories discuss the USSR and its demise as the welcome result of victory by sensible market-force capitalism. However, that same basis of unfettered capitalism brings on continued wars for diminishing resources and very real threats of climate change catastrophe. The USSR experienced its own human and environmental disasters – some self-imposed by its leaders, from absurd irrigations schemes that made rivers run backwards, to Chernobyl – but it was nonetheless grounded on ideas that still resonate because of their differences to the ones that seem to be leading us towards our own self-destruction.

The wartime alliance, at the time, represented for many, the hope of a better, peaceful and more secure future that still seems distant all these years later – and indeed the National Health Service and welfare state provisions in Britain that followed upon victory, have been under sustained attack in recent years. Cynics might sneer, as some did at the time, but aspirations for a better world will shine through this book in the chapters to follow. This is not intended to be an academic history – much of its content is drawn from wartime and other publications written in the period they describe, histories and accounts published since, and images of the period that lend some feel to what was thought and experienced at the time. Unfortunately, any historian of this period has to pick their way through narratives written soon after the event – the 1950s in particular saw a deluge of memoirs written by participants – usually former British officers, which are coloured by Cold War perceptions of events that cast the other side in an unfavourable light. Whilst this is true of western accounts it can also be said to be the case with ones from the Soviet side, all of which had to pass the censorship of the state to ensure that their line was the correct one. This account will therefore try and rescue accounts written before that period, whilst the war was still underway, and lend some transparency to ones written since. Sources are generally only cited in the narrative if direct quotations are borrowed, but all are listed in the bibliography.

Exhibition of Toys For Russia at St Martin’s School of Art, London, 1942. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter 1

The USSR, World Revolution and the British Communist Party, 1917 – 1941

Our task is to generalize the revolutionary experience of the working class, to purge the movement of the corroding admixture of opportunism and social-patriotism, to unify the efforts of all genuinely revolutionary parties of the world proletariat and thereby facilitate and hasten the victory of the Communist revolution throughout the world.

Founding manifesto of the Communist International,

Moscow, March 1919

The 1917 Revolution

Few outside the closed circles of European monarchy mourned the toppling of the Tsar of Russia in February 1917. His unsophisticated absolutism had brutally oppressed his own people and resulted in disastrous military loss, even by the standards of those engaged in the seemingly endless carnage of the Great War that had begun three years earlier. The instability that followed was finally laid to rest when the Bolsheviks seized power in October of the same year on a programme of land, bread and peace that won the support of the masses. Their revolution only found favour abroad with socialists who shared the communist vision of a world freed from the destructive competition that had condemned millions to poverty, exploitation and war. The Bolshevik programme threatened the great powers, not just because of its immediate impact on the war, but through its message to ordinary people that another world was possible if they could wrest power from their rulers. Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky made no secret of their belief that the success of their own revolution rested on similar developments in other countries, particularly the advanced nations of Western Europe and North America. Without such developments their revolution would be strangled. The actual reaction of their counterparts in Great Britain will be discussed in Chapter 2.

Prior to 1914 socialist parties had met across the globe as the Second International – an organization that included huge parties like the German Social Democrats. The Second International effectively collapsed as most of its members, including the Labour Party in the UK, fell prey to national chauvinism, supporting their respective sides as war broke out in 1914. A conference to bring together those who had stood out against militarism was held in Zimmerwald in Switzerland in 1915: thirty-eight delegates attended including Bolsheviks and members of other organizations from Russia. The three British delegates from the British Socialist Party (BSP) and Independent Labour Party (ILP) were refused passports and so could not attend. Despite disagreements reflecting different political positions, there was unity around a strident anti-war ‘Zimmerwald Manifesto’, although its impact at the time was minimal.

The supporters of the Bolsheviks internationally were those socialists who had opposed the war from its beginning in 1914. They were a minority – most of those who had previously described themselves as socialists, like those in the British Labour Party, dropped their internationalism overnight to support their governments and rulers as the battle lines were drawn up. In the United Kingdom, socialist opponents of the war were organized in small organizations like the BSP, ILP and Socialist Labour Party (SLP). Their numbers included the former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. Anti-war agitation was a risky business and many political and shop floor trade union revolutionaries found themselves imprisoned when their activities were considered to have fomented unrest amongst workers and troops. Amongst these were the Glasgow school teacher and Scottish republican socialist John Maclean whose speech from the dock prior to his five-year prison sentence for sedition in May 1918, exhorted workers to tear down the capitalist system: ‘I am not here as the accused, I am here as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.’ By this time Maclean had been appointed Bolshevik consul in Glasgow (a position never recognized by the UK government).

British Bolsheviks

Socialists in Britain (most of whom would join the Communist Party) were quick to advocate support for the Bolsheviks after the 1917 October Revolution. Their influence was a factor in the opposition to government attempts to undermine the revolution that will be discussed in Chapter 2. At the war’s end Europe was in ferment as old empires crumbled – revolutionary change, fomented by adherents of the Communist International, was in the air. In the wake of the carnage of the Great War the Labour Party opposed, although not actively, interventions against the new Soviet state. In January 1919, 500 delegates from 350 organizations formed the Hands Off Russia campaign which determined action to force withdrawal of British forces from Russia. In May 1919 British left-wing socialists argued for support for a European-wide general strike against anti-Bolshevik interventions. This was watered down by Labour leaders, who opposed Bolshevism but supported the right of the Russian people to determine their own future. The climate for change was reaching a crescendo. That summer, strikes in Glasgow and Liverpool were met with military force due to their insurrectionary character.

In May 1920, militants amongst the London dockers – notably Harry Pollitt who was to become a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) – discovered that a cargo ship, the Jolly George, was being loaded with a consignment of weapons for the Polish Army who were at that time involved in an aggressive war against the young Soviet state. They successfully sought official support for this boycott and the Jolly George eventually sailed for Danzig without the offending arms. A National Council of Action was formed by the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to counter the threat of further military intervention against Russia. Over 300 local councils were created but these were far from pro-Bolshevik – some refused Communist Party affiliation after the formation of the Party in July (see below). Others were more left wing – sixty-six added the call for British military withdrawal from Ireland to their demand concerning Russia, but the call for a general strike was reduced by the national leadership to one of demonstrations on 22 August. By October 1920, the councils had all but disappeared as the threat of military action by the UK government receded.

Trial in Glasgow of left-wing leaders following the January 1919 strike. Willie Gallacher is second from left. (Wikimedia Commons)

1970 Soviet postage stamp celebrating Harry Pollitt and the Jolly George incident. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Comintern

In March 1919 the new Soviet government in Russia called together delegates from across the world in Moscow to declare a Third International. Although attended by fewer delegates than Zimmerwald, its influence based on the prestige and success of its hosts, was considerably more profound. In order to ensure that it represented truly revolutionary socialist aspirations rather than the reformist ones that dominated its predecessor, the Executive (influenced by Lenin) laid down twenty-one conditions for membership which were formally adopted at the second congress in 1920. The character of these can be judged by the third condition:

In almost every country in Europe and America the class struggle is entering the phase of civil war. Under such conditions the communists can place no trust in bourgeois legality. They have the obligation of setting up a parallel organizational apparatus which, at the decisive moment, can assist the party to do its duty to the revolution. In every country where a state of siege or emergency laws deprive the communists of the opportunity of carrying on all their work legally, it is absolutely necessary to combine legal and illegal activity.*

A number of mass socialist parties in Europe felt able to meet these and affiliate, bringing the organization real strength and purpose. Britain’s left socialists were not among the best-supported exponents of Bolshevik-style revolution: the BSP, SLP and other individuals united to form the Communist Party of Great Britain in July 1920. Membership amounted to only about 3,000 and this reduced in the first few years. The Third International advised the CPGB to seek affiliation to the Labour Party, a mass umbrella organization with growing representation and influence. The aim was to affiliate but remain organizationally independent so that revolutionary socialist principle could be adhered to and argued within the wider labour and trade union movement. Affiliation was rejected (repeatedly and with a hardening of attitude in ensuing years) but would remain an issue for the CPGB with recurring revivals throughout its history, including, particularly, in the closing years of the Second World War. However, at this early stage few doubted the wisdom of such a move and seven candidates were put forward for the 1922 general election, two of whom, Walter Newbold in Motherwell, and Shapurji Saklatvala, in Battersea North, were elected with Labour endorsement (the LP at this time was an umbrella organization rather than a self-contained political party). During their brief spell in parliament (under a Tory government) they worked together to raise issues about unemployment and housing, but only Saklatvala was accepted into the Labour Party parliamentary caucus. Both lost their seats in the general election in 1923 but Saklatvala was re-elected in the 1924 general election (without Labour support) and sat until 1929 as the only Communist MP.

Communist International newssheet, 1919. (Wikimedia Commons)

Lenin and other world Communist movement leaders at the 2nd Comintern Congress, 1920. (красная панорама April 1924/ Wikimedia Commons)

Early CPGB leaflet against intervention in Russia, 1920. (Wikimedia Commons)

Communists in the Period of the General Strike

The period between the two world wars saw capitalism lurch from crisis to crisis and politics polarized as a consequence: fascism emerged in a number of countries, notably Germany and Italy, whilst Soviet Russia remained the only survivor of the socialist revolutions that took place at the close of the Great War. Industrial unrest in the UK formed a good breeding ground for communist ideas and the CPGB grew in influence, if not in size, within working-class areas – particularly those dominated by heavy industry and coal mining where there were strong traditions of trade union militancy. Communist influence in the trade unions was centred on the Minority Movement, an organization formed in 1924 to challenge the right-wing leaderships, and within a year or two it represented almost a million workers. Labour’s rejection of Communist affiliation was based on fear of left-wing takeover, but that did not prevent them from expressing admiration for the achievements of the Bolsheviks in Russia. This caused establishment fears when Labour won a general election for the first time in late 1923. A further general election was required after the collapse of the Labour government in October 1924: a few days before the election the Daily Mail published a letter from the Comintern leader Zinoviev advising the CPGB of the opportunities for sedition that a Labour victory would bring (see Chapter 2). Labour consequently lost the election, the letter itself being eventually revealed as a forgery. However, the lesson was clear: Labour needed to maintain a distance from Communism and its British representatives.

The CPGB’s big chance came with the General Strike of 1926: in support of Britain’s 1.2 million miners who had been locked out by their united employers, the TUC called all workers out on strike in May. The response was massive and the country ground to a halt for nine days. However, fearful of the repercussions of such a challenge to the state, the TUC General Council called off the strike and the miners were left to fight on alone until eventually starved back to work. The CPGB, with only 5,000 or so members, and despite valiant efforts (with other left activists) to fight on to the finish, was simply too small to countermand the capitulation of the movement’s