Stalin's personally approved CPGB General Secretary who led the party for 25 years
10 May 1920, Port of London. Pollitt convinced dockers not to load the SS Jolly George with munitions bound for Poland, then at war with Soviet Russia. The ship sailed empty on 15 May.
Founding member and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain for over 25 years, the most significant British communist of the 20th century. He persuaded London dockers to block munitions bound for Poland in the 1920 Hands Off Russia campaign. Appointed General Secretary with Stalin's personal approval, he was the party's secret 'Code Holder' in direct radio contact with Moscow. He supported the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and co-authored The British Road to Socialism, committing the CPGB to a parliamentary path. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Pollitt refused to take down Stalin's portrait from his living room.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1920Founding member of the CPGB
- 1924–1929National Secretary, NMM & British Bureau of Profintern
- 1929–1939General Secretary, CPGB (first term)
- 1939–1941Removed as General Secretary; retained in Political Bureau
- 1941–1956General Secretary, CPGB (second term)
- 1956–1960Chairman, CPGB
Related historical events
- 1919–1921The Soviet-Polish WarBlocked arms shipments to PolandIn May 1920, he stopped munitions bound for Poland from being loaded at the Port of London.
- 1936–1939The Spanish Civil WarGeneral Secretary of the Communist Party of Great BritainOrganized recruitment and support for the British Battalion and visited the front repeatedly
The war-line rupture of 1939-1941 and loss of the general secretaryship
When war broke out between the UK and Nazi Germany in September 1939, Pollitt welcomed the British declaration despite the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In his pamphlet How To Win The War he called for a "struggle on two fronts", the "military defeat of Hitler and the political defeat of Chamberlain", though he was ambivalent about rearmament. This position ran against the Comintern line received from Moscow on 14 September and reiterated by the CPGB's Comintern representative on 24 September, as Rajani Palme Dutt, his eventual successor as General Secretary, had warned him it would. Pollitt was forced to resign, and by November 1939 he had disavowed his pro-war stance, saying that by supporting the war he had "played into the hands of the class enemy".
The rupture belongs to a specific conjuncture rather than to a settled position. During 1940-41 the party, under instructions from Moscow, followed a policy of "revolutionary defeatism", a strategy that assumed the goals of the Communist Party could be accelerated by quickening Britain's defeat. Pollitt in this period criticised the war policies of the Chamberlain government, describing them as seeking to exploit the war against "Hitler's fascism" to "impose certain aspects of that same fascism on the workers". On instructions from Georgi Dimitrov in Moscow he was retained in a six-member political bureau after his removal, and he was reinstated as leader after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, again in response to instructions from Moscow. Moscow also overturned Dutt's position of criticising the Churchill government and characterising the war as a struggle for socialism, endorsing instead Pollitt's line of full support to Churchill and of avoiding inflamed anti-socialist opinion. Dimitrov nonetheless had doubts about Pollitt's reliability: in 1942 he questioned what he saw as Pollitt's "strange behaviour" over the penetration of the CPGB by British security services, saying he did not know whether Pollitt acted "deliberately" or whether "English intelligence is taking advantage of his lack of vigilance".
The episode carried consequences beyond the leadership. The CPGB's anti-war position of 1939-41 was cited by J. S. Middleton, along with the party's perceived lack of independence from Moscow, as a reason for refusing Pollitt's application to affiliate the CPGB with the Labour Party. When the Comintern was dissolved in May 1943 Pollitt took the opportunity to apply again, and Labour's central committee again rejected the application, again citing the party's previous opposition to the war against Nazi Germany.