British Trade Unionists and the Soviet Union:
The visit of Walter Citrine in 1925. Part Three
by Dr J. G. Moher
In Part 1, (Labour Affairs, Dec/Jan 2017/18) we described this personal but significant visit in the context of the close relations which had developed between the TUC and Russian trade union leaderships since 1924. We examined the trade union situation there post- revolution and their quite autonomous (but not independent role) in the context of CPSU control in the new USSR, with their leader, Mikhail Tomsky in the Politburo.
In Part 2, (Labour Affairs, February 2018) we examined Citrine and Hicks’ discussions with the senior officials of the Russian TUC about some of the key Soviet figures – Stalin, Trotsky and especially Zinoviev, Head of the Comintern – during the struggle for power after the death of Lenin. It highlighted the political importance the Soviet leadership attached to the Anglo-Russian Committee, which the TUC had enthusiastically just set up with the Russian unions. The credentials of that left leadership (of which Citrine was also a part), of Fred Bramley, General Secretary, Alf Purcell as President of the TUC and IFTU and George Hicks, chair of the International Committee was explored.
Part 3
‘International trade union unity’
An international trade union body was first set up in 1913, but fell into disuse during the First World War. In 1919 the western European and American unions reformed as the International Federation of Trade Unions based in Amsterdam with a membership of around thirteen million. However, no Russian unions were involved though they sought to make contact via their Danish union. No response was received but it soon became clear that the Bolsheviks were hostile. Tomsky on behalf of the Russian unions also questioned their ‘international’ representativeness. [1] Lenin was even more scathing, predictably questioning the moral right of national and social democratic union leaders to assume the mantle of international working class leadership so soon after their complicity in the slaughter of the First World War. Lozovsky and Red International Labour Unions (RILU) were therefore set up to win the western working class away from the IFTU for their revolutionary aims. On the other side, the anti-communist union leader, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labour was involved in IFTU’s creation and so this body emerged in a contest for the allegiance of the unions in each country and internationally. However, the AFL withdrew from the IFTU that same year, signifying that they couldn’t identify with the more ‘Clause IV’-type socialisation platform adopted by the British, German, French, Dutch and Belgian affiliates. [2]
For them, IFTU’s main role was seen as lobbying the League of Nations and its International Labour Organisation (ILO) arm on employment and social reform conventions, which League member countries could adopt.[3] Soon after, in Moscow the Communist International (founded by Lenin in 1919), formed a rival body, the RILU (or Profintern in Russian), to win the western workers for the revolution they fondly expected to follow their own. RILU’s General Secretary, a Bolshevik apparatchik, Aleksander Lozovsky, [4] lambasted IFTU, as a ‘yellow’ body (meaning, ‘paid agents of international capitalism’ viz., the League of Nations) for involving themselves in the tripartite government/employer/union ILO.[5] They thought they could persuade individual unions and international secretariats of IFTU, (transport, dock and railway workers), to join them. For a time after 1920, the success of the Bolsheviks and what appeared to be good prospects for the spread of world revolution to Germany and other parts of Europe, lent credence to RILU/Profintern. Naturally, this further poisoned relations between the two rivals and so the IFTU Executive would have nothing to do with RILU/Profintern for its entire life (1937). However, by 1923 it was clear that RILU/Profintern was not making much impression and only a small number of IFTU national unions had split off to join them. Nowhere was their failure more evident than in Britain, where not a single major union had left the IFTU.[6] It seems that by 1923, Mikhail Tomsky, Chair of the Russian TUC (ARCCTU), had come to the conclusion that a different approach was necessary. As the head of by far the largest RILU affiliate, (over 6 million members), he made overtures to IFTU for a merger with RILU on mutually agreed terms. Most of the IFTU Executive were hostile, but the British IFTU delegation and TUC, led by General Secretary Fred Bramley and Alf Purcell, were keen to include the Russian unions (though not RILU) in that mainstream international ‘family’.[7] Tomsky had, of course, as a member of the Politburo, got prior approval of the Soviet leadership for such a change of tack. His pitch to them was that his approach would have a far greater chance in gaining access to the organised western proletariat and eventually take them over during a revolutionary upsurge.[8] He was a much shrewder union leader/ politician and a milder and more personable individual from a genuine union/working class background than Lozovsky and they were keen rivals. He had much more in common with the likes of Fred Bramley, Alf Purcell, George Hicks and Walter Citrine, all former craftsmen who got on well.[9] Some western unionists’ thought Tomsky’s underlying aim of a link-up internationally was to strengthen the unions’ position in the emerging Soviet society and in view of the controversy in the USSR over the role of unions (see Part 1 Labour Affairs, February issue), this may well have been on his secret ARCCTU agenda.[10]
So, Russian delegates were invited to a succession of annual TUC conferences with Tomsky to address the TUC Congress in Hull, which Alf Purcell chaired, as President, in September 1924.[11] This provided the Russian leader with a major platform and over seven hundred delegates cheered him enthusiastically after his warm address, in a general atmosphere of international solidarity. Tomsky, and other union leaders had been part of the recently negotiated trade and credit Treaty with the Labour government in London, and full British Empire/USSR diplomatic relations were established. The positive terms had been assisted by the TUC’s representations, which we saw caused ructions in the British Parliament, leading to the fall of the government (see Part 2, Labour Affairs, February issue, pp15-16). The Treaty was not ratified by the incoming Conservative government, though recognition and full diplomatic status for the USSR was not then revoked.[12] Tomsky and his union colleagues came again to the 1925 Congress in Scarborough as fraternal delegates, after they had a very comradely Anglo-Russian conference at the then TUC Eccleston Square, Victoria offices in April.[13] To get round the determined opposition of most of the IFTU Executive members at Amsterdam, the General Council formed a bilateral Anglo-Russian Joint Advisory Committee (ARJAC) to co-ordinate their efforts in persuading IFTU to admit the Russian unions on compromise terms (Profintern was forgotten about in practice). They aimed to call their own international union conference if IFTU Executive’s continued ‘to drag their feet’. The Russian representatives were Tomsky, Aleksander Dogodov, Grigoriy Mel’nichansky with Yarotsky as interpreter (Andrew Rothstein, a prominent CPGB member, was also involved, as their British translator).[14] This ‘Anglo-Russian Committee’ came to assume great importance for the Soviet leadership, out of all proportion to its actual role, because they thought it would give them leverage with the hostile British Baldwin government and become the germ of a rival international union movement to IFTU.
XI – Labour Government and Left/Right balance at the TUC
The reason Bramley had been able to proceed with this Left policy towards the Russian unions was, ironically, due to the election of a very moderate minority Labour government in January 1924. Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister, immediately appointed a number of the more ‘right-wing/moderate’ TUC leaders as ministers in his government. [15] Purcell took over immediately as Chair of the General Council because the President elected in 1923, Margaret Bondfield, became a minister in January 1924. Purcell also replaced rail workers’ leader, J.H. (‘Jimmy’) Thomas, (leader of the ‘right-wing’[16] General Council members and ally of the Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, on the General Council). He therefore became President of IFTU (the TUC was the largest and wealthiest affiliate).[17] George Hicks also replaced Thomas as chair of the important TUC International Committee.
Another important consequence of those government appointments was the replacement of the ‘right-wing’ Frank Hodges MP (who also became a minister), by Arthur Cook as General Secretary of the massive Miners Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), in a very close ballot. Even Bramley appreciated the significance of this result (about as great as Arthur Scargill’s victory to become President of the NUM in 1982 – and Cook was his hero), when he described Cook to Citrine prophetically as ‘a raving, tearing Communist. Now the miners are in for a bad time.’[18] Cook, through his place on the General Council and IFTU Miners’ International Secretariat, would prove a strong Comintern/Profintern ally against Purcell and Hicks, when they fell out of favour due to the TUC call off of the General Strike in 1926. He was to disappoint the Soviets a year later however, when the MFGB only abstained on the decision to abolish the Anglo-Russian Committee.[19]
Of course, Bramley, Purcell and Hicks were not alone on those General Councils in wanting to help the new young Soviet ‘Workers’ Republic’. Alonzo Swales (1870-1952), General Secretary of the very left-led Amalgamated Engineering Union (President, Tom Mann), became Chairman of the General Council after Purcell in 1925 and continued the Left hegemony as regards ‘international unity’. He chaired an Anglo-Russian Conference with Tomsky and his ARCCTU colleagues at TUC offices in April 1925. A formidable orator, he did all he could to help them and visited Russia in 1926. The legendary dockers’ leader Ben Tillett (1860-1943) of the Transport & General Workers Union (T&GWU), on the General Council and IFTU delegations, was also a leading figure in the 1924 Russian visit.[20] Will Thorne MP (1857-1946), General Secretary of the municipal general workers (GMWU), who had visited Russia during the Revolution in 1917, strongly supported Fred Bramley on TUC IFTU delegations.
Although not yet on the General Council, Ernest Bevin, still only Assistant General Secretary of the Dockers’ Union, had begun to make a name for himself as ‘the Dockers QC’. He had also championed the famous London dockers’ action in 1920, after they prevented the loading of armaments for the Poles on the Jolly George in the Port of London and he was spokesman for the joint TUC/Labour Party national Council of Action, which lobbied Lloyd George to prevent government intervention generally.[21] However, he didn’t visit Russia and does not seem to have been that interested in the TUC’s ‘international unity’ effort. He it was who sought to ‘rein-in’ the General Council side of ARJAC (Purcell and Hicks especially) from going along with the Russian sides’ demands in 1926, and when it came to the termination of the link in 1927, he spoke strongly against any deferment as Cook and the MFGB wanted.[22] He was probably too taken up with the formation and re-organization of the Transport & General Workers Union (1922) for most of this time and only came on the General Council in September 1925. Other key General Council figures of that time were: John Bromley (1876-1945) of ASLEF, and Labour MP 1924-31, a prominent ILP supporter of the Hands Off Russia campaign, who was also on the 1924 delegation to Russia. Robert Williams, (1881-1936), the syndicalist-minded Welsh Secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation, had stood for Parliament in 1918 on a ‘support the Bolshevik Revolution’ ticket. He had gone to Russia with Purcell on the 1920 Labour movement delegation.
XII – The General Strike 1926 – Citrine as TUC General Secretary
Citrine and Hicks returned from Russia in October 1925, and Citrine took on the far more daunting role as acting General Secretary of the organisation which was facing its greatest ever challenge – the General Strike. As joint Secretary of ARJAC, he also had responsibility for the TUC’s continuing efforts to broker its international unity task. This continued well into 1927 with various meetings and increasingly antagonistic correspondence after the call off of the General Strike.[23] The unions’ ‘Triple Alliance’ and the TUC had flexed their industrial muscles in July 1925 (‘Red Friday’). As a result of his support for two major disputes (London tramworkers and dockers nationwide) during the term of the Labour government the previous year, Bevin ‘bore the reputation of being the most aggressive trade-union leader in the country’, while A.J. Cook as General Secretary of the Miners Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), needed no lessons in that regard, supported as they also were by the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR).[24] This ‘Triple Alliance’ forced Baldwin’s government to reinstate the war-time coal subsidy and set up the Samuel Inquiry about the coal industries’ labour relations and finances. Known as ‘Red Friday’, it inflated the appeal of such threatened syndicalist actions, and its success gave important psychological impetus to repeat the threat a year later.[25] But this time, in May 1926, matters went very differently as the now prepared Government hardened its position with the charge that the TUC was ‘instituting a strike to overthrow the constitution’. Government allegations of active Soviet/Comintern interference in/funding of, the General Strike and miners’ dispute, which had considerable substance, sharpened the TUC dilemma considerably.[26] After much agonising the General Council decided to decline the £26,000 offer in case it confirmed the government’s claims of ‘Russian Gold’ in the public mind. But this refusal was taken as a deep insult by the Russians, who had collected the money from half a days’ wages of their workers. No amount of explanation by Citrine to Tomsky would excuse it.
Of course, the Opposition in the CPSU and Comintern/Profintern leaders, seized on this refusal so as to embarrass Tomsky and Stalin for dallying with such traitors. Nor did the refusal abate the government’s pressure to call off the strike. In addition to declaring an emergency, preparing sedition legislation against the unions, setting up regional police and other bodies to counter the strike and mobilising the middle class and university students as volunteers to break it, they now marshalled the troops. Understandably, the TUC backed down from an ill-prepared and never-intended military confrontation with the state and called off what they sought to call the ‘National’ (rather than ‘General’ with its syndicalist connotations) Strike.[27]
That decision drew an even more amazingly extreme reaction from Tomsky’s Central Council of Trade Unions, from the Comintern/Profintern and naturally from CPGB/Minority Movement. They received ‘a thousand-word torrent of abuse’ telegram (in bad English) in the names of Tomsky and Dogadov dated 5th September 1926 (it was apparently written by A. Lozovsky, Secretary of the Profintern/RILU, in woeful English!).[28] Citrine said, ‘We resented the use of such terms as ‘traitor’ and ‘lick-spittle, although …commonplace in the Russian movement…Lenin had apparently said that the more intimate you were with the other fellow the greater was your entitlement to abuse him’![29] The telegram blamed the General Council and in particular J.H. Thomas and Arthur Pugh (then Chair), though not Citrine, for calling off the General Strike. It blamed the Anglo-Russian Committee (ARJAC) for turning down all their proposals to assist the miners. The General Council circulated the telegram and in September 1926, ‘the Congress recorded its emphatic condemnation of the Russian action.’[30] It was indicative of a return to Lozovsky’s earlier approach. All the efforts of the TUC to assist the Russian unions with IFTU would now be forgotten.
If their attention was drawn to Stalin’s speech to the CPSU Central Committee of August 1st 1927, they would know why. In that speech, the Soviet leader dismissed ‘slanderous’ accusations of the Trotsky/Zinoviev/Kamenev Opposition that they had ‘banked, so to speak, on the Anglo-Soviet Committee’. In their internal CPSU power struggle, the ‘Anglo-Russian Committee’ i.e. ARJAC, had become the subject of a major attack on the Soviet leadership by the Opposition. They sought to use it as evidence of the miscalculations of Tomsky and Stalin for placing such confidence in the ‘treacherous’ TUC leaders, particularly the ‘Lefts’ Purcell and Hicks (at least Trotsky was consistent in this). Stalin had to distance himself from what he now called ‘reformist trade unions, reactionary trade unions’. He claimed that their only reason for taking part in the Committee was to further ‘our work for revolutionising the working class in Europe’, ‘to eliminate reformist political leadership from the working-class movement’ and ‘to defeat the reactionary labour aristocracy in the trade unions’ through the Anglo-Soviet Committee.[31]
The CPSU General Secretary had previously taken little notice of the international world revolutionary activities of Trotsky, Zinoviev and the Comintern/Profintern.[32] He was supportive of the Anglo-Russian Committee (ARJAC), mainly as a useful tool to blunt any renewed British government attack on the Soviet Union. Diplomatic relations were broken off by Britain in 1927. The police ransacked the Soviet trade body, Arcos Limited’s offices, and the government threw most of the CPGB leadership in jail, as tensions had sharpened over nationalist/communist-led rioting in British trade enclaves of Chinese cities. Stalin was convinced they would soon renew war against the Soviet Union. But now, to deflect the Opposition’s attack, he felt obliged to repudiate the very good relations which had developed between the Russian and British TUC’s since 1924 and to minimize the importance of the Anglo-Soviet Committee. It is not often appreciated either how the Tomsky/TUC’s efforts for ‘international unity’ ended up as a catspaw in a much more deadly power struggle in the Soviet Union in 1926.[33]
XIII – TUC terminates Anglo-Russian Committee 1927
Aware of how it would seem if the TUC simply withdrew from ARJAC while the Soviet unions were funding the continuing miners’ dispute – the decision to refuse the generosity of the Russian workers already looked bad to many British union activists – the TUC leadership bent over backwards to avoid winding up the ARJAC throughout 1926, as the Soviet leadership wanted them to do. There were a number of fractious meetings with the Russian side in Paris and other venues. Tomsky, who pleaded ill-health, was replaced by a hard-line apparatchik, Andreev, who abused Citrine, Hicks, Purcell, Pugh and the whole General Council roundly and yet demanded that they fulfil their promises to arrange an international conference of unions. Small chance of that, now! It was only a matter of time before the TUC wound it up.
At the Edinburgh Congress, late in 1927, Citrine moved a report on behalf of the General Council, recommending the end of Anglo Russian Joint Advisory Committee. They had circulated the further 3,000 word letter (‘including the usual tirade of abuse’), received from the Russians.[34] Significantly, ‘practically the same General Council members – including Swales, Purcell and Hicks – who, two years before, had taken the initiative to establish the Anglo-Russian Joint Advisory Committee, were now giving it as their considered opinion that no good purpose could be served by continuing the Council whilst the existing attitude of the Russians was maintained.’[35] The Congress voted by four to one to endorse their recommendation.
Citrine was left to reflect whether Tomsky and the colleagues he had got on so well with in Russia ‘really believed such nasty things he said about us’. The fact that Tomsky’s tactic of working with the TUC was now totally discredited in the eyes of the Soviet leadership and Opposition, must have weakened Tomsky’s position considerably, leading to his and close colleague Mel’nichansky’s removal from the leadership of the Central Council of Trade Unions in 1928. At Amsterdam meanwhile, in 1927 there was a great ‘bust-up’ on the IFTU General Council as the continental union representatives refused to support Purcell for President. Correspondence was disclosed by the British executive member, J.W. Brown, that Dutch General Secretary, Oudejeest had been conspiring with the French vice-President, Jouhaux to block the merger since 1924.[36] This led to a TUC walk-out and the resignation of Oudegeest with the prospect of TUC disaffiliation. However, after the TUC’s own withdrawal from the Anglo-Russian Committee relations were restored by January 1928, with Purcell stepping down to be replaced by the more acceptable Citrine as President. By 1930, with a new (Belgian) General Secretary, Walter Schevenels, Citrine extended the membership of IFTU globally and put it on a more secure financial footing.[37]
It was in these heady times and amongst these ‘big beasts’ of the Labour movement, nationally and internationally, that Walter Citrine emerged to take over responsibility for the running of what was becoming the major trade union centre in the world.[38] Ironically, the great working class response to the TUC’s strike call, though it failed to get its way by the force of protest, established the TUC as its legitimate spokesperson with all governments thereafter and in British society. At age thirty-seven, though with considerable Merseyside and Manchester experience, Walter Citrine was moving ‘from the Championship to the Premiership’ in which he was to prove such a serious player. Though hardly mentioned in the official TUC Annual Report of 1925, he was, in fact, in charge of the arrangements before and during the Scarborough Conference that September.
The increasingly ill Fred Bramley,[39] who made a short appearance and in his brief address to the delegates, praised his deputy fulsomely for covering so effectively for him.[40] He had clearly impressed not just Purcell, Hicks and the other senior General Council members also and he was elected without opposition to the substantive post at the September 1926 Congress. The other addition to the General Council since the 1925 Scarborough conference, Ernest Bevin, along with Citrine would put the TUC on the national and international map from here on.[41] Citrine would go to Russia again in 1935 for a personal visit with his wife, Doris, though as President of the IFTU, he would be allowed to go wherever he wished. In 1941, he led another TUC delegation to Moscow, just as it was being evacuated after Hitler Germany’s invasion, to help bolster their entry to the war. He went again in 1943 as a plenipotentiary of the coalition government to the now firm Soviet ally. His last visit was in 1956, that time at the head of the nationalised British Electricity Authority delegation. Another paper will consider these trips. With this first-hand experience of that vast and complex society, Walter Citrine became one of the most knowledgeable observers of one of the forces that would shape the twentieth century.
Conclusion
The problem is achieving any consensus about the impact and those possibilities of the Russian revolution posed by the recent TUC exhibition. This has been particularly so since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the intensified neo-liberal ideological onslaught against ‘communism’ and all its forms, since then. This has obscured what was for a long time regarded as an event comparable with the French Revolution in world history and has put the Left on the defensive everywhere.
The importance of trade unions for this new socialist Russia, as well as in the western capitalist developed world, was enormous, though their role has been little studied. There they were, the workers of Russia, joining unions for the first time, which were growing and developing in a vast country claiming to base itself on ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. It was a country still undergoing profound political, economic and social change in the ‘aftershock’ of war and revolution. Soviet Russia was ostracized from most of the ‘civilized’ world, yet there was this one group (as well as numerous prominent figures on the Left), for whom this experiment was a beacon of a new socialist civilization. Walter Citrine was one of those and as a senior TUC official, he had privileged access to see and discuss the possibilities with some of the top union and government people there.
Citrine was well aware that the trade union world was divided in its attitude to the communist-led Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic (later USSR). Lenin and the Bolsheviks had slated reformist-minded Social Democratic union leaders across the world as ‘yellow’ and traitors to the working-class interest, because of their support for their national war efforts since 1914. Worse, through the Communist International and Profintern in their pursuit of ‘world revolution’ since 1919, they had been actively seeking to undermine the west European Social Democratic and union leaderships and split the trade unions, especially in Germany. So, the TUC’s efforts to broker ‘international unity’ between the Russian Central Council of Trade Unions and IFTU could be seen as a bold move or wishful thinking by a few besotted British left-wingers.
In the context of the times, the author prefers the former interpretation. Citrine’s visit was part of that initiative and it strengthened his meteoric rise to become TUC General Secretary, soon after. This key position and his subsequent succession as President of IFTU in 1928, gave him the opportunity to become one of the leading union and national statesmen over the following decades. The prospect of the Russian unions developing a relatively independent role in the USSR and so influencing the course of the Soviet Republic, remained alive until Tomsky and his close colleagues in the Central Council of Trade Unions’ demise in 1928. Citrine and Hicks used their influence to strengthen their Russian colleagues’ determination to achieve this end. It was clearly a tragedy that this astute and brave Russian union leadership was lost and that their efforts to moderate the pace of industrial development came to nought. Clearly more detailed work is needed to confirm that thesis.
[1] Goethem, The Amsterdam International, p.77-8.
[2] ibid.,
[3] Calhoun, The United Front, pp. 41-2.
[4] ibid., pp12-13.
[5] Calhoun, The United Front, 4
[6] ibid., CPGB leader, Harry Pollitt recognised this, as they replaced RILU in Britain with the much more effective National Minority Movement from 1924.
[7] Calhoun, The United Front, pp.145-7, probably correctly concludes that it was Bramley’s ‘stubborn persistence’ which led to the creation of the key ARJAC committee.
[8] Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, pp.395-6, 454-6.
[9] The TUC Annual Report 1926, pp. 242-6, probably written by Citrine, vividly outlines the various initiatives and positions taken by ARCCTU and IFTU. One of the IFTU Secretaries, Mr J. Oudegeest of the Dutch unions and a key opponent of the merger, had spoken before him but was non-committal as to the TUC advocacy of the Russian unions’ overture.
[10] Calhoun, The United Front, pp.23 and 186. This was probably Citrine’s hope.
[11] TUC Annual Report 1924, Tomsky’s address, pp.395-400.
[12] TUC Annual Report, 1924, ‘ p.246.
[13] TUC Library Collections, Minutes of The Anglo-Russian Conference, 6-8 April 1925, Fred Bramley Papers, B1/25.
[14] Minutes of the Second Meeting of ARJAC on 8/9 December 1925. Warwick Digital Collections – The Russian Revolution and Britain 1917-1928. Calhoun, The United Front, 342 (re Rothstein).
[15] Morgan, Bolshevism, syndicalism and the general strike, 23. Bullock, Ernest Bevin, p.261.
[16] TUC Annual Report, 1924, p.251. The writer knows from long personal experience as an officer in two major unions, (the T&GWU/CWU) and at TUC committee meetings, that these conventional labels do not often capture the real positions of union leaders.
[17] Goethem, The Amsterdam International, p.36 ‘The IFTU managed to survive only thanks to the contribution of the British TUC’ as the next largest affiliate, the German ADGB, could only pay in grossly inflated Deutsche marks.
[18] Citrine, Men and Work, p.77.
[19] Calhoun, The United Front, 326-9.
[20] He published a pamphlet ‘Some Russian Impressions’ in 1925 which was a paean in praise of the ‘workers republic’. George Hicks wrote a similarly glowing Foreword. TUC Library Collections, DK266.
[21] F. Williams, Ernest Bevin, (1952), pp.82-7
[22] Bullock, Ernest Bevin, p.263; Calhoun, The United Front, pp.287, 335-6, 384-6. Cook had surprisingly only proposed deferment. The MFGB abstained.
[23] TUC Annual Report 1926, pp.242-8. Citrine, Men and Work, pp.90-1.
[24] Bullock, Ernest Bevin, p.251. See the writer’s article in Labour Review, Leaders in the Heyday of Britain’s unions, (February 2017),p.12
[25] Moher, Walter Citrine, A Pioneer of Industrial Cooperation, pp.188-9.
[26] Calhoun, The United Front, 253-6. They offered an immediate donation of £26,000 (equivalent today = just under £1million). The TUC declined, just before the government moved to block the transfer.
[27] Labour Review, Leaders in the Heyday of Britain’s unions, (February 2017), p12-13.
[28] Calhoun, The United Front, p. 337.
[29] Citrine, Men and Work, p.93.
[30] ibid., pp.91-2. See also TUC Library Collections Blog 2 September 2017 (http://blogs.londonmet.ac.uk/tuc-library).
[31] J.V. Stalin, On the Opposition, (1974 compilation of Stalin’s speeches by the Chinese CP, pp.765- 6, 797-802.
[32] The Communist International was directed strategically by Lenin and Trotsky initially and it was they who initiated the United Front line from 1921(which Zinoviev initially opposed). ‘Stalin was not in the inner circle at all. He had little use for the International anyway. He was convinced it was incapable of organizing a successful revolution anywhere and dreaded the possibility it might interfere in the internal affairs of the Russian party and government.’ Calhoun, The United Front, 6.
[33] ibid.,pp.369-71;388-90, 415-16.
[34] Citrine, Men and Work, pp.92-3.
[35] ibid.,pp.93.
[36] Calhoun, The United Front, 374-5.
[37] Goethem, The Amsterdam International, pp. 39-44.
[38] Moher, Walter Citrine, pp.186-97.
[39] Calhoun, The United Front, p. 180 thought it was cancer, but Citrine’s private notes [reference] suggest that it was a serious mental condition, though he never mentioned it publicly.
[40] TUC Annual Report September 1925, pp. 356-8.
[41] Moher, Leaders in the heyday of Britain’s unions: Walter Citrine and Ernest Bevin, Labour Affairs, Part 1, pp.9-13, February 2017.
Labour Affairs Magazine 