Harry Pollitt (22 November 1890 – 27 June 1960) was a British communist who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from July 1929 to September 1939 and again from 1941 until his death in 1960. Pollitt spent most of his life advocating communism. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, Pollitt was an adherent particularly of Joseph Stalin even after Stalin's death and rise of Nikita Khrushchev. Pollitt's acts included opposition to the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and Polish–Soviet War, support for the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, both support for and opposition to the war against Nazi Germany, defence of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and support for the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.
He contested seats in a number of parliamentary elections, but never won. Throughout his time as leader of CPGB, he was in direct secret radio contact with Moscow as CPGB's "Code Holder", and was monitored by the British security services.
Early life Childhood and early career Pollitt was born on 22 November 1890 in Droylsden, Lancashire. He was the second of six children of Samuel Pollitt (1863–1933), a blacksmith's striker, and his wife, Mary Louisa (1868–1939), a cotton spinner, daughter of William Charlesworth, a joiner. Pollitt's parents were socialists, and his mother was a member of the Independent Labour Party before joining the Communist party when it was formed in 1920.
Three of his siblings died in infancy. The death of his younger sister Winifred particularly affected Pollitt, who said that he would "pay God out. Pay everybody out for making my sister suffer". Pollitt began work at the age of 12, alongside his mother. The suffering of his mother, who regularly worked standing in water wearing only wooden clogs, also particularly affected Pollitt, who later said that he "swore that when I grew up I would pay the bosses out for the hardships that she suffered". Pollitt later became a boilermaker and metal craftsman.
During the First World War, Pollitt was exempt from conscription as a skilled worker. Pollitt gained experience leading a strike in Southampton in 1915 and later described being inspired by the 1917 October Revolution, saying it showed that "workers like me ... had defeated the boss class". By this time Pollitt was already a member of Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation and had gained experience with public speaking.
Communist campaigner
In September 1919, Pollitt was appointed full-time national organiser of the Hands Off Russia campaign to protest against Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, for which Pankhurst had obtained funding from Moscow. Pollitt tired of his desk-bound job and went back to work in the Port of London. Whilst there, Pollitt helped convince London dock workers not to load the freighter on 10 May 1920, as she was bound with munitions for Poland, which at that time was fighting against Soviet Russia in the Polish–Soviet War. With support from Ernest Bevin, then a senior official in the dockers' union, the ship's owners were forced by the dockers to unload her cargo of munitions, and she sailed on 15 May 1920 without them. Pollitt failed to prevent a number of other ships laden with arms for Poland, including the Danish steamer Neptune on 1 May 1920, and two Belgian barges.
In August 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was founded by an agreement unifying various left-wing bodies, including the British Socialist Party, of which Pollitt was a member in addition to his WSF membership. Pollitt, thus a founding member of the party, attended the CPGB's founding "Utility Convention". The following year Pollitt visited the Soviet Union. During his visit, he met and shook hands with Vladimir Lenin, an experience he later described as the greatest day of his life. According to the October 1921 issue of Freedom, on his return Pollitt stated that he had seen evidence that Russian anarchists were plotting to restore Tsarism and spoke approvingly of the suppression of anarchism in Russia.
Pollitt was involved in a criminal case against five men he accused of kidnapping him in March 1925 whilst he was on his way to address a meeting of communists in Liverpool. According to Pollitt, he had been taken off a train and held in Wales over a weekend in order to prevent him reaching Liverpool, though treated mildly. The men, who were all members of the British Fascists, were acquitted by the jury following testimony that characterised the "kidnapping" as unserious and a denial from the head of the Liverpool branch of the fascist party that they had authorised any kidnapping of Pollitt. The Labour party conference that year passed a motion condemning the acquittal by the jury of those accused of kidnapping Pollitt as an example of class-prejudice, and calling for representation of workers on juries.
On 10 October 1925, Pollitt married Marjorie Brewer at Caxton Hall, Westminster. Marjorie Edna Brewer (1902–1991) was a communist schoolteacher; the marriage eventually produced a son and a daughter. His best man and witness was fellow CPGB activist and organiser Percy Glading, who would later be convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and imprisoned. A week later, Pollitt was one of 12 members of the Communist Party convicted at the Old Bailey on charges of seditious libel and incitement to mutiny. Pollitt was given a 12-month sentence as a previous offender, which he served in Wandsworth prison. Historian C. L. Mowat described the trial as "the chief instance of a purely political trial in the interwar years".
Pollitt travelled again to Moscow in October 1927, and attended a meeting at which the CPGB was roundly criticised for its failure to criticise the British labour movement. During the same visit, Pollitt met privately with Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, who, over Pollitt's protests, ordered that the CPGB should abandon its "United Front" policy and campaign as widely as possible at the next election, even where the CPGB stood no chance of winning and would draw votes away from the Labour candidate, thus allowing the Conservatives to win. This policy of attacking other left-wing organisations was known as the "Class-against-Class" policy, and remained in place until 1932 when, as leader, Pollitt was able to get it relaxed for trade unions, though it remained in place for other parts of the left.
In addition to his role in the CPGB, from the early 1920s Pollitt served as national secretary of the British Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions (AKA Profintern), an organisation aimed at countering the Amsterdam International and rallying militant trade unionists within existing unions to win those unions over to communism. The Comintern characterised the British Bureau as "not an organisation of unions, but only of revolutionary minorities of unions". On the founding of the National Minority Movement (NMM) in 1924, the British Bureau was folded into it and Pollitt was made its national secretary, a position he remained in until 1929. As secretary of the NMM, Pollitt opposed trying to form new communist-oriented unions aimed at replacing established unions under the "Class-against-Class" policy.
Leadership of the CPGB Pre-World War II and the Great Purge In 1929 the CPGB elected Pollitt General Secretary with Joseph Stalin's personal approval. Pollitt replaced Albert Inkpin, who had attracted disapproval from the Comintern by opposing the "Class-against-Class" policy and perceived softness towards others on the left. On his appointment, Stalin told him, "You have taken a difficult job on, but I believe you will tackle it all right". Pollitt was selected as he had impressed people both within the CPGB and in Moscow as a Comintern loyalist and effective organiser, particularly when representing the Comintern at a meeting of the Communist Party USA in March 1929. Pollitt stated that he saw his role as defending the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) "through thick and thin". Unlike Inkpin, Pollitt was willing to criticise the Labour party as "social-fascists".
Pollitt made clear in his public statements his loyalties to the Soviet Union and to CPSU General Secretary Joseph Stalin. He was a defender of the Moscow Trials, in which Stalin had his political and military opponents executed or otherwise disposed of. In the Daily Worker of 12 March 1938 Pollitt told the world that "the trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress". The article was illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov, whose likeness would be retouched out of the photograph following his 1940 fall from favour and subsequent execution.Redman, Joseph "The British Stalinists and the Moscow Trials", Labour Review, 3:2, March–April 1958
In 1934 Pollitt and Tom Mann, then-treasurer of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM), were summonsed on charges of sedition in relation to speeches they gave in Trealaw and Ferndale in Wales. Pollitt and Mann were both acquitted of all charges by Swansea assizes. The arrests took place on the eve of a meeting in Bermondsey which Mann and Pollitt were due to attend that was to be the culmination of the 1934 Hunger March.
Pollitt travelled again to Moscow in 1935. Whilst there he was invited to make a broadcast on the BBC radio programme The Citizen and His Government, commenting on the difference between the UK and the USSR. However, the invitation was withdrawn after opposition from the Foreign Office. He would not appear on BBC radio until the 1945 election.
When Pollitt's personal friend Rose Cohen, to whom he had proposed marriage on a number of occasions, was put on trial in Moscow in 1937 during Stalin's Great Purge, the CPGB opposed efforts by the British government to get Cohen released, describing her arrest as an internal affair of the Soviet Union. Pollitt privately tried to intervene on her behalf, but by the time he did so she had already been shot. Pollitt placed himself at risk by questioning Cohen's arrest in this fashion, as Béla Kun had, under torture, identified him as a "Trotskyist" and "British spy", though Osip Piatnitsky had refused to confirm these accusations when arrested by the NKVD in 1937. Twenty years after Cohen's death, Pollitt requested information from Moscow about whether she was still alive, stating, untruthfully, that there was press interest in Britain about her whereabouts.
In contrast to Pollitt's concern over Rose Cohen, when CPGB member Freda Utley tried to get Pollitt to intercede with Moscow on behalf of her Russian husband, who was arrested and died in a labour camp in 1938, Pollitt refused. Pollitt also failed to intervene to help George Fles and his wife, Arcadi Berdichevsky and his wife, and a number of other British communists who were arrested by the NKVD and tortured, shot, or imprisoned in the Gulag during Stalin's purge.
Pollitt defied Moscow by opposing the introduction of conscription in Britain when it was introduced in 1939. Pollitt's opposition to conscription led to protests from the French Communist Party, which had supported conscription in France.
Spanish Civil War
During the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War Pollitt visited the country five times, each time giving speeches to the British Battalion that was part of one of the International Brigades supporting the Republican side. Pollitt also played a role in approving or vetoing applications from British volunteers to join the International Brigades. One such veto was against George Orwell, whom Pollitt believed to be politically unreliable. Pollitt was also tasked with writing letters of condolence to the families of British communists killed in Spain.