Marx, Labour and religion

For both Russian Communists and British Socialists, Marx was a common inspiration. Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950, was the Labour party chairman in 1946. That year he also edited the official Labour party centenary edition of the Communist Manifesto and wrote in the preface that

One aspect of Marxism which was to play an important part in the events of 1929–31 was its hostility to religion. It was a perspective that, by that time, many in the Labour party shared, particularly towards organised religion and the established Church.

The idea that the British Labour party ‘owes more to Methodism than Marx’ has become part of what some call ‘Labour mythology’Footnote ⁷ but a number of historians of the party question the extent to which this is true. Henry Pelling suggests that ‘the enlistment of Nonconformity [was] as a whole behind the banner of the Liberal Party’.Footnote ⁸ E. P. Thompson insists that ‘The attempt to suggest that the ILP [the Independent Labour Party, one of the three founding bodies of the Labour Party] was founded by a slate of Methodist parsons and local preachers is even more wildly inaccurate than the attempt to attribute it to the single-handed efforts of Engels and Aveling’,Footnote ⁹ and that the Nonconformist establishment ‘fought the ILP every inch of the way’. Leonard Smith writes that Nonconformity's ‘historic alliance with the Liberal Party … prevented close relations with the Labour movement’,Footnote ¹⁰ and Graham Johnson observes, of the late nineteenth-century Labour movement, that ‘despite Christian members and favourable attitudes, Christianity on the whole was attacked, criticised and [only] occasionally considered in a sympathetic light before being rejected’.Footnote ¹¹

Whether the Nonconformist chapels made a significant contribution to the early philosophy of the party or merely provided a training ground for oratory and the awakening of a social conscience for those who later moved away from their early faith (what E. H. Hobsbawm calls ‘a training ground for labour cadres’Footnote ¹²), Peter Catterell believes that by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century ‘political non-conformity largely ceased to count’.Footnote ¹³

One litmus test of the strength of the voice of Labour Christian, particularly Nonconformist, MPs by the time of the 1929–31 parliament might be their response to appeals made in the Commons on behalf of the hundreds of Russian Baptist leaders who had been shot or had disappeared. There was none. It was Liberal MPs Geoffrey ShakespeareFootnote ¹⁴ and Ernest Brown,Footnote ¹⁵ supported by a number of Tories, who urged the government in parliamentary questions to protest on behalf of their fellow Nonconformists in Russia. Labour backbenchers heckled or denied that there was any persecution, their comments going unchallenged by their fellow MPs.Footnote ¹⁶ On the government front bench Arthur Henderson, a former Methodist lay preacher and the senior Labour figure with overtly Nonconformist origins, insisted that he could not ‘question the right of the Soviet Government to exercise jurisdiction within their own territory’.Footnote ¹⁷ His apparently conciliatory offer to enquire about the persecuted Baptists eventually resulted in Foreign Office enquiries with the British embassy in Moscow concerning just eleven individuals. Even this modest gesture came to nothing when, seven months later, Henderson told the House that the ambassador had not been able to obtain any information about them and that further action was therefore neither ‘expedient or possible’.Footnote ¹⁸

This was not the only appeal made to the government by Nonconformists which was ignored. On 29 April 1930 the General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers (representing the Congregationalist, Baptist and Presbyterian denominations) expressed their ‘indignant reprobation of the persecution of Christian and other religious bodies by the Soviet authorities in Russia’ and ‘trusted the Government would urge upon the Soviet Government its imperative duty to bring this treatment to an end’.Footnote ¹⁹ In the Commons, Henderson was asked by Sir William Davidson – a Tory, not a Labour, MP – for the government's response to the appeal. Two months earlier Henderson had been told by the British Baptist leader J. H. Rushbrooke that ‘there has not been in history so widespread, carefully organised and resolute [an] attack upon religion, and especially upon Christianity’ as that in RussiaFootnote ²⁰ but he side-stepped. He said he had not read it.Footnote ²¹

If there was no significant Nonconformist voice in the Labour party by the late 1920s and British Socialists were predominantly both warm towards Soviet Russia and uninterested in the plight of Russian believers, this did not preclude individual Labour MPs from holding a religious faith. Undoubtedly, valid claims for religious belief or affiliation can be made for a number of Labour MPs, of whom George Lansbury is one of the most well-known.

While Lansbury was certainly a man of faith, a number of qualifying observations need to be made to the implication drawn by some that this indicates that the Labour party was welcoming to mainstream Christians at that time.Footnote ²² Moreover, Lansbury was a high Anglican, not an evangelical Nonconformist, and his faith has little relevance to the subject of Nonconformist influence in the 1929 party or its role in the founding of the party. Even in his Anglicanism Lansbury was something of a maverick and it may not be appropriate to describe his faith as ‘impeccable’, as some have done.Footnote ²³ He was a member of the humanist Ethical Union in the 1890s;Footnote ²⁴ in 1914 he joined the Theosophical Society,Footnote ²⁵ an occult pantheistic sect, and he remained sympathetic to Theosophy until the end of his life.Footnote ²⁶ In the 1930s he became British President of the World Fellowship of Faiths, a body whose ecumenicism was at that time becoming strongly influenced by Hindu mysticism. All three, particularly the Theosophical Society, would have been regarded with considerable suspicion by theologically orthodox Christians.

Theology apart, it is hard to resist the conclusion that, on many occasions, Lansbury's enthusiasm for Soviet Russia trumped some of the imperatives of Christian morality: he excused the executions and atrocities committed by the Cheka in the Red Terror of 1918–22Footnote ²⁷ and the killing of thousands of Orthodox clergy and religious;Footnote ²⁸ he handled stolen Russian gems and cash smuggled by Bolshevik agents into Britain for the support of revolutionary causes, with few apparent qualms as to the manner in which they had been acquired;Footnote ²⁹ he denied that there was any repression of religious believersFootnote ³⁰ and dismissed reports of Russian slave labour as ‘grossly distorted’, insisting that the Soviet experiment was ‘wonderful’ and that it was not for Socialists ‘to judge … all the means they adopt to attain their ends’.Footnote ³¹

In fact, many in the Labour party looked on the established Churches (Anglican, Catholic and even Nonconformist) as reactionary forces to be neutralised and would have agreed with Hobsbawm's observation that Christian teaching ‘remains an obstacle to the construction of a consistently social-revolutionary doctrine’.Footnote ³² Sidney Webb, the early Fabian leader and architect of the 1918 Labour party constitution, expressed the view of many when he described the clergy of the Church of England as ‘a mere appanage of the landed gentry’.Footnote ³³ In 1928 George Bernard Shaw, one of the most famous men in England and a revered elder statesman of both the Labour party and the Fabian Society, declared that a future Socialist state should remove all children from parents who taught them the church catechism.Footnote ³⁴ In the ILP journal New Leader, Labour notables such as H. N. Brailsford decried the Church as ‘an organised conspiracy to perpetuate all the evils of ignorance and poverty under which men labour here below’.Footnote ³⁵ In the same journal Harold Laski, one of the most eminent Labour political theorists of the day, summed up the general view that religious faith could be tolerated only if it remained a private affair and took no place in the public square:

James Maxton, chairman of the ILP, who was offered a seat on the Labour shadow front bench by George Lansbury in 1931, was even more unequivocal:

On religion as well as Marx, therefore, Labour and the Bolsheviks were in broad agreement.

New arrests in Russia

The human cost of the Russian Revolution had been enormous. During the Revolution, and in its aftermath, the number of people who died was equal to the total military casualties in the Great War.Footnote ³⁸ The Bolsheviks turned particularly on the Orthodox Church and thousands of priests, monks and nuns were murdered, some after brutal torture. Although there was a lull in the repression in the mid-1920s, Stalin's rise to power at the end of the decade signalled the start of a new wave of persecution which began in earnest in the winter of 1929–30. Although the first target was small-holding peasants (or ‘kulaks’), clergy were included in the official classification of a ‘kulak’ and so they were targeted too.Footnote ³⁹

Following plans drawn by a special SovnarkomFootnote ⁴⁰ commission headed by Vyacheslav Molotov, arrests began in earnest in January 1930. By mid-April, 140,000 kulaks had been arrested, 5,028 of whom were clergy.Footnote ⁴¹

Over the next two years 1.5 millionFootnote ⁴² kulaks were arrested, their homes and land seized by the state, and they were loaded onto cattle trucks and deported to the far North and Siberia. Of these, 40,000 never made it to the trains.Footnote ⁴³ In accordance with a quota set before the roundups began, they were shot. By the end of 1932 5,000 of the inmates of the infamous Solovetsky labour camps were believers, the same number had been shot, and 240,000 kulaks had perished.Footnote ⁴⁴ At home British Labour enthusiasts hailed the repression of the kulaks and religious believers as a tough but necessary part of the construction of a new Socialist utopia, excusing or ignoring its excesses. The comments of H. N. Brailsford, one of the most influential Socialist journalists of the day, were typical:

Most of the peasants were dumped in the forests, under military guard, where they were forced to cut timber for the export market, a significant proportion of which (approximately £300 m. annually at today's prices) went to Britain.Footnote ⁴⁶ The isolated forest regions were not equipped to receive such vast numbers of exiles. With scant accommodation, many were forced to build their own shelters, sometimes dug in the snow, as they arrived. Malnutrition, disease and exposure took their toll. At least 20,000 children died in the first year.Footnote ⁴⁷

The ‘Morning Post’ Campaign

Although cattle cars were snaking north with thousands of deported kulaks from February 1930, little would become known of their fate until the summer of that year. The forests of the Northern Region were extremely isolated. Timber was cut while the snow lay on the ground and then dragged over the frozen ground to rivers. When the ice melted, around May, the timber was floated down-river and loaded onto ocean-going ships. Only when those foreign ships began to arrive to load timber did the word of the kulaks’ fate get out.

Religious believers had already been subjected to more specific, targeted, persecution and it was this that first attracted the attention and sympathy of many in Britain. The May 1925 Constitution of the Soviet Union disenfranchised every ‘servant of a religious cult’, depriving them of ration cards and housing. Many faced starvation and destitution. The measure affected far more than priests, for it included:

In April 1929 the Law On Religious Associations outlawed almost all but the performance of religious ritual within the confines of a church building. Religious organisations were forbidden to raise funds or organise bible studies; all other meetings of church members (even purely social ones), charitable work or medical aid, meetings for children, and material aid to fellow church members were banned. Further decrees outlawed sermons, evangelism, religious publishing and the distribution of literature. The enforced closure of churches, punitive taxes on remaining church buildings (closed if the faithful could not find the money to pay them), and even taxes on the use of candles, followed. And the threat of arrest for counter-revolution was ever-present:

The persecution of 1917–22 had been mostly confined to Orthodox clergy; now Orthodox, Baptist, Jewish, Muslim believers and even shaman priests were arrested.

In December 1929 the Morning Post newspaper launched a campaign to highlight the plight of Russian religious believers and invited an Anglican clergyman, Prebendary Alfred Gough, to lead it. Gough had begun his ministry in the north of England, then in 1895 moved to north London, to St John's Highbury Vale, where he built up the congregation from 150 to 500 in four years. Seeing his success, the bishop of London asked him to take over the almost empty Brompton parish church of Holy Trinity. By 1929 the church was so popular that, on a Sunday morning, there were queues to get in.

A fine preacher, Gough was no stranger to the world of politics either. Earlier in his career he had led a successful campaign on behalf of Hull shopworkers for shorter working hours and, in London, he played an active part in the British Workers League, an anti-Socialist ‘patriotic Labour’ group which split from the main Labour movement in the early years of the Great War. It was partly because Gough was a vigorous critic of Socialism that the Morning Post approached him. Gough insisted he would only lead the campaign if he was allowed change the basis of action ‘from a largely political one to one of a definitely religious character’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The editors agreed and the Christian Protest Movement was born.Footnote ⁵¹

On 19 December the CPM held a mass rally in the Royal Albert Hall. The left-leaning Manchester Guardian, which had not yet developed its later opposition to the movement, reported ‘Russia's Campaign Against Religion – World Crusade Started’ and the assembly's call to British and world governments ‘to make the strongest possible representations to the Soviet Government to bring this persecution to an end’.Footnote ⁵²

The CPM, whose committee included not only leading clerics, Free Church leaders and the Chief Rabbi, but men such as Viscount Brentford, the former Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks, spread rapidly throughout the country. By March 1930 Gough was speaking at over fourteen meetings a month.Footnote ⁵³ In the first three years of the Campaign (1930–2) more than 600 meetings were held. By December 1933 it had distributed 220,000 leaflets, articles and booklets.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pressure by the CPM kept the subject alive while ministers and civil servants tried to bury it, providing a national backdrop against which subsequent events would be played out in parliament, Downing Street, at Lambeth Palace and at the British embassy in Moscow. Gough himself worked so tirelessly to promote the cause of those persecuted in Russia that his health broke down.Footnote ⁵⁵

‘No interference’

By mid-February the Cabinet was under intense public and parliamentary pressure but on 12 February it decided against action, concluding that ‘as regards the alleged religious persecution His Majesty's Government could not interfere in the internal affairs of a foreign state’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The next afternoon a very different impression was given by Arthur Henderson, the Foreign Secretary, who assured the Commons that ‘His Majesty's Government will, when possible or compatible with the interests of those affected, use all its influence in support of the cause of religious liberty and the freedom of religious practice.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Bound to non-interference by Cabinet collective responsibility, Henderson's promise was worthless.

In the meantime Sir Esmond Ovey, the new British ambassador in Moscow, was asked to prepare a full report on the Soviet persecution of religion and this was now eagerly awaited.

The ambassador reports

Such an important document would have been compiled by both Ovey and his officials. Their objectivity would have been assumed, but in the case of the majority of the staff of the Moscow embassy, this was not a given. Hugh Dalton, Henderson's junior minister at the Foreign Office, had already exercised a highly unusual degree of ministerial interference, having vetoed four of the original appointments to the newly reopened embassy because the candidates were deemed insufficiently impartial.Footnote ⁵⁸ In practice this meant anyone whose views on Soviet Communism were negative. Ovey himself was far from neutral. His pro-Soviet attitude was an open secret among the expatriate community in Moscow. Reader Bullard, the Leningrad consul, observed that Ovey was ‘rather disgustingly pro-Soviet’Footnote ⁵⁹ and ‘never seems disgusted or horrified by anything the Russians do’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Similar observations were made by others.Footnote ⁶¹ At best it seems that Ovey was irresponsibly naïve. When asked to provide an initial report on the situation he cabled that he was waiting for the assistance of a Soviet expert promised him by Foreign Minister Litvinov.Footnote ⁶² Ovey's final report followed the Soviet propaganda line so closely that it seems to betray the hand of that nameless expert.Footnote ⁶³

Henderson had been urged by the British Baptist leader J. H. Rushbrooke to take the allegations seriously.Footnote ⁶⁴ His instruction to Ovey, before the Cabinet decision (and the antipathy of many of his colleagues) tied his hands, indicates some awareness of complexity of the problem. He asked Ovey for

Henderson concluded ‘Your report should be as comprehensive and impartial as possible.’

It was neither. Ovey first changed his brief to ‘a comprehensive report of the alleged atrocities against priests and adherents of the Orthodox Church and other Churches in Russia’ (italics added) and then correctly stated that the mass executions of the Revolutionary period had ceased.Footnote ⁶⁶ He dismissed allegations of religious persecution and insisted that ‘the anti-clerical attitude and anti-religious propaganda … [do] not connote atrocities in the physical sense … There has been no return to the thumbscrew-and-rack period of religious persecution’. He admitted that priests were shot but explained that it was for ‘counter-revolution’ – not surprising given that the Soviets defined religious belief itself as counter-revolutionary. He even offered the Foreign Office his ownFootnote ⁶⁷ new defence – that this was not ‘“cruel persecution” in the sense that anyone practising Christianity is liable to be executed for so doing’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Ovey, who had made it clear to a bishop passing through Moscow that he had little sympathy for religious belief,Footnote ⁶⁹ then downplayed what was happening by likening it to Henry viii's dissolution of the monasteries.

The Cabinet responds

The report was received enthusiastically by the Cabinet. Hugh Dalton, the minister responsible for the day-to-day oversight of Russian affairs, called it ‘a first class document, blowing up all the atrocity stories’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In fact, it contained a combination of incorrect facts, inadequate analysis and bias.

Dalton needed not so much to be convinced as to be given a reason to dismiss stories which inconvenienced the government. When Ovey's attaché Colonel William Osbaldeston-Mitford passed through London a few weeks later and told the members of his club that ‘the stuff about religious persecution is all moonshine’,Footnote ⁷¹ the king let it be known that he was upset to hear that Mitford had called the Bolsheviks, who had shot his cousin the Tsar, ‘very good fellows’. Dalton's response, recorded in his diary, was ‘Good old Mitford!’Footnote ⁷²

With the arrival of the report, whose contents and even conclusion it decided not to disclose,Footnote ⁷³ the government rejected all further stories of persecution. Discordant notes struck by diplomatic despatches received from other sources which kept suggesting that Ovey's perspective on the Soviets in general, and on religious persecution in particular, was adrift, were dismissed. When the British ambassador in Berlin sent a well–provenanced, harrowing, five-page eye-witness account of Soviet religious persecution. Dalton would have none of it:

Church and State clash

Though the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, initially kept his distance from the CPM campaign, he was soon wholly convinced of the reality of the persecution and of the government's unwillingness to make any significant protest. He commissioned his own confidential enquiry from a group of experts including Sir Bernard Pares of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, probably the foremost Russia expert of his day, and Lord Charnwood. Both also worked closely with the CPM.Footnote ⁷⁵ Drawing on far more detailed sources than Ovey, particularly a Russian Orthodox information bureau in Paris which the CPM funded,Footnote ⁷⁶ their report was damning.Footnote ⁷⁷ It emphatically confirmed the extent and severity of the persecution, and Lang called the Church to a national day of prayer on 16 March 1930 on behalf of all believers suffering persecution in the Soviet Union.

Members of the armed forces attended compulsory church services each Sunday. Powerless to halt the nationwide day of prayer, the Cabinet banned all forces chaplains from saying prayers on behalf of the suffering in Russia.Footnote ⁷⁸ This provoked one of the biggest Church-State crises of the inter-war years, wrecking the agreement skilfully obtained only a week earlier by Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, that the archbishopFootnote ⁷⁹ and the CPMFootnote ⁸⁰ would moderate their calls for government action.

The Anglican chaplain-general, answerable to both the archbishop and the Minister of War, refused outright to issue the order until it was reworded to make it plain that it had come from the government and not the Church.Footnote ⁸¹ Nonconformist pastors, with a long experience of state interference, were particularly offended. Nonconformist troops attended civilian chapels on Sundays and now the government was dictating what could or could not be prayed for in those chapels.

When Lang rebuked the government in the Lords for its ill-thought-out action Ramsay MacDonald was furious. In a private letter he accused Lang of interfering in British foreign policy and allowing himself to be manipulated by Opposition forces bent only on bringing down the Labour government.Footnote ⁸² Lang replied that it had not occurred to him to consult the prime minister before he called his Church to prayer. Crisis talks between the leaders of the three main parliamentary parties had to be held at Downing Street before the situation could be defused.

The day of prayer was the biggest single act of protest against Soviet Communism in history. It was observed by millions, not only by Anglican dioceses throughout the empire – from the Americas to Australia, and South Africa to the Far East – but by many other denominations around the world. Meetings and services were held across Europe. In Munich the cardinal archbishop was joined by the Bavarian premier; the Coptic patriarch ordered prayers in Cairo, as did the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Belgrade.Footnote ⁸³ In New York 3,000 worshippers filled St Patrick's Catholic cathedral and special masses were said in all 444 Catholic churches of the archdiocese of New York. A service of prayer at the Anglican Cathedral of St John the Divine was attended by 3,500 worshippers. Archbishop Platon, Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church in America, Archbishop Alexander of the Greek Church in North and South America, as well as Methodist and Presbyterian clergyman and the Secretary of the Greater New York Federation of Churches were in attendance. At a service in New York's Free Synagogue the preacher denounced ‘Russia's crime against religion’. Elsewhere in the city a public meeting was arranged by the American Jewish Congress and on the streets there were marches and demonstrations.Footnote ⁸⁴

Three days later in Rome 50,000 people attended a special papal mass for the victims of Soviet Communism, Gough having previously approached the cardinal archbishop of Westminster and asked for Vatican support for the campaign.Footnote ⁸⁵ British diplomats, offered seats, stayed away.Footnote ⁸⁶

Counter-campaign

In response the Soviets, assisted by British Labour fellow-travellers, launched a vigorous campaign of counter-propaganda. Moscow issued conciliatory statements and outright denials. Stalin himself apparently criticised the over-zealous closure of churches.Footnote ⁸⁷ Thousands came out onto Russian streets to protest. To coincide with the prayer day the Manchester Guardian published a letter from George Bernard Shaw repeating Soviet denials and decrying the campaign's ‘false atrocity stories and malicious inventions’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The letter was also signed by two former Labour party chairmen, four past TUC presidents, some of them MPs, ILP leader James Maxton, and the leaders of the miners’ and railwaymen's unions. The Labour party had been founded by the Fabian Society, the trade union movement, and the ILP. Leaders of all three now showed that support for the Soviets came from the Labour mainstream, not its fringes.

In the end disinformation triumphed. A minor Soviet concession made in March 1930 on the bread ration (all those banned from receiving ration cards were to be allowed to buy more bread on the free market – hardly a concession as the inflated prices were beyond their reach) was spun by Soviet foreign officials into a major breakthrough and a specific concession for priests. It was neither, as Ovey himself told the Foreign Office (‘these concessions … all date from three months ago and … are so worded as to refer to the disenfranchised only without any mention of “clergy”’),Footnote ⁸⁹ but on the same day, 2 July, the Foreign Office wrote to Prebendary Gough, who had heard rumours of an improvement, that ‘generally it may be said that the position of the priests has improved during the last three months’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Morning Post trumpeted it as a victory under the headline ‘Soviet abates war on religion’.Footnote ⁹¹ By the time the truth dawned on the campaigners the political impetus had been lost. But news from the timber camps was about reinvigorate the campaign.

The kulaks and the timber gulag

The first cattle trucks arrived in the isolated northern forests in February 1930 at the height of the British campaign against religious persecution. The Moscow authorities themselves had little idea of the chaos which had followed the kulaks’ arrival. It took even longer for news to reach the west. It was not until after the late spring thaw, when the first foreign ships arrived in Archangel to load the cut timber, that reports began to filter back to west. As revelations of slave labour in the timber camps from escaped prisoners and returned seafarers broke, the Christian Protest Movement, reinvigorated, took on their cause too.

Though they would later downplay it, ministers knew early on that something was up in the Russian north. On 11 June 1930 the Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, told the Cabinet about the growing number of Russian prisoners who had fled to Britain as stowaways on timber ships:

Ministers were sufficiently convinced to agree not to send the stowaways back.

Over the summer William Strang, covering for Ambassador Ovey who was on leave, sent two important despatches to the Foreign Office: both Henderson and Dalton would have been fully aware of their conclusions. On 19 August 1930, a representative of a leading British timber company in Archangel told him there was ‘no doubt whatever’ that about 10,000 prisoners were loading timber in the port.Footnote ⁹³ Keane, the Leningrad Consul reported:

By the autumn of 1930 campaigners were pressing the matter harder in parliament. Lord Parmoor, the Labour leader in the Lords, who was either unaware or feigning ignorance of the despatches from Russia, responded by disputing that the labour of workers in the Russian camps could be accurately described as ‘forced’.Footnote ⁹⁵

The timber story breaks

After eighteen months of government stonewalling, the story finally became fully public when The Times printed an exchange of letters between Ramsay MacDonald and two Conservative MPs, Carlyon Bellairs and Edward Hilton Young. The MPs had demanded that he halt a trade which they called ‘a disgrace to civilisation’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Macdonald refused to respond and passed the letters on to other government departments. When The Times published them MacDonald was stung into an intemperate response, impugning the MPs’ motives and accusing them of mounting a ‘stunt’ solely to bring down the government. The Times published that too, alongside a leader accusing MacDonald of discourtesy.Footnote ⁹⁷

With this publicity, more witnesses came forward. Officers of the Merchant Navy who been in Archangel and Kem wrote to the press.Footnote ⁹⁸ On 16 February 1931 the Swedish ambassador sent MacDonald copies of five affidavits from escaped prisoners which confirmed the widespread use of prisoner labour in the export timber trade and the dreadful conditions in which they were held.Footnote ⁹⁹ Two were clearly from educated men – a trained forest engineer and a pastor. The pastor's testimony confirmed that people were being arrested solely for their religious belief.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Copies of the same affidavits had already been sent to the Foreign Office from the British legation in Helsingfors.Footnote ¹⁰¹ On 4 February Horace Seymour, head of the Foreign Office Northern Department, noted that this was ‘pretty conclusive as to use of prisoners in these camps’. Hugh Dalton's initials are next to the comment, dated ‘4/2’, as is the remark from Henderson's private secretary ‘S[ecretary] of S[tate] informed 3/2’.Footnote ¹⁰²

Arthur Henderson, Hugh Dalton and Ramsay MacDonald were therefore fully aware of the contents of these sworn affidavits – on 3, 4 and 16 February respectively. Yet in a debate on the timber camps in the House of Lords on 5 February Lord Ponsonby, speaking for the government, insisted that ‘We are bound to accept official statements that are brought before us, and His Majesty's Ambassador has been informed by the Soviet authorities that neither prison labour nor any general labour of sentenced persons is employed in the [export] branches of the timber industry.’Footnote ¹⁰³

Ponsonby's denial came during the debate in which the bishop of Durham made his forceful appeal. Ponsonby's response was to accuse the Anglican Church of moral bankruptcy and insist that the evidence so far brought forward was inadequate. Back in the Commons every attempt by campaigners to raise the subject was met by Labour heckling.

The Cabinet admits forced labour

By early February 1931 pressure for an enquiry was growing. The Cabinet met on 11 February and, in the privacy of the Cabinet room, ministers conceded that the evidence for human rights abuses in the camps was very strong and that ‘there was little doubt that an investigation would show that Russian timber was handled by forced labour’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But there would be no enquiry, they decided. The excuse was that the legislation used to ban Russian timber might also block goods produced under forced or indentured labour in the empire.

In fact, this argument, which was to be repeated by the government a number of times during the affair, had already been demolished by the Board of Trade. On 5 January the Board sent a memorandum to the Foreign Office on the legality and implications of banning Soviet timber imports. It stated that ‘there would seem to be no doubt that such a prohibition could be defended under International Convention as one imposed for “moral or humanitarian reasons”’. On empire trade, the Board stated that ‘it is no doubt true that the circumstance of goods being manufactured by forced labour is not likely to occur in many, if in any, countries other than Soviet Russia’, and that in the event of a ban ‘practically no other goods would in fact be excluded’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Six of those present at the 11 February Cabinet meeting had sat on the 1926 Labour Sweated Goods Committee which declared that the use of forced labour was ‘open to grave objection on both economic and moral grounds’ and recommended ‘the exclusion of the goods produced under “sweated” conditions’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the House of Lords, Viscount Brentford, joint President of the CPM, challenged Sidney Webb, Lord Passfield, a member of the Sweated Goods Committee, to accept that timber from the Soviet camps was ‘produced under conditions which violate the world's standards’, the phrase that the 1926 committee had used. Webb, one of the most influential of Labour's Soviet apologists, could only answer, ‘I am not in a position to say.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Forced and slave labour had already been the subject of international treaties. Article 5 of the Slavery Convention (1926) committed contracting nations to bring forced labour to an end and ensure that until then it should ‘always receive adequate remuneration, and shall not involve the removal of the labourers from their usual place of residence’. In June 1930 the British government's representative voted in favour of the Forced Labour Convention (1930) which committed it to work ‘to suppress the use of forced or compulsory labour in all its forms within the shortest possible period’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The most significant measure was over ten years old: Article 23a of The Covenant of the League of Nations (1919) declared that ‘Members of the League … will endeavour to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labour for men, women, and children, both in their own countries and in all countries to which their commercial and industrial relations extend.’

But the government resisted all appeals for it to act in accordance with Article 23a. When Carlyon Bellairs pressed them to do so, George Gillett, for the government, replied that ‘His Majesty's Government have come to the conclusion that no useful purpose would be served by referring the matter to the League.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Gough, as chairman of the CPM, wrote to Henderson in May 1931, urging the government to oppose the admission of Soviet observers to the League of Nations:

Officials break ranks

On 24 February 1931 Reader Bullard, the new Leningrad consul, informed Henderson that the Norwegian consul in Archangel had told him that prison labour was ‘widespread’ in the Northern Region and in the timber loading ports.Footnote ¹¹¹ For the first time, Foreign Office officials began to break ranks. Sir Robert Vansittart, commenting on the internal memorandum circulated with Bullard's report, took the first step: ‘We all know perfectly well in all conscience that in parts at least conditions in the timber trade are inhuman … the time is past for this “Nelson touch” of the blind eye. That is not a proper line of defence. It has been too far breached.’Footnote ¹¹² But Dalton would not give ground, insisting in the same memorandum that there was still ‘evidence to show that there is some lying about the conditions of labour in Archangel by our Tory Wilberforces’.

On 7 March the Manchester Guardian, not given to negative reporting about the Soviet Union, carried an eye-witness account which spoke of 60–100 deaths per day in Solovetsky camps – of which the White Sea timber loading port of Kem was part.Footnote ¹¹³ Two days later Ovey reported that 60,000 prisoners were now thought to be working in the timber camps.Footnote ¹¹⁴ At home British trade union leaders continued to repeat Soviet denials and insist that the Tories were just trying to find excuses to attack Russia. George Hicks mp, secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers and TUC President 1927–8, spoke for many: ‘On what are the charges of “slave” and “forced” labour in the Russian lumber camps based? They are based on a series of affidavits each more ridiculous than the other.’Footnote ¹¹⁵

Dalton kept up his position even as the evidence mounted. On 10 April, when another Northern Department official, C. H. Bateman, wrote of a journalist's report that ‘the fate of the kulak transportees is one of the most loathsome and horrid things I have ever read’, Dalton's response was that conditions were probably ‘no worse than pre-Bolshevik days’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Commons denials

Labour could not fend off Conservative attempts to debate the timber camps indefinitely. On 25 March 1931 the Tories managed to get the subject into a debate on the Consolidated Fund. It was to be the only Commons debate on the subject. William Graham, the President of the Board of Trade, a rising star in the Labour party, tipped as a future leader, was to speak for the government. Briefing notes prepared for him by Board of Trade and Foreign Office officials made it clear that the main allegations about the camps were now undeniable:

They also added that the most persuasive expert eye-witness evidence cited frequently by fellow-travellers (in the Manchester Guardian, parliament and elsewhere) to deny the existence of the camps was completely invalidated because the witness had been in Russia before the kulak deportations began. Dalton altered the brief to water down this point and added a footnote that, even so, the expert's evidence ‘should not be wholly disregarded’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

In the debate the Conservative Edward Hilton Young spoke for many in the country when he deplored ‘conditions utterly alien to our notions of civilisation’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Antony Eden, who would have Dalton's job by the end of the year, unknowingly echoing the briefs given to Graham, insisted that the ‘large volume of evidence’ was undeniable. But, Eden added, ‘there are none so blind as those who are determined not to see’, a statement which Labour speakers confirmed. George Strauss, a future Labour minister and peer, dismissed the humanitarian appeals as a cloak to support an attack on the Soviets ‘put forward on political grounds with political motives’ and insisted that ‘the conditions of the prisoners in Russia are very much more favourable than in our English prisons’.Footnote ¹²¹ Dr Lesley Burgin, speaking for the Liberals in support of the government, was no better. He rejected the affidavits of the escaped prisoners as ‘no more reliable than those of a dismissed servant or discharged employee’.Footnote ¹²²

William Graham insisted that ‘no evidence of any kind’ had been tendered to support the Conservatives’ ‘extravagant’ claims. He concluded with one of the most extraordinary statements given by a minister in parliament:

The Anti-Slavery Society investigates

It fell to the Anti-Slavery Society to step in where the Cabinet refused. In May 1931 it issued a 132-page report on the timber gulag of North West Russia.Footnote ¹²⁴ It completely rejected the denials of Soviet spokesman and British fellow-travellers and confirmed that Russian timber exports were widely cut and loaded by prison and forced labour. Vansittart called it ‘damning and revolting’, adding that there was even ‘fresher and worse evidence available’ which the report had not mentioned.Footnote ¹²⁵ Unable to refute it, the government ignored it. In the Commons Arthur Henderson was asked how the Cabinet would be responding to it. He replied that, as they would not be reading it, the question of a response did not arise.Footnote ¹²⁶

As the leading Socialist journal of the day, the New Statesman carried great weight. Its review of the report was written by Sidney (Lord) Olivier, a former Cabinet minister and one of the ‘Big Four’ early leaders of the Fabian Society (itself a founder of the Labour Party, the New Statesman and the LSE). Olivier's dismissal of the prisoners’ plight was as shocking as Graham's:

The final skirmish

As campaigners frequently reminded the government, legislation already existed to ban the import of goods produced by prison labour – the Foreign Prison-Made Goods Act of 1897. From the beginning the government had put up a number of reasons why the act could not be used (including the suggestion that the gulag camps could not be properly defined as ‘prisons’) and had ignored all Conservative offers of cooperation to redraft it. Finally, Lord Phillimore launched his own brief private bill in the House of Lords which would close every loophole. In the debate Lord Ponsonby, speaking for the government, again insisted that ‘We have been informed by the Soviet Government that, so far as the export of timber is concerned, no convict labour or forced labour is used. Say that this is not true, that they are not speaking the truth … It is a perfectly credible statement.’Footnote ¹²⁸

The Conservative-dominated House of Lords passed Phillimore's Bill on 15 July. It went to the Commons where, as Lord Parmoor had warned, it was allowed to die. By chance a run on gold began on the same day. The ensuing financial crisis split the Cabinet and the government fell on 23 August. When MacDonald tried to form a coalition to deal with the crisis, Labour expelled him and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden. In the subsequent general election campaign Labour's manifesto veered even further to the Left. Snowden damned it as ‘Bolshevism run mad’, a remark for which he is still demonised but which may not have been wholly inaccurate.Footnote ¹²⁹ In the debate in February 1931, the bishop of Durham had warned the government that there was ‘a Nemesis upon the kind of moral indifference’ that it was exercising.Footnote ¹³⁰ He was to prove strangely prophetic. In the October 1931 election Labour suffered the biggest defeat in British electoral history. It would not return to power for fourteen years.

Gough was on the platform in June 1931 when he suffered a heart attack. He died on 8 October. By October the Russian northern ports were freezing over again and trade ceased until the following June. By early 1932 massive transfers of prisoners had taken place to provide the 100,000 strong workforce for building the new White Sea Canal. Soviet cover–ups made it harder to prove that export timber was being cut by slave labour. At home, in December 1931, Antony Eden, now the new junior minister at the Foreign Office, was canvassed about a Conservative back bench proposal to reintroduce Phillimore's bill as a private member's bill. New in the post, he deferred to Horace Seymour, the head of the Northern Department. Seymour, who had consistently inclined more to pragmatism than principle, advised that ‘it could be awkward for the F. O. to appear to be discouraging the introduction of a bill to deal with slave labour etc, [but] we ought I think to do nothing to encourage its introduction’.Footnote ¹³¹

It was dropped.