Letters
German Communism: Some Clarifications
Dear Comrades
A few corrections to the notes and other additions to some of the texts were lost in the production process of Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no 4, so it is worth setting them out for the benefit of readers and for the avoidance of confusion in the future.
Page 23, note 9: Georg Ledebour did not rejoin the SPD when the section of the USPD that had rejected adherence to the Com¬munist International, and thus fusing with the KPD, decided in late 1922 to fuse with the SPD again. Out of just under 300 000 members of the USPD, approximately 85 000 rejected going back to the SPD, and the rump USPD that maintained a separate existence had, at the start, between 30 000 and 40 000 members. The key leaders were Theodor Lieb¬knecht, Georg Ledebour and Paul Wegmann, the latter two were Reichstag deputies. With the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, differences emerged within the party that led to a split. Theodor Liebknecht opposed any concessions to nationalism, while Ledebour and Wegmann inclined towards a line akin to that of the KPD. The result was the Socialist League. However, in October 1931 when the left wing of the SPD broke away and set up the SAP, the Socialist League joined it soon after, and in November the USPD did too.
Page 23, note 10: Heinrich Malzahn did not rejoin the SPD either. He sided with Paul Levi, but stayed in the KPD until expelled in January 1922. Readmitted towards the end of that year, he never had a key post thereafter. He was active in the anti-Nazi resist-ance around Wilhelm Leuschner, but was politically inactive post-1945.
Page 117, note 26: Paul Böttcher (1891-1975) did not join the SAP with the KPD (Opposition) minority. In exile in Switzerland after 1933, working as a journalist, he was also active for Soviet mil¬itary intelligence. He was arrested in 1946 in East Germany, and spent until 1955 in the Gulag system. Upon return to the GDR, he was admitted to the SED and became deputy editor-in-¬chief of the Leipziger Volkszeitung until his retirement in 1968.
Page 125: Thalheimer’s critical analysis of the Fifth Congress of the Communist In-ternational was submitted to various KPD and Comintern organs for pub¬lication, but never was, and instead was part of the evidence used against him, Brandler, Radek, Felix Wolf and others, for factionalism, before the Control Commission of the RCP(B). Das erste Tribunal is an account of the trial and a record of the proceedings. I reviewed it in the Journal of Trotsky Studies, no 3, 1995, pp148-54, so readers can consult that for more de-tails.
Page 135: Thalheimer’s reference to the ‘expert advice’ is the report prepared by the inter-allied committee chaired by Charles Dawes and Owen D Young which investigated the question of German reparations. Out of it came the Dawes Plan which was success¬ful in stabilising the German economy and removing revolution from the agenda for the time being.
In his brochure The German October Legend of 1923, Thal¬heimer refers to an article by Bukharin on the matter in a Pravda feuilleton. Originally feuilleton meant a literary article or serialised novel printed on the lower part of a newspaper page. Today one would call it a supplement printed separately. Not being familiar with Pravda in 1925, I left it as feuille-ton.
Thalheimer refers to Varga as being ‘officious’. Following publication of the Marken Press edition in 1993, Brian Pearce suggested ‘semi-official’ instead, as the German use of the word was surely like the French use, different to the English usage. That proved to be the case and makes more sense. See pages 105 and 115 respectively.
Not long after my reply to the Spartacist’s criticism of both Revolutionary History and myself regarding the 1923 October Legend, I became aware of more recent studies being published in Germany: Otto Wenzel, 1923. Die gescheiterte deutsche Oktoberrevolution, Lit Verlag, Munster, 2003, 374 pages, and Bernhard H Bay¬erlein, Leonid G Babichenko, Frederik I Firsov, Alexander Y Vatlin (eds), Deutscher Oktober 1923. Ein Revolutionsplan und sein Scheitern, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin, 2003, 479 pages. The latter cont¬ains documents from the Moscow archives that cover the various stages and aspects of the 1923 events, intro-duced by Hermann Weber, and with commentaries by Firsov, Pierre Broué and Karsten Rudolph on the SPD in Central Germany, Erich Zeigner (prime minister of the short-lived Left-Socialist–Communist coalition government in Saxony), and in relation to the abortive revolut¬ion.
Mike Jones

Solidarity and Revolutionary History
The following letter was sent to Solidarity, the paper of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, in response to an article in it criticising this journal. John McIlroy re-quested that it be published in full or not at all. It was, however, published in a truncated version.
Dear Editor
I am sorry to discover John O’Mahony, writing under the pseudonym Sean Matgamna, inventing fairy tales about a difference I had with him eight years ago. And proceeding to reprint some awful tosh about Revolutionary History and other journals (Solidarity, 31 March 2005). Let me deal first with his tittle-tattle about myself.
In John’s fantasy I wrote a review of Revolutionary History which in his words ‘devoted much of its space to praising an article by one… John McIlroy’. Such a ‘silly article’, con-sisting substantially of self-advertisement, protected by a pseudonym, is, John avers, at the mercy of all those through whose hands it passes. Perhaps through malice, humour or sub-conscious processes, he explains, the pseudonym was removed. The incident proved ‘politically all defining’. I ‘turned hostile’ to the AWL, thus demonstrating my ‘apolitical and laughably unserious mores’.
This is a fabrication from start to finish. The article can be consulted by those who still believe socialists should have some regard for the truth in Workers Liberty, October 1996. It consisted of eight densely-printed columns approaching 2000 words in total and running over two pages. The first two columns were taken up by a brief description of the seven articles in the current issue of Revolutionary History. Two sentences, the first innocuous, outlined my own contribution. The second sentence read: ‘This detailed study goes beyond its explicit subject matter to deepen our understanding of the problems facing the Trotskyists as war turned to peace and sheds new light on the activities of the RCP.’
Perhaps immodest. Perhaps a straightforward characterisation of the piece. Beyond argument one sentence. One sentence of 33 words in an article of almost 2000 words. I would ask all fair-minded readers to consider again O’Mahony’s statement that the article devoted much of its space to praising an article by one… John McIlroy. And whether the fact that an article of around 2000 words contained this single sentence would exercise persons unknown sufficiently to remove the author’s pseudonym.
I would also ask readers to ponder precisely why John indulges in this falsification. If he can recall that the article was published in ‘late 1996’, why can’t he remember what was in it? Is he just too bone idle to read it again? Or does he consciously or subcon-sciously invent, rearranging uncomfortable reality to meet his self-interested purposes? You tell me. Suffice it to say that all of us should check carefully for truth and accuracy when we read his prolific and self-regarding recollections of past events and former com-rades in Solidarity.
But if silly self-praise took up only one sentence, readers may inquire as to what ex-actly ‘much’ of the article was about? What O’Mahony fails to tell his readers is that ‘much’ of the article was taken up by… criticism of Revolutionary History and even of its editor, the late Al Richardson! Here we have a clue to the malice which led to the re-moval of the pseudonym from an article for which John, no matter how much he at-tempts to disperse responsibility, was personally responsible.
In 1996, John had a long-standing animus towards Al Richardson and Revolutionary History. I often listened to him grinding his axe on this topic. I wrote numerous articles under different pseudonyms for Socialist Organiser and some for Workers Liberty. This arti-cle critical of Revolutionary History constituted the solitary case in which the pseudonym was removed. Both Al and I — I had discussed my criticisms with him before sending the article to John — found it plausible to attribute events to John alone and to his desire to cause problems between us and to make mischief for Revolutionary History. That, not silly self-praise, was what it was all about.
Nor is John’s statements that the incident proved ‘politically all defining’, that I turned ‘hostile to us’, hold water. I had had no political agreement with the group since around 1986. I had collaborated, as he says, ‘in fits and starts’ with John in the 1990s around unsuccessful attempts to establish a broad left journal and contributed the occa-sional article on a freelance basis. Obviously after this and after other incidents where my material was significantly cut without consultation by John, scarcely a model of brevity himself, I ceased to do so.
John’s vexation at my playful depiction of him as ‘a tribal chieftain’ is amusing. Me-thinks the patriarch doth protest too much. In his original attack on Revolutionary History and other journals, he described their supporters as ‘a raucous tribe of middle-class semi-anarchists’. Tribe. What is sauce for the tribal goose, John, is sauce for the tribal gander. In his reprint he disingenuously interpolates that this was a reference to the SWP. Not in the original it wasn’t!  
Connoisseurs of his majesty the baby of the AWL’s love of having things both ways will raise a smile at John’s loincloth reiteration that Revolutionary History is a worthwhile publication. Simultaneously the academics, pseudo-academics, dilettantes, sectarians, snobs, kibbitzers, fantasy footballers and trainspotters (phew!) around it produce ‘much’ of ‘wretched quality’. The only example given, my ‘hagiographical’ obituary of Al Richardson, serves again to demonstrate John’s meanness of spirit. I laughed like a drain at his dismissive reference to ‘Devotees’ of ‘this or that revolutionary… fascinated by old factional struggles’. Rich indeed from an epigone who has spent the last 35 years inside first Cannon and subsequently Max Shachtman.
If we lend some coherence to his diffuse, verbose observations, what he seems to be saying in essence is this. Those around Revolutionary History do not, as is indispensable, combine theory and practice. They do not participate in the class struggle. They ran away. Now, leaving aside exactly how we define theory and practice and accepting John’s per-haps simplistic dichotomy, this is patent nonsense. To take one example of those around Revolutionary History, Barry Buitekant is active in the Labour Party. He may have ran away from John. He did not run away from practice. Ian Birchall and Esther Leslie are active in the SWP: they practice. To criticise their practice is not to demonstrate that they do not practice. To criticise their politics is not to say that they are not political or that they fail to combine, in John’s terms, theory and practice. Or that they ran away from the class struggle. Or that they are kibbitzers, whatever that may mean, or trainspotters.
Paul Flewers, unlike John, works in a 9–5 job. He attends his union meetings, politi-cal meetings and demonstrations. He writes, edits and produces a stream of socialist publications. Paul does not practice as John would have him practice. But John, a word in your ear: he practices all right. But, to touch on the real difficulty, not on the basis of your politics. He has not run away from the class struggle: only from your questionable version of how it should be prosecuted.
What John is doing is monolithically and falsely identifying political practice with the practice of one marginal splinter of perhaps 100 members: John’s group. I am putting my finger here on an enduring problem of the left. I refer to the abiding belief of many small, ineffective groupuscules that they are the chosen people, the revolutionary party, or its embryo: join us or you don’t practice; join us or you’re a trainspotter! John is com-ing close to one aspect of the Healyism he deserted when he broke from the Socialist Labour League.
I leave aside the question of John’s own practice. I pass over his vicarious involve-ment in the class struggle through an ever-changing cast of others, his lack of significant personal engagement in the labour movement for 30 years, his own unedifying ‘prattle and word processing’. The simple, central point which seems to elude him is that Revolu-tionary History is a meeting place — open to John and members of the AWL — where those with very different theories and politics and practices can engage, argue and achieve a degree of collaboration. Nobody, except perhaps John, is more critical of Revo-lutionary History than I am, as its editors will attest. But such a meeting place, such col-laboration, is surely desirable given the state of the class struggle and today’s distressed, divided left.
It would help immensely if John broke from old antagonisms, discarded personalised carping and renounced casual abuse to tell us concretely, specifically, in relation to con-tent, precisely how he thinks Revolutionary History should develop. In terms of concrete criticism Solidarity has not carried a review of Revolutionary History for years. Yet quite recently John (under a pseudonym) wrote a piece instructing us all in how important history is. He concluded: ‘If the labour movement and the left does not know its own real history then it will be unable to learn to avoid repeating its mistakes.’ (Solidarity, 18 November 2004) A similar statement used to appear on the front of Revolutionary History. Is John really saying that authentic history can only be produced by those in the AWL, or those who base themselves on its politics? If not, what exactly is he saying?
John McIlroy
Trotsky’s Critique and Vladimir Weston’s Teddy Bear
To the Editors
In his review of our book, Dog Days: James P Cannon vs Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933, Al Richardson accused us of repeating ‘the long-discredited lie’ that it was James P Cannon and Maurice Spector who smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1928 two out of three sections of Trotsky’s Critique of the Draft Program of the Communist International. Richardson (Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no 4, 2004) insisted instead that ‘it is well known that it was George Weston’ who smuggled out the partial document which had been distributed in numbered copies to members of the Pro-gramme Commission (including Cannon and Spector) at the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Communist International.
What we actually wrote in our introduction to Dog Days was: ‘Resolving to fight for Trotsky’s views they [Cannon and Spector] smuggled out of Moscow the partial copy of Trotsky’s Critique.’ In accusing us of purveying a ‘long-discredited lie’, Richardson qualita-tively escalated the complaint, made in his review of our earlier book, James P Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism that ‘The editors are still reluctant to accept the fact that the Critique in question was smuggled out of Moscow, not by Cannon, but by George Weston (p64), although this is fully confirmed by Harry Wicks’ recently pub-lished memoirs (Keeping My Head, p158).’ (Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no 1 [Autumn 1993])
In Keeping My Head (Socialist Platform Ltd, London, 1992), Wicks described George Weston as an early British CP member who was assigned to work with the International Red Aid in Moscow, where he lived in 1928 with his wife. Elsewhere Weston has been described as Irish (see Revolutionary History, Volume 6, no 2/3, Summer 1996). Wicks was also in Moscow in the late 1920s, attending the Lenin School, and he wrote about the experience in his memoirs, which were unfinished at the time of his 1989 death. Wicks knew the Westons and reported that Weston was a supporter of Trotsky before Cannon arrived in Moscow for the Sixth CI Congress.
When I met Weston’s widow at Tamara Deutscher’s flat during the early 1970s (in the presence of a tape recorder brought by a comrade called Ken Tarbuck), we discussed our Moscow years. By the time I first met the Westons, they already had a daughter and, while I was still in Moscow, their son Vladimir was born. As Weston’s job ended with that World Congress, he and his family returned to Britain at about this time. Mrs Weston remembers this Critique being inserted into Vladimir’s teddy bear. This was how it reached the Fischer-Urbahns group in Berlin. I do not know whether Weston’s copy was Cannon’s or someone else’s.
Wicks claimed no first-hand knowledge of how the document was smuggled out of Mos-cow. His account is a second-hand retailing of Mrs Weston’s memory, many years after the fact. He did not know whether Weston smuggled out the document for Fischer-Urbahns (supporters of Zinoviev) or for Cannon. Hardly, as Richardson implies, defini-tive.
In his contribution to the book James P Cannon As We Knew Him (Pathfinder Press, New York, 1976), Sam Gordon, an early member of the Communist League of America who was personally close to Cannon and who lived after the Second World War in Brit-ain, also told the story of how the document was smuggled out of the USSR in Weston’s son’s teddy bear. Gordon wrote that he got the story from Wicks and Mrs Weston.
In a 1963 interview with the Columbia University Oral History project, Max Shacht-man, who was one of Cannon’s closest personal and political collaborators in 1928, claimed that Cannon and Spector had stolen a copy of the document from an Australian delegate, and that it was Spector himself who smuggled it out in his baggage (pp153-54). Like Wicks’ version, this is a second-hand account, told many years after the fact. Can-non himself never spoke publicly or wrote on the subject, even in later years. All of which led us to write, in the introduction to James P Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: ‘It is unclear how Cannon and Spector managed to get a copy out of the Soviet Union.’
The actual physical means by which the document was gotten out of the USSR is hardly the main point. Cannon and Spector, who were senior leaders of two of the Comintern’s sections, understood the crucial importance of Trotsky’s document. They resolved that Trotsky’s fight was their fight, and orchestrated getting Trotsky’s Critique, which was in effect the founding document of world Trotskyism, out of the country. Believing it was the complete version, the Communist League of America published the partial document, first serialised in the Militant and then in 1929 in pamphlet form. When the CLA obtained a copy of the middle section, ‘Strategy and Tactics in the Imperialist Epoch’, this was published separately in 1930 as ‘The Strategy of World Revolution’. The complete document was published by the American Trotskyists in 1936 in a new and better translation as The Third International After Lenin. According to Louis Sinclair’s de-finitive bibliography of Trotsky’s writings, Trotsky’s Critique was not published in any version in Britain until 1954.
Richardson himself used to acknowledge that Cannon had a role in the smuggling. In Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1924-38 (Socialist Platform Ltd, London, 1986), Richardson and his collaborator Sam Bornstein wrote that the Cri-tique was ‘smuggled out of the country by Weston and Cannon and published in the United States early the following year’ (p37). Why did Richardson insist almost 20 years later that to write that Cannon had a role in getting the document out of the USSR is to retail a ‘long-discredited lie’? Presumably this slander is in purpose of his thesis that hard communist cadre like Cannon were just Zinovievite hacks. According to Richardson the real Trotskyists were those who quickly fell away from the Left Opposition: Ludwig Lore, who defended not only Trotsky but Paul Levi and Serrati; Boris Souvarine, whom Trotsky condemned as a petit-bourgeois dilettante; Kurt Landau, who put personal ties and organisational position above programme; and Alfred Rosmer, who proved constitu-tionally incapable of fighting the internal political battles necessary to forge an interna-tional Trotskyist organisation. It was Richardson’s privilege (as it is that of any reviewer) to not like our book. He abused this privilege by wrongly accusing us of lying.
Emily Turnbull
James Robertson
For the Prometheus Research Library
10 February 2005
cc: Spartacist, theoretical journal of the International Communist League (Fourth Interna-tionalist), Spartacist League/Britain.
The Editorial Board replies:
The late comrade Richardson is unable to speak for himself. As far as the Editorial Board of Revolutionary History is aware, all the inconclusive evidence of how the Critique was smuggled out of the USSR is as stated in the above letter. If anyone has any further in-formation about this incident we would be delighted to publish it.

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 Letters
German Communism: Some Clarifications
Dear Comrades
A few corrections to the notes and other additions to some of the texts were lost in the production process of Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no 4, so it is worth setting them out for the benefit of readers and for the avoidance of confusion in the future.
Page 23, note 9: Georg Ledebour did not rejoin the SPD when the section of the USPD that had rejected adherence to the Com¬munist International, and thus fusing with the KPD, decided in late 1922 to fuse with the SPD again. Out of just under 300 000 members of the USPD, approximately 85 000 rejected going back to the SPD, and the rump USPD that maintained a separate existence had, at the start, between 30 000 and 40 000 members. The key leaders were Theodor Lieb¬knecht, Georg Ledebour and Paul Wegmann, the latter two were Reichstag deputies. With the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, differences emerged within the party that led to a split. Theodor Liebknecht opposed any concessions to nationalism, while Ledebour and Wegmann inclined towards a line akin to that of the KPD. The result was the Socialist League. However, in October 1931 when the left wing of the SPD broke away and set up the SAP, the Socialist League joined it soon after, and in November the USPD did too.
Page 23, note 10: Heinrich Malzahn did not rejoin the SPD either. He sided with Paul Levi, but stayed in the KPD until expelled in January 1922. Readmitted towards the end of that year, he never had a key post thereafter. He was active in the anti-Nazi resist-ance around Wilhelm Leuschner, but was politically inactive post-1945.
Page 117, note 26: Paul Böttcher (1891-1975) did not join the SAP with the KPD (Opposition) minority. In exile in Switzerland after 1933, working as a journalist, he was also active for Soviet mil¬itary intelligence. He was arrested in 1946 in East Germany, and spent until 1955 in the Gulag system. Upon return to the GDR, he was admitted to the SED and became deputy editor-in-¬chief of the Leipziger Volkszeitung until his retirement in 1968.
Page 125: Thalheimer’s critical analysis of the Fifth Congress of the Communist In-ternational was submitted to various KPD and Comintern organs for pub¬lication, but never was, and instead was part of the evidence used against him, Brandler, Radek, Felix Wolf and others, for factionalism, before the Control Commission of the RCP(B). Das erste Tribunal is an account of the trial and a record of the proceedings. I reviewed it in the Journal of Trotsky Studies, no 3, 1995, pp148-54, so readers can consult that for more de-tails.
Page 135: Thalheimer’s reference to the ‘expert advice’ is the report prepared by the inter-allied committee chaired by Charles Dawes and Owen D Young which investigated the question of German reparations. Out of it came the Dawes Plan which was success¬ful in stabilising the German economy and removing revolution from the agenda for the time being.
In his brochure The German October Legend of 1923, Thal¬heimer refers to an article by Bukharin on the matter in a Pravda feuilleton. Originally feuilleton meant a literary article or serialised novel printed on the lower part of a newspaper page. Today one would call it a supplement printed separately. Not being familiar with Pravda in 1925, I left it as feuille-ton.
Thalheimer refers to Varga as being ‘officious’. Following publication of the Marken Press edition in 1993, Brian Pearce suggested ‘semi-official’ instead, as the German use of the word was surely like the French use, different to the English usage. That proved to be the case and makes more sense. See pages 105 and 115 respectively.
Not long after my reply to the Spartacist’s criticism of both Revolutionary History and myself regarding the 1923 October Legend, I became aware of more recent studies being published in Germany: Otto Wenzel, 1923. Die gescheiterte deutsche Oktoberrevolution, Lit Verlag, Munster, 2003, 374 pages, and Bernhard H Bay¬erlein, Leonid G Babichenko, Frederik I Firsov, Alexander Y Vatlin (eds), Deutscher Oktober 1923. Ein Revolutionsplan und sein Scheitern, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin, 2003, 479 pages. The latter cont¬ains documents from the Moscow archives that cover the various stages and aspects of the 1923 events, intro-duced by Hermann Weber, and with commentaries by Firsov, Pierre Broué and Karsten Rudolph on the SPD in Central Germany, Erich Zeigner (prime minister of the short-lived Left-Socialist–Communist coalition government in Saxony), and in relation to the abortive revolut¬ion.
Mike Jones
Solidarity and Revolutionary History
The following letter was sent to Solidarity, the paper of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, in response to an article in it criticising this journal. John McIlroy re-quested that it be published in full or not at all. It was, however, published in a truncated version.
Dear Editor
I am sorry to discover John O’Mahony, writing under the pseudonym Sean Matgamna, inventing fairy tales about a difference I had with him eight years ago. And proceeding to reprint some awful tosh about Revolutionary History and other journals (Solidarity, 31 March 2005). Let me deal first with his tittle-tattle about myself.
In John’s fantasy I wrote a review of Revolutionary History which in his words ‘devoted much of its space to praising an article by one… John McIlroy’. Such a ‘silly article’, con-sisting substantially of self-advertisement, protected by a pseudonym, is, John avers, at the mercy of all those through whose hands it passes. Perhaps through malice, humour or sub-conscious processes, he explains, the pseudonym was removed. The incident proved ‘politically all defining’. I ‘turned hostile’ to the AWL, thus demonstrating my ‘apolitical and laughably unserious mores’.
This is a fabrication from start to finish. The article can be consulted by those who still believe socialists should have some regard for the truth in Workers Liberty, October 1996. It consisted of eight densely-printed columns approaching 2000 words in total and running over two pages. The first two columns were taken up by a brief description of the seven articles in the current issue of Revolutionary History. Two sentences, the first innocuous, outlined my own contribution. The second sentence read: ‘This detailed study goes beyond its explicit subject matter to deepen our understanding of the problems facing the Trotskyists as war turned to peace and sheds new light on the activities of the RCP.’
Perhaps immodest. Perhaps a straightforward characterisation of the piece. Beyond argument one sentence. One sentence of 33 words in an article of almost 2000 words. I would ask all fair-minded readers to consider again O’Mahony’s statement that the article devoted much of its space to praising an article by one… John McIlroy. And whether the fact that an article of around 2000 words contained this single sentence would exercise persons unknown sufficiently to remove the author’s pseudonym.
I would also ask readers to ponder precisely why John indulges in this falsification. If he can recall that the article was published in ‘late 1996’, why can’t he remember what was in it? Is he just too bone idle to read it again? Or does he consciously or subcon-sciously invent, rearranging uncomfortable reality to meet his self-interested purposes? You tell me. Suffice it to say that all of us should check carefully for truth and accuracy when we read his prolific and self-regarding recollections of past events and former com-rades in Solidarity.
But if silly self-praise took up only one sentence, readers may inquire as to what ex-actly ‘much’ of the article was about? What O’Mahony fails to tell his readers is that ‘much’ of the article was taken up by… criticism of Revolutionary History and even of its editor, the late Al Richardson! Here we have a clue to the malice which led to the re-moval of the pseudonym from an article for which John, no matter how much he at-tempts to disperse responsibility, was personally responsible.
In 1996, John had a long-standing animus towards Al Richardson and Revolutionary History. I often listened to him grinding his axe on this topic. I wrote numerous articles under different pseudonyms for Socialist Organiser and some for Workers Liberty. This arti-cle critical of Revolutionary History constituted the solitary case in which the pseudonym was removed. Both Al and I — I had discussed my criticisms with him before sending the article to John — found it plausible to attribute events to John alone and to his desire to cause problems between us and to make mischief for Revolutionary History. That, not silly self-praise, was what it was all about.
Nor is John’s statements that the incident proved ‘politically all defining’, that I turned ‘hostile to us’, hold water. I had had no political agreement with the group since around 1986. I had collaborated, as he says, ‘in fits and starts’ with John in the 1990s around unsuccessful attempts to establish a broad left journal and contributed the occa-sional article on a freelance basis. Obviously after this and after other incidents where my material was significantly cut without consultation by John, scarcely a model of brevity himself, I ceased to do so.
John’s vexation at my playful depiction of him as ‘a tribal chieftain’ is amusing. Me-thinks the patriarch doth protest too much. In his original attack on Revolutionary History and other journals, he described their supporters as ‘a raucous tribe of middle-class semi-anarchists’. Tribe. What is sauce for the tribal goose, John, is sauce for the tribal gander. In his reprint he disingenuously interpolates that this was a reference to the SWP. Not in the original it wasn’t! 
Connoisseurs of his majesty the baby of the AWL’s love of having things both ways will raise a smile at John’s loincloth reiteration that Revolutionary History is a worthwhile publication. Simultaneously the academics, pseudo-academics, dilettantes, sectarians, snobs, kibbitzers, fantasy footballers and trainspotters (phew!) around it produce ‘much’ of ‘wretched quality’. The only example given, my ‘hagiographical’ obituary of Al Richardson, serves again to demonstrate John’s meanness of spirit. I laughed like a drain at his dismissive reference to ‘Devotees’ of ‘this or that revolutionary… fascinated by old factional struggles’. Rich indeed from an epigone who has spent the last 35 years inside first Cannon and subsequently Max Shachtman.
If we lend some coherence to his diffuse, verbose observations, what he seems to be saying in essence is this. Those around Revolutionary History do not, as is indispensable, combine theory and practice. They do not participate in the class struggle. They ran away. Now, leaving aside exactly how we define theory and practice and accepting John’s per-haps simplistic dichotomy, this is patent nonsense. To take one example of those around Revolutionary History, Barry Buitekant is active in the Labour Party. He may have ran away from John. He did not run away from practice. Ian Birchall and Esther Leslie are active in the SWP: they practice. To criticise their practice is not to demonstrate that they do not practice. To criticise their politics is not to say that they are not political or that they fail to combine, in John’s terms, theory and practice. Or that they ran away from the class struggle. Or that they are kibbitzers, whatever that may mean, or trainspotters.
Paul Flewers, unlike John, works in a 9–5 job. He attends his union meetings, politi-cal meetings and demonstrations. He writes, edits and produces a stream of socialist publications. Paul does not practice as John would have him practice. But John, a word in your ear: he practices all right. But, to touch on the real difficulty, not on the basis of your politics. He has not run away from the class struggle: only from your questionable version of how it should be prosecuted.
What John is doing is monolithically and falsely identifying political practice with the practice of one marginal splinter of perhaps 100 members: John’s group. I am putting my finger here on an enduring problem of the left. I refer to the abiding belief of many small, ineffective groupuscules that they are the chosen people, the revolutionary party, or its embryo: join us or you don’t practice; join us or you’re a trainspotter! John is com-ing close to one aspect of the Healyism he deserted when he broke from the Socialist Labour League.
I leave aside the question of John’s own practice. I pass over his vicarious involve-ment in the class struggle through an ever-changing cast of others, his lack of significant personal engagement in the labour movement for 30 years, his own unedifying ‘prattle and word processing’. The simple, central point which seems to elude him is that Revolu-tionary History is a meeting place — open to John and members of the AWL — where those with very different theories and politics and practices can engage, argue and achieve a degree of collaboration. Nobody, except perhaps John, is more critical of Revo-lutionary History than I am, as its editors will attest. But such a meeting place, such col-laboration, is surely desirable given the state of the class struggle and today’s distressed, divided left.
It would help immensely if John broke from old antagonisms, discarded personalised carping and renounced casual abuse to tell us concretely, specifically, in relation to con-tent, precisely how he thinks Revolutionary History should develop. In terms of concrete criticism Solidarity has not carried a review of Revolutionary History for years. Yet quite recently John (under a pseudonym) wrote a piece instructing us all in how important history is. He concluded: ‘If the labour movement and the left does not know its own real history then it will be unable to learn to avoid repeating its mistakes.’ (Solidarity, 18 November 2004) A similar statement used to appear on the front of Revolutionary History. Is John really saying that authentic history can only be produced by those in the AWL, or those who base themselves on its politics? If not, what exactly is he saying?
John McIlroy
Trotsky’s Critique and Vladimir Weston’s Teddy Bear
To the Editors
In his review of our book, Dog Days: James P Cannon vs Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933, Al Richardson accused us of repeating ‘the long-discredited lie’ that it was James P Cannon and Maurice Spector who smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1928 two out of three sections of Trotsky’s Critique of the Draft Program of the Communist International. Richardson (Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no 4, 2004) insisted instead that ‘it is well known that it was George Weston’ who smuggled out the partial document which had been distributed in numbered copies to members of the Pro-gramme Commission (including Cannon and Spector) at the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Communist International.
What we actually wrote in our introduction to Dog Days was: ‘Resolving to fight for Trotsky’s views they [Cannon and Spector] smuggled out of Moscow the partial copy of Trotsky’s Critique.’ In accusing us of purveying a ‘long-discredited lie’, Richardson qualita-tively escalated the complaint, made in his review of our earlier book, James P Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism that ‘The editors are still reluctant to accept the fact that the Critique in question was smuggled out of Moscow, not by Cannon, but by George Weston (p64), although this is fully confirmed by Harry Wicks’ recently pub-lished memoirs (Keeping My Head, p158).’ (Revolutionary History, Volume 5, no 1 [Autumn 1993])
In Keeping My Head (Socialist Platform Ltd, London, 1992), Wicks described George Weston as an early British CP member who was assigned to work with the International Red Aid in Moscow, where he lived in 1928 with his wife. Elsewhere Weston has been described as Irish (see Revolutionary History, Volume 6, no 2/3, Summer 1996). Wicks was also in Moscow in the late 1920s, attending the Lenin School, and he wrote about the experience in his memoirs, which were unfinished at the time of his 1989 death. Wicks knew the Westons and reported that Weston was a supporter of Trotsky before Cannon arrived in Moscow for the Sixth CI Congress.
When I met Weston’s widow at Tamara Deutscher’s flat during the early 1970s (in the presence of a tape recorder brought by a comrade called Ken Tarbuck), we discussed our Moscow years. By the time I first met the Westons, they already had a daughter and, while I was still in Moscow, their son Vladimir was born. As Weston’s job ended with that World Congress, he and his family returned to Britain at about this time. Mrs Weston remembers this Critique being inserted into Vladimir’s teddy bear. This was how it reached the Fischer-Urbahns group in Berlin. I do not know whether Weston’s copy was Cannon’s or someone else’s.
Wicks claimed no first-hand knowledge of how the document was smuggled out of Mos-cow. His account is a second-hand retailing of Mrs Weston’s memory, many years after the fact. He did not know whether Weston smuggled out the document for Fischer-Urbahns (supporters of Zinoviev) or for Cannon. Hardly, as Richardson implies, defini-tive.
In his contribution to the book James P Cannon As We Knew Him (Pathfinder Press, New York, 1976), Sam Gordon, an early member of the Communist League of America who was personally close to Cannon and who lived after the Second World War in Brit-ain, also told the story of how the document was smuggled out of the USSR in Weston’s son’s teddy bear. Gordon wrote that he got the story from Wicks and Mrs Weston.
In a 1963 interview with the Columbia University Oral History project, Max Shacht-man, who was one of Cannon’s closest personal and political collaborators in 1928, claimed that Cannon and Spector had stolen a copy of the document from an Australian delegate, and that it was Spector himself who smuggled it out in his baggage (pp153-54). Like Wicks’ version, this is a second-hand account, told many years after the fact. Can-non himself never spoke publicly or wrote on the subject, even in later years. All of which led us to write, in the introduction to James P Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: ‘It is unclear how Cannon and Spector managed to get a copy out of the Soviet Union.’
The actual physical means by which the document was gotten out of the USSR is hardly the main point. Cannon and Spector, who were senior leaders of two of the Comintern’s sections, understood the crucial importance of Trotsky’s document. They resolved that Trotsky’s fight was their fight, and orchestrated getting Trotsky’s Critique, which was in effect the founding document of world Trotskyism, out of the country. Believing it was the complete version, the Communist League of America published the partial document, first serialised in the Militant and then in 1929 in pamphlet form. When the CLA obtained a copy of the middle section, ‘Strategy and Tactics in the Imperialist Epoch’, this was published separately in 1930 as ‘The Strategy of World Revolution’. The complete document was published by the American Trotskyists in 1936 in a new and better translation as The Third International After Lenin. According to Louis Sinclair’s de-finitive bibliography of Trotsky’s writings, Trotsky’s Critique was not published in any version in Britain until 1954.
Richardson himself used to acknowledge that Cannon had a role in the smuggling. In Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1924-38 (Socialist Platform Ltd, London, 1986), Richardson and his collaborator Sam Bornstein wrote that the Cri-tique was ‘smuggled out of the country by Weston and Cannon and published in the United States early the following year’ (p37). Why did Richardson insist almost 20 years later that to write that Cannon had a role in getting the document out of the USSR is to retail a ‘long-discredited lie’? Presumably this slander is in purpose of his thesis that hard communist cadre like Cannon were just Zinovievite hacks. According to Richardson the real Trotskyists were those who quickly fell away from the Left Opposition: Ludwig Lore, who defended not only Trotsky but Paul Levi and Serrati; Boris Souvarine, whom Trotsky condemned as a petit-bourgeois dilettante; Kurt Landau, who put personal ties and organisational position above programme; and Alfred Rosmer, who proved constitu-tionally incapable of fighting the internal political battles necessary to forge an interna-tional Trotskyist organisation. It was Richardson’s privilege (as it is that of any reviewer) to not like our book. He abused this privilege by wrongly accusing us of lying.
Emily Turnbull
James Robertson
For the Prometheus Research Library
10 February 2005
cc: Spartacist, theoretical journal of the International Communist League (Fourth Interna-tionalist), Spartacist League/Britain.
The Editorial Board replies:
The late comrade Richardson is unable to speak for himself. As far as the Editorial Board of Revolutionary History is aware, all the inconclusive evidence of how the Critique was smuggled out of the USSR is as stated in the above letter. If anyone has any further in-formation about this incident we would be delighted to publish it.

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