CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

would not have known this. Or would it merely have been that he would not have
troubled to remind himself that he knew? The legs of the Government, though
rheumaticky, were stout enough. Nothing would transpire to upset it. Like a dirtbug, it
squatted athwart all England, and so would continue to squat. He was mouthing
revolutionary bunkum, proletarian pap.
Gibbon says much the same thing in his own words about literature in his contribution to Left
Review. ‘To say that the period from 1913 to 1934 is a decadent period is just, if I may say so,
bolshevik blah.’ 20
Later in Grey Granite Ellen Johns describes Trease and Selden as ‘liars and not to be trusted’
(p120) and claims that the party is ‘full of cheats and liars’ (p194) but these may be generic
expressions for politicians. In Cloud Howe Chris also refers to ‘liars and cheats called Labour or
Tory…’ (p198).
The only instance of deliberate lying in Grey Granite is Ewan’s suggestion that the explosion at
Gowans and Gloag has been deliberately planned to test the effect of poison-gas on a crowd. Ellen
protests: ‘…but, Ewan, you know that THAT was a lie. It was sickening of you to suggest that they
let loose the gas deliberately... Ewan, it’s just cheating, it’s not Communism!’ (p188) Marion Nelson
did not refer to this area.
The charge of lying has often been made in respect of communist policy. In Double Lives Stephen
Koch uses the expression ‘lying for the truth’ and the phrase is the title of the first half of the book
and of a specific chapter. ‘Willi [Münzenberg] may have honestly believed that he was lying for the
truth, but he did clearly know he was lying.’ 21
One of the first instances was the lie that the Whites had taken Kronstadt led by the counterrevolutionary
General Kozlovski whereas in fact the Kronstadt sailors had mutinied led by the
Kronstadt Soviet. Gibbon shows that he was fully aware of the suppression of the Kronstadt Soviet
in March 1921 in Stained Radiance (p62), but whether he was aware of the lying is unknown.
Victor Serge wrote later, ‘For the Party to lie to us this way was something new.’ 22 But in the early
years of the revolution even he was quoted as saying: ‘We are obliged to lie to save what can be
saved of the Revolution.’ 23
Plisnier and Silone make several references to lying. In Memoirs of a Secret Revolutionary Iegor,
the Comintern delegate, says: ‘There are higher values than the truth, comrade.’ 24 Silone reports
that, at a meeting of a special commission of the Comintern, the British delegate’s interruption
(‘But that would be a lie’) was greeted with a burst of laughter. 25 (It is remarkable now to note that,
from the identification of a code-name in the OVRA files, Silone may have been giving information
to the fascist police in Italy at the time he was a delegate to the Comintern in Moscow.) 26
In the essay referred to above Jack Mitchell comments of the ‘adventurism’ of Ewan’s lie about the
gas explosion (and other features): ‘There’s no sign of the author distancing himself from his hero
at these points.’ 27
The question of Gibbon’s authorial stance was raised most recently by James D Young in his
chapter on Gibbon and Barke in The Very Bastards of Creation in which he argued that Gibbon
‘was really mocking and ridiculing Stalinist orthodoxy when he discussed the CPGB’s idea of “the
vanguard Party’s” role and falsification of classical Marxism in trying to exploit working folk as
“History’s instruments”’. 28
Dr Young gives a source for his references in Trotsky’s speech to the Thirteenth Congress of the
CPSU in May 1924 when he was under attack from Zinoviev:
‘In the last instance the Party is always right, because it is the only historic
instrument which the working class possesses for the solution of its fundamental
tasks. […] One can be right only with the Party and through the Party because history
has not created any other way for the realisation of one’s rightness.’ 29
Gibbon was certainly aware of the full meaning of ‘History’s instruments’. Ewan had said:
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