CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

Jim Riordan: The Last British Comrade Trained in Moscow: The Higher Party
School, 1961–1963. Socialist History Society. SHS Occasional Paper No. 23. 2007.
34pp.
C
ompared to the 1920s and the 1930s, little is known about the post-war practices of Soviet
party education for foreign communists. Through the Soviet era, party education was the
most central means in creating and maintaining ideological dependence between
communist parties. Another may have been the financial support from Moscow.
In total, only a single cohort of five British attendees were trained at the post-war Higher Party
School (HPS), Moscow, in the early 1960s. Professor Emeritus Jim Riordan has written his
personal account on his time at the HPS. One of the others contributed by giving his diary to the
author, but he did not want his name mentioned. The rest of the British ex-students kept quiet.
Riordan explains the uniqueness of his British HPS course by stressing how far it differed from the
traditional lack of appreciation with theoretical marxism-leninism or the orthodox way it was
taught in Moscow. This critical attitude, combined with disobedience which led to troubles with the
HPS’s officials, led to one British comrade being sent back home after his first year. Another reason
for such low numbers of British students at the HPS, suggested by Betty Reid, was the fates of the
unlucky British communists that had taken the Soviet passport during the 1930s.
‘No doubt the offer was there, but it was not taken up again’, says Riordan. It is hard to believe that
the unsuccessful five caused the CPGB to curtail involvement with this free education programme.
More information is needed to explain why the training at the HPS started in 1961, and why it did
not continue. As, for comparison, the Finns remained at the HPS since they got in (1954) until the
end of the 1980s – and the comrades that were destroyed in the Stalin purges of the 1930s were not
counted in tens but thousands.
In Moscow, Riordan was driven to the Vysshaya partiynaya shkola in a black limousine. On the
wall of the accommodation room, he was welcomed by an image of Stalin that was removed from
there, as well as from the Lenin mausoleum, a month later. However, the Soviet students at the
HPS, about the half of the total, were not able to debate politics or Soviet history, not to mention
the purges: ‘it was like arguing with a religious fanatic’. Riordan’s pride in being there was even
more questioned by ordinary Muscovites that reacted to his introductions with indifference or
hostility. He had become a member of the ruling party elite.
Riordan describes the classes at the HPS as well prepared and illuminating. However, the British
students could not swallow the fabricated Soviet history that they knew to be ‘utter tosh’. Soon
their protests had reached the Soviet Party Central Committee. After a couple of serious
discussions with some British comrades they respected, the renegades promised to play according
to the rules. Riordan concludes that HPS never succeeded in moulding him into a reliable soldier of
revolution.
Riordan did not draw radical conclusions either but worked in Moscow for a couple of years at the
Progress Publishing house. He describes the extraordinary British society in Moscow, including the
members of the famous ‘Oxford circle’. Riordan hints, in passing, that prolonged time in Moscow
was an eye-opener, especially when he was ridiculously accused as an anti-sovietchik before
leaving the country. Back home, he tried idealistically to explain the distortions of ‘real socialism’
to the British comrades who branded him, again, as a heretic. Riordan never left the Communist
Party – it left him in 1991.
Because of Riordan’s later academic career in Russian studies, his personal memoirs are brilliantly
placed into the Soviet historical context of the time. He writes sharply, with British irony. However,
I would have liked to read more details about the culture and practice of the HPS; the publication
consists only of 34 pages, and it includes some other short life stories too.
Joni Krekola, University on Helsinki
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