Andy Bone  (Russell Research Centre)

Russell and the Communist-aligned Peace Movement in the mid-1950s
 

Abstract: The Soviet Union's successful test of an atomic bomb in 1949 fundamentally altered Russell's outlook on international politics. However, as Stephen Hayhurst has argued*, there was a considerable delay between this critical juncture of the Cold War and any perceptible softening of Russell's anti-Communism. After the death of Stalin in March 1953, a cautious optimism about the possibility of change in the foreign and domestic policies of the Soviet Union did enter into Russell's writing. But he remained apprehensive about collaboration with Western Communists and fellow-travellers in the cause of peace. The reasons for this wariness and its impact on Russell's political activities in the mid-1950s will be described and assessed in this paper. Russell was confronted with something of a dilemma. He wanted to achieve some recognition of the nuclear peril on both sides of the Cold War divide, but he did not want control of "The Russell–Einstein Manifesto" and related initiatives to pass to supporters of the Soviet Union in the West. What changed gradually was not so much Russell's outlook as the external situation—namely, the decline of Western Communist Parties following Khrushchev's revelations to the XXth Party Congress and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and the emergence of broadly-based movements for peace which could not easily be tainted by their critics as "pro-Soviet".
 

* "Russell's Anti-Communist Rhetoric before and after Stalin's Death", Russell, n.s. 11 (summer 1991): 67–82.