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HISTORYThe Party: The Communist Party of Australia from Heyday to Reckoning Stuart Macintyre Allen & Unwin, $49.99

In late 1941, after the Soviet Union entered World War II, a symphony concert audience in Sydney heard something remarkable. The orchestra began with the customary God Save the King. Then, the conductor suddenly switched to that anthem of the communist movement The Internationale.

This represented a turning point. No longer was this song reproduced in scratchy recordings or sung in meagre choruses in half-empty halls. The Communist Party was still illegal but its respectability and popularity began to soar. Three years later 23,000 had joined the party. This was the heyday of Australian communism with access to the wartime government and control of the countrys key trade unions.

In the post-war years, many so-called Red Army communists melted away. In The Party, the sequel to The Reds (1998), Stuart Macintyre demonstrates how blind devotion to the Soviet Union created irreconcilable problems for the party as the Cold War deepened.

Its opponents, rapidly increasing in strength and stridency, could point to its divided loyalties and its alien ideology. Worse, in the event of a third world war, which seemed imminent in the early 1950s, communists would become a fifth column for the Soviet Union. Potential treason was darkly hinted at.

Police break up an election meeting of the Australian Communist Party at a Bondi Junction hotel in April 1951. Credit:Norm Herfort

In this context, the Menzies government sought to ban the Reds. All the while, ASIO, convinced that this enemy within posed a threat to national security, intensified its surveillance, job vetting, passport control, harassment, and infiltration with informants. Its files on individual communists, which Macintyre has used adroitly, thickened.

Assailed by the government, vilified in the press, and condemned by the broader community, the party remained steadfast. As Stalin had reminded communists, they were people of a special mould. Fortified by the belief that history was on their side, their faith in the righteousness of their cause, the virtues of the Soviet experiment, or the wisdom of Uncle Joe, was rarely dented. Until 1956.

Macintyres discussion of Khrushchevs revelations of Stalins crimes and the impact on Australian communists is brilliantly synthesised, combining prodigious scholarship with nuanced analysis. Notwithstanding the leaderships denial and suppression of discussion, party members who eventually read the secret speech were shocked to the core and left in droves. When the Hungarian revolt of late 1956 was crushed by Russian tanks, the internal fractures deepened and the decline of the party accelerated.

From the mid-1960s, the party embarked upon de-Stalinisation: a new, independent path without the ideological direction, rhetorical shibboleths or financial support from Russia. After condemning the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the first communist party in the world to do so it began, writes Macintyre, clearing away the dogmas that had brought it undone.

Originally posted here:
The enemy within: How the Communist Party ground to a halt in Australia - Sydney Morning Herald