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Labour and the Gulag. Russia and the seduction of the British Left. By Giles Udy. Pp. xxvii + 660 incl. 12 ills and 1 map. London: Biteback Publishing, 2017. £30. 978 1 78590 204 8
In an essay in 1946 on ‘The prevention of literature’, George Orwell wrote that ‘There can be no question about the poisonous effects of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it, known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written.’ Happily, Orwell's fears were exaggerated. But for a long time many people on the Left in British politics regarded criticism of the Soviet Union as unacceptable. Stories of atrocities were ignored, dismissed as anti-Soviet inventions, or explained away as inevitable collateral damage in the building of socialism.
Giles Udy's book is about this ‘seduction of the British Left’. Interestingly, he originally intended to write a very different book. He begin researching the history of the labour camps in Norilsk, in the Soviet Arctic. He discovered that many of the prisoners there had been transferred from the White Sea labour camps. The White Sea region's only resource was timber, large quantities of which, cut by gulag labourers, were exported to Britain in the early 1930s. Many of the labourers were so-called kulaks (‘rich peasants’), deported from agricultural areas in the south as part of the process of forced collectivisation.
There was a campaign to persuade the Labour...