From the time of my ufe

By Denis Healey TEXT DRAWING BACK THE CURTAIN

Denis Healey was born in 1917 and brought up in Yorkshire. After gainig a double first at Balliol College, Oxford, for six years he was a soldier learning about real life.

Another six years as International Secretary of the Labour Party taught him much about politics, both at home and abroad. From 1952 to 1992 he was a Labour Member of Parliament for Leeds.

He is a prolific journalist and broadcaster. He has published Healey's Eye, a book on his life as a photographer, and has contributed essays to many publications for the Fabian Society¹ including New Fabian essays and Fabian International Essays.

When Shrimps Learn to Whistle, Signposts for the Nineties, also published by Penguin, include a selection of his earlier writings which are relevant to the world after the Cold War.

In the early years after the war, when we first heard the truth of what Russia was doing in Eastern Europe, and began to look more objectively at the Soviet Union itself, my generation was powerfully influenced by George Orwell's 1984, and by a flood of books which purported to analyse the nature of totalitarianism.

My visits to Eastern Europe cured me of any erratic illusions. No power could destroy national traditions which were rooted in centuries of history. Moreover, these peoples yearned to return to the Europe in which Chopin and Bartok were part of a common civilisation with Bach and Verdi. Once Stalin died, it was clear that Soviet Communism already carried the seeds of its own destruction. The Russia of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Herzen was still there beneath the surface. Stalin could no more expunge it from the consciousness of its people than Hitler could liquidate the Germany of Beethoven, Goethe, and Kant.

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I had been fascinated by Russia since I read its great novelists as a schoolboy. My years in the Communist Party at Oxford had given me sufficient understanding of Stalinism to reject it even while I still saw Russia as a socialist state and a necessary ally against Hitler. I was also impressed by much of pre-war Soviet culture.
The great Soviet film-makers of those days — Einstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko — seemed superior to their Western rivals. Though I loathed "Socialist Realism", I admired the paintings of Deineka. They were in a book given me by a friend; she also introduced me to Shostakovich's opera, The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
After the war I found that my friend had disappeared during the great purges, and that Lady Macbeth had been banned.
This helped to reinforce the bitter hostility I had developed for Soviet policies both at home and abroad.
When Stalin died, I was at first deeply suspicious of the changes introduced by his successors.
There were ample grounds for my distrust. The new men, all products of the old system, claimed loyalty to its principles.
At the beginning of 1956 Malenkov came to Britain as Deputy Premier, shortly after losing the leadership to Krushchev. His visit was such a propaganda success that people wondered how the Politburo could ever have replaced him.
Bulganin and Krushchev followed Malenkov to Britain a few months later. Their visit was less successful.
Yet in fact Krushchev continued and extended the liberal programmes which Malenkov had introduced. The Foreign Office rightly saw him during that visit as a shrewd and cunning political leader, by comparison with the better educated and more courteous Bulganin. By 1958 I myself had come to the conclusion that Krushchev was 'one of the half-dozen greatest political leaders of this century. It is doubtful whether any other known figure could operate the Soviet system on a basis of persuasion and incentive as successfully as he. His outstanding personal characteristics are pragmatism and self-confidence... Compared with Stalin he seems little interested in the theory of communism — his faith is all the more formidable because it is not overdogmatic. Both at home and abroad, he insists on seeing things for himself — no modern Prime Minister has travelled so widely. To this extent summit conferences may have a special value in dealing with the Russians today, providing the West can produce leaders of comparable ability' I still maintain these views; they apply even more to Gorbachev.
It was now clear that the picture which the West had painted of the Soviet Union in the early post-war years needed drastic revision. I made my first visit to Russia the following year as part of a Labour Party delegation, with Hugh Gaitskell and Nye Bevan. Our meeting with Krushchev confirmed the views I had now formed of him. He was exceptionally well briefed, but was not ashamed to ask Gromyko to put him right if necessary.
Kruschev never carried a chip on his shoulder about men born in more fortunate circumstances. He had a natural dignity and self-confidence which rejected class envy.
Most of our visit was spent in sightseeing. We were of course, with our consent, taken to schools, factories, and collective farms. It also included the visits to the Hermitage in Leningrad and the magnificent summer palace of Peter the Great overlooking the Gulf of Finland, its fountains sparkling in the autumn sun, its rococo buildings gleaming with white and gold; like most other palaces, it had been meticulously restored to its former glory after almost total destruction by the Nazis. In Leningrad we were given a concert at what had originally been the club where members of the first Russian Parliament, or Duma, used to meet. In those nineteenth-century surroundings, the concert itself was like a salon at the court of Queen Victoria, as sopranos and baritones in evening dress sang ballads and songs by "Kompositori Verdi" in voices of remarkable purity.
By comparison with the eighteenth-century canals of Leningrad, which might have been part of Amsterdam or Bremen, the Kremlin brought us to the heart of old Russia. I had imagined it a building as grimly functional as the Party it housed, and was quite unprepared for the mediaeval splendour of its palaces and churches, scattered among copses of birch and lilac.
My visit to Russia in 1959 began to give me some sense of these cultural changes. I was immensely impressed by the charm and quality of the young sixth formers we met in Leningrad at school.
In manner and appearance they could have come from any of the upperclass families described by Turgenev or Tolstoy. Similarly, the colleges which taught foreign languages and international affairs were giving a rounded education to able young men and women, who are now in key positions in their country, where their knowledge of the outside world is invaluable.
The creative intelligentsia, such outstanding people as Sakharov, with his strong opposition to using the hydrogen bomb, Solzhenitsyn, exposing the life in a labour camp (A Day in the life of Ivan Denisov-

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