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Review of An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews. Originally published in the London Review of Books, 21st November 2019.

The skills of the three top Soviet spies of the 20th century – Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper and Ignace Poretsky/Reiss (better known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory worker in Kharkov who became head of the Communist Party’s regional committee and was killed during the purges. Bibikov was a supporter of Sergei Kirov, a party boss in Leningrad who although a loyal enough Stalinist was alarmed by the excesses of collectivisation and keen to allow some of the discarded oppositionists to rejoin the party. At the Congress of Victors in 1934, when Stalin claimed the success of collectivisation and the triumph of his own faction, Kirov obtained the highest number of votes in the elections to the Central Committee. Mysteriously, he was assassinated in December that year. Bibikov’s turn came in October 1937. He was arrested and forced to confess to his sins, which in his case included membership of a non-existent clandestine ‘anti-Soviet rightist-Trotskyite’ organisation. He was executed three months later.

Matthews wrote about his family in Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War (2009), but despite this background his new book isn’t strong on Sorge’s motivation, or on what led him and others to sacrifice their lives to the cause. There isn’t much new material in An Impeccable Spy, with the exception of Stalin’s crude marginal notes on the Sorge file, but it does confirm and expand on information included in earlier accounts, some of it from the records of Soviet military intelligence, which haven’t been made generally available.

Spying always accompanies war, revolution and counter-revolution. Information-gathering networks have always been needed to report on and infiltrate enemies within and without. Civil wars, in particular, made this an absolute necessity, as Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, Lenin, Mao and Castro quickly understood. For centuries, the methods of obtaining and transmitting vital information barely changed. ‘Cromwell,’ Pepys wrote in his diary, ‘carried the secrets of all the princes of Europe at his girdle.’ The man who got them for him was a civil servant called John Thurloe. A rector’s son from Essex, Thurloe became head of intelligence in 1653, with access to all state papers and secret documents. He pioneered a system of spy networks which long outlasted the English Commonwealth. The documents and reports brought back by couriers from the Continent (still available in the British Library) were analysed in detail by a group that included John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Among other things, they helped support the operations of a navy engineered to preserve and extend British interests.

Thurloe had a tendency to overreact to any threat of dissent. He dealt harshly with Leveller factions and with the apprentices and joiners of the Fifth Monarchy Men, proto-anarchists based in Mile End who were allegedly preparing to assassinate Cromwell and unleash an insurrection. Some of the men didn’t deny the main charge but pointed out that mass uprisings can’t be ordered like a jug of water. The House of Commons thanked Thurloe for his vigilance. A silk-weaver of Whitechapel had revealed the plot. All this and much else was meticulously recorded in the seven volumes of Thurloe’s State Papers.

After the Restoration, the Earl of Clarendon was forced to negotiate with Thurloe to acquire his spy network for the post-revolutionary regime. In return, Thurloe was given the list of the people Clarendon planned to arrest (the regicides in particular), which gave him time to warn them to flee the country. Most went to Holland, but under heavy political pressure (and probably with the help of financial inducements) the Dutch betrayed them and handed over as many as they could catch to Clarendon, who had them executed, their heads displayed in Whitehall. Thurloe’s Europe-wide spy network was preserved more or less intact.

The French Revolution had a Jacobin equivalent of Thurloe: less straightforwardly a spymaster, he exercised just as much ideological control. Joseph Fouché was born in 1759 in a village near Nantes and educated at the city oratory. Unlike Thurloe he was not a civil servant but an ambitious revolutionary politician. He had always been an ardent Jacobin, particularly interested in the de-Christianisation campaign, which began in earnest under his leadership in 1793. He closed down churches, installed a bust of Brutus on the altar of the cathedral in Nevers and paraded a real dancing woman down the nave of Notre Dame to represent the Goddess of Reason. Inscriptions proclaiming that ‘la mort est un éternel sommeil’ – rather than something God could rescue you from – were displayed at the entrance of cemeteries. Religious burials were banned. Sacred objects – ‘ornaments of fanaticism and ignorance’ – were removed from churches and a number of Fouché’s supporters urged Catholic priests to get married: celibacy was out.

Robespierre, busy creating several Republican armies to combat the external military threats to revolutionary France, was unsettled by this display of secular fanaticism, both on principle and for reasons of Realpolitik. He was worried that it would upset the neutral states in Europe and unnecessarily alienate sections of the peasantry. He publicly excoriated Fouché’s excesses in Lyon, where he had crushed a Girondin revolt with startling ferocity. The subsequent public executions of sixty bankers, nobles and hangers-on were preceded by a vicious satirical and semi-pornographic tableau mocking the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the Holy Ghost. ‘The man who is determined to prevent religious worship is just as fanatical as the man who says Mass,’ Robespierre said. ‘The Convention will not allow persecution of peaceable ministers of religion, but it will punish them severely every time they dare to take advantage of their position to deceive the citizens or to arm bigotry and royalism against the Republic.’

Fouché went on the offensive and helped topple Robespierre, imagining he would replace him. But the events of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) marked a turning point in the revolution. What had initially appeared to be a struggle for power within the Jacobin Party sounded the death knell for the radicals. Thermidor led to the victory first of the Directory, then the Consulate and, finally, the Empire, with the bourgeoisie now firmly in command. Fouché served all three as minister for police, falling out with Napoleon over the plan to invade Russia, which he regarded as a combination of personal vanity and politico-military folly. Enraged, Napoleon sacked him. But neither harboured a grudge. After Napoleon escaped from Elba, Fouché was made de facto prime minister and attempted to stabilise the administration. Waterloo put an end to all that. Fouché died peacefully in his bed in 1820. Thurloe had similarly passed away in his chambers at Lincoln’s Inn in 1667, a pattern that would, alas, not be repeated in the Soviet Union.

Jan Karlovich Berzin (born P?teris ?uzis in 1889) recruited the first generation of Soviet spies. From a Latvian peasant family, he participated in the 1905 Revolution that swept the country soon after the crushing defeat inflicted on the tsarist navy by imperial Japan and in 1906 he was elected secretary of the St Petersburg branch of the RSDLP. He was arrested by the Cossacks and sentenced to death, but spared because of his age. He served two spells in Siberia and escaped. After the October Revolution he was given the task of organising Red Guards to defend the Bolshevik leaders, and following Fanny Kaplan’s assassination attempt on Lenin in August 1918 he set up a bodyguard composed of Latvians, Finns, Russians and Chinese migrant workers. In 1920, he became head of the GRU.

The short biographical sketch of Berzin in An Impeccable Spy contains some mistakes, but Matthews’s most important error is to seek to distinguish Berzin from the people he recruited. They, he claims, were idealists, dreamers, intellectuals, well-meaning types. Berzin, in contrast, was a ruthless, violent protégé of Dzerzhinsky, head of the much feared Cheka. Wrong. All the major achievements of the Fourth Department, as Soviet military intelligence came to be known (penetration of the British Foreign Office and intelligence in the 1920s, the creation of the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra, which had spies in the highest echelons of the German military both in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, and Sorge’s astonishing successes in Japan in the 1930s), were planned in detail by Berzin. In Great Game, his memoir of the period, Leopold Trepper, who co-ordinated the Rote Kapelle network in Belgium and France, writes that Berzin was ‘universally respected’. He ‘never left his men in the lurch, never would he have sacrificed a single one’. ‘To him, the agents were human beings and, above all, communists.’ He recounts a conversation between Berzin and Sorge, as reported to him by Sorge (all of them were taught how to memorise messages and conversations). Berzin, Trepper recalled, had summoned Sorge from China just after Hitler’s triumph in 1933. Berzin had no doubt as to the consequences of that victory. He cut to the chase:

BERZIN: What, in your opinion, is the greatest danger the Soviet Union faces at this time?

SORGE: Even if we grant a confrontation with Japan, I think the real threat comes from Nazi Germany.

BERZIN: Well that’s why we sent for you. We want you to take up residence in Japan.

SORGE: Why?

BERZIN: Rapprochement between Germany and Japan is coming; in Tokyo you will learn a great deal about military preparations.

SORGE: What? Go to Japan and become a spy? But I’m a journalist!

BERZIN: You say you don’t want to be a spy, but what’s your idea of a spy? What you call a ‘spy’ is a man who tries to get information about the weak points of the enemy so that his government can exploit them. We aren’t looking for war, but we want to know about the enemy’s preparations and detect the chinks in his armour so we won’t be caught short if he should attack. Our objective is for you to create a group in Japan determined to fight for peace. Your work will be to recruit important Japanese, and you will do everything in your power to see that their country is not dragged into a war against the Soviet Union.

SORGE: What name will I use?

BERZIN: Your own.

Sorge was stunned. Even Berzin’s assistants were taken aback, reminding their chief that Sorge had a police record in Germany. He had been a member of the German Communist Party at the end of the First World War before moving to the Soviet Union. Berzin knew it was risky to make Sorge play a German Nazi, but, as he argued,

a man always walks better in his own shoes. I’m also aware that the Nazis have just inherited the police files. But a lot of water will flow under the bridges of the Moskva before Sorge’s file comes to light … Even if the Nazis find out sooner than we expect, what’s to keep a man who was a communist 15 years ago from changing his political opinion?

Then he turned to an assistant: ‘Arrange to have him hired as the Tokyo correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung.’ ‘You see, this way you’ll feel at home and not as if you’re playing spy,’ he told Sorge.

Sorge went to Berlin in May 1933 and spent the next three months fulfilling the tasks set for him. He joined the Nazi Party, obtained a German passport – his profession declared as ‘journalist’ – and was accredited as the Tokyo correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. He made a favourable impression on the publisher and editor of Zeitschrift für Geopolitik and from them got letters of introduction to key figures in the German embassy in Tokyo and to useful Germans living in the city.

Similar instructions were given, possibly by Ludwik, the third of these Soviet spies, who probably recruited Kim Philby, to Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Philby dropped all his communist contacts and joined the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship, which made it easier for him to get access to Franco’s forces in Spain as a ‘journalist’. Berzin and Ludwik were both in Spain in 1936, in the hope that a victory for the Spanish Republic would weaken the Axis powers. It was not to be. Berzin was recalled to Moscow in June 1937 and resumed his post as head of military intelligence. To his enormous credit he confronted Stalin with the realities of the Spanish Civil War and registered strong complaints against the NKVD’s murders of dissident communists such as the POUM leader, Andrés Nin, and others on the left. He must have known what lay ahead. Arrested by the NKVD later that year, he was shot in the cellars of the Lubyanka in July 1938. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. Ludwik wrote to Stalin in July 1937, returning his medals, condemning the purges and the NKVD’s killings. He then went into hiding in Switzerland, but was tricked into a meeting with a fellow agent and murdered a few weeks later. Twenty years ago I met his son, who showed me his father’s bullet-pierced wallet.

Sorge avoided returning to Moscow, where he might well have met a similar fate, but as a disciplined cadre continued with his mission: whatever the cost, the Japanese empire must be prevented from joining the coming war against the Soviet Union. Most of his achievements are related in An Impeccable Spy. He quickly penetrated the German community of journalists and businessmen in Tokyo and became a close friend of General Eugen Ott, who was appointed Germany’s ambassador to Japan in 1938, and his wife, Helma, who had fallen in love with him (Ott knew Sorge was sleeping with his wife, but seems to have tolerated it in the belief that women found Sorge irresistible). The German embassy in Tokyo became a second base of operations for him. It was in the ambassador’s safe that he later discovered details of the plans for Operation Barbarossa – Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. He sent the information to Filipp Golikov in Moscow, where Stalin had wiped out most of his opponents in the Bolshevik Party, including almost every member of the 1917 Central Committee to which Berzin had belonged. Golikov, a timeserver by any standard, was in a state of permanent fright.

As Matthews reveals, Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Scholl of German military intelligence, who was stationed at the Tokyo embassy, returned from Berlin in May 1941. The news he brought back was sensational and Ott wasted no time in sharing it with Sorge. On 31 May, Sorge cabled Golikov:

Berlin informed Ott that the German attack will commence in the latter part of June. Ott 95 per cent certain that war will commence … Because of the existence of a powerful Red Army, Germany has no possibility to widen the sphere of war in Africa and has to maintain a large army in Eastern Europe. In order to eliminate all the dangers from the USSR side, Germany has to drive off the Red Army as soon as possible.

Ott had provided the barest of outlines, but Scholl provided the information in full: 170-180 mechanised divisions were already close to the Soviet border, he said, and the assault itself would encompass the entire front. The German general staff had few doubts that the Red Army would collapse and they would take Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. Hitler would then take over the Trans-Siberian railway and establish direct contact with the Japanese forces in Manchuria. Stalin, still basking in the so-called triumph of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, refused to believe any of it. ‘You can send your “source” … to his fucking mother,’ he told Golikov. On the message itself he scribbled: ‘Suspicious. To be listed with telegrams intended as provocations.’ (Matthews writes that in 1961 Golikov and Marshal Zhukov, whose troops had liberated Berlin, went to see the Moscow screening of a film called Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge? Afterwards, Zhukov confronted Golikov: ‘Why, Filipp Ivanovich, did you hide these reports from me? Why did you not report such information to the chief of the general staff?’ Golikov replied: ‘What if this Sorge was a double agent, both ours and theirs?)

At around the same time, Sorge found out from his Japanese contacts that Japan was not going to invade the Soviet Union and was instead targeting the United States. This enabled Moscow to withdraw crucial divisions from the Far East, helping to frustrate the German attack on Moscow. Sorge had got much of this information from Ozaki Hotsumi, a journalist close to the Japanese prime minister. ‘Considered simply as spies,’ Chalmers Johnson wrote in An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring, ‘Ozaki and his partner, Richard Sorge (PhD, Political Science, University of Hamburg, 8 August 1920), were possibly the most intellectually overqualified spies in modern history. Neither was a spy for financial gain; their motivations were political.’ Ozaki’s influence was based on his knowledge of Chinese politics and culture: he lived there for several years and wrote a number of sympathetic books and numerous essays on post-Sun Yat-sen China. For a while he had supported the notion of a Japanese-Chinese alliance that would drive the European empires out of Asia, but a closer look at the nationalists of the Kuomintang and the Japanese military leadership cured his illusions. Ozaki saw the KMT as clannish and corrupt, and predicted that the Chinese communists would ultimately defeat them. When Sorge suggested to Ozaki that he should argue for the entire Japanese army to be sent to China, where they would sooner or later be defeated, he presented this hallucinatory notion as allowing three victories: Japan’s defeat would open up the country to a revolutionary uprising; only the Chinese communists were capable of defeating the Japanese empire; the Soviet Union’s eastern border would be secured. Ozaki said bluntly that it was a bad idea, not worth the risk. Neither was aware that the hardcore military faction backed by the emperor was planning an attack on Pearl Harbor, a decision that meant restricting the number of armed forces they sent to China, ignoring the Soviet Union and concentrating on weakening American power in the Pacific.

*

Even without the Japanese opening a second front on the USSR’s eastern border, the Germans almost pulled off a victory. Sorge’s messages had been ignored, the best Soviet military leaders, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had been executed, and despite the military superiority of the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe almost took Moscow and Leningrad in the first wave attack. According to John Erickson, a historian of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky had carried out manoeuvres that predicted the lines of a German attack as early as 1933. In his last off the record question and answer session, restricted to senior Red Army officers, he again insisted that the Germans were preparing a military assault. They would strike suddenly, he said, and deploy everything available on land, sea and air to take the Red Army by surprise. He was accused of treason and shot in June 1937.

Contrary to popular legend, at no point did the Wehrmacht possess military superiority over the Red Army on the frontier. On the contrary, Soviet superiority was staggering: seven to one in tanks, with 24,600 in readiness against 3500 Panzers, four to one in planes. ‘As for the Blitzkrieg which is so propagandised by the Germans, this is directed towards an enemy who doesn’t want to and won’t fight it out,’ Tukhachevsky had claimed:

If the Germans meet an opponent who stands up and fights and takes the offensive himself, that would give a different aspect to things. The struggle would be bitter and protracted; by its very nature it would induce great fluctuations in the front on this or that side and in great depth. In the final resort, all would depend on who had the greater moral fibre and who at the close of the operations disposed of operational reserves in depth.

Unlike the Germans, who saw the Nazi-Soviet Pact as necessary but temporary, Stalin had illusions that it might be lasting. Matthews quotes from a 1966 interview with Zhukov, conducted by Lev Bezymensky, a Soviet historian and war veteran. In January 1941, Zhukov and others had warned Stalin of ominous German troop movements. Stalin wrote to Hitler, asking politely whether these reports were true. Hitler replied that they were, but he swore

on my honour as a head of state that my troops are deployed … for other purposes. The territories of Western and Central Germany are subject to heavy English bombing and are easily observed from the air by the English. Therefore I found it necessary to move large contingents of troops to the east where they can secretly reorganise and rearm.

Stalin believed him.

Zhukov told Bezymensky that in early June 1941 it was obvious to most of the high command that the Germans were preparing to invade. He had showed Stalin ‘staff maps with the locations of enemy troops entered on them’.

A few days passed and Stalin called for me … he opened a case on his desk and took out several sheets of paper. ‘Read,’ said Stalin … it was a letter from Stalin to Hitler in which he briefly outlined his concern over the German deployments … Stalin then said ‘Here is the answer’ … I cannot exactly reproduce Hitler’s words. But this I do remember precisely: I read the 14 June issue of Pravda and in it, to my amazement, I discovered the same words I had read in Hitler’s letter to Stalin.

It was Molotov who broke the news of the invasion to Soviet citizens. For a fortnight, Stalin made no public appearance. Finally, he addressed the nation. His speech was leaden at the start, but improved as he went on, even if its ideology and language were reminiscent of 1812 rather than 1917. He pledged fierce resistance and a scorched earth policy. As the emotional victory parade approached, when the captured flags and regimental banners of Nazi Germany were flung on the ground below Lenin’s mausoleum, he proposed a toast to the Russian people at the Kremlin banquet and made this apology:

Our government made not a few errors, we experienced at moments a desperate situation in 1941-42, when our army was retreating, abandoning our own villages and towns of the Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldova, the Leningrad region, the Baltic area and the Karelo-Finnish Republic, abandoning them because there was no other way out. A different people could have said to the government: ‘You have failed to justify our expectations. Go away. We shall install another government which will conclude peace with Germany …’ The Russian people, however, did not take this path … Thanks to it, to the Russian people, for this confidence!

In the updated 2001 edition of The Soviet High Command, Erickson makes clear that the Red Army’s response wasn’t a foregone conclusion:

The system lived perpetually on a narrow knife-edge. How frighteningly narrow was brought home to me in a singular exchange with Chief Marshal of Artillery N.N. Voronov … Knowing he was present at the very centre of events during the early hours of Sunday, 22 June, I asked him for his interpretation. His final remark was quite astonishing. He said that at about 7.30 a.m. the high command had received encouraging news: the Red Army was fighting back. The worst nightmare had already been overcome. Red Army soldiers had gone to war, ‘the system’ had responded and would respond.

Arming the people in Moscow and Leningrad prevented the fall of the two key cities of the revolution, and in Stalingrad and Kursk the Red Army broke the backbone of the Third Reich. Despite everything, Soviet resistance was decisive in defeating Hitler. The price was 27,000,000 dead, countless numbers disabled. Many who tried their best to ensure a victory at a lesser price had been killed before Barbarossa even began, murdered, in the words of Ludwik’s widow, ‘by our own people’.

Sorge had sent Golikov the details of Operation Barbarossa, but he was slandered and ignored. In October 1941, after the Japanese had become suspicious that a spy ring was in operation and had succeeded in intercepting some of Sorge’s messages, he and Ozaki were arrested. He spent two years in prison. The Japanese offered to exchange him three times but Stalin refused. He was hanged in Sugamo Prison in Tokyo on 7 November 1943, a few hours after Ozaki. It was the anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Trepper was arrested in Paris in December 1942 and a year later escaped from prison. After the liberation of Paris he made his way back to Moscow, where he was arrested as a double agent. He was released in May 1954, less than a year after Stalin’s death. He returned to his native Poland, though he had no family left there: the entire Jewish population of Nowy Targ had been put on a train to Auschwitz. But antisemitism persisted in Poland and he eventually left for Israel – where, unlike Berzin, Ludwik, Sorge and many others, he died a natural death. In the epilogue to his memoirs he writes: ‘I do not regret the commitment of my youth. I do not regret the paths I have taken … I know that youth will succeed where we have failed, that socialism will triumph, and that it will not have the colour of the Russian tanks that crushed Prague.’

A few months after Chalmers Johnson’s book was published in 1964 Sorge was rehabilitated and made a Hero of the Soviet Union. A Post-Constructivist statue of him was erected in his native Baku, and a postage stamp issued. When Yuri Andropov was head of the KGB and a member of the Politburo in the early 1980s, he called in a popular thriller writer called Julian Semyonov and gave him access to some of the files on Trepper and the Red Orchestra. In the resulting thriller, The Red Mole, the hero, Issaev, penetrates the highest levels of the Nazi hierarchy.?? Leonid Brezhnev was so taken by the book that he wanted Issaev to be honoured posthumously. Andropov had to explain that he was a fictional construct. Ludwik alone was left to bask in obscurity.

Originally published on the NYRB daily .

In an unsettled world, amid violent wars and imperial occupations, with all norms ruthlessly cast aside, did Kashmir really have a chance to be free? As unrest spreads, India, the vaunted “world’s largest democracy,” has imposed a total communications blackout. Kashmir is cut off from the world. With even the most conciliatory and collaborationist political leaders now under house arrest, one can only fear the worst for the rest of the region’s population.

For almost half a century, Kashmir has been ruled from Delhi with the utmost brutality. In 2009, the discovery of some 2,700 unmarked graves in three of the region’s twenty-two districts alone confirmed what had long been suspected: a decades-long history of disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Torture and rape of both women and men has been reported, but since the Indian Army is effectively above the law, its soldiers have impunity in perpetrating these atrocities and nobody can be charged with war crimes.

By way of contrast, in India’s far north-eastern state of Manipur, the local women constantly subjected to rape by Indian Army personnel reacted in 2004 with one of the most striking and memorable of public demonstrations—a group of twelve women and girls, aged from eight to eighty, stripped bare and paraded outside the local Indian Army headquarters carrying placards with the tauntingly sarcastic slogan “Come and Rape Us.” They were protesting the mutilation and execution, following her suspected gang rape, of thirty-two-year-old activist Thangjam Manorama by paramilitaries of the 17th Assam Rifles. Their Kashmiri peers, subjected to similar abuses and worse, have been too fearful to do the same.

Many women in Kashmir are scared to tell their own families of their ordeals at the hands of the Indian military, for fear of patriarchal reprisals at home in the name of “honor.” Angana Chatterji, then a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (and now a program co-chair at UC Berkeley), has described one appalling episode, uncovered by her fieldwork from 2006 to 2011 researching human rights abuses in Kashmir:

Many have been forced to witness the rape of women and girl family members. A mother who was reportedly commanded to watch her daughter’s rape by army personnel pleaded for her child’s release. They refused. She then pleaded that she could not watch and asked to be sent out of the room or else killed. The soldier put a gun to her forehead, stating that he would grant her wish, and shot her dead before they proceeded to rape her daughter.

Since the 1980s, India has pursued a colonial-style military occupation, replete with bribery, threats, state terrorism, disappearances, and so on. Clearly, the responsibility for this rests with the Indian government, but Delhi was assisted by the unutterable stupidity of the Pakistani generals and their Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency during the late 1980s and early 1990s. They mistook what was essentially a US cold war triumph against the Soviets in Afghanistan that used the Pakistanis and jihadists as pawns but left them genuinely believing that it was their victory. The jihadi groups responsible, then known as the mujahideen, had been treated by Reagan and Thatcher—not to mention liberal media outlets in the West—as “freedom-fighters.” This type of praise went to the heads of their ISI patrons. A similar exercise in Kashmir, Pakistan’s generals assumed, might lead to another win.

Pakistan was thus responsible for infiltrating jihadist fighters after their “success” in Afghanistan. In Kashmir, the result was a disaster. It helped destroy the social and cultural fabric of what had, until then, largely been a pacific Muslim culture strongly influenced by various forms of Sufi mysticism, and turned many Kashmiris against both governments. Thousands sought refuge elsewhere in India, while hundreds of school students and their families crossed over to Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Many of these subsequently sought military training. The armed insurgency of the 1990s was crushed by India’s superior force of arms.

Eventually, after the September 11, 2001 attacks exposed the folly of using jihadi proxies, Pakistan was forced by the US to dismantle the extremist networks it had unleashed in Kashmir. Local remnants remained, however, and served the purpose of  isolating the province from potential support elsewhere in the country. A good patriot turned a blind eye to what India’s government (whatever its complexion) and the army were up to in Kashmir.

The political discontent did not disappear. On June 11, 2010, the paramilitaries known as the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) fired tear-gas canisters at youthful demonstrators who were protesting against earlier killings by Indian-backed security forces. One of the canisters struck a seventeen-year-old boy named Tufail Ahmed Mattoo in the head, blowing out his brains. A photograph of the boy dead in the street was published in Kashmiri papers, though not elsewhere in India where the event was virtually ignored. A political rebellion erupted, with tens of thousands defying a curfew and marching behind Mattoo’s cortège, pledging revenge. In the weeks that followed, over a hundred more students and unemployed youth were killed. The hatred felt by many against the New Delhi government united Kashmiris of otherwise differing opinions.

Atrocity fatigue, however, sets in very quickly when the state responsible is considered a staunch ally. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, and Congo, India is now firmly established in this category. Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi, for example, are now passionate bedfellows, and Israeli “advisers” have been seen again in recent years in Kashmir—renewing the close intelligence and security cooperation that dates from the early 2000s. The revocation of Article 370, which protected Kashmir’s demography by restricting residency to Kashmiris alone and, under a sub-section known as Article 35A, forbade the sale of property to non-Kashmiris, and the planned division of Kashmir into three separate Bantustan statelets, bear hallmarks of the Israeli occupation in Palestine.

The dynamics of unconditional US support are also similar. From Kashmir’s point of view, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have all been on the same track—underplaying and overlooking state terrorism in the region because Foggy Bottom sees India as a strategic ally, offering potential economic rewards, proximity to China, and partnership in the “war on terror.” Modi, once disallowed a visa to the US as a punishment for the massacre of Muslims that took place in 2002 under his watch as chief minister in Gujarat, is today feted as a statesman not afraid to take tough decisions: an Indian mixture of Trump and Netanyahu.

*

The Kashmir conflict that led to two wars between India and Pakistan and untold repression in the province itself needs to be seen in historical perspective. The partition of India in 1947 took place on the basis that in the northern and eastern territories of British India, large provinces with mixed populations—Punjab and Bengal—would be divided along religious lines. The result was a bloodbath of communal violence that saw the deaths of over a million people and vast streams of refugees. Elsewhere, the 1947 agreement insisted that the colonial creation of  “princely states” governed without any pretense of democracy by British civil servants with maharajas as nominal rulers. The partition plan set out that in provinces where the ruler was Muslim but a bulk of the population comprised Hindus, the ruler would accede to India.

In Hyderabad, where the Nizam (the local monarch) delayed accession, the Indian Army marched in and settled the issue by force. In Kashmir, where the Maharaja Hari Singh was a Hindu but 80 percent of the population was Muslim, it was assumed that the ruler would sign the accession papers and the state would become part of Pakistan. But Singh dilly-dallied.

Pakistan’s army was then headed by the British General Douglas Gracey, who vetoed any use of force. Pakistan’s government despatched irregulars led by serving Muslim army officers and consisting largely of Pashtun tribesmen lacking in military discipline, to put it at its mildest. The two-day delay that caused looting and the raping of locals was fatal. A better-organized force could have taken Srinagar airport without resistance, and that might have been that. Instead, in October 1947, the Nehru government in Delhi, with the backing of its British commander-in-chief and the support of the peacenik Mahatma Gandhi, airlifted in Indian troops, pressured the maharaja to accede to India, and occupied the bulk of the province—“the snowy bosom of the Himalayas,” in Nehru’s words.

A war with Pakistan ensued. It was India that referred the issue to the United Nations, which demanded an immediate ceasefire, followed rapidly by a referendum on the region’s future status. In January 1949, a ceasefire line was agreed, with two-thirds of Kashmir remaining under Indian control. Throughout the 1950s, leading Congress Party politicians, including Nehru and Krishna Menon, pledged in public that they were committed to holding the plebiscite. This never happened because they felt politically insecure, were wracked by guilt, and could never be sure which way the people would turn—to India or to Pakistan. Democracy does have its problems.

Realizing the grotesqueness of the situation they had created, the politicians in Delhi inscribed into the Constitution Article 370, which, with its subsequent sub-sections, guaranteed Kashmir a rare degree of autonomy. This special status barred any non-Kashmiris from acquiring residency and property rights in the region. And, most important, the Indian government committed itself to holding a plebiscite—that is, a vote on according self-determination to Kashmiris to settle the maharaja’s fateful decision. This was the carrot offered to Sheikh Abdullah, the popular, pro-Congress Kashmiri leader who formed an interim government and accepted the temporary accession to India.

Abdullah, the son of a shawl trader, was already a legendary figure when India was divided. During the colonial period, he had fought for the social and political rights of his people, often quoting a subversive couplet from the poet Iqbal: “In the bitter chill of winter shivers his naked body / Whose skill wraps the rich in royal shawls.” Nehru understood at a very early stage that without the support of Sheikh Abdullah, who was a Muslim, nothing was possible in Kashmir. Yet conflict between them was inevitable.

Abdullah continued to demand the referendum, but Nehru stubbornly refused. They fell out, Abdullah was in and out of prison, and Kashmir was effectively governed from Delhi. Article 370, however, was never challenged—except, on the one side, by Pakistan that saw in the clause a permanent basis for Indian occupation, and on the other, by the far-right Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that gained global notoriety through its decision—which it defends to this day—to assassinate Gandhi in 1948.

In 1951, RSS cadres created the forerunner to the modern Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which, following the RSS’s example, always campaigned to “normalize” Kashmir. Today, India’s prime minister is himself a product of the RSS–BJP pipeline, trained from childhood as a paramilitary volunteer. Until now, though, successive BJP and, for that matter, Congress governments had left Article 370 intact, even as they intensified the repression in Kashmir and wrote the Indian Army a series of blank checks. Modi, whose party recently won re-election against a weak and divided opposition, has decided to go the whole way, hailing the revocation of Article 370 in an August 6 tweet:

I salute my sisters and brothers of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh [the new designation of three territories in the disputed region] for their courage and resilience. For years, vested interest groups who believed in emotional blackmail never cared for people’s empowerment. J&K is now free from their shackles. A new dawn, better tomorrow awaits!

That delusionary statement was revealing in its dishonesty: he left out the word Hindu before “sisters and brothers.”

What will happen now? The Congress and the parties to its left will bleat on about Article 370 and refuse to accept that it has been their own policies and silences that paved the way for Modi to push through his party’s demands. Fear and opportunism have silenced liberal India—not least the Muslim Bollywood stars who bend over backward to demonstrate their loyalty to this government, as they did to its Congress predecessors, not realizing that there are no “good Muslims” in the Modi lexicon. The same applies to most columnists in the Indian media and TV show hosts, as the writer Pankaj Mishra has complained:

A few Indian commentators have deplored, consistently and eloquently, India’s record of rigged elections and atrocity in the valley, even if they speak mainly in terms of defusing rather than heeding Kashmiri aspirations. But many more have tended to become nervous at the mention of disaffection in the Kashmir Valley. “I am not taking up that thorny question here,” Amartya Sen writes in a footnote devoted to Kashmir in The Argumentative Indian. In the more resonant context of a book titled Identity and Violence, Sen yet again relegates the subject to a footnote.

Modi has said that what he is doing is the only rational “Kashmir solution.” For him, it is the final political solution, and if the Muslims of Kashmir object, they will simply be crushed. Non-Kashmiri entrepreneurs are licking their chops in anticipation as they plan opening up the last frontier with all legal obstacles removed. And disgusting tweets from Brahmins (upper-caste Hindus) are celebrating the idea of settling there and “marrying Kashmiri girls,” and worse. In Pakistan, the government of Imran Khan has decided to withdraw its own ambassador and expel his Indian counterpart. Token measures and rude words are equally ineffective, but is the alternative another non-nuclear war? I doubt it very much. Neither the US nor China, both countries’ closest allies, would countenance such a move, and the IMF would immediately cancel its punitive loan to Pakistan.

The Palestinians have already suffered a terrible and historic defeat, but they have some support among citizens abroad, the BDS movement included. Modi and Netanyahu both stress that “normalization” largely means economic advance and imagine, as US presidential son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner’s “plan” for Palestine indicates, that a people’s political and national aspirations can simply be bought off with bribes. The whole history of anticolonial movements demonstrates otherwise, as do the more recent attempts at recolonization in the Arab world.

This past weekend, a Kashmiri lawyer working in London sent me a text: “I have not been able to connect to my family for six days now. The worst thing is that we are invisible to the world and not just in the West… look at the shameful conduct of the Arab governments and the open support given Modi by the UAE.” Despite India’s total information blackout, some images out of Kasmir are now appearing on YouTube. A mother weeping in a hospital ward as she fears for her son who has been shot and badly wounded. A shopkeeper describing how soldiers burst into his premises and opened fire for no reason at all. Images of deserted streets. I fear that the Kashmiri people, isolated from and by the world, are smelling the night air on the edge of the abyss.

Originally published on the LRB blog.

That Narendra Modi would win again was never really in dispute. The only question was whether the Bharatiya Janata Party would be forced to seek coalition partners in the Lok Sabha, or repeat its astonishing success of 2014 and govern alone. The main opposition, the Congress, turned the campaign into a referendum on Modi. Could the tea-seller’s son, they asked, an untutored, uncouth, bigoted, small-town petit-bourgeois (who can’t even speak English) be trusted again? India’s electorate has now provided the answer. They love their Modi. The BJP-dominated alliance has 351 seats, the Congress alternative 95. Another landslide victory for the orchestrator of pogroms against Muslims. Hardly a surprise that Modi, Trump and Netanyahu share electoral affinities.

Modi’s triumph is unpalatable to the metropolitan liberal elite and many on its left. But they need to ask themselves some tough questions. In the decade before the BJP came to power, the Congress pioneered neo-liberalism under a caretaker PM, Manmohan Singh (as he waited for the Nehru-Gandhi kids to grow up and claim their inheritance); it often competed with the BJP in fanning anti-minority prejudice in Gujarat and elsewhere. India’s liberals and some on the left hold similar positions to Modi on Kashmir, class inequalities and the institutionalised discrimination against Muslims that started soon after Partition and is now worse than ever.

Many commentators have written that Modi’s electoral victory was helped by a ‘surgical’ attack on Pakistan in February after a terrorist assault in Kashmir that killed Indian soldiers and led to a surge in military-style clothes. But the India military response was a disaster: they lost a plane and targeted an empty camp. The fact is that a majority of Indian voters preferred the BJP to the national opposition. Despite economic problems and mass youth unemployment, they preferred Modi to the remnants of a crumbling dynasty.

The BJP, and its parent RSS, are now pacemakers, embedded in the heart of a modernising Indian state. And they are using all its resources to impose their ideology and punish those who do not conform. History is a crucial battleground. They have not yet burned the books of Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib or Arundhati Roy. But most mainstream publishers will be scared away from publishing critical, scholarly works on the origins and development of Hinduism, the RSS etc. This has already happened and will get much worse.

What of secularism? As many Indian writers have argued over the years, the idea of secularism was limited to defending and tolerating all religions equally and without discrimination. This was not a variant of French or Turkish republicanism, but an expression of intent. It was never implemented. India’s Muslims have suffered on many levels, but ‘secularism’ was also used by the clergy and the Muslim elite to prevent any reforms on divorce and other gender-related issue. While Pakistan reformed its divorce laws, nothing changed in India. The BJP leaders use this as yet another weapon against Muslims, conveniently overlooking Hindu restrictions on women entering temples and much else.

The Maharajas of Indian capitalism – Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata among them – have had no problems working with Modi. They have given a great deal of money to the BJP.

Congress seems a busted flush. At the very least it needs to get rid of the dynasty. The Nehru-Gandhi magic has gone. But will Shashi Tharoor and other modernisers be capable of taking on the BJP by offering another vision for India? it looks unlikely at the moment. Elsewhere regional parties continue to rule the roost. In three states – Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana – parties built by non-Hindi popular movie stars (pre-Reagan) dominate the scene, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Bollywood is now trying to mimic this success with appalling movies that effectively defend the new ‘national culture’: chauvinism, glorification of the military, gratutious appearances by Hindu gods and the worship of money are common themes, marking a break with the culture of previous decades.

There are exceptions. I just re-watched Newton, a wonderful, satirical indy movie directed by Amit Masurkar. Made in 2017, it’s a send-up of Indian elections and politicians. Newton Kumar (played by Rajkummar Rao) is a rookie clerk sent to monitor and supervise voting in Chhattisgarh in central India, where an ongoing Maoist insurgency has led to pitched battles between peasants and the security forces. Newton has to endure a Democracy workshop where he is informed that an election costs five billion rupees, there are nine million polling booths, 840 million people vote and ‘we break our own records every year.’

The movie opens with an election in progress and a BJP type politician entering a small town. ‘I am not here to seek your votes!’ he shouts unconvincingly. ‘Don’t vote for me. My dream is to see every child with a laptop in their right hand and a cellphone in their left. The Commies quote parables. I perform miracles.’ A power cut soon follows. Because the roads are unsafe, Newton is flown to the polling booth in a helicopter. The village has largely been destroyed by the security forces and finally people are forced to vote by the police. A visiting journalist from the United States is impressed. Whatever else, she thinks, this is the world’s largest democracy.

I’ve been to see Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy several times, mainly when Rafael Correa was President and the Embassy felt like a liberated space. A few weeks ago I met him again. By now Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, had capitulated on every level to the American Empire. The Embassy became a prison and Assange’s health deteriorated. He was in no doubt that Moreno had been asked and had agreed to expel him from the Embassy. The US demand for extradition was no longer a secret. The Embassy handed him over to the British police earlier today.

If we lived in a world where laws were respected, then Assange would be charged with jumping bail (a minor offense), fined or kept in prison for a few weeks and then released to return to his native Australia. But both the UK and Australia are, effectively, imperial satrapies and likely to bow to US demands. The secret and not-so-secret state in both countries work closely with (or under) its US masters. Why do they want him so badly? To set an example. To incarcerate and isolate him as a warning to others not to follow the Wikileaks path. Chelsea Manning has been re-arrested because she refused to testify to a Grand Jury against him. Since the Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies are pretty much aware of what the US is up to in most parts of the world, the threat posed by Wikileaks was that it made its information available to any citizen, anywhere in the world, who possessed a computer. US/EU foreign policy and its post 9/11 wars have been based on lies, promoted by global TV and media networks and often accepted by a majority of North American and European citizens. Information contradicting these lies challenges the stated motives for war — human rights, democracy, freedom, etc.

Wikileaks has been exposing all this by publishing classified documents that shine a light on the real reasons. It is an astonishing record. Till now WikiLeaks has published almost 3 million diplomatic cables and other US State Department records, comprising some two billion plus words. This stupendous and seemingly insurmountable body of internal state literature, which if printed would amount to some 30,000 volumes, represents something new in the world. This is where the Internet becomes a subversive force, challenging the propaganda networks of the existing order. Assange and his colleagues made no secret that their principal target was the American Empire and its global operations. The response of US institutions has been hysterical and comical. The Library of Congress, blocked Internet access to WikiLeaks. The US National Archives even blocked searches of its own database for the phrase “WikiLeaks.” So absurd did the taboo become that, like a dog snapping mindlessly at everything, eventually it found its mark — its own tail. As Julian Assange pointed out: “By March 2012, the Pentagon had gone so far as to create an automatic filter to block any emails, including inbound emails to the Pentagon, containing the word ‘WikiLeaks.'” As a result, Pentagon prosecutors preparing the case against US intelligence analyst PFC Manning, the alleged source of the Cablegate cables, found that they were not receiving important emails from either the judge or the defense.

The British government is insisting that they will follow the law. We shall see. The US Department of Justice has stated that Assange could face five years in a US prison. Diane Abbot, a leading member of Jerremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, said in parliament today:

“On this side of the house, we want to make the point that the reason we are debating Julian Assange this afternoon – even though the only charge he may face in this country is in relation to his bail hearings – is entirely to do with the whistleblowing activities of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. It is this whistleblowing activity into illegal wars, mass murder, murder of civilians and corruption on a grand scale that has put Julian Assange in the crosshairs of the US administration. It is for this reason that they have once more issued an extradition warrant against Julian Assange … Julian Assange is not being pursued to protect US national security, he is being pursued because he has exposed wrongdoing by US administrations and their military forces.”

We will learn more in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime, Wikileaks and its founder expect and deserve the solidarity of all those of us who believe that citizens should not be treated like children and that most politicians in the US/EU orbit are untrustworthy and hate their lies and corruptions being exposed.

Exactly four years ago I wrote a piece for the LRB on Corbyn’s victory:

“The establishment decided to wheel out the chief of defence staff, Sir Nicholas Houghton. Interviewed on 8 November, he confided to a purring Andrew Marr that the army was deeply vexed by Corbyn’s unilateralism, which damaged ‘the credibility of deterrence’. On the same show, Maria Eagle, a PLP sniper with a seat on the front bench as the shadow defence secretary, essentially told Marr that she agreed with the general. Just another day in the war against Corbyn. The Sunday Times had previously run an anonymous interview with ‘a senior serving general’. ‘Feelings are running very high within the armed forces,’ the general was quoted as saying, about the very idea of a Corbyn government. ‘You would see … generals directly and publicly challenging Corbyn over … Trident, pulling out of Nato and any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces … There would be mass resignations at all levels … which would effectively be a mutiny. You can’t put a maverick in charge of a country’s security.’ If anything expressed the debasement of Britain’s political culture it was the lack of reaction to this military interference in politics. When Corbyn tried to complain, a former Tory grandee, Ken Clarke, declared that the army was not answerable to Parliament, but to the queen. Anything but Corbyn: even a banana monarchy.”

So the Paras in Kabul, known locally as the testicles of the US (why are they still there?) have been venting their bitternesses with an image of Corbyn as a target. Crocodile tears from the MOD will convince nobody. The cancer has spread from the top.

I recall in 1971 walking to a meeting in London with an Iraqi Marxist friend. We were interrupted by another Iraqi, a cousin. His face paled on seeing me. He spoke in Arabic, shook hands with both of us and hurried away. It emerged he was at Sandhurst (where Saddam’s officers were being trained) and some weeks ago to illustrate an anti-insurgency lecture they had been shown a Vietnam demo in Grosvenor Square. I was targeted in the demonstration and they were taught how the ring-leaders must be shot first. Seeing me in the flesh had slightly unnerved the young Iraqi. Several months later the paras made themselves famous by killing the Irish on Bloody Sunday. Now, as a recreation in between other tortures and killings, they’re practicing killing Corbyn.

The Black Dwarf  was announced with a free broadsheet on 1 May 1968 and published four weeks later. The inspiration was the struggle of the Vietnamese liberation movement against American imperialism that had taken over territories from the European colonial powers. The Tet offensive by the Vietnamese NLF (National Liberation Front) that year had witnessed an assault on most of the provincial capitals in occupied South Vietnam which culminated with a surprise assault on the US Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh city), where the stars and stripes were lowered and the NLF flag hoisted. This symbolism, as well as real gains on the ground, marked the beginning of the end of the US war. The game was up. The tortures, use of chemical weapons, destruction of the ecology by defoliants carried on for another seven years. Imperial narcissism knows no boundaries. It was the Tet offensive that boosted the anti-war movements in the United States and across the world.

In Britain the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign grew rapidly. In October 1967, 10,000 marchers came close to entering the US embassy. In March 1968 contingents from the German SDS and the French JCR joined us as 30,000 people mobilised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign surrounded the US Embassy in London.  We had been baton-charged by mounted police (‘The Cossacks, the Cossacks’ was our cry as we edged forward thinking of Vietnam and Petrograd 1917). Mick Jagger, marching with us, angered by police brutalities, thought we should have answered force with force. Britain was hopeless. A few months later he wrote Streetfighting Man. Culture was intervening in politics.

‘Hey! think the time is right for a palace revolution, but where I live the game to play is compromise solution

Hey, said my name is called Disturbance; I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the King, I’ll rail at all his servants’

The BBC refused to play it. He scribbled a note ‘For you!’ and sent it to me with the song. We published the lyrics in The Black Dwarf, aligned with a text by Engels on street fighting. A debate on the new music and the new mood erupted briefly in the New Left Review with Richard Merton (Perry Anderson’s nom-de-plume) arguing that:

“… it is incorrect to say that the Stones are ‘not major innovators’. Perhaps a polarization Stones-Beatles such as Adorno constructed between Schoenberg and Stravinsky (evoked by Beckett) might actually be a fruitful exercise. Suffice it to say here that, for all their intelligence and refinement, the Beatles have never strayed much beyond the strict limits of romantic convention: central moments of their oeuvre are nostalgia and whimsy, both eminently consecrated traditions of middle-class England…By contrast, the Stones have refused the given orthodoxy of pop music; their work is a dark and veridical negation of it. It is an astonishing fact that there is virtually not one Jagger-Richards composition which is conventionally about a ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ personal relationship. Love, jealousy and lament—the substance of 85 per cent of traditional pop music—are missing. Sexual exploitation, mental disintegration and physical immersion are their substitutes.”

In Britain music, in France cinema, were the auguries of what was about to come.

VSC broke with the more traditional opposition to the war. It declared its solidarity with NLF and supported its victory. Whereas the old New Left had launched CND and developed a ‘third camp’ position, the VSC responded to the conjuncture. The NLF was created, led by the Vietnamese Communist Party. It was armed by the Soviet Union and China. At one point, Bertrand Russell, distinguished VSC sponsor, wrote an open letter to Leonid Brezhnev, then leader of the Soviet Union, demanding that the Soviet Air Force be dispatched to defend the Vietnamese.

This was the political context in which The Black Dwarf was launched. It was conceived as a political-cultural weekly. The idea came from Clive Goodwin, a radical literary agent who became the publisher. The first meeting to discuss the paper took place at his house on 79 Cromwell Road. The room was lit by Pauline Boty’s paintings. She had been married to Clive and died of leukaemia in 1963. Present were Clive, the poets Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell, the playwright David Mercer, Margaret Mattheson, BBC script editor Roger Smith, D.A.N. Jones (who we wanted to be editor) and myself. Behind the scenes were Kenneth Tynan (who offered to review the House of Commons, but didn’t), Ken Trodd and Tony Garnett. We all agreed it was a great idea. Christopher Logue was sent off to look at old radical journals in the British Museum. The following week he returned with the name: The Black Dwarf. It was a polemical paper edited by Thomas Wooler in 1817 and agitating viciously and satirically for electoral and parliamentary reform. The title was inspired by the stunted bodies and soot-stained faces of coal miners.

Communication was slow in those days and it wasn’t till late afternoon on 9 May 1968 that we got news that something serious might erupt in Paris. The Sorbonne had been occupied! Five thousand people were packing the amphitheatre. Action Committees of various sorts were sprouting like magic mushrooms. The isolation of the Nanterre March 22 Committee had been broken. Of its two principal inspirers, Daniel Bensaid died some years ago, steadfast as ever, while the other Daniel (I think his last name was Cohn-Bendit) died politically. His corpse, I’m reliably informed, is currently on guard duty at the Elysee cemetery. He now regards Macron as the true representative of ’68. We published Sartre’s remarks to the Sorbonne students in the amphitheatre:

“Something has emerged from you which surprised, which astonishes and which denies everything which has made our society what it is today. That is what I would call the extension of the field of possibility. Do not give up.”

The night of the barricades on 10 May set France on fire. Soon the whole country was involved and 10 million workers went on strike, occupying factories in Rouen, Nantes, Paris, Lyon, etc. It seemed as if the Paris Commune had been reborn. As the first issue was brought to us, I thought the cover chosen by D.A.N. Jones was too weak and watery. We needed to identify with the movement. On a scrappy piece of paper, I wrote: ‘We Shall Fight, We Will Win, Paris, London, Rome, Berlin’ and handed it to our designer, Robin Fior. Everyone except Jones agreed. We decided to pulp 20,000 copies of the first issue. Jones walked out and I was appointed editor.

In our May Day broadsheet in 1968 we had described the first Editor of the old paper thus:

“Tom Wooler was a clever and humorous man. He edited a great left-wing paper which closed down 140 years ago…He was a printer from Sheffield with an office in Fleet Street. When he was charged with writing seditious and libellous material (they said he had libelled King Richard II) he explained that he hadn’t written a word. He had simply set it up in print!”

He was acquitted but forced a change in the law. Henceforth printers became liable as well. Ironically our Black Dwarf was rejected by almost a hundred printers and we finally ended up taking the train to a printer in Bala, North Wales the only printshop prepared to do the job. It was the same with distributors. They rejected us en masse. Only the great Collets’ bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London and a few radical bookstores elsewhere in the country (all gone now) stocked the magazine. We were dependent on street sellers and Mick Shrapnell a VSC/hippy militant used to sell 500 copies on his own. The musical Hair , a huge West End hit, helped with the lead actress displaying the latest issue on stage in every performance. Our supporters in the painting fraternity: David Hockney, Ron Kitaj, Jim Dine, Felix Topolski didn’t have much dosh but donated paintings that we auctioned. Other donors would drop in with much needed cash. We managed to print 45 issues of the paper and were amongst the first to declare 1969 as the ‘Year of the Militant Woman?’ with Sheila Rowbotham’s stunning manifesto. I had told the designer David Wills that it should be designed like an old-fashioned manifesto. The unreconstructed pig tried to subvert the message by placing the manifesto on two gigantic breasts. Sheila rang in a state as she saw the proofs. I rushed over, had it changed and sacked Wills on the spot afterwards. These things happened.

Politics was getting polarised and a number of the staff and EB members split on my decision to publish three pages from dissident ANC guerrillas who had been tortured and denounced by their leaders simply for asking critical questions of overall strategy and tactics. I was convinced they were genuine. Supporters of the ANC leadership were horrified when the magazine appeared. Thabo Mbeki led a squad of supporters to buy up all our copies in Collets. We reprinted. But the vote had revealed a division between Trotskyists and the others and a split took place. Was it avoidable? Probably, but left politics was becoming more and more polarised after the French May and the Prague Spring. A group of us left and established The Red Mole, much more linked to the IMG [International Marxist Group]. Another problem was lack of funds. We were in trouble anyway but the split was regrettable. The non-Trotskyists set up Seven Days , a paper I liked very much which should have survived.

The Black Dwarf and Seven Days are now digitalised in full and made available by the Amiel-Melburn Trust archive, an extremely valuable resource.

1968 was one of the most seismic years in recent history — Vietnam, the Prague spring, Black Power at the Olympics and protests on the streets of Paris and London so this evening’s programme — Rana Mitter’sextended interview with Tariq Ali — is part commemoration, part reassessment. What remains of that turbulent time and where can we discern its features in our political landscape today? Rana takes Tariq back to his life as a boy in Lahore – a city where his radical parents regularly hosted the likes of Pakistan’s great 20th century poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and brings him via his first hand experience of wartime Vietnam and his intellectual engagement with the Russian revolution to the present where he offers assessments of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn and the US President, Donald Trump. There’s time too for a diversion into literature. Tariq shares his love of Kipling and in the longer version of the interview available as one of our Arts and Ideas podcasts – he reads from his novel Night of the Golden Butterfly featuring a character based on the painter, Tassaduq Sohail.

Tariq Ali has chosen a mixtape for Radio 3’s Late Junction broadcast this week.

As part of Radio 4’s Breaking Free: A Century of Russian Culture series, Tariq Ali recalls a tour of Constructivist Moscow in the 1980s that introduced him to the work of revolutionary architect Moisei Ginzburg.