The Lost World of British Communism: Life and soul of the party

It's fashionable now to talk about British communism in the tone one might use for the Inquisition: something dreadful, but long dead. Even former communists often pass it off as a shameful indiscretion, only excused by youth and naivety.

But Raphael Samuel, one of Britain's most interesting historians, though he left the party (it was always just "the party" to those close to it) in 1956, never regretted, or felt the need to apologise for, the years he spent trying to convert his schoolfellows to communism. In the 1980s he was amused, but not ashamed, by the young man he had been, who "attempted to 'clarify' an aunt and uncle who were 'confused' about Yugoslavia and had come to doubt the Moscow trials".

These essays have been collected to mark the 10th anniversary of Samuel's death on December 9 1996, when he was 62 and at the height of his powers. (The publisher's promise on the press release that "The author is available for interview" will be hard to keep.) They describe the Communist party of the 1940s from the vantage point of the 1980s. The pressure to adopt the "how could I have been so blind?" tone was nothing like as strong then as it is now. In 1985 you could still say "I used to be a communist" or even "I'm still a communist" in almost any company. So these essays are as illuminating about the decade in which they were written as the decade they describe. They also have interesting things to say about what, in the 1980s, one was still allowed to call "the labour movement", of which the Communist party saw itself as a key part.

Even when they have broken away, the children of communists, as Samuel was, still share ways of thinking that the rest of the world does not understand, like former Catholics. Earlier this year I found myself chairing a debate about British communism and - as it turned out - mediating between two of the panellists, Bea Campbell and David Aaronovitch, writers, former communists, and the children of communists. I did this clumsily (and made things rather worse) because the sudden conflagration caught me by surprise. I did not share their past, and did not anticipate, or even quite understand, their hostility to each other.

Samuel describes, with wonderful anecdotes and supporting detail, a top-down organisation in which ultimate authority stemmed from the Comintern - the Communist International, firmly controlled by Stalin - and in which policies and strategies filtered down through the national executive to the rank and file.

He describes the rigidity of party discipline, quoting a worried letter sent in 1926 from the party secretary in St Pancras to the London District asking for advice: "... Mrs Kingston, although she has passed party training, and is therefore a full member of the party, does not accept the materialist conception of history, and she believes that communism is founded on idealism and not on materialism ... She is trying to form a group of people who think the same." The secretary had tried to reason with Mrs Kingston, but without success.

Communists were ambassadors for the party. So they were always soberly dressed and, according to Samuel, always sober, too. I wonder if he knew that the party leader, Harry Pollitt, loved his whisky, which was brought to him in a teacup whenever the abstemious Communist MP Willie Gallacher was present; or that the first chairman, Arthur MacManus, died young of alcoholism. MacManus had the honour of being buried in the walls of the Kremlin, the scene of many evenings when he out-drank even the hard-drinking Russians.

Fast-forward to the 1980s. Samuel's insights into the state of left-wing politics under Thatcher are some of the best things in this book, all the better for having been written at the time, not glimpsed through the prism of the new millennium.

The Communist party was by then divided into two warring camps, the old class warriors whom he remembered from his childhood, and the young men and women of Marxism Today. His sympathies were mostly with the old guard. He looked back on the ideologues of his childhood, not with the newly fashionable scorn, but with respect and affection. It was Marxism Today, he says, that reproduced the party's worst characteristics - its intolerance and ideological rigidity. "For the first time in its history the party is staging something approaching a full-scale purge. It is an odd way to celebrate the advent of pluralism," he writes.

The old guard talked of "correct politics". The Young Turks talked of "political correctness" (this was before every boring right-wing columnist tried to make himself interesting by saying he was "non-PC"). When correct politics clashed with political correctness, the explosion blew away the party of Samuel's youth. But you can't know the times without knowing the party, and Samuel makes a fascinating guide to it.

• Francis Beckett's Stalin's British Victims is published by Sutton.