Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left

The Labour Party welcomed the Russian Revolution of October 1917. For the following two decades it enthusiastically supported the Soviet 'great experiment', excusing all its excesses, and prepared to bring about its own socialist revolution in Britain. In 1929, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to labour camps in the Russian far north. There, in appalling conditions, thousands died. But when British protesters called on the Labour government to halt the import of timber cut by those slave labourers, it refused. In private, the Cabinet acknowledged the truth but blocked appeals for an inquiry. In public, it dismissed the protests as a stunt fabricated by the Tories. Eyewitness accounts were rejected, diplomatic despatches ignored, and Soviet denials repeated as fact. One Labour minister even called it 'a remarkable economic experiment' and declared that the Soviets should be left to pursue it 'without outside interference'. Labour and the Gulag uncovers a dark chapter in British Labour history. It tells the story of the party's seduction by the allure of a socialist utopia and the moral compromises that followed.On the centenary of the revolution and as the hard left's influence in the party grows again, it offers stark lessons for the future.

About the Author :
Giles Udy is a historian who has spent the past fifteen years studying Soviet Communism, with a particular focus on the repression of its citizens and its sponsorship of revolution and subversion abroad. In the process, he has acquired wider expertise in relation to Russia and Eastern Europe today - where, as the Russian Federation seeks to re-establish itself as an imperial power, the parallels with the Soviet era are many.His original work was on the Soviet gulag and in pursuit of that research he has travelled thousands of miles across Russia, visiting some of the most isolated parts of the country. Labour and the Gulag began as a chapter in that book.He is a member of the council of the Keston Institute, Oxford, holds an MBA from the Cass Business School in London and, among his more unusual skills, was at one time qualified to take the helm of a supertanker.

Review :
"Giles Udy has written a compelling work of history - at once scrupulous, angry and humane. He tells the story of Soviet barbarism and the British Labour Party's compromised response to Stalin's outrages with a masterly eye for detail and an unflinching commitment to the truth. This history reminds us all of the vital need to maintain a clear-eyed and robust approach towards regimes which deny their people liberty and it underlines how much the Labour Party has depended on sensible working-class voices such as Ernest Bevin to stay on the side of progress." - Michael Gove; "Enormous efforts continue to be made to ensure the evils of Nazism are not forgotten - and rightly so. In contrast, little is done to educate people about the nature and scale of Communism's horrors. And while Nazism's most prominent appeasers remain infamous, even to this day, those who repeatedly excused Communism's excesses or even pretended they didn't exist at all have been spared judgement. This book changes that - at least for Britain's left. Giles Udy's masterpiece records the evils committed under that bloody red flag kept 'flying here' and the fellow travelling of large numbers of leading Labour politicians." - Tim Montgomerie; "Giles Udy's book is a scholarly and passionate indictment of Labour's complicity with Soviet oppression. Investigating new archives, this is an important book on how a 'progressive' approach to foreign policy can conceal systematic murder on a vast scale." - (Lord) Maurice Glasman, Labour life peer; "In Giles Udy's meticulous account of the British left's attitude to Bolshevik terror in Russia and elsewhere, villains abound, and not just among the murderous zealots in Moscow. He leaves the interwar Labour movement, and its latter-day defenders, sizzling on a skewer." - The Times