Maxton Papers

Materials dating from 1931-1940

Letter from Malcolm Muggeridge to James Maxton, 8 Apr 1933

The journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote this letter to Maxton in April 1933, shortly after Muggeridge had returned from a six-month stint in the Soviet Union as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. While there, Muggeridge had been one of the few Western journalists to have circumvented Soviet restrictions and visited the famine regions of the Ukraine and North Caucusus, formerly rich agricultural lands known as the 'bread basket of Russia'. What Muggeridge witnessed horrified him, and in a series of articles smuggled out in the diplomatic pouch he described a systematic man-made famine that had become a holocaust.

Initially few believed Muggeridge, and his dispatches were severely edited. Obliged by the revelations in his news reports to leave Russia prior to their publication over three days in late March 1933, he was vilified, slandered and abused in left-wing circles, not least in the pages of the Manchester Guardian. Sympathy for what was called 'the great Soviet experiment' was widespread among its readership and this put pressure in turn on the editorial staff with whom Malcolm parted company.

Within months, however, the truth about the effects of Stalin's collectivisation policies increasingly leaked out of the Soviet Union, and the vindicated Muggeridge launched a stinging attack on the British left-wing intelligentsia. He criticised them for their blind loyalty towards, and enormous sympathy for, an authoritarian regime, and controversially stated that the left wing and liberal intelligentsia had not simply overlooked the regime's brutality, but had actually admired it. His experiences in Russia were fully described in a novel entitled 'Winter in Moscow' - this form of narrative reporting enabling him to protect his sources in Moscow. This period coincided with the rise of National Socialism in Germany - Hitler had recently become Chancellor. Whatever the dire situation developing in Russia under Stalin, the foreign policy of the British Government was in trying to maintain Russia as an ally - a policy that ultimately was to fail.

Source: Glasgow City Archives