What was it like growing up as the children of communist parents in the post-war period? In Children of the Revolution, Phil Cohen interviews men and women from a wide range of communist backgrounds, including comedian Alexei Sayle, Guardian journalist Martin Kettle and Brian Pollitt, son of veteran Stalinist leader Harry Pollitt.
Many of the interviewees had a marked sense of being different from other children. Some were embarrassed by their parents' public communist activities. Many went on holiday to eastern Europe while their peers went to Blackpool. Jackie Kay remembers, aged seven, writing about her father in an essay: "My dad is a party man, he organises parties." Gillian Slovo's foreword also expresses a sense of feeling "special", both proud of what her parents did and yet hiding it as if ashamed. She discusses two themes that recur in the book: the conflict between family life and party work and how some household issues had ideological connotations. "My parents had standards," she writes, "and they stuck to them - not standards of personal behaviour which could be restricted to an individual, but a morality that embraced a nation. For a child it was a hard act to follow. How could we not applaud their selflessness? But at the same time how could it not dawn on us that it was this very generosity to others that deprived us of our parents?"
Many write of their parents' almost religious faith in the Soviet Union, others on how their communism fostered a puritanical approach to moral issues. Alexei Sayle, in a somewhat bitter contribution, suggests this led to double standards: communist fathers who used the "cause" to escape family commitments, to philander or go "drinking with the proletariat." Some describe a more menacing interference by the party in their lives. Martin Jones' father moved the whole family to East Germany soon after World War Two, and would enlist the party-state authorities to push his adolescent children down a chosen career path.
Many talk of the party as one big extended family, although when members left, as over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, they were often excommunicated from the family circle. Martin Kettle, who joined the Communist Party at university observed that for him this "wasn't so much about becoming an adult as staying a child."
Unwavering faith in the loveliness of the Soviet Union, despite its historic collapse, also features in Andrew Murray's Flashpoint: World War Three. Sadly this is quite a flaw for a book about international relations. Murray has assembled some useful material about the limits of globalisation, the relative strength of the world's trading blocs, Germany's growing economic influence in eastern Europe and the increasingly parasitic nature of the British economy's external operations. But his analysis is vitiated by his crude taking of sides and his eagerness to attribute the "smashing up" of the Soviet Union to imperialist plots rather than internal degeneration. His propensity to see the USSR as a force exclusively for good on the world stage, even bringing "revolutionary government" to Afghanistan, makes one doubt his grip on reality. Similarly he ridicules Thatcher's seminar in 1990 on the German "national character", while himself arguing that Germany is pursuing the same policies in central Europe today as it did during World War Two. This leads on to a parroting of the pernicious myth that Germany's desire to recognise an independent Croatia was the real cause of the war in former Yugoslavia. There's little to be salvaged here amid the quotations from Stalin and Palme Dutt: a great pity because we do need a serious analysis of the New World Order.
Devotees of the Russian Revolution will also be interested in Dispatches from the Revolution. Writer Morgan Philips Price was a Liberal MP until 1915, a member of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1924 and Labour MP for the Forest of Dean from 1935 to 1959. This book collects edited highlights of his first-hand reports of events in Russia 1916-18 when he became an active supporter of the new Soviet Government.
The book includes a remarkable debate between Lenin and Provisional Government leader Kerensky at the First Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies in June 1917. He contrasts this with Cossack provincial assemblies where the majority of speakers were officers - barred in the more advanced Soldiers' Councils - and where socialist speeches from the rank and file were greeted with shouts of "disgraceful insubordination!" In fact a great strength of the book is its coverage of events away from the capital, including the emergent women's movement in Kazan and its campaign against poly-gamy and the veil.
The book's chief interest, however, lies in what Price could not get published at the time. The British Government imposed "D notices" on reports that were critical of the Tsarist Russian army, Britain's allies in World War One. In particular, news of military atrocities against Jews, including the razing of entire villages, was suppressed as part of the war effort.
Official secrecy is the main concern of another Pluto offering, Ann Rogers' Secrecy and Power in the British state. With New Labour shelving its manifesto commitment to introduce freedom of information, this short history is very timely. Britain has long been one of the most secretive countries in the western world and the 1911 Official Secrets Act, rushed through in a climate of anti-German hysteria, was for the next 80 years the cornerstone of this policy. It effectively outlawed any disclosure of the workings of government to the public or media.
The book discusses the collapse of the high-profile cases of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Clive Ponting's leaking of information on the sinking of the Argentinean cruiser Belgrano to the Select Committee investigating the Falklands War, and the publication of MI5 agent Peter Wright's memoir Spycatcher. These cases effectively discredited the Act. It's worth recalling too how the Guardian, currently basking in the success of its exposés of Tory MPs' corruption, was not always so unswerving in its defence of press freedom. When junior civil servant Sarah Tisdall leaked documents about the arrival of Cruise missiles at Greenham Common airbase, the Guardian caved in to pressure to disclose its source to the authorities; Tisdall got a six month sentence.
The book's weakness is its failure to bring the story up to date. The Official Secrets Act was rewritten in 1989 - vaunted as a liberalisation at the time. In fact it closed loopholes, specifically outlawing both the "public interest" defence which Ponting used to secure his acquittal, and the defence of prior publication elsewhere - the key argument that made the prosecution of Spycatcher so laughable.
A culture of secrecy and an absence of a statutory "right to know" in Britain has also helped cover up the truth about nuclear accidents. John O'Dea's book Exposure: living with radiation in Ireland makes clear the links between the two countries. The Irish Sea receives regular discharges from the Sellafield reprocessing plant, formerly Windscale, scene of Britain's worst known nuclear accident, and is believed to be the most radioactive sea in the world. In Ireland itself, 20% of deaths are due to some form of cancer. The book explains the science behind different types of radiation, covers a range of issues from nuclear weapons to ozone depletion and provides some useful campaigning tips.