New play tells how a Jewish girl from London became an ‘enemy of the people’
Vodka With Stalin opens in Highgate this week telling the true story of communist Rose Cohen who was murdered under the dictator's regime
When Rose Cohen, a Jewish woman in London, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) soon after the First World War, it was a decision taken in hope and optimism and idealism. And it killed her.
Rose was not alone with her ideals. In the 1920s and 30s many British Jews joined the CPBG as a bulwark against fascism and anti-Semitism – only to find that the Soviet Union carried the virus they wanted to exterminate.
Rose Cohen was born in 1894 to Jewish immigrants from Łódź, Poland and as a teenager was an active member of the East London Federation of Suffragettes. In the CPGB she met and fell in love with Lenin’s representative in London, a Ukrainian Jew called Max Petrovsky, living illegally in Britain under the name of Bennett. When Petrovsky was caught and expelled from Britain, Rose went to Moscow with him. They married and had a son, Alyosha.
The knock at the door which Muscovites secretly dreaded came in 1937. The orphaned Alyosha was brought up in a tough Russian orphanage where he was not allowed to mention the names of his parents, for they were “enemies of the people.”
Their story highlights something we have learned about Russia. People thought – Rose and Max thought – that the dark days of the Tsars ended in 1917, and a new, kinder, fairer society would emerge from the wreckage. That dream was shattered for them and for millions of Soviet citizens by Stalin’s terror.
It might strike you, if you come to see my play Vodka with Stalin in Highgate this month, how similar my Stalin is to a more modern dictator, Vladimir Putin.
In 1991 we again thought Russia was about to become a better, fairer place. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had “won” the cold war, communism was dead, the old Stalinist dictators had been overthrown, Boris Yeltsin was in charge and MacDonalds had a branch in Moscow.
We now know that the new dawn of 1991 was as much of an illusion as the new dawn of 1917; that there is a direct line of descent through Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin through to Vladimir Putin. As it was with Stalin, it will be some years before we know the full horror that Putin has inflicted on his people.
One of the reasons Max and Rose came under suspicion was because, as Jews, they were considered likely to have sympathised with the Jewish Leo Trotsky. Stalin’s anti-Semitism grew alongside his paranoia, peaking perhaps in 1953 with the Jewish doctors’ plot – an alleged conspiracy of prominent Soviet Jewish medical specialists to murder leading government and party officials, a conspiracy that existed only in Stalin’s paranoid imagination.
Right up to 1953, many British Jews thought of the CPGB as a bulwark against fascism. The CPGB even had a section of Jewish business people, who did not particularly share its political and economic aims, but funded it generously nevertheless because communists fought fascists. They were organised into their own CPGB branch, called the commercial branch.
Even after 1953, some of them hung onto their illusions about the Soviet Union. In Arnold Wesker’s play I’m Talking About Jerusalem, the east end Jewish matriarch defends her continued members of the CPGB: “You want me to move to Hendon and forget who I am?”
What does all this tell us? First, people cling to their illusions. When they were arrested, Rose’s old friend Harry Pollitt, who had asked her to marry him (on his own account) no less than 14 times, had become leader of the CPGB and an intimate of Stalin’s. What did he say to Stalin about Rose? How did he carry on leading the CPGB, as he did, right up to 1956, knowing what he knew? We know that Pollitt met Stalin while Rose was in prison, but we don’t know what passed between them. My best guess is in a key scene of my play.
Second, it tells us that Russia is as unpredictable as ever it was, and whenever we think we have it taped, we had best wait awhile and see. Russia remains, as Winston Churchill called it, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.
Third, when we hear that this or that political organisation is the only one that will rid the nation of racism and anti-Semitism, perhaps we should approach the claim with scepticism. In the 1930s, the CPGB, prominent in the organisation of opposition in the streets to Oswald Mosley’s fascists, was making this claim.
Now, the claim seems to be being made by the far right. Robert Jenrick, contender for the Conservative Party leadership, has cast himself as the defender of Israel, theatrically demanding that a Star of David be placed at all entry points to Britain. Is this a symbol that you can rely on such a politician to fight anti-Semitism, or is it just empty virtue-signalling?
The action of Vodka with Stalin begins in 1917 and ends in 1956, but I will make the bold claim that it has something important to tell us about the world we inhabit in 2024.
Vodka with Stalin is at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Highgate, 16-27 October. upstairsatthegatehouse.com
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