H.M. Hyndman and the Russia Question after 1917

Abstract

In the last four years of his life the eclectic veteran of British Marxism, H.M. Hyndman (1842–1921), was intimately involved in a transatlantic socialist effort to destroy the Russian Bolshevik regime. Historians have rarely investigated this effort, because it appears not to fit into the customary categories constructed about Marxian socialism. Utilizing Hyndman's extensive published writings and hitherto mostly ignored private correspondence with his many American socialist collaborators, this article reconstructs Hyndman's thinking on Russia after 1917 in an attempt to shed further light on our understanding of socialist anti-Bolshevism in Britain and in the United States. It argues that Hyndman was a much more influential figure in the construction of socialist anticommunism in the English-speaking world (in particular in the United States) than has been generally recognized. His writings and activities in 1917–21 were key not only in setting the ideological bases for much of the English-speaking world's socialist anticommunism but in pioneering the abiding, considered willingness by a significant section of its adherents to use military force to destroy the Soviet regime before and during the Cold War.