The Secret Life of Melita Norwood

Abstract

Melita Norwood was an idealist, a Marxist, who throughout her long life refused to believe in the degradation of Soviet democracy and the failure of the Soviet experiment.1 For most of her lifetime British and European societies struggled for social cohesion, wracked by the class and ideological struggles of the twentieth century. These conflicts had their origins in the unregulated exploitation of labour markets in the nineteenth century and the labour disputes that followed. As early as 1848 the German philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels had predicted the downfall of world capitalism in the Communist Manifesto, calling on the workers of the world to unite: ‘You have nothing to lose but your chains.’ Sixteen years later a group of working men met under the banner of the First International at St Martin's Hall, London, with the purpose of uniting a variety of British and foreign leftwing political groups and trade unions on the basis of the ‘class struggle’. An eclectic body of trade unionists, anarchists, French socialists, Italian followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini, former Chartists and Owenites, the First International was riven with internal disputes, and as a result of unprecedented bitterness between the followers of Karl Marx and the disciples of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin collapsed in 1876. Nevertheless, the seeds of the international communist movement that would inspire the Bolsheviks ‘to scale the heavens’ of revolution in 1917 had been sown in London in 1848 and 1864. Ironically, for most of the nineteenth century very little was known about Karl Marx, or indeed the theory of ‘class struggle’, in Russia before a wave of strikes in St Petersburg in 1897. Before then the revolutionary movement in Russia was poorly organized, and was largely influenced by the nihilism of Bakunin's self-appointed apostle Sergei Nechayev – the model for Dostoevsky's nefarious Peter Verkhovensky in The Possessed and the inspiration behind the terrorism of the Narodnaya Volya (the People's Will). His nihilist manifesto, The Revolutionary Catechism, published in 1869, called for individual acts of terror against selected government officials and led to the formation of a populist terrorist group in 1876, the Zemlya Volya ( Society of Land and Liberty). It was responsible for a number of high-profile attacks on government officials, culminating in the stabbing to death in 1878 of the head of the Russian secret police, General N. V. Mezentsev.