A CERTAIN SAMENESS:

Stalin's ghost sits too easily among us (Ferdinand Mount, March 9, 2003, The Sunday Times of London)

Here in Britain it is a pity that Stalin's most devoted admirer, Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian and former master of Balliol college, Oxford, should have died nine days earlier. For he would surely have given us a second epitaph to rival his ringing words on Stalin's death in 1953: "He was a very great and penetrating thinker. Humanity not only in Russia but in all countries will always be deeply in his debt."

Only this week it has emerged that Stalin might have had some reason to return Dr Hill's gratitude. For the historian Anthony Glees of Brunel University has unearthed some interesting material about Hill's wartime service in charge of the Russian desk in the Foreign Office.

Hill, it seems, had not declared his membership of the Communist party when being recruited. Did the FO think to ask? Please, Hill was a Balliol man - and had been recommended by another former master of Balliol.

While in this key post Hill used his formidable energies to the full. He urged the government to sack all White Russian emigres working in British schools and universities and replace them with Soviet-approved staff. He set up a Committee for Russian Studies including other Communists, notably the Soviet agent Peter Smollett (alias Smolka), to make it easier for Soviet citizens to come to Britain and to exchange intelligence with the USSR. Meanwhile Smollett at the Ministry of Information was busy persuading British publishers not to print George Orwell's Animal Farm. And in face of all the evidence to the contrary, the Foreign Office remained strangely convinced that Stalin's intentions towards eastern Europe were strictly benign.

I would scarcely dignify Hill by the name of mole, that charming and resourceful mammal. After all, his activities were scarcely subterranean. Anyone who had read a line of his would know which way his political proclivities lay. Similarly, anyone who had dipped into the pre-war art criticism of Anthony Blunt would get a strong whiff of vulgar Marxism. But then, from my brief experience, vetting officers do not tend to be very literary types (I was cleared by a man named Carruthers with a walrus moustache).

Still, even if all this had been known when Hill popped off at the ripe age of 91, I doubt that it would have altered the dignified and elegiac tone of his obituaries. After all, we do know most of what Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby got up to. This has not inhibited the BBC from commissioning a new drama called Cambridge Spies, which a BBC apparatchik sought to puff by saying that: "This is the first time they can be seen as heroic."

On the contrary, from the moment Blunt was unmasked he was treated with the most exquisite sympathy. His former pupils at the Courtauld Institute wrote to the newspapers standing by him and pooh-poohing the notion that a little light spying might outweigh Blunt's magisterial catalogue raisonne of Poussin. And the editor of The Times had him to lunch at Printing House Square - truite aux amandes they had, I seem to remember. And why not? It had, after all, been thought quite proper that Blunt should carry on as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures for years after they knew he was a Soviet agent.

Blunt's claim that "I did not betray my conscience" and that helping the Russians was the only way to fight fascism was treated with undeserved respect. Oddly enough, both Blunt and Hill were afflicted by Bell's palsy when threatened with exposure, suggesting that their equanimity was not quite as untroubled as they pretended.

No such indulgence would have been extended if Blunt had turned out to be a Nazi agent. Similarly, Hill would not have had a hope of being elected master of Balliol if he had recently resigned from the National Front (he only packed in his party card when Khrushchev sent the tanks into Hungary). Yet surely someone who could stomach Stalin's purges, his terror famines and his subjugation of half a continent was no more suited to guide young minds than a recently convicted paedophile.

This double standard remains troubling. The most obvious explanation for not treating Stalin's horrific crimes with anything like the same intense loathing as Hitler's is that we never fought a war against the Russians. All the same, the eagerness of the West to minimise, excuse and even forget the gulag has had pernicious effects right up to the fall of communism and beyond.

The Brothers were less charitable to Mr. Blunt in our review of Anthony Blunt: His Lives (Miranda Carter). Posted by Orrin Judd at March 9, 2003 10:53 AM