To belong to the Communist Party in the last few years of its life was an odd experience, and an even odder aspiration. Being a member of any left-wing organisation in the 1980s, including the Labour Party, meant an almost pathological identification with the losing side. But to call oneself a Communist in spite of all the historical wreckage that adhered to that name – Stalin’s purges, the Nazi-Soviet pact, Khrushchev’s revelations, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 – I myself sometimes now find inexplicable.

Whatever one may say of the Labour Party, it has never required its members to be apologists for a sister party sending innocents to the Gulag. Of course, after 1968, the British Communist Party took an increasingly ‘Eurocommunist’ line, and by the 1980s criticism of Stalinism and ‘actual existing socialism’ had become ritualistic. But it wasn’t only the example of the Soviet Union; wherever one looked Communist states were repressive and undemocratic. So what on earth was I thinking of, joining a party with all this baggage? The answer, in the worn-out old argot of Marxism-Leninism, lies in contradiction.

The delight of reading Francis Beckett’s book about the history of the British CP is that, without compromising himself or papering over anything, he has reminded me why, even then, the CP had a certain draw. Part of this pull was, certainly, a romantic one, and therefore suspect. British Communists still sustained themselves through the darkening days of the 1970s and 1980s with the mythology of the Party’s halcyon years of heroism in the 1930s.

This was the glorious period of the Popular Front, the International Brigade fighting Franco in Spain and the Battle of Cable Street, when Jews, Communists and others kept Mosley’s Blackshirts out of London’s East End. After several years of extreme sectarianism in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the CP blossomed. Suddenly all the leading lights in the sciences and arts were carrying Party cards, and it wasn’t just radical chic; these were people who sincerely believed that Communism was the better future, and the majority – bitterly mistaken – thought that socialist paradise was already under construction in Russia.

The CP’s membership reached a peak of 56,000 in 1942, when Uncle Joe was an ally and being a British Communist temporarily lost its taint of Moscow stooge; sales of the Daily Worker stood at 120,000 in 1948, and in the 1945-50 Parliament the Party had two MPs of its own, and about nine Labour fellow travellers. It was a slow but steady decline ever after. The Cold War, and then the Soviet adventures in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, took their toll. Only the industrial strength which the Party had built up by the 1960s and 1970s postponed the eventual demise. The trade unions were the last bastion of Communist power and influence, and Beckett is excellent in both his knowledge and his analysis of this phase of the Party’s history.

Enemy Within also provides reliable sketches of the key players, some culled from full-length biographies, but others very clearly the result of his own researches and interviews. A vivid picture of the leadership of the CP’s heyday emerges, with Harry Pollitt, an English boilermaker who possessed the easy charm of a natural politician, playing the ‘good cop’ and Rajani Palme Dutt, the glacial ideological servant of the Comintern, as the ‘bad cop’. This ground has been covered well elsewhere, but Beckett’s strength is in seeking out some of the figures who, though they may never have served higher than as branch secretaries and congress delegates, are none the less emblematic of what was still good about the Party even in its fading years.

The CP was always a meeting place for Clydeside shop stewards and Hampstead intellectuals alike, and despite the infamous rubric of ‘democratic centralism’, the internal culture of the Party was strikingly egalitarian. Beckett is right to point out that one of the CP’s great traditions was the way it nurtured a breed of worker-intellectual rarely found elsewhere in the British labour movement. Industrial workers were as well read and as likely to be opera buffs as their university-educated comrades. The pathos of this achievement was that the organisation which gave them this education also took their best years – and for what? The Party staggered on through the shattering revelations about Stalinism, secretly continued to take Moscow gold after those revelations until 1979, and then tore itself apart in the mid-1980s. Wherever one stood in the Party – on the soft-left ‘Euro’ wing, or on the die-hard ‘tankie’ side – one’s best hopes were somehow betrayed.

Beckett is scrupulously fair, almost too fair to the hardliners who lost the Party but won control of the Morning Star in 1984. These ‘class warriors’, as he terms them for shorthand, were still singing the praises of East German socialism up until the moment the Wall came down. But he is right to point out that they represented an authentic strand of the CP’s membership from its foundation in 1920 at Lenin’s instigation. For every Pollitt there was a Palme Dutt, and therein lies the contradiction that was the CP.

In many ways, the Party comprised the best elements of the British labour movement, both in personnel and in policy, yet for much of its history it hobbled itself by servitude to Moscow. Over several generations it attracted some of the finest minds — with and without formal education — in the country, and yet it too often sacrificed independent thought to doctrinal orthodoxy. Its greatest rabble-rousing orators were also the drabbest phrasemongers of Marxist dialectics. The anti-Establishment firebrands became at other times conservative, grey-suited bureaucrats. And the instinctive democrats of the street and shop floor defended authoritarian rule in the name of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Enemy Within is fast-moving and colourful, a journalist’s account that succeeds most when it simply shows the Party at its best and at its worst without editorialising. Though a former member, I am no student of the minutiae of Party history; there may be minor matters of interpretation that some would take issue with, but the broad picture looks about right. Beckett is a sympathetic historian certainly, but his analytical instinct comes before sentiment. I admired his objectivity; in fact, I found myself envying it.