The Comintern and The Spanish Civil War [antikvár]

E.H. CARR: A PERSONAL MEMOIR* in valedictory speeches, and in one or two obituaries of E. H. Carr the authors - independently of each other - described him as enigmatic. This struck me, and I asked myself why this very English historian seemed so enigmatic to some of his close professional colleagues. In Britain he became, towards the end of his life, something of a monument to scholarship, recognized, admired, if somewhat grudgingly, and a little neglected. But he knew long years of hostility and even ostracism not only by British Academia but also by the Establishment as a whole. When I first met him, some thirty-six years ago, Carr was in the political and academic wilderness and was just embarking on his great History of Soviet Russia. It was at that time that the intellectual friendship between him and Isaac Deutscher was formed. At first sight their personal amity might seem puzzling: on one side, a self-educated former member of the Polish Communist Party - Marxist by conviction, Jewish by origin - who was a refugee from Hitler and Stalin stranded in London; and, on the other side, an English historian who was an unmistakable product of Cambridge, a former member of the Foreign Office, schooled in a diplomatic service famous as a bastion of British traditionalism. But they were both under attack (if an attack veiled by formal respect), and both were debarred from academic posts. They were also both engaged in the study of the Soviet Union -albeit from two quite different angles: one a historian of institutions and poUcies, increasingly under Marxist influence; the other an unrepentant Marxist, analysing movements and ideas, surveying a society in turmoil torn by ideological battles. The "enigma" of that friendship, and of the personahty of Carr tiimself, becomes perhaps less perplexing once one understands the degree to which Carr was in the British tradition and yet was not quite of it; the extent to which he was an intellectual expatriate from the world of diplomacy, a rebel against his own tradition, criticizing it - as it were - from within. • R-P--intedfromiVe«.Le/i No. 137, Jan.-Feb. 1983.