R. Palme Dutt
Rajani Palme Dutt (19 June 1896 – 20 December 1974), generally known as R. Palme Dutt, was a leading journalist and theoretician in the Communist Party of Great Britain. His classic book "India Today" heralded Marxist approach in Indian historiography. Early life. Rajani Palme Dutt was born in 1896 on Mill Road in Cambridge, England. His father, Dr. Upendra Dutt, was an Indian surgeon, his mother Anna Palme was Swedish. Anna Palme was a great aunt of the future Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme. His sister was the statistician Elna Palme Dutt, who went on to become  an official of the International Labour Organization in Geneva. His older brother was Clemens Palme Dutt, and both brothers were foundation members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Dutt was educated at The Perse School, Cambridge and Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class degree in Classics, after being suspended for a time because of his deemed subversive propaganda as a conscientious objector in World War I. Dutt married an Estonian, Salme Murrik, the sister of Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki, in 1922. His wife had come to Great Britain in 1920 as a representative of the Communist  International. Political career. Dutt joined the Labour Research Department, a left-wing statistical bureau, in 1919. The following year, he joined the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and in 1921 founded a monthly magazine called "Labour Monthly," a publication that he edited until his death. In 1922, Dutt was named the editor of the party's weekly newspaper, the "Workers' Weekly." Dutt was on the Executive Committee of the CPGB from 1923 to 1965 and was the party's chief theorist for many years. Dutt first visited the Soviet Union in 1923, where he attended deliberations of  the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) relating to the British movement. He was elected an alternate to the ECCI Presidium in 1924. Following an illness in 1925 which forced him to stand down as editor of "Workers' Weekly," Dutt spent several years in Belgium and Sweden as a representative of the Comintern. He also played an important role for the Comintern by supervising the Communist Party of India for some years. Palme Dutt was loyal to the Soviet Union and to Leninist ideals. In 1939, when the CPGB General Secretary Harry Pollitt supported the United Kingdom's entering  the Second World War, Palme Dutt who promoted Stalin's line and forced Pollitt's temporary resignation. As a result, he became the party's General Secretary until Pollitt was reappointed in 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union cause a reversal in the party's attitude on the war. In his book "Fascism and Social Revolution", a scathing criticism and analysis of fascism is presented with a study of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and other countries, he called fascism a violent authoritarian, ultranationalist and irrational theory: "Fascism is antithetical to everything of substance within  the liberal tradition." After Stalin's death, Palme Dutt's reaction to Khrushchev's Secret Speech played down its significance, with Dutt arguing that Stalin's "sun" unsurprisingly contained some "spots". A hardliner in the party, he disagreed with its criticisms of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and opposed its increasingly-Eurocommunist line in the 1970s. He retired from his party positions but remained a member until his death in 1974. According to the historian Geoff Andrews, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still paying the CPGB around £15,000 a year "for pensions" into the  seventies, recipients of which "included Rajani Palme Dutt". The Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People's History Museum in Manchester has Palme Dutt's papers of in their collection, spanning from 1908 to 1971.