Left to the Wolves: Irish Victims of Stalinist Terror (review)

Barry McLoughlin's profile of the Irish communists Patrick Breslin, Brian Goold-Verschoyle, and Seán McAteer, who perished in Stalinist Russia during the purges in the late 1930s and early 1940s, immediately raises two fundamental and related questions. First, why were some Irish men and women drawn to communism, so much so that they would choose to live in Stalinist Russia; and second, why did they die there?

McLoughlin's accounts, meticulously researched and developed, are detailed chronicles of the would-be revolutionaries' histories and activities that led to their tragic ends. For the most part, the author declines to analyze or reflect; he does not overtly address what the Irish communists were thinking, what drove them or drew them to Stalinist Russia, what they hoped to find there that was lacking in Ireland or Western Europe, or what they found out. Instead, McLoughlin leaves the reader to tease out answers from the narrative.

The book begins with a pithy introduction on the struggles of socialism and communism in Ireland, especially in the 1930s. Throughout Europe in that decade, the Catholic church tended to condemn communism and the class struggle and to side with the Right—making the position of the Left especially weak in any place where the church dominated to the extent that it did in Ireland. McLoughlin examines the ways that trade unionism, socialism, and communism in Ireland were always tied to—and almost always therefore eclipsed by—the "national question." Finally, he remarks briefly on how little, in fact, the profiled Irish revolutionaries shared in terms of background; it seems there were no common denominators among them that might help to suggest why they were drawn to communism and Russia, except a heightened sensitivity in each, for different reasons, to social injustice. As for what caused their destruction, McLoughlin suggests a simple tendency to be outspoken: "Patrick Breslin, Brian Goold-Verschoyle and Seán McAteer had minds of their own. That was their ultimate undoing." In Stalin's Russia, an inability to be led and a tendency to speak one's mind were fatal proclivities: the nation was mired in ongoing revolution and on the verge of one of the most massive military invasions in history. McLoughlin would have done well to emphasize this context more.

McLoughlin, in fact, assumes a fair amount of familiarity with both Irish and Soviet politics and history, which could cause confusion for both general readers and for specialists in one or the other area. One might also take issue with some aspects of McLoughlin's historical interpretation—for instance, its reliance on an all-too-common sui generis interpretation of Soviet history. The author suggests that the Soviet security apparatus as it developed under Stalin's guidance, and its full-blown insanity and paranoia in the late 1930s, were unique to Soviet Russia and, thus, the product of inherent weaknesses in communism generally and Stalinism particularly. But was the foreign threat, or the threat of foreigners, and the response of the government to that threat within the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and early 1940s much different from what has happened in democratic countries in similar circumstances? The Soviet Union at the time was arguably in a precarious position internationally, encircled by a hostile world and about to suffer yet another and far more catastrophic invasion than those of the past. Two of the three Irishmen met their ends in the very midst of the German invasion—and this begs us to ask another question, which challenges the traditional interpretation of Stalinism: how much does its development, and particularly its violent excesses, owe simply to the international position of Soviet Russia, and how much or little does it have to do with communism or Soviet politics or Stalin himself?

Finally, some words about organization. It is puzzling, and unhelpful, that McLoughlin fails to include a summary chapter to tie the...