Harry Pollitt was a British communist who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1929 to September 1939 and again from 1941 until his death in 1960.
53 Facts About Harry Pollitt
2.
Harry Pollitt contested a number of parliamentary elections, but never won, despite coming close in 1945.
3.
Harry Pollitt was the second of six children of Samuel Pollitt, a blacksmith's striker, and his wife, Mary Louisa, a cotton spinner, daughter of William Charlesworth, a joiner.
4.
Harry Pollitt's parents were socialists, and his mother was a member of the Independent Labour Party before joining the Communist party when it was formed in 1920.
5.
Harry Pollitt began work at the age of 12, alongside his mother.
6.
In September 1919, Harry Pollitt was appointed full-time national organiser of the Hands Off Russia campaign to protest against Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, for which Pankhurst had obtained funding from Moscow.
7.
Harry Pollitt failed to prevent a number of other ships laden with arms for Poland, including the Danish steamer Neptune on 1 May 1920, and two Belgian barges.
8.
On 10 October 1925, Harry Pollitt married Marjorie Brewer at Caxton Hall, Westminster.
9.
Harry Pollitt was given a 12-month sentence as a previous offender, which he served in Wandsworth prison.
10.
Harry Pollitt travelled again to Moscow in October 1927, and attended a meeting at which the CPGB was roundly criticised for its failure to criticise the British labour movement.
11.
Harry Pollitt replaced Albert Inkpin, who had attracted disapproval from the Comintern by opposing the "Class-against-Class" policy and perceived softness towards others on the left.
12.
Harry Pollitt was selected as he had impressed people both within the CPGB and in Moscow as a Comintern loyalist and effective organiser, particularly when representing the Comintern at a meeting of the Communist Party USA in March 1929.
13.
Harry Pollitt stated that he saw his role as defending the Communist Party of the Soviet Union "through thick and thin".
14.
Unlike, Inkpin, Harry Pollitt was willing to criticise the Labour party as "social-fascists".
15.
Harry Pollitt made clear in his public statements his loyalties to the Soviet Union and to CPSU General Secretary Joseph Stalin.
16.
Harry Pollitt was a defender of the Moscow Trials, in which Stalin murdered or otherwise disposed of his political and military opponents.
17.
The arrests took place on the eve of a meeting in Bermondsey which Mann and Harry Pollitt were due to attend that was to be the culmination of the 1934 Hunger March.
18.
Harry Pollitt privately tried to intervene on her behalf, but by the time he did so she had already been shot.
19.
Harry Pollitt placed himself at risk by questioning Cohen's arrest in this fashion, as Bela Kun had, under torture, identified him as a "Trotskyist" and "British spy", though Osip Piatnitsky had refused to confirm these accusations when arrested by the NKVD in 1937.
20.
Twenty years after Cohen's death, Harry Pollitt requested information from Moscow about whether she was still alive, stating, untruthfully, that there was press interest in Britain about her whereabouts.
21.
Harry Pollitt failed to intervene to help George Fles and his wife, Arcadi Berdichevsky and his wife, nor a number of other British communists who were arrested by the NKVD and tortured, shot, or imprisoned in the Gulag during Stalin's purge.
22.
Harry Pollitt defied Moscow by opposing the introduction of conscription in Britain when it was introduced in 1939.
23.
Harry Pollitt played a role in approving or vetoing applications from British volunteers to join the International Brigades.
24.
One such veto was against George Orwell, who Harry Pollitt believed to be politically unreliable.
25.
Harry Pollitt was tasked with writing letters of condolence to the families of British communists killed in Spain.
26.
Harry Pollitt recalled the five leading members of the battalion involved in the dispute to Britain.
27.
From 1933 until November 1939, Harry Pollitt was in direct radio contact with Moscow as the CPGB's "code holder".
28.
One 1936 coded instruction advised Harry Pollitt to publicise the plight of Ernst Thalmann, a German Communist leader who had been arrested by the Nazis and who later died at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
29.
Harry Pollitt replied that he was "having difficulties" getting British statesmen to make public declarations supporting Thalmann but that they promised they would speak privately with German officials in London.
30.
In one of the more amusing dispatches, Harry Pollitt informed his Soviet contact about a recent visit to France to make campaign appearances for candidates from the French Communist Party.
31.
Harry Pollitt tasked Gray, whose class background would make her less conspicuous aboard an ocean liner than the CPGB's mostly working-class membership, with delivering money, instructions, and a questionnaire to a contact in India.
32.
CPGB members, including Harry Pollitt, were the subject of continual monitoring efforts by the British security services throughout the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.
33.
Harry Pollitt criticised the war policies of the Chamberlain government, describing them as seeking to exploit the war against "Hitler's fascism" to "impose certain aspects of that same fascism on the workers".
34.
On instructions from Georgi Dimitrov in Moscow, Harry Pollitt was retained in a six-member political bureau after his removal.
35.
Harry Pollitt was reinstated as the leader of the CPGB after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, again in response to instructions received from Moscow.
36.
Harry Pollitt urged Jawaharlal Nehru to moderate his demands for Indian independence for the duration of the war.
37.
When strike action was proposed during the war, Harry Pollitt was opposed to it as it would damage the war effort.
38.
Harry Pollitt defended the 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, characterising it as the work of "millions of lads" who were "led by their Shop Stewards" to overthrow capitalism.
39.
The programme, which was championed by Harry Pollitt, committed the CPGB to independence from Moscow, and a constitutional or parliamentary path to power.
40.
Harry Pollitt went on to say that "[n]ever before in the history of humanity ha[d] there been such universal grief" as the people of the world "mourned him with tears in their eyes and with deep uncontrollable sorrow".
41.
Harry Pollitt was a member of the guard of honour at Stalin's funeral.
42.
Harry Pollitt faced another crisis when Khrushchev, in his 1956 Secret Speech, attacked the legacy of Stalin.
43.
Harry Pollitt's embarrassment was heightened by the fact that he had been present in Moscow for the party congress at which the speech took place, but along with the other foreign delegates had been excluded from the session at which it had been given.
44.
Harry Pollitt, suffering from worsening health in his final years, resigned as General Secretary in May 1956, with John Gollan succeeding him, and was appointed CP Chairman.
45.
When Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin was formally made public the following month, Harry Pollitt stated that he was "too old to go into reverse and denigrate a man he had admired above all others for more than a quarter of a century".
46.
Harry Pollitt refused to take down a portrait of Stalin that hung in his living room, saying that "He's staying there as long as I'm alive".
47.
Harry Pollitt supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary, stating that it had "saved Hungary from fascism".
48.
In 1959, when British communist journalist Alan Winnington became disillusioned with Chinese politics, Harry Pollitt arranged for him to travel from China to East Germany, where Winnington spent the remainder of his life as an author and film actor.
49.
Harry Pollitt contested a number of parliamentary elections, but did not win any.
50.
Harry Pollitt then contested the London East End Stepney, Whitechapel, and St George's constituency in 1930, where he received 2,106 votes.
51.
Harry Pollitt contested the same constituency again in 1931 and received 2,658 votes.
52.
Harry Pollitt stood as the CPGB candidate for election in Rhondda East in South Wales three times.
53.
Harry Pollitt is commemorated in the song "The Ballad of Harry Pollitt", which was originally written during his lifetime, and hence inaccurately describes his murder, which was included by the American folk band The Limeliters on their 1961 album The Slightly Fabulous Limeliters.