Socialist and Tory governments pursued this dichotomy in policy with almost complete freedom from political interference. The British, an island people dependent on international trade, strive in any crisis to maintain communications with their enemies and thus retain a means through which negotiations can be carried out. They will go to great, often shaming lengths to avoid war. Once it comes, they wage it with earnest intensity and fight it to the end.
In periods of danger such as followed the influx of Soviet power in Europe, British politicians usually assume a bipartisan attitude. This does not mean that the opposition of the time refrains from criticism of the government policy. It does mean that opposition speakers use restraint. During the period of maximum strain with Russia, no politician shrilled a warning against talking with the Russians about Berlin or Korea, or predicted that the admission of Russian high-jumpers to a track meet would undermine the nation. The British never gave up on the situation; they did not like it, but they thought that any means of finding a way out should be used.
This was, as I have noted, a period of danger. The bipartisan approach broke down completely over Suez. When Sir Anthony Eden ordered intervention in Egypt the danger was real but indistinct. It was also a long-term economic danger arising from threat to the country's oil supplies rather than the immediate military danger represented by the Soviet Union's military strength in East Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe accompanied by Russian diplomacy and subversion. Russian military power already had won its foothold in Egypt. But the Labor Party refused to regard this power as an immediate threat and consequently rejected it as a reason for the adoption of a bipartisan approach.
The British people have never been so violently anti-Russian as the Americans. There is a distinction between anti-Russian and anti-Communist. Communism has had few more bitter opponents than Ernest Bevin or Herbert Morrison, two leaders in the post-war Labor government. They represented elements of the movement which for decades had been fighting in the unions and in the constituency parties to prevent the Communists from winning control of the Trades Union Congress and the Labor Party. But neither the leaders nor the led could be called anti-Russian.
The war alliance with the Soviet Union meant far more to Britons than the military co-operation between the Soviet Union and the United States during the same period meant to Americans. The British attitude was rooted in the situation of June 1941 when the Germans turned east and attacked the Soviet Union.
The British had then been fighting the Germans and the Italians single-handed for a year. Their cities had been bombed, their armies and navies grievously punished in France, Norway, Libya, and Greece. Each month the German submarines in the North Atlantic were bolder and more numerous and the toll of shipping losses was higher. Most Britons knew they had stout friends in the United States, but the wiser also recognized the strength of isolationist sentiment. And, although American industrial mobilization was gaining momentum, that would not avert another Coventry tonight or another Dunkirk tomorrow.
Suddenly all this altered. Russia, which had sided with Germany for two years and had gobbled up parts of Finland, Poland, and Romania as her reward, was invaded. Overnight the British became willing to overlook the despicable role Russia had played in the first two years of the war. Here, at last, was an ally. An ally, moreover, that fought, that was undergoing the same punishment Britain had known.
Naturally this warm admiration for the Russian war effort and this sympathy for the Russian people offered an opportunity for the British Communists, who exploited it to the utmost. Propaganda from the Soviet Union portrayed life there in glowing terms. The British working class was informed that this was a working-class war—a few months earlier the Communists had been calling it a capitalist war—and that side by side the British and Russian "brothers" would fight it to a successful conclusion.
The propaganda would not have made much headway, however, had it not been for the basic strain of admiration and sympathy which existed. The decade of cold war which included the rape of Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade, and the Korean war obviously altered the British working-class attitude toward Russia. But some of the old wartime feeling remained. It is there yet in the minds of the working class, tucked behind the football scores and the racing tips: the Russians didn't let us down, they went on fighting, they must be like us, they can't want another war.
The changes in Soviet leadership and tactics since the death of Stalin have affected the British approach to Russia and Communism. In Britain, as elsewhere, the immediate danger has receded. The East is slowly opening up. This means a great deal more to Britain than to the United States.