Labour And The Gulag

The Labour Party welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917: it paved the way for the birth of a socialist superpower and ushered in a new era in Soviet governance. Labour excused the Bolshevik excesses and prepared for its own revolution in Britain. In 1929, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to work in labour camps. Subjected to appalling treatment, thousands died. When news of the camps leaked out in Britain, there were protests demanding the government ban imports of timber cut by slave labourers. The Labour government of the day dismissed mistreatment claims as Tory propaganda and blocked appeals for an inquiry. Despite the Cabinet privately acknowledging the harsh realities of the work camps, Soviet denials were publicly repeated as fact. One Labour minister even defended them as part of 'a remarkable economic experiment'. Labour and the Gulag explains how Britain's Labour Party was seduced by the promise of a socialist utopia and enamoured of a Russian Communist system it sought to emulate. It reveals the moral compromises Labour made, and how it turned its back on the people in order to further its own political agenda.

Giles Udy is a historian who has spent the past fifteen years studying Soviet Communism, with a particular focus on the repression of its citizens and its sponsorship of revolution and subversion abroad. In the process, he has acquired wider expertise in relation to Russia and Eastern Europe today - where, as the Russian Federation seeks to re-establish itself as an imperial power, the parallels with the Soviet era are many. His original work was on the Soviet gulag and in pursuit of that research he has travelled thousands of miles across Russia, visiting some of the most isolated parts of the country. Labour and the Gulag began as a chapter in that book. He is a member of the council of the Keston Institute, Oxford, holds an MBA from the Cass Business School in London and, among his more unusual skills, was at one time qualified to take the helm of a supertanker.