Background
Rajani Palme Dutt was born in 1896 on Mill Road in Cambridge, England. His father, Upendra Dutt, was an Indian surgeon, his mother Anna Palme was Swedish. He was thus half-Bengali and half-Swedish.
Rajani Palme Dutt was born in 1896 on Mill Road in Cambridge, England. His father, Upendra Dutt, was an Indian surgeon, his mother Anna Palme was Swedish. He was thus half-Bengali and half-Swedish.
Balliol College.
Early years
Anna Palme was a great aunt of the future Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme. Dutt was educated at The Perse School, Cambridge and Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a first class degree in classics after having been suspended for a time due to his status as a conscientious objector in World War I.
Dutt married an Estonian, Salme Murrik, the sister of Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki, in 1922. 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 which he edited until his death.
In 1922, Dutt was named the editor of the CPGB"s weekly newspaper, The Workers" Weekly. Dutt first visited Soviet Russia 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 Communist International.
He also played an important role for the Communist International 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 entry into World World War II, it was Palme Dutt who promoted Stalin"s line, forcing 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 Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics and consequent reversal of the Communist Party attitude towards WW2.
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 within the CPGB, he disagreed with its criticisms of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and opposed the CPGB"s increasingly Eurocommunist line in the 1970s, retiring from his party positions, although remaining a member until his death in 1974. According to 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 the papers of Rajani Palme Dutt in their collection, spanning from 1908 to 1971.
Political career
Dutt was on the Executive Committee of the CPGB from 1923 until 1965 and was the party"s chief theorist for many years. 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, ultra nationalist, and irrational theory. In his own words: "Fascism is antithetical to everything of substance within the liberal tradition.".
Quotations: "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".