State surveillance and the communist lives: Rose Cohen and the early British communist milieu

Callaghan, JT; Phythian, M

Abstract

Rose Cohen was a prominent member of the Communist Party of Great Britain
(CPGB) in the 1920s. She relocated to Moscow with her husband Max Petrovsky,
the Comintern’s UK representative, in 1927. Both were arrested and shot in 1937
during the Stalinist Great Terror. Drawing on information contained in MI5 personal
files on Cohen and her closest friends and associates, this article has two aims: first, to
use her case to illuminate the intelligence environment in which the CPGB operated in
the 1920s, highlighting the extent to which this should be seen in terms of a contest;
second, to use these files to develop our understanding of what it meant to be a
Communist at this time, including the clandestine dimension, and the tensions and
compromises that accompanied a Communist identity. In relation to this, the article
uses the MI5 record as a basis for explaining the CPGB leadership’s reaction to
Cohen’s death.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2013
• Deposit Date: May 2, 2013
• Journal: Journal of Intelligence History
• Print ISSN: 1616-1262
• Electronic ISSN: 2169-5601
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 2013
• Issue: 1
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjih20/current