Comintern History Archive.

Ian Birchall writes (November 2000)

George Matthews recalls that Bill Wainwright (Obituary November 16) “worked on publicity for the war effort” at Communist party headquarters, His most notorious effort was the 1942 pamphlet “Clear Out Hitler’s Agents.” The “agents” were the small band of British Trotskyists — courageous and perceptive people who, three decades earlier than Wainwright, had become critical of the Soviet Union and its travesty of socialism. Wainwright urged his readers, on encountering a Trotskyist, “to treat him as you would an open Nazi” This was a green light to every CP member to physically attack Trotskyists and many such acts were committed. The surviving representatives of British Stalinism should not be allowed to erase such episodes from the record.