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Hello, my name's David Rundsman and this is past-present future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today in our series Political Conversions, I'm talking to the political historian, David Klemperer, about a group of individuals who embraced and then

renounced communism. A number of them wrote essays about the experience in a book they published

in 1949 called The God That Failed. They compared their

experience to religious conversion and the loss of faith. Are they to be believed?

Last time we talked about a series of cases of individuals who became fascists. Today we're going

to talk about what is in many ways the parallel story and a lot of it is rooted in the same

decade, the 1930s, individuals who became communists. A difference in this case, individuals

who became communist converted and then lost the faith. That's what today's story is about. But we can start with

someone who connects these two stories very directly because, David, you mentioned him in the last

episode when we were talking about Oswald Mosley, a man called John Strachey, who was in many

ways Mosley's sidekick and who followed him on that journey through

the 1920s, in the Labour Party, trying to get the Labour Party to adopt Mosleyite ideas and reforms,

in frustration, leaving the party, joining the new party, leaving the new party, but here's where the stories diverge.

At that point, Mosley and Strachey take the two opposite parts.

Strachey became a communist.

So just tell us a little bit more about who he was, but really what we want to understand is how to explain that very, very

different outcome from what had looked to that point like a very similar journey.

John Strachey is in many ways a similar man to Mosley. He's a little bit younger, but like

Mosley, he's someone from an aristocratic conservative family

who in the early 1920s joins the Labour Party and becomes convinced of the need for

...