Ο Eλληνικής καταγωγής ιστορικός John Saville (John Stamatopoulos)

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John Stamatopoulos, the son of an Greek engineer, was born near Gainsborough on 2nd April 1916. His mother later remarried and after this he was known as John Saville. He won a scholarship to the Royal Liberty School and in 1934 began his studies at the London School of Economics.

Saville was strongly influenced by the teaching of Harold Laski and The Coming Struggle (1932) by John Strachey. He considered joining the Labour Party but disagreed strongly with its policy towards the Spanish Civil War. He wrote in his autobiography, Memoirs from the Left: “The most wicked decision of these years, however, was undoubtedly Labour’s support for the infamous Non-Intervention policy… Support by Labour was withdrawn after eighteen months but by this time the scale of fascist intervention was considerable and the Spanish Republic was already on the way to defeat and the terrible decades which followed.”

Saville, who had been very impressed with the speeches of Harry Pollitt, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain: “There were about twenty-five to thirty members of the LSE student Communist Party group at the time I joined. Membership figures always appeared some what imprecise, partly because of the uncertain numbers of evening students but more perhaps because people always seemed to be drifting in and out… There was always a very lively core who conducted their affairs in a notably intense manner and in the earlier years of the thirties sometimes in a conspiratorial atmosphere; some parts of which were no more than late adolescent play-acting. There were, however, more serious aspects of party membership. The general view that capitalism was a degenerate and declining system was contrasted with what was believed to be the bright star of Socialism in the Soviet Union.”

In the Second World War he refused to accept a commission and served as an anti-aircraft gunner in Liverpool. “My section of guns was first allocated part of the defence system around Speke aerodrome, outside the city…. During daylight hours, below 30,000 feet, firing was often useful in breaking up enemy formations although direct hits were rare. At night the Ack-Ack firing during the year of the Blitz could first be regarded as a reassuring volume of noise for the civilian population.” John Saville was sent to India in 1943 and by 1945 had been promoted to the rank of regimental sergeant major.

In 1947 Saville was appointed to teach economic history at the University of Hull and along with E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, A. L. Morton, Raphael Samuel, George Rudé, Rodney Hilton, Dorothy Thompson, Edmund Dell, Victor Kiernan and Maurice Dobb he helped establish the Communist Party Historians’ Group. Saville later wrote: “The Historian’s Group had a considerable long-term influence upon most of its members. It was an interesting moment in time, this coming together of such a lively assembly of young intellectuals, and their influence upon the analysis of certain periods and subjects of British history was to be far-reaching.”

During the 20th Party Congress in February, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev launched an attack on the rule of Joseph Stalin. He condemned the Great Purge and accused Joseph Stalin of abusing his power. He announced a change in policy and gave orders for the Soviet Union’s political prisoners to be released. Pollitt found it difficult to accept these criticisms of Stalin and said of a portrait of his hero that hung in his living room: “He’s staying there as long as I’m alive”.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinzation policy encouraged people living in Eastern Europe to believe that he was willing to give them more independence from the Soviet Union. In Hungary the prime minister Imre Nagy removed state control of the mass media and encouraged public discussion on political and economic reform. Nagy also released anti-communists from prison and talked about holding free elections and withdrawing Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. Khrushchev became increasingly concerned about these developments and on 4th November 1956 he sent the Red Army into Hungary. During the Hungarian Uprising an estimated 20,000 people were killed. Nagy was arrested and replaced by the Soviet loyalist, Janos Kadar.

Saville, like most members of the Communist Party Historians’ Group, supported Imre Nagy and as a result he was expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain after the Hungarian Uprising. “I still regard it as wonderfully fortunate that I was of the generation that established the Communist Historians’ group. For ten years we exchanged ideas and developed our Marxism into what we hoped were creative channels. It was not chance that when the secret speech of Khrushchev was made known in the West, it was members of the historians’ group who were among the most active of the Party intellectuals on demanding a full discussion and uninhibited debate.”

He remained a Marxist and joined forces with E. P. Thompson to publish The New Reasoner. In 1958 Saville and other left-wing historians established The Society for the Study of Labour History. This inspired the three volume, Essays in Labour History (1960,1971,1977). He was also the editor of the 10 volume Dictionary of Labour Biography (1972-2000). As Eric Hobsbawn has pointed out this “remarkable work, the best of of its kind anywhere in the world, will almost certainly remain as his most lasting monument.”

Most of Saville’s work was published in the Socialist Register, an annual volume he co-edited with Ralph Miliband. He was also active in the Oral History Society and the Council for Academic Freedom.

Saville retired from University of Hull in 1982 and published his autobiography, Memoirs from the Left, in 2003.
John Saville died on 13th June 2009.