Andrew Rothstein

{{Short description|British communist journalist and author (1898–1994)}} {{Use dmy dates|date=January 2021}} {{Infobox person | name = Andrew Rothstein | image = Andrew Rothstein.jpg | birth_date = {{birth date|df=y|1898|9|26}} | birth_place = London, England | death_date = {{death date and age|df=y|1994|9|22|1898|9|26}} | citizenship = United Kingdom | education = Balliol College, Oxford | occupation = Soldier, journalist, author | known_for = 1919 British Army mutiny.<br>Advocacy for the Soviet Union. | political_party = Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) | honours = Order of Lenin }}

'''Andrew Rothstein''' (26 September 1898 – 22 September 1994) was a longtime member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and one of the public faces of the British Communist movement. He served in the CPGB's political apparatus, worked as the London correspondent for the TASS news agency, and wrote numerous books and pamphlets in support of the Soviet Union.

==Biography==

===Early life=== Andrew Rothstein was born in London in 1898 to Russian Jewish political emigrants. His life was always tinged by the identity of his father, Soviet diplomat Theodore Rothstein (1871–1953), who had been forced to flee Tsarist Russia for political reasons. Theodore settled in England in 1890 and remained there for the next 30 years, before moving back to the Soviet Union.<ref name=Stevenson>{{cite web |title=Andrew and Theodore Rothstein (1898-1994) |url=https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/andrew-rothstein-and-theodore-rothstein/ |publisher=Graham Stevenson |website=Compendium of Political Biographies |access-date=29 April 2026}}</ref>

Andrew grew up in an ardently communist household, visited by Lenin during his pre-revolution stays in London, such as in 1905.<ref name=Stevenson /> After winning a London County Council scholarship, Andrew studied history at Balliol College, Oxford.<ref name=Balliol>{{cite book |editor-last=Elliott |editor-first=Ivo |title=The Balliol College Register: 1833–1933 |url=https://archive.org/details/balliolcollegere0000ivoe/page/354/mode/1up |page=354 |edition=Second |year=1934 |publisher=University Press |location=Oxford |oclc=39161348}}</ref> In World War I he served in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and Hampshire Yeomanry. He was a corporal in 1919 when he learned his unit was being sent to Archangel to aid the Allied intervention against the new Soviet government. Rothstein led a mutiny that refused to go to Archangel. It was the first of many British Army rebellions and mutinies—involving up to 30,000 troops at its height—in opposition to the intervention, the history of which Rothstein wrote about in ''Soldiers' Strikes of 1919''.<ref name=Stevenson />

He returned to Balliol and completed his history degree in 1921.<ref name=Guardian_obit>{{cite news |last=Morgan |first=Kevin |title=Obituary: Andrew Rothstein |newspaper=The Guardian |date=3 October 1994 |url=https://www.newspapers.com/image/260599298/ |url-access=subscription |page=34 |via=Newspapers.com}}</ref> The previous year he had been a founding member of the CPGB, and was actively recruiting others to the Party, including Tom Wintringham.<ref name=Stevenson /> When Rothstein applied for postgraduate research at Oxford, he was denied an Army grant and thus could not afford to continue his studies:{{blockquote|A stern letter from the Master and Fellows at Balliol announced that he must leave immediately. Twenty years later...a former junior dean from those days...told him that the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon had personally intervened in his case. Rothstein recalled: "He told me a letter was read out from Curzon, which said that I was a very dangerous Communist and must not be allowed to stay."<ref name=Stevenson />}} Lord Curzon, who was Chancellor of Oxford University at the time, was reportedly angry that Rothstein had taken other undergraduates on a trip to Soviet Russia.<ref name=Telegraph_obit>{{cite news |title=Andrew Rothstein |newspaper=The Daily Telegraph |date=27 September 1994 |page=23 |via=Newspapers.com |url=https://www.newspapers.com/image/751803116/ |url-access=subscription}}</ref>

===Career=== In 1921, Rothstein became the London correspondent of ROSTA (later TASS), the state-owned Soviet news agency. He remained in that post until 1945.<ref name=Guardian_obit /> He sometimes used the political pseudonym "C. M. Roebuck",<ref name=Stevenson /> both as an author,<ref>{{cite book |last=Roebuck |first=C. M. |title=The Nationalisation of Women: The natural history of a lie, being a study in bourgeois frightfulness |publisher=British Socialist Party |year=1919 |oclc=1087474979}}</ref> and in his role on the CPGB's National Executive Committee.<ref>{{cite book |last=Webster |first=Nesta H. |title=The Socialist Network |publisher=Boswell Printing & Publishing |url=https://dn711104.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheSocialistNetwork/The%20Socialist%20Network.pdf |location=London |year=1926 |page=117}}</ref> From 1929 to 1931, Rothstein was deputy head of the Anglo-American Bureau of the Moscow-based Red International of Labour Unions.<ref>{{cite web |title=Andrew Rothstein Collection |publisher=Marx Memorial Library & Workers' School |date=May 2021 |url=https://www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/special-collections-and-subject-guides/andrew-rothstein-collection}}</ref> In the late 1920s he was on the first Executive Committee of the Society for Cultural Relations Between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Lygo |first=Emily |journal=The Modern Language Review |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.108.2.0571 |volume=108 |number=2 |date=April 2013 |pages=571–596 |title=Promoting Soviet Culture in Britain: The History of the Society for Cultural Relations Between the Peoples of the British Commonwealth and the USSR, 1924–1945 |url-access=subscription}}</ref>

Rothstein wrote frequently on the economy, history, institutions, and foreign relations of the Soviet Union. His works included ''The Soviet Constitution'' (1923), ''Soviet Peace Policy: A Barrier to War'' (1935), ''Workers in the Soviet Union'' (1942), and ''Man and Plan in the Soviet Economy'' (1948).<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rothstein |first1=Andrew |last2=Miller |first2=Margaret |last3=Berlin |first3=Isaiah |author-link3=Isaiah Berlin |title=Correspondence |journal=The Slavonic and East European Review |volume=28 |number=71 |date=1950 |pages=600–610 |url-access=subscription |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4204176 |jstor=4204176}} Contains an exchange of letters between Rothstein and Margaret Miller after she had negatively reviewed his ''Man and Plan in the Soviet Economy'' book in the previous issue of ''The Slavonic and East European Review''.</ref> From 1943 to 1950, he was president of the Foreign Press Association. After World War II, he was London correspondent of the Czechoslovak trade union paper, ''Práce'', a position he held until 1970.<ref name=Stevenson />

Starting in 1946, he lectured at London University's School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Four years later he was dismissed on the grounds of "inadequate scholarship"; however, he claimed, and ''The Guardian'' also suggested, that there was "an unpleasant whiff of McCarthyism" about his dismissal.<ref name=Guardian_obit /> In 1950 he published ''A History of the U.S.S.R.'', the first of two works for Penguin Books, the other being ''Peaceful Coexistence'' (1955).

With his fluency in Russian,<ref name=Telegraph_obit /> Rothstein translated numerous Russian-language texts into English, such as ''The Last Days of Tsar Nicholas'' (1935), ''Hitlerite Responsibility under Criminal Law'' (1945), Georgi Plekhanov's ''In Defence of Materialism'' (1947), Boris Ponomarev's ''History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union'' (1962), and Nadezhda Krupskaya's ''Memories of Lenin'' (1970).

===Later years=== In 1970, Rothstein was awarded a Soviet pension.<ref name=Stevenson /> He also became chair of London's Marx Memorial Library, and was vice-chair of the British-Soviet Friendship Society.<ref name=Stevenson /> In his later years, he continued to research and write, for example, he published ''A House on Clerkenwell Green'' (1966) about the building that houses the Marx Memorial Library. Drawing on personal experience, he wrote two books about resistance to the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War: ''When Britain Invaded Soviet Russia: the Consul Who Rebelled'' (1979) and ''The Soldiers' Strikes of 1919'' (1980).

An orthodox Marxist all his life, Rothstein was a critic of the 1980s trends in the CPGB toward revisionist Marxism and Eurocommunism. In October 1985, he and Robin Page Arnot co-wrote an article entitled "The British Communist Party and Euro-Communism" for the CPUSA's ''Political Affairs'' magazine, in which they argued that "Euro-Communism today is the revisionism of yesterday".<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Rothstein |first1=Andrew |last2=Arnot |first2=Robin Page |author-link2=Robin Page Arnot |magazine=Political Affairs |title=The British Communist Party and Euro-Communism |date=October 1985 |page=28 |volume=64}}</ref>

In 1988, Rothstein was a proud recipient of card number one of the re-established Communist Party of Britain (CPB).<ref>{{cite book |last1=Beckett |first1=Francis |title=Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party |year=1995 |isbn=0-7195-5310-5 |pages=118–119, 228 |publisher=John Murray}}</ref> His last published article was "British Communists and the Comintern 1919-1929", printed in summer 1991 in the CPB publication, ''Communist Review''.

Andrew Rothstein died in London on 22 September 1994, at age 95. Some obituaries sharply criticized him for his decades-long loyalty to the Soviet Union.<ref>{{cite news |last=Shulman |first=Milton |author-link=Milton Shulman |title=Belief based on a lie |newspaper=Evening Standard |date=7 October 1994 |page=174 |url=https://www.newspapers.com/image/724711864/ |url-access=subscription |via=Newspapers.com}}</ref>

===Personal life=== Rothstein married Edith Lunn in Hampstead, London, in 1922.<ref name=Balliol /> They had a son Andrew, and a daughter Natalie who became a curator and academic.

==Selected works== * ''[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.100088 The Soviet Constitution]''. Labour Publishing Company, 1923 (as editor). {{OCLC|2988516}}. * ''Russia's Socialist Triumph: Exposition of the Soviet Union's Five Years' Plan of Socialist Construction''. Communist Party of Great Britain, 1929. {{OCLC|12202088}}. * Bykov, P. M. ''The Last Days of Tsar Nicholas''. "Translated by Andrew Rothstein". International Publishers, 1935. {{OCLC|4273520}}. * ''Soviet Peace Policy: A Barrier to War''. Modern Books, 1935. {{OCLC|37754322}}. * ''Workers in the Soviet Union''. F. Muller, 1942. {{OCLC|13345118}}. * Plekhanov, G. V. ''In Defence of Materialism: The Development of the Monist View of History''. "Translated by Andrew Rothstein". Lawrence & Wishart, 1947. {{LCCN|49000762}}. * ''[https://archive.org/details/ManAndPlanInSovietEconomy Man and Plan in Soviet Economy]''. F. Muller, 1948. {{OCLC|3497332}}. * ''[https://archive.org/details/AHistoryOfTheU.S.S.R. A History of the U.S.S.R.]'' Penguin Books, 1950. {{OCLC|803656559}}. * ''[https://archive.org/details/APeopleRebornTheStoryOfNorthOssetia A People Reborn: The Story of North Ossetia]''. Lawrence & Wishart, 1954 (as editor). {{OCLC|26831075}}. * ''[https://archive.org/details/PeacefulCoexistence Peaceful Coexistence]''. Penguin Books, 1955. {{LCCN|55003505}}. * ''The Soviet Union and Socialism''. London Communist Party, 1957. {{OCLC|7045092}}. * ''[https://archive.org/details/TheMunichConspiracy The Munich Conspiracy]''. Lawrence & Wishart, 1958. {{OCLC|236248}} * ''A House on Clerkenwell Green''. Lawrence & Wishart, 1966. {{OCLC|12413007}}. * ''When Britain Invaded Soviet Russia: The Consul Who Rebelled''. Journeyman Press, 1979. {{OCLC|6902165}}. * ''The Soldiers' Strikes of 1919''. Palgrave Macmillan, 1980. {{OCLC|60071857}}. * "The British Communist Party and Euro-Communism", ''Political Affairs'', October 1985. Co-written with Robin Page Arnot.

==References== {{reflist}}

==Further reading== * {{cite magazine |last=Hussey |first=Leonard |title=Mr. Rothstein and the Soviet Union |url=https://banmarchive.org.uk/new-reasoner/the-summer-1957/mr-rothstein-and-the-soviet-union/ |magazine=New Reasoner |volume=1 |number=1 |date=Summer 1957 |pages=65–70}} A review of Rothstein's ''The Soviet Union and Socialism''. * ''Morning Star'', 29 September 1988.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Rothstein, Andrew}} Category:1898 births Category:1994 deaths Category:20th-century British journalists Category:20th-century British male journalists Category:Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford Category:British Army personnel of World War I Category:British mutineers Category:British people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent Category:British Yeomanry soldiers Category:Communist Party of Britain members Category:Communist Party of Great Britain members Category:Hampshire Yeomanry soldiers Category:Jewish socialists Category:Military personnel from London