HARRY POLLITT was the most significant figure in the history of the British Communist Party and in the early 1920s, he fell passionately in love. He claimed at the time to have proposed marriage to Rose Cohen no less than 14 times. But his love was to be tested in a way he never foresaw.

Cohen, who seemed to have everything – brains, bravery, beauty – was an English feminist, suffragist and founding member of the CPGB in 1920. But she spurned Harry’s advances, preferring those of David Petrovsky, also known as Max, Lenin’s secret representative in Britain. Petrovsky was both a dedicated communist and a Ukrainian Jew, and for both reasons he had earned himself periods of imprisonment in different parts of the world.
 
Cohen became, like Petrovsky, a Comintern (Communist International) agent, carrying Soviet money and advice to Communist parties all over the world. Eventually Cohen and Petrovsky settled in Moscow. They, and their baby son, arrived just in time to be targeted as potential Trotskyists during the murderous paranoia of Stalin’s purges.

Pollitt, by then leader of Britain’s communists, was a drinking companion of Stalin and one of the leading figures of world communism. He raised her case privately in Moscow, and tried to keep Cohen’s spirits up by writing her letters. But in Britain he was silent and even denied that anything was amiss.
 
I came across Rose Cohen’s story because I met her niece Joyce Rathbone at the Marx Memorial Library, and included the story in a book, Stalin’s British Victims. But even after researching it thoroughly, the role of Harry Pollitt still baffled me, and still baffles me now.