An East End boy who led his nation with a smile
A communist stalwart born to Baltic Jewish parents in London’s East End, Max Levitas was at Cable Street when Mosley and his thugs tried to march through. When the actual Nazis arrives four years later, Levitas joined the resistance, first as a deliverer of underground newspapers. By the end of the war, he was blowing up railways with the Molotov Club.
A plain-speaking man with simple roots, Levitas served as a useful counterweight to the more intellectual occupants of the Central Committee. When the Chinese Scare of 1971 had various more bookish figures in the government on edge, it was Levitas who persuaded them there was no risk of ‘another Azores’ because the Chinese simply had ‘nowhere else to go’. Sure enough, by the end of the year, Lin was reassured, calmer, and in control of the party and of China. Relations with the Kremlin normalised, and the Indian government in particular breathed a sigh of relief.
Levitas cut his teeth on foreign affairs in the former Raj. In 1959, he was made ambassador to the Balaram government and was present during the renewal of the Indo-Soviet ‘treaty of friendship’ that had been in place since the death of Lloyd George. Finding the climate delightful but the work uninspiring, Levitas requested a transfer into a domestic department in 1963, and by the mid-sixties he was the Assistant Secretary for Prices, Quantities and Standards. In 1967, he was made Secretary for Housing and Civil Construction, partnering him with the brilliant Rodney Gordon. Gordon’s brutalist designs were revolutionising inner London and would, across the next fifteen years, become a common (if divisive) sight in all major cities of the CGB.
By 1976, Levitas was a powerful and respected member of the Central Committee. On Feather’s sudden death, he was the obvious candidate to replace him. Brushing aside a nominal challenge from Jack Jones (who was, in 1977, sent to oversee tyre production in Brentford), Levitas took over the CGB in the bloodless fashion the country had become used to. It might not have been so easy - when his candidacy was first considered, there was an elephant in the room that made some Secretaries uneasy. Levitas was Jewish. Were it not for the fact that the leader of the Soviet Union himself was as well, it is unlikely that this ‘landmark moment’ for British Jews would have occurred. As it happened, even the most strident anti-Semites in the government could barely talk higher than a whisper while Kaganovich was still in charge. When the Grand Old Man stood down in 1978, Levitas was already entrenched and had, thankfully, weeded out the more reactionary members of the Central Committee.
While he shared Feather’s desire for stability and prosperity, Levitas was aware of the dangers of appearing to govern as a do-little. While ‘public discontent’ was hardly the concern it had been in the days of ‘democracy’, a riot at the wrong time could lead to a telephone call from Moscow and a one-way ticket to a farm in Wales.
With this in mind, Levitas made himself a very public figure. ‘Dynamic socialism’ became the watchword of the day, and the BBC had its Expectations Charter for 1975-1980 formally ripped up and replaced with a new, more targeted agenda. Levitas allowed the Central Committee to become perceived as slightly more ‘human’ and ‘in touch’. They were present, for example, at the FA Cup final in 1978, (where Portsmouth Maritime beat Watford 3-2). The nightly news began to feature the relevant secretaries reading out statements themselves (in the style, though not the reality, of an interview) rather than simply sending a fax of what to say straight to the BBC.
Critics have called Levitas’ tenure ‘window dressing’. Real reform was not forthcoming, but the Cable Street veteran did a very good job of making people feel like things were substantially better than they had been. In many ways, it was an impossible task to meaningfully reform the British state within ten years of the Summer of London.
The ‘window dressing’ charge is, however, somewhat unfair. There was a small but noticeable relaxation of public censorship, though only in the fields of ‘entertainment’. Shakespeare, as in the Soviet Union, had never been censored and had for years served as the obvious outlet for subversive directors and actors. Peter Hall’s 1980
Hamlet, starring Derek Jacobi, turned Elsinore into an ever-watching police state, and contained sequences all too familiar to Britons who had been present when Special Branch raided or shut down a pub.
Hall’s production was not a new phenomenon - as early as 1960, Laurence Olivier directed a seminal
Measure for Measure, and allowed the idea of a benevolent ruler disguising himself and going among his people in order to survey them to speak for itself. Olivier was visited at his home by Special Branch, it is alleged, but no formal action was taken.
What made the 1980
Hamlet so significant was what followed it. After three extended runs at the People’s Theatre and a trip to Broadway (the ‘Muskie Thaw’ was in full swing), there was a palpable sense that the Levitas regime was becoming more permissive in terms of culture. It is this mood that inspired Harold Pinter to write (or rather, put on - he had written it in the 1960s)
The Birthday Party a confusing, savage play that involved two men breaking down an apparently innocent man through interrogation. When, in 1982, it was a rave success, Levitas was faced with a choice. In a move that would define his cultural legacy, he contacted British Films and asked that Mr Pinter be contacted about a screenplay of the work.
While foreign affairs were never his strength, relations with the GDR were particularly strained during Levitas’ tenure. He found it impossible to hide his disdain for his comrades in Berlin. While this was understandable given the fate of several members of his family during the war (including his older brother), it seriously damaged his position and credibility as Germany gained the ascendancy within the western end of the COMECON. ‘Temper the Teutons’ had been the unofficial slogan of the British government since the war, echoing the attitude pursued by Moscow. But the ‘post-war trudge’ that had eventually brought German industry back up to speed by the mid-1960s was impossible to reverse. To dismantle one generation of factories and rebuild them in other countries is unfortunate - to dismantle two is sheer malice.
The backwards-looking nature of French socialism also meant that France began to fall significantly behind both Britain and Germany. Unwilling to change (or perhaps unable to), and hamstrung by strikes and the rise of the illegal Solidarité trade union, the French state had a difficult 1970s. By the end of the decade, rumblings were afoot of a military takeover on Moscow's orders, and sure enough by 1981 General Archambault was 'President and Defence Secretary of the People's Republic'.
The economic turmoil of the mid-1970s was weathered rather more effectively by the British people, however - a new generation of folk songs, akin to those sung in air raid shelters, would be heard cheerily ringing out from queues for bread, fuel or appliances. The Mini, its engine slightly improved, became a beloved symbol of Self-Sustaining Economics, Levitas’ favourite slogan. The usual waiting lists for the Mini came down to below six months for the first time in 1981. It seemed things were on the up.
Sadly for a man who focused his life on Britain, it would be foreign affairs that ended Levitas’ life. He attended the January 1984 Ankara Conference, at which both Tikhonov and Muskie agreed to a reduction in nuclear warheads. Allegedly a last-minute intervention from him saved the whole deal from collapse, though it is unknown how much of that claim is after-the-fact hagiography. Desperate to get home, he boarded the BOA flight back to Croydon International airport. Somewhere over the Adriatic, the plane broke apart and he was killed along with four other senior Central Committee members - and thirty others.
An inquiry was immediately launched into the crash, but no evidence of foul play was ever found. To this day, however, there are those who curse Koliševski and his government for an alleged missile strike on the aircraft. While foul play was never formally proven, the crash sparked the series of events that would lead to the occupation of Yugoslavia and full incorporation into COMECON and Antwerp by 1988.
As for Max Levitas, he is fondly remembered by many in Britain today. A cheerier face than Feather before him, and the last of Britain’s leaders to have actively fought in the war or resistance, his abrupt passing represented a sea change in British governance. As 1984 dawned, Britons wondered what awaited them next.
