Alexei Sayle

STALIN ATE MY HOMEWORK

by ALEXEI SAYLE

Sceptre, 2010, 304 pages, $35 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/46774

Even at primary school in Liverpool in the 1950s, the future comedian, Alexei Sayle, was a "mouthy little bastard", he writes in his memoir, Stalin Ate My Homework. When his teacher asked her class to bow their heads and thank God for the milk at break time he piped up with 'No, Miss Wilson, I think you'll find that the milk comes to us via the Milk Marketing Board, a public body set up in 1933 to control the production, pricing and distribution of milk and other dairy products within the UK. It has nothing to do with the intervention of some questionable divine entity'.

"Deliciously inflammatory" views like this were a feature of Sayle's family. His father and mother, Joe and Molly, were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and they saw the world through Marxist eyes. A lot of shouting was involved - "it seemed we had bought a television mostly so we could argue with it, a response which became particularly violent when a news report came on when one or both parents would begin shouting 'Nonsense!', 'Lies!' or 'Capitalist propaganda!' at anything they disagreed with, which tended to be nearly everything". "We weren't like other families", he concludes with mixed feelings.

Born in 1952, Alexei was the child of communists who was taken to see Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible (films by the Soviet director, Sergei Eisenstein) rather than Bambi and Pinnochio. Such was the child cultural development duty of the genial Joe, a railways unionist, and the temperamental Molly, who led the shouting at the Queen's Christmas speech on the TV ('Parasite! Liar! What's she got on her head? What about the Rosenbergs? Second front now!').

Joe and Molly delighted in anti-patriotic heresy - taking pride in the British football or cricket teams "was somehow reveling in slavery, the Amritsar Massacre, the suppression of the Irish or the Opium Wars". The Sayles were not blinkered nationalists. They were a cosmopolitan family, "a family that went abroad" including to Czechoslovakia, "a place so foreign it had a 'z' in its name".

Travel to the Stalinist eastern bloc, however, raised questions in young Alexei's mind, trying to cope with the concept of "Marxist limousines", and his unease increased after the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Still liking the people of the left, however, Sayle's anti-parental revolt took the form of becoming "a different kind of Communist", specifically a Maoist at the time of the Sino-Soviet split where, as a member of the Liverpool branch of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), he took on their deadliest enemies, the Communist Federation of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).

Unfortunately, Sayle's exposure to the left via Moscow-obedient Stalinists and sectarian Maoists has rather soured him to the organised left as a whole, reinforcing a basic anti-political temperament. He claims, for example, that protests and demonstrations are "ridiculous and stupid", a familiar excuse for the stay-at-home individualist, but there are plenty of counter-examples to show that mass public dissent seriously matters to the privileged and powerful. Similarly, Sayle's assertion that revolutionaries are dedicated to censorship, state repression and "forced eradication of unwanted classes" is historically simplistic, the cynically familiar dross that comes from mixing up socialism with its Stalinist negation.

Sayle is a fine comic writer and when he laughs with the left, his humour and critical sympathy combine with a comedic flourish, but when he laughs at the left (or, rather, at his caricature of the left), the writing descends into cheap conservative gags. Nevertheless, despite his analytical fragility, Sayle's heart is in the right (i.e. left) place and his ability to tell a funny anecdote is top-rung. Perhaps having communist parents and a cultural diet of Eisenstein rather than Disney has, in the end, given us not just a good comic but a socially-aware one.