[The red notebook continued:]

13th November, 1955

Ever since Stalin’s death in 1953 there has been a state of affairs in the CP that the old hands say would have been impossible at any time before. Groups of people, ex-communists and communists together, have been meeting to discuss what is going on in the Party, in Russia and in Britain. The first meeting I was asked to attend (and I’ve been out of the Party for over a year now) consisted of nine members and five ex-members. And none of us, the ex-members, had the usual ‘You are traitors’ inflicted on us. We met as socialists, with full trust. The discussions have slowly developed and there is now a sort of vague plan — to remove the ‘dead bureaucracy’ at the centre of the Party, so that the CP should be completely changed, a genuinely British Party, without the deadly loyalty to Moscow and the obligation to tell lies, etc., a genuinely democratic Party. I again find myself among people filled with excitement and purpose — among them people who left the Party years ago. The plan can be summarized thus: (a) The Party, shorn of its ‘old hands’ who are incapable of thinking straight after so many years of lying and double-cross should make a statement repudiating its past. This, first. (b) To break all ties with foreign Communist Parties, in the expectation that other Communist Parties will also be rejuvenating themselves and breaking with the past. (c) To call together the thousands and thousands of people who have been communist and who have left the Party in disgust, inviting them to join the revitalized party. (d) To …

[At this point the red notebook was stuffed full of newspaper cuttings to do with the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, letters from all kinds of people about politics, agendas for political meetings, etc. This mass of paper had been fastened together by rubber bands and clipped to the page. Then Anna's handwriting began again:]

11th August, 1956

Not for the first time in my life I realize I have spent weeks and months in frenzied political activity and have achieved absolutely nothing. More, that I might have foreseen it would achieve nothing. The Twentieth Congress has doubled and trebled the numbers of people, both in and out of the Party, who want a ‘new’ Communist Party. Last night I was at a meeting which went on till nearly morning. Towards the end a man who had not spoken before, a socialist from Austria, made a short humorous speech, something like this: ‘My dear Comrades. I have been listening to you, amazed at the wells of faith in human beings! What you are saying amounts to this: that you know the leadership of the British CP consists of men and women totally corrupted by years of work in the Stalinist atmosphere. You know they will do anything to maintain their position. You know, because you have given a hundred examples of it here this evening, that they suppress resolutions, rig ballots, pack meetings, lie and twist. There is no way of getting them out of office by democratic means partly because they are unscrupulous, and partly because half of the Party members are too innocent to believe their leaders are capable of such trickery. But every time you reach this point in your deliberations you stop, and instead of drawing the obvious conclusions from what you have said, you go off into some day-dream and talk as if all you have to do is to appeal to the leading Comrades to resign all at once because it would be in the best interests of the Party if they did. It is as if you proposed to appeal to a professional burglar to retire because his efficiency was giving his profession a bad name.’