Raji Palme Dutt and Salme

Greetings card to Rajani Palme Dutt from all the staff at labour Monthly, including Zelda Curtis


Whilst Raji Palme Dutt was hated by Harry Pollitt, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and an arch political rival, he was greatly revered by many rank and file comrades. During the war comrades serving in India set up groups to discuss his Notes of the Month and these Labour Monthly Readers' Groups influenced great numbers of soldiers who later swelled the ranks of the Communist Party on their return to Britain. They speak, even today, of labour monthly having been their lifeline to sanity in a mad, mad world.
Even his political adversaries recognised in Raji not only a giant intellect but a man committed devotedly to a cause; a man whose influence affected events throughout the world. Nehru, Kenyatta, Nkrumah, all sought discussion of their problems with him and history will record the roles these men played and the part Dutt had in the events they shaped.
Dutt's father, an Indian, had been a country doctor here, doing his rounds in a pony and trap. He often took the young Raji along with him and it was witnessing the poverty of his father's patients that turned Raji into a socialist, he told me. Seeing the squalor of their lives, the dreadful housing and cramped conditions in which they lived, and the tuberculosis that ravaged their lives, he pledged himself to fight for a better society. The irony was that he also suffered from TB.
Raji often spoke to me about Salme, his wife, and it was to me he entrusted the task of publishing her poems after her death. A beautiful woman, a poet and a political activist all her life, Salme was fluent in French, German, Russian, Swedish, Estonian and Finnish. She had been a brilliant scholar. Born in Estonia in 1888, she took part in the Russian Revolution of 1907. During her University years she was banished to Siberia for her underground activities, and it was that ordeal that caused her health to suffer. She was never really fit throughout the rest of her life.
In 1919 she asked Lenin to assign her a task in whichever country the battle was toughest. "Lenin looked at me with his usual quizzical smile" she told her friends" and replied that in that case I should go to England as that was the toughest place for communism. So I did."
She came to England in 1920 and while working here with Willie Gallacher she was introduced to the young Raji. He was much younger than she was, but within two years they were married. In a poem she wrote in 1936 she said her longing was "to swim where the waves are wildest, And moor a red flag on the whirl."
When I met her in 1965 her health was failing fast and she was in bed most of the time, looked after lovingly by Raji. The day she died I was phoned early in the morning by Raji's secretary at the Party Headquarters. I rushed round to his flat to be with him As he opened the door I saw his sadness. i held his hand for a moment and kissed his cheek. Then my eyes fell on the breakfast tray on the small hall table. A silver teapot and cream jug stood beside a delicate bone china cup and saucer resting on a plate. Two slices of toast stood in a rack alongside a small ot o honey and a tall, slender deep red rose stood in a silver, single-stem vase. Propped up against it was a birthday card. "It was her birthday" he sighed as tears welled up in his eyes.
This was the man the press called "Arch villain", the "intellectual doyen of the international communist movement". Here he was, lover of Salme, crying at his loss, clinging to me in his grief.