The authorities used newspapers to ask Mitchell to give himself up. Members of the Kray ‘firm’ cautiously negotiated with the Home Office, on the understanding that Mitchell would be considered for parole if he surrendered. But when Mitchell was consulted, he announced he had no intention of surrendering. He was sick of jail, and he was enjoying freedom and a normal sex life. The Krays became aware that he was going to be a severe embarrassment.
On 23 December 1966, eleven days after the escape, a Kray henchman called at the flat and asked Mitchell to go with him; Mitchell kissed Liza Prescott – who had become fond of him – and left. A few minutes later she heard muffled bangs from outside. The prosecution alleged that Mitchell had got into a van where he had been shot in the head by Fred Foreman, whose gun was equipped with a silencer. At a party soon afterwards, Reggie Kray burst into tears when Mitchell was mentioned, and said: ‘This is a tough game.’
With the Krays in custody, many witnesses came forward. The barmaid who had been present when Cornell was shot – and had insisted she saw nothing – now described the killing and admitted, ‘I was too afraid to talk.’ And the Krays’ cousin, Ronald Hart, described the murder of Jack McVitie. After a forty-day trial, ten of the eleven men in the dock were found guilty. The Kray twins received thirty years each; their brother Charles received ten. The days when London resembled Prohibition Chicago were over.
The study of organised crime underlines the point made by Yochelson and Samenow in The Criminal Personality: that the basic characteristic of the criminal is not so much calculated wickedness as a kind of childish wilfulness. We can see this very clearly in the case of Charles Richardson, holding mock trials in his judge’s robes. This was not uncontrollable rage; it was the decision ‘to be out of control’. The same is true of Ronald Kray’s shooting of George Cornell. Kray pointed out in court that he had sent fruit to Cornell’s son – who was in hospital – only a few days before the killing. It was not rage; it was a feeling that he ‘owed it to himself to avenge this insult, as deliberately as Astyages arranged for Harpagus to eat his own son. He was a judge delivering a sentence, according to a set of laws he had invented himself. Charles Richardson insisted that he had become a changed man in jail; yet he walked out of an open prison because his request for parole had been denied – the gesture of a child suddenly overcome by self-pity. In the last analysis, the criminal is a Peter Pan, a child who refuses to grow up.
POLITICAL GANGSTERISM
At the time the victors of the First World War were quarrelling about the apportionment of the spoils, Russia was divided by a murderous civil war; it ended in 1920. In that year, the year Prohibition came to America, Russia prepared to begin an extraordinary experiment: to put Karl Marx’s theory of socialism into practice.
From the beginning, the Bolshevists had shown that they had no intention of wasting time on old fashioned democratic procedures. It is true that they had suggested a parliament – a constituent assembly – before the revolution; but when they won only about a quarter of the votes, they used force to break it up. By 1921, most of the people of Russia were sick of the communists and their slaughter of opponents – they had inaugurated a terror like the one that followed the French Revolution – and fourteen thousand sailors on Kronstadt Island – off Petrograd – constituted themselves spokesmen for the peasants and demanded a socialist government without the Bolshevists. Lenin sent in troops, and most of the sailors were killed. In 1922, he re-imposed censorship of literature, its purpose being to prevent publication of counter-revolutionary works. By 1924, with the civil war over and the loyalists – the Whites – defeated, Lenin decided that it would be too much to attempt to impose Marxism -state ownership of all resources – in one swoop. His New Economic Policy declared that only large industries would belong to the state; the small businessmen and farmers could continue to operate as before. Lenin, in fact, showed every sign of being a realist who would apply Marxism cautiously to see how it worked. But he died in January 1924. His place was taken by a triumvirate: Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin – the latter being the General Secretary of the Party. Almost immediately, a struggle began between Stalin and Leon Trotsky, the Party’s most distinguished theorist (and the man most responsible for winning the civil war) about whether Russia should attempt to spread communism throughout the world, or should be content to try to make it work within its own borders. Trotsky thought the Party should work for international communism; Stalin, more realistic, believed Russia should concentrate on its own problems. Trotsky’s expulsion from the Party in 1927, and his subsequent banishment, was a triumph for Stalin. Zinoviev and Kamenev also came under heavy criticism from the Party. Stalin was now virtually the dictator of Russia.
In 1929, the year of Trotsky’s exile, Stalin decided to make the Party an instrument for the ‘revolutionary transformation of society’. What this meant, in effect, was that everyone of influence was to swallow the Marxist dogmas about ‘collectivism’. (Stalin had already ended Lenin’s New Economic Policy in the previous year.) There was to be no more backsliding towards capitalism or individualism. According to Marx, the proletariat had to be allowed to take control, to become the true leaders of the new society. The bronzed tractor driver should finish his day’s work and go to the local Party meeting to learn about the teaching of Marx and Lenin, or to the local opera house to see an opera about the revolution. Artists and intellectuals had to abandon personal problems and begin to think in political terms. It was their job to educate the masses to recognise their own destiny. Writers who brooded on the nature and destiny of man were wasting their time; when they had achieved mystical union with the proletariat, they would suddenly understand human destiny.
In fact, Russian literature and art had been flourishing since the revolution. The first reaction to the downfall of the tsar was euphoria; the intellectuals saw communism as the defender of freedom. ‘Modernism’ flourished in art and in the cinema (Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was the sensation of 1925); the poetry of Mayakovsky and Essenin actually reached the masses; so did Sholokov’s Tales of the Don and Babel’s Red Cavalry (the latter containing nightmare descriptions of the cruelty of the civil war). In the theatre, Meyerhold’s productions created their own revolution. The first symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich (1925) was soon being played all over the world, while his satirical opera The Nose appealed to intellectuals and workers. But even at this early stage, many writers expressed their reservations about communism and the ‘brave new world’ it was trying to force into existence. Olesha’s novel Envy dramatises the problem of the old fashioned individualist who feels out of place in this society of commissars and ‘comrades’. It seemed to take a critical attitude to the envious individualist; but the underlying feeling is a profound distaste for ‘collectivism’. Zamyatin’s We is an astonishing anticipation of Orwell’s 1984, about a future state in which all freedom has been crushed in the name of collectivism.
By 1930, Stalin had decided that it was time to put a stop to all this individualism, which was basically a longing for the old bourgeois ideals. From now on, literature and art should be political: its aim, to glorify the masses. Experiment must cease, because the masses could not understand experimental works. ‘Revolutionary proletarian art’ was what was needed. Writers, who were willing to glorify the masses, and write about factories and collective farms, became honoured members of the Writer’s Union (RAPP); they were presented with country cottages where they could work, and had financial security, since their works were produced in vast editions by the state publishing house. Individualists such as Babel, Zamyatin and Olesha could be ignored and made to feel their isolation. Mayakovsky, who had been made to join RAPP, committed suicide. Zamyatin went abroad. Olesha dried up. Babel finally disappeared into a concentration camp. The same thing happened to Meyerhold, and his wife was brutally murdered soon after his arrest. Shostakovich was criticised for ‘formalism’, which meant that his work sounded too much like music and not enough like propaganda; he felt obliged to withdraw his Fourth Symphony, his finest work up to that date.
What had happened in Russia is what would have happened in France if Robespierre had been able to stay in power and become dictator. Stalin was not particularly intelligent; but he was cunning and brutal, and became increasingly paranoid. He was also a dogmatic Marxist, and was quite determined that anything that looked like private ownership or private enterprise should be abolished. The small proprietors – kulaks – were forced out, or simply arrested and shot; their farms were forcibly united into ‘collectives’. Food production dropped dramatically – although Stalin took care to suppress the figures. Having ordered this forced ‘collectivisation’, Stalin seems to have become alarmed at the resistance it aroused. He announced publicly that his officials were showing ‘excessive zeal’, and should slow down the process. In this way he managed to appear to be the defender of the peasants against his own officials, the benevolent father figure who was doing his best to keep everybody happy. But the policy of destroying the kulaks continued until millions had been executed or deported. Stalin was committing mass murder on a scale – and with a cool deliberation -that made Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible seem benevolent. Another ten million died as a result of the famines that swept the country between 1931 and 1933 because of collectivisation. In many areas, there was cannibalism.