Brian Pearce


Brian Leonard Pearce was a British Marxist political activist, historian, and translator. Adept and prolific in Russian-to-English translation, Pearce was regarded at the time of his death as "one of the most acute scholars of Russian history and British communism never to have held an academic post."

Early years

Pearce was born in Weymouth, Dorset on 9 May 1915. His father was an upwardly mobile engineer, his mother a domestic servant of Irish extraction. Brian was their only child, a shy and precocious boy, poor at athletics and not popular among his peers. His father's growing prosperity allowed the young Brian the freedom to travel. In 1931 he went to Germany and in 1933 to France, where he further developed the language skills which he had learned in school.
Although his parents were Tories, Brian's father investigated a few early issues of the Communist Party of Great Britain's organ, The Daily Worker, which Brian read thoroughly. He was also greatly influenced by an uncle who worked as a railwayman and who was a partisan of the socialist Independent Labour Party. Brian also read various books and pamphlets which he purchased on his own from a radical bookseller located on Charing Cross Road.
Brian briefly worked for a company which produced trade journals before going away to University College London in 1934. It was there as a history student that Pearce joined the Communist Party.
While he had been expected to get a first in History and to win a scholarship to further pursue his own research in the Tudor period, en route to a career in academia, he instead received an upper second on his last exam. His only choice if he was to proceed on a PhD program would be to work under the close direction of a supervisor on a topic not of his own choosing. He laboured at that unpleasant task for two years before discovering that another person was almost finished plowing the same research ground, making award of a PhD unlikely. Pearce henceforth chose to follow a different path.

Career

Pearce married for the first time in 1939 to a party comrade, Lilla Fox. The pair had three children before separating in the late 1940s.
Pearce was drafted into the military early in 1940 and was stationed in the north of England. His wartime experiences were uneventful.
After being demobilised, Pearce went to work in the civil service, where he learned Russian. He subsequently left the civil service to work in various Communist Party-related capacities, including as a member of the staff of The Daily Worker, for the Anglo-Soviet Friendship Society, and as a teacher of English at various East European embassies in London.
In 1953, Brian joined a delegation of the British-Soviet Friendship Society and travelled to the Soviet Union. He was also an important member of the Communist Party Historians Group, a group of party members which conducted serious historical research into various questions of the British labour movement.
Pearce's world was rocked by the so-called Secret Speech delivered by Soviet leader N.S. Khrushchev in 1956. These revelations about the violent and criminal behaviour of the regime of Joseph Stalin had the effect of dividing the CPGB between those who favoured becoming truly independent and thoroughly democratised and others who disregarded Khrushchev's revelations as hysterical and overblown and having no real relationship to the situation facing the Communist Party in the UK. Pearce began contributing to an opposition journal called The Reasoner, a publication which was terminated just as the Soviet invasion of Hungary was taking place. This event created an even wider fissure in the British Communist Party, ultimately ending in September 1957 with Brian's expulsion from the CPGB.
After being expelled from the Communist Party in 1957, Pearce turned to Trotskyism as a member of the Socialist Labour League, a membership which he retained for many years.
Pearce became a professional translator to make ends meet. He was skilled at his craft, combining accuracy with a highly readable style, and was a three-time winner of the prestigious Scott Moncrieff Prize for his translating work.

Death and legacy

Pearce died on 25 November 2008. He was 93 years old.
At the time of his death, he was described as "one of the most acute scholars of Russian history and British communism never to have held an academic post." His papers are in the process of being catalogued at Aberdeen University, which will hold the Brian Pearce Archive.

Footnotes

Selected works

Writings