Moscow, Nauka Publ. 1983. 256 p.

The founders of scientific communism were the first to reveal the interdependence of the British labour movement and the national liberation movement in Ireland. They noted that the suppression of national liberation forces in Ireland in the name of strengthening the positions of the largest landlords who considered Ireland their fiefdom, trade magnates, and the English military invariably strengthened and fed the reaction in England itself .1 Its policy towards Ireland provided the founders of scientific socialism with rich material for the elaboration of the national - colonial question.

M. E. Orlova, Senior Researcher at the Institute of International Labor Movement of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Candidate of Historical Sciences, is devoted to the interdependence of the British labor movement and the national liberation movement of Ireland. There are already a number of studies in Soviet historiography that highlight key points in the history of the Emerald Island2 . However, many problems remained unexplored, including the topic chosen by M. E. Orlova, on which only a number of articles concerning certain periods can be named .3 Meanwhile, the national movement in Ireland has always been a non-national movement.-

1 K. Marx and F. Engels Soch. Vol. 32, pp. 304, 531.

2 First of all, the following works are meant: Kerzhentsev P. I. Ireland in the struggle for Independence, Moscow, 1936; Kolpakov A.D. Ireland - the Rebel Island, Moscow, 1965; his. Ireland on the way to the revolution of 1900-1918 M. 1976; Erofeev N. A. The decline of the British Empire. M. 1968; Orlova M. E. Ireland in search of ways of independent development. M. 1973; History of Ireland. M. 1980; Gribin N. P. The tragedy of Ulster. M. 1980; Polyakova E. Yu. Ulster: the origins of tragedy. Moscow, 1982; et al.

3. Tupoleva L. F. The Irish question and the English working-class movement of the 80s of the XIX century. In: Rabocheye dvizhenie Britannii XIX-XX vv. M. 1979; Orlova M. E. Rabocheye dvizhenie Irelii i Britannii: problemy sotrudnichestva i vzaimodeystviya (kontsa XIX - 70-e gody XX v.). V kn.: Rabocheye dvizhenie Britannii: natsional'nye i rasovye problemy [Working Movement of Ireland and Great Britain: Problems of Cooperation and Interaction (late XIX-70-ies of XX century)].

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an integral part of British political life. Using a large amount of material, the author reveals the roots of traditional alienation, indifference, and age-old prejudices of English society towards the Irish and their aspirations. These prejudices also affected the British working class. The presence of the working class in England, which, in Lenin's words, beheaded itself with a liberal workers 'policy, 4 played a fatal role in the fate of the Irish workers' and national liberation movements. Pointing out this circumstance, the author does not lose sight of the fact that "the lack of prospects for a progressive union of Irish democracy with the English working class contributed to the unhindered spread of the influence of the national bourgeoisie, which limited the horizons of the Irish working-class movement to narrow nationalism and thereby strengthened the tendency to dissolve it in" supra-class, nationwide anti-imperialist unity " (p. 7)..

The Irish working class was decapitated by nationalist labor policies, which for many decades determined the fate and path of national liberation of Ireland. The idea of the common interests of the working - class movement of England and Ireland in the cause of national liberation of the latter had to overcome the powerful opposition of traditional forces - Irish bourgeois nationalism, on the one hand, and British imperial chauvinism, on the other. The author emphasizes that this problem has not been solved to this day (p. 7).

M. E. Orlova gives examples of successful and fruitful interaction of the mass English working-class movement with the national liberation struggle in Ireland. In this regard, the approach to the Irish problem of the Chartist movement in the 30 - 40s of the XIX century is characteristic. Chartist documents provide evidence of a deep understanding of the closeness of the goals and objectives of the movement for democracy in England and the liberation struggle of the Irish people. "The times of chartism have shown firsthand how mutually enriching international cooperation in the struggle for freedom and democracy is," the author points out (p.19).

The defeat of Chartism and the beginning of the revolutionary wave, the book emphasizes, radically changed the situation. The former leaders of the political struggle of the working class were replaced by new people-the leaders of the trade unions. With the establishment of the trade Unionist ideology, with the rejection of the class struggle and the spread of a narrowly reformist understanding of the political struggle in the British working class, the chauvinist views implanted by the bourgeoisie on the Irish question are becoming even more deeply rooted.

Bright pages in the history of the Irish socialist and labor movements occur at the end of the XIX-beginning of the XX century. The author writes: "It was the most advanced socialist organizations of England and Scotland in the 1980s of the 19th century-the Socialist League and the Social Democratic Federation, to whose activities, according to the British Communists, the origins of the British communist movement go back, as well as the rise of the English working-class movement associated with the "new" trade unionism, that became the main ones universities that gave Ireland the outstanding Marxist, labor organizer, and national hero James Connolly" (pp. 56-57). Connolly was convinced that the two currents of revolutionary thought in Ireland - the national and the socialist - "do not contradict each other, but, on the contrary, complement each other" (ibid.).

The period of the national liberation, anti-imperialist revolution of 1918-1923 is associated with the glorious pages of the English labor movement, which came out in the early 1920s with support for the struggling Ireland, with demands for granting it the right to self-determination and the withdrawal of British troops. But it was at this time, in 1921, that London carried out an insidious plan to split the country, the consequences of which are most tragically felt to this day.

Turning to the question of Northern Ireland, the author observes: "Almost every historian or publicist involved in research or interpretation of the Ulster events during the current crisis has touched on the reaction of British public opinion, which is strikingly inconsistent with the scale and nature of what is happening, or the degree of actual involvement of British politics and public life in it" (p.160). Indeed, by vaccinating-

4 See Lenin V. I. PSS. Vol. 25, p. 305.

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the centuries-old chauvinism, arrogant malevolence, and dismissive attitude towards the Irish have become characteristic of mass public opinion in England, weighed down by the weight of old stereotypes in the mind, indelible prejudices and a sense of "imperial superiority". Sophisticated British propaganda in the anti-Irish spirit processes public opinion, trying to "present events in Northern Ireland as the result of religious confrontation, without linking them to the arch-reactionary unionist regime, discrimination against the Catholic minority, or acute socio-economic problems of a backward province" (p.162).

The attitude of the British trade unions and the Labour Party to the Ulster crisis attracts special attention of the author. Based on the study of the reports of meetings of trade union congresses, annual conferences of the Labour Party, and the press, M. E. Orlova comes to the conclusion that the solidarity resolutions adopted by the British trade unions conceal formalism and a very significant weakness in the actual support of the fighters for democracy in Northern Ireland: "In the decisions taken, in the speeches of the leaders of individual trade unions and the BCT itself violations of democracy, violence, sectarianism, and the problems of Northern Ireland's economic backwardness exist, as it were, in isolation from the policies of the British government in the past and present, and from the policies of the Unionists " (p. 192). The Ulster events were considered without taking into account the Irish problem as a whole. "In no trade union document does the problem of Northern Ireland appear as part of the general or unresolved problem of Irish independence and unity" (p. 194).

In turn, the Labour Party has generally followed a two-party policy on the issue of the Northern Ireland crisis. Neither the revival of interest of mass grassroots Labor organizations in the Irish issue, nor the efforts of the left wing of the party could influence the formation of an alternative political course for Labor. As the author rightly points out, "the rejection of any attempts at political settlement in Northern Ireland and the transfer of the initiative to the Ulster parties, which deliberately refused any compromises on the issue of power sharing, recorded in the new Labour program for Great Britain in 1976, represented a rather grim result of the evolution of the Irish policy of the Labour leadership of the 70s" (p. 215).

A significant part of the book is devoted to the analysis of the position of the British Communists on the Irish question. Their speeches consistently reflected on the connection between the Ulster crisis and the unresolved Irish problem as a whole. The author emphasizes that the Communist Party of Great Britain actively uses the new opportunities for cooperation with left-wing forces in the British labor movement, opened up in connection with the strengthening of the left's position in the Labor Party and their increased attacks on the right wing, in particular on the Irish question.

In the future, first of all, we should continue to study the causes of mass chauvinism and hostility to Irish national movements, study the socio-psychological aspects of the English labor movement, and undertake a retrospective analysis of the interdependence of the historical destinies of the peoples of the two countries since the middle of the XVII century. It would also be desirable to trace in more detail the connection of the problem under consideration with the general aggravation of the national question in Great Britain and other countries of developed capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century, since, despite the complexity and diversity of various aspects that make up this topic, the national question is dominant. It would be interesting to pay more attention to the role of the religious factor in the current Ulster crisis, as well as to consider the economic aspect of the interdependence of two neighboring countries as a basis for studying the interaction of their labor movement.

M. E. Orlova's research, which is interesting in its approach to the problem, is distinguished by the validity of conclusions concerning the most acute problems of the modern workers ' and national liberation movement of the British Isles.

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