96 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
or respected abroad. The Communist Party of Great Britain, for
instance, thought him too ready to issue advice without having much
idea of realistic possibilities.^14 Though the USSR never disclosed the
rationale for its distribution of largesse, the annual accounts in 1980
show that the Kremlin calculated on the basis of current foreign and
security policy rather than on a desire to foster communist revolu-
tions. The priority was to secure the Soviet Union’s influence and
prestige on all continents, and this necessarily involved competition
with America. The Politburo wished to appear as the vanguard of the
global ‘anti-imperialist struggle’.^15
The biggest grant that Ponomarëv made was the $2.5 million that
he gave to Gus Hall and the Communist Party of the USA. American
communist candidates, including Hall himself, had suffered defeat by
voters at every presidential and state election since 1945.^16 This did not
bother Ponomarëv. The USSR needed an agency of continuous propa-
ganda for its cause, and Hall was the person whom Moscow regarded
as the best at performing this task. (The fact that Hall was a dour,
repetitive speaker with the charisma of a faulty metronome was over-
looked by the International Department.) Hall had endorsed the
invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. He rhapso-
dized on the virtues of life for people in the Soviet Union. He sang the
praises of Brezhnev while lamenting the sequence of US Presidents
who had held office since he had been elected General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the USA. He passed every test in the Kremlin’s
book, even offering support of the Soviet Army’s war in Afghanistan.
He and his party were cheap at the price; and when in 1982 they asked
for a remission of their debts, the Secretariat recommended approval.^17
Next in the line of financial assistance were the French commu-
nists with $2 million; the position of their leader Georges Marchais in
Western Europe as a spokesman for the ‘peace-loving’ intentions of
the USSR in Western Europe was pre-eminent. They might not have
won any national election, but they never did very badly and indeed
they often received a substantial enough proportion of votes to be able
to influence the composition of government coalitions. France was
anyway the most awkward of the Western powers for the US to handle,
not least because it had withdrawn from NATO’s military command
structure and several of its presidents had criticized American foreign
policy. The Kremlin saw every reason to prop up the French Commu-
nist Party and get it to try and increase the tensions between Moscow
and Paris.^18 Soviet leaders assumed that French comrades could not