Soviet Communism
In 1928, the Webbs moved to Liphook in Hampshire, where they lived until their deaths in the 1940s. Soon Sidney was a minister in the new Labour government. Observing the wider world, Beatrice wrote of "Russian communism and Italian Fascism" as "two sides of the worship of force and the practice of cruel intolerance" and she was disturbed that "this spirit is creeping into the USA and even ... into Great Britain."
The frustrations and disappointments of the next few years – the election of a narrow Labour majority of MPs in May 1929, the Great Depression which began later that year, the agreement of fellow Fabian Ramsay MacDonald, after the October 1931 election, to form and head a National Government, thereby splitting the Labour Party – partly explain why Beatrice and Sidney began to look on the USSR and its leader Stalin with different eyes.
In 1932, Webb was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA); she was the first woman elected to the fellowship. That year, Sidney and Beatrice, now in their 70s, spent two months from 21 May to late July in the Soviet Union. Their views about the Soviet economic experiment were published three years later in a massive volume, over 1,000 pages in length, entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935). Most of the text was written by Sidney Webb and based on a copious study of publications and statistics provided by the Soviet embassy in London. In 1933 he made a further "fact-finding" trip to the USSR before publication, accompanied by their niece Barbara Drake, a prominent trade unionist and member of the Fabian Society, and by John Cripps, the son of their nephew Stafford Cripps.
Historians have criticised the Webbs for her supposition that the methods they had developed in analysing and formulating social policy in Britain could be applied to the Soviet Union. Their book promoted and encouraged an uncritical view of Stalin's conduct, during agrarian centralisation in the first five-year plan (1928–1933), the creation of the gulag system, and the extensive purges of the 1930s. Trotskyist historian Al Richardson later described their 1935 account of the USSR as "pure Soviet propaganda at its most mendacious".
According to Archie Brown, there also seemed to be an element of deliberate deception. In the third edition of Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation (1941), for instance, the Webbs voiced the opinion that in 1937 "strenuous efforts had been made, both in the trade union organisation and in the Communist Party, to cut out the deadwood". This phrase was used to reassure a wider public about the damning accusations against former leading Bolsheviks. In her diaries, Beatrice expressed her disquiet at the opening of the Moscow Trials in the summer of 1936, and after the conviction of Nikolai Bukharin in March 1938.
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? – in later editions the question mark was dropped, as was any public doubt the Webbs might have about the nature of the USSR – has since been roundly condemned. In the preface to an anthology of Left Book Club publications, for instance, British historian A. J. P. Taylor is quoted as calling Soviet Communism: A New Civilization "the most preposterous book ever written about Russia". In the early 1930s Malcolm Muggeridge, one of Beatrice's own family by marriage, and himself the son of a Fabian, told her in no uncertain terms of his horrified disapproval of the Soviet system.
She was among those listed in the German-compiled "Black Book".
Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Union's ambassador to the United Kingdom during much of World War II, was friendly with Webb. In a conversation with Webb on 10 October 1939, Maisky quoted her as saying "Churchill is not a true Englishman, you know. He has Negro blood. You can tell even from his appearance."
