Part I. Revolution! -- 1. 'The red flag waves' -- 2. Poland and the crisis of 1920 -- 3. 'Hang Churchill' -- 4. Labour socialism and the Russian revolution -- 5. 'Parliament and revolution' -- 6. The 'great game' continues (1921-23) -- 7. The rise and swift fall of the first Labour government (1924) -- 8. Labour's road back to power (1927-29) -- 9. Gun-running and money laundering: the Labour connection -- Part II. Russia: 'bloodsuckers' and 'parasites' -- 10. War on the countryside: the liquidation of the Kulaks -- 11. The Samilenko story: an eyewitness account -- 12. Opium of the masses: socialist morality and religion in Russia -- 13. Labour: more Methodism than Marx? -- 14. The persecution of the Russian church -- Part III. Persecution (May 1929-July 1930) -- 15. The anti-persecution campaign begins (May-December 1929) -- 16. The Foreign Office (June 1929-March 1930) -- 17. The protests go national (January 1930) -- 18. The cabinet decides... to do nothing --- 19. Ovey's secret report (March 1930) -- 20. Empire protest -- 21. Counter-attack: disinformation and propaganda (February-June 1930) -- 22. Archbishop Lang and the House of Lords -- 23. 'Soviet abates war on religion' -- Part IV. Slave labour (July 1920-October 1931) -- 24. Opening salvoes -- 25. The affair goes public (December 1930-January 1931) -- 26. The 'blue book' debate (5 February 1931) -- 27. The cabinet admits the truth... and does nothing (11 February 1931) -- 28. 'Economic war!' -- 29. 'Let the experiment continue': the only Commons debate (25 March 1931) -- 30. Prisoner in the timber gulag: the story of George Kitchin -- 31. The Anti-Slavery Society investigation -- 32. The last act: Lord Phillimore's bill (May-July 1931) -- 33. The Bishop's nemesis: the fall of the Labour government -- Part V. Fellow travellers -- 34. Defeat -- 35. Labour and the Metropolitan-Vickers trial (1933) -- 36. Fabians (I): Sidney and Beatrice Webb -- 37. Fabians (II): George Bernard Shaw -- 38. Shaw, the Webbs and the fate of Freda Utley's husband -- 39. 'Guards of the revolution': the next generation: Cripps, Cole and Laski -- 40. Realism: Atlee and Bevin.

"The Labour Party welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917: it paved the way for the birth of a socialist superpower and ushered in a new era in Soviet governance. Labour excused the Bolshevik excesses and prepared for its own revolution in Britain.

In 1929, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to work in labour camps. Subjected to appalling treatment, thousands died. When news of the camps leaked out in Britain, there were protests demanding the government ban imports of timber cut by slave labourers.

The Labour government of the day dismissed mistreatment claims as Tory propaganda and blocked appeals for an inquiry. Despite the Cabinet privately acknowledging the harsh realities of the work camps, Soviet denials were publicly repeated as fact. One Labour minister even defended them as part of ‘a remarkable economic experiment’.

Labour and the Gulag explains how Britain’s Labour Party was seduced by the promise of a socialist utopia and enamoured of a Russian Communist system it sought to emulate. It reveals the moral compromises Labour made, and how it turned its back on the people in order to further its own political agenda." -- Taken from dust jacket.