My life as a teenage communist was going along just fine … until Khrushchev blew it up

At 15, in the early 1950s, and not long after Menzies had failed to have the Communist Party of Australia banned, I signed up. And I stayed loyal to the CPA … until Khrushchev blew it all up.

Cuban president Fidel Castro with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during Castro's first visit to Moscow in April 1963.

The original Speakers’ Corner is in the northeast of London’s Hyde Park. At this spot ideologues, fanatics and sundry ratbags spruik their intellectual or religious wares to anyone who will listen. Among the crowds that have gathered there over the years were Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and George Orwell.

Sydney’s Speakers’ Corner was in the Domain, and Melbourne had Yarra Bank. The old “stumps” remain – bluestone rings full of packed clay on which the ranters ranted. These are sacred sites for democracy.

I was a regular at Yarra Bank from the age of 14, entranced by the Commos. It was the early ‘50s, not long after Menzies failed in his attempt to have the Communist Party of Australia banned. The Cold War was at its coldest; the entire world lived beneath a mushroom cloud of dread. The question for kids of my generation wasn’t “What are you going to do when you grow up?” but “What are you going to do if you grow up?”

So I approached a Yarra Bank Bolshevik and asked, “How do I join?” It wasn’t so much my youth that surprised him – it was the fact that in those days of “Reds under the beds”, anyone was volunteering. Soon thereafter, by bending the rules (I was under the age of political consent), I became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, attending the sub-branch that met a mile from Eltham High, the school I’d just left. One year later, aged 16, I had my very own ASIO file. I was the youngest person ever to do so.

Decades later I finally got access to this curious and heavily redacted document, and learned that ASIO considered recruiting me to spy on my comrades, but decided that “whilst highly intelligent, Adams is unstable”. I do not demur from that diagnosis.

My first job in journalism? Film critic for the Guardian. Not the international mastheadbut the CPA paper of the same name. I was also kept busy at Melbourne’s New Theatre, selling tickets and manning the projector to screen Soviet epics like Battleship Potemkin.

As dutiful comrades we turned a deaf ear to stories of show trials and the gulags. It was only after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary that the CPA imploded. Suddenly, everyone was quitting or being expelled – in my case both. And a year later I joined the ALP, only to endure more disappointments. Culminating in Gillard’s coup against Kevin – to me, as traitorous as Kerr’s dismissal of Gough. I resigned from the ALP that night and have never rejoined.

My life as a teenage Bolshevik did not begin with reading the communist bibles of Marx or Engels but via my first “grown-up” book, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. It was handed to me by a librarian at the East Kew sub-branch of the Kew Municipal Library. She’d decided that, at the age of 12, I’d exhausted the possibilities of Just William and Biggles. Steinbeck’s novel about the doomed dustbowl farmers in Oklahoma changed the life of a kid living on a tiny farm outside Melbourne. And the rest is history. It was John Steinbeck who would, down the track, make me such a threat to national security that I had to be surveilled by the authorities. This crucial fact is not in my ASIO file.