Victor Kiernan

Edward Victor Gordon Kiernan (4 September 1913 – 17 February 2009) was a British Marxist historian and a member of the Communist Party Historians Group. He was recognised as one of the most wide-ranging of global historians. While his middle name came from one of British imperialism's greatest heroes, General 'Chinese' Gordon of Khartoum, he emerged as one of Britain's foremost ideological warriors against empire.

Born in Ashton-on-Mersey, a southern district of Manchester, Kiernan was one of three children born to Ella née Young and John Edward Kiernan, who served as a translator of Spanish and Portuguese for the privately owned Manchester Ship Canal. His family came from a congregationalist, non-conformist religious tradition that he later suggested played a role in his socialist formation and that of many of the Communist Party Historians Group founded in 1946.

A scholarship student at the Manchester Grammar School, Kiernan developed a passion for the classics, as he added ancient Greek and Latin to the modern European languages he had already learned at home. Propelled with three new scholarships, he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge where he achieved a double-starred First in History (B.A.,1934; M.A., 1937). Recruited by Guy Burgess during a time of radical ferment among Cambridge students, Kiernan joined the Communist Party in 1934. He found his radicalism subsequently reinforced by what he regarded as the treachery of Britain's elites. Perhaps the greatest influence on Kiernan was Maurice Dobb. A lecturer in economics at Cambridge, he had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920 and was open with his students about his communist beliefs. Kiernan later wrote: "We had no time then to assimilate Marxist theory more than very roughly; it was only beginning to take root in England, although it had one remarkable expounder at Cambridge in Maurice Dobb."

In 1938, as a junior fellow, Kiernan departed for Bombay in to continue his political activities and to teach at the Sikh National College and Aitchison College in Lahore, India (now Pakistan). Shortly after his arrival he married the theatre activist and childhood friend of Indira Nehru, Shanta Gandhi. Though they remained friends, they split up when Kiernan returned to Cambridge in 1946 to complete his Fellowship.

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