Monty Johnstone, who has died from complications following treatment for a burst ulcer, aged 78, was an admired, but for the most part lonely, presence in communist and socialist politics for half a century. He was indeed hard to overlook. The journalist Francis Beckett recalled him at the final congress of the Communist party in 1991 as "a tall, thin, imposing figure who ran his fingers through his long dark hair as he spoke and sounded like an eccentric history professor". More likely he will be remembered, looking genial and perennially youthful, cycling through London - his grandfather Sir John Foster Fraser had in 1896-97 been the first man to cycle round the world - on his way from one meeting to another to debate Marxist theory and developments in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Learned, a formidably multilingual traveller, as vocal about public matters as he was silent about private ones, and utterly indifferent to the comforts and conveniences of life, he seemed a modern secular version of a medieval scholarly friar. Born to CJS Montague Johnstone of the Royal Scots Greys and Margaret Fraser in Sir Walter Scott's house, Abbotsford, in Melrose, Monty joined the Young Communist League aged 12 in the unlikely milieu of Henley on Thames before going to Rugby school. After national service in Germany and communist agitation in the Hamburg dialect, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, with a languages scholarship to study politics, philosophy and economics. After he graduated in 1952, he took a party job as editor of the Young Communist Challenge until his heterodoxy ended his party career in 1956. Perhaps he might have been happier as an academic. Monty was to remain a loyal but critical communist all his life, hostile to the dilution of socialist ideals but equally critical of the destruction of democracy in post-1917 Russia and the blind loyalty of communist parties to Moscow. Though he stayed in the party after 1956, he was viewed with suspicion, and the party press was closed to him until after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, during which, in Prague, he tried to dissuade embarrassed Russian tank crews in fluent Russian. Meanwhile in the CP, his anti-Stalinism pioneered what later became known as Eurocommunism. He also established a reputation among the 1960s New Left, and became associated with Ralph Miliband (obituary, May 23 1994) and Isaac Deutscher. By the 1980s, the ideological shift in the CP leadership brought Monty rehabilitation within what was by then a doomed party. He was finally put on the editorial board of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels and was even elected to the CP executive committee. However, he was unsympathetic towards the wholesale revisionism of Marxism Today. None the less, in 1980 - nobody quite knows how - he secured that newspaper the journalistic coup of a double interview in Poland with the leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, and prime minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski. He was pessimistic about Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, opposed the dissolution of the Communist party of Great Britain, but kept a political home in the Socialist History Society, the Alliance for Green Socialism and various continental groups analysing the failures and might-have-beens of communism. In the late 1960s, Monty gave up a successful career teaching at Woolwich Polytechnic - now part of Greenwich University - for a freelance life of writing, lecturing in Britain and abroad (he was a powerful speaker), and bringing up his children. He had a contract for a major book on the development of Leninism, but never completed that or any other book, although he published numerous lucid and persuasive lectures. Following the break-up of his marriage in the early 1970s, he became in effect a single parent. After his children grew up and left, he sold the family house and lived increasingly in unadvertised and uncomplaining poverty in a south London flat without a telephone, analysing

By Daniel Singer, published in The Independent, August 10th 1990. TAMARA DEUTSCHER, although a gifted writer and intellectual in her own right, devoted most of her active life first to collaborating closely with her husband, the well-known socialist historian Isaac Deutscher, and then to perpetuating the influence of his ideas. She was horn Tamara Lebenhaft in 1913 in Lodz, the Polish Manchester, in an intellectual family that was to be almost entirely wiped out by the Holocaust. Having gone to school in her home town and then to college in Belgium, she came to Britain in 1940 after the fall of France and lived here most of her adult life. Indeed, it was in wartime London that she took the crucial decision that was to shape that life. A beautiful young woman of great charm and a budding literary critic, Tamara was greatly admired in the highest circles of the Polish government in exile, with which she was professionally connected. But she chose as partner for life a fellow Pole who was for them an outcast, the very enemy of the establishment, the socialist and Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher, who was then at the beginning of his journalistic career. The two travelled together as war and post-war correspondents in Germany. Tamara, however, decided to interrupt her own career, convinced as she was that Isaac was destined to accomplish more lasting things. She encouraged him when he, in turn, chose to give up journalism and devote himself full-time to writing books. There followed a long period of intensive creative activity. These were also the years of the Cold War and, therefore, of awkward, painful isolation. In their ivory tower, Tamara was not only the wife and mother of their beloved Martin, she was a most efficient assistant, a thorough researcher, a devoted critic. The books, notably the three-volume biography of Trotsky (1954-63), were at the same time, as she put it, deep "links in their friendship". By the mid-sixties came the psychological reward. Deutscher's books were no longer just greeted with critical acclaim. They were a source of inspiration to an entirely new generation brought into politics by the movement against the war in Vietnam. But they were to have very little time to enjoy this new mood. In 1967 Tamara's world was shattered by Isaac's sudden death. In the many years that followed she did show, to some extent, what she had sacrificed in order to help in a major intellectual venture. Her essays and reviews revealed a lively pen, a witty mind, a critical spirit. She produced, inter alia, a Lenin anthology (Not By Politics Alone). Others, notably Professor E.H. Carr, could now get an idea what a valuable assistant and collaborator she could be. And yet, to a very large extent, she went on with her former task. Devoting her time to the Deutscher memorial prize committee, editing and prefacing his books and essays, preserving and extending the circle of younger friends, notably of the New Left Review, she had the feeling of remaining true to the cause of genuine socialism. These last months, as the countries of Eastern European were opting for capitalism and the Western world was proclaiming the end of history, the wind clearly was not blowing in her direction. She would have preferred, say, if her former compatriots had chosen other gods, or rather no god at all. But this did not shake her fundamental confidence. She had a sense of perspective and had no doubt that, sooner rather than later, the monumental Trotsky trilogy would have a seminal influence in Russia and throughout the former Soviet empire. Altogether, she was convinced that the crucial choice she had made was not only highly rewarding in personal terms, but was also historically right, whatever the current odds.