Secondly, sexuality or Eros was seen as an aggressive instinct incompatible with the new brotherly love under socialism. Psychoanalysis was also thought to be "soft on homosexuality", which the Stalinist regime viewed as criminal depravity. Finally, the vulgar Marxism of Stalin postulated an utopia where human misery and conflict would wither away, whereas Freud saw them as ineradicable aspects of the human condition.By the 1930s, it had become much too dangerous for any Russian to attempt a fusion of Freudian and Marxist thought. It became the party line that Pavlov was the last word in psychology, and that psychoanalysis should he consigned to the rubbish dump of bourgeois garbage, along with Gestalt psychology, relativity and quantum theory. Discouraged by the failure of psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union, Freud hit back at his Bolshevik critics, accusing them of naivety: human beings were not perfectible and there was a limit to what social amelioration could do for individuals.Freud was nettled by charges that Freudianism was simply a new religion and, as such, merely a new opiate for the people. Freud replied that it was Marxism that replicated the worst faults of Christianity: the salvation and the Second Coming, the intolerance of unbelievers and the use of the Inquisition to silence dissenters.Martin Miller's political perspective on the Soviet Union reads like unreconstructed John Foster Dulles-speak from the 1950s, but there can be no denying his erudition, nor the clarity with which he differentiates his four distinct epochs: 1917-24, the Stalin years, 1953-85, and the Gorbachev age of "openness" The flaw with the book is its dry, disinterested quality.

Miller is content merely to report the various attempts to reconcile Freud and Marx, but he does not seem to find the issue of any intrinsic interest and there is an above-the-battle flavour to his treatment of the Russian psychoanalysts, as if they were specimens in a laboratory. Miller, alas, proves the truth of the maxim that scholars are rarely intellectuals, and American academics seldom committed.The reviewer's latest book, `1066: the Year of Three Battles', is published by Cape. MEREDITH EDWARDS was one of those Welsh character actors who, during the post-war years found parts in the comedy films largely associated with Ealing Studios. In A Run For Your Money (1949), an affectionate but stereotypical view of the Welsh in which a group of rugby-loving miners spend an international day in London with uproarious results, he starred alongside the wild-eyed, dissolute harpist Hugh Griffith and the handsome dimwit Donald Houston who is fleeced by a West End tart played by Moira Lister - the sort of woman, as one collier puts it, who paints her toenails. Now the Welsh are notoriously difficult to please when it comes to seeing themselves on film and many found A Run For Your Money, which Ealing intended to be the Welsh equivalent of Whisky Galore, too simplistic and, at worst, patronising. The film does have some nice comic touches, however, as when a voice over the loudspeaker at Paddington asks Mr Thomas Jones and Mr David Jones to come to the stationmaster's office, and a horde of leek- bedecked fans answer to these archetypal Welsh names. It was characteristic of Edwards that, offered a chance to work in Hollywood on the strength of his memorable performance, he turned it down and chose to stay at home. He was never to regret his decision, for he was rarely out of work thereafter.Although he had no formal training - his first job after leaving Ruabon Grammar School was that of laboratory assistant at the Courtaulds factory in Flint - he had become a professional actor in 1938 when he joined the Welsh National Theatre Company which the quixotic Lord Howard de Walden was trying to found at Plas Newydd, the former home of the Misses Butler and Ponsonby, "the Ladies of Llangollen".

This touring group, although it made little headway as a national company, taught him the rudiments of his trade and inspired in him the ideal of a permanent home for the theatrical profession in Wales, for which he was to campaign long and hard, but to no avail.Edwards's acting career proper began at the Liverpool Playhouse, where he played in Julius Caesar, but it was interrupted in the war when, as a conscientious objector on Christian pacifist grounds, he was set to work as a fireman in Liverpool, Chester and London, and later drafted into the Non-Combatant Corps, where he entertained the troops with amateur theatricals sponsored by Ensa.He spent most of the war years in Palestine. His stage career was resumed after the war at the Old Vic, where he played Glendower in Henry IV and, less predictably, John of Gaunt in Richard II; of his Churchillian rendering of the "happy breed" speech in the latter play the London Evening News commented, "After hearing Meredith Edwards's impassioned delivery of John O'Gaunt's speech, every schoolboy who has got it from memory will go back and get it by heart."Edwards was born, a collier's son, in 1917 in the hill-top village of Rhosllanerchrugog, near Wrexham, in industrial north-east Wales. The district has a robust Welsh-speaking culture and a tradition of radical politics which left an indelible mark on him. He spoke Welsh fluently, delighting in the local peculiarities of Rhos speech, including its retention of the familiar ti (thou) with which its inhabitants habitually address friend and stranger alike, and he wrote it with panache in his autobiography, Ar Lwyfan Awr ("On an hour's stage", 1977).The language was at the heart of his patriotism and he worked tirelessly on its behalf, contributing generously to such causes as the Welsh Schools Movement, in particular the Welsh School in London (now at Willesden Green) in the days when the LCC was refusing to fund it. He was also a political nationalist and left-wing member of Plaid Cymru, serving as a member of the Flintshire County Council and standing as the party's candidate in the West Denbigh constituency at the General Election of 1966.