unions from the path of class conflict rhetoric to pragmatic cooperation with employers and government in return for union recognition and industrial advances. It was said that they took the TUC 'from Trafalgar Square to Whitehall'. From 1928 to 1945 he was also President of the International Federation of Trade Unions, chiefly an honorific position. He was also a Director of the Daily Herald 1929–1946, the newspaper that spoke for the trades union movement. Citrine declined Churchill's offer to serve in his all-Party war-time coalition government. He did accept the position of Privy Councillor and this gave him total access to the Prime Minister and considerable influence with all Ministers on behalf of the TUC throughout the war. Together with Bevin who became Minister of Labour and National Service, they mobilised and directed the organised working classes' enthusiastic productive effort for victory. Citrine also acted as an envoy for the Prime Minister with the U.S and Soviet trade unions. This major contribution to the war effort immensely strengthened the position of the Labour ministers in Churchill's government of 1940 to 1945 which greatly assisted Labour's election as a majority government in 1945. That government's radical programme had been shaped on the National Joint Council of the 1930s. With this new prestige and standing, the trade unions came to be regarded as 'an estate of the realm', by all parties. Feuds with communists and far-left Citrine's battles with the Communist International (Comintern) and its British agents began after the 1926 general strike. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and its front group in the unions, the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), later the Minority Movement, blamed the TUC leadership for the defeat of the strike and attacked them viciously. In a fully-researched pamphlet, Citrine exposed that attempt by the Comintern to subvert the leaders of the British trade unions and helped to isolate British communists in the trade unions and the Labour Party. However, Citrine had originally been a keen supporter of the Russian Revolution and trade with the Soviet Union – an admirer of what he described as Lenin's 'Electric Republic'. He was one of the first to visit the Soviet Union in 1925 and would do so again in 1935, 1941, 1943, 1945 and 1956 However, as president of the IFTU, based in Berlin from 1931 to 1936, he saw the rise of Hitler and the destruction