What derailed the process of rapprochement was a letter that appeared in the Daily Mail four days before the snap general election on 29 October 1924. Its immediate side-effect was to cut short the life of the first ever Labour government, but its long-term repercussions for the West's relations with Russia are being felt to this day. It could be argued that it was this letter and not Churchill's Fulton speech 22 years later that signaled the start of the Cold War.
"Moscow Orders To Our Reds"
The infamous letter was purported to be from Grigory Zinoviev, a member of Stalin's ruling circle and head of the Comintern, an international organisation ostensibly bent on spreading communism around the world. The letter urged the British Left to put pressure on the cabinet of Ramsey MacDonald in support of an Anglo-Russian Treaty and a British loan to the Soviet government, contingent on the ratification of the Treaty by Parliament.
The language of the letter was quite flowery, inciting — and off-putting to a lot of British voters:
"A settlement of relations between the two countries will assist in the revolutionising of the international and British proletariat not less than a successful rising in any of the working districts in England, as the establishment of a close contact between the British and Russian proletariat, the exchange of delegations and workers etc, will make it possible for us to extend and develop the propaganda of ideas of Leninism in England and the colonies."
The Daily Mail made the most of it, calling the letter "Moscow's orders to our Reds". It succeeded in resuscitating the anti-Soviet sentiment in Britain that appeared to be on the wane after the recognition of the USSR by London in February 1924. Its publication in the Daily Mail was followed by a flood of spiteful commentary and caricature in the British press, this one from Punch being reminiscent of its anti-Russian sketches during the Crimean and American Civil Wars.
The caption "On The Loan Trail" under a parody of a trump summed up the Conservatives' opposition to lending money to the Bolsheviks. And the first thing they did when they squeezed the Labour out of power in the General Election of 29 October 1924 was to cancel the unratified trade agreement with Moscow.
Forgery exposed but not before damage was done
The Soviet Government and Zinoviev himself protested vigorously against what Zinoviev labelled as a forgery by the "White Guard" counter-revolutionaries. The Baldwin cabinet studied the letter and was satisfied that it was genuine. However, a number of much later British investigations into the matter vindicated Zinoviev's view that the letter was indeed a falsification commissioned by the "White Guard" movement, and passed over to British secret agents.
The most thorough study was undertaken in 1998 by Gill Bennett, chief historian at the Foreign Office, at the request of the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. She was given unhindered access to the archives of the Foreign Office, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and MI5. She also worked in the Moscow archives of the Executive Committee of the Communist International and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as well as in the Comintern archive of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Although some of her findings remain secret, Bennett's paper remains the definitive account of the affair. It points a finger at a number of officers in the British intelligence agencies close to Churchill and the Central Conservative Office. According to Ms Bennett the security and intelligence community at the time consisted of a "very, very incestuous circle, an elite network" whose allegiances "lay firmly in the Conservative camp".
The archive files show the forged Zinoviev letter was widely circulated, including to senior army officers, to cause maximum embarrassment to the Labour government. MacDonald told his Cabinet he "felt like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea."
Although Ms Bennett did not think that MI6 bosses set up the forgery, her report made clear that MI6 deceived the Foreign Office by asserting it did know who the source was thereby giving credence to the fabrication.
Actually, the Foreign Office did protest to the Russian Charge D'Affairs about the letter and was planning to go public with the matter when it was piped to the post by the Daily Mail, who got the letter from no other than the same MI6, Ms Bennett's investigation revealed.
All this may seem a distant history now but somehow the Zinoviev letter scandal is acquiring new relevance in the current international climate.
Pushing Russia into isolationism
The damage done by the letter to the first Labour government was secondary in significance to its consequences on the world stage. A 1968 book by three British researchers argues that the primary impact of the alleged Comintern directive was on Anglo-Soviet relations:
"Under Baldwin, the British Government led the diplomatic retreat from Moscow. Soviet Russia became more isolated, and, of necessity, more isolationist. […]
"The Zinoviev letter hardened attitudes, and hardened them at a time when the Soviet Union was becoming more amenable to diplomatic contact with the capitalist world. […]
"Thus, after successfully weathering all the early contradictions in Soviet Diplomacy, Britain gave up when the going was about to become much easier. And it gave up largely because the two middle-class parties suddenly perceived that their short-term electoral advantage was best served by a violent anti-Bolshevik campaign."*
The snub confirmed to Stalin, who obviously knew that the letter was not written by anyone in his government, that London was Moscow's main adversary, and could not be trusted. By 1927 the Conservative government had undone almost all of what had been achieved in Anglo-Russian relations since the end of British intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920. By coincidence or not, 1927 was the year when Stalin consolidated his grip on power and set about on a collision course with the West.
The two middle-class parties that gained a short-term political advantage back in 1924 were of course the Conservatives and the Liberals. The latter withdrew their initial support for the Macdonald government in Parliament thereby bringing it down. However, in doing so the Liberals brought a much bigger disaster upon themselves, losing a million votes and 118 seats in the snap election of 29 October 1924. The Zinoviev letter scandal spelled the end of Liberals as a major political force.
The two modern-day middle-class British parties will soon be facing a day of reckoning with the electorate, and Russia again is portrayed as the bogeyman from a Punch caricature. The educational web page of the National Archives aimed at high school and college students presents the Zinoviev letter as if it was a genuine communication from the Comintern. It fails to mention the FCO's own admission that it was indeed a forgery. Students are asked what does the story "tell us about attitudes towards Russia in Britain in the 1920-s?" Shouldn't the time reference include 2014 as well?
*[Lewis Chester, Steven Fay, and Hugo Young, The Zinoviev Letter: A Political Intrigue. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1968. Page xvii.]
