Zinoviev Letter

The "Zinoviev Letter" refers to a controversial document published by the British press in 1924, allegedly sent from the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain. The letter, later revealed to be a forgery, purported to be a directive from Moscow calling for intensified Communist agitation in Britain and helped ensure the fall of the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald in the October elections. The letter took its name from Bolshevik revolutionary Grigory Zinoviev.

History

PM Ramsay MacDonald, head of the short-lived Labour government of 1924

Background

On 8 October 1924, the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald suffered defeat in the House of Commons on a motion of no confidence, causing MacDonald to go to the King to seek a dissolution of Parliament. The immediate cause of the parliamentary loss had been the government's decision to drop the prosecution of communist editor John Ross Campbell under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797 for publication of an open letter in Workers Weekly encouraging members of the military to join together in preparation for future revolutionary action.

New national elections were scheduled for 29 October.^[1] Suddenly, near the end of the short election campaign there appeared in the press the text of a letter purporting to have originated from Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern) and Arthur MacManus, the British representative to ECCI, and addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

One particularly damaging section of this letter read:

"A settlement of relations between the two countries will assist in the revolutionizing of the international and British proletariat not less than a successful rising in any of the working districts of England, as the establishment of 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."^[2]

The damning document was published in the conservative British Daily Mail newspaper four days before the election. The letter came at a sensitive time in relations between Britain and the Soviet Union, due to Conservative opposition to the parliamentary ratification of the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement of 8 August.

The publication of the letter was severely embarrassing to Prime Minister MacDonald and his Labour Party.^[3] Although his party faced long odds in the voting booth, MacDonald had not given up hope in the campaign. Any chance of an upset victory was dashed as the spectre of internal revolution and a government oblivious to the peril dominated the public consciousness. MacDonald's attempts to cast doubt as to the authenticity of the letter was in vain, hampered by the document's widespread acceptance among government officials. MacDonald told his Cabinet he "felt like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea."

Grigory Zinoviev

The Conservative Party proceeded to a decisive victory in the October 1924 election. This ended the country's first Labour government. After forming a government with Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister, the Conservative Party refused to investigate the matter of the "Zinoviev letter" further.

The Comintern and Soviet government vehemently and consistently denied the authenticity of the document.^[4] Grigorii Zinoviev issued a denial on 27 October 1924, which was finally published in the December 1924 issue of The Communist Review, the monthly theoretical magazine of the CPGB, well after the MacDonald government had fallen. Zinoviev declared:

"The letter of 15th September, 1924, which has been attributed to me, is from the first to the last word, a forgery. Let us take the heading. The organisation of which I am the president never describes itself officially as the "Executive Committee of the Third Communist International"; the official name is "Executive Committee of the Communist International." Equally incorrect is the signature, "The Chairman of the Presidium." The forger has shown himself to be very stupid in his choice of the date. On the 15th of September, 1924, I was taking a holiday in Kislovodsk, and, therefore, could not have signed any official letter....
"It is not difficult to understand why some of the leaders of the Liberal-Conservative bloc had recourse to such methods as the forging of documents. Apparently they seriously thought they would be able, at the last minute before the elections, to create confusion in the ranks of those electors who sincerely sympathise with the Treaty between England and the Soviet Union. It is much more difficult to understand why the English Foreign Office, which is still under the control of the Prime Minister, MacDonald, did not refrain from making use of such a white-guardist forgery."^[5]

On 21 November 1924 Britain's new Conservative government cancelled the unratified trade agreement with the Soviet Union.

Impact

In the view of historian Louis Fischer, the so-called "Zinoviev letter" was a decisive part of the October 1924 British election which installed a new Conservative government:

"The letter when published caused an unprecedented storm of excitement in England, and undoubtedly determined the outcome of the elections. The smashing victory of the Conservatives would have been impossible without it. Neither the Tories nor the Liberals nor Labour denied for one second the effect of the 'Zinoviev' letter in determining the constitution of the House of Commons from November 1924 to June 1929. It changed the nature of many, many seats - of at least 100 is the usual estimate."^[6]

A 1967 British study deemed that the Labour Party was destined for defeat in October 1924 in any event, and argues that the primary effect of the purported Comintern communication was upon 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. The apologists of world revolution were being superseded by infinitely more pliant subscribers to the Stalinist philosophy of "Building Socialism in One Country." 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."^[7]

Current scholarship

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook launched an official historical review of the Zinoviev letter in 1998

Contemporary scholarship on the so-called "Zinoviev letter" dates to a 1967 monograph published by three British journalists working for The Sunday Times. The trio - Lewis Chester, Steven Fay, and Hugo Young - asserted that two members of a Russian monarchist organisation called the Brotherhood of St. George composed the document in question in Berlin. The widow of one of the two men said to have authored the document, Irina Bellegarde, provided the authors with direct testimony that she had witnessed the forgery as it was performed.^[8] The authors are said to have studied Bolshevik documents extensively before creating a sensational document in an effort to undermine the Soviet regime's relations with Great Britain. The British Foreign Office had received the forgery on 10 October 1924, two days after the defeat of the MacDonald government on a confidence motion put forward by the Liberals.^[9] Despite the dubious nature of the document, wheels were set in motion for its publication, with elements of the Conservative Party and their friends in the Foreign Office in cahoots in what the British journalists characterised as a "conspiracy."^[10]

This book motivated the British Foreign Office to initiate a study of their own. For three years Millicent Bagot of the MI5 delved into the archives and conducted interviews with surviving witnesses. She produced a long account of the affair, but the paper ultimately proved unpublishable because of its containing sensitive operational and personnel information.^[11] Still, Bagot's work would prove important as a secondary source when the Foreign Office revisited the matter nearly three decades later.

Early in 1998, reports of a forthcoming book allegedly containing revelations about the origins of the so-called "Zinoviev letter," based on information from Soviet archives led to renewed press speculation and parliamentary questions.^[12] In response British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced on 12 February 1998 that in the interests of openness, he had commissioned the historians of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to prepare a historical memorandum on the Zinoviev Letter, drawing upon archival documents. A paper by the Chief Historian of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Gill Bennett, was published in January 1999 and contains the results of this inquiry. Bennett had free and unfettered access to the archives of the Foreign Office as well as those of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), MI5, and MI6. She also visited Moscow in the course of her research, working in the archives of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the Comintern archive of the Communist Party of Great Britain.^[13] Although not every operational detail could be published because of British secrecy laws, Bennett's paper remains the definitive account of the affair of the so-called "Zinoviev letter."

In 2006, FCO historian Gill Bennett incorporated some of her findings on the Zinoviev letter into chapter 4 of her biography of SIS agent Desmond Morton.^[14]

Another 2006 book on spycraft attributes authorship to Vladimir Orlov (1882-1941), a former aide to Baron Wrangel during the Russian Civil War.^[15]

See also

• Campbell Case

Footnotes

External links

• The National Archives of Britain has made available the complete text of the Zinoviev Letter.
• Gill Bennett, "'A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business': The Zinoviev Letter of 1924." Historians, LRD History Note No. 14. London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, January 1999. Part 1 (pdf), Part 2 (pdf), Part 3 (pdf), Part 4 (pdf), Photos (pdf).