Zinoviev letter

The Zinoviev letter was a fake document published and sensationalised by the British Daily Mail newspaper four days before the general election of October 1924. The letter purported to be a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), ordering it to engage in seditious activities, both in society in general and in the military in particular. It claimed that the normalisation of UK relations with the Soviet Union under a Labour government would radicalise the British working class and put the CPGB in a favorable position to pursue a Bolshevik-style revolution. It further suggested that these effects would extend throughout the British Empire. The right-wing press depicted the letter as a grave foreign subversion of British politics and blamed the incumbent Labour Party for promoting the policy of political reconciliation and open trade with the Soviet Union on which the scheme appeared to depend. The election, whose late-stage hustings the scandal heavily influenced, saw the Labour Party fall from its minority government after less than a year in office, delivered a sweeping parliamentary majority to the Conservatives, and marked the extinction of the Liberal Party as a major political force capable of forming governments. Labour supporters often blamed the letter, at least in part, for their party's defeat.

The letter was widely taken to be authentic upon publication and for some time afterwards, but historians now agree it was a forgery. The letter aided the Conservative Party by hastening the already-underway collapse of the Liberal Party and enticing its voting base to support the Conservatives out of fear of Labour's alleged acquiescence to Soviet foreign policy objectives and subversive operations. A. J. P. Taylor argued that the letter's most important impact was on the mindset of Labourites, who for years afterwards blamed foul play for their defeat, thus misunderstanding the political forces at work and postponing what Taylor regarded as necessary reforms in the Labour Party.

History

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

Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Executive Committee of the Comintern

A cartoon from Punch, published after the letter was released, depicting a caricatured Bolshevik wearing a sandwich board with the slogan "Vote for MacDonald and me"

Background

On 22 January 1924, the Labour Party formed a government in the United Kingdom for the first time, with Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister. However, it was only a minority government and therefore liable to fall if the Conservatives and Liberals combined against it. In foreign policy, the MacDonald cabinet, aware that it could not have its way in parliament on most issues, used its limited executive powers to offer official British recognition of the Soviet Union in February 1924. It also proposed to lend it money and to open up trade, but the Conservatives and Liberals worked together in parliament to obstruct almost all of these measures. On 8 October 1924, the Labour government suffered defeat in the House of Commons on a motion of no confidence forwarded by the Liberals, who had until then supported the continuation of the minority government while also blocking most of its signature policy initiatives. The proximate pretext that the Liberals cited for the no-confidence vote had been the government's decision, on grounds of freedom of speech and the press, to drop the prosecution of editor John Ross Campbell under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797. Campbell had published an open letter addressed to British soldiers in Workers' Weekly, the main official newspaper between February 1923 and January 1927 of the CPGB, that proclaimed, "let it be known that, neither in the class war nor in a military war, will you turn your guns on your fellow workers, but instead will line up with your fellow workers in an attack upon the exploiters and capitalists, and will use your arms on the side of your own class." All the same, most historians agree that the Liberals' real motive was, in terms of policy, to thwart the Anglo-Soviet free trade agreement – negotiated by the Labour government, drafted on 8 August, but then doggedly stalled by a Conservative-Liberal coalition in parliament – and, in terms of politics, to oust the ascendant Labour Party from its first spell in government and thereby discredit it in the eyes of a non-Tory electorate that had since the end of the First World War been deserting the Liberals for Labour in large numbers. It is notable (and was noted at the time) that the Liberal Party ditched its supposedly principled commitment to free and impartial trade when faced with the practical test of whether to allow it to flourish laissez-faire with the Soviet Union.

In a plucky manoeuvre that he would come to regret before long, MacDonald, having lost the confidence of parliament, chose not to resign the premiership and return parliament to a hung status in which Labour, having the second greatest number of seats, could possibly renegotiate its confidence agreement with the Liberals or else form a strong opposition to a Conservative-Liberal coalition (unprecedented in peacetime) but rather to obtain permission from King George V for a dissolution of Parliament and for a new general election. MacDonald and his colleagues hoped that Labour would at last win an outright majority in parliament, using the obstructionism of the Tories and Liberals and the extreme economic hardships left behind by the First World War to make an effective case for social democratic reform to the electorate. A general election was scheduled for 29 October.

Letter

Near the end of the short election campaign, there appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper the text of a letter addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It purported to originate from Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern); Secretary of the Comintern Otto Wille Kuusinen; and Arthur MacManus, a British representative at a conference of the Executive Committee. It predicted that the Labour government's attempted normalisation of Britain's diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union would, if successfully implemented, not only profit the latter but also stir the British proletariat to revolutionary action and allow Soviet influence throughout the British Empire to widen.

One particularly damaging section of this letter read:

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 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.

Publication

The document was published in the conservative Daily Mail newspaper four days before the election and then picked up by other right-wing newspapers. The letter rankled at a sensitive time in relations between Britain and the Soviet Union, owing to vehement Conservative opposition in parliament, backed up by most of the Liberals (despite their age-old claim to favor free trade), to the 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. Although faced with a high likelihood of losing office anyway, MacDonald and his associates had not entirely given up hope in the campaign. Following the letter's publication, however, any chance of an upset victory was dashed, as the spectre of internal unrest and a government oblivious to, or even complicit in, the alleged peril thereof dominated the headlines and public discourse, to the exclusion of issues on which the Labour Party might have held or could through suasion have attained widespread popular support. MacDonald's spirited attempts to deny the authenticity of the letter were in vain, hampered by what the public, thanks to the press, came to see as the document's acceptance as genuine and dangerous among officially impartial and partyless government functionaries and civil servants. So fruitless did he find his efforts to counter the Zinoviev letter narrative that MacDonald memorably lamented to his cabinet that he "felt like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea."

Election result

The Conservatives decisively won the October 1924 election, ending the country's first (albeit minority) Labour government. After the Conservatives formed a majority government with Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister, a cabinet committee supposedly investigated the letter and declared that it was genuine. The Conservative government did not undertake any further investigation and did not open its sources to parliament or the public, despite continuing suggestions that the letter was, in fact, forged. On 21 November 1924, the government cancelled the unratified trade agreement with the Soviet Union that the preceding Labour government had negotiated but that parliament had blocked, just as the forgers of the letter had most likely intended. At about this juncture, MI5 determined secretly that the letter was beyond question a forgery. In order to protect its reputation and to keep the myth of Labour's acquiescence to the Soviet Union alive, it did not inform the rest of the government, which continued to treat it as genuine.

At the election, the Conservatives netted a huge gain of 154 seats, for a commanding majority of 412. The Labour Party netted a sizeable loss of 40 seats, retaining 151. The Liberals netted a staggering loss of 118 seats and haemorrhaged over a million votes from its total at the last election, overwhelmingly to the Conservatives. This occurred even though overall voter turnout had risen by 5.9% from the last poll and even though the party had placed an already historically humiliating third at the 1923 election, albeit with a modest increase in votes and seats from its shock third-place finish in 1922. They now clung to a mere 40 seats, and this crushing loss made it absolutely clear that their party had at last fallen firmly behind Labour as the main rival to the Conservatives.

Denial by Zinoviev

The Comintern and the Soviet government strongly and consistently denied the authenticity of the document. Grigory Zinoviev himself issued a denial on 27 October 1924 (two days before the election), which was finally published in English in the December 1924 issue of The Communist Review, the monthly theoretical magazine of the CPGB, well after the MacDonald government had already broken up. 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.

Impact

Christian Rakovsky dictates a note to the British government in response to the Zinoviev letter, denying its authenticity.

Most historians now agree that the letter did little direct damage to the Labour vote from a strict numerical standpoint relative to its performance at the previous election. It not only held up but, in fact, increased slightly in proportional terms, although the main reason for this uptick was that the party fielded candidates in 87 more constituencies than it had the year before. (In those constituencies, even small local minorities of voters in 1923 could not so much as choose to cast their ballots for Labour and thereby add to Labour's national vote tally because no Labour candidates stood there in the first instance.) Still, the letter undoubtedly deprived Labour of a certain number of new voters that it would otherwise have drawn to its side and helped to propel the Conservatives to a large parliamentary majority by allowing them to poach voters from the crumbling Liberal bloc who were frightened by the First Red Scare but who would not normally or outside the atmosphere of an ostensible national security emergency have voted for the Liberals' traditional political foes.

The Conservative politician Robert Rhodes James opined that the letter provided Labour "with a magnificent excuse for failure and defeat. The inadequacies that had been exposed in the Government in its brief existence could be ignored". Indeed, many Labourites for years blamed the letter, at least in part, for the failure of their party to absorb new voters, particularly from the disintegrating Liberal electorate. Figures such as Taylor believed that they tended to misunderstand the political forces at work and drew the wrong lessons from the experience. Many other observers and Labour commentators, however, have cited the letter as a chief factor in the election outcome.

One of the preeminent long-lasting impacts of the election, at least in party-political terms, was that the Liberal Party, which Labour had supplanted as the second-largest party at the 1922 general election and kept at third place at that of 1923, became permanently recognised as a minor party, a shrunken shadow of its former Victorian and Edwardian self, and hence as highly unlikely to form a majority government in the near future. By the same token, the Labour Party, despite its loss of seats and ejection from a short-lived minority government that it could barely control at any rate, became recognised as the Liberal Party's successor as one of the two main parties in British politics. For this reason, if gaining office or smashing competition from the growing Labour Party was their top motive, then the no-confidence gambit completely backfired on the Liberals, although the desire of most of them to scuttle the MacDonald cabinet's diplomatic and economic overtures to the Soviet Union came to fruition, albeit under colours different from those they probably preferred. Furthermore, the completion of this shift in British politics put an end to the political instability caused by evenly-matched three-way party competition in the consecutive general elections of 1922, 1923, and 1924, the first two of which were thoroughly indecisive.

A 1967 British study argued that the Labour Party was destined for some degree of defeat in October 1924 in any event and that the primary effect of the purported Comintern communiqué fell 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. The proponents of world revolution were being superseded by more pliant subscribers to the Stalin's 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.

Current scholarship

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

Most contemporary scholarship on the Zinoviev letter dates from a 1967 monograph published by three British journalists working for The Sunday Times. The authors – 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 Berlin. Irina Bellegarde, the widow of Alexis Bellegarde, one of the two men said to have written the document, stated that she had witnessed the forgery herself as it was performed. She added that her husband had drafted the letter after fellow-émigré Alexander Gumansky told him that a request for the forgery had come from "a person in authority in London". Gurmansky and Bellegarde were later sentenced to death in absentia by a Soviet court. No longer willing to venture into the Soviet Union lest he be caught and executed, Bellegarde went on to work during the Second World War for the Russia-related section of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) in Berlin. Some evidence hints that he was the highly effective British double agent known as "Outcast". He had been an important source on Soviet matters for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS; commonly known as MI6) since the First World War, raising the possibility that he already had deep links to British intelligence when tasked with the fabrication of the Zinoviev letter.

The forgers appear to have studied Bolshevik documents and signatures extensively before crafting the letter, with the goal of reversing the recent improvement under the Labour government of the Soviet Union's relations with the United Kingdom. The British Foreign Office had received the forgery on 10 October 1924, two days after the defeat of the MacDonald government on the no-confidence motion initiated by the Liberals. Despite the dubious origins of the document, wheels were instantly set in motion for its publication, members of the Conservative Party banding together with Foreign Office officials in what Chester, Fay, and Young characterised as a "conspiracy."

These findings and allegations motivated the British Foreign Office to undertake a study of their own. For three years, Milicent Bagot of MI5 examined the archives and conducted interviews with surviving witnesses. She produced a long account of the affair, but the paper ultimately proved unpublishable because it contained sensitive operational and personnel information. Nevertheless, Bagot's work proved important as a secondary source when the Foreign Office revisited the matter three decades later.

In the first two months of 1998, growing rumors of a forthcoming book on the true origins and aims of the Zinoviev letter, based on information from Soviet archives, led to renewed press speculation and parliamentary questions. In response, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced on 12 February 1998 that he had commissioned a team of historians at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to prepare a 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 MI5 and MI6 alike. She also visited Moscow in the course of her research, reading the archives of the Executive Committee of the Communist International and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, together with the Comintern's archive of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Although not every operational detail could be published because of British secrecy laws, the publicly available extracts of Bennett's paper still opened a rich vein of fresh insight into the Zinoviev letter affair. Her report showed that the letter contained statements worded very similarly to those made by Zinoviev to other communist parties and at other times to the CPGB in particular, but at the time of the letter, when critical Anglo-Soviet trade talks were taking place and a general election was impending, Zinoviev and the Soviet government had adopted a more restrained attitude towards propaganda in Britain. Despite her extensive research, she concluded that "it is impossible to say who wrote the Zinoviev Letter", though her best guess was that it was commissioned by White Russian intelligence circles in Berlin or the Baltic states, most likely in Riga. Nevertheless, it was soon leaked to the papers, probably by MI6, that she had privately stated, "I have my doubts as to whether [SIS agent Desmond Morton] thought it was genuine but he treated it as if it was."

In 2006, Bennett incorporated some of the findings that seem to have led her to this view into chapter four of her biography of Morton, this time publicly. Another 2006 book, a monograph by Nigel West on spycraft, attributes authorship to Vladimir Orlov, a former intelligence agent of Baron Wrangel during the Russian Civil War. West wrote, too, that the OPGU (Soviet secret police) always initiated investigations into leaks of Soviet documents and into mishandlings of propaganda, and the fact no investigation was opened after the publication of the Zinoviev letter indicates it was certainly a forgery.

In 2011, Jonathan Pile published his book Churchill's Secret Enemy, detailing the mysterious career of Sir George Joseph Ball. Pile accessed Ball's papers (most of which Ball had attempted to destroy) from the Bodleian Library, along with other newly available sources. Pile's thesis, explained in the book, is that the Zinoviev letter was likely composed by Ball (at the time a long-serving MI5 officer) and his cohorts.

In 2017, the British government claimed that it had "lost" a file on the Zinoviev letter scandal, adding that it could not determine whether copies of the material had been made.

In 2018, Bennett published her book The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies, which tries to encompass the history not just of the 1924 scandal itself but also of the wide variety of research, scholarship, and commentary that it has attracted ever since.

See also

• Campbell Case
• October surprise
• Zimmermann Telegram

Further reading

• Adelman, Paul. The decline of the Liberal Party 1910–1931 (Routledge, 2014).
• Bennett, Gill. The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies (Oxford University Press, 2018). excerpt
• Chester, Lewis, Stephen Fay, and Hugo Young. The Zinoviev Letter (JB Lippincott, 1968).
• Girard, Pascal. "Conspiracy theories in Europe during the twentieth century." Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (Routledge, 2020) pp. 569–581.
• Lomas, Dan. "The Zinoviev letter." International Affairs 95.1 (2019): 201–206.
• Lomas, Dan. "The idea that the UK’s intelligence agencies have an anti-Labour bias runs deep–but it is false." British Politics and Policy at LSE (2021). online
• Madeira, Victor.. Britannia and the Bear: The Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars, 1917–1929 (2015). excerpt
• Mowat, Charles Loch. Britain between the wars 1918–1940 (1955) pp. 188–194. online
• Taylor, A.J.P. English History 1914–1945 (1965) online

External links

• The National Archives of Britain has made available the complete text of the Zinoviev Letter.
• Russia and the British voter: the 'Zinoviev Letter', 'Red Scare' and 1924 general election: digitised archives from the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, including the original Daily Mail article and a telegraphed denial of responsibility from Zinoviev.
• Bennett, Gill (1999). 'A most extraordinary and mysterious business': The Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Historians, LRD. Vol. 14. London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office. ISBN 0-903359-77-4.