Zinoviev letter

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The Soviet politician Grigori Evseevich Zinoviev (1883-1936) served the Russian Communist party in several high positions between 1901 and 1927. Opposed by Stalin, he was executed after a dramatic purge trial.

Although he did not possess Lenin's decisive leadership abilities and strong will, Grigori Zinoviev was a man of intense ambition. An indefatigable and brilliant public speaker, he used his skills in collaboration with V. I. Lenin throughout the prerevolutionary era. To a large extent his senior position within the party elite rested on his reputation as Lenin's closest supporter during the dark and hungry days after the failure of the Revolution of 1905 and before the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917.

Zinoviev, whose real family name was Radomyslsky, was born in the southern Russian town of Elizavetgrad (Kirovgrad). His parents were middle-class Jews able to provide him with an exceptionally good education as well as a financial headstart. In spite of this, as early as 1901 he made his first contacts with the illegal Russian Social Democratic Workers' party. By 1903 he had become a close disciple of Lenin. From that time until the Revolution of 1917, Zinoviev is generally believed to have followed Lenin more closely than any other member of the Bolshevik political leadership.

Early Career

As a consequence of his close affiliation with Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks, Zinoviev was at the center of decision making during the Revolution of 1917. For example, together with Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, and others, he was a member of the first Politburo of the Communist party. As the political position of the Bolsheviks improved during the fall of 1917, plans were laid for a seizure of power. Zinoviev argued forcefully against such plans. When his pleas went unheeded, he made a public appeal which had the effect of betraying the previously secret insurrection to the provisional government. For this, Zinoviev was to be haunted throughout the remainder of his political life with Lenin's epithet of "strikebreaker" of the Revolution.

Immediately following the successful revolution, Zinoviev clashed with Lenin again. At issue was whether the new Bolshevik government could or should survive as a one-party government, as Lenin wanted, or whether it should be a coalition government, including the major leftist parties. Failing to secure their point with the Politburo and the party's Central Committee, several proponents of the coalition government resigned their posts in government and party. Prominent among these was Zinoviev.

A third political crisis which arose at this time concerned the means of concluding Russia's continuing role in the world war. The Soviet leadership was split over whether to go on fighting this costly, losing war or to sue for peace on terms extremely unfavorable to the Revolutionary government ment. In this issue, Lenin supported the option for peace at virtually any price - a breathing space, as it were, for the Bolshevik government. Zinoviev supported Lenin strongly in this position and was thus able to reestablish close relations with him. From this time until 1925, Zinoviev, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, member of both the Politburo and the Executive of the Communist International (Comintern) played a highly visible and authoritative role in Soviet politics.

Struggle for Power

In 1923 Lenin was incapacitated by a cerebral hemorrhage. The Politburo, and later a small group within the Politburo, began making the day-to-day high-level decisions of government in Lenin's absence. Gradually, a triumvirate, consisting of Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin, emerged from the Politburo as a whole, with Zinoviev being recognized as the senior member of this group. As later events were to show, the emergence and maintenance of the triumvirate is to be principally explained by two crucial factors: first, Zinoviev and Kamenev tended to reflect Lenin's attitudes, ideological prejudices, and interests closely, and they were known for this throughout the party; second, all three members were strongly antagonistic to Trotsky and his ambitions to become Lenin's successor. As long as common enemies threatened the interests of the triumvirate, it tended to function cohesively. Difficulties arose, however, when Trotsky was isolated and removed from his position as commissar of war in 1925. Soon, Zinoviev found it increasingly difficult to maintain his position of seniority in the triumvirate. In part this directly resulted from the fact that there was no longer a common enemy against whom Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin could cooperate. In addition, however, it resulted from the fact that Stalin was now cooperating with new allies against Zinoviev and Kamenev.

In the spring of 1926 Zinoviev and his old enemy, Trotsky, found it expedient to stand together against Stalin in a "Joint Opposition." By this time, however, Stalin had deprived both men of their bases of authority within the government and party. Although the Joint Opposition remained a notable force in Soviet politics for a year and a half (spring 1926 to fall 1927), it suffered a decisive defeat within the Communist party apparatus at the Central Committee meeting of July 14-23, 1926. Defeated within the party, the Joint Opposition appealed to the public in Leningrad and Moscow, only to be met with indifference or the hostility of well-organized Stalinist mobs. At a joint meeting of the party's Central Control Commission and the Central Committee (Nov. 14, 1927), Zinoviev and Trotsky were expelled from the party. Shortly thereafter Zinoviev publicly recanted his position and was later readmitted to the party until 1932, when Stalin again found it possible to expel him. This time he was not readmitted until 1933.

Trial and Execution

In December 1934 Sergei Kirov, a close collaborator with Stalin in arranging the downfall of Zinoviev, was assassinated. Almost immediately Zinoviev was expelled again from the party and this time arrested, tried, and sentenced to imprisonment for complicity in the assassination. In 1936 Zinoviev was removed from prison long enough to be tried again for treason in one of the most famous purge trials conducted by Andrei Vishinsky under Stalin's direction. Having admitted to the most humiliating and demeaning acts against the Soviet state and the party, Zinoviev was condemned and executed.

Further Reading

As is the case with most of the old Bolsheviks (except Trotsky), there is little book-length material in English on Zinoviev's life. Lewis Chester and others, The Zinoviev Letter (1968), deals with an episode in diplomatic history which has little more than passing significance in Zinoviev's life. His early career and his role in the struggle for power is covered in Isaac Deutscher's works The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (1954) and The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 (1959). Additional material on Zinoviev and the historical background is in Leonard B. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1960), and Edward Hallett Carr, A History of Soviet Russia (9 vols., 1951-1969).

Supposed to have brought down the first Labour government of 1924. It bore the signature of Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, and was addressed to the Communist Party of Great Britain, calling on it to sow subversion among the armed forces of the crown. There is a faint possibility that it was a forgery; and a stronger likelihood that it was deliberately ‘leaked’ by the British secret services, shortly before the October 1924 general election, to scare voters over to the Conservatives.

Letter of mysterious provenance purporting to have been sent by Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International (Comintern), to the British Communist Party with instructions to prepare for revolution.

The letter was first published on October 25, 1924, four days before a general election, in the British newspaper Daily Mail under the headline "Civil War Plot by Socialists' Masters." Its appearance caused great embarrassment to the Labour government of Ramsey MacDonald, which on February 2 of that year had bestowed diplomatic recognition on the Soviet Union and on August 10 had concluded a series of trade treaties, now awaiting parliamentary ratification. A conservative victory in the October 29 elections signaled instead the launch of a vigorously anti-Soviet line, culminating in the abrogation of diplomatic ties in May 1927. Denounced immediately by the Soviet government as a forgery, investigations at the time and since have failed to discover conclusive proof of the letter's authorship, which has been variously attributed to White Russian émigrés, Polish spies, the British secret services, communist provocateurs, or possibly even to Zinoviev. In January 1999, the British government published a report on the letter based on research in British and Russian secret service archives. This proposed that the document was a forgery instigated by White Russian agents in Berlin, carried out in Riga, Latvia, drawing on genuine intelligence information concerning Comintern activities, and channeled by British intelligence to Britain, where certain right-wing members of the security service proved eager to vouch for its authenticity and ensure it reached the press. The letter and subsequent "Red scare" did not, however, cause Labour's electoral defeat or discredit the party, which had already suffered a parliamentary vote of no confidence and loss of Liberal support. Indeed, the Labour party's vote in 1924 grew by one million over the previous year's election.

Bibliography

Andrew, Christopher. (1977). "The British Secret Service and Anglo-Soviet Relations in the 1920s, Part 1: From the Trade Negotiations to the Zinoviev Letter." The Historical Journal 20:673 - 706.

Bennett, Gill. (1999). "A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business." In The Zinoviev Letter of 1924. London: Foreign & Commonwealth Office, General Services Command.

Chester, Lewis; Fay, Stephen; and Young, Hugo. (1967). The Zinoviev Letter. London: Heinemann.

—NICK BARON

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.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Background 1.2 Impact 1.3 Current scholarship 2 See also 3 Footnotes 4 External links

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 characterized 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. He also visited Moscow in the course of his 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 his findings on the Zinoviev letter into a biography of SIS agent Desmond Morton.^[14]

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

See also

• Campbell Case

Footnotes

1. ^ Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs: A History of the Relations Between the Soviet Union and the Rest of the World, 1917-1929. In Two Volumes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951. Vol. 2, pp. 492-493.
2. ^ The National Archives, "The Zinoviev Letter.", retrieved Aug. 27, 2009.
3. ^ Gill Bennett, "'A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business': The Zinoviev Letter of 1924," Historians LRD No. 14. London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Jan. 1999. Page 1.
4. ^ Bennett, "'A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business,'" pg. 2.
5. ^ Grigorii Zinoviev, "Declaration of Zinoviev on the Alleged 'Red Plot'", The Communist Review, vol. 5, no. 8 (Dec. 1924), pp. 365-366.
6. ^ Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs, vol. 2, pg. 493.
7. ^ Lewis Chester, Steven Fay, and Hugo Young, The Zinoviev Letter: A Political Intrigue. Philadelpha: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1968. Page xvii.
8. ^ Chester, Fay, and Young, The Zinoviev Letter, pp. 51-52.
9. ^ Chester, Fay, and Young, The Zinoviev Letter, pg. 65.
10. ^ Chester, Fay, and Young, The Zinoviev Letter, pp. 65-81.
11. ^ Bennett, "'A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business,'" pg. 2.
12. ^ The book in question was Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev's The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives, published by HarperCollins in 1998.
13. ^ Bennett, "'A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business,'" pp. 2-3.
14. ^ Gill Bennett, Churchill's Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence. London: Taylor & Francis, 2006.
15. ^ Nigel West, At Her Majesty's Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain's Intelligence Agency, MI6. London: Greenhill Books, 2006. Pages 34-39.

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).

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