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The Zinoviev Letter

The Zinoviev letter was one of the most famous political frauds of the 20th century, a forgery which some claim cost Labour the 1924 election. Although later accepted to be a fraud, the letter ruined the anti-Communist credentials of Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister. MacDonald's government was already in trouble, though its showing in the 1924 election was a good one. When dealing with spies one cannot tell that they are not playing a double game; one does not know whether they are lying or not.

Great Britain occupied a place of importance in the Soviet scheme for world revolution even before communist propagandists made its name a synonym for imperialist reaction. Karl Marx is reported to have said that revolution without England would be a storm in a tea cup. Zinoviev, in addressing the fifth congress of the Comintern, focused attention on Great Britain. "The main task of the Communist International in all spheres," he said, "lies now in England. A communist mass party in England would mean half the victory in Europe. The circumstances are ripe for it. Therefore, we should not underestimate what is going on in England."

The Conservative government refused to have diplomatic contact with the USSR. The British and Soviet governments had reached many minor agreements before 1923. One of them was the formula on propaganda in May 1923. "The Soviet Government, acting on behalf of itself and of all associated and federated Governments, reiterates the pledges contained in the Russian Trade Agreement of 16th March, 1921, which were as follows: To refrain from hostile action or undertakings against Great Britain, and from conducting outside of its borders any official propaganda direct or indirect against the institutions of the British Empire, and more particularly to refrain from any attempt by military or diplomatic or any other form of action or propaganda to encourage any of the peoples of Asia in any form of hostile action against British interests or the British Empire, especially in India and in the Independent State of Afghanistan. It then, proceeds: In view of complaints which have been made, the Soviet Government undertakes not to support with funds or in any other form persons or bodies or agencies or institutions whose aim is to spread discontent or to foment rebellion in any part of the British Empire, including therein all British protectorates, British protected states and territories subject to a British mandate, and to impress upon its officers and officials the full and continuous observance of these conditions."

This basically meant that the Soviets agreed not to support organisations which stirred up trouble in Britain. On 06 December 1923 the Conservative Party under Baldwin was badly defeated in a General Election --- even Churchill lost his seat --- in an inconclusive election that the ruling Conservatives lost but nobody won.

Ramsay MacDonald took office as both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of a minority government on 22 January 1924. The Annual Register called it ‘A revolution in British politics as profound as that associated with the Reform Act of 1832’. Churchill called it ‘a national misfortune such as has usually befallen a great state only on the morrow of defeat in war’. The right-wing press professed disbelief that a group of socialist ‘wild men’, whose party had been in existence for less than twenty years, could take charge of Britain and her Empire. Under the Labour Government of Ramsay MacDonald, the British trade union movement had swung to the left.

The Bolshevik government that had defied expectations (and hopes) by remaining firmly in power in Russia since 1917, pursued an aggressive campaign of espionage and subversion against the British Empire while insisting on being treated as a ‘respectable’ power. The Socialist government of Ramsay MacDonald embarked on Anglo-Russian talks in 1924. The Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, changed this policy. He signed a number of business agreements with the USSR. He also proposed a treaty between Britain and the USSR that would establish official relations between the two countries. It would also give the Soviet Union a large loan to help it develop its economy.

Relations with the Soviet Union that were to prove Labour’s downfall. Many of Labour's opponents tried to discredit Labour by claiming that it was full of Russian Communist agents. On October 8, 1924, the Labor Government lost a vote of confidence. The dissolution of Parliament followed. The Labour Government had been under severe attack for some time by Liberal and Conservative alike. Criticism stemmed primarily from the position it maintained in favor of an Anglo-Soviet trade agreement. The Labour Government was also unpopular because of its tolerance of com- munism. Even its subsequent outright rejection of a request by the British communist party to affiliate with it, and its refusal to permit communists to hold membership in the Labour Party, failed to improve the policital position of the Labourites.

On October 10, 1924, the executive committee of the Comintern, the organisation whose job was to spread Communism across the world, wrote a letter to the central committee of the British communist party setting forth detailed instructions with regard to the Parliamentary election to be held later the same month. The letter from Moscow bore the signature of Kuusinen, the secretary of the executive cominittee. During the campaign, the letter directed, conduct of the MacDonald Government was to be sharply criticized. In general, the letter said, the British communists should support the Labor candidates. Slogans were to be raised against the League of Nations, against British naval policy, and against the danger of war. The slogans were also to be used calling for ratification of the Anglo-Russian trade treaty, the fraternisation of soldiers and workers, and votes for soldiers and sailors. A call should be issued to the soldiers not to shoot upon workers on strike, the letter said.

On October 24, 1924, the British Foreign Office forwarded a note of protest to the Soviet charge d'affairs in Great Britain, protesting against direct soviet interference in internal British affairs. Enclosed with the note was a letter purporting to have originated with the executive committee of the Comintern in Moscow on September 15, 1924. Like the later letter of October 10, it was addressed to the central committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The letter was signed by Zinoviev, and counter-signed by Kuusinen.

The Soviet charge d'affaires, Rakovsky, replied the following day in a note which charged that the letter was a "gross forgery." From the communist point of view, Rakovsky stated, the contents of the letter were a "tissue of absurdities" intended to arouse public opinion in Great Britain against the Soviet Union.

Publication of the Zinoviev letter advocating violent revolt became an election issue that defeated MacDonald in October 1924. Baldwin became Prime Minister again, but made Austen Chamberlain the Foreign Secretary and Churchill the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Churchill undertook drastic reductions in the Navy budget while Chamberlain --- long a Lloyd George affiliate --- pursued a pro-German policy.

The political exposure and leaking of intelligence results to affect domestic politics came into vogue. Later, in October 1924 just before the General Election, the Foreign Office and the press publicized a notorious "Zinoviev Letter" which was purported to be a secret communication from a noted Soviet head of the Comintern. The "letter" was savagely critical of the current British Labour leaders, who were friendly to Russia, and it urged the British Communist Party to penetrate the British Army and to promote revolutionary action.

The British Foreign Office sent a sharp note to the Soviet Charge d'Affairs in London, apparently without Prime Minister MacDonald's knowledge. There was public indignation, Labor O wes overwhelmingly defeated and the ConservatiVEtS took power. After his defeat the ex-Prime Minister MacDonald and the Soviet government denounced the letter as a forgery --- although it was no different from what Zinoviev and other Soviet leaders had been saying publicly. The letter had obviously been obtained from some secret source --- quite possibly a decrypt of a diplomatic message to the Russian mission in London.

In 1927 the British Government under Baldwin ordered the famous "Arcos raid" in which the police entered and searched Arcos Ltd. a Soviet trading organization on 12 May 1927. The government believed that some stolen secret War Office documents were on the premises. The documents were not found, but the Baldwin government declared that they had found evidence of espionage and revolutionary activities. The offices of the Soviet Trade Delegation in the same building were also searched. On 26 May 1927 Britain severed diplomatic relations with Russia.

Questions were raised about the affair, and the Government published a White Paper in 1927 containing the decrypts of Russian diplomatic messages to justify the raid and the subsequent severance of relations. The politicians, intent on revealing Moscow’s perfidy, made public the fact they had evidence obtained by decoding Moscow’s cables. The Soviets switched to one-time-pads, a major setback for SIS. Finally, an infuriated SIS was forced to give up running agents in Britain to spy on foreign enterprises. The domestic security mission was moved to MI5, where it remains.

Was the letter a forgery? The answer to this question still has not been satisfactorily resolved. Had the communists chosen to undertake a comparative analysis of the letter, they would have had a comparatively easy task in "documenting" the original source material used in the alleged fabrication. However, to have followed such a procedure would have been as disastrous for them as the admission that the Zinoviev letter was valid, for the real question posed by Great Britain was whether the Soviets were interfering in int ernal British affairs. Instead, the communists chose to base their case on the externals of the letter, e.g., on the validity of the term "Third Communist International", on whether Zinoviev signed documents as "president of the executive committee" or as "president of the presidium" of the executive committee of the Comintern, etc.

Soviet foreign policy in 1924 was based upon Stalin's hope that economic difficulties in Russia could be be overcome by fostering trade abroad. Soviet diplomats were frustrated in their efforts to improve political relations for economic advantage by the revolutionary policies of Zinoviev and the Comintern which ra.n con- trary to the broader soviet interests. The unfavorable publicity which accompamed the publication of the Zinoviev letter severely damaged Soviet prestige throughout the world, and caused a serious split in the Russian communist party between conservative and revolutionary wings. Although Zinoviev was publically defended in official party statements, Stalin and other high Soviet officials used the incident as a weapon to weaken Zinoviev's influences in furtherance of their own efforts to seize control of the Comintern.

SIS initially concluded that the letter advocated “armed revolution” and contained “strong incitement to contaminate the armed forces.” It was then forwarded to the Foreign Office with an endorsement stating that “the authenticity of the document is undoubted.” Further investigation, however, revealed it was a fake and the Foreign Office was informed that SIS was “firmly convinced the actual thing was a forgery” as Moscow had maintained. When the Foreign Office refused to believe that it was a fake, SIS reconsidered and reversed its position again. The episode did not enhance the reputation of SIS.

"Man and an institution—Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretariat and the Custody of Cabinet Secrecy" by Mr. J. F. Naylor, published by the Cambridge University Press, on the Zinoviev letter said: there is no longer room for doubt that "the political bomb which exploded in the last days of the Labour Government was planted by the intelligence community' … the 'Zinoviev letter' was deliberately manipulated by a number of hands to secure a political end, namely Labour's defeat at the polls … from a historical perspective, the shocking aspect of the sordid electoral proceedings is the joint intrigue of the intelligence community with leading Tory party officials, including the chairman, Sir Stanley Jackson, and the treasurer, Lord Younger, to ensure the publication of a document bound to influence the latter stages of the campaign."

Most evidence today agrees that this letter was a forgery conceived by Sydney Reilly ("Ace of Spies", Britain's "Master" spy). His services to British intelligence prior to and during the Great War had already made him legendary. Between Reilly's attempted coup in 1918 that almost toppled the Bolsheviks and his probable death in 1925 following his final return to Russia, he was continually raising funds to combat the Bolsheviks.

The Zinoviev letter, which contributed to the downfall of the first Labour Government in 1924, is now believed by many to have been produced by two Russian emigres who were working in Berlin. They passed the forgery to an MI5 officer, Donald im Thurn. Once in the hands of MI5, senior officials realised that its details of an alleged communist plot would be a devastating blow to the Labour Government in the closing days of the election campaign. MI5 leaked the letter to a Tory Member of Parliament and former intelligence officer, Sir Reginald Hall. It also leaked it to Tory central office and the Daily Mail, which obligingly ran it on its front page.

In the run-up to the 1929 election, the links between MI5 and the Tory party were renewed. The head of MI5's investigation branch, Major Joseph Ball, was employed by Conservative central office to run agents inside the Labour party. After the election, Ball was rewarded with the directorship of the Tories' research department.