Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  For most of September 1939 the CPGB supported, in an equivocal way, the war against Germany. Early in October, however, under Comintern directions, and at the remorseless urging of the Marxist-Leninist theoretician Rajani Palme Dutt, it resolved to treat the fighting as an imperialist war waged in the interests of the ruling classes rather than a proletarian anti-fascist war. The three leading opponents of Moscow’s line, Harry Pollitt, Willie Gallacher and J. R. Campbell, subsequently recanted, and submitted to party discipline. The CPGB abased itself in repentance of its ‘vulgar liberal democrat conceptions’ in September 1939, and ‘blurring of the distinction between the national interest of the British people and the imperial interest of the British ruling-class’. The Home Office successfully opposed the suppression of the CPGB in 1940 when the Daily Worker was shut on government orders. Palme Dutt’s orthodoxy imposed after the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact led to over a quarter of CPGB members leaving the party. Membership was at a low of 15,000 when Germany launched Operation BARBAROSSA against the Soviet Union in June 1941.38

  Throughout 1941 Blunt was running his sub-agent Leo Long, who supplied sound British military intelligence analyses of German intentions towards the Soviet Union. Vladimir Dekanozov, Stalin’s Ambassador in Berlin, sent confirmatory reports on the tendency of events. When Philby also supplied early warnings of German divisions being mustered near the Russian frontier, the chief of Soviet military intelligence speculated that with the Luftwaffe daily blitzing London, the English secret services were using Philby to deceive the Kremlin. In April 1941 Sir Stafford Cripps, Ambassador in Moscow, made an unauthorized threat to Stalin that if the Anglo-German war was protracted by Soviet supplies to Germany, ‘we might be tempted to make peace with Germany at Russian expense’. The crazy peace mission of Rudolf Hess, who flew to Scotland in May, intensified Stalin’s distrust of perfidious Albion. Fearing an Anglo-German united front against Russia, he dismissed as ‘disinformation’ more than a hundred warnings of Hitler’s preparations for Operation BARBAROSSA as an English conspiracy to jockey Russia into war with Germany. Then, in Jonathan Haslam’s words, ‘Beria, utterly inexperienced but inebriated by overweening self-confidence, proved [himself] to be the most disastrous head of intelligence the Soviet Union ever had.’ On 21 June, the eve of BARBAROSSA, he toadied to Stalin by demanding Dekanozov’s recall from Berlin and punishment for bombarding Moscow with misdirection about German invasion plans: ‘surely the nadir of Moscow’s intelligence assessment’, says Haslam.39

  Once Russia had joined the war on Nazi Germany, Lord Swinton of the Security Executive ordained that MI5 must concentrate all its efforts on Nazis and their fifth columnists. The Soviet Union became an ally rather than an adversary, and was reduced more than ever as a counter-espionage priority. The CPGB adjusted its criterion so that an unjust imperialist war became a righteous People’s War. As Swinton observed in October 1941, ‘the Communist game is still the same, but it is being played on a much better wicket’. CPGB membership revived to about 50,000 by December 1942. Registered membership settled at about 46,000 for most of 1944–5.40

  Visitors from London began to arrive in the beleaguered Soviet Union. The earliest journalist to arrive there, Philip Jordan, who spent seven months reporting the Eastern Front fighting from July 1941, assured English readers that the Russian army was a stronger fighting force for having been ‘purged of its incompetents and its traitors’, although he conceded that the purges may have ‘sheared a little too closely to the bone’. He only wished that generals had been purged in other armies. ‘Had the Spanish Government behaved as drastically as the Russian Government did in the middle thirties, there would have been no civil war in Spain; for the traitors would have been dead. Had we applied a purge to our own Army, it would have been a more efficient fighting force when this war broke out.’ Moscow had jettisoned the Trotskyite theory of world revolution, he reported. In Stalin’s entourage the Comintern was considered ‘one of the great historic failures of our age’.41

  In December that year Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, visited Moscow to confer with Stalin at a time when German troops were only 20 miles from the city. He travelled by destroyer to Murmansk, where Maisky visited his cabin clutching a black bag packed with rubles which he asked Eden to feel free to use without reservation. ‘I was agape at so much wealth,’ said Eden, who did not pocket the bribe. Stalin impressed Eden in conference as prudent, well informed and an unexpectedly good listener. At the final banquet of caviar, sturgeon and suckling pig, after swilling vodka, champagne and Georgian wines, Marshal K. Y. Voroshilov fell across Stalin’s knees in a stupor. The feasting was a morbid and grotesque experience for Eden because, he said, ‘where one man rules all others fear’.42

  The Anglo-Soviet alliance agreed in May 1942 committed both signatories to safeguarding and strengthening the economic and political independence of all European nations, and disavowed future territorial aggrandizement by either party. It had no more value than earlier scraps of paper. In the month of the treaty’s signature the English diplomat Roger Makins noted that the Soviet aim was ‘exclusive Russian influence over the whole of Eastern Europe, to be effected by the occupation of Finland, the Baltic States and Romania, the closest possible association with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the crushing of Hungary and the encirclement of Poland’. The future PUS William Strang minuted on Makins’s comments: ‘I do not think that we can counter the establishment of Russian predominance in Eastern Europe if Germany is crushed and disarmed and Russia participates in the final victory.’ Sir Archie Clark Kerr, Cripps’s successor as Ambassador in Moscow, expected the Soviet Union to make post-war territorial claims in the Baltic and Bessarabia, and to assert a protectorate over the Slav nations of Europe, but did not expect the spirit of the Anglo-Soviet treaty to be broken. ‘One thing can be said: Soviet Russia, after the war, will probably be prepared to take things quietly for a considerable period of time. There will … be a general desire for a greater degree of comfort and happiness than was granted them before the war.’ Articles by E. H. Carr in The Times urged that Britain should resile from central Europe and the Balkans, and accept those parts of the continent as Russia’s exclusive sphere of interest.43

  In April 1943, shortly before the first anniversary of the Anglo-Soviet treaty, central European leaders exiled in London tried to rouse British resistance to Stalin by invoking the spurious arguments of national exceptionalism. ‘We are immensely powerful, and may be more powerful at the conclusion of the war,’ argued O’Malley, who was the British Ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile. ‘We shall have the opportunity to exert moral authority on the continent of Europe, because we are the only European Great Power that has no wish to annex or dominate or even create a new “sphere of influence”, because we alone are feared by none except those with whom we are at war, because we alone can hold the balance between despotism and chaos, and because, without us, nothing can ensure freedom, justice and security to all.’ Commenting on O’Malley’s attempt to rally Britain against Soviet intrigues, Strang wrote: ‘Unless the 80,000,000 aggressive Germans can be contained or tamed, our very existence, not only as a world power, but as an independent state, will again be threatened. In order to contain Germany we need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet treaty last year marks our decision that this must be our policy now and after the war … There is a respectable and well-informed opinion that Russia will not, either now or for some years after the war, aim at the Bolshevisation of Eastern and Central Europe.’ Even if it did, ‘I should not like to say that this would be to our disadvantage,’ Strang admitted. ‘It is better that Russia should dominate Eastern Europe than that Germany should dominate Western Europe.’44

  London believed that it was working in concert with Moscow, and showing its trust of Soviet intentions. It had meagre intelligence sources on the intentions of the Kremlin, and was following hunches based more or less on optimism. Moscow, however, had no trust in
London. It knew from its various spies that the British were not sharing either their progress with the Americans in developing nuclear weaponry nor their success in deciphering the Abwehr’s wireless traffic. The British intervention in the Russian civil war of 1918, the anti-Bolshevik propaganda of the inter-war period, the exaggerated fear of British spies, the slowness of Anglo-American armies to open a second front in the west, and suspicions that the Americans and British would make a separate peace with Germany were all reasons for Soviet hostility. ‘Spectacular Russian victories continue,’ noted the Foreign Office’s Oliver Harvey in February 1943. ‘The Russians are very tiresome allies, importunate, graceless, ungrateful, secretive, suspicious, ever asking for more, but they are delivering the goods.’ Churchill, meanwhile, gave policy guidance to Clark Kerr in Moscow: ‘I don’t mind kissing Stalin’s bum, but I’m damned if I’ll lick his arse.’45

  Inside SIS, among its younger officers, there was a feeling that the pre-war service had been obsessed by Bolsheviks but insufficiently concerned by Nazis. They began thinking of the Russians as allies after June 1941. ‘Chapman Pincher is quite wrong to see Oxbridge intellectuals as responsible for this sort of view,’ a retired SIS officer told Anthony Glees in the 1980s. ‘The Daily Mirror and [its columnist] Cassandra were far more significant: it was an anti-upper-class populism that made us so pro-Russian. Everybody who was intelligent and powerful underestimated Soviet long-term plans in the intelligence sphere.’46

  In an episode that would have astounded the pre-war anti-Bolshevik Conservative leaders – Churchill himself, Curzon, Birkenhead, Joynson-Hicks – the twenty-fifth anniversary of the creation of the Red Army was celebrated with mass enthusiasm across England on 21 February 1943. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury appointed the date as a day for special prayer for Russia and Soviet comrades. Eden addressed a ‘Red Army’ demonstration in the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington. There a gigantic hammer-and-sickle flag was raised above the stage, whereon stood a solitary Red Army soldier with his rifle. Government ministers spoke at solidarity meetings in twelve industrial cities. Attlee in Cardiff compared the Red Army overthrowing the corrupt tsarist regime to Cromwell’s New Model Army defeating the obsolete Royalist forces of the 1640s. Sir Stafford Cripps in Sheffield extolled the Red Army and ‘the unruffled steel-like purpose of their supreme commander, Stalin’, to whom ‘the world owe[d] the deepest debt of gratitude. In the dark days of retreat his leadership of the Soviet Union was as inspiring as was that of our own Prime Minister in the days of Dunkirk. I could pay no higher tribute than that to any man.’ At the demonstration in Newcastle City Hall, Sir Charles Trevelyan, a former Labour Minister of Education, assured the audience that every second man in the Red Army had received a secondary education. ‘On the platform were all the swells – generals, admirals, air marshals, M.P.s, the nobility and gentry,’ reported Sir Cuthbert Headlam. ‘The audience was mainly composed of sailors, merchant seamen, soldiers, airmen, representatives of trades and industries, A.R.P., Fire Service, etc. with of course a large attendance of extremists in the galleries for whom the whole thing was a political demonstration.’47

  London became gripped by pro-Soviet enthusiasm. The Red Flag was flown over Selfridge’s. Young women emulated by the cut of their clothes the Soviet comrade type. Russian songs and films came into vogue. Seventy thousand copies of a booklet of the war speeches of Stalin and Molotov were sold in a few weeks. Beaverbrook kept a photograph of Stalin on his mantelpiece. The Athenaeum and St James’s clubs both elected Maisky to membership; the mayor of Kensington gave a reception in his honour with 500 eminent guests. The Hollywood film of Joseph Davies’s ambassadorial memoirs, Mission to Moscow, was released in England: with its deceptive documentary format and rousing music, it hailed Soviet military prowess, upheld the integrity of Kremlin statesmanship, belauded the efficiency of state planning and shamed those who had residual doubts about Russia’s recent pact with Germany. The defendants in the show-trials of the Great Terror were portrayed as fifth columnists serving Germany and Japan. Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, Director General of the Political Warfare Executive in 1942–5, warned that press adulation might convince Stalin that British public opinion was so pro-Soviet that he could do what he liked in Europe. ‘Moreover,’ warned Bruce Lockhart, who had been imprisoned in the Kremlin in 1918 while on a mission to Trotsky, ‘to Bolsheviks hardened in the school, first of revolution and then of social ostracism, bourgeois flattery is a certain sign of bourgeois weakness.’48

  There was unstinted admiration for the Red Army in England, noted Maisky: ‘Everywhere – among the masses and in the army. To fight this wave would have been dangerous.’ As part of the ideological capitulation, King George VI announced a gift to Stalinist Russia, the Sword of Stalingrad. This was a ceremonial sword 4 feet long, with a steel blade sharp enough to behead a man and sufficiently ductile to bend into a crescent moon. When finished it was exhibited at Goldsmiths’ Hall and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and then taken on a triumphal tour of provincial cities, where it attracted huge, appreciative crowds. Evelyn Waugh, in Unconditional Surrender, described the scenes in October 1943 when the Sword reached Westminster Abbey, where it was displayed near the shrine of Edward the Confessor. There were long queues outside the abbey, where Philby as a schoolboy had spent so many frustrating hours at services. The populace shuffled forward in a mood of devotion, said Waugh, every civilian looking shabby and grubby, each carrying a respirator against a gas attack, some munching Woolton pies while others sucked on cigarettes pieced together from the sweepings of butts on canteen floors. ‘Every day the wireless announced great Russian victories while the British advance in Italy was coming to a halt. The people were suffused with gratitude to their remote allies … They knew no formal act of veneration. They paused, gazed, breathed and passed on.’ Any member of the crowd who tried to linger in front of the Sword was pressed forward, Waugh wrote, ‘not jostled resentfully, but silently conscribed into the unseeing, inarticulate procession who were asserting their right to the fair share of everything which they believed the weapon symbolized’. Churchill presented the Sword to Stalin during the Tehran conference in November 1943, and toasted the Generalissimo as ‘Stalin the Great’.49

  This atmosphere of Anglo-Russian unity gladdened the Cambridge spies, and helped the atomic spies Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs to feel that they were doing right by giving official secrets to Britain’s Soviet allies. Similarly, Ormond Uren saw no harm in his meetings with Douglas Springhall of the CPGB. Uren, a young Australian-born, Quaker-educated and intellectually powerful SOE officer, who was fluent in French, Spanish, Hungarian and Russian, met Springhall in order to expedite his application for party membership. Among other indiscretions, he provided a written account of SOE activities, which he did not think betrayed any useful secrets. For this misjudgement, Uren was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude in October 1943: after his release in 1947 he was blacklisted from academic posts for years before finally receiving a lectureship in linguistics at the University of London.

  Stalin was sacrosanct. In 1944 London publishers refused to handle George Orwell’s new novel, Animal Farm, after being warned by Smolka that it insulted Stalin and would afflict Anglo-Soviet relations. Orwell was told that the novel might seem less offensive in an age of Stalin-worship if a species other than pigs was used. He later included Smolka in a list of crypto-communists with the comment: ‘some kind of Russian agent. Very slimy.’ Churchill, though, had another animal in mind when two months after the Tehran conference Pravda claimed that England was negotiating a separate peace with Germany. ‘Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile,’ he told the Cabinet, ‘you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or to beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.’50

  ‘Softening the oaken heart of England’

  From the 1920s the Czech leader Edvard Beneš worked fo
r the ‘Europeanization’ of the Soviet Union and urged western governments to accommodate it among the comity of European nations. In 1948, during the final months of his life, as the Stalinists took control in Prague and wrecked his hopes, he could only curse them: ‘Liars! Frauds! Scum!’ The Beneš-like hope that Stalinists might be made into good social democratic Europeans underlay the tactics of Churchill and Roosevelt when they conferred with Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam in 1944–5. By courtesy of the Cambridge spies Stalin knew in advance the contents of British policy papers. Roosevelt was a dying man while Churchill was often verbose or contrary at this stage of the war. ‘P.M. still pursuing savage vendetta against France,’ Oliver Harvey recorded in April 1945. ‘He is now very definitely on the side of fallen royalty: Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns or Glücksburgs.’51

  Russia was kept as an ally against Germany with the bribe of a free run in eastern Europe. The English-speaking allies gambled that if Stalin was enabled to recover the territories of tsarist Russia in Bessarabia, eastern Poland, Finnish Karelia and the Baltic states, his forces would refrain from communist militancy and territorial aggression elsewhere. Churchill’s conciliation of his ally Stalin, to whom he was bound by the Anglo-Russian treaty of 1942, was required by Britain’s diminishing international power. ‘Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevised; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it,’ Churchill told his private secretary in January 1945. ‘There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.’52

  Some opinion-formers in London felt that Chamberlain’s insularity had lost Britain the trust of mainland Europe. ‘Englishmen do not yet realize the intense and enduring bitterness, hatred and mistrust that Chamberlain sowed in Europe,’ Philip Jordan, who was appointed First Secretary at the Washington embassy in 1946, wrote in the year of the Anglo-Russian treaty. ‘Europe attributes, and rightly, her own present miseries to the British Conservative Party. Until we can oust that party from its place of power, Europe will not trust us again – whatever the Ministry of Information may tell us about the success of our broadcasts.’ Some of Churchill’s finest hours were spent in reducing Europe’s mistrust of the offshore kingdom where he was the paramount war leader.53