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The Zinoviev Letter and 1924 “Red Scare”: Was Churchill Involved?
- By THE CHURCHILL PROJECT
- | April 11, 2024
- Category: Churchill Between the Wars Truths and Heresies
Zinoviev clamor
Sensationalized by the Daily Mail, the Zinoviev Letter was a forgery published just before the 1924 British general election. Purportedly issued by Comintern head Grigory Zinoviev, it urged the Communist Party of Great Britain to engage in seditious activities. Electing a Ramsay MacDonald Labour government, it claimed, would awaken the working classes and lead to a Marxist revolution with the CPGB in the vanguard.
Instantly dismissed by Zinoviev himself, the Letter was eventually accepted as a forgery. It did, however, enable conservative politicians, including Churchill (running as an independent “Constitutionalist”) to raise the specter of Red revolution.
It had little effect on the election: The Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin swamped their Labour and Liberal opposition. Baldwin made Churchill Chancellor of the Exchequer and he returned to the Tories. (Zinoviev was ultimately consumed by his own side, executed after a Moscow show trial in 1936.)
“The effect of the Zinoviev letter on the 1924 election result is problematical,” wrote Robert Rhodes James, “but it is of interest to see what Churchill’s reactions were.”1
Was Churchill involved?
A prominent historian asked the Churchill Project to help determine if Churchill was implicated the Zinoviev plot: “I am struck that it does not even appear in the index to Martin Gilbert’s biography….
“Given Churchill’s proximity to Desmond Morton of the Secret Intelligence Service, his fervent anti-communism and his rejoining the Tories after the election, he seems an obvious target for conspiracy theorists.
“Neither Baldwin, the party stalwart J.C.C. Davidson nor MI5’s Joseph Ball knew of the plot. William Ormsby-Gore knew about it, possibly slightly later. It is hard to imagine that Churchill did not know, but it seems he was not a participant. Is that how you see it?” Yes.
He was not…
Remarkably, the conspiracy theorists have not got round to accusing Churchill of helping to spawn the Zinoviev Letter–at least as far we know! It is virtually certain that he was not involved in the forgery, though he initially accepted it as genuine. (He so wrote Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain a month after its appearance.)
Churchill did take political advantage of the Zinoviev uproar. Even if it were forged, he said, it was nothing new where Bolsheviks were concerned. (He called Ramsay MacDonald a “futile Kerensky.”) He even published an article about it, criticizing MacDonald’s reaction to it but skirting the issue of genuinity.
The following references are from our digital archive of 80 million words by and about Sir Winston Churchill. Martin Gilbert did not entirely ignore Zinoviev, publishing WSC’s 14 November 1924 letter to Chamberlain. That was written after Churchill’s “Red Plot” article had appeared in the Weekly Dispatch. At the time, WSC seemed to believe the Tories might label it authentic. But on the whole he was non-committal.
“Futile Kerensky,” 25 October 1924
Speaking a few days before polling day, Churchill highlighted what he saw as a very real danger of Soviet agents in Britain, and MacDonald’s unconcern. (Alexander Kerensky was the Menshevik head of the short-lived 1917 Russian provisional government, ousted by Lenin in the October revolution.)
[Extract] Even if the Moscow letter is a forgery it in no way alters the facts that Bolshevik propaganda has never ceased during the last four years. They have never ceased to stir up bloody revolution in India and to foster strife in this country. The Prime Minister [MacDonald] said he believes this letter is authentic, but the Communist forces are already on his track, and the moment is coming when this futile Kerensky will make another surrender.
The process of conversion has already begun. Mr. MacDonald said he was going to probe the matter to the bottom, and he described the affair as a new Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot. The Guy Fawkes plot was a very real plot, seeing that Parliament only escaped being blown sky-high.
The Prime Minister is preparing already to turn about, and I venture to predict that before the election is over, we will find Mr. MacDonald singing in chorus with the rest of his Ministers that the letter he has said he honestly believes is authentic is a gross forgery and a dodge of the Conservative Party.2
“The Red Letter,” 2 November 1924
Writing three days after the election, Churchill insisted that the Zinoviev Letter represented genuine Soviet intentions. He lampooned the now-defeated MacDonald’s efforts to loan Russia money and expand trade:
[Excerpt] Let us consider this “Red Letter” itself. It contained nothing new. From the earliest moment of its birth the Russian Bolshevist Government has declared its intention of using all the power of the Russian Empire to promote a world revolution. Their agents have penetrated into every country. Everywhere they have endeavoured to bring into being the “germ cells” from which the cancer of Communism should grow. Great assemblies have been held in Russia of conspirators and revolutionaries of every race under the sun for the purpose of concerting world revolution….
When, on October 16, the “Red Letter” first received the attention of the Prime Minister, only two courses were possible for any reasonable man. The first was to treat it as a document of no more consequence than many others in the Foreign Office archives or to refuse to accept its authenticity and to continue his advocacy of the loan to Russia. The second was to publish it with the dispatch which he evidently drafted, and declare that after such an affront, the whole policy of the Russian Treaties must be abandoned.
Mr. MacDonald did neither. He accepted the authenticity of the document; he affirmed its extraordinary importance; he denounced it in sweeping terms, and he continued to appeal to the amazed electors for a guaranteed loan to Russia. Malice can be explained; plots can be unravelled; but muddle and pure unreason are not capable of clarification, and can only be recorded.3
* * *
Was the letter a forgery [or] the Foreign Office hoaxed? Was its chief misled by his officials? Such were the furious questions which the discomfited Socialist Ministers immediately hurled at their leader…. We do not know what evidence they had at their disposal [but] it was weighty and cogent. We know that these attempts to foment disorder and revolt in Britain and the British Dominions have been unceasing.
Such a document is only typical. It might have been sent out as a matter of mere routine from the Bolshevist headquarters. The case against the Bolshevist loan, the opposition and intrusion of the Soviet power in our affairs do not rest, and have never rested, upon this single foundation. If it were proved to be a forgery, if the Foreign Office were proved to have been deceived, not the slightest change would have occurred in our view of the character and intentions of the Soviet Government.
The “Red Letter” did not illuminate the controversy. Its publication, with Mr. MacDonald’s confirmation and protest, only stultified him and the Socialist Party. But that stultification came as the final stroke in a long process of conviction which at length roused the British nation to an expression of national censure more effective than any which our modern political history records.4
Churchill to Austen Chamberlain, 14 November 1924
[Excerpt] We shall in all probability have to proclaim in a few days’ time that we believe the Zinoviev Letter to be authentic, and that is only part and parcel of the general policy of propaganda unceasingly pursued by the Soviets. If we say this, it follows that we believe the Bolsheviks have broken their solemn engagements under which they were admitted to this country both in the days of the Krassin mission and in those of Rakovsky.5
If they have thus broken their engagements, and have attempted to stir up rebellion in our midst, what grounds are there that can justify our proceeding to allow them to remain here? The representatives of no other country would be permitted to remain if convicted, in our opinion, or similar offences. I am certain that no mere Note or answer will by itself be sufficient to satisfy either justice or public opinion. It is essential that action should follow a declaration of the authenticity of the Zinoviev letter. The question is what action.6
Views of Historians: Paul Addison, 1992
“The intelligence community had leaked the Zinoviev Letter to the press with the intention of creating an electoral scare that would ensure Labour’s defeat. The Russians denounced the letter as a forgery and so it may have been, but as Christopher Andrew has pointed out, its contents were an accurate reflection of Comintern policy.
“On election day, 29 October 1924, Churchill was returned with a majority of nearly 10,000 votes…. The Conservatives won 419 seats, giving them a majority in the House of more than 200 over Labour, with 151 seats, and the Liberals with forty.
“Churchill may well have concluded that the Zinoviev Letter played an important part in the result. In November he wrote to the new Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, to call for the breaking off of diplomatic relations with Russia.”7
David Stafford: Zinoviev and Reilly, 1997
“I see no reason to change what I wrote in Churchill and Secret Service. Churchill obviously took political advantage of the Zinoviev hoax, but I have no reason to believe he was involved in it. The British spy Sidney Reilly was involved, and Churchill may have known more than he was willing to admit. Later he tried to downplay his contacts with Reilly, but that was a separate matter.”
Reilly worshipped Churchill, whom he called “the irrepressible Marlborough,” wrote a reviewer of Stafford’s book. Though they exchanged confidential letters, Churchill “distanced himself from Reilly so as to keep clear of controversy surrounding the notorious Zinoviev Letter…. Churchill and the Tories made political hay out of the letter, which helped Labour lose and returned Churchill to power. But the idea that Churchill had been part of this plot is a fabrication.”8
Zinoviev in the War Memoirs
In 1947, Churchill asked the philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin to read a draft of The Gathering Storm, his first volume of Second World War memoirs. Berlin replied with a mention of the Zinoviev Letter. The Gathering Storm, Berlin wrote
seems to me to take some time to get going properly. The main theme is the Rise of Hitler, and the blindness of England and the Western World. If the story is to start with the earlier “peaceful years” 1924-1929, it may be felt to lack something unless the central events which linger in the popular memory—the General Strike, relations with Russia (the Zinoviev Letter, the Arcos Raid), etc. are placed in proper focus; alternatively all this could be condensed into a general prelude to the real story—with not too rigid a skeleton of chronology—a kind of commentary on the moods and acts of these remote deluded years, not overweighted with specific detail, a background to the awful things to come.9
Berlin suggested jettisoning the rather bland Chapters II and III (“Peace at Its Zenith” and “Lurking Dangers”) and going right to Chapter IV (“Adolf Hitler”). Churchill did shorten those chapters. If WSC’s draft mentioned the Zinoviev Letter, it did not appear in the book.
The only reference to Zinoviev in The Gathering Storm was in passing, though abrupt. Describing Stalin’s 1937 purges, Churchill wrote: “Zinoviev, Bukharin, and others of the original leaders of the Revolution, Marshal Tukhachevsky, who had been invited to represent the Soviet Union at the Coronation of King George VI, and many other high officers of the Army, were shot.”10
Endnotes
1 Robert Rhodes James, “Churchill the Politician,” in A.J.P. Taylor, ed., Churchill: Four Faces and the Man (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1969), 88.
2 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), “The Zinoviev Letter,” 25 October 1924, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), IV: 3497.
3 WSC, “Memories of the House of Commons: The Red Plot—and After,” Weekly Dispatch, 2 November 1924, reprinted in Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1974), II: 156-59.
4 On 29 October 1924, Baldwin’s Conservatives won a substantial majority. WSC was returned as an independent “Constitutionalist” for Epping. Appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by Baldwin, he returned to the Conservatives in early 1925.
5 Leonid Krassin (1870-1926), a Soviet diplomat, negotiated the 1921 Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement and continued to lobby for expanded trade between the USSR and Britain. He was succeeded in London by Christian Rakovsky.
6 Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 11, The Exchequer Years 1922-1929 (Hillsdale College Press 2009), 244-46. Churchill recommended withdrawing recognition of the Soviet Union without eliminating trade relations, a rather complicated balancing act. Baldwin did not act on his suggestion.
7 Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 232.
8 David Stafford to the Churchill Project, 4 February 2024. Stanley H. Winfield, review of David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, in Finest Hour 96, Autumn 1997, 36.
9 Isaiah Berlin to WSC, 28 December 1947, in Martin Gilbert & Larry Arnn, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 22 (Hillsdale College Press, 2019), 914. “Arcos” was the All-Russian Cooperative Society, which promoted Anglo-Soviet trade in Britain.
10 WSC, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 225
Further reading
David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, new edition, Lume Books, 2021.
Connor Daniels, “‘Favourable Reference to the Devil’: Why Churchill Allied with Stalin,” 2021.
Richard M. Langworth, “Churchill, Henry Ford and Sidney Reilly: Anti-Bolshevik Collaborators?” 2022.