The Zinoviev Letter

Russian deception, British lies and the political mystery of the century

The history of Anglo-Soviet relations since the Russian Revolution is filled with deception and disinformation. The two European powers, who began the First World War as allies prior to the Bolshevik takeover of the country, were in many respects natural rivals. Britain was an imperial power, with an empire that spanned the globe, whilst the early Soviet Union remained committed to global revolution and decolonization.

The magnitude of the Russian Revolution in 1917 meant that the question of Britain’s relationship with the Soviet Union remained a key foreign policy challenge for any British government – and this made influencing British domestic politics an important objective of Soviet foreign policy.

The ideological clash between Britain and the Soviet Union in the years after the revolution laid the groundwork for one of the most controversial and intriguing political scandals in British history, with the politicians of a century ago having to tackle the same challenges over ‘fake news’ that we see today. The Zinoviev Letter was a political conspiracy that would linger over Westminster in the inter-war years, casting a dark shadow over the British establishment and intelligence apparatus.

Britain and Russia

In 1924, Britain was experiencing something that had never happened before in the history of the country – a Labour government was in power. The December 1923 general election had seen the formation of a minority Labour government under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald, with support from the Liberals under H.H. Asquith.

One of the key policy questions MacDonald needed to address was his approach towards the Soviet Union. After Imperial Russia fell under Bolshevik control during the Russian Revolution, relations between the two countries had collapsed.

The Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, supported by Britain, France and the US, saw Britain actively support the Whites against the Bolsheviks on the battlefield. This meant the question of dealing with Russia would be especially contentious, with the British establishment highly hostile to the fledgling communist state.

Admiral Alexander Kolchak and British general Alfred Knox during the Russian Civil War (1919)

The new Labour government looked to transform Anglo-Soviet relations and normalize ties between the two countries. To do this, MacDonald aimed to negotiate two treaties with the Soviets: the first covering Anglo-Soviet trade, and the second to address the question of repaying British bondholders that had loaned the Imperial Russian government billions before the revolution and were now left out of pocket.

This resulted in accusations from the right that the Labour Party held sympathy for the communists, with the Security Services in particular holding deep concerns over the influence of communism in Britain.  

The situation reached a boiling point in August 1924, when MacDonald’s government dropped a case against J.R. Campbell, editor of the Workers Weekly, a newspaper produced by the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the paper’s July edition, a provocative article called on members of the armed forces to side with the communists:

“Soldiers, sailors, airmen, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, the Communist Party calls upon you to begin the task of not only organising passive resistance when war is declared, or when an industrial dispute involves you, but to definitely and categorically let it be known that, neither in the class war nor 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…

Refuse to shoot down your fellow workers!
Refuse to fight for profits!
Turn your weapons on your oppressors!"

Sir Patrick Hastings, the Attorney General for England and Wales, advised the government to bring charges against Campbell under the Incitement to Mutiny Act, but pressure from sympathetic Labour backbenchers saw the charges dropped – setting the scene for a Parliamentary showdown.

Liberals and Conservatives in the House of Commons passed a motion that a Select Committee should investigate the circumstances around the affair. Labour’s defeat on the motion by 364 to 198 would remain the largest government defeat in the Commons until the 2019 Brexit vote, and MacDonald had no choice but to view the motion as a vote of no confidence and dissolve the government, calling a general election for 29 October 1924.

The Zinoviev Letter

As the Conservatives, Liberals and Labour went into campaign mode and vied with one another for votes, the Secret Intelligence Service received a surprise letter. The letter was sent by Grigory Zinoviev, President of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, to the Communist Party of Great Britain, and it contained a trove of damning evidence against the Labour Party.

Zinoviev claimed in the letter, dated 15 September, that the Labour government planned to push ahead with the normalization of economic and diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, and detailed the advantages this could present to the Communist Party of Great Britain. This included providing an economic boost to the Soviet Union, alongside allowing the Soviets to spread their influence within the British Empire and ferment revolutionary fervor among the British proletariat.  The letter proclaimed:

“A settlement of relations between the two countries will assist in the revolutionising of the international and British proletariat”

and that MacDonald’s foreign policy:

“will make it possible for us to extend and develop the propaganda of ideas of Leninism in England and the Colonies.”

Zinoviev then turned his attention to the details of the supposed revolution that MacDonald’s policies would foreshadow, stating:

“it would be desirable to have cells in all the units of the troops, particularly among those quartered in the large centres of the country, and also among factories working on munitions and at military store depots. We request that the most particular attention be paid to these latter.”

In essence, the letter was a damning indictment of MacDonald’s foreign policy and his reconciliatory approach towards the Soviet Union – and it had arrived at the worst possible time, just before he was set to face a crucial general election.

Propaganda or fact?

Within the government, the Zinoviev Letter caused a great deal of uncertainty. The Secret Intelligence Service took the public stance that the letter was authentic, but doubts remained about its authenticity.  However, with the Foreign Office pushing to publish the letter despite opposition from the Prime Minister, the Daily Mail also received two copies of the letter – which they published themselves on 25 October, only a few days before the general election - and other right-wing publications quickly picked up the story.

The affair bolstered Conservative accusations of communist influence within the Labour Party, with hostile media sources being only too happy to broadcast the story to the British public. With the Labour Party already trailing heavily in the polls, the Zinoviev Letter ended any hope of an unlikely upset in the general election, and the Conservatives won a major victory – returning Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin to Downing Street.

Almost immediately, those implicated in the letter refuted their involvement. Zinoviev himself denied responsibility for the letter and claimed it was a forgery, and MacDonald also cast doubt on its authenticity.

But within the government, civil servants and British intelligence had widely accepted that the letter was authentic, leaving MacDonald and Labour with little choice but to accept defeat. Before leaving office, he told his cabinet that he felt “like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea".

A cartoon depicting a Bolshevik campaigning for MacDonald (1924)

Many within the Labour Party suspected they had been set up by British intelligence and individuals within the civil service, who had published the document to derail Anglo-Soviet relations and deny any possibility of a Labour government.

A subsequent investigation, led by the new Conservative government, found that the Zinoviev Letter was likely to have been a genuine document, but historians have since cast doubt on the investigation’s findings. Even today, the letter’s origins are still shrouded in mystery. Some historians have put the blame on Russian monarchists working out of Riga or Berlin, who they claim had forged the letter in Zinoviev’s name to strain relations between the Bolsheviks and London.

The role of the Security Services has also been called into question. Whilst there is no evidence to suggest they were involved in the letter, the willingness of British intelligence to believe in its authenticity and communicate this publicly provided credibility to the notion that communist forces held influence over British politics. Although the full extent of their role is shrouded in mystery, a stench of foul play certainly lingers around the affair on the part of British intelligence.

The wider impact of the Zinoviev Letter has also been questioned. Historians like A.J.P Taylor have pointed out that whilst the letter did not necessarily have direct electoral consequences, as Labour was already unlikely to win the 1924 election, it did have wider implications for domestic British politics and Anglo-Soviet relations.

Domestically, the affair delayed reforms in the Labour Party, with Labour politicians blaming Security Services and the establishment for their defeat. In foreign policy, the incident caused a rift between the British and the Soviets, with the British government under Baldwin taking a more hardline attitude towards Moscow and leaving the Soviet Union increasingly isolated on the international stage.

In the years that followed, Britain maintained a highly anti-Soviet foreign policy, even when Stalin’s philosophy of ‘Building Socialism in One Country’ became the dominant Soviet position and the aspirations of the early Soviet state for international revolution were dropped.

Whether the work of Russian monarchists or another anti-Soviet group, the Zinoviev Letter showcases that the use of false stories to shape the political narrative is certainly nothing new – and with support from an intelligence apparatus that was hostile to Labour’s foreign policy, those who opposed a Labour government were able to influence the political narrative. Today, ‘fake news’ is a commonplace tactic in international relations, but the Zinoviev Letter shows that it has a long and controversial past.