The Zinoviev letter was a forged document published and sensationalised by the Daily Mail newspaper four days before the 1924 United Kingdom general election, which was held on 29 October. The letter purported to be a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), ordering it to engage in seditious activities. It stated that the normalisation of British–Soviet relations under a Labour Party government would radicalise the British working class and put the CPGB in a favourable position to pursue a Bolshevik-style revolution. It further suggested that these effects would extend throughout the British Empire. The right-wing press depicted the letter as a grave foreign subversion of British politics and blamed the incumbent Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald for promoting the policy of political reconciliation and open trade with the Soviet Union on which the scheme appeared to depend. The election resulted in the fall of the first Labour government and a strong victory for the Conservative Party and the continued collapse of the Liberal Party. Labour supporters often blamed the letter, at least in part, for their party's defeat.Charles Loch Mowat, Britain between the wars 1918–1940 (1955) pp. 188–194.
The letter was widely taken to be authentic upon publication and for some time afterwards, but historians now agree it was a forgery. The letter perhaps aided the Conservative Party by hastening the ongoing collapse of the Liberal Party vote, which, in turn, produced a Conservative landslide.Charles Loch Mowat, Britain between the wars 1918–1940 (1955) 188–194 A. J. P. Taylor argued that the letter's most important impact was on the mindset of Labourites, who for years afterwards blamed foul play for their defeat, thereby misunderstanding the political forces at work and postponing what Taylor regarded as necessary reforms in the Labour Party.A.J.P. Taylor English History 1914–1945 (1965) p. 219
History
Background On 22 January 1924, the Labour Party formed a government in the United Kingdom for the first time. However, it was a minority government and therefore liable to fall if the Conservatives and Liberals combined against it. In foreign policy, Ramsay MacDonald used Royal Prerogative to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union in February 1924. The Labour Government also proposed to lend it money and to open up trade in return for a settlement of Russia's prewar debts which the Soviets had repudiated, but these measures met resistance in Parliament. The Government was then defeated on 8 October 1924 in the House of Commons because of its decision to drop the prosecution of communist editor John Ross Campbell under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797, for publication of an open letter in Workers' Weekly calling on soldiers to "let it be known that, neither in the class war nor in 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.". The vote was on a motion by the Liberals, who had until then supported the continuation of the minority government while also blocking many of its signature policy initiatives, for a select committee to investigate the Government's actions; MacDonald had made clear that he would treat the vote as a motion of no confidence. Instead of resigning, MacDonald obtained permission from King George V for a dissolution of Parliament and the holding of a new election. A general election was scheduled for 29 October.A.J.P. Taylor, English History: 1914–1945 (1965), pp. 218, 225
Letter Near the end of the short election campaign, there appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper the text of a letter addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) purporting to have originated from Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern); Secretary of the Comintern Otto Wille Kuusinen; and Arthur MacManus, a British representative at a conference of the Executive Committee. It predicted that the Labour government's attempted normalisation of Britain's diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union would not only profit the latter but also stir the British proletariat to revolutionary action and allow Soviet influence throughout the British Empire to widen. One particularly damaging section of this letter read:
Publication The document was published in the conservative Daily Mail newspaper four days before the election and then picked up by other right-wing newspapers. The letter rankled at a sensitive time in relations between Britain and the Soviet Union, owing to vehement 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.Gill Bennett, "'A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business': The Zinoviev Letter of 1924", Historians LRD No. 14. London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Jan. 1999. p. 1. Although his party faced a high likelihood of losing office, MacDonald had not given up hope in the campaign. Following the letter's publication, any chance of an upset victory was dashed, as the spectre of internal unrest and a government oblivious to, or even complicit in, the alleged peril thereof dominated the headlines and public discourse. MacDonald's attempts to cast doubt on the authenticity of the letter were in vain, hampered by the document's widespread acceptance among government officials. He told his Cabinet that he "felt like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea.".
Election result The Conservatives decisively won the October 1924 election, ending the country's first Labour government. After the Conservatives formed a government with Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister, a Cabinet committee investigated the letter and concluded that it was genuine. The Conservative government did not undertake any further investigation, despite continuing suggestions that the letter was forged. On 21 November 1924, the government cancelled the unratified trade agreement with the Soviet Union. At about this juncture, MI5 determined secretly that the letter was beyond question a forgery. In order to protect its reputation and to keep the myth of Labour's acquiescence to the Soviet Union alive, it did not inform the rest of the government, which continued to treat it as genuine.
The Conservatives gained 155 seats, for a total of 413 seats. Labour lost 40 seats, retaining 151. The Liberals lost 118 seats, were left with only 40, and lost over a million votes.
Denial by Zinoviev The Comintern and the Soviet government strongly and consistently denied the authenticity of the document.Bennett, "'A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business,'" p. 2. Grigory Zinoviev issued a denial on 27 October 1924 (two days before the election), which was finally published in English in the December 1924 issue of The Communist Review, the monthly theoretical magazine of the CPGB, well after the MacDonald government had already fallen. Zinoviev declared:
Impact
Most historians now agree that the letter had little immediate impact on the Labour vote, which not only held up but, in fact, increased slightly in terms of its share of the popular vote (although the main reason for this uptick was that the party fielded candidates in 87 more constituencies than it had in the previous election). Still, the letter helped to propel the Conservatives to a large parliamentary majority by allowing them to poach voters frightened by the First Red Scare from the withering Liberal bloc. The Conservative politician Robert Rhodes James claimed that the letter provided Labour "with a magnificent excuse for failure and defeat. The inadequacies that had been exposed in the Government in its brief existence could be ignored". Indeed, many Labourites for years blamed the letter, at least in part, for the defeat of the party. Commentators such as Taylor believed that the party's subsequent failure to address demonstrated policy inadequacies, such as unemployment and relations with the trade unions, was because the letter was blamed for the defeat, and not the political programme.Taylor (1965)
The real significance of the election was that the Liberal Party, whom Labour had displaced as the second-largest political party in 1922, became a minor party, its select committee gambit having completely backfired.
A 1967 British study concluded the Labour Party was destined for defeat in October 1924 in any event and argued that the primary effect of the purported Comintern communiqué fell on Anglo-Soviet relations:
Current scholarship
Contemporary scholarship on the Zinoviev letter dates from a 1967 monograph published by three British journalists working for The Sunday Times. The authors, 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 Berlin. Irina Bellegarde, the widow of Alexis Bellegarde, one of the two men said to have written the document, stated that she had witnessed the forgery as it was performed.Chester, Fay, and Young, The Zinoviev Letter, pp. 51–52. She said that her husband had drafted the letter after fellow-émigré Alexander Gumansky told him that a request to forge the letter had come from "a person in authority in London". Gurmansky and Bellegarde were later sentenced to death in absentia by a Soviet court. Bellegarde was later forced to work during the Second World War for the Russian section of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) in Berlin. Some evidence suggests that he was the highly effective British double agent known as "Outcast". He had been an important source on Soviet matters for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS; commonly known as MI6) since the First World War, raising the possibility that he already had deep links to British intelligence when involved in the fabrication of the Zinoviev letter.
The forgers appear to have studied Bolshevik documents and signatures extensively before creating the letter to undermine the Soviet regime's relations with the United Kingdom. The British Foreign Office had received the forgery on 10 October 1924, two days after the defeat of the MacDonald government on the no-confidence motion initiated by the Liberals.Chester, Fay, and Young, The Zinoviev Letter, p. 65. Despite the dubious nature of the document, wheels were set in motion for its publication, members of the Conservative Party combining with Foreign Office officials in what Chester, Fay, and Young characterised as a "conspiracy".Chester, Fay, and Young, The Zinoviev Letter, pp. 65–81.
These findings and allegations motivated the British Foreign Office to undertake a study of their own. For three years, Milicent Bagot of MI5 examined the archives and conducted interviews with surviving witnesses. She produced a long account of the affair, but the paper ultimately proved unpublishable because it contained sensitive operational and personnel information. Nevertheless, Bagot's work proved important as a secondary source when the Foreign Office revisited the matter three decades later.