Abstract
Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the United Kingdom had to face a twofold threat: propaganda and nationalism in India—the British Empire’s ‘jewel in the crown’—and an expanding Marxist movement at home. Bentivoglio documents how Russia, with the growing role of the Communist International, jeopardised British political legacy and social stability. Moreover, she illustrates how the connections between Soviet Russia, socialists in Britain and nationalists in India became the object of suspicion on the part of British intelligence. Bolshevism thus represented a prime concern in terms of imperial defence, although, most surprisingly, the first legal acknowledgement to Soviet Russia came from Britain, with the signing of an Anglo-Soviet trade agreement in 1921. This chapter analyses the correlation between the development of Anglo-Soviet relations and Bolshevik attempts to infiltrate India in the early twentieth century.
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Notes
- 1.
W. P. Coates and Z. K. Coates, A History of Anglo-Soviet Relations (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1943); F.S. Northedge and Audrey Wells, Britain and Soviet Communism. The Impact of a Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982); Curtis Keeble, Britain, the Soviet Union and Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Keith Neilson, Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On the Bolshevik Revolution see E. H. Carr, The Russian Revolution – from Lenin to Stalin 1917–1929 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
- 2.
G. H. Bennett, British Foreign Policy during the Curzon Period, 1919–24 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 61.
- 3.
Northedge and Wells, Britain and Soviet Communism, 143–144. See also John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).
- 4.
Bennett, British Foreign Policy, 74.
- 5.
On the psychological impact of war see Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics of Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
- 6.
On the widespread network of Soviet agents in the West, see Robert Service, Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the role and evolution of British intelligence see John Fisher, Gentleman Spies: Intelligence Agents in the British Empire and Beyond (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2002).
- 7.
Keith Neilson, ‘Tsars and Commissars: W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden and Images of Russia in British Adventure Fiction, 1890–1930’, Canadian Journal of History, Vol. 27 (3), 1992: 487–500; Eric Homberger, ‘English Spy Thrillers in the Age of Appeasement’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 5, 1990: 80–92.
- 8.
Many of those who were active in the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign would go on to found the Communist Party of Great Britain.
- 9.
Keith Jeffery, The British Army and the Crisis of Empire 1918–1922 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 44–49; Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence. British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995), 306–325.
- 10.
Tim Reese and Andrew Thorpe (eds.), International Communism and the Communist International (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
- 11.
‘Statutes of the Communist International adopted at the Second Comintern Congress, 4 August 1920’, in The Communist International 1919–43: Documents Volume One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 161–166.
- 12.
See, among others, Peter Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia (London: John Murray, 1984).
- 13.
Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 106–107.
- 14.
‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 28 July 1920, in The Communist International, Volume One, 151.
- 15.
The National Archives (TNA), CAB/24/35/59, Short memorandum on the Manifesto of the Bolshevik Government at Petrograd ‘to all the Labouring Class Moslems of Russia and the Orient’, 12 December 1917.
- 16.
‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, 28 July 1920, in The Communist International, Volume One, 140.
- 17.
Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, Comintern, India and The Colonial Question, 1920–37 (Calcutta-New Delhi: K P Bagchi & Company, 1980).
- 18.
Cecil Kaye, Communism in India (Calcutta: Editions India, 1971), 1.
- 19.
John Patrick Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M.N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
- 20.
The Communist International, Volume One, 151. See also John P. Haithcox, ‘The Roy-Lenin Debate on Colonial Policy: a New Interpretation’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 23 (1), 1963: 93–101.
- 21.
Jacobson , When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, 7. On economic and trade relations with Soviet Russia see Andrew J. Williams, Trading with the Bolsheviks. The politics of East-West trade, 1920–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Christine A. White, British and American Commercial Relations with Soviet Russia, 1918–1924 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Jennifer Siegel, For Peace and Money: French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 22.
M.V. Glenny, ‘The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, March 1921’, Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 5 (2), 1970.
- 23.
Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, vol. 125, 44.
- 24.
Stephen White, Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), 16.
- 25.
Trades Union Congress (TUC) Archive, 292/947/1/31, leaflet ‘Peace with Russia’, dated 1920.
- 26.
White, Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution, 16.
- 27.
Alex Pravda and Peter J.S. Duncan (eds.), Soviet-British Relations since the 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 20–22.
- 28.
Stephen White, The origins of détente. The Genoa Conference and Soviet-Western Relations, 1921–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 25–26.
- 29.
TNA/FO/371/6844, 4878, n. 256, 20 April 1921.
- 30.
‘Trade Agreement Between His Britannic Majesty’s Government and the Government of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic’, 16 March 1921, in Richard H. Ullman, The Anglo-Soviet Accord (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 474–478.
- 31.
Rupert Furneaux, Massacre at Amritsar (London: George & Unwin, 1963), 34–35.
- 32.
India Office Records (IOR), L/PS/11/136, file 2888, The Bolshevik Blue Book on India: English translation, 4 June 1919.
- 33.
TNA/FO/141/433, report ‘The Nearer East and the British Empire’, 5 May 1919.
- 34.
TNA/FO/141/433, Note on Pan-Islamism and Bolshevism, 22 December 1919.
- 35.
TNA/FO/141/433, 10,770/8, Note on Pan-Islamism and Bolshevism, Cairo, 22 December 1919.
- 36.
Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Report for India during the year 1920, Cmd. 950, 6.
- 37.
White, Britain and the Bolshevik Revolution, 100–101.
- 38.
TNA/FO/141/433, The activities of the Secretariat for Propaganda in the East, August 1921.
- 39.
Jacobson , When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, 77.
- 40.
Robert H. Donaldson, Soviet Policy toward India: Ideology and Strategy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 6–7.
- 41.
TNA/FO/371/6844, 5116, n. 15, ‘Eastern propaganda’, 28 April 1921.
- 42.
TNA/FO/371/6844, file 5258, Bolshevik aid to Indian revolutionaries, 2 May 1921.
- 43.
IOR/L/PS/10/886, paper 2094, circulated 14 June 1921.
- 44.
IOR/L/PS/10/886, paper 2956/1921. Despite this reassurance, other reports suggested that the Bolshevik could attack in the Caucasus (‘Bolshevik concentrations in the Caucasus are of such nature as not to exclude the possibility of offensive action’): IOR/L/PS/10/886, paper 3135, 9 July 1921.
- 45.
TNA/CAB/23/26/22, Cabinet minutes, 15 August 1921.
- 46.
TNA/FO/371/6855, N 10221/5/38, Curzon to Hodgson, 7 September 1921.
- 47.
Victor Madeira, Britannia and the Bear: The Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars, 1917–1929 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2014).
- 48.
Christopher Andrew, ‘The British Secret Service and Anglo-Soviet Relations in the 1920s. Part I: From the Trade Negotiations to the Zinoviev Letter’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 20 (3), 1977: 683.
- 49.
Jacobson , When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, 110.
- 50.
IOR/L/PS/11/212, Bulletins on Bolshevik activities in India.
- 51.
Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London: Heinemann, 1985), 292–293.
- 52.
TNA/FO/371/9365, N 3948, Curzon to Hodgson, 2 May 1923.
- 53.
Lawrence Dundas, Life of Lord Curzon, vol. 3 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1928), 356.
- 54.
See the recent volume by Gill Bennet, The Zinoviev Letter. The Conspiracy that Never Dies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
- 55.
Harriette Flory, ‘The Arcos Raid and the Rupture of Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1927’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 12 (4), 1977: 707–723.
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Bentivoglio, G. (2020). The Empire Under Attack: Anglo-Soviet Relations and Bolshevik Infiltration in India in the Early 1920s. In: Lomellini, V. (eds) The Rise of Bolshevism and its Impact on the Interwar International Order. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35529-6_6
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