Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West Read Free Page A

by instinct and preconception as by steady analysis of the reports placed on their desks. Lloyd George in particular went his own way in his pursuit of Britain’s post-war economic recovery, stealing a march on France and America by authorizing the 1921 trade agreement with Soviet Russia. He had an exaggerated belief in the erosion of communism that would result in Russia. As a result he donated a breathing space to Lenin for his New Economic Policy, decisively enabling the Soviet state to restore its economy and stabilize its control over society.
    This book takes up an international vantage point on Soviet Russia and the West. The foreigners who reported, denounced, eulogized, negotiated, spied on, subverted or attacked Russia in 1917–21 rest in their graves. The Russians – Reds and Whites – who fought over Russia’s future in their Civil War are long gone. Lenin’s mausoleum still stands on Red Square in Moscow, a monument to an October Revolution that shook the world’s politics to its foundations. His corpse remains there because Russian public opinion is not ready for its removal. What happened in Petrograd in late 1917 transfigured global politics in the inter-war period. Out of the maelstrom of revolutionary Russia came a powerful state – the USSR – which defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War and for decades after 1945 was locked in the contest of the Cold War against the US and its allies. The October Revolution gave rise to questions which remain important today, questions that find expression in the polarities of democracy and dictatorship, justice and terror, social fairness and class struggle, ideological absolutism and cultural pluralism, national sovereignty and armed international intervention. This is a cardinal reason why the history of Soviet Russia and the West continues to command attention.

 
    PART ONE
    REVOLUTION

 
    PART TWO
    SURVIVAL

 
    PART THREE
    PROBINGS

 
    PART FOUR
    STALEMATE

 
    SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
     
    Archives
     
    Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow [APRF]
    Bodleian Library, Oxford
    Papers of Alfred Milner, Viscount Milner, 1824–1955
    Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow [GARF]
    Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA [HIA]
    American Relief Administration Russian Unit
    Vladimir N. Bashkirov Papers
    Communist International Instructions
    Merian C. Cooper Papers
    Theodore Draper Papers
    Paul Dukes Papers
    Arthur M. Free Papers
    T. T. C. Gregory Papers
    George Halonen Papers
    George A. Hill Papers
    Ronald Hilton Papers
    Herbert Hoover Collection
    Hungarian Subject Collection
    N. A. Ioffe Papers
    Henry James Papers
    William J. Kelley Papers
    Nicolai Koestner Papers
    Aleksandr Vasil’evich Kolchak Papers
    General A. A. von Lampe Papers
    Robert Lansing Papers
    M. J. Larsons Papers
    Ivy Litvinov Papers
    Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart Papers
    Jay Lovestone Papers
    Gibbes Lykes Papers
    L. K. Martens Papers
    Frank E. Mason Papers
    Russia. Posol’stvo
    Russian Subject Collection
    Jacques Sadoul Papers
    Boris Savinkov Papers
    US Consulate – Leningrad [ sic ]
US Department of State: Records of the Department of State Relating to Political Relations between Russia (and the Soviet Union) and Other States, 1910–29
    Pëtr Vasil’evich Vologodskii Papers
    P. N. Vrangel Papers
    Nikolai Yudenich Papers
    National Archives, Kew
HO = Home Office
FO = Foreign Office
KV = Security Service
    Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii, Moscow [RSGASPI]
fond 2
fond 17
fond 46
fond 325
fond 5
fond 44
fond 89
fond 515
    Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voennyi Arkhiv, Moscow [RGVA]
    Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford [RESC]
    Ivy Litvinov Papers
    Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge
    Churchill Papers
    Contemporary Periodicals
    Byulleten’ Narodnogo Komissariata Inostrannykh Del
Daily Express
Izvestiya Tsentral’nogo Komiteta KPSS
Daily Herald
Labour Leader
Daily