Zinoviev Letter - Current Scholarship

Current Scholarship

Contemporary scholarship on the so-called "Zinoviev letter" dates to a 1967 monograph published by three British journalists working for The Sunday Times. The trio — 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 question in Berlin. The widow of one of the two men said to have authored the document, Irina Bellegarde, provided the authors with direct testimony that she had witnessed the forgery as it was performed. The authors are said to have studied Bolshevik documents extensively before creating a sensational document in an effort to undermine the Soviet regime's relations with Great Britain. The British Foreign Office had received the forgery on 10 October 1924, two days after the defeat of the MacDonald government on a confidence motion put forward by the Liberals. 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."

This book motivated the British Foreign Office to initiate a study of their own. For three years Millicent Bagot of MI5 delved into the archives and conducted interviews with surviving witnesses. She produced a long account of the affair, but the paper ultimately proved unpublishable because of its containing sensitive operational and personnel information. Still, Bagot's work would prove important as a secondary source when the Foreign Office revisited the matter nearly three decades later.

Early in 1998, reports of a forthcoming book allegedly containing revelations about the origins of the so-called "Zinoviev letter," based on information from Soviet archives led to renewed press speculation and parliamentary questions. In response British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced on 12 February 1998 that in the interests of openness, he had commissioned the historians of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to prepare a historical memorandum on the Zinoviev Letter, drawing upon archival documents.

A paper by the Chief Historian of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Gill Bennett, was published in January 1999 and contains the results of this inquiry. Bennett had free and unfettered access to the archives of the Foreign Office as well as those of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), MI5, and MI6. She also visited Moscow in the course of her research, working in the archives of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the Comintern archive of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Although not every operational detail could be published because of British secrecy laws, Bennett's paper remains the definitive account of the affair of the so-called "Zinoviev letter". Her report showed that the letter contained statements similar to those made by Zinoviev to other communist parties and at other times to the CPGB, but at the time (Anglo-Soviet trade talks and a general election) when Zinoviev was being more restrained towards the British. Despite her extensive research, she concluded "it is impossible to say who wrote the Zinoviev Letter" though her best guess was that it was commissioned by White Russian intelligence circles from forgers in Berlin or the Baltic states, most likely in Riga.

In 2006, FCO historian Gill Bennett incorporated some of her findings on the Zinoviev letter into chapter four of her biography of SIS agent Desmond Morton. Another 2006 book on spycraft attributes authorship to Vladimir Orlov (1882–1941), a former aide to Baron Wrangel during the Russian Civil War.drew has confirmed that the z. letter was a forgery and that MI5 knew it all along but delibertely deceived parliament and government for around 80 years.