CENSORING AN ‘ENGLISH RENEGADE’ IN GERMANY: THE CASE OF MORGAN PHILIPS PRICE

Abstract

AbstractThe author and politician Morgan Philips Price (1885–1976) is best remembered today as a sympathetic eye-witness to the Russian Revolution and commentator on events in Soviet Russia throughout his long life. Less well known are his activities in Germany, to which he travelled in 1918 to observe the course of the November Revolution and better communicate his favourable view of Bolshevik Russia to Western Europe, and where he remained until 1924. In the summer of 1919, Price was arrested and held without trial in Berlin's Moabit prison, an incident which he later insisted was instigated by the British authorities. This article examines the extensive files on Price kept by the British security services in order to verify this interpretation of his arrest. In so doing, it will argue that a consideration of the case not only sheds light on an interesting aspect of Price's biography but also reveals much about the prevailing mind-set amongst some leading British military officers, security personnel, and politicians, and the methods by which they sought to neutralize perceived ‘revolutionary’ threats in the months after the First World War.