More on the Zinoviev Letter

Abstract

Many Comintern policy decisions and missives to foreign Communist parties were, as Dr Carr observes, made public at the time.' But many were not. Aino Kuusinen, wife and assistant of Comintern's Finnish secretary-general, later described the 'three days and nights of feverish activity' which were necessary to remove 'secret instructions to the British Party' and other 'compromising documents' from the Comintern archives in preparation for the visit of a T.U.C. delegation anxious to discover the truth about the Zinoviev letter. 'After the delegation had left', she recalled, 'there was general relief and everyone had a good laugh over the fact that they had been able to pull the wool so easily over the Englishmen's eyes.' It was less easy to pull the wool over the eyes of foreign intelligence services. In the pre-Stalinist era Comintern security appears to have been woefully defective. As Aino Kuusinen later acknowledged, 'many of its secrets were penetrated by agents of foreign governments'. Documents were not the only things to go astray. On several occasions Comintern's secret subsidies to foreign Communists were embezzled en route.2 The contents of the Zinoviev letter of I5 September 1924 were, as Dr Carr says, 'no novelty'. Internal evidence alone is insufficient to prove or to disprove the charge of forgery. Advocates of the forgery hypothesis (like Mr Chester and his colleagues)3 have, however, invariably neglected a substantial part of the external evidence. They have notably failed to place the Zinoviev letter within the broader context of British communications intelligence. Yet GC & CS, SIS, MI 5, the special branch, and the Indian intelligence bureaux were all involved with varying regularity and varying success in intercepting Soviet and Comintern communications at source, in transit, or at destination. The authenticity of the largest category of Soviet intercepts the coded telegrams and wireless messages intermittently decrypted by GC & CS until 1927 (and invariably left out of account by the forgery theorists) is in scarcely greater doubt than that of the German intercepts during the Second World War. Those intercepts must have been of at least some assistance in checking the credibility of the other Soviet and Comintern documents less frequently obtained by other