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The Zinoviev Letter by Gill Bennett
£14.99
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9780198860280
Published:
23 Jul 2020
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
368 pages
Dimensions:
233x152x27mm
Weight:
0.448kgs
Author:
In 1998, Chief Historian of the Foreign Office Gill Bennett was commissioned by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to get to the bottom of a mystery that had haunted the Labour Party--and British politics more generally--for over seventy years. This is the story of what she discovered.
This is the story of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in British politics, an intrigue that still has resonance almost a century later: the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Almost certainly a forgery, no original has ever been traced, and even if genuine it was probably Soviet 'fake news'. Despite this, the Letter still haunts British politics nearly a century after it was written; it was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and cropped up in the media as recently as during the Referendum campaign and the 2017 general election.
The Letter, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervour, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Bolshevik propaganda organization, to the British Communist Party in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, it arrived during the general election campaign and was leaked to the press. The Letter's publication by the Daily Mail on 25 October 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a 'Red Scare' in the media. Labour blamed the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been a right-wing Establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it.
The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call 'fake news'. But it is also a gripping historical detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.
About the Author: Gill Bennett MA, OBE, FRHistS is a senior Associate Fellow of RUSI. She was Chief Historian of the Foreign Office from 1995-2005, and senior editor of its official history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas. As a historian in Whitehall for over forty years, she provided historical advice to twelve foreign secretaries under six prime ministers, from Edward Heath to Tony Blair. In 1998, in her role as Chief Historian of the Foreign Office, she was commissioned to write a report into the Zinoviev Letter affair for the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. A specialist in the history of secret intelligence, Gill published a ground-breaking biography, Churchill's Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (Routledge, 2006). Her book, Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013.
| Number of pages | 368 |
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