Editing Zinoviev letter (section)

== History ==
[[File:Ramsay MacDonald ggbain.37952.jpg|thumb|Ramsay MacDonald, head of the short-lived Labour government of 1924]]
[[File:Zinoviev-grigorii.jpg|thumb|Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Executive Committee of the Comintern]]
[[File:Bernard Partridge Punch 1924-10-29.jpg|thumb|A cartoon from ''[[Punch (magazine)|Punch]]'', published after the letter was released, depicting a caricatured Bolshevik wearing a sandwich board with the slogan "Vote for MacDonald and me"]]

=== Background ===
On 22 January 1924, the [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour Party]] formed a government in the United Kingdom for the first time. However, it was a [[minority government]] and therefore liable to fall if the [[Conservative Party (UK)|Conservatives]] and [[Liberal Party (UK)|Liberals]] combined against it. In foreign policy, the government used its executive powers to offer official recognition of the [[Soviet Union]] in February 1924. It also proposed to lend it money and to open up trade, but parliament mostly obstructed these measures. On 8 October 1924, the Labour government of [[Ramsay MacDonald]] suffered defeat in the [[House of Commons of the United Kingdom|House of Commons]] on a [[motion of no confidence]] forwarded by the Liberals, who had until then supported the continuation of the minority government while also blocking most of its signature policy initiatives. Instead of resigning, MacDonald obtained permission from [[George V|King George V]] for a dissolution of [[Parliament of the United Kingdom|Parliament]] and the holding of a new election. The immediate cause of the parliamentary defeat had been the government's decision to drop the prosecution of communist editor [[John Ross Campbell]] under the [[Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797]], for publication of an open letter in ''[[Workers' Weekly (UK)|Workers' Weekly]]'' calling on soldiers to "let it be known that, neither in the class war nor in a military war, will you turn your guns on your fellow workers, but instead will line up with your fellow workers in an attack upon the exploiters and capitalists, and will use your arms on the side of your own class." [[1924 United Kingdom general election|A general election]] was scheduled for 29 October.<ref>A.J.P. Taylor, ''English History: 1914–1945'' (1965), pp. 218, 225</ref><ref>{{cite book|author=Keith Jeffery|title=The Secret History of MI6|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=52nYgUsVn9QC&pg=PT195|year=2010|publisher=Penguin|pages=195–196|isbn=978-1101443460}}</ref>

=== Letter ===
Near the end of the short election campaign, there appeared in the ''[[Daily Mail]]'' newspaper the text of a letter addressed to the Central Committee of the [[Communist Party of Great Britain]] (CPGB) purporting to have originated from [[Grigory Zinoviev]], head of the Executive Committee of the [[Communist International]] (Comintern); Secretary of the Comintern [[Otto Wille Kuusinen]]; and [[Arthur MacManus]], a British representative at a conference of the Executive Committee. It predicted that the Labour government's attempted normalisation of Britain's diplomatic and economic relations with the Soviet Union would not only profit the latter but also stir the British proletariat to revolutionary action and allow Soviet influence throughout the British Empire to widen.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Chamberlain |first1=Austen |author1-link=Austen Chamberlain |editor1-last=Medlicott |editor1-first=William |editor1-link=W. N. Medlicott |title=Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939 |date=1968 |orig-date=1926|publisher=[[HMSO]] |location=London |page=919 |volume=II|display-editors=et al}}</ref>
One particularly damaging section of this letter read:
{{quote|A settlement of relations between the two countries will assist in the revolutionising of the international and British proletariat not less than a successful rising in any of the working districts of England, as the establishment of close contact between the British and Russian proletariat, the exchange of delegations and workers, etc., will make it possible for us to extend and develop the propaganda of ideas of Leninism in England and the Colonies.<ref>The National Archives, [http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title=The_Zinoviev_Letter "The Zinoviev Letter."] {{webarchive|url=http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090216122459/http%3A//yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php?title%3DThe_Zinoviev_Letter |date=16 February 2009 }}, retrieved 27 Aug. 2009.</ref>}}

=== Publication ===
The document was published in the conservative  ''[[Daily Mail]]'' newspaper four days before the election and then picked up by other right-wing newspapers.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://cdm21047.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/2595|title=Trades Union Congress|website=cdm21047.contentdm.oclc.org}}</ref> The letter rankled at a sensitive time in relations between Britain and the Soviet Union, owing to vehement Conservative opposition to the parliamentary ratification of the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement of 8 August.

The publication of the letter was severely embarrassing to Prime Minister MacDonald and his Labour Party.<ref>Gill Bennett, "'A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business': The Zinoviev Letter of 1924", Historians LRD No. 14. London: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Jan. 1999. p. 1.</ref> Although his party faced a high likelihood of losing office, MacDonald had not given up hope in the campaign. Following the letter's publication, any chance of an upset victory was dashed, as the spectre of internal unrest and a government oblivious to, or even complicit in, the alleged peril thereof dominated the headlines and public discourse. MacDonald's attempts to cast doubt on the authenticity of the letter were in vain, hampered by the document's widespread acceptance among government officials. He told his Cabinet that he "felt like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea.".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Naylor |first1=John F. |title=A Man and an institution: Sir Maurice Hankey, The Cabinet secretariat and the custody of Cabinet secrecy |date=1984 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=Cambridge |isbn=0-521-25583-X |page=150}}</ref>

=== Election result ===
The Conservatives decisively won the October 1924 election, ending the country's first Labour government. After the Conservatives formed a government with [[Stanley Baldwin]] as Prime Minister, a Cabinet committee investigated the letter and concluded that it was genuine.<ref>{{cite book|first=Charles Loch|last=Mowatt|title=Britain between the wars: 1918–1940|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=1955|page=193}}</ref> The Conservative government did not undertake any further investigation, despite continuing suggestions that the letter was forged.<ref>{{cite book|first=Charles Loch|last=Mowatt|title=Britain between the wars: 1918–1940|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=1955|page=194}}</ref> On 21 November 1924, the government cancelled the unratified trade agreement with the Soviet Union.<ref>{{cite book|title=Britain, Soviet Russia and the collapse of the Versailles order, 1919–1939|url=https://archive.org/details/britainsovietcol00neil|url-access=limited|first=Keith|last=Neilson|page=[https://archive.org/details/britainsovietcol00neil/page/n60 49]|year=2006|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0521857130}}</ref> At about this juncture, [[MI5]] determined secretly that the letter was beyond question a forgery. In order to protect its reputation and to keep the myth of Labour's acquiescence to the Soviet Union alive, it did not inform the rest of the government, which continued to treat it as genuine.<ref>{{cite book|author=Christopher Andrew|title=Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=M84O5pYh3rcC&pg=PA151|year=2009|publisher=Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group|page=151|isbn=978-0307272911}}</ref>

The Conservatives gained 155 seats, for a total of 413 seats. Labour lost 40 seats, retaining 151. The Liberals lost 118 seats, were left with only 40, and lost over a million votes.

=== Denial by Zinoviev ===
The Comintern and the Soviet government strongly and consistently denied the authenticity of the document.<ref name="Bennett pg. 2">Bennett, "'A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business,'" p. 2.</ref> Grigory Zinoviev issued a denial on 27 October 1924 (two days before the election), which was finally published in English in the December 1924 issue of ''[[The Communist Review]]'', the monthly theoretical magazine of the CPGB, well after the MacDonald government had already fallen. Zinoviev declared:

{{quote|The letter of 15th September, 1924, which has been attributed to me, is from the first to the last word, a forgery. Let us take the heading. The organisation of which I am the president never describes itself officially as the "Executive Committee of the Third Communist International"; the official name is "Executive Committee of the Communist International." Equally incorrect is the signature, "The Chairman of the Presidium." The forger has shown himself to be very stupid in his choice of the date. On the 15th of September, 1924, I was taking a holiday in Kislovodsk, and, therefore, could not have signed any official letter. [...]

It is not difficult to understand why some of the leaders of the Liberal-Conservative bloc had recourse to such methods as the forging of documents. Apparently they seriously thought they would be able, at the last minute before the elections, to create confusion in the ranks of those electors who sincerely sympathise with the Treaty between England and the Soviet Union. It is much more difficult to understand why the English Foreign Office, which is still under the control of the Prime Minister, MacDonald, did not refrain from making use of such a white-guardist forgery.<ref>Grigorii Zinoviev, "Declaration of Zinoviev on the Alleged 'Red Plot'", ''The Communist Review'', vol. 5, no. 8 (Dec. 1924), pp. 365–366.</ref>}}

=== Impact ===
[[File:Rakovsky letter to UK.jpg|right|thumb|[[Christian Rakovsky]] dictates a note to the British government in response to the Zinoviev letter, denying its authenticity.]]
Most historians now agree that the letter had little immediate impact on the Labour vote, which not only held up but, in fact, increased slightly in terms of its share of the popular vote (although the main reason for this uptick was that the party fielded candidates in 87 more constituencies than it had in the previous election). Still, the letter helped to propel the Conservatives to a large parliamentary majority by allowing them to poach voters frightened by the First Red Scare from the withering Liberal bloc. The Conservative politician [[Robert Rhodes James]] claimed that the letter provided Labour "with a magnificent excuse for failure and defeat. The inadequacies that had been exposed in the Government in its brief existence could be ignored".<ref>{{cite book|author=Robert Rhodes James|author-link=Robert Rhodes James|title=The British Revolution|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VeQZY8_rlLgC|year=1977|page=194}}</ref> Indeed, many Labourites for years blamed the letter, at least in part, for the defeat of the party. Figures such as Taylor believed that some of them misunderstood the political forces at work and learned the wrong lessons. Many others, however, have held up the letter as a chief factor in the election outcome.<ref>Taylor, ''English History: 1914–1945'', pp. 219–220, 226–227</ref><ref>{{cite book|author=Charles Loch Mowat|title=Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lNgOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA188|year=1955|publisher=Taylor & Francis|pages=188–194}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|author=Andrew J Williams|title=Labour and Russia: The Attitude of the Labour Party to the USSR, 1924–1934|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9D4NAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA18|year=1989|publisher=Manchester U.P.|page=18|isbn=978-0719026249}}</ref>

The real significance of the election was that the Liberal Party, whom Labour had displaced as the second-largest political party in 1922, became once again a minor party, its no-confidence gambit having completely backfired.

A 1967 British study concluded the Labour Party was destined for defeat in October 1924 in any event and argued that the primary effect of the purported Comintern communiqué fell on Anglo-Soviet relations:
{{quote|Under Baldwin, the British Government led the diplomatic retreat from Moscow. Soviet Russia became more isolated, and, of necessity, more isolationist. [...]

The Zinoviev letter hardened attitudes, and hardened them at a time when the Soviet Union was becoming more amenable to diplomatic contact with the capitalist world. The proponents of world revolution were being superseded by more pliant subscribers to the [[Stalinism|Stalin's philosophy]] of "[[Socialism in One Country|Building Socialism in One Country]]". Thus, after successfully weathering all the early contradictions in Soviet Diplomacy, Britain gave up when the going was about to become much easier. And it gave up largely because the two middle-class parties suddenly perceived that their short-term electoral advantage was best served by a violent anti-Bolshevik campaign.<ref>Lewis Chester, Steven Fay, and Hugo Young, ''The Zinoviev Letter: A Political Intrigue.'' Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1968. p. xvii.</ref>}}