Beware the Rugged Russian Bear by John Ure
Old Street, £20
The retired diplomat John Ure, whose first posting was to Moscow during the Cold War, has written a tale he obviously relishes: an account of the British adventurers who exposed the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. These were the individuals who described what was really happening in the newly formed Soviet Union between 1904 and 1939.
For a long time, despite their reports and warnings gleaned from eyewitness experiences, they were largely ignored by the British public – and when terrorists turn into government ministers, diplomacy and prudence dictate future policy. Thus the British government gradually accepted the new order in Russia. Indeed, anxious to avoid the possibility of social unrest at home, George V took the unwise (if not craven) decision to leave his cousin, the Tsar, to his fate.
Left-wing intellectuals such as HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw joined forces with working-class activists to promote the illusion of a new socialist paradise that was replacing the corrupt old autocracy. There was also genuine sympathy for those struggling to throw off the yoke of their oppressors.
Nonetheless, others warned the government, the intelligence services, their families or the public back home of the violence endemic in the ideology of the Soviet leaders. They included Robert Bruce Lockhart, the young consul-general in Moscow during the Revolution, Maurice Baring of the banking family, Sidney Reilly, the elusive spy who saw at first-hand the Bolshevik terror, the English and Scottish governesses who had stayed on after the Revolution with their rich Russian employers, and novelist Somerset Maugham. Stephen Graham, a Russian scholar, understood “how this collectivised philosophy would lead to a justification for starving out minorities who did not fit into the communist master plan”.
The author himself interviewed survivors of the Revolution in the 1950s. His book vividly brings to life the extravagant, dying days of Tsarist Russia, the dangerous lives of the adventurers and the brutal rise to power of the Bolsheviks.
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