Evgeny Sergeev is Chief Research fellow at the Institute of World History in the Russian Academy of Sciences and also Professor of International and British History at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He has written several books and articles, including The Great Game, 1856–1907: Russo-British Relations in Central and East Asia (2013).
His newest book examines how the October Revolution and advent of the Bolshevik regime affected the Anglo-Russian relationship from 1917 to 1924, a tumultuous period of transition from World War I allies to hostile military confrontation to an unsteady and mistrustful resumption of diplomatic relations. This is already a much-studied topic, with important contributions by E.H. Carr, Richard H. Ullman, Richard Debo, Stephen White, Michael Jabara Carley, Keith Neilson, and several others. Sergeev's book does not alter the broad outlines of that tortuous London-Moscow relationship, already sketched in by previous scholars, but, with access to more recently available documents, he is able to add some fascinating details. Most importantly, he utilizes newly accessible British intelligence service archives as well as Soviet foreign policy archives.
A strength of this book is the author's exploration of debates and disagreements among decision-makers in both London and Moscow. Sergeev highlights a pattern of conflict among British leaders who sought to heal the breach with Russia and establish “normal” relations, who were opposed by inveterate enemies of the Soviet experiment. The first group included Prime Minister David Lloyd George and subsequent Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (supported by the Labour Party and the Trade Union Council), while their opponents, led by Winston Churchill and Lord Curzon, intended the destruction or at least the isolation of the Bolshevik menace. On the Soviet side, the author demonstrates the commitment of Ambassador Leonid Krasin and Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maksim Litvinov to create an Anglo-Soviet rapprochement, frequently in opposition to the views of Comintern boss Grigorii Zinoviev and Red Army chieftain Lev Trotskii, with Vladimir Lenin often occupying a middle ground between the two sides.
Advocates of Anglo-Soviet cooperation were doomed to achieve no more than modest success because the objectives of each side were mutually incompatible. Even those British leaders who wanted to engage with Moscow expected the Soviets to repay bondholders and compensate the owners of nationalized assets, terminate the state monopoly of foreign trade, fully open Russian markets to British manufacturers and merchants, and halt all subversive activity and propaganda in the UK and the empire. Revived ties with Russia, as numerous scholars have noted, were expected to bolster Britain's shaky postwar economy by restoring a lucrative trade in British goods with the Russians. Sergeev highlights another motive for restoring relations with Moscow: Lloyd George and some of his associates believed that drawing the Soviet state into the capitalist trade network would somehow tame the Bolsheviks.
Each of those points was unacceptable to Soviet leaders. They intended to continue revolutionary agitation in Europe and the colonial lands, maintain the government's monopoly of foreign trade, while at the same time securing substantial loans from Britain on favorable terms, preventing the rise of an anti-Soviet coalition of imperialist powers, and insuring that foreign military intervention would never recur. Sergeev mentions but does not fully elaborate the painful evolution of Soviet thinking from the initial belief that spreading the revolution abroad was an existential necessity to the reluctant acceptance of the doctrine of socialism in one country and the necessity of normalizing diplomatic relations and seeking trade and technological assistance from the west that that idea implied.
Sergeev is especially interested in the impact of intelligence services on the conduct of international relations. He utilizes the recently opened files of Britain's MI5 and MI6, though he did not have access to the Soviet intelligence archive. Sergeev discusses British decrypting of Soviet messages during the abortive “Lockhart Plot” to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. He also delves into the murky “Zinoviev Letter” affair, though he takes an oddly equivocal position on its authenticity, while most scholars have condemned it as a forgery. He also explores the revived “Great Game” in the Trans-Caucasus, Central Asia, and beyond, pitting British secret agents and Chekists in a traditional competition now intensified by ideology.
Ultimately, the two sides could not overcome their mutual fears, suspicions, and hostility. The “ . . . Kremlin,” Sergeev writes, “presumed that Whitehall was forming a new anti-Soviet military alliance, the [British] Cabinet charged the Bolshevik government with sponsoring the Communist groups in the countries from London to Peking” (169). Sergeev has provided a valuable addition to the literature on Anglo-Soviet relations that historians of interwar international affairs will find useful.
