An alleged 1924 secret communication from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Soviet Comintern, to the Communist Party of Great Britain. The letter, which may have been a forgery, urged communist cells in the British Army and labor unions to get ready to start a revolution. The letter, published in British newspapers on Oct. 25, 1924, four days before a general election, helped to destroy Britain's first Labour Party government, under Ramsay MacDonald.
The Comintern, a Moscow-directed organization for fostering worldwide communism, was seen as a grave threat to Britain in the 1920s. Responding to the “Red Scare,” the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 sought revolutionaries, especially in the ranks of the Labour Party and trade unions. The investigations turned up the letter, and MI6 did not say how it had been intercepted. The modern consensus is that the letter was forged by British plotters trying to bring down a Labour Party perceived as dangerous to the nation. Master spy Sidney Reilly was probably involved.
Intelligence documents released in 1997 indicate that the letter was an ingenious fake. British intelligence apparently had an asset that provided verbatim transcripts of Politburo sessions. Revolutionary plans were aired in those sessions. So the Zinoviev letter had what was probably genuine rhetoric but was nonetheless forged to advance a British-inspired plot. Speculation about the transcript supplied centered on Boris Bajanov, who had been Stalin's private secretary and later became Politburo secretary. Bajanov successfully fled Russia in 1928 and reportedly was settled in France, under official protection, in a move to dispel suspicion that he had been a British agent.
The Labour government had established diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union and had been planning to sign a commercial treaty with Soviets. When the letter was published, a shocked MacDonald sent a protest to the Soviet government. But the damage was done. Labour suffered an enormous loss in the election, and the Conservatives came back into power.
Ironically, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin soon eliminated both the Comintern and Zinoviev, who was falsely accused of working for foreign intelligence services. In a 1936 show trial, he was condemned to death and soon shot.
