Thirty years ago I sat in the office of the cultural attach? of the British embassy in Moscow and handed him a notebook containing a long hand-written note. Its author was a British graduate student on a year's exchange in Russia. He had been given a drugged glass of wine by a Soviet "friend" and had woken up naked in bed with a Russian homosexual. Standing a few yards away were two KGB officers and a photographer. On the floor lay icons and dollars. The student was threatened with seven years' hard labour for homosexual activity (a criminal offence in the Soviet Union) and for speculating in icons.
His KGB interrogators, who initially offered him no hope, told him that they might persuade the prosecutors to drop the charges if he were to cooperate with them. They wanted to know everything he could tell them about the staff of the British embassy and other members of the group of British Council exchange scholars in the Soviet Union. He was allowed to return to his room at Moscow University, but was subjected to daily pressure from the KGB. His minders warned of the dire consequences which would follow if he breathed a word of this to the embassy or to anyone else. Within a week he was brought to the verge of a nervous breakdown and looked dreadful. Passing him in a corridor of Moscow University, I asked him if he was all right. Unconvincingly, he told me that he was.
A day or two later he wrote his account of what had happened and passed it to a fellow exchange student, who brought it to me. The conversation was cryptic. The rooms of foreign students in the Moscow University Stalinist skyscraper were selectively bugged and would certainly be actively listened to in the course of a dirty tricks operation intended to recruit an informer.
The British embassy was even more comprehensively bugged, so I told the cultural attach?, James Bennett (who died at the age of 39, soon after completing his tour of duty in Moscow) that I had brought the list of plays I was hoping the British Council could supply for a Russian drama group which put on amateur productions in English. He began reading, put his hand to his head, and said: "It's rather a long list. It will take me some time to read it. Could you come back in two hours?"
The student was in due course safely ensconced in the embassy and, following several weeks of Soviet threats to put him on trial, flown back to Britain. Episodes of this kind were common in Soviet-British relations. I was not surprised to find no reference to it, or others like it, in the Foreign Office documents compiled by FCO historians and recently released, unusually and commendably, inside the 30-year-rule period.
The very different case of Gerald Brooke, however, which became a bone of public contention between the British and Soviet governments, figures prominently. He was sentenced in 1965 to one year in prison and four years in a labour camp for bringing into the USSR anti-Soviet propaganda produced by an ?migr? organisation (which had been infiltrated by the KGB). He was eventually released in the summer of 1969, after the Soviet Union had threatened to retry him as a spy, in exchange for the Krogers who, by contrast, were real spies.
In a sense, the toughest issue facing Foreign Office ministers and officials, and a common thread in these two volumes, was how to combat Soviet aggression, intimidation and lies while engaging in dialogue designed to moderate Soviet behaviour and to help open up Russian and east European society. These volumes reveal the many differences of opinion among FCO officials on ways of resolving this dilemma. For some, concern about Soviet influence in British society led them to be excessively distrustful of citizen exchanges; for others, it was clear that it was the Soviet system which was most threatened by a two-way traffic in people and ideas.
There were also British diplomats, however, for whom pragmatism bordered on cynicism. Those views probably surfaced more in conversation than in official memoranda. I could find no example in these documents of the views of two FCO officials with whom I had a strenuous argument in the 1970s. They scorned both the Prague Spring and the Czech opposition to the Soviet-imposed regime, and praised Hus?k for having brought stability and a decent standard of living to Czechoslovakia. A majority of Soviet officials (possibly at that time even a majority of citizens) would have placed a higher value on order and a relatively plentiful supply of food in the shops than on liberty and democracy. But it was not what I expected to hear from British diplomats, one of whom went on to become an ambassador.
At the other extreme were the conservative ideologues, only thinly represented in the Foreign Office but vociferous among its outside critics, who believed in shunning all contact with the Soviet Union. The idea that there was a diversity of opinion within the Soviet establishment, or that any Soviet leader would ever risk trying to reform the system, was dismissed out of hand. Yet it is clear from the conversations and memoirs of the reformers of the second half of the 1980s-who, overwhelmingly, were Communist party members-that their visits abroad and meetings with westerners played a big part in undermining stereotypes and stimulating a reassessment of their beliefs.
In fact, more often than not the Foreign Office got the big issues right in the years covered by these volumes, although Harold Wilson, as prime minister, achieved little in east-west relations by being excessively obsequious to the occupants of both the Kremlin and the White House. It is one of history's small ironies that although the pragmatic Wilson aspired, like Harold Macmillan before him, to be an honest broker between Moscow and Washington, the person who played that role to more significant effect than any of her predecessors was Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s. But, to be fair, from March 1985 there was a Soviet leader with whom it was feasible to do business. The limits of the possible were far narrower with the old guard who still controlled the Kremlin in the 1960s and 1970s.
One issue which figures prominently in Volume 1 was the expulsion of 105 Soviet spies from Britain in 1971. This operation, prepared in secrecy and code-named FOOT, was both justified and worthwhile. The FCO document predicting the scope and likely limits of the Soviet response was impressively accurate.
Volume 2 deals with the making of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement. Officials whose enthusiasm was greatest for sending the KGB men packing in 1971 tended to be the most sceptical about any good coming out of an east-west Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. But those who realised that even a fragile d?tente threatened the hegemony of communist parties were right. The western diplomats, with British officials well to the fore, who negotiated a tough human rights agreement did an excellent job. They aimed to maximise the opening-up to outside influences of the communist states of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe; the outcome justified their efforts. They not only put those regimes on the defensive (to the extent that they did not fulfil their Helsinki obligations), but also gave the states' internal critics a document their leaders had themselves signed, as a stick with which to beat them. On a visit to the Institute of State and Law in Moscow in 1976, I was told that its former director, a notorious Stalinist who was not given to criticising Soviet policy, had muttered: "Our leaders made a big mistake when they signed the Helsinki Accord."
For an academic observer of Soviet politics, it is reassuring to discover that the FCO knew no more (and, in some respects, less) about how Soviet policy was made than did the scholars; and that they, too, disagreed with each other. However, one advantage the diplomats had over much of the academic writing of the period is that the letters and memoranda published by the FCO are far less jargon-ridden than much of the work of the scholars.
Sir Duncan Wilson, the British ambassador in Moscow, responded elegantly in December 1970 to a mild rebuke from the foreign secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had found his previous dispatch "too selective and too optimistic." In particular, the foreign secretary drew attention to the disturbingly prominent role which class struggle continued to play in the thinking of the Soviet leadership. The draft of his letter was prepared by CS Giffard and Sir Thomas Brimelow, who had produced a suitable quotation on the currently acute character of the international class struggle from Leonid Brezhnev.
Sir Duncan replied: "I do not doubt... that Brezhnev and the other party leaders of his generation have been brought up on the full range of Marxist mythology, including the doctrine of the class struggle magnified to a worldwide scale, and that they continue in some sense to believe in it. But beliefs can be held with varying intensities and at different levels of the mind, and can be more or less closely related to actions. I personally find it hard to believe that the CPSU does not by now include its fair share of pious agnostics; or that Brezhnev and men of his generation believe very intensely in the sort of text quoted in your dispatch; or that they find the concept of the class struggle the most helpful guide to most of their current decisions on foreign policy."
The ambassador added that the stress on class struggle might prove a hindrance to the Brezhnev leadership's advisers abroad. He wondered whether Smirnovsky, the ambassador to Britain, "reported the fact that the annual conference of one of the two main political parties in Britain traditionally ends with the singing of the words 'Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set,' and that of the other party with 'Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we'll keep the Red Flag flying here.'"
Let us hope that the spirit of glasnost, which has now reached the FCO, will prevail in the Russian ministry of foreign affairs and that it will publish a similar volume. It would be interesting to learn what Smirnovsky did report, even if his dispatches are less elegant than Sir Duncan Wilson's.
Documents on british policy overseas, series III: vol.1, Britain and the soviet union 1968-72; vol. 2, the conference on security and co-operation in europe 1972-75
Gill Bennett et al (editors)
The Stationery Office 1997, ?80 each
