Posted by Adam Quinan on April 23, 2002 at -1:17:57 from 24.114.244.51:
In Reply to: Re: Erskine Childers: WasDo Agents Have to be Consistent..? posted by Andy Morley on April 22, 2002 at 19:43:30:
If the 1930s are anything to go by, British spies tended to be recruited from among Communist agents at Cambridge. So AR is obviously innocent of espionage as he was not a University man ;-) even though he may have had Communist sympathies.
More seriously, spies come in various types, there are nationals of the country being spied on who for political or mercenary motives give information to foreign powers. There are semi-official spies such as embassy staff who do their best to pick up additional unathorised information while conducting their usual business. Then there are the spies who are usually people with a legitimate reason to be in the country, business or journalism are good covers, who also try to pick up secret information. Ransome could have been one of this sort but until someone provides documentary evidence instead of merely claiming to have seen it, I won't rush to judgement.
My reading of Ransome is that he was perfectly capable of passing on snippets of information to the British authorities, but only if they furthered what he saw as the right course of action which was to come to an agreement with Lenin's Russia which he saw as far preferable to the previous regimes. I think that the early Soviet system was still relatively democratic, remember in most Western "democracies" of the time, women, and some men, still did not have the vote either. Ransome seems (at the time) to have been a relatively left wing and democratic character and had no sympathy with the Russian autocracy. Later on when he saw some of his ideals betrayed by Stalinism he seemed to become more cynical and anti-politics.