Posted by Duncan on July 31, 2002 at 15:13:03 from 205.188.209.46 user Duncan.
In Reply to: Re: Arthur Ransome - A Spy, again posted by Phil Tomaselli on July 25, 2002 at 20:21:33:
I can certainly concur with Phil that he made no spectacular or sensationalist claims about AR's connections with the British Secret Service. Indeed I found the article very interesting and informatiive. I was already aware of many of the AR details related in the article, but the more general account of SIS was clearly delivered with the authority of an expert in the field.
Having said as much, I hope Phil will forgive me for still not being 100% convinced. Phil says that he has traditionally been a supporter of a Ransome as Honest Broker school of thought. May I say, perhaps controversially, that I've always leaned closer to a 'Ransome as supporter of Bolshevik Russia with a healthy historicised dose of British nationalism to occasionally confuse matters' school of thought.
As for AR's articles, it would seem a perfect way to defuse them and undermine them in official quarters for those that knew their honest (if censored) viracity to paint them as sops to an 'enemy' regime. Let us not forget that these also included a pamphlet for the American market that gave one of the most spirited defences of the bolsheviks to have ever emerged - even from amongst their own ranks. One could potentially take a 'sop' too far if the result was quite feasibly hundreds of Americans deciding that communism sounded pretty damn good.
I could certainly come up with a less alarming reason for the variation in content between his briefs to officials and his articles - and that is that AR was a writer, and what's more a writer who knew how to work an audience. He wanted to write things that comforted easily spooked, staid establishment officials; he wanted to write something that excited Americans who knew little of the bolsheviks; he wanted to write articles that would both inform and entertain his readers in the UK. I would also accept that the bolshevik regime and their censors were another audience he wished to satisfy, but put it no stronger than that.
I agree that the War Office communications are more difficult to fit into my picture. If you read AR's letters you see that he ideally wants to leave Russia once Britain is effectively at war with her, because he feels that he can be of use no more: there is clearly a two-edged dilemma here in that he felt that he could not be so unpatriotic as to continue to write spirited defences of his country's enemy, nor to remain close to its leadership, and yet he had no desire to write condemnations of his bolshevik friends either - he opposed the wars of intervention. So why did he hand over lists of old regime officers in the Red Army? What could be his motivation for doing so? Why might Britain want the names? Why might Russian want the names known?
I certainly don't have the answer although I think I might be able to give a very small part of it:
That old regime officers numbered amongst the Red Army was interesting. It was interesting in an entirely journalistic way; it was interesting from a political perspective. Professional soldiers returning to the national army suggests a country returning to a degree of normality. This was a central theme of AR's telegrams at the time (and of his interviews with Lenin, where he debated the NEP with the Russian leader). It fitted western propoganda for old regime officers to all be fighting alongside their 'White Russian' colleagues; that there was a sense of an old 'European' sensible, non-communist Russia run by 'people like us' fighting against an angry rabble of peasants, vagabonds, 'intellectuals' (not to mention asians and jews)who represented this upstart government. In fact, more and more Russians from various ethnic backgrounds were getting used to the new normality and the civil war was more territorial than politically, ethnically or class-based.
This doesn't explain a list of names, and I don't pretend it does. But I think it keeps the question open. I always anticipate fireworks when I write this kind of thing from people who think I'm saying AR was a communist...
Duncan