Britain, the Soviet Union and Russia (review)

For those looking for a survey of British-Soviet-Russian relations in the twentieth century, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Russia, by former diplomat Sir Curtis Keeble, is a good place to start. The first edition of the book, Britain and the Soviet Union, 1917-89, was written more than ten years ago to provide an overview of the policies of successive British governments toward the Soviet Union. Keeble, who served as British ambassador to the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, argued that Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power had given the West a historic opportunity to dismantle the seventy-year East-West confrontation and to erect in its place a new relationship based on common interests (new edition, p. xi). The revised edition has retained the first of these two themes; events in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sir Curtis believes, demonstrated that his assessment of the Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) was correct. The new edition has been updated to take this into account and to discuss developments within Russia and in Anglo-Russian relations from 1989, when the first book appeared, to the end of 1999, when Vladimir Putin became acting president of the Russian Federation.

Keeble admits that in the first edition, written two years before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, he did not foresee that Gorbachev's reforms would spark a revolution that would tear down the Soviet regime and break the CPSU's monopoly of power. In the eight years that followed the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia was mired in political, social, and economic turmoil as it sought to consolidate democratic institutions and make the transition to a market economy. Although the circumstances of 1989 and 1999 were very different, Keeble argues it was no less important in 1999 than it had been a decade earlier for the West to understand the history of Anglo-Soviet relations since 1917. Only through such an understanding could Western governments recognize and seize the opportunities in the new situation to build a stable and cooperative long-term relationship. Although Keeble presents his study as the work of a nonhistorian, he has produced a clearly written narrative worthy of a professional historian.

The book's main theme is unchanged: Anglo-Soviet relations frequently oscillated, and "each swing reflected a change in the balance between the search for a basis of mutual interest, be it only the basic interest of self-preservation, and the profound conflict of ideology and power" (p. xii). Keeble establishes a framework for the relationship, as well as what made it unique, in an expanded introduction in which he summarizes the history of the relationship between the two countries. Contacts between Britain and Russia, dating back more than eight centuries, were marked by both cooperation and conflict: cooperation in preventing Europe from falling under the domination of another power, cooperation in trade and investment, and conflict in their clashing imperial ambitions and their abhorrence of each other's system of government. The elements of this fluctuating pattern survived the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, Keeble maintains, but were "distorted" by the Bolshevik leaders' adoption of Marxism-Leninism. Their embrace of this revolutionary ideology, with its canon of "pre-ordained, irreconcilable confrontation" between socialism and capitalism, "conditioned" the British-Soviet relationship.

Britain, the Soviet Union, and Russia covers well-hoed ground, but Keeble has done yeoman's work in using official British records, memoirs, government statements of policy, and contemporary press reports to tell his story. Except for the chapter on the World War II alliance, he approaches his theme chronologically in twelve chapters. Keeble offers no new arguments but has synthesized his material well. The British government, he writes, intervened in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution to keep resistance to Germany on the Eastern front alive. Only after the armistice in November [End Page 120...