Britannia and the Bear: The Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars 1917–1929 by Victor Madeira (review)

British espionage in Bolshevik Russia remains a favourite topic in the literature about intelligence. The exploits of Sidney Reilly, the British agent who almost engineered the demise of Vladimir Lenin’s infant regime, even merited a popular TV miniseries in the 1980s. On the flip side, Moscow’s spying in Great Britain during the decade after the Revolution of 1917 is much less well-known. Victor Madeira’s Britannia and the Bear is therefore a welcome addition to the field.

There is a story to be told. Soon after the Armistice of 1918, Bolshevik subversion supplanted the Hun as the principal threat to Great Britain’s security. The menace seemed very real. Not only had Lenin’s conspirators seized control of the erstwhile Russian Empire, but Communist revolutionaries also temporarily declared Soviet republics in Hungary and Bavaria. Closer to home, mutinies disrupted the British and French armed forces, and, more ominously, already in the summer of 1918 London’s Metropolitan Police had gone on strike. It was all too easy to see such post-war unrest as harbingers of Lenin’s world revolution.

The bulk of Madeira’s narrative is taken up with London’s response to the “Red Menace.” Based on extensive research in the National Archives at Kew, along with some other repositories in Britain, France, and Russia, the author describes the efforts of MI5, the Government Code and Cipher School (gccs), the Secret Intelligence Service, and the London police’s Special Branch to combat Bolshevik subversion — real and imagined — in the United Kingdom.

It will come as no surprise that inter-agency rivalries, not to mention a fair dose of incompetence, hampered British counter-intelligence. But there were some successes. Led by Pavel Karlovich Vetterlein, a brilliant Russian émigré who had served as one of Imperial Russia’s leading codebreakers, gccs was able to decrypt all Soviet cables until overzealous government ministers alerted Moscow to the vulnerability of their ciphers in the late 1920s. Indeed, as Madeira points out, the “symbiotic relationship” (6) between politicians and spooks did not serve the state well. It would not be the last time this relationship faltered, as Americans learned to their cost in launching the second Iraq War in 2003.

Was there something to the spectre of Soviet subversion in post-war Britain? Moscow did give substantial subsidies to UK miners when they laid down their tools in 1926. However, when the Trade Union Council called for a general strike to support them that year, it wisely turned down the offer of a million Soviet rubles. Madeira suggests that, in general, British Conservatives saw too many reds under their beds when it came to labour unrest. At the same time, he explains that Moscow did set up an intelligence network that managed to penetrate the Special Branch, making the Kremlin privy to the operations of British counterintelligence until a police raid in 1927 shut the network down.

Although Madeira’s research also took him to Moscow, including the notoriously elusive Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (avp rf), he could have done much more work with Russian sources. Although “dozens of works” (5) have been published about Soviet intelligence in the wake of the USSR’s collapse twenty-five years ago, the bibliography only includes four books and one article in a popular history monthly. Thus the author suggests that the gru, the Red Army’s intelligence agency, was more effective than the cheka, the kgb’s forerunner, but tells us nothing about the former.

Britannia and the Bear is a reasonable account of the early years of the “Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars,” but the author’s somewhat disjointed narrative will tax the reader’s patience. There are a number of irrelevant digressions, including the impact of an Eton education on a head of the Special Branch and a discussion of the definition of subversion. At the...