Zinoviev letter published in Daily Mail - October 25, 1924

On this day in 1924, a letter sent from Grigory Zinoviev to the Communist Party of Britain was published in the British newspaper Daily Mail. The document is now believed to be a forgery. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class. It's a production of I
Heart Radio. Hi again everyone, I'm Eves and you're listening
to This Day in History class, where instead of going
back to the future, we go back to the past.
Today is October. The day was October nine. The British

(00:28):
newspaper The Daily Mail published a letter reported to have
been sent by Grigory Zinoviev, who was chairman of the
Communist International, to the Communist Party of Great Britain. It
was published just four days before the United Kingdom general election.
Though many people took the letter seriously at the time,
it's now considered to be a forgery. In the nineteen

(00:51):
three UK general election, the Conservative Party won the most seats,
but the Labor Party and the Liberal Party won enough
seats to create a hung part Lament, which happens when
no single political party wins a majority in the House
of Commons. So in n Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin

(01:11):
resigned in Britain's first ever Labor government, formed with Ramsay
McDonald as Prime Minister. The government had the support of
the Liberals, but it was still a minority government, with
only one ninety one members of Parliament in the Commons.
There was a lot of opposition to the new Labor government.
The Labor government gave diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union

(01:33):
and agreed to loan Russian money. An incident called the
Campbell case also ignited opposition and led to accusations of
McDonald being lenient on communism. John Ross Campbell was the
acting editor of the Workers Weekly, a newspaper controlled by
the Communist Party of Great Britain. After the newspaper published
an open letter that urged military members to quote turn

(01:56):
your weapons on your oppressors, Campbell was charged under the
Incitement to Mutiny Act of sev but the Labor government
dropped the prosecution on August thirteen. This, along with other
alleged pro Soviet activity involving the Labor Government, helped lead
people to fear a Communist threat in leadership and contributed

(02:17):
to the downfall of McDonald's government. In early October, Liberal
Party leader H. H. Asquith called a motion of no
confidence in McDonald's government. The Liberals hoped that the Conservative
Party or the Labor Party would be forced to enter
a formal coalition with them, but McDonald called for a
general election, which was scheduled for October twenty nine, even

(02:39):
though there was a slim chance of Labor winning it.
But on October nine, British intelligence agents in Riga sent
the text of the Zenoviav letter to London. The letter
was addressed to the Central Committee of the British Communist
Party and signed by Zenoviev, Secretary of the Communist International
Otto willakujin In, and Arthur McManus, a member of the

(03:01):
common Tern's executive committee and is Presidium. The Communist International
or common Tern, was a Soviet organ that promoted world
revolution and communism through propaganda and subversion. The zenovia Of
Letter encouraged leaders of the British Communist Party to incite
revolution among the factory workers and armed forces of Great Britain,

(03:24):
and it was dated September. Soviet officials and the British
Communist Party said that the letter was not legitimate, but
a copy of the letter was leaked to the press
four days before the controversial general election. The zenovia Of
Letter was published as the front page story in the
Daily Mail. It was published under the headline civil war

(03:45):
plot by Socialist Masters, with the subheading Moscow orders to
our reads. The Labor government's political opponents used the letter
to drum up a red scare in the media. The
publication of the letter humiliated the Labor government it but
it did not have a huge effect on the Labor
vote in the nine general election. Still, the Conservative Party

(04:07):
won the election. The Labor Party's loss was likely not
due to the Zenobia letter controversy and instead due to
the success of the Conservatives and the collapse of the
Liberal vote. Conservatives largely believed the letter was authentic, while
British intelligence deemed it a forgery. The authenticity of the
letter has been the subject of much debate since, and

(04:29):
the letter later underwent investigations, but there is no solid
proof of who wrote the letter, and the original letter
has not been discovered. I'm Eve Scheffcote and hopefully you
know a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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(04:53):
letters at this day at I heart media dot com.
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