An extraordinary claim in The Times by the Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, that Arthur Ransome has been identified in KGB documents as ‘the most important secret source of intelligence on British foreign policy’ for the Cheka, the terror organisation of Bolshevik Russia, has infuriated lovers of Ransome’s work. Unlike Michael Foot, similarly traduced, Ramsome is not here to sue Rupert Murdoch for libel. But many of the children who fell in love with the 11 classic sailing stories, beginning with Swallows and Amazons in 1930 and ending with Great Northern? in 1947, are now important members of the chattering classes.
TARS to the rescue
The global network of grown-up Ransome children, who often call themselves TARS, from the acronym of The Arthur Ransome Society, is still ringing with denunciations of Professor Andrew’s article, which had been cut from an easily-missed New Year’s Eve edition of The Times and faxed round the world. The TARS resent Professor Andrew’s claim that Ransome was a man who had ‘idolised’ Feliks Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka, before Stalin and Beria turned it into the NKVD and the KGB.
Professor Andrew’s article appeared under The Times headline ‘Swallows and Bolsheviks’. In it he wrote: ‘The Cheka, which Ransome so admired, probably executed over a quarter of a million “enemies of the people” during its first four years.’ He noted a ‘striking similarity’ in the way the Russians greatly exaggerated the value of the information about Britain they got from both Arthur Ransome, whom he describes as ‘The Guardian’s Moscow Correspondent’ and Richard Gott, of today’s Guardian.
This remark infuriated the TARS, who were quick to point out that for most of his dangerous years in Russia, from 1916 to 1919, Ransome worked as a wartime special correspondent based in Petrograd for the Daily News, not the Manchester Guardian; and that when he did work for the Manchester Guardian between 1919 and 1921, it was not as Moscow correspondent but as a special correspondent, based in Estonia. Tania Rose, the daughter of Morgan Philips Price, the Manchester Guardian‘s actual special correspondent in Russia from 1914 to 1918, made this clear in a letter she wrote to the Guardian. She illustrated the hazards of reporting for British papers in a Bolshevik Russia, being invaded by British forces, quoting from the title of a British Foreign Office memo of 1918: ‘Dangerous Activities of Mr Price and Mr Ransome’. The suspicion voiced by Christopher Andrew was widespread at the time.
The journalist Paul Foot, who in 1992 had republished Ransome’s rare and exciting pamphlet Six Weeks in Russia 1919 under his small, left wing Redwords imprint, spotted ‘Swallows and Bolsheviks’ in a paper he grabbed before catching a New Year’s Eve train from Cornwall to London. He managed to squeeze an early reply into his next column in the Guardian: ‘The professor’s caricature of this most principled, independent and forthright of journalists as just another suborned spy is ridiculous.’
Andrew’s attack on Ransome united two experts on Ransome’s days in Russia, who had previously been arguing about the meaning of Russian documents concerning Ransome’s work as a war correspondent in 1919.
The diplomat, the historian….
One of them is Hilary King, a yachtsman and retired diplomat, who was flown into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia on a mission to reach Tito’s partisan headquarters in 1943, and was once commercial counsellor at the British embassy in Moscow. The other is Greg Palmer, a Russian-speaking historian who owns Ransome’s old sailing cruiser Peter Duck and took her into Estonian and Russian waters just after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Greg Palmer said,’The words Andrew quotes are taken so much out of context as to totally change their meaning. There are many cases where lifetime spies were never suspected even by close friends and relatives. Ransome was under suspicion at different times of being a Bolshevik agent or a British agent, but no-one who has written about him has taken these claims seriously.’
Both Palmer and King say that the truth about Ransome lies in the words of a real British agent who knew him well, Robert Bruce Lockhart, who was arrested by the Cheka after British and French forces had seized Archangel from the Bolsheviks. Ransome fled to Sweden to escape arrest.
….the secret agent…
In Memoirs of a British Agent Bruce Lockhart wrote:
‘Ransome was a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist, who could always be relied upon to champion the under-dog, and a visionary whose imagination had been fired by the revolution. He was on excellent terms with the Bolsheviks and frequently brought us information of the greatest value. An incorrigible romanticist, who could spin a fairy tale out of nothing, he was an amusing and good-natured companion. As an ardent fisherman who had written some charming sketches on angling, he made a warm appeal to my sympthy, and I championed him resolutely against the secret service idiots who later tried to denounce him as a Bolshevik agent.’
Greg Palmer says: ‘In the Biographical Chronicle of Lenin, published in 1974….. three meetings between Ransome and Lenin are recorded. None of these seems like a meeting with a Bolshevik agent. The Bolsheviks never regarded Ransome as a Bolshevik, Marxist or even a fellow traveller.’
….and Mr Piip
Working from the ‘Trotsky Papers’, Hilary King, who cruised Eastern Baltic waters in 1992, wrote last year for an Estonian journal on Ransome’s description of his dangerous work as a go-between carrying oral government messages fram Tallinn and Moscow which helped to end the war between Estonia and Bolshevik Russia. His work as an unofficial link-man between the Estonian Foreign Minister A. Piip and the Bolsheviks in Moscow led to the 1920 Treaty of Dorpat that won twenty years of independence for Estonia. According to Ransome: ‘Some years later Mr Piip stopped me in the street and said, “I have been going through our archives of 1919-1920, and I should like to tell you that you have a very honourable place in Estonian history”.’ Ransome remembered later, ‘I think that is the only time that anybody has ever said “Thank you” for any of my amateur meddling in public affairs’.
Ransome was well known in the Kremlin. He could drop in at any time on Lenin and Trotsky, at their offices, and he fell in love with Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina. Genia left Moscow with him in 1919, and married him at the British Consulate in Estonia, after Arthur had managed to get a divorce from the highly-strung English wife whom he had avoided for years by dint of working as a war correspondent. Genia lived with Arthur for the rest of his life, usually in a house somewhere in the old Lancashire parts of the Lake District; for 10 years in their first cottage, Low Ludderburn, overlooking the River Winster. Their last home in the Lakes was Hill Top, above the Lakeside and Haverthwaite railway line.
Hilary King from his home on the Hebridean island of Luing, said in the aftermath of Professor Andrew’s article:
‘To regard Arthur Ransome as some sort of “Bolshevik agent” is to misread his character and attitude completely. Rather, he saw himself as a sort of intermediary, explaining each side to the other in the British interest (or in Estonia, in the interest of the decidedly anti-Bolshevik Estonians). Andrew’s claim about Ransome “idolising” Dzerzhinsky as his “main hero” cannot be justified. On all the big issues at stake, AR’s reporting was right in general, and official opinion in London was wrong. AR saw his role as not only to report as accurately as he could in impossible circumstances, but also to show Whitehall that our policy was likely to prove fatally damaging to British interests in the long term.’
Rumalus!
Hilary King has found in the Estonian State Archives a message to the Estonian Foreign Ministry from the Chief of Police in Tallinn which informed them that Ransome was a Bolshevik agent. ‘In its margin’, says Mr King, ‘There is a terse, lapidary comment, in Estonian by a certain “G.E.” ‘ The word is ‘Rumalus!’ which Mr King translates as ‘balderdash’.
Jan Needle, one of today’s childrens writers, wrote to Ransome as a boy, and still keeps the old man’s reply in his desk. He said, ‘It’s a bit difficult to take seriously an attempt to slur Ransome or the Guardian which fails to notice that he actually wrote for a different newspaper at the time in question. Sadly the truth seems to be more mundane. Ransome was a journalist who became a fine writer. Christopher Andrew appears to be an academic who could become a tabloid journalist.’