Four days before the general election in October 1924, the rightwing Daily Mail published a letter supposedly from Comintern leader Grigory Zinoviev to the Communist Party of Great Britain (or ‘British Communist Party’ as it is called in the letter). The Comintern was an organisation established by Lenin in 1919 to facilitate international revolution. British politics spun into a spiral of fear about an imminent uprising of workers who were acting on Moscow’s orders. The story was accompanied by headlines including ‘Civil war plot by socialists’ masters.’
In January 1924, Britain had its first Labour government, albeit a minority one. Newspaper placards read ‘Lenin dead (official), Ramsay MacDonald Premier’. Placing these two facts so closely together was apt, as the USSR played an important role in Labour’s political and ideological fortunes. However, the role was not always positive and Labour’s right-wing opponents used the Soviet Union as a stick with which to beat the party. For example, the Tories often portrayed Labour as little more than a Bolshevik party or a stooge of Moscow. Some Conservative members of the British establishment used Labour’s links with the Soviet Union in an attempt to damage Labour’s electoral fortunes.
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