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Britain and the Soviet Union, 1917–89 PDF

417 Pages·1990·41.777 MB·English
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BRITAIN AND THE SOVIET UNION, 1917-89 Also by Sir Curtis Keeble THE SOVIET STATE: The Domestic Roots of Soviet Foreign Policy (editor) Britain and the Soviet Union, 1917-89 Sir Curtis Keeble H.M. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1978-82 Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-20645-2 ISBN 978-1-349-20643-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20643-8 © Sir Curtis Keeble, 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-43919-7 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 ISBN 978-0-312-03616-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keeble, Curtis. Britain and the Soviet Union, 1917-89/Sir Curtis Keeble. p. em. ISBN 978-0-312-03616-4 1. Great Britain-Foreign relations-Soviet Union. 2. Soviet Union-Foreign relations-Great Britain. I. Title. DA47.65.K44 1990 327.41047---dc20 89--36456 CIP To Margaret and all our colleagues in the Moscow Embassy from 1978 to 1982 Contents List of Maps viii List of Illustrations ix Preface X Acknowledgements xiv Introduction: Britain and Imperial Russia 1 1 Response to Revolution 12 2 Intervention 23 3 Facing the Facts 62 4 Working Relations 80 5 Relations Broken and Resumed 99 6 The Approach to War 117 7 Alliance 158 8 Post-War Confrontation 206 9 The Khrushchev Years 238 10 Between the Europeans and the Superpowers 267 11 A New Start 297 12 A Policy for the 1990s 325 Appendix 1: A Chronology of British-Soviet Relations 334 Appendix 2: The British and Soviet Leadership 1917-89 353 Appendix 3: British and Soviet Diplomatic Representatives 355 Notes 357 Index 375 vii List of Maps The Soviet Union and Neighbouring States Frontispiece From Brest-Litovsk to Stalingrad 28 The Polish-Soviet Frontier 71 European Battlefronts January-May 1945 192 viii List of Illustrations 1 British landing in Vladivostok, 1918 2 Propaganda leaflet, 1918-19 3 Chicherin and Litvinov at Genoa, 1922 4 A 1924 election poster warning John Bull not to let his pockets be emptied by Labour's Bolshevik friends 5 Police raid on Soviet Commercial Offices in Moorgate, 22 May 1927 6 Departure of Soviet Charge, 1927 7 Eden leaves for Moscow, 1935 8 Stalin, Molotov and Ribbentrop celebrate signature of Non aggression Treaty, August 1939 9 Stalin, Truman and Churchill at Potsdam, 1945 10 · A Russian girl sniper in London, 1942 11 Hurricanes at Murmansk, January 1942 12 A Ministry of Information wartime poster 13 Eden, Bidault and Dulles prepare for the 1954 Berlin Conference 14 Eden with Bulganin and Khrushchev, signing the official communique, 26 April1956 15 Soviet forces in Hungary, November 1956 16 Macmillan and Selwyn Lloyd with Khrushchev and Gromyko in Moscow, 21 February 1959 17 The author presenting credentials in Moscow, March 1978 18 Farewell to Moscow 19 The author and wife in the Moscow Embassy 20 On tour in Uzbekistan 21 Mrs Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe in Moscow, March 1987 22 The Gorbachevs stop at Brize Norton on the way to Washington, 7 December 1987 23 A British built polyethylene plant in the Soviet Union ;~}Architect's impressions of the new British Embassy in Moscow 26 Mrs Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev in St George's Hall in the Kremlin IX Preface In the conduct of British foreign policy, the relationship with the Soviet Union has a unique quality and a unique potential for good or ill. It raises issues which have plagued the statesmen of the Western democracies for seven decades and which are still unresolved. In the years between the two world wars, the new Russia was the unknown factor. Lloyd George did his best to draw her into the community of nations, but those who governed Britain throughout most of the 1920s and 1930s preferred not to deal with the Soviet Union. When, too late, they tried to deal, they found their prejudice confirmed by experience. Among the British people, some of us viewed her with hope, some with apprehension, some with detesta tion, some with scorn, most with perplexity and many with the sadness which comes at the sight of the corruption of brave ideals. Some few chose treason. All had their reasons, for the Soviet Union can show many faces. Might a more determined effort to establish a sound relationship with the Soviet Union in those years have lessened the suffering which Europe had to bear? The answer will never be certain. It is hard to accept that the effort should not have been made. It is harder to believe that it could have succeeded. My first contact with the reality of Soviet power came as the war time alliance was disintegrating into the post-war confrontation. Experience in the repatriation of British and Soviet prisoners of war revealed in stark clarity those qualities of the Russian character and the Soviet system which have, in peace and in war, made the conduct of relations such a frustrating task. I joined the Foreign Service in 1947, a year after Winston Churchill had made his 'iron curtain' speech at Fulton. My experience of the cold war and the beginning of detente was gained in West Berlin in the early 1950s and East Berlin twenty years later. When, in 1978, I was appointed to Moscow, it was possible to envisage in the aftermath of the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin and the Helsinki Final Act the development of a better working relationship with the Soviet Union, and we had a promising base in the agreements signed between Harold Wilson and Leonid Brezhnev in 1975. I was in fact to experience the full cycle of relations, as we moved from the false dawn of detente into the first chill of the Shcharansky and Orlov trials, the invasion of Afghanistan, the Western counter- X

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