Setting the Scene
On the 25 May 1940, a handwritten memo left the personnel department of the General Post Office, destined for the desk of Roger Hollis of the British Secret Services. The author, G. A. Harlow, attached to the note a specimen copy drawn from private correspondence recently intercepted on their way to William (‘Willie’) Gallacher . Harlow’s expressed aim was to direct MI5 ’s attention to a sudden increase in the volume of mail directed to Gallacher, a prominent member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB ). 3
He was not acting entirely on his own initiative. In collaboration with the postal service, warrants to seize and search Gallacher’s mail had been routinely issued by the state throughout the first half of the 1930s, citing the ‘interesting and useful information’ they had yielded about the communist revolutionary movement. 4 Unfortunately for MI5 , on the 14 November 1935, a marked shift in his position within both the revolutionary movement and the political landscape of the country occurred; Gallacher’s election as Member of Parliament for West Fife secured the CPGB ’s first parliamentary seat in over ten years.
This unexpected improvement in the CPGB ’s political fortunes immediately raised the question of whether such invasive surveillance could be justified now that its target was an elected government official. Willie Gallacher was no longer a political agitator on the fringes of British politics, lacking the legitimacy and platform of a seat in the House of Commons. The dilemma moved MI5 to cancel their official supervision of the Gallacher household’s correspondence —earlier warrants had sanctioned the postal service to include the mail of his wife Jean and other close associates in their checks—though an unofficial monitoring of the volume of mail was tacitly encouraged. Even after this was ostensibly ordered to stop the following year, Harlow’s actions demonstrate that he understood the importance of keeping the state well informed of any sudden shifts in the activities of such a high-profile communist. 5 By the spring of 1940, this need was reaffirmed due to the rapid deterioration of relations between London and Moscow since the previous summer.
A frosty state of affairs between Westminster and the Kremlin had continued to cool after the inexplicable reconciliation of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under the provisos of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact . Their carving up of Central and Eastern Europe at the diplomatic table in the late summer of 1939 eventually sparked war on the continent, as international audiences witnessed the division of Poland between German and Soviet troops in September. While Allied forces settled into a state of ‘phoney war ’ with the Axis powers, the often overlooked advances of Soviet influence across Moscow ’s neighbours to the west and north suddenly spilled out into open conflict. 6 The invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939 ignited a further flashpoint in the Kremlin ’s foreign relations. Contemporaries perceived the subsequent match-up as a David and Goliath struggle for survival for ‘little Finland ’, which at once drew forth the sympathies of much of the international community. Despite the public outcry, Britain and France proved reluctant to intercede militarily. However, by the conflict’s conclusion, both countries were on the brink of direct intervention against the Soviet Union —a scenario not envisioned since the Russian civil war twenty years earlier. 7
Even as Moscow faced a rapid deterioration in its relations with the Allied powers, the Kremlin could rely on at least one source of vocal support within the British government. For the duration of the war with Finland , Willie Gallacher was belligerent in his defence of the Soviet Union , attracting in return the frequent and biting criticism of his peers in Westminster . 8 His contentious stance put MI5 on surer footing. Monitoring of his movements throughout the war revealed an increasingly untenable position for Gallacher and the CPGB , with the war inspiring vehement protest among even his own constituency of West Fife:
It is reported that the love for Willie Gallagher (sic) has cooled a great deal among his [constituents] in Fife. That the Fife Miners Executive had passed a resolution sympathising with Finland , and declared both Stalin and his pal Gallagher ‘Hypocritical Humbugs’. 9
The Red Army ’s actions in Finland , though limited and indecisive, had a far from negligible impact on the entire international communist movement.
Behind the front lines of the fighting, the British Secret Services had a further role to play. The opportunity to interrogate Soviet prisoners of war under Finnish custody elicited recorded testimony and evidence of widespread disaffection towards Soviet power. This was carefully scrutinised in the event of Britain and the USSR coming to blows. 10 Though privately neither the Foreign Office , nor chiefs of staff anticipated this possibility for much of the conflict, it became impossible to discount the outcome entirely, especially in view of the speed with which events were unfolding and the growing impetus given to preparations by their French allies. 11
Following the cessation of hostilities on 14 March 1940, these former Red Army prisoners would go on to attract the same close attention of the Soviet authorities as their British counterparts. The Kremlin opted to immediately repress any potentially infectious individuals on their return to Soviet custody, determined that their testimony and experiences of the Finnish front would remain quarantined from the rest of the population. 12
Silencing men and media alike, the Soviet regime did its best to limit the damage caused by the debacle. Shortly after agent Hollis received word on the recent surge in postal traffic directed to Willie Gallacher, two thousand kilometres away in Leningrad , Communist Party boss Andrei Zhdanov received a classified report from the Soviet Union ’s respective ministry of internal affairs , the NKVD . As with the British example above, the report arrived with an enclosed attachment. Unlike the copied specimen intercepted on behalf of MI5 , the handwritten letter Zhdanov’s report contained was being delivered to its author’s intended recipient; it offered no postmark and had bypassed the domestic postal service entirely. However, the letter’s arrival in the hands of Zhdanov was no less dependent on a pervasive network of state surveillance and an apparent degree of individual initiative. 13
The letter contained a plea for clemency from a former Red Army officer. Captured by the Finns, imprisoned for the remainder of the war and then returned to the USSR shortly after hostilities were halted, the author, Ivan Andreevich Gromov , was placed directly into the custody of the NKVD . Gromov’s subsequent sentencing to five years hard labour in the Soviet penal colonies of the NKVD-Gulag system was a bitter blow after his service to the state. His last-ditch appeal to Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad party apparatus and a leading figure in the city’s mobilisation for war, arrived after many months of his not knowing the likely fate of himself and his men. 14 In the light of the desperate manner by which the author sought to send his appeal, it is not immediately clear why either the guards of Pechlag Camp or the NKVD determined it prudent to forward this particular piece of correspondence . 15 It remains a source that raises more questions than it answers.
Though the Soviet–Finnish War of 1939–1940 occupied a relatively narrow space both geographically and chronologically, it touched upon, if only briefly, the hearts, minds and activities of millions of people. A tragicomedy that unfolded on the world stage, the conflict elicited a huge range of responses from audiences, whether opponents or advocates of the international communist movement. Yet its prominence, like the fighting, was short-lived and the war has not remained in the wider public consciousness. As a result, the machinery operating behind the scenes of this theatre of war has also elicited scant attention from scholars—a sentiment perfectly captured by Koestler’s protagonist in Darkness at Noon. 16
Originating on opposite sides of the acute political divide that persisted between Westminster and the Kremlin in these months, the cases of Gallacher and Gromov when reviewed together take a small step towards addressing that shortfall. Furthermore, notwithstanding the distance between London and Le...