The Bolsheviks and the Lockhart Plot: Jonathan Schneer (1918)
Jonathan Schneer (c) Jonathan Hilyer
How close did we come to a world without the USSR? A world with no Stalin, no KGB, or even Putin today? In this episode of Travels Through Time we head back to 1918 and the scene of an audacious plot to find out.
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The year that followed the Russian Revolutions of 1917 was as chaotic as any in modern history. Nowhere more so than in the streets of Moscow and Petrograd (the name given to the great fallen Tsarist stronghold of St. Petersburg).
With World War One raging across the battlefields of Europe, Russia had abandoned the Eastern Front and had brokered an uneasy peace with Germany in the small Belarusian town of Brest-Litovsk.
The Allies had looked-on aghast as Lenin’s Bolsheviks handed Germany the initiative, allowing its generals to divert thousands of soldiers away from the east to concentrate their forces on the Western Front.
Meanwhile, Russia reverberated with rumour upon rumour of counter revolution. Everyone from foreign governments and anarchists, to nationalists, royalists and more seemed to be involved. It fuelled the flames of a (somewhat justifiable) paranoia at the heart of the new Soviet State, one that continues to dominate Russia’s foreign relations to this day.
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Jonathan Schneer’s dramatic story takes us right to the heart of this momentous point in world history by examining the events and career surrounding Britain’s unofficial envoy to the Bolshevik regime, a ruthless, dashing and Machiavellian Scot called Robert Bruce Lockhart.
The Lockhart Plot is the story of how a triumvirate of British, French and American diplomats conspired with secret agents, saboteurs and Russian nationalists to bring down Lenin’s regime as it desperately fought for life. How close they came to success is as shocking as the lengths they were prepared to go to achieve their aims.
Published in hardback in July, The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia is described by The Guardian as having ‘a rollicking and thriller-like narrative that captures the chaos and turbulence of post-revolutionary Petrograd and Moscow.’
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Jonathan Schneer is a historian whose work looks at modern Britain through a range of political, social, cultural and diplomatic subjects. He is an emeritus professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia is published by Oxford University Press.
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“They rushed from room to room, carrying papers, folders, dossiers; they were making history despite the Germans, despite the Allies, despite their home-grown enemies. Consciously, excitedly, they were fashioning the world’s first communist state” - Jonathan Scnheer
“We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest…they must be annihilated.” -
Gregory Zinoviev, Soviet Politburo
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Click here to order Jonathan Schneer’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show notes
Scene One: February 15, 1918: Bruce Lockhart’s first appointment with Leon Trotsky at the Smolny Institute in Petrograd.
Scene Two: August 25, 1918: secret meeting at the American Consulate in Moscow, hosted by American Consul General, DeWitt Clinton Poole, but presided over by French Consul General Josef Fernand Grenard.
Scene Three: Earliest hours of September 1: #24 Khlebnyi pereulok (Grain Alley), Cheka agents arrive to arrest Lockhart, George Hicks, and Moura von Benckendorff .
Memento: Sidney Reilly’s full report on the status of the plot for British Intelligence
People
Presenter: Peter Moore
Interview: John Hillman
Guest: Jonathan Schneer
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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Featured images from the Library of Congress
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