moted to general officer in 1945 like most of his contemporaries. In
1946 he was recalled to Moscow from Siberia—reportedly to face
charges of corruption—and committed suicide on the way.
Zhuravlev’s rise and fall indicates how closely Stalin and his lieu-
tenant Lavrenty Beria supervised the security service. They re-
spected and rewarded vigilance (denunciations), but they demanded
competence. Zhuravlev, a drunk and a sadist, was not tolerated, and
he sank almost as quickly as he rose.ZINOVIEV LETTER.On 8 October 1924, the British Labour Party
lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons. On 25 October
a letter reportedly from Grigori Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern,
to the British Communist Party was published in the Daily Mail, en-
couraging the British party to prepare for class war. Four days later,
Labour lost a general election and the Conservatives returned to
power. Moscow always denied that the Comintern had sent such a
letter, but for 75 years a debate continued about the provenance of the
letter. There are several mysteries in the brief outline of the story: was
such a letter sent by the Comintern; what was the role of the OGPU;
was it part of a plot by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) to destroy
the Labour Party; did the Conservative Party deliberately use a
forged document to bring down Labour?
In 1998 a British historian was given access to British, Russian,
and American archives. She found that the Zinoviev letter was a for-
gery—possibly created by White Russian émigrés. The OGPU had
no role in a plot against the Crown. The letter was obtained by SIS
officers, who believed the information was accurate, and passed to
the Foreign Office, who accepted the bona fides of the information.
There is no firm evidence that the Conservative Party used the letter
in the election, although two of the men responsible for leaking it did
belong to the Conservative Central Office.
While the evidence of Moscow’s innocence in the case is proven, the
Comintern did in fact seek a more militant British Communist Party. A
letter from Christian Rakovsky, a senior Comintern official, to British
comrades in 1924 stated: “real, objective, conditions are being created
for a real revolutionary mass communist party in Great Britain.”
Clearly the Whitehall civil servants were not able to understand Marx-
ist rhetoric or differentiate between forgeries and real documents.ZINOVIEV LETTER• 30306-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 303