Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Dramatis Personae
- Dedication
- Prologue
- 1 Remembrance of Things Past; Hampstead Man Among ‘The Modernists’
- 2 National Planning for the Future and the Arrival of Walter Gropius
- 3 1935: ‘Art crystallises the emotions of an age.’ Musicology and the Art of Espionage
- 4 Arnold Deutsch, Kim Philby and Austro-Marxism
- 5 The Isobar, Half-Hundred Club and the Arrival of Sonya
- 6 The Plot Thickens: Jurgen Kuczynski, Agatha Christie and Colletts Bookshop
- 7 Refugees, The Kuczynski Network, Churchill and Operation Barbarossa
- 8 Klaus Fuchs, Rothstein once more, and Charles Brasch
- 9 Vere Gordon Childe
- 10 The New Statesman, Ho Chi Minh and the End of an Era
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The Plot Thickens: Jurgen Kuczynski, Agatha Christie and Colletts Bookshop
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Dramatis Personae
- Dedication
- Prologue
- 1 Remembrance of Things Past; Hampstead Man Among ‘The Modernists’
- 2 National Planning for the Future and the Arrival of Walter Gropius
- 3 1935: ‘Art crystallises the emotions of an age.’ Musicology and the Art of Espionage
- 4 Arnold Deutsch, Kim Philby and Austro-Marxism
- 5 The Isobar, Half-Hundred Club and the Arrival of Sonya
- 6 The Plot Thickens: Jurgen Kuczynski, Agatha Christie and Colletts Bookshop
- 7 Refugees, The Kuczynski Network, Churchill and Operation Barbarossa
- 8 Klaus Fuchs, Rothstein once more, and Charles Brasch
- 9 Vere Gordon Childe
- 10 The New Statesman, Ho Chi Minh and the End of an Era
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Munich agreement of September had been arrived at without the participation of the Soviet Union, and encouraged Stalin to conclude that Britain and France were leaving Germany a free hand against the USSR. Stalin faced with a ‘dagger pointing east towards the heart of the Soviet Union’, accordingly revised his policies towards the West. On 23 August 1939, two days after the collapse of military talks between the USSR, France and Great Britain, Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This momentous act demanded an unprecedented intellectual leap on the part of the world communist movement, from one of outright opposition to Fascism, to one of open opposition to western imperialism. The following day Moscow Centre began withdrawing its agents from Germany and severed radio links with German nationals working for Soviet intelligence inside the Third Reich; while the NKVD in Russia began handing German communists who had taken refuge in the USSR to the Gestapo. The German Communist Party issued a statement on 25 August:
The German working people, and especially the German workers, must support the peace policy of the Soviet Union, must place themselves at the side of all peoples which are oppressed and threatened by the Nazis, and must now take up the fight as never before to ensure that peace pacts in the spirit of the pact which has just been concluded between the Soviet Union and Germany are also made with Poland and Romania, with France and England, and with all peoples which have reason to feel themselves threatened by Hitler's policy of aggression …
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Lawn Road FlatsSpies, Writers and Artists, pp. 132 - 151Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014