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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2023
When Theodore Rothstein succeeded Litvinov as Lenin's unofficial diplomatic representative in London he immediately stepped up his clandestine activities on behalf of the Bolshevik government. One of his first acts was to approach Leonard Woolf and suggest that he publish in the International Review the full text of a number of Lenin's post-April 1917 speeches:
The question was how the typescript of the translation of Lenin's speeches should be physically handed over by Rothstein, his agent, to me, the editor. Having had no experience of revolutionaries, secret agents, or spies, I naturally thought that it would be sent to me in the ordinary way through the post. Rothstein was horrified at such a crude and naïve idea.
On Wednesday afternoon I was to walk down the Strand towards Fleet Street, timing it so that I should pass under the clock at the Law Courts precisely at 2.30. I must walk on the inside of the pavement and precisely at 2.30 I would meet Rothstein under the clock walking from Fleet Street to Trafalgar Square on the outside of the pavement. He would be carrying in his right hand an envelope containing Lenin's speeches, and, as we passed, without speaking or looking at each other, he would transfer the envelope from his right hand to mine.
This early example of how to execute the ‘brush pass’ was a good illustration of the lengths ‘the real underground revolutionary’ was prepared to go to overcome the government's efforts to control the reading matter of the British working class. Was it necessary? Certainly the government, the security services and Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express and Director of the Ministry of Information, thought so. They had been so thoroughly alarmed by Bolshevik propaganda that they had recently invited the leading writer of spy fiction of the day, John Buchan, to write a novel about the threat socialism posed to the British Empire. In his first post-First World War novel, Mr. Standfast, the main danger to the British empire from foreign espionage may have remained German imperialist ambition, but ‘the enemy within’ in the shape of a rebellious working class manipulated by foreign revolutionaries was never far from the surface:
‘Well, I’m a shop steward. We represent the rank and file against office-bearers that have lost the confidence o’ the workin’ man.
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