THE GREAT CONSPIRACY,
by MichaelSayers and Albert E. liahn '34. Little,Brown and Company, 1946, 433 pages, $3.50.
This is the story of the war against the Soviet Union, which has been waged continuously and on many military, political, and ideological fronts by a wide variety of adversaries from the summer of 1917 down to tomorrow morning's headlines. It is the story of the attempts to forestall the rise of the Soviet internal power before the outbreak of the October Revolution; of the plots and counter-plots culminating in the War of Intervention participated in by the armed forces of fourteen states without the formality of a declaration of war; of the Cordon Sanitaire established against the spread of Bolshevism after the end of the Civil Wars; of the fantastic activities of the Fifth Column within and without the Soviet Union, disillusioned revolutionaries who allegedly conspired with anyone and everyone who would listen to them; of the years of appeasement in the thirties when the western democracies, despite the warnings of old Bolsheviks like Winston Churchill, chose to believe that the growing power of Nazi Germany would be turned eastward rather than westward; and finally of the forces which attempted, for reasons of their own, to postpone or nullify the Great Coalition of the United Nations which alone could have brought the war to a successful conclusion.
The authors tell the stories of some of the more devious characters who intrigued continuously and with varying success over the past 30 years to bring about anything from mutual suspicion and bad feeling to open hostilities between the western nations and the Soviet Union. The stories are copiously documented from a variety of sources of varying authenticity, ranging (not necessarily in this order) from newspaper accounts, the private papers of diplomats, their private and public conversations, the published documents and white papers of state departments and foreign offices, to extensive quotations from the testimony at the Moscow Trials. International secret agents of dubious loyalties, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary terrorists, agents provocateurs, dissident revolutionaries from the extreme right to the extreme left, saboteurs of all descriptions and degrees of skill, and gunmen of all parties, nations, and ideologies make up the cast of characters, along with many of the leading statesmen, politicians, generals, field marshals, and miscellaneous public figures of the past three decades. The sympathies of the authors are frankly on the side of the Soviet Union and, particularly in the alleged Trotskyist conspiracies, official Soviet documents are accepted as the literal and complete truth. That part of the story connected with the fabulous activities of Trotsky and the trials of his confederates is naturally highly controversial and any allegations on the subject are hotly debated by the partisans of either side. The nature and repository of the documents themselves preclude any conclusive answer for some time to come.
Many of the other events in the great conspiracy (or rather the series of conspiracies great and small) are, however, not only matters of public record but the source of satisfaction to those participants who are still living. The reader need not accept all of the special pleading in this book to understand a little more clearly why, rightly or wrongly, the Soviet Union maintains an almost pathological suspicion of its principal allies, even in this moment of victory over a common enemy. Governments in other countries have come and gone; men, dynasties, and political parties have been in power and then left the stage, many of them forever. Continuity in the foreign affairs of the democratic nations has been lacking since the days of Lenin's New Economic Policy. But the man in the Kremlin is still there. And he has a long memory.
