Russia - a country with a special place in the British psyche.
For centuries, Russia has both intrigued and frightened us.
There are aspects of Russia that we love,
but we feel somehow uneasy in her company,
unsure of how she will react.
And perhaps rather wary of a certain barbarism in her make-up.
For much of my professional life, I have kept a close eye on Russians.
Now, I want to turn to the British side of the relationship.
How has our view of Russia developed?
And what have the turning-points been in our perceptions?
My own view of Russia was formed during the Cold War when it was the largest part of the Soviet Union.
I remember well the fear of nuclear annihilation when I was young.
A fear made concrete by bunkers like these.
Then, when I started working at MI5, there was the constant need
to combat the activities of the Soviet intelligence services.
Russia was unscrupulous, expansionist, devious.
Russia was the enemy.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we should have seen the back of all that.
But it only took a milligram of polonium to bring back visions of the Cold War.
I think that to understand our response to Russia,
we have to go back, beyond the Cold War, beyond the Russian Revolution.
Russian territorial expansion was a concern for Britain throughout the 19th century.
The British Lion and the Russian Bear were engaged
in a subtle battle of exploration, espionage and diplomacy,
which has become known as the Great Game.
My first job in London, before I joined MI5,
was in the India Office Library and Records, which at that time were housed in this building.
In the records were the files of the Political Department
- the department that ran the real Great Game
- the battle for influence in Central Asia between Britain and Russia.
As India became an important outpost to the British Empire,
Russia, once a distant and alien country, seemed suddenly closer.
And in the early 19th century,
as its frontiers began to move in Central Asia,
India seemed to be under threat.
Some feared that the Russians might at any moment pour over the Himalayas into India.
In the late 1960s, I drove from Delhi to Kabul over the Khyber Pass
and saw for myself the ground over which the Great Game was played out.
My inspiration for the journey was Rudyard Kipling's Kim
- arguably the first British spy novel
- which brought vividly to life this game of espionage.
I got my tap on the shoulder from MI5 not long after I had read it
and so I joined the Intelligence Services with my mind full of this conflict with Russia.
But the Great Game, for all the grandeur of its name,
was territorial rivalry like any other.
It does not explain our unique and sustained disquiet about the Russian Bear.
For this, we need to look to another empire - the Ottoman Empire
and to a single man,
a senior British diplomat called David Urquhart.
Serving in Turkey, on the border with Russian power,
he became convinced of a vast Russian conspiracy to threaten British interests.
Urquhart's influence was significant.
He persuaded Victorian Britain to adopt the Turkish bath.
But he also persuaded us to fear Russia.
I have come with Professor Miles Taylor to the Victorian Turkish baths at Harrogate
to learn how Urquhart fermented Britain's first wave of Russophobia.
Was Russophobia different from other forms of xenophobia in Britain?
I think it is very specific in time.
It doesn't focus on particular stereotypes or characteristics
of the Russian people, about which there is general ignorance.
It is largely tied up with this "conspiracy theory".
Urquhart believed Russia had an exceptional ability to infiltrate and influence foreign ministries.
He felt that Britain's policies were too favourable towards Russia
and this led him to the theory that Lord Palmerston,
the British foreign secretary, was in the pay of the Russians,
a theory no doubt encouraged by the fact that Palmerston
had sacked Urquhart from his diplomatic position in 1837.
After he'd left the diplomatic service, what happened next? What did he do then?
He comes back to Britain and gets involved in popular politics in 1839, 1840,
when he starts the first of his foreign affairs committees.
What where they, exactly?
Foreign affairs committees are small groups of largely working men
who meet, usually in the Turkish baths that they have helped set up,
to discuss the documents of foreign policy.
Urquhart's view is that the reason Russia gets away with its secret diplomacy
is that people don't read properly, they don't read the treaties and the small print.
And on occasion, he will come round and tell them how to read these documents.
So a very nineteenth-century form of amusement, really!
'Urquhart was a consummate self-publicist.
'He published violently anti-Russian pamphlets and his own newspapers.
'He developed an almost cult-like following.'
He comes with this terrific story - I have been to the East,
I have seen the ways of another people and a culture. I have adopted their habits.
And also, this sense in which he is pure and untarnished by the system, the establishment.
He got out, he broke free,
and he knows the truth.
It's no accident that the word Russophobia first appeared in print
at the same time as Urquhart's ideas.
By the 1850s, anti-Russian feeling was at fever pitch.
It was now that another noted Russophobe entered the fray.
Karl Marx.
In 1853, he came across the theories of David Urquhart and was intrigued.
He set up a meeting with him, but for Marx at least,
it was a disappointment and he later described Urquhart as an utter maniac.
But of one Urquhart's theories at least, Marx remained convinced
and that was that the British government was completely in thrall to Russia.
So Marx too began to publish articles about what he called
the secret and permanent collaboration of the cabinets of London and St Petersburg.
But in 1854, Britain joined the Crimean War.
How did the conspiracy theorists explain the fact that Britain was now at war with Russia?
Easy. Marx wrote that the British government
had fought Russia to put the conspiracy theorists off the scent,
which is why we entered the war late and made so many mistakes.
It's a delicious irony that Karl Marx was stoking anti-Russian feeling.
But as the years went on, other views came to the fore.
It's very striking that in the late 19th century, Russia became popular,
if I can put it that way,
among a small section of the population because it was seen as different.
At a time when Britain had gone through the Industrial Revolution,
had what was widely seen as a bourgeois, philistine culture,
Russia somehow seemed to have a kind of energy, a mystery of its own.
In the 1870s, you begin to see translations of the novels of people like Turgenev.
Then in the 1880s and the 1890s, some translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
And suddenly, a small group of people begin to understand that Russia has a culture of its own,
in literature, most obviously, but also in music, one thinks of people like Mussorgsky.
Also in art, particularly as the century draws to a close.
What I think you see from the 1880s onwards is a much more nuanced
and subtle view of Russia developing in British society.
At the same time as this influx of Russian culture came to Britain,
a tide of Jewish immigrants reached our shores, fleeing heightened persecution in Russia.
For nearly the whole of the 19th century, and into the 20th century,
there was no way in which a British government could stop any foreigner
coming in to the country, for any reason at all,
or get rid of them once they were there.
There were no extradition laws, no alien laws, and so on and so forth.
But that's not to say that they welcomed them.
Nonetheless, Britain was proud of its tolerance.
And there was sympathy for the Russian exiles.
Russia had become, for liberal Victorian Society, the quintessential tyranny.
This is from a school book of 1850.
It's by a woman called Favell Lee Bevan, and it's called Near Home, Or The Countries of Europe Described.
And it's a little geography book for children in schools.
"The Russians are not as happy as the little Laps," whom she has just described,
"for in Russia, there are many rich Lords who are very cruel to the poor people.
"They treat them like slaves.
"They beat them when they are angry and take away their things whenever they please.
"The chief Lord of Russia is not called King, but Emperor,
"and he does whatever he likes.
"He can put people in prison whenever he is displeased."
And this is true in almost every geography book I have read for this period.
This is the cause or the reason why it is thought that people ought to be hostile to Russia.
The Tsar!
Most Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Russia in Britain ended up in the East End of London.
By the early 20th century, there were complaints of overcrowding
and for the first time, restrictions were placed on immigration,
the 1905 Aliens Act.
But the right to asylum for political refugees was retained.
Soon, radicals drawn to Britain by its open-door policy began to have an impact.
In May 1907, the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was held
to debate strategy for a Communist revolution in Russia.
It had originally been intended to hold it in Denmark and then in Sweden.
But under pressure from the Tsarist government in Russia, the delegates were refused entry.
So they ended up here, in Hackney, holding the conference,
symbolically, opposite these factory gates.
There is no sign now of the venue, the Brotherhood Chapel,
the bare hall into which 302 delegates filed.
Perhaps we would prefer to forget the part Britain played
in the making of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
To find out more about the congress, I've come to meet Professor William Fishman, historian of east London,
who can show me the few surviving traces in the fabric of the East End.
And this is a very interesting street indeed.
Fulbourne Street here.
And this door,
seemingly ordinary door,
in May 1907, this door opened and a stream of men and women walked through this door,
led by a balding, little red bearded Russian called Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin.
And a little man called Joseph Djugashvili,
pockmarked, bad arm, walked through that door.
Stalin walked through that door.
The only time he was in England.
Followed by Alexandra Kollontai, Trotsky,
and all the founding fathers and mothers of the Soviet Union came in.
So this is an unholy door!
There should be a plaque!
The Fifth Congress drew crowds eager to catch sight of a real revolutionary.
The delegates were even invited to a reception in Chelsea
where they were toasted by future Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.
But their day-to-day existence was not so glamorous.
This is where Stalin and Litvinov slept in a doss house.
At the time of the congress?
At the time of the congress. In this doss house, as it was.
But it's an interesting story that I must tell.
Stalin had a weakness.
What was it, Stella?
Women! Right.
And he wanted a girl for - I don't know what reason - I'm quite ignorant!
And the nearest where girls were openly proclaiming their sexuality was by the river.
Mainly they were poor Irish girls.
So, together with Litvinov,
there to be his guide and guard, they went down to Wapping.
And coming out of the pub, there was a pretty Irish girl
and Stalin went up to this girl and tried to chat her up.
The Irish dockers who saw this, saw this foreigner,
couldn't even speak the lingo, trying to chat up one of their girls.
They came up and started beating Stalin up! But who defended him?
Litvinov.
He virtually carried Stalin from the south in Wapping through these side-streets and up there.
He virtually saved his skin. Really?
So no lady that night, anyway!
Move forward.
'It's interesting to note that Stalin never spoke about his stay in London.'
Whilst the British sympathised with dissidents fighting Russian tyranny,
a series of scares soon raised the spectre that through our tolerance,
we had allowed terrorists into our midst.
The most famous case began with an attempted robbery of a jeweller's shop in Houndsditch
and the murder of three policemen.
Then on January 3rd, 1911, Inspector Wensley of the Metropolitan Police
cornered two men on the first floor of 100 Sidney Street in east London.
Well, what I would have done, being an ex-infantryman,
bashed open the door and seized them straightaway.
But no! What he did was to get a platoon of police with pistols
pointing at the windows where these two men were asleep.
And at 7 o'clock, they threw bricks up there and said, "Surrender, we've got you surrounded!"
Instead of which, there was a burst of gunfire in return
and thence began a battle between these terrorists
and a local platoon of police.
After about four hours, they were still firing back.
They decided to let the Home Secretary know what was happening, rang up,
and who was the Home Secretary?
Winston Spencer Churchill,
who immediately came straight towards the East End of London.
What is interesting is that as he got to the Whitechapel High Street,
he was unanimously booed.
When they saw Churchill, they booed him!
Why?
Because he had voted against the Aliens Bill of 1905.
Ah, yes. Letting these bloody foreigners in to come and kill our policeman!
However, they rang the Tower for a platoon of infantry men to come in and storm the building.
Shifted the others aside,
and you got this extraordinary scene of people cheering
and these Scotsmen marching to kill these two people.
A lovely scene!
When they got here, they got down and started firing.
And they were still firing back after six hours!
Churchill's had enough.
Lifts up the phone, "Bring up a cannon!"
A cannon is drawn up and just as they were about to shout, "Fire!",
a massive fire breaks out in that building.
And what had set the house on fire?
The shooting had penetrated a gas pipe. Like that - zoomph!
Who were the people who were actually in there?
They weren't Russians, they were Latvians. Latvian revolutionaries.
Members of Liesma - "The Flame", dedicated to the overthrow of the Tsar.
But the people outside here thought they were Russians?
But they were Latvians.
So it affected their attitude to all these Russian emigres in the country?
As far as the ordinary people, they said Russians. Russian foreigners.
Three years later, the Great War began.
Russia became a vital ally against Germany
and a new picture of Russia was born,
one fostered through government policy.
During the First World War, there were also significant attempts to,
if you like, mobilise British sentiment in favour of Russia.
There were translations of lots of key Russian texts like Dostoevsky,
reflecting, I think, a growing interest in Russian culture.
There were books written about the Russian church,
trying to persuade people that the Russian church and the Anglican church were similar.
Attempts, if you like, to portray Russia in a much more positive light.
What diplomats and military men understood was that Russia was crucial to the war effort
and that attempts had to be made to make this an alliance,
not simply a form of military alliance but, if you like, to give it a deeper texture.
Britain feared that if Russia pulled out of the war,
Germany could focus all its might on the Western Front and our own troops.
So as unrest grew in Russia,
our government tried to induce the Tsar to make democratic reforms.
Then in February 1917, the Tsar was overthrown.
Eight months later, the Bolsheviks took power in the October Revolution.
Russia withdrew from the war.
I think there was a growing concern
in some of the more diehard Conservative establishment circles in Britain
that Bolshevism might not only be a problem in Russia, it might be a problem for the British as well.
It was very noticeable that after Nicholas II had abdicated in February 1917,
the British government was reluctant to have him come to Britain.
The reasons have been much debated, but one of them was they were afraid
it wouldn't be popular with the British working class.
Bolshevism was described by politicians and generals as a spreading, infectious cancer.
Britain helped the anti-Bolshevik forces in the civil war that followed the revolution,
but the move was unpopular so soon after World War I
and many in Britain welcomed the revolution as a release from oppression.
In the wake of World War I, there were strikes across Britain
and in 1920, the Communist Party of Great Britain was founded.
I'm travelling to Chopwell, a village near Newcastle which still shows signs
of the popular sympathy for Russia in the wake of the revolution.
In the 1920s, the press dubbed it Little Moscow and "the reddest village in England".
One particular relic of the period appears to bear out this reputation.
All the pit villages, or many of them, had these banners, didn't they? That's right, yes.
Do you know if there were any others who have Marx and Lenin on them?
I think this combination is somewhat unique.
This, in fact, is the fourth banner that's been produced for Chopwell.
The first one was in 1907 and cost £26
and it had none of the icons of Marx, Lenin and Keir Hardie that you see now.
That didn't come about until the 1924 banner was produced.
Obviously, if you look at the front of this banner, you have socialism,
that runs right through it
and the icons at the time
who represented strong working movements and working people.
So we've got Marx and Lenin surrounding Keir Hardie?
That's right.
You said that you'd revived the tradition of parading this through the village
and that the schoolchildren were interested.
That's right. What do they make of Marx and Lenin and Keir Hardie?
Do they know anything about them or presumably they're taught, are they?
I think they probably haven't gone into a lot of detail for the history or the background.
To them, they are three old men. "That one looks like my granddad.
"That one looks like uncle so-and-so..."
And he's got a big beard. That's right.
The reverse, to me, is actually more important than the front.
I know the front tells the history but, to me, when you're walking through the streets of Chopwell,
the streets of Durham, this is what you look at when you're walking behind it.
You're not looking at the front. You're not looking at Karl Marx, Lenin.
You have the grandfathers, the miners in the dark area with the pit in the background. Yes.
And they're being shown the future.
This could be optimism, hope or aspiration.
He's pointing towards a brighter future.
They've got decent housing.
They've got nice clothes. They're playing games
and the flag for liberty, the freedom of hard work...
..brings a good life.
One resident of Chopwell, Jack Fletcher, has a direct connection to these street names.
My grandfather was Harry Bolton. He was a miner.
He lived at 6 Owen Terrace and I remember going into the living room
and on the shelf, there was a big bust of Lenin.
Next to him,
there was a big colour picture of the Red Star over the Kremlin.
Like most people in Chopwell, Harry Bolton didn't regard himself as a Communist.
In 1924, he became a Labour councillor
and was responsible for naming Marx and Lenin Terraces.
Russia, after the revolution, was the new Jerusalem.
If it could happen in a country like Russia,
which was looked upon as particularly backward,
it could happen in a country like Britain that had the vote.
Privilege would disappear
and ordinary, everyday people would be able to create their own happiness
and bring up their children in dignity.
It would be a meritocracy.
Admiration for the worker's paradise in Russia went hand-in-hand with political activism
and the fight for better working conditions.
In 1925, Chopwell miners went on strike.
They stayed out for 18 months, compared to the mere nine days of the general strike of 1926.
There were a large number of strikes in Britain in 1921
and then, of course, the general strike in 1926.
A Communist flag was hoisted over Glasgow town hall
and the Government had to send tanks in to disperse the great Communist meeting there
and so on and so forth.
The response, of course, of the British government
was much more hostile and much more worried
because it was anti-socialist,
not only anti-Communist and couldn't really distinguish between the different grades of it.
Consequently, I think, they tended to assume that these strikes and so on
that were happening in Britain were being fermented by Russian Communists.
It was this that led to Chopwell earning its Little Moscow title.
There were claims that the strikers were receiving money from the Soviet Union,
rumours disputed by the residents of Chopwell.
Miners' attempts to maintain the strike led to arrests, imprisonments
and the billeting of police officers in the village.
The government had planned to station warships,
ships of the line, off the north-east coast with their guns trained on Chopwell
and, if necessary, wipe the place off the face of the earth.
Of course, such extreme measures were not necessary
but after the strike, radical politics in Chopwell continued.
It was inevitable that my grandfather would go to Russia.
He tried in 1924.
Unfortunately, he couldn't get for the simple reason the man he wanted to see, Lenin, died.
He did, however, go in 1928.
I remember my grandmother telling me that she decked him up in all his long johns.
He went to a lot of receptions hosted by Stalin.
He was there about a fortnight and he was taken around the prize spots.
Now what he didn't realise was he was taken to the best of everything.
The best schools, the best universities, the best clinics...
These were projected as typical of the USSR and, of course, being a believer, he accepted it.
It wasn't only the people of Chopwell who looked to the Soviet Union.
Leading British intellectuals also liked what they saw.
Perhaps the most famous of these was George Bernard Shaw.
Hello, all you dear boobs
who have been saying for a month past that I have gone dotty about Russia.
Propaganda like the magazine USSR In Construction drew on the latest
graphic techniques to cement the seductive image of the Soviet Union.
Subscriptions in Britain were high.
The fellow travellers appreciated the Soviet Union for its ideals,
or, increasingly, saw Communism as a bulwark against Fascism.
Of course, those not on the Left in Britain saw more to fear than to praise in Bolshevism.
Why don't you sit down?
Well, I can't very well sit on the floor.
Why not? Nearly everybody I know sits on the floor.
Oh, they must be funny people.
Funny, are Russians funny?
Yes, I suppose they are, very funny.
Russians? Are you a Bolshie?
Bolshie? Oh, Bolshevik!
No, I am not a Bolshevik.
Oh. Well, in that case I'll sit down.
Do.
In 1931 Special Branch, who'd kept an eye on Bolshevism in the civilian population
since the Russian Revolution, handed over the responsibility to MI5, retitled The Security Service.
New threats were appearing - no longer the danger of revolution,
but the possibility of Russia acquiring secrets from the fellow-travellers.
In the late 1920s and early '30s, a mood of cynicism with capitalism
began to spread among British universities.
To them, I suppose, the system of Communism as practised in the Soviet Union seemed preferable.
The Russian intelligence service was keeping a sharp eye on this and used the opportunity to recruit
some of them to become spies for the Soviet Union.
The most famous group of these was the so-called Ring Of Five, Burgess,
Philby, Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, who were centred here at Trinity College, Cambridge.
These men went on to take posts in the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6
and were able to supply the Russians with a stream of information.
Eventually MI5 got onto two of them, Burgess and McLean, and they fled to the Soviet Union in 1951.
They were followed some years later by Philby.
When I joined MI5 in 1969, the shadow of the Cambridge spies still hung over us.
Had others recruited in the 1930s reached positions of power and might they still be there?
One of my first jobs was to go to Trinity College in search of clues as to who had recruited these men.
We didn't find the answer until much later.
In 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet pact.
The alliance with Fascism lost Russia many of its supporters in Britain
and for the first years of World War II, the Soviet Union was vilified.
British newsreels set the tone.
Now look at the remnants of a shattered army - the 44th Division
of the once-great Soviet land force is broken and destroyed.
Supplies valued at £1 million have fallen into the hands of the gallant free soldiers of Finland.
The Soviet hordes were driven across their neighbour's boundary as an army of slaves
and the defenders of liberty cut them to pieces.
Many illusions...
about Soviet Russia
have been dispelled
in these few, fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle.
Everyone can see how Communism rots the soul of a nation.
How it makes it abject and hungry in peace and proves it base and abominable in war.
Then, in 1941, as the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, we found the Red Army fighting on our side.
Almost overnight, the alliance brought a change of message.
Previously banned Russian propaganda films were taken out of the archives and put straight into newsreels.
The battle on land.
Nobody outside the inner councils of the supreme Soviet knows the strength
of the Red Army, either in men or in machines,
but we do know while Germany was building up for war on a gargantuan scale, Russia was not asleep.
We have read of the millions of men and the thousands of tanks locked in
a death grip on the line of the Eastern Front and 100 miles in depth.
This is the first instalment of the film story of a titanic battle
that shook the very earth and rocked the Gods above. A battle, 1941.
Stalin became Uncle Joe.
Mrs Churchill encouraged us to knit socks for Russian soldiers
and pro-Russian events were held across Britain, although the government took care
not to involve members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The people of this country have saluted an ally and a friend.
Here in Bristol, the great procession marched through scenes of devastation.
These could be matched in many cities of the Soviet Union
but this evidence of enemy fury is a true bond between our two great peoples.
The British government made a deliberate attempt
to portray Stalin's Russia in a more positive light.
It was quite a difficult exercise because for 20 years or more
the Soviets had, in a sense, been the enemy,
at least for large sections of the British population
and now try to present them as a friend and ally was quite a difficult exercise.
I say, Kingsley, what about a Soviet flag? I mean, it's their party.
I'm afraid we were in a bit of a fix about that until McDougall came to the rescue.
We borrowed the two Red Ensigns from the Town Hall.
We're going to fold them in half and use them red side outwards.
And I'm going to cut a hammer and sickle out of one of these yellow pennants. Jolly good show!
The film, The Tawny Pipit, gently satirised our romance with the Soviet Union.
I bring greetings from the Red Army to the heroic comrades in the British fields, factories and workshops.
We are proud to be allied to the free people of Britain.
We mean to smash the Fascist invaders.
I myself have shot over 100 Hitlerites
and I am looking forward to shooting many more.
In the firmly socialist London Borough of Finsbury, the council commissioned a memorial to Lenin.
The monument, complete with the symbolic broken chains of the workers,
was designed by Russian emigre architect, Berthold Lubetkin.
On April the 22nd, 1942, the anniversary of Lenin's birth, Lubetkin's memorial was
unveiled here in Holford Square, outside the house that Lenin had briefly occupied in 1902.
The regimental band of the Home Guard played the Internationale as
the monument appeared behind the hammer and sickle and the Union Jack.
The fate of the monument was to mirror the course of Anglo-Russian relations over the years to come.
BAND PLAYS "THE INTERNATIONALE"
The Foreign office approved this gesture and its unveiling was
attended by the Soviet ambassador as well as enthusiastic crowds.
But less than a year after the Lenin memorial was unveiled,
it was the subject of an attack by Fascist vandals.
Terrified that this might sour relations with the Soviet Union, Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden,
was forced to apologise for the desecration.
And at the height of the war, the monument was given 24-hour police protection.
Pragmatically, Lubetkin stockpiled two dozen busts of Lenin in case of further attack.
By 1946, all this was becoming a bit of an embarrassment.
The wartime love of Russia was on the wane.
Churchill famously described the influence of the Soviet Union as an
Iron Curtain descending across the continent.
I think throughout the period 1945-49, you see the emergence of
what you might call Cold War attitudes in Britain.
A sense that Stalin and Soviet Russia pose a very real threat
to British security and British interests worldwide.
I think it's fair to say, of course, these images build on much older images, going back
tens, even hundreds of years, that Russia is alien and an enemy.
It's during this time that you do sometimes see talk of Stalin being a Red Tsar.
For the Lenin memorial, the future did not look bright.
There were complaints in parliament about the waste of police time.
Soon Finsbury Council, under pressure from government, suggested it be removed to storage.
But Lubetkin had other ideas.
In 1951 he buried it.
Somewhere in the foundations of this building, designed by Lubetkin,
and built on the bomb-damaged remains of Holford Square, the Lenin memorial still lies.
The building was supposed to be called Lenin Court, but in the last irony,
by the time it was finished in the early 1950s,
that name would no longer have been acceptable to the British public.
So instead it was called after the post-war Foreign Secretary,
Ernest Bevin, who was himself a staunch anti-Communist.
It is said that Lubetkin denied any recognition of Lenin, designed the soaring modernist staircase
at the heart of Bevin Court to be his own private tribute to Lenin.
The new situation with Russia after World War Two
had one rather surprising consequence -
if Britain was to know what was going on behind the Iron Curtain,
we would need speakers of Russian, to listen to radio transmissions
and interpreters to interrogate Soviet prisoners in case of war,
so 5,000 studious young men discovered that instead of the usual gruelling physical regime
of National Service, they would instead be learning Russian
at the Joint Services School for Linguists.
I'm off to meet Dr Harold Shukman, who was on the course.
The recruiting officers had to be sure that they weren't taking
too many people from the natural officer class, and turning them into
Russian linguists, when they could do that perfectly well with mostly grammar school boys, which they did.
It was mostly a grammar school boy...
catchment, I would say.
Very bright people, very interesting, lots of them became writers, people interested in music, classical music.
Writers Michael Frayn, Alan Bennett, D M Thomas and Dennis Potter are among those who were on the course,
taking with them an appreciation of classic Russian literature, as well as the language.
What kind of people were teaching you on the course?
They were a very interesting bunch of emigres of different kinds.
There was the old emigres, who had left Russia after the 1917 revolution,
many of them aristocrats, princesses, princes, who spoke beautiful Russian.
It was a very different kind of Russian from subsequent generations,
and then Soviet defectors and refugees from the Second World War.
They spoke a different kind of Russian, it was much coarser.
One of the most striking people among the instructors was a man called Dmitri Makarov,
who used to take poetry classes and also put on plays in Russian.
Grouped around me is the all-male cast of the service production of Hamlet in Russian.
As you can see, these people are dressed in mid-18th century costumes.
This is in fact Hamlet set in 18th-century Russia.
HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN
And for a long time I just thought, this was a kind of idea that it would
be good to put on plays to help us learn Russian and to create an atmosphere,
but I discovered later that this was actually a policy.
The Air Ministry, which was responsible overall for the courses, decided that this would be
the best way to energise students, to get them involved in all kinds of Russian cultural activities,
to promote a kind of fluency.
Did you go on to use any of your Russian in earnest?
Yes, I spent my life as a teacher of Russian history.
There was an explosion in the Russian departments at the British universities.
A lot of the teachers and academics of my generation
in the British system, both in schools and universities, had done the Russian course.
Most of these linguists never put their Russian to military use,
and later on, took it with them into civilian life.
Some of them went into the intelligence services or the Foreign Office.
For most of the British population, there was no such encounter with the Soviet Union.
In 1956, the first visit of a Soviet leader to Britain produced a decidedly mixed response.
This crowd is watching the arrival of Marshal Bulganin and Mr Khrushchev at the Clarendon Building in Oxford.
They're just about to start a tour of the university.
I don't know what impression our Russian visitors are getting of Oxford as they whizz by.
What I'm really interested in is finding out...
BOOING ..what impression... they are making on Oxford.
I doubt whether many of those who turned up to boo on that day
in April 1956 really knew what they were protesting about.
It was certainly true of me when later on, Bulganin and Khrushchev turned up in Edinburgh,
and there I was as a student with my home-made poster,
declaring in the immortal words "Bulge and Krush go home!"
In fact, amazingly enough, my own protest was filmed.
That's me there in the scarf.
For the most part, crowds that turned out to stare at Khrushchev and Bulganin
seemed uncertain whether to welcome them as peacemakers or condemn them as oppressors -
so they just stood quiet.
Then in October of the same year, a rather more effective student protest in Hungary
precipitated a revolt, and the Soviet Union invaded Hungary.
This brutal response tipped the balance.
Now even faithful supporters of the Soviet Union deserted it.
Russia had become what in the 19th century we had always
feared her to be - a powerful, ruthless, expansionist nation.
As the Cold War progressed, our fear of the Soviet Union became tied up with another fear - nuclear war.
When this bunker was built, it was a regional war room.
Its designers predicted that war with the Soviet Union would mean a few hundred Hiroshima-sized bombs.
The people holed up in here would co-ordinate the response, planning military strategy and civil defence.
Government issue scouring powder with bleach.
Goodness, this place is a real time capsule.
It looks as though they just got up one day and left, which I suppose is what they did.
It really does give that sort of atmosphere that I can remember
of the '60s, where really we never knew when the bomb was going to drop.
When the Soviet Union acquired the hydrogen bomb, our predictions for war changed radically.
In 1963, this bunker was converted to a regional seat of government.
The war would last a matter of minutes and Britain would be destroyed.
Ministry of Health! 'The bunker would be about survival.
'450 men and women inside this vault, keeping the country going.'
Here's the scientist, I should think he was very important because they were expecting nuclear fall-out.
Goodness me, here's the Home Office.
Let's see what size room they've got.
It's minute! Heaven knows what the Home Office were going to do in a room this size.
Still, they've got a large filing cabinet to do it with and one chair.
Poor old Home Office.
Nothing left.
Gosh, I wouldn't have liked to have worked here for very long.
Presumably they were expecting to be here for months.
The 1960s cemented another enduring image of the Soviet Union - as a nation of spies.
And reality fed the fiction, with a series of Soviet spy cases hitting the news...
culminating in 1971 with the expulsion of 105 Soviet embassy staff from Britain for spying.
Meanwhile, Soviet defectors and dissidents brought news from behind the Iron Curtain.
One who caught our attention was Vladimir Bukovsky.
He became a cause celebre when he exposed the Soviet regime's
use of psychiatric institutions for political prisoners.
Then in 1976, while in prison, Bukovsky was exchanged for a Chilean Communist leader.
Can you tell us?
Everything I will tell you tomorrow, excuse me very much.
How do you feel? I'm very tired, you know.
They came along and put your handcuffs on and took you out?
Exactly, and they didn't tell me where.
Only when I was
put on board of a plane, I suddenly realised that I must have been expelled.
In 1977, Bukovsky was invited to study in Britain.
I wanted to know what he thought of Britain's view of Russia at that time.
So when you came to Britain, what sort of attitude, apart from these
people who were supporting you, did you find?
When I came, it was still the government of Jim Callaghan, it was a Labour government -
Old Labour, I must say, who were more ideologically attuned to the regime in Moscow.
Although occasionally critical of it, they would be kind of
inclined to understand it and forgive it and go along with it.
It was not possible to change their minds at all.
The general public was much better at that time.
In the Soviet time, it was a closed society, so people knew that something is going on behind
the Iron Curtain which they're not allowed to know, and only occasionally have a glimpse of it.
I was one of these glimpses.
And in '77-'78, it was the year when the...
campaign for human rights became very fashionable.
The repressive nature of the Soviet regime was pretty much obvious to people at that time, and they were
sympathetic to anyone who tried to stand up to it.
Bukovsky developed a friendship with Margaret Thatcher shortly after he arrived.
But during perestroika, as the popular mood in Britain
became pro-Russian, Bukovsky didn't agree with her support of Gorbachev.
She took him seriously, she took him at face value, and I had to argue with her for seven years,
trying to prove to her that he's not what she thinks.
She would argue, she would say, "He's pragmatic."
And I would say, "Give me definition of pragmatic communist, that's very strange creature."
She wouldn't, and I would say, "I can give you a definition of pragmatic communist.
"A pragmatic communist is a communist who run out of money, it's very simple."
But she still would argue.
But I think she saw the beginning of change, quite frankly, and that Gorbachev, whatever his intentions
had been, was in fact instrumental, ultimately, in bringing about the fall of the Soviet Union.
I would say God chooses very strange instruments.
Initial reaction when the Soviet Union collapsed was kind of a great relief, and it's all over, and now
Russia is instantly democratic, and no matter how much I tried to
explain that it's not, and it's a big question would it ever be, no, that wouldn't be perceived.
It's now democratic, finished.
I can remember we, in my service, thought that this is a moment of greater openness, and maybe we'd
be able to start having good relationships with our colleagues in Russia.
But that's not really how it worked out. They're not really your colleagues, believe me.
They're more like the Gestapo. Don't ever call them your colleagues. No.
In December 1991, just a month before my
appointment as Director-General of MI5 was announced, I made a journey that I never thought to make.
I went to Moscow.
We received a message from the man whom Yeltsin had put in charge of the KGB - Vadim Bakatin.
He asked if we would come out and talk to the KGB
about the regulations and laws necessary to govern intelligence services in a democracy.
If that visit seems to mark a warmer phase in Anglo-Russian relations, things soon changed again.
While in Moscow, I stayed with the British ambassador, Sir Rodric Braithwaite,
and I've come to talk to him about that moment in 1991.
We all really thought that maybe we were at the brink of a change,
actually, and there I was, with a couple of colleagues, lecturing a long line of KGB officers.
It was absolutely incredible.
Meanwhile, of course, as we did a bit of sightseeing in our off moments,
there they were following us around in a very Cold War-ish sort of way.
The Cold War was still going on as far as we were concerned,
at the same time as we were paying them a formal visit.
The problem was that the KGB, like the Tsarist secret police before them,
thought that they were the guardians of the state, not the Tsar,
they were the best and brightest.
They were the people. And therefore they could allow themselves,
with the best motives in the world, to do all sorts of things.
I can remember having meals in the embassy, and being conscious that there were microphones
everywhere, and that we were openly discussing these things to the large listening ears of the KGB.
What they heard us saying in the embassy, it provided employment for
lots of nice people, but I don't believe it was all that valuable, particularly at that point.
Your visit made me think, when you came out, of the
Christmas truce in 1914, when on both sides of No Man's Land, these muddy figures emerged from the trenches
and stumbled forward to shake hands and sing Christmas carols.
And then the firing started, within hours.
And people went back to the trenches and started shooting at one another.
And actually that's what happened with you.
In 1991, they lost, in a matter of months, an empire, a political system, an economic system,
an ideology, a place as the other superpower, and by the end of that year, they were starving.
Their enemies were sending them food aid.
And lecturing them about democracy, and one thing and another.
As we did, coming out to the KGB.
And of course they resented it.
It was a huge humiliation. Now, with oil and one thing and another,
they feel, "You thought we were off the map, and now you see we're not."
It goes back also a very long way - Peter the Great said, "Countries that didn't know we exist now see
"that we've come into the light and they've got to take account of us."
Russians have always felt that they're not
taken at their full value.
Over the years, we've created many different images of Russia.
It seems clear to me now that these images reflect
our own hopes and desires as much as the reality of Anglo-Russian relations.
We've been influenced, sometimes by Russia herself, more often by
individuals, emigres, vested interests, or our own government.
Our strange dance with the great Russian bear has all too often
just wheeled us round in circles, condemning us endlessly to repeat history.
Somewhere, in this cemetery, lies the grave of Alexander Litvinenko,
whose sinister murder in the heart of London
raised again in people's minds the sense that Russia is a country that behaves unpredictably,
unscrupulously, and in ways that we find alien.
But Russia is the largest country in Europe.
It's a country with whom we have to do business.
Somehow, there seems to me to be a question unanswered, that still remains,
and that is, will we ever truly understand and trust each other?