Antonia Senior’s exceptional new book opens with a bold claim: that an innocent-looking meeting between Comintern spymaster Arnold Deutsch and the 22-year-old Harold ‘Kim’ Philby on a London park bench in June 1934 ‘would change history and help to gift Joseph Stalin an empire’. Over the following beautifully constructed chapters she more than justifies this, with a novelist’s eye for atmosphere and emotion but also a determination to make the reader look at the Cambridge spies in a fresh new way. Not as players in a twee saga of the intellectually conflicted British upper classes, the ‘Reform Club version of the story’ as she puts it, but as central actors in one of the most terrible and tragic events in human history – the rise of the Soviet Empire.
Senior goes out of her way to explain why idealistic young men and women of the 1930s might have been tempted by communism, in reaction to the excesses and failures of both global capitalism and British imperialism. But you can sense her growing anger as these five men stay true to their faith whilst coming to know the reality of Stalin’s rule, witnessing his cynical deal with Hitler in 1939, and helping him crush all independent life out of his unfortunate neighbours. As Senior puts it with characteristic precision: ‘[Even before the Nazi-Soviet Pact] all the Five’s original links to the regime in Moscow – the men who had recruited them, trained them, nurtured them – were dead, imprisoned, missing or on the run…It was not ignorance that kept them loyal in the face of the Terror, it was an act of revolutionary resolve.’
By focusing on the silk ties, the academic prestige and the thrill of the double life, previous writers have romanticised what was essentially a catastrophic failure of character, masking the sheer venality of men who traded their privilege not for a noble cause, but for a hollow, radicalised identity that prioritised ideology over human life.
And so, in Senior’s telling, the story of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross is reimagined as a searing – and very timely – indictment of obsessive radicalisation and wilful blindness. These were not enlightened rebels, they were the architects of a cruel new empire, handing over vital secrets to a man busy constructing a graveyard of nations.
Her account of Kim Philby’s callous villainy is a highlight. Whilst serving as the head of the SIS anti-Soviet section, he personally made certain that hundreds of anti-communist guerrillas were parachuted directly into the hands of waiting torturers and executioners. These men did not just leak documents, they destroyed the lives of everyone from fellow British and Allied intelligence officers to local resistance members engaged in a shared fight for freedom.
Historians will enjoy the insights that Senior draws from numerous newly declassified files – especially into how these men gave Stalin a priceless insight into Anglo-American strategic conversations at critical moments during World War 2. But at its heart this is a book about character – which is why it is such a gripping and an easy read.
Phil Craig is a bestselling historian and the author of 1945: The Reckoning: War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World. You can listen to a full conversation between Antonia and Phil on the Aspects of History podcast feed.
