ABSTRACT
In the atmosphere of mutual suspicion which continually manifested itself it is easy to see that charges and countercharges of espionage played their part. Indeed at a stage in the present assessment yet to be described, alleged espionage was the direct cause of one of the more serious crises in Anglo-Russian relations. The whole vexed subject merits examination even if only to clear up certain misconceptions which were general at the time and which are being resuscitated today by Soviet historians. They have their reasons, but modern British writers have no excuse for repeating the old fallacies. An initial difficulty arises from the characteristically different attitude to spies which has always existed in Britain and Russia. On the whole the British do not like spies; they regard their profession as a nefarious one and the less they know about their activities, at any rate of those who spy for Britain, the better. In his day Hobhouse illustrated the point very well in choosing, as the subject for his maiden speech in Parliament, to speak against their employment. But if the British do not like spies they certainly enjoy reading about them, in fact as well as fiction. A long line of writers from Kipling in Kim, through John Buchan, to the present day, shows the popularity of spy stories in British fiction; whilst factually Colonel F. M. Bailey’s Mission to Tashkent would be hard to surpass, certainly in its Central Asian setting. Russians on the other hand have always had spies in their midst almost as part of their way of life: they have no need or inclination to read about them. A corollary of that is that they quite naturally expect other countries to employ spy networks to the same extent as themselves. They see spies under the bed where the West might see Reds.
