Britannia Radio

Thursday, 5th November 2009 Labour and the KGB FRASER NELSON 10:42am How close were Labour and the Soviets during the cold war? At the time, many newspapers were on the hunt for links - but allegations were hard to prove. Today, the Spectator tells the story from the horse's mouth - Anatoly Chernyaev, the Kremlin's link man withLabour in the 70s and 80s. Unbeknown to his visitors - Michael Foot (who welcomed Brezhnev as 'comrade') and even Charles Clarke (who comes out of this quite well) Chernyaev was keeping a diary. It shows how various Labourvisitors begged for help - after all, Labour and the Soviets had a common enemy: the Conservatives. They said so in terms. Edward Short, as Harold Wilson's deputy, said: "if you, the Communist party of the Soviet Union, want aLabour government in Britain then help us". It goes on like this. Chernyaev records how he promised Neil Kinnock "everything they wanted from us to beat Thatcher and get to power". How do we know this is genuine? Well, Chernyaev is alive and remembers this still (Dasha Afanasieva, who helped pull the story together for us, spoke to him on Monday). He gifted his diary to the US National Security Archive which has translated the post 1985 passages (when he was prompted to work withGorbachev).  Pavel Stroilov, a Russian living in London who has written our cover story, found the passages about Labour between 1973 and 1985. His translations were independently verified by Svetlana Savranskay from the US National Security Archive who describes the Chernayev diary as ‘the single most authoritative source on Soviet policy-making in the last 20 years of the Cold War’. All told, the diaries offer a fascinating insight into Labour Soviet relations, andPeter Oborne and Gerald Kaufman give their takes in this week’s magazine. We have more disclosures in next week's magazine. This is a story that is just beginning to be told. Filed under: Communism (3 more articles) , Labour (344 more articles) , UK politics (549 more articles) 08.11.200916:16 (GMT) http://www.axisglobe.com/news.asp?news=15943

Russian dissident Pavel Stroilov met with online paper HotNews.ro analysts in London to discuss about an issue he studies in The Spectator this week: the KGB infiltration into the British Labour Party during the Cold War and its present day reminiscences.  According to Stroilov, the young researcher who copied precious KGB archive pages from Gorbachev’s Foundation, the Labour Party used to be full of Soviet agents, secret communists and not very secret communists, dominated by them for long periods of time. “Eventually, the present leaders have, at least, enjoyed patronage of communists or pro-communists in the Labour Party during the Cold War, or were communist themselves. So they are essentially the product of the Soviet infiltration and subversion of the Labour Party,” Stroilov told HotNews.ro. The Labour Party was dominated by trade unions, many of trade unions were controlled but communists and communists, eventually, controlled by Moscow.  Pavel Stroilov: There was a big breakthrough in the 1970’s when the Labour Party established a special relation with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The man behind it was Ron Hayward at that time, the general secretary of the Labour Party. The man in charge of Britain was Anatoly Chernyaev, who – luckily – kept a diary for his whole life, including all the discussions he had with the British Labourites. Stroilov recalls a recent disclosure by a famous former MI6 spy in the KGB Oleg Gordievsky. The leader of the British Union of Transport and General Workers Jack Jones, who was rated in an opinion poll in the 1970s as the most powerful man in the UK, was the leader of the biggest trade union in the country, and a KGB agent. The union’s general secretary had two elected deputies. One of them worked on the industrial side of the activity, the other was responsible for the political side of the union’s activities in the Labour Party. That position was occupied by one Alec Kitson, and Gordievsky told Stroilov that he was a KGB agent, too.  It is known from biographies that the decision to give Gordon Brown a seat in the Parliament belonged to two men: Communist Hugh Wyper, the regional boss in the trade union, and Alec Kitson.