The Ian Fleming Miscellany Read Online Free PDF Page A

fighting force. The population was 170 million. The USSR’s strategic value to Britain could be considerable. It would lie in diverting hostile forces from the Far East, the Mediterranean and the North Sea and thereby allowing food and fuel to pass.
    He reckoned the possible strength of the Soviet army was 5 to 10 million soldiers, currently undersupplied with arms of any kind. Communications along the Western Front (road, rail, radio, fuel dumps and preparation of the people and terrain) were good.
    Inside the country, roads and railroads were in poor state, except on the approach to the main cities. Raw materials produced in Ukraine and the north west were accessible.
    Russian air power was small by comparison with its army. A supply of better quality fuel was scheduled but maintenance was slovenly. The paratroopers were expert and there were lots of them.
    The Russian navy had plenty of nimble light vessels and submarines but too few big ships; they had only one aircraft carrier so far. Large destroyers and cruisers were promised but not yet built.
    Morale was low in all the services, industry and the population generally. The purges of 1937 and 1938 had upset people far more than any war.
    Russians, including Stalin, would prefer Germany as an ally. Their army had been trained in Germany. They neither liked nor trusted the British. Fleming concluded that if collaboration proved unavoidable, we must sup with a long spoon.
    This is a mere summary. The real thing was grippingly written and authoritative, despite the disclaimers. It proved, in the event, right about Stalin’s intentions. So who were Ian’s sources? If all the figures he cited had been available to a journalist who was presumably under 24-hour surveillance throughout a short stay in Moscow, surely MI6 would have had them already? It is true that MI6 was in a state of near-collapse, but even so – where did he get his information?
    The figures may have been surreptitiously provided by more than one person. The foreign diplomatic corps in Moscow at the time was not allowed to leave the capital and any contact with the locals was strongly discouraged. But the Narkomindel, the Soviet Diplomatic Corps abroad, and its foreign commissar Maxim Litvinov, had found it difficult to explain away the horror of the 1937–38 purges. Key Ambassadors were recalled from all over the world – including Washington – and not replaced; others were required to return twice a year. At home, the NKVD interfered constantly. But other than Stalin, Litvinov and his diplomats must have had the closest insight into Russia’s foreign policy intentions. Litvinov was old-school Bolshevik and one of Lenin’s circle in his lifetime. He had lived in Britain as unofficial Soviet ambassador at the end of the First World War but had been arrested by British Military Intelligence and swapped for Robert Bruce Lockhart, the spy and journalist, in 1918. Litvinov was married to Ivy Low, who was English, and they had children already when he was deported; his family followed him to the USSR later. As an Anglophile and a Jew, he was considered suspect. Stalin’s code for that identity was ‘rootless cosmopolitan’.
    Throughout the 1930s Litvinov had worked hard through the League of Nations to mend fences with the Allies, especially the Americans. In January 1939, he wrote a worried letter to Stalin about the damage being done to foreign relations by the lack of ambassadors, competent second-tier diplomats or even staff abroad. Stalin was unconcerned. He was preoccupied by Russia’s possible co-operation with the Nazi government. He dismissed Litvinov in May of 1939 and encouraged a campaign against him and other Jews in high positions. The dismissal and the campaign were signals to Hitler that he was open to talks.
    Wherever the sources of his data, this sober report on Russia’s potential as an ally, or quite possibly as an enemy, was Ian’s calling card. When the right people read it,