Anthony Blunt:
His Lives
By Miranda Carter
Macmillan, 2001
590 pp, $25 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
In 1979, when British PM Margaret Thatcher exposed Sir Anthony Blunt as the Fourth Man of the famous Cambridge University spy ring (Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Donald Maclean were the others), Cold War Tory homophobes had a big day out.
Art historian Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures and a war-time member of MI5 (Britain's domestic spy agency), was accused of being a spy with no shame, a predatory homosexual/paedophile who seduced and blackmailed his Cambridge University students into spying for Russia. Traitor was his inseparable adjective in the corporate press, Blunt, buggery and betrayal was a representative headline.
Highly useful as a hate figure in Thatcher's war against the left, the real Anthony Blunt has been expertly captured in Miranda Carter's biography.
Born in 1907 into Britain's middle class, Blunt hated the spartan sadism of the English public (private) school system, its rugby toughs, the Officer Training Corps and the reign of terror by prefects.
Blunt learnt to cultivate difference and to practice dissidence early on, before falling in with the Bloomsbury set, Britain's artistic avant-garde, which provided an avenue for his cultural non-conformity but failed to satisfy his deepening hostility to the political status quo.
From this protected, contented and absolutely unreal world, Blunt moved to another Cambridge University where the ideas of Marxism were increasingly attractive under the impact of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and a looming world war.
Cambridge academics and students (amongst the latter were Burgess, Philby and Maclean) made up a large branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the only organisation doing anything serious to fight unemployment and fascism. Blunt was not a CPGB member, but a sympathiser. He was not on Soviet intelligence's radar screen when the foreign directorate of the Soviet NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) began recruiting spies from Britain in 1934. The NKVD were looking for CPGB members capable of entering British state institutions, and Cambridge had the right mix of campus radicals well-bred, highly trained and Communist.
The early recruiters were cultivated and idealistic European agents of the Comintern, the international organisation of the world's Communist parties. In theory and origin, the Comintern was a body of equal parties dedicated to the international socialist revolution and the defeat of fascism. However, since the late-1920s it had increasingly becoming a servant of the national self-interest of the bureaucratic regime that ruled in Russia, led by Joseph Stalin.
The early recruits, likewise, were Communist internationalists and committed anti-fascists who accepted their spying role in the belief that they were working for the advance of socialism, not Stalin's secret police.
In 1937, when Burgess approached Blunt (now a respected academic) to work undercover for the Comintern, Blunt accepted, prompted by his disgust at the abandonment of republican Spain by the British (and other Western) governments when Spain was attacked by the fascist General Franco aided by fascist Germany and Italy. The Spanish Civil War was the Vietnam War of the 1930s, a time to take sides, and Blunt made his choice.
Blunt's life as secret agent began as a talent-spotter of potential student recruits. Following his exposure in 1979, Blunt was presented as an evil Svengali who bullied and trapped his victims into spy work. However, these slurs are based on the self-serving recollections of a few of those he recruited who had turned conservative and were keen to minimise their willingness to be recruited and to downplay the degree of their passing left-wing commitment.
When Stalin's purges reached the NKVD, Blunt's work as a spy came to a temporary halt and he began his rise to fame as a public intellectual, including broadcasting on the BBC on art. Broadly, but not overtly, informed by Marxism (stressing the importance of the social and historical context of art) and abandoning an earlier doctrinaire attitude that art should be judged primarily by its political content (and conformity to the latest line from Moscow), Blunt proceeded to become one of the most influential people in art history and criticism in Britain.
There was, however, no diminution of Blunt's anti-fascist ardour. The outbreak of World War II and his promotion to the rank of major in MI5 revived his undercover work. Desperate for competent intelligence agents, MI5 accepted people of Communist (and homosexual) background, content to condescendingly regard the outbreak of Cambridge communism as a form of undergraduate measles. Blunt and the other Cambridge spies, who, as an undercover ruse, had publicly renounced their communist convictions, were regarded as cured.
MI5 got it so wrong. During the war years, Blunt passed 1800 documents to the Soviet Union (his Cambridge colleagues provided many more). Much of this material proved invaluable to the Soviet military in their resistance to Nazi Germany's invasion. Blunt, for example, supplied critical documents on German military strategy on the eve of the Battle of Kursk, a crucial tank battle won by the Red Army and one of the major turning points of the war.
The documents kept flowing because, while 9 million Soviet soldiers and 19 million civilians were killed during the Nazi invasion, Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill was keeping military information secret from the Soviet Union, Britain's ally. Churchill wanted to bleed the Soviet Union and weaken both it and Germany in order to grab more of the spoils of the eventual Allied victory for Britain. Blunt was appalled by this callous political self-interest and by spying for the Soviet Union materially helped to win the war and defeat fascism.
The Cambridge spies were rewarded by being caught up in Stalin's pathological paranoia and were spied on by the NKVD as suspected double agents. They were rehabilitated but, having spied as anti-fascists first and defenders of the Soviet Union second, the end of the war saw the high point of their spying careers pass.
Blunt left MI5 in 1945 and his appointment as Surveyor of the King's Pictures was not likely to yield much strategic intelligence for Moscow. Blunt continued to pass some information but let it be known to his NKVD contacts that he thought Stalin's domestic and foreign policies were damaging to communism.
Stalin's secret police were only too happy to cut their ties to a now unreliable Blunt, who also faced being exposed after the 1951 defection to the Soviet Union of Burgess and Maclean (Philby followed in 1963). Blunt defected to his art career to cover his tracks.
Blunt confessed to MI5 in 1964 in return for immunity from prosecution. MI5 proposed this deal, keen to keep Blunt's spying under wraps. He was no longer a threat, just a potential scandal, and the list of high-profile spy trials was already embarrassingly large.
But Blunt was not entirely safe. Thatcher was an avid kicker of the communist can in her crusade against the trade unions, anti-nuclear protesters and other threats to God, family and profits. Why not wheel out a honest-to-goodness Russian spy, a left-wing intellectual (and gay to boot) for some political mileage. Her exposure of Blunt in parliament uncorked an explosion of spy-mania in the corporate press (Treacherous Communist poof in the elegant words of the Daily Express). However, Blunt's immunity deal was respected until his death in 1983.
Blunt and the Cambridge spies were a minor offshoot of 1930s Communism, their continuing prominence fuelled by the literary spy industry and the capitalist culture which elevates the individual above social and class forces.
Blunt, Philby, Burgess and Maclean were driven to their acts by a hatred of fascism and capitalism. There is no shame in Blunt's betrayal because there is no shame in choosing anti-fascism and internationalism over one's own capitalist class and national state. The real betrayal lies in the cynical manipulation of Blunt's sincere motives by the Stalinist murderers of international socialism.
From Green Left Weekly, March 19, 2003.
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