Anthony Blunt
Anthony Blunt: His Lives
By Miranda Carter
Macmillan, 2001, 590 pp, $25 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/28017
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.