Talk

Soviet Infiltration of British Politics in the 1970-1980s

14 Dec 2010

Event times

at 7:30pm

Cost of entry

£7.00, conc. £5.00, FREE for Friends of Pushkin House

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Pushkin House

London, United Kingdom

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  • Tube: Holborn, Tottenham Court Road and Russell Square
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Talk | Soviet Infiltration of British Politics in the 1970-1980s

About

by historian Pavel Stroilov PUSHKIN CLUB PROGRAMME Language: In English Old communist secrets are still guarded zealously in today's Russia. Nearly all secret archives of the last sixty years remain as secret as they were under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. And yet, the truth about the Cold War accidentally trickles out now and then. Thus we learn about Soviet agents of influence in the high places of the West — business, journalism, academia, and of course politics; the agents who were to play the key role in the upcoming worldwide triumph of communism. However, do we quite appreciate how powerful they were? Do we realise these were the Soviets who made the politics of today what it is? The documents from the archives of Soviet officials in charge of the subversion of Britain show that the Labour Party was the main target of the Soviet infiltration. They reveal the contents of secretive talks between the Kremlin and top Labour politicians, such as Neil Kinnock and Dennis Healey. Completely unknown even to their closest party colleagues, the negotiations covered a range of subjects from unilateral nuclear disarmament to the situation in the Middle East. The documents reveal the names of the Soviet agents of influence in the very heart of the Labour party machine — people who were personally responsible for selection and promotion of the next generation of Labour leaders. Here we find the names of the known patrons of Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Charles Clarke, and many other architects of the New Labour. The Labour Party, the party of Attlee and Gaitskell with a century-long democratic tradition behind it — could it be destroyed from within by a pro-Soviet Trojan horse? Pavel Stroilov is a Russian historian who, in early 2000s, covertly copied and smuggled out of Russia a vast top secret archive of the Cold War years. The archive consists of CPSU Central Committee and Politburo documents which reveal a massive web of Soviet subversion of the West in 1970s and 1980s. Since 2004, Pavel Stroilov lives in Britain, researching this archive and working to make it public.

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