Christopher Hill a Soviet spy?

One of the most influential historians of the 20th century, who went on to be Master of Balliol College, Oxford, stands accused today of taking a dark secret to his grave: he was a Soviet mole.

Christopher Hill, who died last week aged 91, concealed his membership of the Communist Party to serve first in Military Intelligence, then at the Foreign Office, during the Second World War.

Declassified government papers suggest that Hill used his position as head of the Russian desk at the Foreign Office to push pro-Soviet policy, and that he was a close associate of another Soviet agent.

Read the full story in the Times of London.

UPDATE: Read on for more. . .

Hill never made any secret of his left-wing sympathies and was open about his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the postwar years, before resigning in 1957. However, his name appears to have been kept on one of the CPGB’s secret membership lists. He joined at some point between taking a first in history at Balliol in 1934 and returning as a tutor in 1938. He spent ten months in the Soviet Union in the intervening period. Hill established his academic reputation by offering a Marxist interpretation of the events surrounding the English Civil War and was elected Master of Balliol in 1965.

The existence of a group of spies at Oxford, similar to but less successful than the infamous Cambridge spy ring, was discovered when the KGB briefly opened its files four years ago. However, while researching his book in 1985, [historian] Dr [Anthony] Glees came across a series of previously confidential Foreign Office papers which, he says, suggest that Hill operated as an “agent of influence” for the Soviet Union during his time as a civil servant.

Dr Glees wrote to Hill in September that year to request a meeting. “He rang me a couple of days later and asked to see me immediately, before catching a bus from his home near Banbury to visit me at my house in Oxford.”

During their 90-minute meeting, Hill explained to Dr Glees that he assumed he had been vetted by MI5 before being recruited to Military Intelligence in 1940 and seconded to the Foreign Office three years later. However, he escaped identification as a Communist by simply not declaring his party membership.

Hill had first worked as a liaison officer with Soviet military engineers who were in Britain to inspect British tanks and had then been assigned to a small unit that was preparing to be parachuted into the Baltic states to foment rebellion. When that mission was shelved, he was seconded in 1943 to the Northern department of the Foreign Office, and as a fluent Russian speaker was quickly appointed head of the Russian desk.

Among the papers discovered by Dr Glees was a proposal, signed by Hill, that all White Russian emigrés teaching Russian at British universities and schools should be sacked and replaced with Soviet-approved staff. Polish exiles were to face similar treatment after the war. . .

Dr Glees discovered that Hill had forged a relationship with Peter Smollett, the head of the Russian desk at the Ministry of Information, and that the two men had formed a committee to help to develop future British government policy towards the Soviet Union.

Smollett, an Austrian-born former journalist at The Times, whose real name was Smolka and who was a friend of Kim Philby, was a Soviet spy. Among his successes, as an agent of influence, was to persuade a number of publishers to reject George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He was later exposed and fled to the Soviet sector of Vienna. . .

While at the Foreign Office, Hill wrote a book, The Soviets and Ourselves: Two Commonwealths, which he published after the war under the pseudonym K. E. Holme, with the help of Smollett. In the book he extolled “Lenin’s genius”, claimed that all Soviet citizens enjoyed the vote, and described the Stalinist purges of the 1930s as “non-violent” and comparable to the Chartist movement.

The story has also been picked up by the Guardian, which does its best to spin it to minimize the devastating nature of the evidence:

The late Christopher Hill, the distinguished Marxist historian who became master of Balliol College, Oxford, is alleged to have operated as a Soviet "agent of influence" during wartime service at the Foreign Office.

A fellow historian has revealed details of conversations and government papers which he says prove that Mr Hill - who died aged 91 on February 23 - was a Soviet "mole" who concealed his membership of the Communist party.

The allegation has prompted a fierce defence of Mr Hill by other academics.

The only defender mentioned, however, is Eric Hobsbawm -- himself a committed Marxist, and self-described "unrepentant Communist", about whom you can read more here.
Meanwhile, today's Times is running a blistering essay by Ferdinand Mount: "Stalin’s Ghost Sits Too Easily Among Us":

They miss him still, you know, they really do. It was the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death last Wednesday, and the Russian parliament spent the day happily debating a motion to turn Volgograd back into Stalingrad. An opinion poll reported that more than half the population thought that Uncle Joe had been a benefit to Russia.

Here in Britain it is a pity that Stalin’s most devoted admirer, Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian and former master of Balliol college, Oxford, should have died nine days earlier. For he would surely have given us a second epitaph to rival his ringing words on Stalin’s death in 1953: “He was a very great and penetrating thinker. Humanity not only in Russia but in all countries will always be deeply in his debt.”

Only this week it has emerged that Stalin might have had some reason to return Dr Hill’s gratitude. For the historian Anthony Glees of Brunel University has unearthed some interesting material about Hill’s wartime service in charge of the Russian desk in the Foreign Office.

Hill, it seems, had not declared his membership of the Communist party when being recruited. Did the FO think to ask? Please, Hill was a Balliol man — and had been recommended by another former master of Balliol.

While in this key post Hill used his formidable energies to the full. He urged the government to sack all White Russian émigrés working in British schools and universities and replace them with Soviet-approved staff. He set up a Committee for Russian Studies including other Communists, notably the Soviet agent Peter Smollett (alias Smolka), to make it easier for Soviet citizens to come to Britain and to exchange intelligence with the USSR. Meanwhile Smollett at the Ministry of Information was busy persuading British publishers not to print George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And in face of all the evidence to the contrary, the Foreign Office remained strangely convinced that Stalin’s intentions towards eastern Europe were strictly benign.

I would scarcely dignify Hill by the name of mole, that charming and resourceful mammal. After all, his activities were scarcely subterranean. Anyone who had read a line of his would know which way his political proclivities lay. Similarly, anyone who had dipped into the pre-war art criticism of Anthony Blunt would get a strong whiff of vulgar Marxism. But then, from my brief experience, vetting officers do not tend to be very literary types (I was cleared by a man named Carruthers with a walrus moustache).

Still, even if all this had been known when Hill popped off at the ripe age of 91, I doubt that it would have altered the dignified and elegiac tone of his obituaries. After all, we do know most of what Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby got up to. This has not inhibited the BBC from commissioning a new drama called Cambridge Spies, which a BBC apparatchik sought to puff by saying that: “This is the first time they can be seen as heroic” . . .

No such indulgence would have been extended if Blunt had turned out to be a Nazi agent. Similarly, Hill would not have had a hope of being elected master of Balliol if he had recently resigned from the National Front (he only packed in his party card when Khrushchev sent the tanks into Hungary). Yet surely someone who could stomach Stalin’s purges, his terror famines and his subjugation of half a continent was no more suited to guide young minds than a recently convicted paedophile. . .

Have we at long last discarded these illusions, I wonder? It is so easy to forget how deeply they penetrated into British life and thought. In English history, for example, the three most revered practitioners bestriding the modern era were convinced Marxists: Hill (17th century), EP Thompson (18th-19th) and Eric Hobsbawm (19th-20th). Hobsbawm, who didn’t even leave the party after Hungary, was appointed a Companion of Honour under new Labour.

Over the years these talented and persuasive academics have sought to elevate class warfare as the driving force in English history, downplaying other motives such as religion or patriotism.

Even in fields that seem remote from the political heat — such as English literature or art history — the assumption that most things can be explained in terms of hidden economic motives has soaked deep. After all, Stalin thought of himself as an “engineer of human souls” who was just as qualified to impose the correct ideological outlook on music and literature and genetics as on mere politics. And there are still plenty of students today who believe in a conspiracy theory of just about everything.

Posted by David on March 5, 2003 10:09 AM