The Lawn Road Flats by David Burke

Author:David Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Modern History
ISBN: 9781782042860
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2014-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

The following week’s bulletin reported that Russian broadcasts were ‘less full of news than might have been expected’, and had opted to broadcast a large number of resolutions as opposed to war news: ‘The broadcasting of resolutions from Communist Party, Trade Union and factory meetings,’ had ‘always been a feature of Russian broadcast programmes,’ and ‘the coming together of the anniversary of the foundation of the Constitution in 1936 and the assassination of M. Kiroff in 1934’ had been seized upon to continue that trend.

Resolutions ‘in connection with the war and the forthcoming elections to the local soviets’, were dominating Russian radio programmes.70 One such resolution, expressing the view that the war in Finland would ‘be written indelibly in the book of the history of the liberation of the working class’, sent greetings to the new People’s Government of Finland and quoted from The Times newspaper of 1919 to justify the invasion: ‘Finland is the key to Petrograd, Petrograd is the key to Moscow.’ This simple statement was broadcast alongside a declaration that ‘the present incident will bring peace and security to Finland and Russia … the Russian last word on the subject.’71 Finnish stations, on the other hand, broadcasting in Russian at 2 am on 3 December, called on all ‘Red soldiers not to fight against Finland’. They too recruited Comrade History, pointing out that on 15 May 1917 Lenin had made a declaration in favour of the freedom of Finland. They also quoted Stalin, reminding the world that the policy of the Soviet Union was to defend small nations fighting for their independence. An interview with a Red Air Force officer who, not wanting to fight in Finland, had dropped his bombs in a lake and parachuted to safety, was also broadcast. The interview was translated into English, French and German with one slight but significant alteration in the German broadcast. The pilot had ‘asked his interviewer if he could be provided with French and English novels in Russian, in the German broadcast the words “French and English novels” were replaced by the words “Foreign novels”.’72 The broadcast concluded with an appeal to the “true followers of Lenin” not to fight against Finland.73

Broadcasts from Madrid, Budapest and Rome were all, unsurprisingly, ‘strongly sympathetic to the Finns’. Rome called for a united front against Bolshevism and reported that all ‘the countries of South America are calling for an anti-Bolshevik block’. ‘Only President Roosevelt,’ it was claimed, remains ‘unwilling to take energetic steps against the U.S.S.R.’ Berlin’s response was ambivalent; restrained by the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, German broadcasters simply began airing the Russian communiqués from the beginning of the war without any comment at all, and only ‘began later to broadcast the Finnish communiqués as well’.74

All this would have undoubtedly interested the Kuzcynskis. Comparative Broadcasts had built up good contacts inside the BBC and the MOI through Vyvyan Adams’ wife, Mary who worked for both organisations. Comparative Broadcasts’ report on the BBC Overseas Service’s monthly review of

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