'Stalin’s Apostles': The Cambridge Five and the lost world of Jewish Communism - review

From the 1930s up until Stalin’s death in 1953, six million people were sent to the Soviet Gulag. A quarter did not survive. Another 16-17 million were transported to strict regime labor camps, where the death rate was around 10%.

Within these numbers are the names of tens of thousands of Jews of every kind, from the devout hassid to the assimilated Communist.

With McLean and Cairncross embedded in the British Foreign Office, Stalin was able to read the personal correspondence exchanged between Churchill and Roosevelt and to understand British thinking at the most crucial junctures of decision-making.

The Foreign Office in the 1930s had no security precautions.

Officials could take home important documents, and spies could indulge themselves by photographing files and delivering the copies to a handler by the shovel load. These were taken to a safe house in Copenhagen and then passed on to Moscow, where their Russian translations were typed onto pale green paper and bound in only five copies. One was delivered to Stalin.

This laxity was embellished by visits by some of the spies to gay brothels at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. Some also regarded perpetual bed-hopping as their right as members of the British upper class. This was further fuelled by a liking for pink gin, followed by drunkenness on a dissolute scale. This loosened the tongues of Burgess and McLean as to their true views on many occasions.

Together with Cairncross, he passed on information about British thinking during the Spanish Civil War.

Philby had posed as an ardent pro-Franco enthusiast in order to enter sympathetic circles in London and was actually awarded a medal by the Spanish dictator.

Unlike George Orwell, Philby had no qualms about the Soviet persecution and killing of Trotskyists and anarchists in Spain who were similarly opposed to Franco’s fascism.

One particular strength of Senior’s excellent book is that it highlights the terrible cost in lives lost during Stalin’s purges and mass killings. She quotes Osip Mandelstam’s famous poem about Stalin: “He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.”

The Cambridge Five are usually characterized as being upper-class, gay, and intellectually brilliant. This book rightly veers away from portraying them in a pseudo-romantic light in the understandable service of a mistaken cause.

The first inkling that Britain harbored a nest of spies came in January 1940, when a defector told British intelligence that a “young aristocratic man” who had attended public school at Eton and gone to Cambridge University was a Soviet mole in the Foreign Office.

Senior notes that by the end of the Great Terror in the USSR in the 1930s, 275 out of the 450 foreign operatives who had been run by the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, had been shot or sent to the Gulag. Many of these defectors, believing they had escaped, met unexpected and suspicious deaths.

The Cambridge Five dwelled within the lost world of Jewish Communism. The Balfour Declaration and the Russian Revolution occurred within days of each other in 1917. It set parallel paths to the future before 20th-century Jews.

Blunt’s handler in London was Arnold Deutsch, who posed as an observant Jew. Deutsch had been in Mandatory Palestine and operated in several European capitals. He moved to London, and his cover was to carry out research in psychology at University College London. His task was to seek out the brightest and the best at British universities, spark their idealism, and recruit them for the cause.

Deutsch lived in Hampstead, where he held soirèes for an interested intelligentsia. Many of these Anglo-Jewish

Communist émigrés came from central Europe. Philby himself lived in nearby Belsize Park.

Philby’s first wife was Litzi Friedmann. Teddy Kollek, the future mayor of Jerusalem, was at their wedding in Vienna. Senior notes that in September 1950, Kollek bumped into Philby at CIA headquarters and was speechless. He rushed to tell the legendary James Jesus Angleton of the Office of Special Operations that “a known Communist sympathiser” was walking the corridors of the CIA. Angleton waved the complaint aside, saying that he was “a good friend of the Agency.”

Harry Smollett, aka Hans Peter Smolka, was another Viennese Jew who was a friend of Litzi, as was Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky).

Gossip and information from a network of friends reached Philby, and the others who passed such tidbits on to their Soviet handlers.

Flora Solomon was a long-time friend of Philby, who had tried to recruit her in the 1930s. Like many other associates, she said nothing. But her suspicions deepened when Philby was publicly accused of being “the Third Man,” even when he had been exonerated by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons.

Solomon made certain to block Philby’s employment by the Anglo-Jewish firm of Marks and Spencer. In virtual exile in Beirut, Philby acted as a stringer for The Observer but annoyed Solomon, an ardent Zionist, because he praised Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of the United Arab Republic, then Israel’s greatest foe.

She told British intelligence about her suspicions shortly before Philby defected.

In 2022 and in January 2025, the National Archives in the UK released a tranche of MI5’s files on the investigations of Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross. Some have been held back, and Antonia Senior raises pertinent questions about this.

All five died free, in their own beds, albeit unhappily.

In July 2023, Putin erected a statue of Philby near the battleground of Kursk, where the Red Army defeated the Nazis in 1943.