Zinoviev Letter

The Zinoviev letter was a document published by the Daily Mail four days before the British general election of October 29, 1924, purporting to be a letter from Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, instructing the Communist Party of Great Britain to prepare for seditious activity. The letter claimed that normalized British-Soviet relations under a Labour government would help radicalize British workers and spread communist revolution through the British Empire. Historians now agree the letter was a forgery, though its true authorship remains disputed, with most modern scholarship pointing to Russian monarchist emigres in Berlin and some suggesting involvement by British intelligence; a 1999 official inquiry could not determine the authors with certainty. The letter's publication damaged Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government just before the election, which produced a Conservative landslide, though most historians judge that Labour would likely have lost regardless.