During the spring and summer of 1918, with World War I still undecided, British, French and American agents in Russia developed a breathtakingly audacious plan. Led by Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, a dashing, cynical, urbane 30-year-old Scot, they conspired to overthrow Lenin’s newly established Bolshevik regime, and to install one that would continue the war against Germany on the Eastern Front. But the Cheka had penetrated their organization and pounced. The Lockhart Plot was a turning point in world history, except it failed to turn.
The Lockhart Plot is published by Oxford University Press.
FIVE MINUTES WITH JONATHAN SCHNEER
Jonathan Schneer is Professor Emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his doctorate from Columbia University and taught at Yale University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. The recipient of numerous academic fellowships and awards, he has written seven previous books including The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of Arab-Israeli Conflict, (2010), which won a National Jewish Book Award.
What made you interested in Russia?
There are two answers. It had never occurred to me to write about Russia. I don’t know the language. The book came out of my friendship with Tanya, the daughter of Moura, Lockhart’s mistress. I would come to London, where she lived, working on one project or another, and we became really good friends. I learnt about the story from her. Then at some point I was reading a biography of Stalin just for fun and the plot was mentioned. I twigged: ‘there’s a subject for my next book’. I have also recently begun researching my family history. It turns out my mother’s parents were Bolsheviks and were sent to Siberia in 1903. So I do have a Russian connection.
What does your book add to existing knowledge?
I think the main contribution is to show conclusively that the British government was conspiring with the French and the American governments to overthrow the Bolsheviks in 1918. That has always been denied. There is no smoking gun evidence because the authorities were very careful: I’m quite sure people have weeded the documents.
What is your assessment of Lockhart?
He never supported Bolshevism, but he saw very clearly that the Tsar’s government was rotten and destined to fall. The question was what would replace it. He realised his liberal and socialist connections and friends were not the stuff of which revolutionaries were made, while the Bolsheviks were. He kept trying to persuade the British government to work with them in order to reopen the eastern front and win World War I. He was idealistic. When it became obvious that the Bolsheviks never would re-enter the War, he wrote a justification for British intervention. But he was more opportunistic and personally ambitious than anything else. He supported the plan for intervention and, eventually, he plotted counter-revolution. He was conscience stricken, but that did not stop him.
Was Lockhart’s treatment by the Cheka surprisingly light?
It’s astonishing he survived. I speculate that Moura saved him. She has been accused of having spied for the Germans, Ukrainians, British and the Russians. I suspect almost all of that is make-believe. But, after the plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks failed, and she was in prison, and Lockhart too was in jail in great danger of being executed, I think the Cheka approached her with an offer to release them both if she worked for them. Moura once told HG Wells (who also became her lover) that there are times when not to do what must be done is to elect not to survive.
What was Tanya’s view of her mother?
She knew Lockhart was the love of Moura’s life, which is astonishing given her life with many lovers. When he died, Moura took over the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Ennismore Gardens in London and had a service for him (without his body) just for her as the only person attending. I once asked Tanya whether her mother was a spy. She was her daughter, of course, and she said no. She thought Moura liked people to think she was important, and to be with important people.
Did your research change your views on the Communists?
The plot could have been a world turning point but it’s a turning point that didn’t turn. I am more convinced than when I began that the revolution was compromised irretrievably pretty early on. On the other hand, I have just finished writing a book about the British General Strike of 1926, and I realized that Baldwin’s government entertained the most ludicrous notions about communist influence in the British labour movement. There was a Communist party which had a programme, members and important people in various trade unions, but they had very little influence on the General Strike. Yet there were really quite hysterical British anti-communists, including members of the Government. I don’t think they were wrong that the Bolsheviks would have liked to see a communist revolution in Britain, but by 1926 even most British communists didn’t think the Strike would lead to one.
Have you had any reaction in Russia to your book?
I think the plot has been pretty well forgotten by now in Russia. There is going to be a Russian translation, and I suppose I can see how the Putin government could use it to re-expose perfidious Albion and the perfidious west. That is certainly not a use I want for my book, but I guess it’s not to be ruled out. Perhaps, a lesson of the book is to beware of governments advocating regime change. Americans should think carefully about regime change anywhere, and so should Russians.
Did you come across any surprising new materials during your research?
I had a Russian graduate student finding sources for me and translating them. He found an unpublished book written by the son of one of the Cheka agents who helped to crack the plot. I used one of the photos of the three Cheka agents Dzerzhinsky sent to Petrograd - although initially the author demanded an enormous sum for it!
What plans do you have for your next book?
As I mentioned, I have just finished an enormous book about the British general strike. It was supposed to be published in November 2025 but retirement and Covid meant I had very little else to do, so I finished the research and wrote it over the last two years. Now I’m working on my family history. I’ve hired a Russian researcher to ferret out information and we now have police records and transcripts of court cases.
INTERVIEW FOR PUSHKIN HOUSE BY ANDREW JACK (@AJACK)
REVIEWS
"It would make a cracking Hollywood thriller ... The Lockhart Plot is terrifically entertaining. Schneer does an excellent job of evoking the paranoid atmosphere of Russia in 1918, and his book teems with colourful characters." - Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times
"A rollicking and thriller-like narrative that captures the chaos and turbulence of post-revolutionary Petrograd and Moscow." - Jonathan Steele, The Guardian
"Schneer has made not one but several gripping narratives out of what he has been able to discover." - Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books
"A well-researched and well-written reminder of the pitfalls and bear-traps that governments can encounter when attempting, clandestinely, to interfere in other countries." - Roderick Bailey, Times Literary Supplement
"Schneer does an excellent job of untangling the thick mass of contradictory testimony, false leads, dubious sources, fake identities, double-dealing, and skullduggery to present the most complete and reliable history of Allied plotting in the first year of Soviet power." -Douglas Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Excellent ... [This pacey] book is worth reading for its character portraits alone." - Alexander Watson, Literary Review
"Bruce Lockhart, debonair British secret agent, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, ruthless mastermind of the Soviet security service, face off in a deadly duel of smoke and mirrors. At stake: the fate of the Russian Revolution itself. It's an incredible story and Jonathan Schneer tells it with wit, panache and a razor-sharp historical sensibility. A brilliant examination that finally uncovers the mysteries of the "Lockhart Plot". - Marc Mulholland, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, Author of The Murderer of Warren Street
