标题: Two British Spies Against Russian Revolution [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 5-30-2012 11:11 标题: Two British Spies Against Russian Revolution Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Best of Enemies. One British diplomat-spy befriended Lenin and Trotsky and then planned a coup d'état. It ended in preposterous tragicomedy. Wall Street Journal, Aug 29, 2012 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 53732795520806.html
(book review on Robert Service, Spies and Commissars. The early years of the Russian Revolution. PublicAffairs, 2012)
Note:
(a) cutthroat (n; First Known Use 1535):
"1: KILLER, MURDERER
2: a cruel unprincipled person"
wwwb) wild-eyed (adj):
"1: having a wild expression in the eyes
2: consisting of or favoring extreme or visionary ideas"
(c) useful idiot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiots
(d) The review says, "When Lenin came to power he promised peace and indeed withdrew Russia from World War I within weeks, handing over to the Germans much of the Ukraine."
* Ukrainian War of Independence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_War_of_Independence
(from February 1917 [February Revolution of Russia] to March 1921 and resulted in the division of Ukraine proper between the Bolshevik Ukrainian SSR, Poland, and Romania)
Quote: "The German and Austro-Hungarian armies then drove the Bolsheviks out of Ukraine, taking Kiev on March 1[, 1918]. Two days later, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which formally ended hostilities on the Eastern Front of World War I and left Ukraine in a German sphere of influence."
* Treaty of Brest-Litovsk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk
(a peace treaty signed on March 3, 1918 at Brest-Litovsk (now Brest, Belarus) between Russia (the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) and the Central Powers marking Russia's exit from World War I; the treaty "did provide some relief to the Bolsheviks, who were tied up in fighting the Russian Civil War, and it affirmed the independence of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania")
(e) The review next states, "Even after Germany's defeat, Winston Churchill remained obsessed with crushing what he called the "baboon-like" evil of Bolshevism. He pushed his own war, fought by "my army," the disunited, ruthless and chaotic anti-revolutionary Whites, who at times almost destroyed Lenin's Soviet creation.
* Winston Churchill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
(1874-1965; A major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Office [as its head, Secretary of State for War, 1919-1921] was the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Churchill was a staunch advocate of foreign intervention, declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle")
* War Office http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Office
(responsible for the administration of the British Army; 1684-1864 (replaced by Ministry of Defence, which unified the War Office, Admiralty [responsible for Royal Navy], and Air Ministry [overseeing Royal Air Force])
* British Army http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army
(land warfare branch of British Armed Forces in the United Kingdom)
(f) hoary (adj):
"1: gray or white with or as if with age
2: extremely old : ANCIENT <hoary legends>"
(g) Felix Dzerzhinsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dzerzhinsky
(1877-1926, when died of heart failure)
(h) Sidney Reilly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Reilly
(1873-1925; Jewish; Ian Fleming would use Reilly as a model for James Bond; section 4 Tsarist Russia and the Far East; section 11 Death)
(i) R H Bruce Lockhart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._H._Bruce_Lockhart
(Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart; 1887-1970; his 1932 book Memoirs of a British Agent)
(j) Regarding "nether garments."
nether (adj; Middle English, from Old English nithera, from nither down):
"situated down or below : LOWER"
(k)
* Moura Budberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moura_Budberg
(Moura (Maria Ignatievna) Zakrevskaya; ca 1891-1974; daughter of a Russian nobleman; first married Count Johann von Benckendorff, a high-ranking Czarist diplomat, in 1911 who was assassinated in 1919; much later, briefly married to Baron Nikolai von Budberg-Bönningshausen)
* See book cover only in
Nina Berberova, Moura; Moura: The Dangerous life of the Baroness Budberg. NYRB Classics, 2005. http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/moura/
The book was first published in Russian in 1981. It was translated into English and published in 2005.
* Enchanted Moura http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchanted_Moura
(section 2 Etymology)
(l) double agent (n; First Known Use 1935):
"a spy pretending to serve one government while actually serving another"
(m) Maxim Gorky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Gorky
(Alexei Maximovich Peshkov; 1868-1936; Russian)
(n) HG Wells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells
(Herbert George Wells; 1866-1946; British author)