Читать книгу Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 27

The first English network of communist espionage reporting to Moscow came into existence because of a commotion in a Pimlico side-street in 1909 some eight years before the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Wolverhampton, Chatham, Hornsey and Bristol – not Cambridge colleges – spawned the earliest Soviet spy ring. Renegade policemen worked for Moscow first. The covert activities of these policemen and their journalist associates, and the way that MI5 handled them, is fundamental to understanding secret service priorities and techniques in the seventy years before the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991.