Reilly, ace anti-Bolshevik

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"REILLY, Ace of Spies" has introduced this murky, nasty, interesting villain from history to millions of people who had never heard of him or his activities.

These activities, it seems, included some responsibility for the notorious forged 'Zinoviev letter'. Supposedly from the President of the Communist International to thee. British Communist Party, it was used by the Daily Mail and the Tories to bring down the 1924 Labour government.

Of course 'Reilly, Ace of Spies' is fictionalised and romanticised in the James Bond vein. So, it seems, was Reilly.

Captain Sidney Reilly was not always such an obscure figure as he had become by the time the TV series 're-launched' him. In the '40s and '50s he was widely known to sections of the international labour movement.

Conspiracy

He was a central character in one of the great political bestsellers of all time, 'The Great Conspiracy against Russia' by Sayers and Kahn.

This purported to be a history, but it had a great deal more fiction in it than the TV 'Reilly' It was an exposition of the Moscow trials, told in popular thriller style.

With considerable skill, the fantastic testimony forced from the chief victims of Stalin's show trials of 1936-38 was woven together with real historic events and accounts of real people in the Russian Revolution and civil war.

In the trials the surviving Bolshevik leaders of the revolution and civil war - with the exception of Trotsky and Stalin had confessed that they themselves, and most of those who led the revolution, had all the time been sneakily working as spies and agents of the imperialist powers whose armies they drove out of Russia!

This tissue of nonsense lent itself well to Sayers' and Kahn's enterprise of popularising lying Stalinist 'history' by presenting it in the style of a fantastic thriller. So did the life and activities against the Russian Revolution of Sidney Reilly.

White Guards British agent and emissary to the White Guards, paymaster of the counter-revolutionaries, associate of Social-Revolutionary terrorists, friend of leading anti-Bolshevik Boris Savinkov (about whom Winston Churchill wrote a memorial lament), aspirant Napoleon of the Russian counter-revolution - Reilly was a god-send to Sayers and Kahn.

The real history of the counter-revolution was used as a source of facts, testimony and quotations ripped misleadingly Frank Higgins reviews the ITV series, 'Reilly, Ace of Spies' out of context, on which to weave and try to make plausible the fantastic fictions of the Moscow trials.

Fat hands

The style did a great deal of the work. Bukharin, ideologist of the Bolshevik ultra-left during the revolution, and afterwards Stalin's ally and leader of the Right Bolsheviks, was described as "a blond Machiavelli in a leather jacket"

Trotsky was depicted as a vainglorious failed Hitler, rehearsing gestures of his 'fat, white manicured hands' in front of a mirror, and surrounded by smart leather-clad bodyguards.

These were the prototype stormtroopers of incipient Russian fascism. Their goal was to make the arch-traitor and imperialist saboteur, BronsteinTrotsky, personal dictator of Russia!

For, 'with the death of Sidney Reilly in 1925' , wrote Sayers and Kahn, and the elimination of Boris Savinkov, 'only one man could play Napoleon for, the White Guards, and that man was Leon Trotsky.

Packaged with a friendly, anti-Cold War foreword by 'progressive' US Senator Claud E. Pepper (still a Congressman from Florida today though an octogenarian), the book had an enormous circulation - until Stalin's mountain of lies was shattered in the 1950s.

Ludicrous Now television has discovered Reilly and woven a more benign type of semi-fiction around him. This is much less serious antiBolshevik propaganda than that of Reilly's poisonous former 'handlers', Sayers and Kahn!

Me, I enjoyed much of it and found some of it gripping. Some of it, of course, was ludicrous.

Example: It is 1918, and Russia has had to make a costly separate peace with Germany. Von Mirbach, the German ambassador, tells an assembly of Bolsheviks (the Central Committee? The Council of Commissars?): "We put you in power, and we can drive you out The problem with 'Reilly, Ace of Spies' is that it takes a very interesting story and fillets it into episodes to hang a cluster of conventional 'entertainment values'on.

By any standards the story of Reilly — anti-Bolshevik tured GPU agent?

Stalin — the real saboteur of the revolution the people he is involved with in the Russian episodes is high tragedy - Savinkov, the former anti-Tsarist revolutionary; the Left Social-Revolutionaries and their patriotic revolt in 1918 against their erstwhile Bolshevik coalition partners; the antiBolshevik socialistic and populist intelligentsia who were to be mowed down in the Bolsheviks' defensive 'Red Terror' and so on.

I looked up Reilly in a serious book about spies at the local library. Reilly disappeared into Russia in 1925 and was never seen again. An announcement that he was executed in November 1925 is refuted by much circumstantial evidence that he was alive for some time after. There were reports that he was still alive in the 1940s.

There is a serious possibility that he voluntarily went back to collaborate with the Cheka/ GPU. He was something of a Russian nationalist and politically he was probably a Social Revolutionary like Savinkov, who did voluntarily return to Russia and to a ten year jail sentence.

Reilly was brought up as a normal upper class anti-semite to whom such toasts as 'Long live the Tsar and damn the Jews' were normal. Then at the age of 19 he discovered that his mother's husband was not his father and that his father was a Jewish doctor. He remained an anti-semite for some years more at least. He had a serious identity problem all his life which might well have led to a dramatic switch in allegiance and identity. And in 1925 he was facing bankruptcy.

But whether he went to the Russians voluntarily or otherwise he is reckoned to have collaborated with them, delivering up a vast knowledge of the Western intelligence services.

Russian penetration of the British and other secret services - Burgess, Maclean,, Philby, Blunt and so on - is reckoned to date from Reilly's capture or defection and to be in part a result of the information he passed over. I wonder what the last episode of Reily, Ace of Spies will make of that?

Film review SOME twenty-five years ago Henry Fonda starred in a film called '12 Angry Men'. The entire film, except maybe for a minute at the end, was shot in the jury room.

The film's thematic focus was equally unswerving. In a rivetting, minutely observed, yet eventless plot, the film warned of the threat to human decency posed by a casual attitude to evidence and a prejudiced attitude to race, to class and to youth.

The law, the film was saying, needs to be applied scrupulously if we are to be able to call ourselves civilised.

Now comes 'Star Chamber" (directed by Peter Hyams, starring Michael Douglas). A newly installed judge (Douglas) is forced to dismiss the cast-iron case against The Southside Killer - who has killed five elderly women for their welfare cheques - on a legal technicality. Soon after the judge is forced to rule as inadmissible a piece of evidence that crucially links two crooks to the slaughter of a young boy after he had been tortured and sexually abused as part of a child pornography racket.

The message is clear: the law has got so concerned with protecting the rights of the defendant that it can no longer protect the community.

In despair the judge turns to his friend and former Law School tutor who tells him about the Star Chamber. The Chamber consists of nine Superior Court judges who are fed up to the teeth with the inadequacy of the law. They hear cases - the ones that got away - pronounce sentence on the evil-doers and hire a killer to carry it out.

By this time the movie has already turned the probability corner and made tracks for the Starsky and Hutch film factory situated at the far end of Fantasy Avenue.

Predicament

If any pertinent social comment or human predicament had managed to surface in the early part of the film, it disappears in a welter of deserted warehouses, fight scenes, exploding drug factories, car chases, cool cops with Kojak scripts, nick of time rescues, cross and double-cross.

After the twist in the plot has been followed by another twist we are left with a corkscrew narrative that fails to pull a single thematic cork.

The cork that should have popped concerns the relationship between the law as a set of rules operated by a select group with its own distinct ethos -the judges - and the community that the law is supposed to serve, a community increasingly Andrew Hornung reviews the film 'Star Chamber' (on general release)

disenchanted with what it sees as 'the law?' Instead - even if we overlook the gratuitous thrills-and-spills aspect of the film - what we have here is a group of judges (the community makes its appearance only very indirectly) who are disenchanted and a judge who becomes disenchanted with their way of dealing with their disenchantment.

It is interesting to compare the film with "Death Wish", a film which some years ago really captured that mood of outrage at the ineffectiveness of law enforcement in the face of street crime.

In that film the hero was the solid citizen (Charles Bronson) whose wife and daughter had been raped. Mr Solid Middle Class Citizen - he is an architect - junks his habitual liberalism and reasserts the old Puritan and frontier values that have "made America great" He becomes a lone vigilante admired by the ordinary decent folk of the community.

Now "Death Wish" was a vile, reactionary hate-whipping movie. But it made sense. "Star Chamber" tries screwing together the issue behind "Death Wish" with the copand court worship of Ironside.. and consequently screws up.

But if the rationality of the film is too confused to convince, the feeling is not. The feeling is not dissimilar to 'Death Wish": here too the criminals "are is counterposed to reasoned behaviour, here too the irrevocable bullet is the only agent of justice and civic protection. New pamphlet, 50p; latest TSC bulletin, 30p, plus postage. From TSC, BM Box 5965, London WCIN 3XX.

----- pull-quotes -----

creatures, they're not human beings", , here too "manhood"

FATSA: A TOWN ON TRIAL