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Swallows, Amazons and Leon Trotsky


I bet you didn't know that the author of Swallows and Amazons was connected closely with Trotsky. But what was his motive?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/mar/01/uk.books

"Who did Arthur Ransome work for during Russian Revolution: The Manchester Guardian, MI6, or the Bolsheviks? Files only add to confusion

was he a British agent getting valuable information from his Kremlin contacts?

Or, perhaps, a double agent?

His later Swallows and Amazons series of idyllic childhood sailing adventures in the Lake District give no clues. Neither did his 1976 autobiography.

But files released by MI5 at the National Archives put some flesh on the enigma. The answer seems that this complex man - shortsighted, fat, ruddy-faced, with a magnificent moustache - was an amalgam of all these personae.

An indication of his close relationship with the British authorities in Russia came in an application to the passport office in October 1915. He had first gone to Russia, at 28, in 1912 to research folklore and escape a disastrous marriage.

At the outbreak of war he was taken on by the radical Daily News. After one of his brief returns to England, his application has the note: "Has certificate from [ambassador] Sir George Buchanan that he has worked for the embassy for three years." Come the revolution of 1917, Ransome made friends with Bolshevik leaders - Lenin, Radek and Trotsky - and his dispatches were seen as unduly sympathetic to the regime. He also fell in love with - and later married - Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jransome.htm

"Adam Mars Jones has argued: "Ransome knew which side his bread was buttered on, though he may not have realised how busily it was being buttered on both sides, by British and Bolshevik agencies alike. He was nothing as complicated as a double agent, but was useful to each side only if he had some standing with the other." Sir Cavendish-Bentinck reported to the Foreign Office: "He (Ransome) is really rather a coward and is trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/leeds/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8388000/8388891.stm

"Best known for Swallows And Amazons, Ransome published a series of best sellers in the 1930s and 1940s.

However his reputation as the quintessential Englishman has been tarnished with accusations of being a double agent when he worked for MI6."

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It's not "sci-fi", it's SF!

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Time for a spot of revisionism post-Roland Chambers ' book & a new version with the Swallows/Marxist-Leninists hunting down Marxist-deviationists 'Hunger Games' style in 1929 Cumberland.

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