Last of the Cold War Spies by Roland Perry Read Free Book Online

recruitment. If they could nurture the right kind of idealist—one with the potential to climb into high ranks of politics, intelligence, or the military—from early undergraduate days, it fitted their plans. Even if the recruit was a sleeper (mole)—quietly working in a chosen field for even twenty years before being directed to spy—that was in accord with communist strategy. Marx wrote about it, Lenin articulated it, and Trotsky, then later Stalin (to a telling degree), implemented the long-term plan. It applied as much to industry as it did to espionage. But in the seventy years of communist domination of Russia it was more successful in the latter.
    Dartington’s radical approach to education even attracted the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, who was invited to visit the Hall in mid-May 1933. Pom Elmhirst, Straight, Young, and the other students warmly greeted him and his wife. 4 Maisky gave his usual glowing chat about the Soviet Union, stayed two days and nights, and dined with the Elmhirsts. No doubt Straight, then 16, impressed the ambassador with his keen mind. Over dinner on May 14, the estate patriarch, Leonard—a liberal and open-minded humanist—spoke about his visit to Russia in 1930 and how he admired its scientific developments in artificial insemination and in cattle. Leonard told the ambassador how he had tried to introducesuch techniques in England, a point that would have raised the ambassador’s eyebrows. Ever since Trotsky’s instructions soon after the revolution for communists to steal everything they could from the capitalist nations, Soviet representatives abroad had been desperate to “gather” as much data of any kind, including scientific information, for the advancement of “the great Soviet experiment.” Leonard’s effort on behalf of his more modest experiments at Dartington was a case of plagiarism. It was no worse than what the Soviets were doing.
    Dorothy too was open to the superficial Soviet line of propaganda. She espoused “internationalism”—international peace, the breaking down of national barriers, goodwill to all men and women. All Russia’s key representatives preached internationalism while planning the undermining of the British system and all other Western democracies, in their various states of decay and fragility in the 1930s.

    The school itself, at least, became international and fashionable in an eclectic circle of, as Aldous Huxley remarked, the “‘odd, the odious, the famous and the fatuous, the accomplished and the artistic.” He sent his son Matthew there but was not pleased that he chose carpentry as his main subject. It wasn’t sufficient for Matthew to plead that it had been good enough for Christ, so why not him? Bertrand Russell took a liking to the school too and sent along his two children, Kate and John, by his second wife, Dora. Sigmund Freud’s architect son, Ernst—a refugee from Nazi Germany—enrolled his three sons. The eldest, Stefan, complained that it lacked games and competition in work. He missed racing to finish his algebra sums.
    Among the other talented creatives to put in cameo appearances were the painter Ben Nicholson and his later wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Victor Gollanz, the publisher and life-long Stalin enthusiast, turned up, as did the controversial Jacob Epstein, another notable sculptor.
    Dartington started as “alternative” and took a huge left turn as it developed and departed radically from traditional schooling. Leonard had disliked his own establishment schooling and wanted something different. Dorothy veered away from the norm too as a follower of John Dewey, an American educator and philosopher. He was also one of the founders ofthe philosophical school of pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, and a representative of the progressive movement in U.S. education, which was only too willing to embrace the far left. Dartington was also a coeducational boarding school, something unheard