Stalin double agent, historian asserts

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32457, 18 November 1970, Page 21

Stalin double agent, historian asserts

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) LONDON, November 17. A historian who specialises in Russian affairs said in an interview yesterday that the Communist leader, Josef Stalin, was a double agent who served both the Tsar and the Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution. The historian is H. Montgomery Hyde, a former member of the House of Commons. “I have retraced the footsteps of Stalin from the time he acquired power to his death in 1953,” Mr Hyde said. “I have uncovered evidence beyond any reasonable doubt that Stalin worked for the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) between 1906 and 1912.” The British historian said that Stalin cut his ties with the Tsarist regime in . 1912 when Lenin made him a member of the Bolsheviks’ ruling Central Communist Committee. Mr Hyde asserts that Stalin was recruited by the Tsar’s secret police after being arrested in a raid on an underground revolutionary printing press in the Georgian capital of Tiflis in 1906. He was ’ given a lenient sentence as a cover then and at other times. “I am convinced that Nikita Khrushchev and maybe some of Khrushchev’s clique knew this secret about Stalin, but were afraid of revealing this even in his de-

nunciation of the Soviet dictator at the twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956,” said Mr Hyde. “They didn’t want to bring this terrible disgrace to the party.” But his evidence was uncovered in the records kept by the Tsarist Ambassador to Paris, Mr Maklakov, who fled to the United States in 1917 when ordered by Kerensky to return to Moccow. “This collection of secret police papers is at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University in California,” he said. “I was given access to it.”