The Afterwar: Britain’s Secret Battle Against Revolutionary Russia
James Crossland

Britain 1918. The war with Germany is over. The war with Russia is just beginning.

Though Britain emerged victorious from the First World War, it entered the 1920s on the brink of collapse. The nation’s economy was shattered, unemployment was high and trust in its leaders had eroded. Its exhausted workers were agitated. Its traumatised soldiers were mutinous. The streets of its cities shook with riotous violence and its politicians and generals lived in fear of terrorist bombs and assassin’s bullets. These threats from within were stirred by an enemy beyond Britain’s borders. Having seized control of Russia in 1917, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin was determined to spread his revolution across the globe, despatching infiltrators, propagandists and insurgents into Britain and its colonies, chipping away at the war-battered foundations of the world’s largest empire with the aim to destroy it from within.

The Afterwar tells the story of the Britons tasked with thwarting Lenin’s plans. These defenders of the realm were a dubious bunch – adventurous soldiers out to spill blood, ambitious detectives in thrall to conspiracy theories, paranoid spies and puritanical politicians who saw the violence of Fascism as the best way to combat the Bolshevik menace. In tracing the interweaving battles waged by these flawed characters against revolutionary Russia, The Afterwar shows how fear and ideology shaped MI5, MI6 and Special Branch in the 1920s, forging the British intelligence community into the force it would become in the century that followed. Taking the reader back to an era of political extremism, civil unrest, extraordinary police powers and Russian expansionism, The Afterwar reveals the origins of Britain’s intelligence community and its century-long struggle with Russia, offering lessons from the past to our troubled present-day.