The reason the Cambridge Spies continue to fascinate Russians and British alike is simple – they were Establishment. They went to public school then Oxbridge; they worked at the Foreign Office or the Treasury; they wrote for The Economist and The Spectator magazines; and of course, several of them worked for MI5 and MI6 – those most establishment, most English of institutions.

And yet, emerging as they did from the backbone of English society, they nonetheless betrayed their country for several decades.

The story fascinates Russians partly because the British Establishment fascinates Russians – its manners, its language, its institutions and codes. As much as the KGB ever wanted to crack the British cipher, Russians also wanted to crack this secret code of Englishness, as if the key to being European lay in the way an Englishman drank his tea.

That such Establishment figures as Kim Philby or Guy Burgess devoted their lives to harming the British State and promoting the Soviet Union seems, to Russians, to be a joyful affirmation of the superiority of Russian civilization to English. Look – even their privileged sons realize the merit of the collectivist, egalitarian, Russian model!

For the British, the episode was one more blow of the axe to the cherry tree of the public school class, a class which had ruled Britain for around 300 years, and who suddenly fell from power between 1955 and 1985.

Up until, say, 1977, every British prime minister would have gone to one of the top public schools – Eton, Winchester, St Paul’s, Westminster etc – and then to Oxbridge. The ruling class of England wasn’t so much a class as a club. Connections which held at the highest level of society, between say the Archbishop of Canterbury, the chairman of BP and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were forged over tea and crumpets at school or university.

Several things did for this class. Chief among them was Margaret Thatcher. She liberalized the British economy, opening it up to foreign competition and to the new idea of ‘shareholder value’. Suddenly, family-owned companies were bought in hostile takeovers, and gentlemanly chairmen were kicked out because they couldn’t maximize shareholder value. It didn’t matter who you knew or what tie you wore, what mattered was simply how much money you made. The personal relations of the public school club were blown away by the cold logic of advanced capitalism.

More subtly, the right and competence of the public school class to run the country was increasingly called into doubt. Foreign policy disasters like the Suez Crisis – orchestrated by the gentlemanly prime minister, Anthony Eden – made the class look out of touch with Britain’s new post-war position in the world. Economic disasters like the terrible strikes and industrial decline of the 1970s made their brand of paternalist, clubby economics look like a form of slow death.

And then there was the Cambridge Spies scandal, which made non-public school Brits wonder what they had always wondered – were public schoolboys really ‘British’, or were they from ‘Another Country’– the name of a famous play about the public school upbringing of Guy Burgess – a foreign country of privilege, cosmopolitanism, homosexuality, intellectual decadence, and even treason?

My grandfather, an Eton-Trinity College Cambridge educated ex-ambassador, still talks of Philby et al with wonder, horror. That the head of SIS in Washington could have been a KGB spy. That the head of MI5 in London could have been working for the Soviets. That the institutions of Eton, All-Souls, Trinity, Whitehall, could have been penetrated by closet Bolsheviks. That they could have infiltrated…theclub. He talks about it in quiet tones, as one talks about some awful plane crash.

What made them betray not just their country, but even worse, their class? One has to understand the peculiar attractiveness of Marxism for British intellectuals in the 1930s. Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Cairncross were some of the brightest undergraduates at Cambridge. And many of the brightest young minds in Britain at that time were totally seduced by the brilliant dialectic logic of Marx, and the romantic justice they thought they saw in the Soviet Union.

Many of these bright young things flocked to Spain to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. When both the US and UK failed to support the Republican armies, while the USSR provided plenty of financial and military support, many drew the conclusion that Kim Philby drew – the West was incapable of opposing fascism. One only had to look at the bumbling attempts of the clown Neville Chamberlain to placate Hitler. Only the USSR had the backbone and ideological purity to put up a proper fight.

Such were the professed reasons they gave. However, the majority of the Cambridge spies continued to spy for the KGB even after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, even after revelations of the Great Terror, when other public school supporters of the USSR, like George Orwell, had realized what kind of amoral regime they were actually dealing with.

One can conjecture other, more psychological reasons. The British Establishment occasionally throws out radical opponents of itself, people who have reacted in horror and revulsion at the stiff conventions and artificiality of the upper middle class. Almost all the spies were sexually heterodox – either adventurist heterosexuals, or profligate homosexuals – and their KGB controller, Arnold Deutsch, who was himself a sexual libertarian, seems to have succeeded in painting the USSR to them as a land of sexual freedom as well as equality.

Public school-educated adults sometimes also feel a sense of guilt and unease at the gulf separating them from the ‘ordinary working man’, much like Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century felt this guilt. As a result, they can romanticize said working man, and feel they owe it to him to dedicate their lives to vague terms such as ‘the people’. Sometimes this guilt can propel the privileged children to noble acts, and sometimes it can propel them to unfortunate, violent and hateful acts that have more to do with damaging the sphere from which they came, than helping any working man.

Others who knew Philby et al have given specific psychological reasons – they were arrogant, and needed to feel special, super-human. Having risen to the top of British society, they needed to feel superior even to that, by serving some higher ideal which put that establishment to shame – the ideal of the international working class. It was an easy ideal to serve from a distance, though bourgeois aesthetes like Burgess found the USSR little to their taste when they were actually forced to live here.

Whatever their reasons, one can but applaud the Cambridge Spies’ highly skilled controller – Arnold Deutsch – who had the fantastic idea of recruiting Cambridge high-fliers when they were young, before they rose to the top of the Establishment. Deutsch was himself academically brilliant, so perfectly suited to appeal to the intellectual arrogance of the young undergraduates.

But you can’t give the KGB as a whole that much credit for the Five’s work. For much of their career, the KGB wasn’t even sure it could trust them, such was the amount and quality of the information they supplied – it was too good to be true! After the Terror, when Stalin had purged the KGB of half its foreign network, the Five didn’t even have a controller for some years. Such was their dedication, however, they carried on working and recruiting none-the-less.

The challenge for the FSB now is how it can ever get such good secret intelligence on the West again as it did in the 1930s and 1940s. Well, it can’t. Such intelligence was a one-off. It was a product of rare, never-to-be-repeated conditions – the attraction of Marxism and the USSR for US and European intellectuals in the 1930s, the sloppiness of US and European governmental secrecy before various high-level KGB spies were revealed in the 1950s. Foreigners will never be seduced by Putin’s ‘power vertical’ ideology in the way they were by Marxism in the 1930s, though they may still be open to the more perennial incentives of sex and money.

However, the good news is that western and Russian foreign policy circles are more open than ever. It’s perfectly possible for Russian academics to gain positions at Washington think-tanks such as the Carnegie or Brookings Institute, and from there to get access to top foreign policy officials in the government, or for Moscow-based academics to take part in international seminars on foreign affairs. Indeed, several foreign Russia-watchers recently spent a week on a boat going up the Volga, meeting with Russian experts and senior ministers. They ended their trip with a long meeting with Putin himself in the Kremlin, from which they emerged ‘very impressed’ according to reports.

I hope that these official, open channels of dialogue and information transfer become increasingly important to Russia’s relationship with the West, and covert, illegal channels become less important. You still need spies to track terrorists and scrutinize rogue states. But hopefully neither Russia nor western countries see each other as rogue states anymore.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

September 6, 2005