46
PARTISAN REVIEW
this aCtiVIty. Jenny's interview with Tsarev supplied a possible
explanation, if not an excuse, for Rees's carelessness in having maintained
his friendship with Burgess and even for his doubt of Burgess's
continuing allegiance to the Soviet Union. Following the Pact, when
Rees had himself broken with Communism, both Burgess and Blunt -
Tsarev told Jenny - had similarly announced that they were no longer
Communists. This was not the truth, but Goronwy had believed them
or at least hoped that he could. Not until Burgess defected to the
Soviet Union did Rees allow himself to realize the extent of his friend's
deception.
In his own account of things, Rees reports that in his anxiety to
wring the truth from Burgess - had he or had he not spied for the
Soviet Union? Was he or was he not still a Comintern agent? - he had
resorted to a dangerous lie: he had told Burgess that he had deposited
with his lawyer a sealed letter in which he recorded Burgess's 1936
confession to him. This was a dangerous move. The threat would not
have been lost on Burgess and could well have proposed a counter–
move. With his connections in Moscow, Burgess could at any time store
away incriminating information about Rees. There is no evidence that
Burgess did this. So far as we know, he never deliberately set out to
implicate Rees in his espionage or otherwise do him harm. But the fact
that clever Goronwy could have delivered himself into Burgess's hands in
this fashion indicates how little he belonged in the hazardous company
of fully-fledged agents.
"Romanticism" and "ideological conviction": the terms are Tsarev's
but could we better describe the motives which, in the Thirties and For–
ties, moved not Goronwy alone but so many intellectuals in his country
and ours to choose Soviet Communism in preference to the problem–
ridden processes of democracy? Time passes and for those who were not
yet born in the Thirties and Forties, it becomes daily less credible that a
few decades ago Stalin's repressive regime could appeal as it did to the
idealistic young and not only to the young but to their elders who, we
could suppose, might have known better, reputable writers and artists,
lawyers, doctors, university professors, clerics, so many of whom gave
themselves so trustingly to the beguilements of the Soviet propaganda
machine. When I think of this folly of a generation, it seems hardly fair
that Goronwy, whose service to the Soviet Union was so brief in
duration and whose assignment as a Comintern agent was all but
ludicrous in its nature - to eavesdrop on his dinner table companions at
All Souls! - should be singled out as he was for scorn.
We remind ourselves, however, that Goronwy was condemned by
the British intellectual community not for his politics but for his betrayal
