On SpyCast: Where Vladimir Putin's 'West versus Russia' narrative begins

Why does Vladimir Putin often say that the West is conspiring to weaken Russia? Historian James Crossland traces the narrative back to a British intelligence officer, Robert Bruce Lockhart, and a failed assassination attempt on Vladimir Lenin in 1918.

Lockhart was working in Russia on behalf of MI6, just nine years into the British intelligence service’s existence. He and so-called “Ace of Spies” Sidney Reilly cooked up a plot to oust Lenin.

“This is an important point that a lot of his historians have missed. There is no approval of this from Whitehall, or from Paris or from Washington, D.C., because there are American and French diplomats and spies involved in this as well,” James says in this episode of SpyCast.

The Bolshevik’s secret police, the Cheka, infiltrated the plot from the start. But even after the plan went awry, and Lockhart’s time in prison ended, the story of the “Lockhart plot” took on new twists and turns under Joseph Stalin, after World War Two, and then into Putin’s reign — a single moment in the dying days of Czarist Russia which helped fuel a century of paranoia and rifts.

Episode length: 28 minutes

Listen: On Spotify | On Apple Podcasts