Episode 193: The Plot to Bring Down the Soviet Revolution

Historically Thinking

In the spring of 1918, a young Scottish diplomat began to put together a plot that was intended to change the entire direction of the Great War, and save the Allies from defeat. As Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart began making his plans, Germany’s Operation Michael was threatening to break the western front open before American troops arrived in full strength. Lockhart thought that he could bring Russia back into the war that it had abandoned the year before. He would do this by killing Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, overthrowing the Bolshevik government, and installing a new regime that would attack Germany and reestablish an eastern front. This plot, and the extraordinary personalities and stakes involved in it, are recounted in Jonathan Schneer’s new book The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia, which among other things demonstrates the truth of the moldy old cliché that fact is stranger than fiction. Jonathan Schneer is Professor of Emeritus of History at Georgia Tech in the School of History and Sociology. A specialist in the history of modern Britain, his books include London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis, The Thames: England’s River, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet, 1940-45, and The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of Arab-Israeli Conflict, which won a 2010 National Jewish Book Award. He is currently working on a book about the British General Strike of 1926.