Jonathan Schneer, "The Lockhart Plot: Love Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia" (Oxford UP, 2020)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Oct 30, 2020 · 55m

History in the making can be messy. As a tale told years later by historians, it is usually a clean narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and a mostly logical and foreordained end. Much of that messiness gets lost. Not in Jonathan Schneer's new book, The Lockhart Plot: Love Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia (Oxford UP, 2020). Schneer's recounts the story of a young British diplomat, Bruce Lockhart, sent to Soviet Russia soon after the October Revolution in 1917. Initially seeking some sort of accommodation with the Bolsheviks, Lockhart ends up plotting to…