Divided loyalties

Traitor or peace-broker? Julia Jones is intrigued by the contradictions of Arthur Ransome

"I think of England as a sort of dream country," Arthur Ransome wrote to his mother in July 1917. He was the Daily News foreign correspondent in Petrograd - "a sick city", as he described it then. Half a million soldiers had been killed on the Galician front and deserters were streaming home. There was hunger, mutiny, political chaos.

"It really was jolly hearing about Tabitha and you playing at retrieving grouse," he continued wistfully. "All that, however, seems so very far away and every sentence in your letter which touched on Russia showed that people in England, even intelligent birds like yourself, have no notion of the condition of things here."

Later, Ransome expressed fury at the failure of his mission to explain. "Shouting in daily telegrams across the wires from Russia I feel I am shouting at a drunk man asleep in the road in front of a steam roller." He hated "the intellectual sloth, the gross mental indolence" that prevented his fellow countrymen making the necessary leap of imagination to understand the Russian situation.

Yet he never ceased to long for home. On 1 September 1917, he was writing to his mother again with a few weeks' leave in prospect. "I said to myself, 'Be calm . . . You are going to England where you will have a worrying time and a short one.' It was no good. Myself replied by yelling hurroo and jumping over my camp bed."

Roland Chambers investigates the non-hurrooing Ransome - the Ransome who was regarded with suspicion as an apologist for the Bolsheviks; who was recruited as an MI6 agent in 1918 but was nevertheless arrested by special branch under the Defence of the Realm Act the following year. He asks hard questions about the sources of the money spent on building and equipping Racundra - the sturdy Baltic ketch on which Ransome began his symbolic voyage away from red politics and back to the blue blazers of the Royal Cruising Club. When the yacht was sold, the proceeds furnished half the sum necessary to buy Low Ludderburn, the Lake District farmhouse in which Ransome's best-known novel, Swallows and Amazons, was written. Had this money been earned from the INO, an intelligence-gathering branch of Felix Dzerzhinsky's sinister Cheka? Ernest Boyce, MI6's head of station in Russia, sailed on Racundra with Ransome. Was Ransome a double agent - and if so, what did this mean?

Chambers's most startling discoveries come from the files of the Comintern (for which he gives generous credit to his Russian researchers). Late in 1917, Ransome met Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, whom he later married. It's an extraordinary revelation that, while Ransome was living in Low Ludderburn, writing his children's books and the "Rod and Line" column for the Manchester Guardian, his sister-in-law, Iroida, was deputy director of the Moscow Region Forced Labour Camp, one of the busiest in the gulag.

When Ransome first encountered these two tall jolly girls, Evgenia was working as Trotsky's personal secretary. She gave him a view behind the scenes "such as no other foreigner enjoyed", and when Ransome finally persuaded her to leave Russia she smuggled out a million roubles' worth of jewellery to help fund Bolshevik propaganda abroad. After which she made him a written promise "that I will engage in no conspiratorial work whatsoever without informing you that I consider this promise no longer binding".

Chambers's steady narrative and awareness of sources enables him to highlight the people and events that Ransome does not mention - or who chose not to mention him. It's a dispassionate approach which refrains from bludgeoning the reader into any pre-determined position: was Ransome a traitor, a conscientious peace-broker or merely, in Lenin's phrase, a useful idiot? Chambers neither whitewashes nor condemns. He acknowledges Ransome's commitment to the Bolshevik ideology and his devotion to Evgenia, but does not hesitate to suggest simple self-interest as the likeliest explanation for some of his manoeuvrings. His Ransome is complex, contradictory and certainly not a cosy personality. This is good biography - and even better history.

Paul Foot believed that it was never too late to reread and be inspired by the reports from our man in Petrograd; that we could still make that leap of imaginative sympathy for which Ransome campaigned. Chambers facilitates this by setting both countries - Russia and England - in the contexts of revolution and the first world war, "when all notions of identity were tested to the limit: loyalty to a philosophy, to a government, to a class, to a race, to a family". "Ransome's story," he concludes, "is essentially that of a man who professed all these loyalties, often simultaneously."

In this interpretation, Swallows and Amazons becomes a recognisable postwar product, a survivor's book with themes of rehabilitation and utopian re-ordering. "I love the real England," Ransome asserted in The Truth about Russia (1918). But where is the "real" England? Ransome's enduring achievement is to persuade his readers that this place does exist, that it is not a lost Atlantis. Chambers's triumph is to chronicle the crucial period of physical, emotional and intellectual exile through which Arthur Ransome finally came home.

Julia Jones's books include The Adventures of Margery Allingham (Golden Duck). Listen to Roland Chambers discuss his book with Claire Armitstead at theguardian.com/books.