Elton John had sex with KGB spy on hotel roof when he performed in Russia

Visiting Kyiv for the first time as Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooperhas announced new sanctions againstRussia - unveiling 100 extra measures targeting Moscow’s military and energy sectors.

Frustrated with Vladimir Putin, rumours suggest Donald Trump, too, is poised to levy harsher sanctions against the Kremlin - including tariffs on the oil and financial sector. A swift look back at the history between Russia and the UK reveals that - despite being united in defeating the Nazis throughout the Second World War - problems set in the moment the guns stopped firing.

Suspicion started after the Allied forces declared victory and started dividing what was left of the war-torn continent into Western and Eastern blocs.

And, 80 years ago this month, Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet Union embassy clerk based in Ottawa, defected to Canada.

He brought with him more than 100 documents, code books and decryption materials detailing the Russians’ wartime espionage activities in the West - including their attempts to steal nuclear secrets.

Months later, in 1946, Winston Churchill - who had just lost the general election to Labour’s Anthony Eden - gave the keynote speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where he coined the phrase ‘the Iron Curtain’ to describe the tightening of influence Moscow was having over devastated Eastern Europe.

It was the ‘Gouzenko Affair’ coupled with that speech, titled the Sinews of Peace, which pinpointed the start of the Cold War, shaping the next 50 years of Western relations with the USSR. Yet, two years after Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s death from a stroke, British artists, actors and musicians began an extraordinary series of cultural swaps between the UK and the USSR.

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This year marks 70 years since director Peter Brook brought Hamlet to Moscow in 1955, a play that hadn’t been performed there since the 1930s.

It was soon followed by British exports like the Royal Shakespeare Company, Helen Mirren, Laurence Olivier and TV presenter Hughie Green, who hosted a Russian version of the 1960s TV hit Double Your Money in Moscow - the first time a Western quiz show had ever been broadcast in the USSR.

“The British government saw this as a way of building up British prestige and influence,” says Sarah Davies, a history professor at Durham University, who is writing a book on the subject. “It was a time when Britain’s power was declining, in the 1950s.”

Describing the UK as “at the end of empire,” she continues: “Britain wasn’t such a key player on the world stage. So they tried to compensate by sending in the RSC and the National Theatre and all the leading actors over there, to try and boost Britain and her prestige that way.”

The British government also had a hidden agenda, according to Sarah. She continues: “It seems to me they were very interested in ideological subversion.

“They could use Western culture to introduce new ideas and challenge the Soviet government's monopoly on culture. It was basically a propaganda operation. And there were so few ways of getting ideas, Western ideas, into the USSR. This was one way of doing it, and certainly that was something that we needed.” But the propaganda machine worked both ways.

“In exchange, they had to accept that the Soviets were sending their ballets, their theatre companies back, which they weren’t so happy about,” Sarah smiles. “That was the Soviets’ opportunity to make propaganda for the West about Soviet culture, ballet and so on.”

Excited by visiting a hidden world, the actors may not have realised the extent to which they were being used, according to Sarah, who adds: “They saw themselves as going over and understanding culture, cultivating good relations. I’m not sure they were aware of the propaganda element of it all.”

Throughout the Cold War, British cultural icons like Cliff Richard and Sir Elton John went to the USSR as part of these cultural exchanges. But by the 1970s, the glamour and excitement was wearing off, as Soviet atrocities came to light.

“From the late ‘60s into the 1970s, there was a lot of concern about how the Soviet government was treating its dissidents,” says Sarah. “People started getting more cautious about going to Russia because they thought they shouldn’t be aiding and abetting this authoritarian regime. Certainly the Royal Shakespeare Company was in two minds about it.”

Those who went to the USSR were monitored and spied upon during their stay, shadowed by minders and interpreters.

“It’s clear these minders were reporting back on them,” says Sarah. “On the flip side, the Soviet entertainers coming to Britain would have had tabs kept on them too.”

Elton John was the first Western popstar to perform behind the Iron Curtain in 1979 - his every step followed by a ‘handler’ who turned out to be a KGB spy. In a bid to ‘compromise’ the mole, Elton had sex with him, he admitted years later.

"I went to Russia in 1979 and I knew we were being watched all the time," he said. "I had an interpreter that they'd clearly set up. I ended up having sex with him on the hotel roof."

But in 1958, The Dam Busters actor Michael Redgrave secretly met with his old Cambridge pal - and notorious British traitor - Guy Burgess, during a tour of Hamlet in Moscow. Burgess, a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring, defected to the USSR in 1951 after passing thousands of British secrets to the Russians.

A top-secret memo by Sir Patrick Dean, chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, gave details of a party attended by both men at the Moscow flat of a British journalist. There, a cast member lent Burgess 100 Russian rubles to get home.

The memo added: ''We also heard that after one of the performances Burgess made his way to Redgrave's dressing room and there was sick."

In 1961, celebrated Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev famously defected from the Soviet Union during a Kirov Ballet tour in Paris, foiling attempts to stop him by KGB minders. He was barred from returning to his homeland to see his mother until Mikhail Gorbachev relented in 1987, as she was dying.

But despite these scandals, the USSR and the West continued this programme of cultural exchange. In 1976 Cliff Richard visited Moscow, later recalling how he swapped a pair of his old jeans for an ornate tea urn.

And Beatlemania raged behind the Iron Curtain throughout the ‘70s, with black market bootlegged records reaching delighted fans of the Fab Four. Then Billy Joel made waves when he crowdsurfed in Leningrad as part of his six-show The Bridge to Russia tour in 1987.

Even after the Cold War, Western entertainers remained keen to visit. Sir Paul McCartney made the trip in 2003, performing to a Red Square packed with around 130,000 screaming fans - including Vladimir Putin, who arrived just in time to hear Back in the USSR.

Over tea, Putin later told McCartney how his Beatles music had been “like a gulp of freedom … an open window to the world”.

But, since the Russian dictator’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, such displays of ‘soft power’ have been heavily curtailed. In return, Russian athletes were banned from competing in Wimbledon, while the country was barred from Eurovision.

Resistance to Russian cultural influence seems to be crumbling again, though. This month Russian soprano Anna Netrebko will perform at London’s Royal Opera House, three years after the New York Metropolitan Opera dropped her when she refused to denounce Putin.

And Sarah thinks the old propaganda machine may be in play again. “I guess the British government is interested in supporting Russian people who might be a source of resistance, opposition to the Putin regime; they would want to encourage them as a way of future-proofing,” she says.

“I don't know if that's going on now, but that was certainly going on during the Cold War. The sense that you support very influential members of society, people who can shape opinions, and that might have some effect, ultimately, on politics in the country.”