Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

If in her foreign operations Soviet Russia had to rely exclusively on Communists, her prospects would have been dismal, indeed: in the spring of 1919, when the Comintern came into existence, there must have been more vegetarians in England and more nudists in Sweden than there were Communists in either country. By 1920–21, the number of supporters abroad had grown considerably, but even so they were too few to influence the policies of foreign governments toward Soviet Russia. Such successes abroad, especially in the West, as Moscow could lay claim to in the early 1920s, it owed mainly to liberals and “fellow-travelers,” people prepared to support the Soviet government without joining Communist ranks. Whereas liberals rejected both the theory and practice of Communism and yet found certain areas of agreement with it, fellow-travelers accepted Communism as a positive phenomenon, but were unwilling to submit to its discipline. Both groups rendered Soviet Russia invaluable services at a time when she was ostracized and isolated.

The affinities between liberalism and revolutionary socialism have been pointed out in the discussion of the Russian intelligentsia.¹¹⁵ They derive from the fact that both ideologies believe that mankind, being entirely shaped by sensory perceptions (that is, devoid of inborn ideas and values), can attain moral perfection through the restructuring of its environment. Their disagreement is over the means toward that end, liberals preferring to reach it gradually and peacefully, through legislation and education, while radicals prefer a sudden and violent destruction of the existing order. Psychologically, liberals feel defensive toward genuine radicals, who are bolder and prepared to take greater risks: the liberal can never quite rid himself of the guilty feeling that while he talks the radical acts. Liberals, therefore, are predisposed to defend revolutionary radicalism and, if necessary, to help it, even as they reject its methods. The attitude of Western liberals toward Communist Russia did not much differ from that of Russian democratic socialists toward Bolshevism before and after 1917—an attitude distinguished by intellectual and psychological schizophrenia, which greatly contributed to Lenin’s triumph. Russian socialists in emigration perpetuated it. While urging Western socialists to condemn the Communist “terroristic party dictatorship,” they nevertheless insisted that it was the “duty of workers throughout the world to throw their full weight into the struggle against attempts by the imperialist powers to intervene in the internal affairs of Russia.”¹¹⁶

The overwhelming majority of the spokesmen for Western liberals and fellow-travelers were intellectuals. The Bolshevik regime, for all its objectionable features, attracted them because it was the first government since the French Revolution to vest power in people of their own kind. In Soviet Russia intellectuals could expropriate capitalists, execute political opponents, and muzzle reactionary ideas. Because they have little if any experience with the exercise of power, intellectuals tend wildly to overestimate what it can do. Observing the Communists and fellow-travelers who flocked to Moscow in the 1920s and there put up with appalling living conditions and round-the-clock spying, the American journalist Eugene Lyons wrote:

Fresh from cities where they were despised and persecuted, [they] had never been so close to the honeypots of power and found the taste heady. Not, mind you, the make-believe power of leadership in an oppressed or underground revolutionary party, but the power that is spelled in armies, airplanes, police, unquestioned obedience from underlings, and a vision of ultimate world dominion. Relieved of the risks and responsibilities under which they labored at home, their yearning for position, career and privilege in many cases took on a jungle luxuriance.… No one who has not been close to the revolutionary movement in his own country, can quite understand the palpitant anxiety with which a foreign radical approaches the realities of an established and functioning proletarian regime. Or the exaltation with which he finally confronts the signs and symbols of that regime. It is a species of self-fulfillment, a thrilling identification with Power. Phrases and pictures and colors, tunes and turns of thoughts connected in my mind with years of ardent desire and even a measure of sacrifice were now in evidence all around, in the places of honor, dominance, unlimited power!¹¹⁷

Confident of their ability to manage affairs better than politicians and businessmen, they identified with the Soviet rulers even as they criticized them, longing to duplicate (and improve on) their achievement. Whatever mistakes they might have committed, Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and the other commissars were people to whom they could relate as they could not to a Clemenceau, Wilson, or Lloyd George. This sense of personal affinity predisposed many Western intellectuals to sympathize with Russian Communism, to ignore, minimize, or justify its failings, and to pressure their governments to come to terms with it.

It took the Bolsheviks some time to realize the utility of liberals and fellow-travelers. Friendly foreign visitors to Moscow had to overcome Lenin’s ignorance of conditions in postwar Europe and his deep-seated suspicion of liberals to persuade him that in many countries, including England, they could do more for Soviet Russia than could Communists. They were right. While Communists staged futile putsches, liberals helped prevent military intervention and economic embargoes against Soviet Russia and paved the way for commercial and diplomatic accords with her.

A couple of examples will convey better than any generalizations the attitude of Western liberals toward Soviet Russia.^* We have noted the overwhelming rejection by the British Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress of Communists’ applications for admission. In 1920, the Labour Party and the TUC sent to Soviet Russia a fact-finding mission. To make certain the foreign visitors obtained a favorable impression and yet did not contaminate Russian workers with their trade-unionist ideas, Lenin asked the Central Committee to issue appropriate instructions. The Soviet press was to organize a systematic campaign to “unmask” (razoblachat’) the guests as “social-traitors, Mensheviks, accomplices in the English looting of colonies,” and workers were to be chosen to ask them embarrassing “questions.” The “harassment” was to be carried out in an “ultra-polite manner.” The visiting Britons were, on the whole, treated well but they had no chance to find out the true sentiments of Russian workers, because, again on Lenin’s orders, they were never left out of sight by a staff of “reliable” interpreters.¹¹⁸

Among the members of the delegation was Ethel Snowden, the wife of a leading Labourite and a member of the left-wing ILP. An intelligent woman with a sharp eye, she was determined to learn the truth. Like her husband and all but a small minority of British socialists and trade unionists, she felt no sympathy for Communist ideology, the October coup d’état, or the Bolshevik dictatorship. She saw the seamy sides of Communist life: the lawlessness and the terror, the social inequalities, the sham democracy. An audience with Lenin left her unimpressed: she thought him a cruel fanatic, a “dogmatic professor in politics.” She departed from Russia with warm feelings for the people but without a good word for Communism. Moscow regarded the book she published on her return as hostile.¹¹⁹ And still … in the midst of a devastating description of Communist misrule, there occurs an apologia that springs not from the mind but from the heart, since it has no connection with the accumulated evidence:

Moscow is the Government’s headquarters. It is the home of the Commissars. It is the seat of one of the most amazing experiments the modern world has seen. It is a place of great interest for the whole of the watching world. It is the pivot upon which earthshaking events will turn. And it deserves to be treated with respect, and not with the ignorant contempt which stupid people shower upon it. Mistakes have been made there, cruel things are being done there; but the mistakes are not bigger nor the cruel things more cruel than have recently been made and done in other capital cities by men who, for character and integrity, ability and personality are not fit to tie the shoe-strings of the best of the men and women of Moscow.¹²⁰

She has somehow managed to convince herself—not without assistance from her hosts—that many if not most of the sordid aspects of Communist life were the fault of Western hostility. Once the West stopped intervening in Russia’s affairs and helped her with food, clothing, medicines, machinery, and all else she so desperately needed, Russia would become “what she was destined from before the foundations of the world to become—a great leader in the humanitarian movements of the world.”¹²¹

The official report of the British delegation on its visit showed similar equivocation. The authors saw less to criticize than Mrs. Snowden: what they disliked they attributed directly to the legacy of tsarism and Allied hostility. Russia, they explained, was simply not ready for democracy:

Whether, under such conditions, Russia could be governed in a different way—whether, in particular, the ordinary processes of democracy could be expected to work—is a question upon which we do not feel ourselves competent to pronounce. All we know is that no practical alternative, except a virtual return to autocracy, has been suggested to us; that a “strong” Government is the only type of Government which Russia has yet known; that the opponents of the Soviet Government when they were in power in 1917, exercised repression against the Communists.… The Russian Revolution has not yet had a fair chance. We cannot say whether, in normal conditions, this particular Socialist experiment would have been a success or failure. The conditions have been such as would have rendered the task of social transformation extraordinarily difficult, whoever had attempted it and whatever had been the means adopted. We cannot forget that the responsibility for these conditions resulting from foreign interference rests not upon the revolutionaries in Russia, but upon the Capitalist Governments of other countries, including our own.¹²²

They concluded that Soviet Russia’s domestic difficulties made her unlikely to pose a serious threat to the West.^*

Not much different were the conclusions of H. G. Wells, the author of The Time Machine and an ardent believer in scientific utopia, who visited Soviet Russia in September 1920 at the invitation of Lev Kamenev. He was shocked by the sordid condition of Petersburg, which he remembered as a lively and elegant city. Under Communist rule, he thought, Russia had suffered “a vast irreparable breakdown.”¹²³ Although he had nothing good to say about socialist doctrine—Marx was “a Bore of the extremest sort,” and Das Kapital “a monument of pretentious pedantry”—he felt that what he termed “the greatest debacle in history” should not be blamed on Communism. Communism, he argued, was the result of ruination; its cause was imperialism and the decadence of tsarist Russia: “Russia fell into its present miseries through the world war and the moral and intellectual insufficiency of its ruling and wealthy people.… The Communist party, however one may criticize it, does embody an idea and can be relied upon to stand by its idea. So far it is a thing morally higher than anything that has yet come against it.”¹²⁴ Russian anti-Bolshevik émigrés struck him as “politically contemptible” spreaders of “endless stories of ‘Bolshevik outrages’ ” deserving no credence. Although acquaintances in Russia cautioned him to believe nothing that he was told, he returned convinced that the “better part of the educated people in Russia are … slowly drifting into a reluctant but honest cooperation with Bolshevik rule.”¹²⁵ He recommended diplomatic recognition of the Communist government and the granting to it of economic assistance—“helpful intervention” that was certain to moderate Communist excesses. As in the case of Mrs. Snowden, at a certain point objective observation was pushed aside to allow for assessments and recommendations that were pure acts of faith.

One of the earliest foreign visitors to Soviet Russia was William Bullitt, who came in March 1919 on a confidential mission for President Wilson (see above, this page–this page). Lacking knowledge of Russian and with his visit lasting only one week, Bullitt had to rely on information supplied by his Soviet hosts. And yet he felt no hesitation on his return in giving utterance to the most sweeping generalizations about Soviet Russia and her government.¹²⁶ As he summarized them later that year, “The destructive phase of the revolution is over and all the energy of the Government is turned to constructive work.” The Cheka no longer engaged in terror: it only indicted suspected counterrevolutionaries. The people seemed generally to support the government and the Communist Party and to “lay the blame for distress wholly on the blockade and the governments which maintain it.”¹²⁷ Russia should be left alone to allow internal forces to effect changes.

Such assessments—critical in specifics, sweepingly sympathetic in conclusions—were common among Western liberals of the 1920s. To European socialists in particular, no matter what the Bolsheviks did—whether violating the democratic precepts of Social Democracy or persecuting fellow socialists—they remained “comrades.” This blindness was caused by the belief that any movement that professed to uphold socialist ideals was socialist: it placed slogans above reality. The October Revolution was for them a glorious event: for Karl Kautsky, Lenin’s severest critic in socialist ranks and for Lenin an arch-“renegade,” “it has made, for the first time in world history, a socialist party the ruler of a great power.”¹²⁸ For the Austrian socialist Otto Bauer, “The dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia [was] not the subjugation of democracy but a phase in the development to democracy.”¹²⁹ Like their Russian counterparts in 1917, democratic socialists in the West interpreted all anti-Bolshevism as a cover for anti-socialism, and hence saw it as ultimately directed against themselves. On this premise only they, the socialists, whose motives were pure, had the moral right to criticize the Communists.

The ambivalence of European socialists toward Communism found reflection in the confused explanation of the Labour Party’s policy given in July 1919 by Ramsay MacDonald, who five years later would head Britain’s first Labour cabinet:

In supporting the Russian Revolution we are not necessarily taking sides either for or against the Soviets or Bolsheviks. We are recognizing that during a Revolution there must be Jacobinism, but that if Jacobinism be evil, the way to fight it is to help the country to settle down and assimilate the Revolution.¹³⁰

Which statement, if it meant anything, had to mean that until and unless the people of Soviet Russia submitted to the Bolshevik dictatorship, Bolshevik terror was both inevitable and legitimate.

The pro-Communist policies of liberals and socialists were significantly and in some instances decisively influenced by considerations of internal politics, namely the desire to use Soviet Russia as an ally against domestic conservatives. Even as they refused to admit the Communists into their ranks, British Labourites entered into a tacit league with them against their common enemy, the Tories. They opposed intervention in Russia not only because they considered it directed against socialism but also because it enabled them to depict the British government as militantly antilabor. In the early 1920s the Labour Party consistently defended the foreign policies of Soviet Russia, even when, as in the case of the Rapallo Treaty with Germany, these policies harmed Britain’s national interests. The underlying principle was simple: “The Labour’s Party adversary was also Russia’s enemy; how sensible, therefore, that the party should be Russia’s friend.”¹³¹ Seen in this light, what actually was happening in Soviet Russia was of secondary importance.

The exploitation of Soviet Communism for internal political purposes was not confined to liberals. In the United States, isolationists like Senators Borah and La Follette turned into apologists for the Soviet Union for the same reason: “A group of Americans defended Soviet Russia not because of ideological commitment, but because of hostility toward American motives and actions. During the coming decade [of the 1920s], these isolationists were to remain in the seemingly anomalous position of advocating tolerance and diplomatic recognition of the Bolshevik regime.”¹³² In the words of The New Republic, “Anti-imperialists” (of both the right and left variety) “loved Russia for her enemies.”¹³³ No American publication more insistently pressed for U.S. recognition of and help to the Soviet government than the conservative Hearst press: in its case, the rationale was not sympathy for Communist Russia, but dislike of Europe, especially Great Britain, and hostility to Washington.^*

Non-Communist and even anti-Communist friends of this type were of inestimable value to Moscow. H. G. Wells was entirely correct when he told the Petrograd Soviet “it was not to a socialist revolution in the West that Russians should look for peace and help in their troubles, but to the liberal opinion of the moderate mass of Western people.”¹³⁴

Fellow-travelers (poputchiki) acted from different motives from the liberal and socialist apologists. The term, adopted by Trotsky from the vocabulary of Russian socialism and applied to Russian writers who cooperated with but did not join the Communists, was extended to include foreign sympathizers. As the operating methods of the Comintern became better known and it was realized that all Communists were acting under orders of Moscow, they came to be perceived as Soviet agents. Once this happened, their credibility diminished and so did their ability to influence opinion. Fellow-travelers were free of this stigma because they acted, or, at any rate, seemed to act, in obedience not to a foreign power but to their own consciences. Such status was particularly important in the case of prominent Western intellectuals whose literary reputations appeared to provide a guarantee of integrity. Pro-Soviet statements by celebrated novelists like Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Arnold Zweig, and Lion Feuchtwanger, or scholars like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Harold Laski, carried great weight with educated Westerners. Although the phenomenon of fellow-traveling assumed large proportions only in the 1930s, following the onset of the Depression and the Nazi takeover in Germany, it first emerged in the early 1920s after Soviet Russia had opened her borders to friendly visitors. Moscow assiduously cultivated sympathetic foreign intellectuals, treating them with a deference that exceeded anything to which they were accustomed at home.

In return, the fellow-travelers depicted Communist Russia to a curious but ignorant Western public as a country that endeavored, under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, to build the first truly democratic and egalitarian society in history. The role of the Party and the security police was passed over in silence, and Russia was portrayed as a society where political decisions were made democratically by the soviets, Russian equivalents of American town meetings.^* Much was made of alleged social, racial, and sexual equality, as well as the unique cultural and educational opportunities offered the common man. To make these fantastic scenarios credible, shortcomings were conceded, but blame was attributed to the inevitable difficulties that attended the “striving to build the New Jerusalem.”¹³⁵ Once the myth of a nearly perfect participatory democracy could no longer be sustained—this happened as more came to be known abroad about Soviet conditions—all the failures of the regime to make good on its promises were attributed to tsarism. In the words of the New York Times’s Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, the prime supplier of arguments to American fellow-travelers, what perfection could be expected of a country that had just “emerged from the blackest of tyranny”?¹³⁶ Admittedly, Soviet Russia was a dictatorship, but then democracy was not learned in a day, which would have been a reasonable argument if Soviet Russia were, indeed, striving to become a democracy.

The motives of fellow-travelers varied as much as did the personalities of those who made the pilgrimage to Moscow: “anxiously heretical professors, atheists in search of a religion, old maids in search of revolutionary compensations, radicals in search of reinforcement for a wavering faith.”¹³⁷ Angelica Balabanoff, who as Secretary of the Comintern was in a position to know, says that on their arrival in Soviet Russia all visitors were placed in one of four categories: “superficial, naïve, ambitious, or venal.”¹³⁸ In practice, of course, few fitted neatly into any one of these categories. A “naïve” idealist found it easier to keep the faith if the reward was fame, while a “venal” visitor enjoyed his profits more if they could be justified in idealistic terms (as in, “Trade promotes peace” or “Trade civilizes”). The Hammers, père and fils, the most successful American entrepreneurs in Communist Russia in the 1920s, were said by Eugene Lyons to have “mixed the business of helping themselves with the pleasure of helping Russia.”¹³⁹

Material self-interest, and not only in the narrow commercial sense, was a powerful motive for turning into a Communist mouthpiece. The willingness faithfully to follow the Party line through all its zigzags ensured a writer or an artist of unstinting support by the Party’s effective and well-financed propaganda machine: with its help many a mediocre writer became a celebrity and even a best-selling author. Examples include Romain Rolland, Lion Feuchtwanger, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Howard Fast, whose productions have in due course sunk into well-deserved oblivion. English fellow-traveling authors had access to Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which at the height of its popularity in mid-1939 distributed pro-Soviet nonfiction to fifty thousand subscribers. Books of a similar orientation under the Penguin imprint sold in the six figures.¹⁴⁰ This happened at a time when Darkness at Noon, by the disenchanted Communist Arthur Koestler, a book that in time attained the status of a classic, had in England an initial printing of one thousand copies and total first-year sales of less than four thousand.¹⁴¹ George Orwell’s Animal Farm was rejected by fourteen publishers on the grounds of being too anti-Soviet.¹⁴² Western journalists could make a name for themselves by being accredited to Moscow, and there enjoy a style of life quite beyond the reach of their colleagues at home, provided they wrote only what the Soviet authorities approved: the alternative was disaccreditation and expulsion. And, of course, for venturesome and politically sympathetic businessmen there was money to be made from concessions and trade. From Moscow’s point of view, sympathizers inspired by venal motives were the most dependable of all, because, having no ideals to begin with, they were immune to disillusionment.

Most fellow-travelers probably fitted in the category of “naïve.” They believed what they heard and read because, desperately wishing for a world free of war and want, they ignored all unfavorable evidence about Soviet Russia. They believed that man and society could be made perfect: and since the world which they knew was far from perfect, they readily accepted Communist ideals for Communist reality. Capitalism disgusted them for the poverty it tolerated in the midst of affluence and for its inner contradictions that made for militarism and war. The aesthetes among them were revolted by the vulgarity of modern mass culture and correspondingly enchanted by the efforts of the Communists to bring “high” culture to the common man. Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, in the non sequitur reasoning characteristic of the type, wrote: “Since at present we altogether have no culture but only civilization, I am certain that Bolshevism, notwithstanding all its evil byproducts, is the only way in the foreseeable future to create the premises of a new culture.”^*

Closing the mind to adverse evidence did not come easily to true idealists: they had to resort to all kinds of psychological stratagems to exclude from consciousness undesirable data. There exists much retrospective testimony from disenchanted Communists and fellow-travelers on how this process worked. Arthur Koestler, living in Soviet Russia in the early 1930s, at a time of mass starvation and total extinction of civil rights, developed the habit of rationalizing whatever he saw and heard by treating Soviet reality as something not quite real, “a quivering membrane stretched between the past and the future”: “I learnt to classify automatically everything that shocked me as the ‘heritage of the past’ and everything I liked as ‘seeds of the future.’ By setting up this automatic sorting machine in his mind, it was still possible in 1932 for a European to live in Russia and yet to remain a Communist.”¹⁴³

Idealistic fellow-travelers found it especially difficult to cope with evidence that the leaders of Soviet Russia were not altruistic benefactors of mankind but self-seeking politicians of an unusually ruthless kind. They rarely talked, therefore, of Communist politics—of the Party’s role in Soviet life, of the factional struggles within it, of the intrigues and slander which accompanied the purges that became a regular feature of Communist life once the Civil War was over. They preferred to treat Communism as exclusively a social and cultural phenomenon. Anna Louise Strong, one of the most faithful fellow-travelers, first of Moscow and then of Peking, could not acknowledge even to herself that her Communist idols struggled for personal power, as ordinary politicians do everywhere, so fixed were her eyes on the ultimate goals of Communism. To her, Stalin’s expulsion of Trotsky from the Party made no sense: “I never quite saw why he was thrown out,” she wrote. “I couldn’t see so much difference between those theories. Everybody wanted to build this country, didn’t they?”¹⁴⁴ Even after Stalin had become absolute master of the Soviet Union, such people would deny his dictatorship had a political dimension: “Oddly enough, the fellow-travellers were victims of their own intelligence and high education. Having learned in the best Enlightenment manner that there is a material or environmental cause of everything, they were not to be taken in by obscurantist hocus-pocus about one man’s megalomania and paranoia.”¹⁴⁵ In sum, the more intelligent and well-educated a person, the more difficult it was for him to grasp the true nature of a regime which observed no rational principles and which habitually resorted to violence to resolve differences that in a normal society are settled by compromises or appeals to the electorate. Coming to grips with such a regime came easier, for once, to the poor and uneducated, whom experience has always taught to accept irrationality and violence as facts of life.

Fellow-travelers were mesmerized by Stalin’s tyranny: instead of seeing it as the crassest violation of Communist claims to democracy, they interpreted it as a guarantee of Communism’s purity, since by eliminating politics and all the sordid infighting that went with it, it enabled the Communists to concentrate on what they assumed to be the movement’s ultimate objective. Paradoxically, as soon as the Communist leaders themselves began to admit to failures and crimes, which happened after Stalin’s death, fellow-travelers deserted them in droves. Soon the breed vanished. For the idealistic fellow-travelers, self-delusion was a necessity: they would ignore oppression and mass murder in the name of an ideal rather than subscribe to a more humane policy whose pragmatism robbed them of Utopian dreams.

The soul of the idealistic fellow-traveler was an eternal battleground. For many, there was a limit to the negative evidence they were capable of rejecting: for them, sooner or later, came the moment of truth—for some, the expulsion of Trotsky, for others, the trials of the 1930s, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the suppression of Hungarian liberty. In every case it meant not only a painful admission of having been wrong, but a break with a community of believers of which one had been part, resulting in isolation as well as ostracism. Those who underwent this wrenching experience stress in their memoirs the misery of breaking with friends and finding themselves adrift in a hostile world in which not only Communists and fellow-travelers but liberals, too, treated them like despicable renegades.^* For others, the limits of tolerance were infinitely expandable, and there was literally nothing that the Communists did for which they could not produce a satisfactory explanation.

The archetypal idealistic fellow-traveler was John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, a book that more than any other contributed to making foreigners look at the Russian Revolution as a great romantic adventure. Reed’s career combined the elements that, in varying proportions, went into the making of most fellow-travelers: middle-class origin, inordinate and unsatisfied intellectual ambition, genuine idealism. The son of a utility magnate from Oregon, he had spent his childhood in luxury, attended by liveried footmen, in a whirl of parties and balls.¹⁴⁶ At Harvard he found himself an outsider: his nouveau riche background did not impress schoolmates, and his un-“Aryan” appearance—he was clumsy, with large eyes and dark hair—did not help. To his chagrin, he failed to make a “final” club. Walter Lippmann, who studied at Harvard with him, described Reed as someone for whom objects acquired reality only to the extent that they could be personalized: “Revolution, literature, poetry, they are things which hold him at times, incidents merely of his living.”¹⁴⁷ He seems to have had cravings for intense experiences and for impressing others. A few days after arriving in Cambridge, he proposed to a fellow student collaboration on a book on Harvard. Asked how he proposed to write on a subject about which neither knew anything, Reed replied, “Hell, we’ll find out doing the thing.”¹⁴⁸

It was in this spirit that he approached the Russian Revolution. He was as ignorant of Russia’s past as he was of her language;¹⁴⁹ nor did he know anything about socialism. But this did not matter: revolutions were high adventure, Reed’s first journalistic coup was an account of the Mexican Revolution. By the time he arrived in Petrograd in September 1917—it was his second visit, for he had spent a brief and unhappy time there as a war correspondent in the summer of 1915—he was one of America’s most highly paid journalists. He was enchanted with the sights that greeted his eyes: “For color and terror and grandeur,” he wrote on arrival, “this makes Mexico look pale.” He observed the October coup rather like a spectator viewing a film in an unfamiliar foreign language, and in two months of feverish effort wrote down his impressions. Ten Days is structured as drama and could have served as a script for a colossal D. W. Griffith film. It has its stars—Lenin, Trotsky, and a few other leading Bolsheviks—backed by a supporting cast of thousands. The hero is the proletariat; the villain, the “propertied classes,” in which category he places everyone, socialists included, who stands in the Bolsheviks’ way. All complexities, whether of character or narrative, are ignored for the sake of fast-paced, easily understood action pitting the “good guys” against the “bad.”

30. John Reed and Louise Bryant.

Carried away by what he had seen, Reed turned fellow-traveler.^* Like many sympathetic Western observers, he was captivated not by revolutionary ideas but by the Revolution’s dynamism, in such sharp contrast with the despair of “bourgeois” Europe—by what a fellow journalist with similar political ideas described as “the creative effort of the Revolution … the living, vivifying expression of something hitherto hidden in the consciousness of humanity.”^† Reed’s book, published in 1919 with Lenin’s introduction, made a great impression. Since its appearance it has been widely regarded as a reliable account of October 1917, even though as a historical record its only merit lies in conveying how the Russian Revolution struck the imagination of an outsider in quest of excitement.^*

Reed’s disillusionment with Bolshevism began with his return to Soviet Russia in October 1919, when he became aware of how Russian Communists manipulated the Comintern, which he had joined, and what misery they had brought to Russia’s rural population, as observed on a boat trip on the Volga. He died of typhus in 1920, a thoroughly disenchanted man. Angelica Balabanoff, who was with him during his last days, believes that the “disillusionment and disgust which he experienced during the Second Congress of the Communist International contributed to the causes of his death. The moral and nervous shock deprived him of the wish to live.”¹⁵⁰ His break came quickly and early, because, being emotionally rather than intellectually committed to Communism, he lacked the better-informed fellow-traveler’s repertoire of rationalizations with which to shield against disappointment.

Others had an easier time of it. Reed’s widow, Louise Bryant, managed to accommodate herself to unpleasant experiences in Soviet Russia and even to find a good word for the Red Terror. This terror, she insisted, was a policy forced on such sensitive men as Lenin and Dzerzhinskii by circumstances beyond their control: “It was [Dzerzhinskii’s] duty to see that the prisoners were quickly and humanely disposed of. He performed this grim task with a dispatch and an efficiency for which even the condemned must have been grateful, in that nothing is more horrible than an executioner whose hand trembles and whose heart wavers.”¹⁵¹

One could shut one’s eyes to Soviet reality even while living in Soviet Russia, but it was obviously easier to do so from a distance. Louise Bryant chose to eulogize Soviet Communism from the Côte d’Azur, where she had settled with her millionaire husband, William Bullitt. After Hitler’s advent to power, Feuchtwanger and the circle of German fellow-travelers he headed also found southern France a congenial refuge. Lincoln Steffens, an ardent apologist first for Lenin and then for Stalin, similarly preferred to make his home in the sunny regions and the spas of the capitalist West, initially on the Riviera and ultimately in Carmel, California. “I am a patriot for Russia,” he wrote a friend in 1926, “the Future is there; Russia will win out and it will save the world. That is my belief. But I don’t want to live there.” The letter was postmarked Karlsbad.¹⁵²

The open hostility of Russia’s Communist regime to “capitalism,” and especially its denial of the right of private property, should have turned the Western business community into an uncompromising foe of Lenin’s government. In fact, many of the pot-bellied, top-hatted capitalists of Soviet propaganda posters turned out to be remarkably friendly and cooperative. Western capitalists lost no sleep over the fate of their Russian brethren: they were quite prepared to make deals with the Soviet regime, leasing or buying at bargain prices the sequestered properties of Russian owners.^* No group promoted collaboration with Soviet Russia more assiduously and more effectively than the European and American business communities. The Bolsheviks exploited their eagerness to do business by having them pressure Western governments for diplomatic recognition and economic assistance. When the first Soviet commercial missions arrived in Europe in the summer of 1920 in quest of credits and technology, they were shunned by organized labor, but welcomed by big business. Hugo Stinnes, the head of the Union of German Industrialists and an early backer of Hitler, while hosting the Soviet delegation, declared that he was “favorably disposed toward Russia and her experiments.”¹⁵³ In France, the delegation was advised by a right-wing deputy not to rely on Communists and left-socialists: “Tell Lenin that the best way to win France over to doing business with Russia is through the businessmen of France. They are our only realists.”^†

Businessmen eager to exploit Russia’s natural resources and sell to her manufactured goods justified trading with a regime that had violated, at home and abroad, all accepted norms of civilized behavior, with the following arguments: First, any country was entitled to the government of its choice. Hence, it would be not only unrealistic but undemocratic to ostracize Soviet Russia. As Bernard Baruch said in 1920: “The Russian people have a right, it seems to me, to set up any form of government they wish.”¹⁵⁴ The unspoken premise behind this argument was that the Russian people had chosen the Communist government. Second, trade civilizes, because it teaches common sense and discredits abstract doctrines. This argument was frequently resorted to by Lloyd George, who in February 1920 called for the reopening of commercial relations with Soviet Russia: “We have failed to restore Russia to sanity by force. I believe we can do it and save her by trade. Commerce has a sobering effect in its operations. The simple sums in addition and subtraction which it inculcates soon dispose of wild theories.”¹⁵⁵ Henry Ford, who managed to reconcile rabid anti-Communism and anti-Semitism with highly profitable commercial arrangements with the Soviet Union, also believed in the moral force of reality: “facts will control” ideas, he asserted, unwittingly paraphrasing Marx’s dictum that being determines consciousness. The more the Communists industrialized, he argued, the more decently they would behave because “rightness in mechanics [and] rightness in morals are basically the same thing.”¹⁵⁶

Such rationalizations, frequently repeated and sometimes believed, received added strength from the unwillingness of businessmen to treat seriously Communist slogans about the coming world revolution. Businessmen tend to see in their own motives, in which material self-interest is the guiding force, the common aspirations of humanity. Ideas and ideologies not based on such interest they regard either as signs of immaturity or as camouflage: in the former case, they are curable by the actions of time, in the latter, they can be neutralized by attractive commercial propositions. The social and economic programs of the Bolsheviks appeared so fantastic to the average homme d’affaires that he refused to accept them at face value: as far as he was concerned, Russia’s new rulers either did not mean what they said or else would quickly realize the absurdity of their ideas. In either event, they should be put to the test.

The Bolsheviks adroitly exploited this fallacy: already in 1918, Ioffe and Krasin had with some success advised German businessmen to ignore Moscow’s “maximalism.”¹⁵⁷ After the Civil War, when the economy had suffered a catastrophic collapse, Soviet representatives abroad used a similar tactic insinuating that, notwithstanding the Comintern, their country’s supreme interest lay in peaceful commerce. While heading a trade mission to Britain in 1920–21, Krasin painted for English businessmen enticing prospects of trade with his country, which, in truth, had next to nothing to sell and little with which to buy. Moscow, which understood the weaknesses of the Western psyche far better than its strengths, exploited these illusions to the utmost. The New Economic Policy, a relaxation of economic restrictions introduced in 1921, which it depicted at home as a tactical and temporary retreat, was advertised abroad by no less an authority than Chicherin as intended to create “in Russia conditions that will favor the development of private initiative in the fields of industry, agriculture, transport, and commerce.”¹⁵⁸ Such propaganda was readily believed by Western statesmen and businessmen since it fitted their preconceptions. The New York Times found a ready audience when it declared in 1921 in a dispatch of its Moscow correspondent that the Soviet government was “getting back to individualism” and personal initiative.¹⁵⁹

A major reason why Western businessmen were so willing to ignore contrary evidence lay in the widespread conviction that Russia offered unlimited opportunities for the exploitation of natural resources and an outlet for manufactured goods; in the United States it was seen as the greatest “empty” market in the world, and in England as a “gold mine.”¹⁶⁰ Given the immense expansion of productive capacity during World War I, especially in the United States, the Western business community had a very strong interest in the Russian market.

As it turned out, commercial arrangements paved the way for diplomatic recognition, which Western governments were reluctant to grant Soviet Russia because of her renunciation of debts and her subversive activities. Moscow had all along assumed, correctly as it turned out, that the way to diplomatic recognition lay through trade agreements, a premise Lloyd George confirmed when he told the House of Commons in March 1921 that the recent Anglo-Soviet trade accords were tantamount to de facto recognition of the Soviet state.^*

The attitude of American labor could not have been more different. Samuel Gompers, the President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), called the Bolsheviks “pirates.” His successor, William Green, adopted a similar stance. American trade unions time and again turned down with large majorities pro-Communist resolutions sponsored by a small radical wing. The only organized labor groups to adopt a conciliatory attitude toward Soviet Russia were the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, both organized by immigrants from Russia who harbored romantic illusions about the Communist experiment.

The posture of Western governments toward Soviet Russia was affected by a variety of factors, some of them of a contradictory nature. As had been the case with revolutionary France, the great powers were not unhappy to see a traditional rival weakened by internal turmoil. This fact was noted with dismay by Peter Struve, Wrangel’s Foreign Minister, when in the summer of 1920 he met with Allied diplomats to seek help for his government.¹⁶¹ The Germans in 1918, and Lloyd George as well as Joseph Pilsudski in 1919, acted on the assumption that Bolshevik Russia presented less of a threat than would a restored national Russia. This consideration helped them suppress their loathing of Communism and fear of its subversive activities.

The Western powers could not immediately grant recognition to the Soviet government even after victory in the Civil War had given it undisputed control of the country, because of its reputation as an outlaw regime: a regime that not only treated its citizens in a barbarous manner, but violated accepted norms of international conduct. In the latter category, its worst offense was repudiating the country’s debts and nationalizing foreign properties.

Defaulting on debt was not a Soviet invention: it was a practice frequently resorted to by capitalist governments.^* Even so, there was a fundamental and very troubling innovation in the Soviet move. Traditionally, defaulting countries pleaded inability to pay without denying responsibility for their debts. The Soviet decree of January 21, 1918, was the first instance in history of a government repudiating its country’s obligations on principle. The Soviet action could not be accepted without imperiling the entire structure of international finance. No less important was its size, which dwarfed every previous default. As of January 1, 1918, the Russian state debt, domestic and foreign, was estimated at 60 billion rubles (nominally, 30 billion dollars), of which 13 billion rubles (6.5 billion dollars) was owed to foreign creditors.¹⁶² In addition, Soviet nationalization decrees inflicted heavy losses on foreign owners of Russian enterprises and securities: French investors alone lost 2.8 billion dollars.

Moscow realized that this issue presented the greatest single obstacle to normalizing foreign relations and securing economic assistance abroad. In 1919, 1920, and 1921, Chicherin and other Soviet officials hinted more than once that their government was prepared, under certain conditions, both to repay its foreign debts and to compensate foreign investors. Thus, in July 1920, in response to the terms submitted by Britain for a trade accord, Moscow acknowledged “in principle” its obligation to repay moneys owed foreign citizens.¹⁶³ This total Russian foreign debt (to foreign governments and individuals) was estimated by officials in the Commissariat of Finance to amount to 4.4 billion gold rubles (2.2 billion dollars) of debt incurred before the outbreak of the World War, more than half of it owed to France, and the wartime debt of 8 billion gold rubles (4 billion dollars), mostly owed to Great Britain.¹⁶⁴ That the offer of repayment was not serious became apparent when the Soviet government made known its conditions: it would honor foreign debts provided that it received, in return, compensation for losses suffered from foreign assistance to its enemies. These, in its estimate, considerably exceeded the sums due to foreigners. Just by how much may be gathered from an internal report prepared for Lenin by an official in the Commissariat of Finance, S. Piliavskii, in September 1921. Combining the direct expenses for the Civil War, entirely charged to the Allies, with compensation for deaths and wounds suffered by the Red Army, also charged to them, Piliavskii arrived at the figure of 16.5 billion gold rubles (8.25 billion dollars). To this sum he added 30 billion gold rubles owed for “losses caused by pogroms and the moral injury inflicted on the population by torture,” which he fixed at 30 billion gold rubles. He then added the cost of epidemics, decline of education, and all else that afflicted Russia since October 1917, to arrive at the global sum of 185.8 billion gold rubles or 92.9 billion dollars, which Soviet Russia could demand from the Allies. Piliavskii further thought, without attaching a figure, that Russia had the right to compensation for failing to obtain Constantinople and having to accept an unsatisfactory border with Poland.¹⁶⁵ These absurd claims were never released: Lenin recommended that they be seriously studied, but that the relevant documentation be destroyed.^166*

Because of such factors, any rapprochement with Soviet Russia had to be accomplished gradually and obliquely: the way chosen was commerce. Lloyd George had unbounded faith in its efficacy: “The moment trade is established with Russia,” he predicted, “Communism will go.”¹⁶⁷ British “experts” saw great economic advantages accruing to the West from such trade, on the grounds that imports of Russian cereals, timber, and flax would lower world costs of these commodities and compel the United States to reduce grain prices.¹⁶⁸ In December 1919 and January 1920, the Allies agreed in Paris to terminate military intervention in Soviet Russia and to resume normal commercial relations with her.¹⁶⁹ But trade, too, was difficult to initiate as long as the issue of Russian debts remained unresolved, since Soviet assets were liable to be seized abroad by creditors. Hence, the Allies decided to open commercial relations not with the Soviet government but with Russian cooperatives.^† From talks with Soviet cooperative leaders, including the head of Russian cooperatives abroad, Alexander Berkenheim, they learned that these organizations were “apolitical.” The Paris bureau of the Russian cooperative movement claimed to have 25 million members and to hold vast stocks of grain for export. On January 16, 1920, the Allies agreed to enter into trade relations with the Russian cooperative organization, stipulating that this step did not imply diplomatic recognition.

In truth, Soviet cooperatives were not independent agents, having been nationalized in the spring of 1919 and integrated into the state economic machinery: their directing organ, Tsentrsoiuz, was a government department. The little independence they had managed to preserve they lost on January 27, 1920, when, anticipating their use in dealings with the West, Lenin drafted a decree placing them under complete Communist control.¹⁷⁰ The following month, Krasin departed for Western Europe to negotiate as head of Tsentrsoiuz. In reality, he represented the Soviet foreign trade organization (Vneshtorg): Radek described him as traveling in a “Trojan horse.”¹⁷¹ The charade made it possible for Western enterprises, eager for trade with Russia, to resume commerce without settling the thorny issue of Russian debts.

Fiction paved the way for reality. In the spring of 1920, Britain initiated commercial discussions with Moscow. The war with Poland and other impediments delayed the signing of a trade accord until April 1921. In the meantime, in May 1920, Sweden and Germany had concluded their own trade agreements with Moscow. These were the first commercial treaties between Soviet Russia and Western governments. The United States lifted the ban on private trade with Russia in July 1920. Soon the major European countries followed suit.

To the architects of Soviet Russia’s foreign policy four countries were of special concern: Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany. The highest priority they assigned to relations with Germany.

France remained the most implacable foe of the Bolshevik regime, for economic as well as political reasons. She had the greatest investments in Russia, and, therefore, suffered the greatest losses from Bolshevik defaults and nationalizations. She wanted a government there that would make good these losses. France also desired a friendly Russia to counterbalance Germany, whose revanchist aspirations she greatly feared. The U.S. refusal to join the League of Nations and to honor the pledge, given jointly with Britain, to defend France from foreign aggression, left her exposed and insecure. France sought to compensate for her weakness by conducting an intransigent policy toward the Weimar Republic and creating a cordon sanitaire separating Germany from Soviet Russia. The policy was exceedingly short-sighted, for it had the effect of undermining Germany’s pro-Western government and pushing the Bolsheviks and German nationalists into each other’s arms. Moscow had nothing to expect from France.

The United States, which had been relatively uninvolved in continental rivalries and lost relatively little from Soviet economic actions^* regarded Communist Russia as an outlaw state and refused to have official dealings with her. In August 1920, the U.S. Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, explained why the United States could not recognize the “present rulers of Russia as a government with which the relations common to friendly governments can be maintained.” This stemmed not from objections to her political or social system, but from the Soviet regime’s violations of “every usage and convention underlying the whole structure of international law.” Its leaders “have frequently and openly boasted that they are willing to sign agreements and undertakings with foreign Powers while not having the slightest intention of observing such undertakings or carrying out such agreements.” They have furthermore declared:

The very existence of Bolshevism in Russia, the maintenance of their own rule, depends, and must continue to depend, upon the occurrence of revolutions in all other great civilized nations, including the United States, which will overthrow and destroy their governments and set up Bolshevist rule in their stead. They have made it quite plain that they intend to use every means, including, of course, diplomatic agencies, to promote such revolutionary movements in other countries.¹⁷²

Washington, however, did not object to private commercial dealings with the Soviet government, which in the 1920s were by no means negligible.

From the time Britain had disengaged from the Civil War, and until his resignation in October 1922, Britain’s policy toward Soviet Russia was dominated by Lloyd George. The Prime Minister, unfortunately, knew very little about that country: how little, he revealed in a speech in which he informed the House of Commons that Britain was assisting not only General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak, but even “General Kharkoff.”¹⁷³ With the troublesome Whites out of the way, he intended to repair relations with the Soviet government, starting with trade, which would bring economic benefits to Britain and, at the same time, help moderate Communism.

Public opinion in Britain was strongly anti-Communist for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was resentment over Russia’s defection in 1917 from the war, for which England paid with many lives. The British press, led by the Times, gave great prominence to stories of Bolshevik atrocities. The Foreign Office and the War Ministry both opposed a rapprochement with Soviet Russia. Churchill, however, was discredited by now and without influence. His anti-Bolshevism was regarded as a personal obsession; the failed intervention was ridiculed as “Mr. Churchill’s private war.”¹⁷⁴ In the Commons in February 1920, Lloyd George made a plea for “peace and trade with the Bolsheviks.” “Trade,” he said, “will bring an end to the ferocity … of Bolshevism.” Did Russia have anything to trade? Certainly, he told the skeptics: “the corn bins of Russia are bulging with grain.”¹⁷⁵ In this case the Prime Minister was not so much ignorant as disingenuous: although for public consumption he depicted Soviet Russia as a cornucopia, he was in receipt of information from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, that the country faced “complete economic disaster” and was in desperate need of foreign economic aid.¹⁷⁶ Lloyd George resorted to deception because given the state of public opinion, the rapprochement with Bolshevik Russia that he ardently desired had to be disguised as economically beneficial to Britain.

British-Soviet negotiations began with the arrival in London in May 1920 of a Soviet trade mission headed by Krasin, the only prominent Bolshevik with business experience. Krasin came as the representative of Russian cooperatives, but from the outset his mission was treated as a diplomatic one, to the extent of Britain’s allowing him to communicate with Moscow by code and to dispatch and receive mail under seal.¹⁷⁷

Although less hurt than France, Britain had lost substantial sums from Soviet defaults: Russia owed her 629 million pounds, more than nine-tenths of it borrowed during the war.^* Hoping to be repaid in due course, Britain was prepared for the time being to be satisfied with Moscow’s acknowledgment of responsibility for this debt. Her main concern now lay elsewhere: in Communist agitation in British industrial centers and the Middle East. Lloyd George’s cabinet apparently hoped that in return for de facto recognition, implied by a trade accord, Moscow would cease such hostile activities.

Churchill believed these expectations to be naïve:

The Bolsheviks are fanatics. Nothing will turn a fanatic from his purpose. L[loyd] G[eorge] thinks he can talk them over and that they will see the error of their ways and the impracticability of their schemes. Nothing of the sort! Their view is that their system has not been successful because it has not been tried on a large enough scale, and that in order to secure success they must make it world-wide.¹⁷⁸

But Churchill’s warnings went unheeded, and the trade negotiations got underway on May 31, 1920, when Krasin met with Lloyd George and his staff. For the Soviet government this encounter represented a historic breakthrough: the first occasion when its emissary was received by the head of government of a great power.¹⁷⁹ Krasin turned out to be so charming, his appearance and behavior contrasted so sharply with the prevalent image of Bolsheviks as savages, that some Englishmen who met him expressed doubts whether he was the genuine article. He told his hosts that the issue of Russia’s debts would be settled following the restoration of peace and full diplomatic relations between the two countries. He insisted, however, that Britain would have to refrain from giving aid to Poland during their war. In the matter of supreme concern to Britain, namely hostile Soviet propaganda, especially in the Middle East, he promised that if Britain committed herself to normalizing relations and ceased further assistance to Soviet Russia’s enemies (including Wrangel, who was still holding out in the Crimea), “she, in turn, [was] prepared to furnish full guarantees from participation in or connivance at any kind of hostile action, not only in the East but elsewhere.”¹⁸⁰ In giving this pledge, Krasin apparently exceeded his mandate, because British intelligence intercepted and decoded an angry rebuke from Chicherin protesting these concessions, and from Lenin the following advice: “That swine Lloyd George has no scruples or shame in the way he deceives. Don’t believe a word he says and gull him three times as much.”^*

The negotiations were temporarily disrupted by the Red Army’s invasion of Poland, which caused great consternation in London: the prospect of a Communist Poland and a common border between Soviet Russia and Germany alarmed even Lloyd George.¹⁸¹ In July 1920 Krasin returned to Russia.

In Moscow’s eyes, Germany held the key to world revolution: nowhere did the Comintern pursue more zealously its subversive activities. German was the official language of the first two Congresses of the Comintern, and German delegates to them were accorded special honors. Moscow sent its top officials, Zinoviev and Radek, to address conferences of German socialist parties and trade unions.

The main obstacle to the Comintern’s designs on Germany was its Social-Democratic Party (SPD). It was a socialist government that suppressed Communist rebellions in the winter of 1918–19, and again in March 1921. The German socialists knew the Bolsheviks from long association in the Second International and treated them with unconcealed disdain. The Bolsheviks repaid them by slandering SPD leaders with particular vehemence.

The SPD stand on the Bolshevik regime was first formulated in the summer of 1918 by Karl Kautsky in The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Kautsky, who had personally known Marx and Engels and served as their literary executor, spoke with unique authority. He had opposed World War I and helped found the party’s radical wing, the USPD. He had welcomed the October coup. But the Bolsheviks’ methods of government were to him entirely unacceptable. He reproached them for establishing a one-party dictatorship and for pretending that the soviets were a superior form of democracy while using them to destroy democracy. The Bolshevik regime had nothing in common with socialism. Kautsky rejected the Bolsheviks’ favorite analogy with the Paris Commune: “[The Paris Commune] was the work of the whole proletariat. All socialist currents participated in it: none excluded itself or was excluded from it. By contrast, the socialist party that today rules Russia came to power in a struggle against the other socialist parties. It exercises power to the exclusion from its ruling organs of the other socialist parties.”¹⁸² In 1919, Kautsky published a second appraisal of the Soviet experiment, Terrorism and Communism.¹⁸³ Here he described the Soviet Russian regime as “Kasernensozialismus” (“barracks socialism”).

The Bolshevik leaders could not ignore this criticism, coming as it did from a man widely seen as the heir of Marx and Engels. Lenin, unable or unwilling to cope with Kautsky’s arguments, resorted to abuse. In an essay written at the end of 1918 he castigated the German socialist as a “bourgeois lackey” and “base renegade.”¹⁸⁴ Trotsky gave a more reasoned reply in his own Terrorism and Communism.^* Conceding that Soviet Russia was a dictatorship, he pointed out that it was a dictatorship of the working class: in submitting to compulsion, the worker was in fact obeying himself.¹⁸⁵ Marx, he argued, had never made a shibboleth of democracy and had never placed it above the class struggle.

Especially damaging to the Bolshevik reputation in Germany was the censure of Rosa Luxemburg, who jointly with Karl Liebknecht headed the Spartacists, and whom no one, not even Lenin, dared to accuse of being a renegade, since she paid for her convictions with her life. Luxemburg actively worked for a socialist revolution in Germany during and after World War I and also approved of the Bolshevik coup. Nevertheless, she opposed Moscow’s insistence on an immediate seizure of power in Germany on the grounds that German workers were not ready to take over. She also opposed the creation of the Comintern, fearing that it was bound to lead to the domination of international Communism by the Bolsheviks, whom she mistrusted.¹⁸⁶

In the fall of 1918, while in prison for her antiwar activities, Luxemburg wrote a critique of Lenin’s regime. German Communists judged it “inopportune” and delayed its publication until 1922: even then, they saw fit to bring it out only in a bowdlerized version.¹⁸⁷ Luxemburg lauded the Bolsheviks as the only committed socialists in Russia. She disapproved, however, of the Land Decree, because it strengthened the peasant’s proprietary instincts and widened the gulf between city and countryside. She also denounced the Bolshevik policy of “national self-determination” as responsible for the disintegration of the Russian Empire, a regressive phenomenon from the socialist point of view.

But, like Kautsky, she reserved her harshest words for the Bolshevik suppression of democracy. (She did not refer to the Red Terror, formally introduced in September 1918, possibly because she did not know of it.) The critical event in the political degeneration of the Bolshevik regime was the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly. If, as the Bolsheviks claimed in self-justification, the Assembly elected in November 1917 no longer reflected the mood of the masses as of January 1918, then they should have held fresh elections instead of liquidating it. Next in importance came the suppression of the press and the rights to assembly and association, “without which the rule of the broad masses is utterly inconceivable.”¹⁸⁸

Freedom only for supporters of the Government, only for members of the Party, no matter how numerous they may be, is no freedom. Freedom is always the freedom for him who thinks differently. Not because of a fanatical commitment to “justice,” but because everything enlightening, wholesome, and purifying in political liberty derives from its independence and loses effectiveness when “freedom” turns into a privilege.¹⁸⁹

She criticized the Bolshevik practice of governing by decree, which had been a fine device for destroying the old order but was worse than useless in constructing a new one. Creativity demanded unfettered freedom. “The public life of states with restricted freedom turns out to be so inadequate, so poor, so schematic, so infertile, precisely because, by excluding democracy, it dams up all the living sources of prosperity and progress.”¹⁹⁰ Without openness, Soviet officialdom was bound to fall prey to corruption. She predicted the thorough bureaucratization of Soviet life: its consequence will be a dictatorship not of the proletariat but of a “handful of politicians, i.e., a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of Jacobin rule.”¹⁹¹

These astute analyses, which anticipated the theories of the “Eurocommunists” of the 1960s, Luxemburg went on to weaken with the absurd claim that, properly understood, “dictatorship” was not an alternative to “democracy” but its complement: “Dictatorship is the art of using democracy, not of eliminating it.”¹⁹² As she defined it, the dictatorship of the proletariat presumed mass participation. When leading the German Revolution in November 1918, she would indeed insist that the “Spartacus League will never take power except in accordance with the clearly expressed will of the great majority of the proletariat masses of Germany”¹⁹³—which was as good as saying never. In practice she exhorted the minuscule minority of revolutionaries affiliated with the Spartacists to topple the government of Philipp Scheidemann and Friedrich Ebert, although the government had taken office with the consent of the All-German Council Congress, which represented the great majority of German labor.¹⁹⁴

These polemics revealed once again the cultural chasm separating Russian and European radicals. Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg spoke of democracy and civil freedom as indispensable preconditions of socialism. For Lenin and Trotsky, who had acquired their political education under tsarism, politics was warfare and victory required unquestioned obedience: in Trotsky’s phrase, “intimidation” was as indispensable to revolution as to war¹⁹⁵—a truism that by a sleight of tongue was made to apply not to enemies but to one’s own people. Both Lenin and Trotsky argued in the terms, sometimes in the actual language, of the most reactionary defenders of tsarist autocracy. But whatever their argument lacked in theoretical substance, it gained from the incontrovertible fact that they had acquired power and their German critics had not.

Controversies of this kind exacerbated the animosity between the Bolsheviks and German Social Democrats. Although the SPD opposed Allied intervention in Russia and in 1920 prevented Allied military supplies from reaching Poland, Moscow never forgot that it was their government that had suppressed Communist uprisings in Germany. To add to its sins, the SPD favored a pro-Western policy. In 1923, Zinoviev publicly accused German Social Democrats of paving the way for the “Fascists.”¹⁹⁶ This charge became official policy of the Comintern after its Fifth Congress had designated the German Social-Democratic Party the “left-wing of Fascism.”¹⁹⁷

Moscow, however, was not without potential allies in Germany, and of these the most promising were the reactionary political and military circles, the future supporters of Hitler. It was a marriage of convenience based on a shared hatred of the SPD and the Versailles Treaty.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the remarkable continuity of German Russlandpolitik from its birth in Imperial Germany, through the Weimar Republic to the Nazi era. From the February Revolution until the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia, German conservatives and militarists viewed an alliance with Russia, in which Germany would play the role of senior partner, as an indispensable precondition first of retaining and then, after November 1918, of recapturing for their country the status of a world power.¹⁹⁸ During the Weimar period this trend was intensified by the desire to abrogate the Versailles Treaty, in which Germans could only rely on the help of Moscow. As soon as the terms of the treaty had been made public (May 1919), the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs denounced it and appealed to German workers to follow suit.¹⁹⁹ The Comintern released on May 13 a proclamation, “Down with the Versailles Treaty!” which set the tone of its policy.²⁰⁰ This reaction paved the way for an understanding between Moscow and the German right. Standing alone against France and the “Anglo-Saxons,” Germany was powerless; with Soviet Russia at her side, she was a power to be reckoned with.²⁰¹ The issue was starkly formulated by the German Prime Minister, Joseph Wirth: “The only chance I see for us to rise again as a great power is for the German and Russian people to work together as neighbors in friendship and understanding.”²⁰²

The attraction of nationalistic Germans for Soviet Russia became evident as early as 1919, when a German academic of extreme right-wing views urged the adoption of Bolshevism as a means of escaping Allied “enslavement.”²⁰³ Such ideas produced a curious movement, labeled by Karl Radek “National Bolshevism,” which gained a following in the left wing of the Nazi Party. Its philosophy called for an alliance between Communists and nationalists in a united front against democracy and the Western powers. Although Moscow initially rejected this heresy, which won some adherents also in the German Communist Party (KPD), it soon changed its mind. In March 1920, during the so-called Kapp putsch organized by right-wing politicians and generals to place the country under a military dictatorship, the leadership of the German Communist Party, almost certainly on orders from Moscow, assumed a neutral stance, announcing that “the proletariat will not lift a finger for the democratic republic.”^* If Moscow could not have a Communist Germany, it preferred a right-wing military dictatorship there to a democracy governed by the Social Democrats.

The link between Moscow and the German right was provided by Radek, who had spent many years before the war in Germany working as a Social Democratic journalist and knew well German conditions. Incarcerated in February 1919 for his role in the Spartacist revolt, he was at first kept in strict isolation. After the publication of the Versailles Treaty his treatment greatly improved and henceforth he lived in comfortable quarters, treated more like a guest than a prisoner. In August 1919, when he was allowed visitors, he established what he called a “prison salon,” receiving Communists as well as prominent military and political figures, including Walter Rathenau, then President of the giant AEG concern and later Minister of Foreign Affairs, a strong advocate of economic ties with Soviet Russia.²⁰⁴ Radek owed such preferential treatment to German generals eager to inaugurate military cooperation with Moscow. The Spartacist Ruth Fischer was astonished to have her meeting with Radek arranged by officers who provided her with false identity papers for the occasion.²⁰⁵

Radek had been sent to Germany to organize a revolution. The experience of the Spartacist revolts, however, disillusioned him: he reluctantly concluded that Germany was not ripe for revolution and would be of greater use to Soviet Russia as a military and economic partner. Under his influence, Rathenau founded a commission to study the prospects of trade with Russia.²⁰⁶ In October 1919 Germany rejected the Allied demand that she join in the blockade of Russia: it was her first act of defiance since Versailles.²⁰⁷ The action received full backing from the nationalist right. In November Germany welcomed Victor Kopp, an official of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Kopp’s ostensible task was to arrange for the exchange of civilian and military prisoners of war, but he was treated as a de facto Soviet envoy and permitted to communicate with Moscow in cipher.²⁰⁸ He sent Lenin frequent and elaborate letters on the internal situation in Germany and on Russo-German relations. In January 1920 Gustav Hilger went to Moscow as his counterpart.²⁰⁹

Collaboration with Soviet Russia had support among various strata of German opinion, the Social Democrats excepted, but its most zealous champions were the military, and among them no one supported it more enthusiastically than General Hans von Seeckt, a political general who viewed the army as the “purest reflection of the State.”²¹⁰ The provisions of the Versailles Treaty requiring the virtual demilitarization of Germany were for him tantamount to a death sentence on the nation. In March 1920 he refused to join the generals who under Wolfgang Kapp tried to seize power. His reward was appointment as Chief of the Army Command (Chef der Heeresleitung), the highest military post in the country, which he held until 1926.²¹¹ He immediately began to draw up plans for building an army of 21 modern divisions: once that force was in place, Germany would present the Allies with a fait accompli and renounce the Versailles Treaty.²¹² This objective, however, could be attained only with Soviet help.

31. Von Seeckt.

Seeckt, who cultivated Radek, initiated in 1919 secret military negotiations with Soviet Russia with the view to circumventing those provisions of the Versailles Treaty that denied the German army, or Reichswehr, the sinews of modern warfare: aviation, heavy artillery, tanks, and poison gas. The collaboration, which he initiated and which continued in greatest secrecy until 1933, was to prove of immense importance to both the German and Soviet armies in preparing them for World War II. Unfortunately, since the Germans systematically destroyed the documentary evidence²¹³ and the bulk of the Soviet documentation has not yet been released, much that concerns this episode remains obscure.²¹⁴

In Seeckt’s view, Germany’s unchangeable objective was political and economic understanding with “Great Russia.” It lay in Germany’s interest to help reconstruct Russia economically: while Russia needed Germany as a source of know-how and organization, Germany required Russian raw materials and foodstuffs.²¹⁵ Under postwar conditions this cooperation entailed the reestablishment, under Bolshevik rule, of the Russian state within its pre-1914 borders, which would restore a common border between the two countries; defeat of the White armies; and destruction of independent Poland, the bulwark of French influence:

Only in firm cooperation with a Great Russia does Germany stand a chance of regaining her position as a world power.… It is quite immaterial whether we like or dislike the new Russia and her internal structure. Our policy would have been the same vis-à-vis Tsarist Russia or a state under Kolchak or Denikin. Now we have to come to terms with Soviet Russia—we have no alternative.… If we disregard earlier times, when it was wrongly held that our eastern neighbor could be rendered harmless through demolition, blasting, and partition, now everybody’s eyes should be opened to the fact that the sole purpose of creating Poland, Lithuania, Latvia was to erect a wall to separate Germany from Russia.²¹⁶

To Seeckt and his followers, the very existence of independent Poland, a French “vassal” state, was an affront, since it provided the vital link in the French campaign to “encircle” Germany. Seeckt, Radek wrote Chicherin from Berlin, seemed perfectly calm and self-controlled except when the subject of Poland came up; then his eyes lit up like an animal’s: “She must be partitioned,” he said, “and will be partitioned as soon as Russia or Germany grows strong.”²¹⁷ This view was widely shared. Many Germans believed that the destruction of independent Poland would in and of itself abrogate the Versailles Treaty—which, as we have seen, happened to be Lenin’s view as well.^* It would have the effect of allowing Germany to break out of the isolation imposed on her by the victors. A memorandum drafted by the staff of the German Ministry of War defined the issue as follows:

The Allies realize clearly that only a German Reich that is surrounded on all sides by borderland states and in the West by the Allies cannot defend herself against the Versailles Treaty. Direct contact between Germany and Russia offers both countries fresh possibilities of development from which Germany must, without doubt, derive the greater advantage and greater utility in attaining the main objective: the revision of the Versailles Treaty.²¹⁸

To achieve this end, German nationalists were prepared to see the Red Army on the German frontier. They seem to have been unaware of Soviet strategy, for which the destruction of independent Poland was only a step to the German Revolution to be carried out with the help of the Red Army. In the summer of 1920 the majority of Germans, from the extreme left to the extreme right, cheered the Red Army as it advanced into Poland: in the Reichstag, all parties expressed sympathy for Russia’s side in the war.²¹⁹

On July 26, as the Red Army neared Warsaw, Seeckt sent the German President a memorandum outlining his political program.²²⁰ Soviet victory over Poland was a foregone conclusion. Soon Soviet troops will approach the frontier of Germany, he predicted, and the two countries will once again stand in immediate proximity: a principal objective of Versailles—isolating Germany from Russia—will be foiled. It was in Germany’s interest that Russia defeat Poland because Moscow was helping her fight “Anglo-Saxon capitalism and imperialism.” “The future belongs to Russia”: she was inexhaustible and unconquerable. “If Germany sides with Russia then she herself will become invincible”: the Allies will have to reckon with Germany because in back of her will stand a mighty power. By contrast, a Germany aligned with the West would turn into a nation of “helots.” Hence the government’s policy of buying Allied goodwill with concessions was contrary to the national interest. Russia’s intrusion in Germany’s internal affairs need not be feared: she was certain to respect her sovereignty because she needed Germany. But even if Russia were to violate the frontiers of 1914, rather than turn for help to the Western democracies Germany should enter into an alliance with her. Seeckt believed that a pro-Soviet policy would have the additional advantage of enabling the government to appease the masses attracted to Bolshevism, in this manner helping to stabilize the home front. He advocated reforms that would bring together manufacturers and workers and thus neutralize Communist agitation. His program of combining nationalism with socialism directly anticipated the strategy adopted by Hitler.

Collaboration with Soviet Russia was also favored by German industrialists alarmed by the prospect of shrinking markets for their manufactures in a world dominated by the victorious “Anglo-Saxons.” Already in the spring of 1919, a year before such commerce was officially legalized and in defiance of the Allied blockade, German enterprises began to export goods to Soviet Russia, accepting payment in worthless paper rubles. The Allied blockade and other obstacles to the illicit commerce were overcome by various devices, such as shipping merchandise by air from East Prussia or through neutral intermediaries.^* Such activities were justified with the argument that Germany could not afford to lose her traditional markets in Eastern Europe. The German Ministry of Economics in June 1919 argued as follows:

There is reason to fear that if in the future we should also refuse to have economic relations with Russia then other governments, notably England and the United States of America, will take our place in the Russian economy. According to information reaching us, unofficial representatives of the Entente and America are active in this direction, working to ensure for themselves all kinds of economic connection with Russia.²²¹

At a conference organized by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in February 1920, one of its officials said: “If in the past affairs connected with Russia were largely in German hands, then now our previous enemies are striving to take them into their own hands.”²²²

The pro-Soviet orientation of Germany’s politics and economics was vigorously supported by Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who in 1917, as ambassador to Copenhagen, had been instrumental in arranging for Lenin’s passage through Germany and would soon become Germany’s ambassador to Moscow.²²³ One of the few prominent dissenters from this consensus was Rathenau, who, favorable as he was to close relations with Soviet Russia, thought she was as yet in no position to become a serious trading partner: the idea that she had large surpluses for export he dismissed as “fables.” Russia could revert to her traditional role as exporter and importer only after Germany had rebuilt her economy. Personally, he preferred to see Germany in the role of “intermediary” between Russia and the United States.²²⁴

After Germany had legalized private commerce with Soviet Russia (May 1920) the two countries experienced a rapid growth of economic relations: in the next five months, Germany sold to Russia merchandise in excess of 100 million marks in value, mostly agricultural implements, printing machinery, and office equipment.²²⁵ Before long German firms entered into commercial agreements with Soviet Russia, from which they acquired concessions for the exploitation of natural resources. In January 1921, the Minister of Foreign Affairs told the Reichstag that his government had no objections to expanded commercial relations with Moscow: “Communism as such is no reason why a German republican and bourgeois government should not trade with the Soviet Government.”²²⁶ That summer, Krasin arrived in Germany. Following his visit, joint Soviet-German companies were set up to handle the sea and air traffic between the two countries. Concessions were granted to German firms, Krupp among them, to manufacture tractors. Ambitious plans were drawn up to lease the port and manufacturing facilities of Petrograd to the Krupp concern.²²⁷ Communist subversion and repeated putsches did not alarm German businessmen; apparently they did not take those activities seriously, and, in any event, they felt confident that giving Soviet Russia a stake in capitalism would make her less eager to subvert Germany: “The Bolsheviks must save us from Bolshevism,” was a slogan given currency by the Foreign Office.²²⁸ The Communist putsch of March 1921, launched at the very time when the two countries were negotiating trade agreements, had no effect on the talks.

Thus was put in place the groundwork for the German-Soviet rapprochement that the two powers were to spring on an unsuspecting world in 1922 at Rapallo.

Lenin made no secret of the importance he attached to propaganda: in a conversation with Bertrand Russell he identified it as one of the two factors that had enabled his government to survive against overwhelming odds (the other being the disunity of his opponents).²²⁹ We shall treat the domestic propaganda campaigns of the Communist regime elsewhere²³⁰ and here concentrate on their international dimension.

A major instrument of propaganda were the wire services, which the new regime nationalized. In September 1918, Moscow created the Russian Telegraphic Agency (Russkoe Telegrafnoe Agentstvo, or ROSTA) to serve “as the transmitter (provodnik) of the party line in the press.”²³¹ ROSTA was not so much an information as a propaganda agency: it employed, for example, artists to design posters. In 1922 it received a monopoly on information services. In 1925 it was renamed the Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union, or TASS.

The West was immensely curious about Soviet Russia, and as soon as the Civil War was over, numerous travelers and journalists made their way there. Some published accounts: the market for such eyewitness literature was insatiable because Western readers, confused by contradictory information about the Communist experiment, trusted it more. In France alone between 1918 and 1924 there appeared 34 accounts by returning travelers.²³² By the time of Lenin’s death, several hundred books and many more articles had been published in the West by foreign visitors to Soviet Russia.

Moscow could not, of course, control what foreigners wrote once they had returned home, but it could and did control whom to admit. Exit and entry visas were introduced early: two months after taking power, the new regime decreed that all who desired to leave or enter the country required permission and had to submit to frontier searches to ensure they were not carrying forbidden items, or documents that could “harm the political and economic interests of the Russian Republic.”²³³ The authorities made certain that foreigners who came to Soviet Russia were well disposed, or, at least, susceptible to manipulation.

In an age when the press served as the principal source of information, the best way to assure that Soviet Russia received favorable coverage abroad was to accredit only those newspapers and journalists who had given proof of a cooperative attitude. Whether they cooperated from conviction or self-interest was immaterial. Since every major newspaper and wire service wanted a bureau in Moscow, most complied with the demand to send friendly correspondents. Journalists in Moscow learned to minimize, rationalize, or, if necessary, ignore adverse information, blur the distinction between Soviet intentions and Soviet realities, and deride the regime’s critics. Once they acquired the habit, they sooner or later turned into conveyors of Soviet propaganda. Much of the foreign press corps came to practice a form of self-censorship. Before cabling a dispatch, a correspondent had to secure approval of the Press Department of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. “One took them in,” recalls Malcolm Muggeridge, “to be censored, like taking an essay to one’s tutor at Cambridge; watching anxiously as they were read over for any frowns or hesitations, dreading to see a pencil picked to slash something out.” One censor refused Muggeridge permission to cable some information, explaining: “You can’t say that because it’s true.”²³⁴

Newspapers that refused to cooperate were penalized. The outstanding victim was The Times of London. During the Revolution and Civil War, The Times adopted an extremely hostile attitude toward the Bolsheviks. Its regular Russian correspondent, Robert Wilton, an unabashed monarchist and anti-Semite, left for England in September 1917; when he tried to return six months later, he was denied entry. The Times refused to replace him with a more compliant journalist, as a result of which, for the next twenty years, the most authoritative newspaper in the world had its Soviet correspondent based in Riga.²³⁵ For direct reporting from Soviet Russia, the English public depended on journalists sympathetic to the Communist cause: Arthur Ransome of the Manchester Guardian and the Daily News, Michael Farbman and George Lansbury of the Daily Herald, and M. Phillipps Price, also of the Guardian.^*

Lansbury may serve as an example of an unscrupulous Western journalist who entered Soviet employ with open eyes. A self-designated “Christian pacifist,” he was the editor from 1908 of the Daily Herald, the organ of the radical wing of the Labour Party. In early 1920 the paper fell on hard times. Facing insolvency, Lansbury journeyed to Moscow in search of financial assistance. As soon as his request for subsidies had been approved, the Daily Herald adopted an unambivalently pro-Soviet position: in a message from Copenhagen to Moscow intercepted by British intelligence, Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs, reported, “In Russian questions [the Daily Herald] acts as if it were our organ.”²³⁶ One of the paper’s directors, Francis Meynell, received in Copenhagen from Litvinov a packet of jewels that he smuggled into England. When in August 1920 Krasin and Kamenev arrived in London to resume the trade negotiations disrupted by the Polish war, they brought with them precious stones and platinum, which they sold through intermediaries. The proceeds, amounting to 40,000 pounds, they gave to Lansbury; eventually, the subsidy reached the sum of 75,000 pounds. Unfortunately for the Russians, they were under surveillance by Scotland Yard, which kept a record of the banknotes realized from the sales. On August 19, the British government released to the press the intercepted messages between Litvinov and Chicherin concerning these handouts,²³⁷ following which Lansbury had to return the money.^* Kamenev was expelled from Britain for his role in the affair.²³⁸ Lansbury remained loyal to Moscow: the services he had rendered to a foreign power did not disqualify him from being chosen in 1931 Chairman of the Labour Party.

The leading American daily, the New York Times, did not follow the example of its London namesake. In the early years of the Communist regime, it, too, was exceedingly hostile, contributing to the so-called “Red Scare.” Much of its anti-Communism, however, was emotional and based on hearsay. In August 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Marz published a scathing critique of the New York Times’s coverage of Soviet Russia, showing that it had reported the demise of the Bolshevik government on no fewer than 91 occasions.²³⁹ When in 1920 the New York Times requested Soviet permission to send a correspondent to Moscow, Litvinov replied that “while he would welcome conversations with sympathetic newspapers like the London Daily Herald or the Manchester Guardian, a hostile one like the New York Times would not be considered.”²⁴⁰ In other words, if the paper wanted a Soviet bureau, it would have to change its attitude toward Soviet Russia. The New York Times chose to comply.

One of the most outspoken anti-Communists on the New York Times staff was Walter Duranty. An Englishman by birth and upbringing, he had much in common with John Reed, in that like him he came from a socially undistinguished (although far less affluent) family and had suffered snubs from schoolmates.²⁴¹ Duranty, who in 1920 held a minor post with the New York Times Paris office, was eager to go to Russia as a full-fledged correspondent. Moscow cold-shouldered him, but he found ways to overcome its hostility by publishing some friendly remarks about Litvinov and assuring his readers that with the New Economic Policy (NEP) Lenin had “thrown Communism overboard.”²⁴² A few days after these items had appeared in print, the New York Times was informed it could send a correspondent to Moscow. The assignment went to Duranty, who received a Soviet visa and accreditation, albeit on a “probationary” basis. Once in Moscow, he ingratiated himself with the Soviet authorities by cabling “on the spot” reports that played down, without denying, the sordid aspects of Soviet reality (such as the famine of 1921). He further stressed Lenin’s alleged adoption of Western economic models, which was very important for Moscow to convey at a time when it actively sought foreign credits. To allay concerns about the revolutionary proclamations of the Communist International, Duranty drew a false distinction between the Comintern, which he portrayed as staffed by “fanatics,” and the “realists” running the Soviet government, whom he depicted as “quite willing to let the communist fanatics blow off … steam.”²⁴³

Duranty’s “probation” was lifted, and as Moscow correspondent of the New York Times he became the most prestigious American journalist in Russia. The position not only brought him influence and fame, but also enabled him to enjoy Moscow’s high life, which flourished under the NEP: nightclubbing at the Grand, poker at the Savoy, embassy parties, carousing in his imported Buick, the favors of a Russian mistress. His extravagant life-style led some to suspect that he was on the Soviet payroll.²⁴⁴ Jay Lovestone, a leading figure in the American Communist Party and a frequent visitor to Moscow in the 1920s, believed Duranty to have worked for the security police.²⁴⁵ To enjoy such perquisites, Duranty increasingly resorted to outright lies: he denied, for example, that Russia lived under police terror and assured his readers that a well-behaved Soviet citizen had no more to fear from the police than Americans from the Department of Justice.^* His falsehoods gained credibility because he balanced them with minor concessions to the truth. He was neither a sympathizer of Communism nor a friend of the Russian people, but simply a corrupt individual who made a living by lying. Eugene Lyons, who saw him often, writes that Duranty “remained, after all his years in Russia, detached from its life and fate, curiously contemptuous of Russians. He spoke of Soviet triumphs and travail as he might of a murder mystery he had read, but with not half the passion or sense of personal involvement.”²⁴⁶

Duranty had the good fortune to choose Stalin early as Lenin’s most likely successor (he later boasted that he had picked “the right horse on which to bet in the Russian race”²⁴⁷), which greatly helped his career after Lenin’s death. His eulogies of Stalin became ever more exorbitant and his mendaciousness ever more brazen. In the 1930s he praised collectivization and in 1932–34 denied the Ukrainian famine. To lure investments to Soviet Russia, he spread false stories about the great profits allegedly made by American businessmen there, especially his friend Armand Hammer.^† These accomplishments earned him in 1932 the Pulitzer Prize for “scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity.”²⁴⁸ It has been said that no individual had done more to promote in the United States a favorable image of the Soviet Union at a time when she was suffering under the most savage tyranny known to man. Radek said that his reporting had been most influential in paving the way for U.S. diplomatic recognition in 1933.²⁴⁹

Only slightly less harmful was the disinformation spread by Louis Fischer, the Russian correspondent of The Nation, who is said to have been under the influence of his wife, an employee of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.²⁵⁰

Russian émigres of every political persuasion tried to inform Europeans and Americans about the Soviet regime, but their influence was negligible because the outside world saw them as poor losers. The Mensheviks Martov and Rafael Abramovich appeared regularly at gatherings of European socialists to speak about Soviet realities. Their admonitions sometimes resulted in Western socialist and trade-union organizations passing perfunctory resolutions critical of the Soviet government. In practical terms, however, their exertions yielded nothing, since in typically schizophrenic Menshevik-SR fashion they neutralized such admonitions with exhortations to defend Soviet Russia from Western “imperialism.”

Paul Miliukov, the titular leader of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, published in 1920 a warning to the West that Communism was not, as widely believed, a purely Russian affair.²⁵¹ Communism had two aspects, one internal, the other international. But it was primarily a doctrine for export and the driving force behind it was the idea of world revolution. Such counsel, too, found little acceptance in the West. Miliukov himself soon converted to the notion that Communism was a transitory illness and a prelude to the triumph of democracy in Russia.

Russian monarchists enjoyed much greater success abroad. In the 1920s Germany became a haven for Russian right-wing exiles, many of them uprooted Baltic Germans. These émigrés established connections with German nationalists and injected into their ideology the notion that Communism and Jewry were one and the same. It was they who popularized in the West the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, until then an obscure pamphlet available only in Russian.

The record of the Comintern, from its foundation in 1919 until its formal dissolution in 1943, is one of unrelieved failure. In the words of its historian, and onetime member, Franz Borkenau, “The history of the Comintern has many ups and downs. It contains no steady progress, not a single lasting success.”²⁵² These failures have to be attributed first and foremost to the Bolsheviks’ ignorance of foreign political cultures. Their leaders had spent long periods in the West: between 1900 and 1917, Lenin lived all but two years in Europe, Trotsky all but seven, and Zinoviev all but five. But even as they lived in their midst, they had little contact with Westerners, for they led isolated existences in émigré communities and communicated only with the more radical elements of European socialism. The Comintern’s dismal record abroad emphasizes the extent to which Communism, its international trappings notwithstanding, was essentially a Great Russian phenomenon, unsuited for export. This cultural difference was seen by some observers already then as raising an insurmountable barrier between East and West: the expression “iron curtain” was in use as early as 1920.²⁵³

The failures of the Comintern can be also attributed to specific causes. In 1918–20, there were in Western Europe no revolutionary parties remotely like the Bolshevik Party in numbers and organization. When they emerged, first under Kemal in Turkey and then under Mussolini in Italy, they took the path of nationalism and employed Lenin’s methods not to promote Communism but to fight it. European socialist parties were loosely organized on the Menshevik rather than the Bolshevik model, and although each had a radical wing, they were committed to reform: the closer their links to trade unions, the less appetite did they have for revolution. Moscow succeeded in forming European Communist parties only in the second half of 1920. In the critical period immediately following the Armistice, when the opportunities for spreading revolution were best, it had no dependable partners abroad.

But even when European Communist parties did emerge, the Bolsheviks were unable to use them effectively because they insisted on their adopting the strategy and tactics of coup d’état and civil war used in Russia. This was not feasible, if only because the anarchy the Bolsheviks had exploited in their own country did not exist in Western Europe: even in Germany, an effective government was in place three months after the Kaiser’s abdication. Nor did the Russian leadership of the Comintern make allowance for European nationalism. When in April 1918 an anarchist pointed out that the Western worker would never have dared to make the October Revolution because he “feels himself the bearer of a fragment of power and a part of the same state which [he] is at present defending,” whereas the Russian proletariat is “spiritually non-statist,” Lenin dismissed such talk as “silly,” “primitive,” and “obtuse.”²⁵⁴ Much as he liked to remind the hotheads in his ranks that Europe was not Russia, that making revolution there was incomparably more difficult, in practice Lenin acted as if such differences did not matter. In July 1920, he ordered the Red Army to march on Warsaw, doing so in the conviction, based on the lessons of the Civil War, that the masses did not respond to patriotic appeals. He soon learned otherwise, but experience taught the Bolsheviks nothing in this respect: each failure abroad they blamed either on some tactical mistakes or the indecisiveness of foreign Communists. “We must teach, teach and teach the English Communists to work the way the Bolsheviks used to work,” Lenin insisted.²⁵⁵ This attitude exasperated foreign Communists. “Is there nothing more,” a British Comintern delegate asked Zinoviev, “to learn from the struggles, movements and revolutions of other countries? Have [the Russians] come here not to learn, but only to teach?”²⁵⁶ Another British delegate to the Second Congress of the Comintern wrote on his return:

The utter incapacity of the Congress to legislate for the British movement was perhaps the most conspicuous fact there. Some of the tactics that were useful and successful in Russia would be grotesque failures if put into operation here. The difference between conditions in this highly-organized, industrially-centralised, politically compact and insular country, and medieval, semi-barbaric, loosely-organised (politically) and politically-infantile Russia is almost inconceivable to those who have not been there to see.²⁵⁷

In the end, foreign Communists almost always suppressed their doubts and yielded to Moscow’s wishes because of its unique prestige earned by having staged the only successful revolution. Those who balked or protested too much, Lenin expelled from the Comintern. Thus the leading German Communist, Paul Levi, who had warned Moscow against staging putsches in his country, was in April 1921 declared a “traitor” and ousted from both the German Communist Party and the Comintern. He was penalized not for being wrong, since even Lenin conceded he had given him sound advice, but for being insubordinate.^* Such methods succeeded in silencing the critics, but at the price of repeating the same mistakes.

Angelica Balabanoff assigns much of the blame for the Comintern’s failures on Lenin’s personnel policies. Because he insisted on unquestioned obedience, he purged from the movement true revolutionaries prone to independent judgment, in favor of careerists whose only qualification was submissiveness. The ranks of the Third International quickly filled with scoundrels and intriguers, beginning with its head, Zinoviev, of whom she wrote that after Mussolini he was “the most despicable individual I have ever met.”²⁵⁸ Referring to Lenin’s “habit of selecting his collaborators and trusted men precisely because of their weaknesses and shortcomings and also because of their checkered past,” she noted:

Lenin was neither blind nor indifferent to the harm [that] personal dishonesty might do to the movement, yet he used individuals who were the scum of humanity.… The Bolsheviks … used any individual as long as he proved shrewd, unscrupulous, a jack-of-all-trades, able to obtain access anywhere, and a humble executor of his boss’s orders.… Considering me a good revolutionist, though not a Bolshevik, [Lenin] and his collaborators believed I approved of their methods: corruption in order to undermine opposing organizations, slander of those capable or inclined to offer opposition by branding their actions as dishonest and dangerous.²⁵⁹

She did not approve, and resigned; the least worthy elements stayed on.

To these causes one may add a fourth, imponderable by its very nature and therefore difficult to demonstrate. This had to do with the “Russianness” of Bolshevism. The distinguishing quality of Russian radicalism had always been an uncompromising extremism, an “all or nothing” and “go for broke” attitude that scorned compromise. It derived from the fact that before seizing power Russian radicals, intellectuals with a small following and no influence on policy, had nothing but ideas to give them a sense of identity. Such people could be found in the West, too, especially among the anarchists, but there they constituted an insignificant minority. Western radicals wanted to reshape rather than destroy the existing order: the Russians, by contrast, saw little in their country worthy of preservation. Because of this profound difference in political philosophy, this Russian nihilism, the Bolsheviks had difficulty communicating with their Western sympathizers. In Russian eyes, they were not true Communists. “Bolshevism is a Russian word,” wrote an anti-Communist émigré in 1919.

But not only a word. Because in that guise, in that form and in those manifestations which have crystallized in Russia during nearly two years, Bolshevism is a uniquely Russian phenomenon, with deep ties to the Russian soul. And when they speak of German Bolshevism or of Hungarian Bolshevism, I smile. Is that really Bolshevism? Outwardly. Perhaps politically. But without its peculiar soul. Without the Russian soul. It is pseudo-Bolshevism.²⁶⁰

^* According to Ruth Fischer, the most extreme radicals in the German socialist movement came from Eastern Europe: they brought with them a militancy and hatred of German imperialism that exceeded even that of native socialists. Among them, in addition to Luxemburg and Jogiches, was Julian Marchlewski, who would negotiate a Polish-Soviet truce in late 1919. See her Stalin and German Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 9.

^* Vos’moi S”ezd RKP (b): Protokoly (Moscow, 1959), 444. The message of greetings contained the earliest hint of what later came to be known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, assuring the Hungarian Communists that “the workers of the entire world … will not permit the imperialists to raise a hand against the new Soviet Republic.” In Communist vocabulary, “workers” was a synonym for Communist parties. A similar though less specific pledge was given by Chicherin to the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic: “Every blow aimed at you is aimed at us.”: Izvestiia, No. 77/629 (April 10, 1919), 3.

^† Lenin ordered the Red Army to send troops to link Hungary with the Soviet Ukraine: PSS, L, 286–87. The partisan leader Grigorev was to march into Bessarabia, but he refused to do so and revolted: his mutiny on May 7 doomed Bela Kun’s government. Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia Krasnoi Armii (Moscow, 1969), 234.

^‡ Kun, who later participated in revolutions in Germany, perished in Stalin’s purges in 1939.

^* Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964), 69–70. Like many of the founding members of the Comintern who had made their home in Soviet Russia, Eberlein perished in Stalin’s purges.

^† “On June 19 [1790] … there was arranged an unanticipated spectacle proper to attract the eyes of the multitude: sixty aliens were assembled, men without country living in Paris by swindling and intrigue. They are decorated with the pompous names of envoys of all the peoples of the universe; they are dressed up in borrowed clothes, and induced by the twelve francs promised them, they consent to play the role intended for them.… [The] troop of people were announced to be Prussians, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards, Germans, Turks, Arabs, Indians, Tartars, Persians, Chinese, Mongols, Tripolitans, Swiss, Italians, Americans, and Grisons. They wore the habiliments of these different peoples. The stock of the Opera had been exhausted. At the sight of this grotesque masquerade, every one stared open-eyed and waited in silence for an explanation. The initiated filled the hall with noisy acclamations. The galleries, overcome at seeing the universe in the midst of the National Assembly, clapped their hands and stamped their feet.” Memoirs du Marquis de Ferrières, II (Paris, 1822), 64–65, cited in E. L. Higgins, The French Revolution (Boston, 1938), 150–51.

^* Balabanoff, Impressions, 110. This was to be Lenin’s last visit to Petrograd.

^* The Curzon Line ran from Grodno south through Brest-Litovsk, assigning the Russians Vilno and Lwow and other territories that the Poles would conquer in 1919–1920 and hold until 1939. It resembled closely the border that Stalin imposed on Poland in 1945.

^* P. Wandycz, Soviet-Polish Relations, 1917–1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 191–92. The text of the accord is in John Reshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920 (Princeton, 1952), 301–2. See also Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star (London, 1972), 102–4. Its terms refute allegations that Poland intended to annex the Ukraine.

^* Norman Davies in White Eagle, 105 and passim, maintains that the Polish offensive of April 1920 did not mark the beginning of the Soviet-Polish war but only “transformed the scale, the intensity, and the stakes of the war entirely.” It is difficult to agree with this opinion, given that previous engagements between the two armies had been little more than skirmishes, lacking on either side a clear strategic objective.

^* Izvestiia, No. 116 (May 30, 1920), 1. In an unpublished diary written in 1925 during a visit abroad, Brusilov wrote that he had never offered his services to the Red Army and that the appeal had been obtained from him by subterfuge: “Moi vospominaniia,” Aleksei Brusilov Collection, Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, 59–67.

^* The speech, deposited in RTsKhIDNI, F. 44, op. 1, delo 5, Listy 127–32, was first published in IA, No. 1 (1992), 14–29.

^* Lenin, PSS, XLI, 324–25. Churchill, too, called Poland “the linch-pin of the Treaty of Versailles.” Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London, 1929), 262.

^† TP, II, 228–31. Several historians have questioned whether Trotsky really opposed the invasion of Poland as he later claimed. L. Trotskii, Moia zhizn’, II (Berlin, 1930), 193–94, and Stalin (New York, 1941), 327–28. But the documents cited against him date from August 1920, when the matter had long since been decided, and Trotsky, having fallen in line like a good Bolshevik, naturally desired a quick and decisive victory. See Titus Komarnicki, The Rebirth of the Polish Republic (London, 1957), 640–41, and Davies, White Eagle, 69.

^* Angelica Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel (New York, 1938), 269. The relationship between the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern was for a long time not understood abroad. As well informed an observer as Alfred Dennis, who followed Soviet affairs for the U.S. State Department, asserted in 1924 that the Russian Communist Party “belonged” to the Comintern, whereas it was the other way around. Alfred L. P. Dennis, The Foreign Policies of Soviet Russia (New York, 1924), 340.

^* Jane Degras, The Communist International, 1919–1943: Documents I (London, 1956), 166–72. Hitler, who emulated many of Lenin’s methods, imposed a “25-point program” for admission to the Nazi party: Karl D. Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur (Franfurt a/M., 1979), 60.

^* On August 14, the Revvoensovet ordered an assault on the Polish Corridor to seize war materiel believed to be stockpiled in Danzig: Direktivy glavnogo komandovaniia, 655.

^* IA, No. 1 (1992), 18. Victor Kopp, Lenin’s agent in Germany, in a dispatch to Lenin of August 19, 1920, bluntly referred to the advance of the Red Army into the Polish Corridor as designed to restore to Germany territories of which she had been deprived by the Versailles Treaty: RTsKhIDNI, F. 5, op. 1, delo 2136.

^* Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (London, 1929), 20. Ignacy Daszynski was a leader of Polish socialists and Poland’s Vice Premier.

^* According to Lewis L. Lorwin, Labor and Internationalism (New York, 1929), 229–31, a separate trade union organization was established in deference to the French syndicalists who did not want to be subordinated to the Comintern as a political organization. The Comintern created several other such front organizations, formally independent of it, including a Red Youth International (1919), a Sports International (1921), and a Peasants’ International (1923).

^* A leading American Communist, Louis C. Fraina, admitted that he had received in Moscow $50,000, $20,000 or more of which he turned over to the English Communist John T. Murphy: Theodore Draper, Roots of American Communism (New York, 1957), 294. Fraina edited from 1919 The Revolutionary Age, the first publication in the U.S.A. to eulogize Lenin and Trotsky, and he possibly kept some of the money for that publication.

^†* This account can be seen on a two-page hand-written statement from late 1920 preserved in RTsKhIDNI, F. 495, op. 82, delo 1, list 10. The request of the Finnish Communists for 10 million Finnish marks in gold, platinum, and other precious objects, personally approved by Lenin, is ibid., F. 2, op. 2, delo 1299.

^* For the purposes of this discussion, democratic socialists will be treated as liberals.

^* During its visit to Soviet Russia, the British delegation demanded to meet with the socialist opposition. At a gathering arranged by the hosts, Victor Chernov made a dramatic appearance: he had been hiding from the Cheka and living on the verge of starvation. According to an eyewitness, he branded the Bolsheviks “corrupters of the Revolution and denounced their tyranny as worse than the Tsar’s”: Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (London, 1925), 150, and Mrs. Philip Snowden, Through Bolshevik Russia (London, 1920), 160. The British delegates thought his appearance very sporting: his criticism of the Communists, however, made on them no impression. Chernov managed to elude the Cheka after this adventure, which led to the detention of his wife and 11-year-old child as hostages: Julius Braunthal, History of the International, II (New York, 1967), 223.

^* In a signed editorial in the New York American on March 1, 1918, William R. Hearst described Lenin’s regime as “the truest democracy in Europe, the truest democracy in the world today.” He maintained this position throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, when his sympathies shifted to Hitler’s Germany: Joe Wershba in The Antioch Review, XV, No. 1 (Summer 1955), 131–147.

^* According to M. Phillipps Price, the Manchester Guardian correspondent in Russia in the 1920s, “Nobody at the time saw … that the real seat of power in Russia was going to be no department of government but the Communist Party. Lenin was already quietly pushing the Party functionaries into all important organs of the State, thus making the Party the sole source of authority” (Survey, No. 41, April 1962, 22). A notable exception was Lydia Bach’s Le Droit et les Institutions de la Russie Soviétique, published in Paris in 1923. In the United States, the role of the Communist Party in ruling Soviet Russia as well as the Comintern was first publicly revealed by Senator Henry C. Lodge in January 1924 on the basis of information provided by the Department of State: Christopher Lasch, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (New York and London, 1962), 216–17.

^* Cited in Heinrich von Gleichen, Der Bolshewismus und die deutschen Intellektuellen (Leipzig, 1920), 50. Loathing of the vulgarity of modern commercial culture could, of course, also assume other forms, such as Anglophilia (e.g., Henry James and T. S. Eliot).

^* Whittaker Chambers tells how after leaving the Communist Party and exposing Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent he became the victim of the animosity of “enlightened people”: Witness (New York, 1952), 616 and passim. Cut off from the Party, he saw the world he was leaving as “the world of life and of the future. The world I was returning to seemed, by contrast, a graveyard” (ibid., 25).

^* Reed would probably be best characterized as a “naïve” fellow-traveler; yet he, too, was not immune to the rewards normally reserved for the “venal.” It has become recently known that on January 22, 1920, he accepted from the Comintern treasury precious metals valued at 1,008,000 rubles: RTsKhIDNI, Fond 495, op. 82, delo 1, list 10. On the black market this sum would have fetched 1,000 dollars, the equivalent of 50 ounces of gold.

^† Arthur Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 (London, 1919), p. viii. This was a common theme in Western reactions to Soviet Russia. In 1928, in an influential account of his trip to the U.S.S.R., John Dewey defined the “essence of the revolution” to be the “release of courage, energy and confidence in life”: cited by Lewis S. Feuer in the American Quarterly, XIV, No. 2, Part 1 (1962), 122.

^* When told in Russia that “things didn’t happen” the way he had described them, Reed responded: “What the hell difference does it make?” The important thing was not “photographic accuracy” but “over-all impression.” B. D. Wolfe, Strange Communists I Have Known (New York, 1965), 43.

^* An honorable exception was Averell Harriman, who offered to turn over a percentage of the profits he expected to make from his manganese concession in Soviet Georgia to the mines’ rightful proprietors.

^† Simon Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia (Chicago, 1945), 133. The man who gave this advice, Anatole de Monzie, proved very helpful in establishing contacts between the Soviet government and France. He practiced similar “realism” during World War II when he promoted Franco-Nazi friendship, for which he was subsequently tried as a collaborator. Ibid.

^* E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, III (New York, 1953), 287n. Recognition was a matter of considerable importance for Soviet foreign trade, because Soviet purchases abroad were paid for in gold: as long as Soviet Russia lacked diplomatic recognition, the gold was liable to be seized on behalf of foreign creditors. On May 12, 1921, a British court ruled that Soviet bullion was not subject to such seizures: I. Maiskii, Vneshniaia politika RSFSR (Moscow, 1923), 102.

^* See David Suratgar, ed., Default and Rescheduling (Washington, D.C., 1984), and F. Borchard and W. Wynne, State Insolvency and Foreign Bondholders (New Haven, Conn., 1951). According to Clifford Dammers (in Suratgar, Default, 77), in 1880, 54 percent of foreign government obligations were in default. Mr. Dammers in his survey inexplicably ignores the Soviet default of 1918, the greatest in history.

^* In his confidential report to the Ninth Party Conference (September 1920), Lenin mocked “the strange people” in England and France “who still hoped to retrieve” the billions they had lost in Russia: IA, No. 1 (1992), 15.

^† The notion that Soviet cooperatives were free agents and good potential trade partners is said to have been popularized by the historian Bernard Pares and by E. F. Wise, the top British representative on the Supreme Economic Council in Paris. See Bernard Pares, My Russian Memoirs (London, 1931), 562, and Richard H. Ullman, The Anglo-Soviet Accord (Princeton, 1972), 11.

^* Total U.S. losses in Soviet Russia have been estimated at 223 million dollars: Dennis, Foreign Policies, 457.

^* Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Accord, 107. This was equivalent to 3.145 billion dollars or 4,900 tons of gold, worth in 1990 some 60 billion dollars.

^* Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service (New York, 1986), 262. The British cryptographic service employed a Russian named E. C. Fetterlein, who cracked the Soviet diplomatic cipher: Ibid., 261–62.

^* Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1961. As a concession to American sensitivities, the book originally came out in the United States under the title Dictatorship vs. Democracy.

^* Ossip Flechtheim, Die Kommunistische Partei in der Weimarer Republik (Offenbach a.M., 1948), 62. This tactic was later abandoned under the pressure of the Communist rank and file: Gerald Freund, Unholy Alliance (New York, 1957), 59–60.

^* Germany also hoped to regain from Poland’s destruction Danzig and Upper Silesia: Sovetsko-Germanskie otnosheniia ot peregovorov v Brest-Litovske do podpisaniia Rapall’skogo dogovora, II (Moscow, 1971), 167.

^* Sovetsko-Germanskie otnosheniia, II, 107–09, 113–15,116–18, 153–54. The German Ministry of Economics reported that a good part of the agricultural machinery that Germany exported to Denmark and Sweden these two countries resold to Soviet Russia at a high profit: Ibid., II, 119.

^* Forty-five years later, Price admitted that he had not behaved professionally when reporting from Soviet Russia. Referring to My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution (London, 1921), a book based on his Manchester Guardian dispatches, he wrote: “I did not let the narrative speak for itself, but expounded my own views, as if I had been listening to the speeches of Lenin and Trotsky and were repeating something of what I had heard. Moreover, the book contains fairly extensive passages of communist jargon which I had picked up in those two years. I had become, in fact, a ‘fellow-traveller.’ ” Survey, No. 41 (April 1962), 16.

^* The publication of these materials alerted the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs that its codes had been broken: RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 2, ed. khr. 404.

^* The analogy was also drawn by Louise Bryant, who wrote, “Even we ourselves have a Cheka, but we call it a Department of Justice”: Mirrors of Moscow (New York, 1923), 54.

^† Joseph Finder, Red Carpet (New York, 1983), 67. Julius Hammer, an American millionaire Communist, settled in Moscow and received a concession for the exploitation of asbestos mines in the Urals. His son, Armand, assisted him in this work and later manufactured pencils and office equipment. Lenin, PSS, LIV, 806. With his brother, Armand Hammer also sold abroad artworks the Communist regime had requisitioned from their owners and disposed of for badly needed hard currency.

^* Milorad M. Drachkovitch and Branko Lazitch, The Comintern: Historical Highlights (New York, 1966), 271–99. Levi committed suicide in 1930.