In March 1917, while Europe was convulsed by the Great War, news of a revolution in Russia began to spread abroad. It started in Petrograd, the capital, with an outburst of industrial conflict. Strikes had taken place in the two previous winters and the army and political police had dealt with them efficiently. Workers determined to bring down the Imperial monarchy walked out of the factories and joined demonstrations. Emperor Nicholas II was at GHQ in Mogilëv, five hundred miles away, and saw no reason for concern. This time, however, the strikers did not simply go home, but massed on the streets and goaded the militants of clandestine revolutionary parties into joining them. When the army garrisons were mobilized to restore order, the troops went over to the side of the workers. The popular mood was fiercely radical. Workers and soldiers elected their own Petrograd Soviet (or Council) to press for their cause. Suddenly the Russian capital became ungovernable. Alert at last to the magnitude of the emergency, the emperor sought to abdicate in favour of his haemophiliac young son Alexei. When counselled against this, he suggested that his brother Mikhail should take the throne, but this compromise was angrily rejected by those demonstrating on the streets. They would be satisfied only by the removal of the Romanov dynasty, and they had Petrograd at their mercy.
The end for the Romanovs, when it came, was abrupt. It was also unexpectedly peaceful. On 15 March Nicholas II’s nerve suddenly cracked and he stood down, allowing a Provisional Government to take power. It was led by the liberal Georgi Lvov with Pavel Milyukov as Foreign Affairs Minister and Alexander Guchkov as Minister for Military Affairs. Most of the cabinet’s members were liberals, with Guchkov as the sole representative of moderate conservative opinion. There was but one minister on the political left. This was the Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski, a young lawyer who became Minister of Justice.
The Petrograd Soviet, led by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, gave its blessing to this arrangement. The Mensheviks were a Marxist faction dedicated to the ultimate objective of socialist revolution; but they believed that the country had not yet reached the level of modernization necessary to socialism, and they shuddered at the thought of burdening themselves with responsibility for governance in wartime. The Socialist-Revolutionaries looked for support more to the peasants than to the workers. But they too were influenced by Marxism and they shared the judgement of the Mensheviks. Together these two socialist organizations could easily have taken power in the Russian capital. Instead they gave approval to Lvov’s cabinet on condition that he agreed to renounce Nicholas II’s expansionist aims and fight only a defensive war. They also demanded the realization of a full range of civic reforms. Lvov agreed. He understood that, without the Petrograd Soviet’s consent, the Provisional Government would be still-born. So began an uneasy system of rule known as dual power.
The press in Paris and London initially held back from reporting what was going on. The war against the Central Powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria — was poised on a knife edge, and France and the United Kingdom wanted nothing done that might damage Russia’s fighting capacity. The Russians had joined the French and the British in the Triple Entente that had taken Serbia’s side in its dispute with Austria-Hungary in mid-1914. The Entente powers, usually known as the Allies, were joined by Japan, Italy and others. Two great military fronts, the western and the eastern, stretched across Europe. The early successes fell to Germany as its armies pressed into northern France and Russian-ruled Poland. But quickly the Great War became a conflict fought from trenches as the fronts were stabilized and neither the Central Powers nor the Allies appeared able to devise methods to break the stalemate until December 1916 when the flexible offensive of General Alexei Brusilov resulted in a Russian advance. The French and the British, worn down on the western front, acclaimed Russia’s military achievement at the time; and when telegrams arrived reporting the political disturbances in Petrograd, the governments in Paris and London avoided any semblance of interference. Not until 19 March 1917, when the Provisional Government was already in office, did the press report that Nicholas II had abdicated.1
What happened in Russia had been predicted for years but few revolutionary emigrants had expected the final moments to be so orderly. Ivan Maiski, a left-wing Menshevik resident in London, raced around calling on fellow emigrants and ‘congratulating’ startled English passers-by. The cry went up among the comrades: ‘To Russia!’2 Another of the émigrés was Maxim Litvinov, who phoned his wife Ivy at a nursing home in Golders Green after the birth of their son Misha. Litvinov belonged to the Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxists, led by Lenin, which regarded the Mensheviks as disgraceful moderates; and he was no armchair revolutionary, having helped to launder the money stolen by Bolsheviks in the sensational Tiflis bank robbery in 1907. Ivy shared Maxim’s delight: ‘Darling it means we’re not refugees any more.’3 Litvinov was so elated that he tried to shave with his toothpaste and got into the bath without having turned on the water. He had waited for revolution all his adult life. Now it had happened, and his hands trembled with excitement as he read the newspapers.4 ‘The colony’ of Russian Marxists assembled to confer about the situation: ‘[They] began to feel the compulsion to meet every day in each other’s rooms, talking, exclaiming, surmising, looking from face to face, and their wives, unwilling to miss a word, popped the dishes into the cold oven, too impatient even to take them out to the scullery.’5 The small world of Russian political emigrants bubbled with exhilaration.
Litvinov felt he had to do something, almost anything, for the revolutionary cause in Russia. His mind was bursting with frustration. While Petrograd was in political ferment, he was stuck hundreds of miles away in London. As a Bolshevik, he regarded the war as an ‘imperialist’ conflict between two coalitions of greedy capitalists. Most Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries thought the same. But no socialist organization in Russia, not even the Bolsheviks, had yet fixed its policy on how to end the war — it would take months before some degree of clarity emerged on this matter.
In a burst of zeal, Litvinov met up with British socialists who opposed the Allied war effort. The Labour anti-war MP Ramsay MacDonald received them in the House of Commons. MacDonald naturally did not share the British government’s hope that the fall of the Romanovs would increase Russian combativeness on the eastern front. In fact he was predicting the opposite.6 But although he was courteous enough, he disappointed Litvinov by providing no notion about what ‘he was going to do about the Revolution’.7 Litvinov called next day at the Russian embassy in Chesham House and was received by the chargé d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov. He asked why the staff had not yet taken down the portraits of the Imperial family.8 He enjoyed rubbing up the old regime’s officials the wrong way. Nabokov stood his ground and behaved with dignity. He had never disguised his sympathy with the Russian liberals and was hoping to receive the trust of Lvov and his cabinet. Instead the Provisional Government gave the London embassy to former Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Sazonov.9 But as Sazonov failed to arrive, Nabokov continued to head the embassy.
On 31 March the Labour Party held a celebration of the revolutionary events at the Albert Hall. Ten thousand people attended and Ramsay MacDonald was the main speaker. Others on the platform included Israel Zangwill, who spoke on behalf of the Russian Jewish refugees in London’s East End. The audience adopted Russian custom and bared their heads before observing a silence in honour of ‘the countless sacrifices which the Russian people have made to win their freedom’.10 It was an occasion that nobody present would forget. The Romanovs were gone and freedom had arrived in Russia. There was talk of a brotherhood of the Russians and the British no longer poisoned by the existence of tsarist despotism.
Most of the revolutionary emigrants in central and western Europe were impatient to return to Russia. The only routes available to them were across the North Sea, either directly to Archangel and onward by rail to any number of Russian cities or to Scandinavia and then by a longer railway journey looping over northern Sweden and Finland south to Petrograd.11 Britain’s Royal Navy had penned Germany’s large fleet in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven for the duration of the war. The result was that transport to Sweden or Norway from the rest of Europe became a British prerogative, and even the French government had to seek authority to send ships eastwards. The big Russian revolutionary colonies in Paris, Geneva and Zurich therefore had to cross the English Channel if they aimed to go home. London was turned for the first time into the largest centre for Russian political emigrants.12 Excitement grew about the chance of a trip to Scandinavia, and the passenger ferries from the French ports to Dover were kept busy with Slavic passengers. The editorial board of Nashe slovo, a Russian Marxist anti-war newspaper based in Paris, was stripped bare by the exodus; the same happened to the émigré revolutionary press in Switzerland. The place to shape opinion was Petrograd. Nowhere else mattered, and the emotional tug on the minds of émigrés was seldom resistible.
They knew the physical risks. Although the Royal Navy kept the German battleships trapped and inactive, the U-boats were a constant menace. Sneaking out from their ports, they had a licence to sink all Allied military and civilian shipping. In 1916 a submarine laid a mine that sank the ship carrying Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, on a trip to Russia. There were grievous losses of ships and supplies throughout the year.
Yet the hastily invented convoy system protected a lot of commercial traffic across the Atlantic. The Americans were giving political and financial assistance to the Allies short of going to war. The German high command successfully pressed for a change of policy to allow its forces to attack US shipping. The rationale was simple. Germany’s economy was being suffocated by the British naval blockade. Urban consumers had endured a ‘turnip winter’ when coffee, sugar and even potatoes ran out. Raw materials for military production were no longer plentiful. Meanwhile Britain and France were obtaining what they needed from their American friends. The Germans gave notice of unrestricted submarine warfare from 1 February 1917 and US merchant vessels began to be sunk in March. British intelligence sources discovered that Germany had promised to restore Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico if the Mexican government would agree to fight America. Washington fell into uproar. Until that point it had been impossible for President Woodrow Wilson to gain the support of his Congress to enter the fighting. These isolationist obstacles crumbled when news of the U-boat campaign was printed. On 6 April the US announced that it would join the Allied as an Associated Power in the struggle against Imperial Germany. Wilson intended it to be a ‘war to end war’.
In New York the fall of the Romanovs had been greeted with wild enthusiasm. The American press, being free from the British and French constraints of wartime censorship, had reported quickly and extensively on the revolution.13 News of the abdication appeared in the newspapers two days earlier than in London and Paris. Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire were ecstatic.14 The tyrant had been overthrown; equality of religion and nationality was being proclaimed. Then came the complication of American entry into the war. The Jewish Forward newspaper approved of President Wilson’s decision, whereas the anti-war left was furious with him. Lev Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin were prominent critics of US ‘militarism’. Trotsky had been deported from France for his agitation against the war; he was, at that time, a far-left Marxist who was neither a Bolshevik nor a Menshevik but demanded the installation of a ‘workers’ government’. Bukharin was a young Bolshevik who was not shy of challenging Lenin’s writings on the Marxist doctrines. Trotsky and Bukharin called on socialists in the US to oppose America’s military involvement. Noisy public meetings took place in the cities of the east coast where anti-war and pro-war activists confronted each other about whether the old government in Washington and the new one in Petrograd merited support.
Nearly all the Russian political refugees in America, regardless of this dispute, were as keen as their comrades in Europe to get back home without delay. In the United Kingdom, the ultimate permission to travel across the North Sea rested with the cabinet. The Prime Minister David Lloyd George dallied for some weeks before allowing the anarchist Pëtr Kropotkin and the Marxists Georgi Plekhanov and Grigori Alexinski to make the trip. Kropotkin, Plekhanov and Alexinski were picked for having advocated the cause of the Allies.15 Anti-war militants denounced this as favouritism, and the Mensheviks Ivan Maiski and Georgi Chicherin formed a repatriation committee with themselves as chairman and secretary. They visited the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Home Office to argue the case for a passage to Russia. After a month of frustration they called on Nabokov at Chesham House, where they were pleased to discover that he was under instructions from Petrograd to assist with all requests by emigrants to leave Britain. Nabokov duly issued the visas but, because of the risk of German U-boat attack, only to the men. Loud protests ensued from the female revolutionaries living in White-chapel. (Nabokov later shuddered at the memory: ‘God knows they can make a noise.’) The chargé’s job was not made any easier by the political emigrants’ habit of using false passports. Nabokov complained that Litvinov alone had four or five aliases. So even when the embassy tried to be helpful it was not an easy process to issue visas.16
The first large group of applicants obtained tickets to sail from Aberdeen to Bergen on HMS Jupiter.17 Having taken the train from King’s Cross Station in high spirits, they then had to sit around in Aberdeen for four days. The ship’s captain announced that this was normal procedure. He was waiting for a storm to brew up and curtail the German submarine patrols. He was also a little too optimistic. Halfway across the North Sea the Jupiter had to lurch to port to evade a German submarine.18 Some later convoys were even less fortunate and one of the ships went down with all on board — it was the same vessel that Litvinov had hoped to take. Only the recent birth of his son had dissuaded him from buying a ticket.19
The anti-war activists did not thank the British for helping them. One of them, Georgi Chicherin, went around saying that Lloyd George was discriminating against them in the issuance of travel documents.20 This was untrue, at least for those setting out from the United Kingdom. Nabokov as chargé had indeed co-operated with Chicherin, although nobody would have known this from Chicherin’s journalism — and his tirades against the Allies could only aggravate the difficulties of British diplomacy in Petrograd. What is more, Chicherin was unusual in being in no hurry to depart for Russia. His presence in London became an annoyance, and the British cabinet was to lose patience with him in August on learning how he had written articles in Pravda that virulently condemned the Allied war effort — he was also suspected of favouring the German side. Without further ado he was taken to Brixton prison under a Defence of the Realm order.21 Pëtr Petrov was already in custody for agitating among British workers against the war.22 Chicherin and Petrov were recalcitrant prisoners. They interpreted their treatment as yet further proof that the Allied powers would stop at nothing to fight their ‘imperialist’ war. They declined to make a special plea to the Lloyd George cabinet for their release.
Nearly all other male political emigrants in the British, French and Swiss revolutionary colonies got back to Russia if they wanted to make the journey. Many of the travellers, moreover, had it in mind to throw out the Provisional Government; and some were determined to stop Russia from continuing in the war.
The shortest route to Russia from France or Switzerland, of course, would have been by rail across Europe. But this was impossible at a time when two military fronts with their millions of troops and artillery were stretched out from north to south down the middle of the continent. Revolutionaries based in Swiss cities had the theoretical option of travelling across Germany to Scandinavia and entering Russia via Finland. The snag was that Russian citizens on German territory were enemy aliens in wartime. Most Russians had fled Germany and Austria at the outbreak of hostilities rather than face possible arrest by police or a beating up on the streets. But the German government had always seen the advantage of subsidizing Russian and Ukrainian revolutionary groups that aimed to bring down the Romanov monarchy; and when Nicholas II abdicated, the German Foreign Office expressed interest in schemes to infiltrate anti-war revolutionaries back into Russia. Diplomats in Switzerland began negotiations for the transit of Russian revolutionaries by rail across Germany to the Baltic coast. Lenin and his Bolsheviks were courted through intermediaries. Since Lenin not only wanted an end to Russian involvement in the war but actively advocated Russia’s defeat, the German high command could not wish for a better helpmate.
Together with the Menshevik leader Yuli Martov, Lenin explored the opportunities, but Martov worried about the absence of sanction by the Provisional Government. He hated the liberals and thought of them as warmongers and imperialists. But he was loath to risk going back without an official imprimatur. Lenin was made of tougher mettle. He had taken too long to return from Switzerland in the 1905 revolutionary crisis and paid the price of diminished political influence. He was not going to repeat that mistake in 1917.
But he had to be circumspect. If the Provisional Government could in any way accuse him of collaborating with Germany he would be in jeopardy on arrival. He might even be shot for treason. He therefore struck a deal with the German ambassador Gisbert von Romberg that he and his supporters would travel over German territory without contact with Germans. Not even the driver or guard of the locomotive was to approach them. This would call for a ‘sealed’ train. German ministers readily agreed to Lenin’s terms.23 For his part Lenin sought to entice other anti-war emigrants like Karl Radek into putting their names down for the trip. Radek, a bright and witty Polish Jew with a record of criticizing Lenin in past years, belonged simultaneously to the German Social-Democratic Party and a far-left Polish Marxist organization. If he and Martov joined the train, the initiative would look less like an exclusively Bolshevik scheme. Radek consented but Martov continued to refuse. Although Martov was on the far left of Menshevism and deplored the Russian war effort, he continued to worry about being tainted by association with Imperial Germany. Nothing Lenin said would make him budge. Nevertheless thirty-two assorted political emigrants, mainly Bolsheviks, turned up in the cold on 9 April at the railway station in Zurich. Lenin was accompanied by his wife Nadezhda and his principal adjutant Grigori Zinoviev. His ex-lover Inessa Armand was also in the group — and Radek, renowned for his scabrous wit, was cracking jokes from the moment the train departed.24
Nearly everyone felt pleasantly entertained except Lenin, who took exception to the noise coming from the next-door compartment where Radek, Inessa, Olga Ravich and Varvara Safarova spent the entire time larking about. Olga Ravich had a shrieking voice when she laughed, and Lenin gruffly hauled her out into the corridor until her companions rescued her; but he then told them again to keep the noise down. Throughout the trip he was a killjoy: he was determined to get on with his writing as the train chugged its way through Stuttgart, Frankfurt-on-Main and Berlin on its route to the ferry port at Sassnitz. He reprimanded anyone who smoked. When he saw a queue building up for the toilets, he introduced a ticketed waiting system — this calmed his mood until he discovered that Radek was using his time in the closet to light up his pipe. Another scolding followed.
Once they had arrived in Denmark, Lenin and his fellow travellers made their way to Sweden where a reception committee awaited them in Stockholm. He himself adopted yet another assumed name. For a while this foxed the sympathizers who wanted to escort him on his way. An overture also arrived from Alexander Parvus-Helphand. Parvus was a Marxist from Odessa and a millionaire merchant who conducted political errands for the German government; and he wished to make an arrangement whereby the Germans could subsidize Bolshevik activity in Russia. Although Lenin wanted the money, he could not risk being reported as having met with Parvus. Instead he let subordinates negotiate on his behalf. Not everything went as he wanted. He lacked the strength to resist Radek’s admonishments about his sartorial appearance. Radek explained that he simply did not look the part of a revolutionary leader while walking round in hobnailed mountain boots. As Radek got his own back for being told off on the sealed train, Lenin reluctantly agreed to buy new shoes and trousers. But he would go no further than that. He told his tormentor that he was not going back to Russia in order to establish himself in the clothing business. He might have added that someone with Radek’s eccentricities of dress had little right to tell him what to wear.25
All this time Lenin was clarifying his thoughts about overthrowing the Provisional Government and introducing a socialist dictatorship. En route to Russia he wrote them up as his ‘April Theses’. After the Swedish socialists had made their fuss of him, it was on to the border with Finland at Haparanda. This was a neat little riverside town where Swedish gendarmes kept order as the baggage was unloaded. Over the bridge was the village of Tornio that already bore signs of the recent revolution. Russian soldiers were slovenly and unhelpful. The gendarmes had disappeared and the rail timetable had lost any semblance of reality.26 For the travelling party from Switzerland it was an emotional moment as they began to experience the sights and smells of a proper revolution. On 13 April they boarded the train at Tornio, taking copies of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda to their compartments with them. At Beloostrov they crossed the Russo-Finnish border, where they were greeted by Bolshevik Central Committee member Lev Kamenev. Shortly before midnight on 16 April they pulled into Petrograd’s Finland Station where a huge crowd was waiting to welcome the returning revolutionary hero. Lenin was less than gracious to the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries present; he snubbed their ideas about unity among socialists and brusquely called for ‘worldwide socialist revolution’.27
Martov paid dearly for his scruples. He sat it out in Switzerland until he received formal permission from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to do what Lenin had done, not arriving in Petrograd until 22 May.28 By then his Mensheviks had fallen decisively under the sway of comrades like Irakli Tsereteli and Nikolai Chkheidze who had persuaded the Petrograd Soviet to support the Provisional Government. Pavel Milyukov, the new Russian Foreign Affairs Minister, was the piggy in the middle of the negotiations about travel permits. He had not sanctioned Lenin’s trip and consented to Martov returning solely because the Petrograd Soviet had stipulated that every single revolutionary emigrant should have the right to a visa. The Provisional Government could not lightly contradict the will of the soviets.
Martov was slow enough but Trotsky was even slower. It was little consolation for him that Lenin, his old opponent on matters of revolutionary strategy, was edging close to his ideas. Lenin’s ‘April Theses’ were proof of this, but years of dispute between the two had to be surmounted before they could actively co-operate. And anyway Trotsky was stuck in New York. As soon as the Russian consulate had issued a visa for him, he booked a passage for himself and his family on the SS Kristianiafjord. The Trotskys left New York on 27 March. The ocean crossing was as perilous as any taken over the North Sea, and indeed that summer a German U-boat sank the Kristianiafjord on an Atlantic crossing. Trotsky gave no thought to the dangers. Any risk was worth taking when revolutionary Petrograd was the destination. In fact things went well until the steamship pulled in at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Canada was a dominion of the British Empire and the authorities were vetting the passenger lists of transatlantic ferries between Canada and Europe. The British control officers based in Halifax had been alerted to Trotsky’s presence on board and were unhappy about facilitating the journey of a well-known anti-war militant to Scandinavia and Russia. He was arrested and, kicking and shouting, bundled off the vessel to a detention camp. He conducted propaganda among German prisoners-of-war while daily demanding the right to rejoin his family.
Word of what had befallen Trotsky quickly reached Russia, where both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet clamoured for his release as an honourable fighter against the hated monarchy. At first Milyukov had favoured this step. But then he pressed Sir George Buchanan, the United Kingdom’s ambassador in Petrograd, to get the British to keep Trotsky in detention. This they duly did. But when the political left in Petrograd started a press campaign for Trotsky to be freed, Buchanan sensed a danger to the physical security of Britain’s many businessmen in Russia. He leant on Milyukov to stress that the British were not responsible for the situation in Halifax. On 21 April the Provisional Government made clear its lack of objection to Trotsky’s release, and he was reunited with his family and they were allowed to take the next scheduled boat — the Helig Olaf — across the Atlantic.29 They reached Christiania (Oslo) without mishap and made for Haparanda before the last stage across Finland to Petrograd. Like others before him, he was greeted warmly at the Finland Station a month after Lenin’s arrival. His close comrade Moisei Uritski and the Bolshevik Central Committee member G. F. Fëdorov had gone out to accompany him and help acclimatize him to Russian revolutionary politics.
He never forgave the British for his experience in Halifax. His Marxist doctrines and analysis should have told him that the leading capitalist powers were hardly any different from each other and that the French would have done the same in similar circumstances; indeed, from his own doctrinal viewpoint, it was little short of incredible that the American authorities had allowed him out of New York City harbour in the first instance. But Trotsky moaned that the British authorities had had the impertinence to strip-search him; he noted that even the Imperial Russian government had never subjected him to this degrading treatment. It was as if the compulsion to take off his clothes for inspection by a medical doctor was the ultimate barbarity. For a man who was about to introduce a harsh dictatorship this was remarkably over-sensitive.
With Trotsky’s arrival in Petrograd, the Provisional Government was faced by not one but two exceptional troublemakers. He and Lenin set about exploiting the political situation. Even before returning, both had denounced the cabinet as being militarist and imperialist; and they had dismissed those Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders in the Petrograd Soviet who supported Georgi Lvov and fellow ministers and passed up the opportunity to take power in the name of socialist revolution. Russia after the fall of the Romanovs was like no other great power in the world. Restrictions on freedom had vanished. Lenin, the lifelong enemy of the Imperial government and its oppressiveness, was impressed by the reforms undertaken by the Provisional Government. Famously he declared before his return that Russia was the freest country in the world at that time. He and Trotsky could write fluently and get their pieces quickly published. Lenin had a ready-made faction of followers which he could turn into a mass party. He was as yet a nervous speaker, but Trotsky — along with Kerenski — was a talented orator who could stir vast audiences whenever he appeared. And though Trotsky did not immediately join the Bolsheviks, he and Lenin knew they had to bury their past disputes. They wanted the same thing: supreme power in revolutionary Russia.
The returning emigrants came upon a disorientating mixture of the old and the new in Petrograd. The statue of Catherine the Great had a red flag flying from her sceptre. At noon every day without fail the bells of the Peter-Paul Fortress rang out the Glinka melody of ‘God Save the Tsar’. Much also remained unchanged in Moscow and it was still possible to catch sight of the younger grand dukes near the Spasski Gates on Red Square going out for the evening. The brilliant ballerina Tamara Karsavina gave performances in both cities. The world-famous bass Fëdor Shalyapin sang in Verdi’s Don Carlos at Petrograd’s Bolshoi Opera; he had never been a supporter of the old regime and was enjoying his acclaim as a champion of the people. Despite the wartime evacuation of the Hermitage art collection from Petrograd to Moscow, there were weekly exhibitions of paintings as well as public lectures on painting and literature in the capital. Plays were put on which had long been banned. At the Alexandrinski Theatre there was a revival of Alexei Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan the Terrible. The censorship office ceased to function. The Salvation Army, which had been prohibited on Imperial soil by Nicholas II’s government, plastered announcements of its gospel meetings on the walls. A vegetarian restaurant was doing a lot of business by enticing customers with a huge poster of the writer and Christian anarchist Lev Tolstoy and a sign that stated: ‘I Eat Nobody’.1
The conventions of society were being turned inside out. Domestic servants became less likely to obey when their masters or mistresses made demands on them. Many waiters refused to accept gratuities because the practice offended their dignity: ‘Just because a man has to make his living waiting on table is no reason to insult him by offering him a tip!’ Social deference was disappearing. Tram conductors addressed passengers as ‘comrades’ regardless of social status — an innovation that middle-class passengers often found unnerving.2
The most remarkable phenomenon was the influence wielded by organized labour. Workers elected their own soviets in the factory yards. Many cities acquired their own Red Guards to fill the gap left by the gendarmes who had fled. The entire labour movement wanted both order and better conditions for working people as they expanded their network of trade unions and set up factory-workshop committees. And when one body failed to satisfy their demands they either replaced its leadership or turned to some other body to act on their behalf.3 Although the industrial labour force led the way, the enthusiasm for participation spread to every corner of society — with the exception of the aristocracy and the landed gentry whose members lay low after the monarchy’s downfall. Peasants in most Russian regions already had their own bodies, the village communes, to run their affairs. The communes had traditionally engaged in rural selfpolicing and they now extended their authority over all aspects of life in the agricultural areas. Popular administration was a slogan of the day. Even the Trans-Siberian railway was affected. Foreign passengers trying to make their exodus from Russia found themselves being asked to choose a council for their carriage. The motive was more practical than political as the train had to pick up food and drink on the journey and there had to be effective bargaining at each big station. Citizenship in 1917 required everyone to become something of a politician.
Workers wanted higher wages, improved living conditions and secure employment. Increasingly they feared being conscripted if the Provisional Government were to resume active operations on the eastern front. Garrison soldiers felt menaced by the same prospect. At any time they might be ordered to the trenches, and everyone knew how poorly the Russian Army was beginning to perform against the Germans. Peasant households were also restless. They resented having to pay land rents and looked enviously upon the woods and pastures of absentee gentry landlords. It seemed only a matter of time before the villages became ungovernable.
The administrative disintegration picked up pace and the forces of order broke down almost entirely. The gendarmerie in the Russian Empire had never operated with the consent of society. As soon as the monarchy fell, gendarmes pulled off their uniforms and hid themselves from the enraged populace. The old political police — the Okhrana — was disbanded. The commanders of army and navy garrisons could no longer enforce military discipline. The Petrograd Soviet on 14 March issued Order No. 1 stipulating its right to overturn commands issued by military officers. This left the Provisional Government with few instruments to impose its will. Ministers were dependent on favours dispensed by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in the great network of soviets elected by workforces and garrisons in the cities. Prince Lvov could hardly drink a cup of tea without checking whether he had permission. The cabinet kept itself busy and funnelled its policies down through the ministries. The old bureaucrats remained in place; many of them were eager to serve their new masters and implement instructions. But orders formulated in the capital were frequently slow to be obeyed in the provinces. The Provisional Government encountered difficulties from the very start of its rule.
Lvov’s hand of cards held no trumps even before the first post-Romanov crisis occurred in early May. Pavel Milyukov, Minister of Foreign Affairs, shared the deposed emperor’s war aims and expected to acquire the Straits of the Dardanelles for Russia once the Central Powers were defeated, something he made very clear in telegrams to Paris and London. Unfortunately this was in contradiction to the understanding between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government that Russia would fight only a defensive war. Workers in the telegraph offices informed the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders about Milyukov’s telegrams. A protest demonstration was organized. The Lvov cabinet met in a panic, and Milyukov felt compelled to resign along with the Minister for Military Affairs Alexander Guchkov. Lvov also brought Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries into his reconstructed cabinet, hoping that a coalition of liberals and socialists could pull the country together. The Allied diplomats in Petrograd felt relieved. It seemed to them that the new government stood a realistic chance of restoring order to Russia and keeping its armed forces active on the eastern front.
The Bolsheviks had joined in the protest but they had also called for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and inception of a socialist order. Until Lenin’s return to Russia there had been confusion among them. The Bolshevik leaders in the capital who had survived the arrests in the previous winter favoured the kind of radical extremism that Lenin advocated from far-off Switzerland. The Russian Bureau of the Bolsheviks took seriously its old factional doctrine about the desirability of a socialist dictatorship. The Bureau was headed by Vyacheslav Molotov, then only twenty-seven years old. Molotov called for unconditional struggle against the Provisional Government. The moment for Bolsheviks to prevent the liberals from achieving power had already passed, but Molotov believed that Bolshevism required that he and his comrades should seek to reverse the outcome. This remained the official policy of the Russian Bureau until the arrival of senior figures such as Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin from Siberian exile. The Bolshevik Central Committee fell into their hands as they insisted on a policy of conditional support for the Provisional Government. But there were many Bolsheviks in Petrograd and the provinces who thought Molotov had been right, and it was not difficult for Lenin to persuade the faction to sanction the revolutionary course he had proposed in his ‘April Theses’.4
Bolshevik militants stood against Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, whom Lenin denounced as ‘social-traitors’, in elections to the soviets, trade unions and factory-workshop committees. Their party newspaper, Pravda, predicted that conditions for working people would not improve until a socialist revolution had occurred. They adopted slogans of Peace, Bread and Land and promised national self-determination to the non-Russians. They demanded the installation of a government based on the soviets, and declared that the era of socialism was at hand throughout Europe. Lenin and his comrades contended that Lvov’s cabinet was a capitalist government motivated by militarist and imperialist objectives. Only a minority of workers and soldiers as yet accepted this, and hardly any peasants had heard of Bolshevism; but the drip-drip effect of Bolshevik propaganda was noticeable. Covertly helped by funds from the German government, which was willing to finance any organization that would pull Russia out of the war, the party expanded its printing facilities and grew in size as tens of thousands of people signed up for membership. Lenin himself attracted massive attention as the champion of the antigovernmental cause and Trotsky and other left-wing Marxists joined the Bolsheviks as the likeliest instrument of revolutionary socialism in Russia. The Provisional Government was put on notice that it could take nothing for granted.
Lvov now presided over a divided cabinet. Socialist ministers undertook reforms in industrial relations; they also permitted peasants to cultivate land left unsown by gentry landlords. The liberals in the cabinet, led by the Constitutional-Democrats (usually known as Kadets), worried that socialism was being installed by stealth. They wanted to resume military operations on the eastern front, which was in fact agreed by Alexander Kerenski in his new post as Minister for Military Affairs. Inside the cabinet, however, the debate continued. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were pushing for a more active search for peace, and ministers duly sanctioned Russian involvement in an international socialist conference in Stockholm where this would be the core of the agenda. But at the same time Kerenski was laying plans for an offensive against the Austro-Hungarian forces on the southern sector of the front.
This display of commitment delighted the Allies. It did not displease Lenin and Trotsky, who said it proved that the coalition was as aggressive as they had always contended. The Bolsheviks exploited the popular unease by calling for an armed demonstration in Petrograd against government policy. This was set to coincide with the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets in mid-June. Suspecting that the Bolsheviks were plotting to overthrow the Lvov cabinet, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries decided to organize their own unarmed demonstration through the centre of the city. They dominated the Congress of Soviets; but when they asserted that no single party wished to take power in Russia, Lenin shouted from the floor: ‘There is such a party!’ The Bolshevik Central Committee, confident that its fortunes were improving, organized a yet further demonstration. The Kronstadt naval garrison — a hotbed of anticabinet feelings — promised to sail over to the capital and bring their rifles. Lenin chose this moment to take a few days’ holiday in the countryside. This was an artificial display of nonchalance. Anatoli Lunacharski, one of Trotsky’s sympathizers and someone who would soon join the Bolshevik party, later admitted that the demonstration was intended to ‘probe’ the scope for a socialist insurrection.
The Provisional Government was crippled by internal dispute. Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary ministers were insisting on granting regional autonomy to Ukraine; they wanted to recognize its Central Rada — the as yet unofficial elected body that combined a broad range of Ukrainian organizations — as the legal holder of administrative authority in Kiev. The Kadets objected to this as the first step to breaking up the entire multinational state. They resigned from the cabinet when Lvov sided with the socialists. Yet the rump of the cabinet held firm. Loyal troops in Petrograd were sent out to break up the Bolshevik-led demonstration. Dozens of civilians were killed. The Ministry of Internal Affairs seized the opportunity to suppress the Bolshevik party in the capital and manipulate public opinion by the release of documents pointing to the secret German subsidy. A warrant was issued for Lenin’s arrest. Lenin fled to sanctuary in Finland; Trotsky flaunted his sympathy with the Bolsheviks and was taken into custody. The rest of the Bolshevik leadership in Petrograd went underground and waited for the political storm to blow over.
Lvov had run out of energy in the emergency; he could see no future for his premiership and handed over power to Kerenski, who spent weeks putting together a fresh cabinet. The June military offensive was a disaster and the Central Powers marched deep into Ukraine. War-weariness spread to garrisons and trenches. Food supplies to Russian cities dipped. Industrial conflict intensified in factories and mines as owners faced down the demands for higher wages. Inflation racked the financial system. Law enforcement was pitiful while garrison troops showed allegiance exclusively to the nearby soviets. Peasants began to use the gentry’s pastures and woods without compensation, and it was obvious that a vast land grab was in the offing. The outlying regions of the old Russian Empire grew restless; and as the economic crisis sharpened, local administrations took to ignoring Petrograd and engaging in self-rule. The socialist ministers who had served under Lvov resigned in order to devote themselves to shoring up the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Petrograd Soviet. Kerenski held supreme power but was politically isolated. His oratory was losing its impact. His capacity to impose the decrees of the Provisional Government was diminishing.
Few options were available to him as he sought to widen his base of support. On 25 August he opened a State Conference that brought together every anti-Bolshevik group from the Kadets through to the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. His idea was to demonstrate that Russian politicians were still capable of responding to the country’s needs in times of war. He spoke with something like his earlier panache and was fêted by female admirers as he left the proceedings.
But it escaped nobody’s attention that the Commander-in-Chief Lavr Kornilov was greeted rapturously by the liberals and right-ofcentre groupings. Kerenski assured Kornilov that he still desired to reinforce the eastern front and bring the city soviets to heel. Kornilov consented to send reliable troops from the front to quell the Petrograd disorder. As the trains started to move them to the capital, Kerenski changed his mind for fear that Kornilov might be scheming against him. He gave orders for Kornilov to pull back his contingent. This exasperated Kornilov, who concluded that Kerenski now lacked the nerve to act for the good of the country. The situation was not helped by the confusing reports received by Kerenski from his own military adviser Boris Savinkov. The advance on Petrograd continued and developed into an outright mutiny. Kerenski in panic turned to the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, asking them to go out and cajole Kornilov’s force into disobeying his commands. Bolsheviks joined in the effort and the mutiny collapsed. Kornilov was put under arrest. Kerenski drew a sombre lesson. Noting that the Kadets had cheered on Kornilov as the hope of Russia, he called a Democratic Conference at the end of September that excluded all those liberals who had failed to stand by the Provisional Government. Kerenski saw this as the only way to obtain broad popular approval.
Hatred for the Romanovs remained strong among workers, and Kerenski worried that things might run out of control. His first thought was to arraign the former emperor before a proper court and, if he was found not guilty, send him off to England and his cousin George V. But the Provisional Government, with all its pressing difficulties, formulated no decisive policy. A commission was appointed to investigate Nicholas, his wife Alexandra and the rest of the Romanov family. The public agitation against the Romanovs induced the Provisional Government to enquire whether the British would give asylum to the Romanovs. Kerenski, when Minister of Justice in the first cabinet, had gone to see the former Emperor Nicholas at Tsarskoe Selo and pass on best wishes from his Windsor cousins, but the family was deprived of liberty for its own protection. But now, although Lloyd George had no objection, George V worried that the ex-tsar’s arrival in Britain would make the house of Windsor unpopular.5 The British authorities replied in the negative. The Provisional Government held an unminuted discussion and decided to deposit the Imperial family in Tobolsk in Siberia. Its distance from the main centres was a primary advantage and the old governor’s residence was chosen for them. Nicholas told Kerenski: ‘I’m not worried. We trust you.’ The planned destination was kept secret; and although monarchist militants tried to reach him in Tobolsk there was no serious attempt at a rescue.6
Other policies of the Provisional Government were less effective. Manufacturers despaired of order being restored to the factories; many closed down their businesses and moved their accounts abroad. Few landowners dared to stay on their estates. Bankers focused their endeavours on preserving their assets and cut off financial credits to industry. The urban economy was crashing to the ground and conditions worsened for all social strata. Shopkeepers were pulling down their shutters. Mass unemployment rose steadily in the cities. Whereas the industrial workforces had once struck for higher pay and better conditions, the priority became to keep enterprises open and save jobs. Kerenski raised the prices paid for agricultural produce so as to entice the peasantry into selling to government procurers. The result was disappointing. Peasants complained about receiving rubles that were useless for purchasing farm equipment that was unavailable. Armed units had to be put at the ready to march into the countryside in order to feed the cities and the front. At the same time there were disturbing reports from the trenches that troops were deserting in an ever swelling stream. Discipline was falling apart in the Russian Army. The entire state was ceasing to exist and Russia fell to its knees.
The Bolshevik party benefited from this collapse. Increasingly its militants were again operating in the open; indeed they had never disappeared from view outside Petrograd and Moscow. Trotsky was released from prison and returned to public platforms to heap the blame for Russia’s misfortunes on the Provisional Government. Lenin in his Helsinki refuge declared that the Kornilov affair proved that there were only two alternatives: military dictatorship or socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks attended the Democratic Conference only to state their case against Kerenski and walk out.
Far from being delighted by this, Lenin thought the Bolsheviks were allowing themselves to become distracted from the organizing of an insurrection. He got articles couriered to Petrograd from his places of hiding. He nagged his comrades about the urgent need to overthrow the cabinet — and it was becoming clear that he could count on Trotsky, the newly recruited Bolshevik, to support his strategy. Although the Central Committee did not always accede to Lenin’s ideas, it never wholly ignored them. The anti-Bolshevik press went on building up his importance, representing him as a demonic figure with a mesmeric power over the Bolsheviks and Trotsky was depicted as his political twin. In the Petrograd Soviet there was anxiety among Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries whenever Trotsky appeared. He replaced Kerenski as the great orator of the Revolution. From early September he was Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, and other city soviets throughout Russia quickly began to go over to the Bolsheviks. The mood in the party grew confident that some new kind of coalition would eventually be formed with willing Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders. Kerenski and his cabinet appeared about to be consigned to oblivion, and opinion grew among workers and soldiers in favour of a government composed exclusively of dedicated socialists.
Lenin’s thoughts were fixed on an uprising; he denied that ‘Kerenski’s clique’ could be removed without violence. He returned incognito to Petrograd to put his case at the Bolshevik Central Committee. A nocturnal meeting was held on 23–24 October when he harangued fellow leaders as only he could do. Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev opposed him. They doubted that the working class was firmly in favour of an uprising. They questioned whether Europe was on the point of experiencing socialist revolutions; they feared that any premature move by the Bolsheviks would expose them to an irresistible counter-strike. But Lenin beat them back and the vote went ten to four in his favour. The Central Committee met again six days later with Bolshevik leaders from the rest of Russia. For the second time Lenin faced down his opponents after a blistering dispute. Official Bolshevik policy was set definitively in the direction of seizing power.7
The principle of insurrection but not the practicalities were debated. As Lenin went back into hiding on the outskirts of the capital, it was Trotsky who devised tactics and strategy. The Petrograd Soviet had recently established a Military-Revolutionary Committee to oversee the garrisons. Trotsky saw that he could use this body to rally support among troops and co-ordinate armed action against the Provisional Government. This would have the advantage of making the coup appear less as a Bolshevik party coup d'etat than as a step towards installing rule by soviets. What happened in Petrograd could then be copied in other cities. And once Kerenski had been arrested or expelled from the Winter Palace, power could be presented to the Second Congress of Soviets that was scheduled to meet in the next few days. Lenin was not pleased: he wanted instant action. Kamenev and Zinoviev broke ranks by divulging their trepidation about the Central Committee decisions. Everyone in Petrograd now knew that the Bolsheviks were about to embark on drastic measures. Kerenski and his ministers did not intend to go down without a fight. They made efforts to rally support from garrison commanders as the moment of armed collision grew closer. They felt certain that Russia’s woes would increase a thousandfold if it fell under Bolshevik rule.
The situation was deeply unpromising for the Provisional Government. Germany’s army marched into Riga on 3 September and the Russian Army was scattered into retreat. The railway network was disrupted as troops piled on to any train moving towards their home regions. The economy was disintegrating. In the cities a winter of unemployment and food shortages was the prospect for all but the wealthy in the cities. In the villages of Russia and Ukraine agitation for the transfer of all arable land to the peasantry grew. Whole regions ignored government decrees. A French propaganda film of model guns and planes was shown in Petrograd to encourage Russian patriotic enthusiasm. This was never going to be popular since Russia’s war was all but over.8
By October the mood on Petrograd streets was flagging. Outwardly there was normality. The trams were running. The post and telegraph system was working. But people were talking about what the Germans might do next; they wondered whether zeppelins and aeroplanes might be used to drop bombs on the capital. The authorities took the necessary precautions. Air-raid sirens were given frequent tests. There were rehearsals for the measures to be taken in case of an attack, and firemen doubled the number of practice exercises. Street gas lamps were banned. Crime and disorder had been bad enough since March when the gendarmes fled. Now they were worse.9 These were weeks of sombre news as the war went in favour of the Central Powers. German forces seized the two islands at the extreme northern edge of the Gulf of Riga in mid-month. Russian armed forces were pushed eastwards. Although they held on to Estonian territory, they had to withdraw their strategic defence to the Gulf of Finland for the first time.10 Supplies in the capital’s shops dwindled. There was no tobacco on sale and anyone wanting chocolate had to queue for it with a ration book.11
Kerenski seldom left the Winter Palace. His courage and commitment remained high but there were days when his morale dipped low. The Bolsheviks no longer troubled to debate with other socialists. They sped round Petrograd making final preparations for a decisive violent clash. Kerenski was visibly losing his earlier confidence. He was no longer waving to his crowds: he was drowning.
As the Russian Army fell apart on the eastern front, the Western Allies ceased to pay much attention to the opinions of Alexander Kerenski. They came reluctantly to this position. Sharing a dislike of the Romanov monarchy, they had hoped to co-operate well with democratic Russia. There was no rush among them to ditch the Provisional Government. But the news from Petrograd was constantly depressing, and leaders in Paris, London and Washington concluded that it was no longer sensible to fund and supply the Russian armed forces.
The French President Georges Poincaré was prominent among the small group of politicians who revised the agenda of the Allied powers. An intensely ambitious lawyer who had once acted for the writer Jules Verne, he had been elected President in 1913, and held the post through to 1920. Poincaré was a political conservative and had served regularly in cabinets before the Great War, constantly pushing for the firm pursuit of France’s national interest. The turnover in ministerial postings enabled him to increase his influence. There were four premiers — Aristide Briand, Alexandre Ribot, Paul Painlevé and Georges Clemenceau — in 1917 alone. Not until Clemenceau, a fierce Radical who had made a name for himself by speaking against anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus Affair, became premier in November that year was there a rival to Poincaré’s dominance and the President would find himself sidelined. The two men anyway agreed about national military and foreign policy. German armies occupied departments in northern France. No leading politician in France proposed the slightest appeasement of the Central Powers. The war had to be fought to a victorious end. Germany had to be made to pay for the devastation it had caused — and subjected to a peace settlement that would disable it from threatening the French again.
David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, was usually less strident in his rhetoric but agreed that the Germans had to be totally defeated. He had acceded to supreme office in December 1916 to lead a governing coalition of Conservatives and Liberals and so straddled the political right and centre-left. He was a Welshman whose accent had not entirely left him, and he was a Nonconformist. Becoming MP for Caernarfon Boroughs, he supported social reforms with a panache which brought him to attention inside and outside the House of Commons. His private life was a mess. He kept his secretary Frances Stevenson as a mistress; he shamelessly sold peerages for political favours. But he proved himself as a war leader, and helped to lessen the U-boat threat by imposing the convoy system on the Royal Navy. He spoke with equal impressiveness to aristocrats at house parties and to factory workers and shop girls at the hustings. A man of abundant self-belief, he was acknowledged alongside Winston Churchill as one of the great orators in the House of Commons.
As the war dragged on, Lloyd George concentrated on military questions to the exclusion of post-war planning. But President Woodrow Wilson had no intention of letting the topic disappear from the Allied agenda. He was determined to see that victory over the Central Powers would be followed by a peace which offered a better future to the peoples of the world. Wilson had occupied the White House since 1913. Patrician in appearance and austerely intellectual, he was the most academic of the leaders of the world’s great powers, having headed Princeton University before becoming Governor of New Jersey. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on congressional government. He detested militarism, and, like other American politicians, he also hated empires. He had won a second presidential term in 1916 by promising to keep his country out of the Great War. He was resolute in his principles but open to correcting them in the light of examined reality. He could not directly explore the currents of European politics since constitutionally he was prevented from travelling abroad on long trips. For that purpose he employed his confidant Edward House, who despite having no military experience was always known as Colonel House. No one talked directly with so many leading politicians of the Allies and the Central Powers, and President Wilson received the very best and latest information about war and politics in Europe.
The Allied leaders knew that the great cities in Germany and Austria were experiencing a growth in discontent. Allied intelligence agencies and embassies reported regularly on the situation in Germany. British and French diplomats in Sweden were well placed to gather information simply by speaking to ferry passengers arriving from Hamburg. The Swedish newspapers were anyway discussing the same material.1 The government in Berlin got wind of this and sometimes produced a false edition of some German newspaper containing misinformation. But although Stockholm experienced a swirling fog of claims and counter-claims, there was no denying that Germany faced growing difficulties.2
German politics was entering a volatile period. The extreme left had been rounded up and imprisoned in mid-1916, including leading revolutionaries such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Their Spartakusbund, named after the gladiator who headed the slave revolt against Rome in 73–71 BC, continued clandestine activity. Liebknecht and Luxemburg smuggled articles out of prison which argued that the war was being fought for the exclusive purposes of the rich and powerful. More and more German socialists were attracted to their message. By 1917 the Social-Democratic Party of Germany was splitting apart as its radical members, led by Hugo Haase in the Reichstag, refused to obey the party line. By then it had become plain not only that the General Staff under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff dominated both Kaiser and government but that they were pushing for policies of naked territorial expansion. Haase and his comrades would no longer tolerate the mildness of their party’s critique of the government and the high command. As a result, they established the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany — and they brought the old party’s great theorist Karl Kautsky along with them and communicated with the imprisoned Spartacists.
Ludendorff and Hindenburg resolved to take an all-or-nothing gamble on the western front — indeed this was why unrestricted submarine warfare had been introduced. Every last resource was to be dedicated to an offensive strategy. They insisted that the Kaiser should replace the vacillating Theobald Bethmann Hollweg, Chancellor since 1909, with their protégé Georg Michaelis. If they were to beat the Allies on the western front it was essential to win battles decisively before the American armies reached France and acquired the necessary training. The industrial capacity of Germany had reached its limit. The adherence of the US to the Allied cause was bound to aggravate the problems in the economy. Time was not on the German side; and the fact that Austria-Hungary was known to be searching for a way of obtaining an honourable withdrawal from the war was an additional complication. Yet Ludendorff and Hindenburg also knew that morale was slipping in the French Army and that Marshal Pétain was having to deal with mutinies by the most severe means. The Germans would never have a better chance to swarm over the Anglo-French defences and finish the war in the west.
The Western Allied leaders were sensitive to this possibility. While reinforcing their troops and equipment in northern France, they continued to look to the Russians to make their contribution in the east. Financial credits were still forthcoming. Military supplies came across the Pacific and the North Sea. Russian armed forces in the winter of 1916–17 had registered success with an offensive planned by General Alexei Brusilov. London, Paris and Washington had no illusions about where Germany had to be defeated. The western front would be their priority. But for this to happen it was essential for Russia to remain a threat in the east. The millions of peasants in uniform had to stay at the eastern front and tie down hundreds of German divisions.
Throughout the war the Western Allies had frequently sent official visitors to Russia to gather information and consolidate support for the war effort. A group of French and British socialist parliamentarians arrived at the Finland Station on 14 April 1917. They included Marcel Cachin, Ernest Lafont and Marius Moutet — two professors of philosophy and a lawyer. The British sent cabinet-maker James O’Grady and plumber Will Thorne.3 Although they received a warm welcome from the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, their impact on popular opinion was negligible. The French resolved to improve on this in midsummer by sending no less a personage than their Minister of Munitions Albert Thomas. He too was a socialist and the idea was that he would find it easy to talk to leaders of the Russian labour movement. But Thomas overdid his performance as a man of the people. At a banquet in his honour he ate his meat off the end of his knife; Russians detected a degree of condescension.4 The British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst arrived around the same time. She lost no time in criticizing opponents of the Allied military endeavour. She denounced the anti-war MP Ramsay MacDonald on the grounds that he was simply copying what Lloyd George had done in the Boer War in order to gain cheap popularity.5 MacDonald would have liked to visit Russia but the patriotic Seamen’s Union made it impossible for him to set off.6 The Provisional Government anyway did not want people like him in the country. As for Pankhurst, she got on well with Kerenski and his wife but attracted little wider attention. The political situation was no longer influenced by the thoughts of strangers.
President Wilson’s special representative Elihu Root arrived in the same weeks and stayed in the Winter Palace.7 The Americans had offered a loan of a hundred million dollars to the Provisional Government on condition that it was used to buy products and supplies from American companies.8 That had been in May. The other requirement was for Russia to prove its military capacity to benefit from such assistance. Root, a former secretary of state, had a direct manner. His mission was ‘to devise, in accordance with the Russian government, effective means to aid Russia in her efforts to defeat the universal enemy’.9 He warned ministers that American aid would depend on the Russians continuing to keep up the fight on the eastern front.10 On returning to the US, he praised Kerenski to the skies and denounced American protesters against the war: ‘There are men here who should be shot at sunrise.’ He claimed that German agents were at work everywhere; he attacked Trotsky and other political emigrants who had returned to Russia and now vilified the country that had given them asylum.11 His advice to Wilson was to release funds to the Provisional Government. He insisted that the Russians, with American help, could still make an important contribution to victory over Germany.12
The information reaching London and Paris was of good quality throughout the war; and the American diplomats quickly matched this effort. In March 1917, just before the United States entered the war, the American consul-general in Petrograd, North Winship, had found himself surrounded at the entrance to his office in the Singer Building by a crowd suspicious that he was pro-German. Singer seemed a Teutonic name; and as for the American bald-headed eagle, perhaps it was really a German symbol. Winship courageously held his nerve and set about supplying Washington with a detailed, daily summary of Petrograd politics. He followed the proceedings in the Petrograd Soviet. He explained the doctrines and policies of the ‘Maximalists’ under Lenin. He reported on every big newspaper’s reaction to President Wilson’s declaration of war. He described the poor showing of Russia’s armed forces and the decline in popular support for the war.13 His expertise was invaluable to David R. Francis, who had been appointed to the US embassy at the age of sixty-five in March 1916.
The dean of the Petrograd diplomatic corps was the United Kingdom’s Sir George Buchanan. Tall and always dressed to perfection, Buchanan had not troubled to learn Russian despite having been ambassador since 1910. When about to be honoured with the freedom of the city of Moscow he had to spend an hour learning the word for ‘thank you’ (spasibo). But as the mayor hung a gold chain round his neck, Buchanan instead said pivo, which is the Russian for ‘beer’.14 Moscow’s dignitaries showed their magnanimity by pretending they had not heard the plea for alcoholic refreshment, and Buchanan survived his faux pas in serene ignorance. For the rest of his time in Russia he remained unapologetically monoglot except for when he spoke French (in which he was fluent but with a British lack of enthusiasm). Buchanan kept to the steady manners of the British ruling class abroad. He was thought the quintessential Englishman, although in fact he was Scottish. He was respected but not liked. Joseph Noulens, the French ambassador, described him as ‘dry, cold and disdainful’. High society in the Russian capital retained a lot of its old liveliness, but an evening at the Buchanans’ was unlikely to be a jolly occasion.15
Buchanan was never going to make a close friend of the American ambassador. When visiting the US residence with Noulens, Buchanan seldom forbore to comment on what he saw as the vulgarity of the Americans. He scorned the large photograph of himself that Francis had hung outside his reception room: ‘Don’t you find this in bad taste?’ If asked to dine, he would turn to Noulens and say something like: ‘Ah, we’re going to have a bad supper… cooked by a Negro.’16
Ambassador Francis sensed this contempt but continued to think well of Buchanan.17 Evidently he had a generous side to his nature; he had kindly Southern manners and rarely lost his temper. Nor did he disguise his own feeling that he was not the right man for the Russian posting. His qualifications were slim indeed. Like Buchanan, he spoke no Russian; but, unusually for a diplomat in those days, Francis’s French was primitive. This was hardly his fault. Although he had served in the cabinet of President Grover Cleveland as Secretary of the Interior in 1896–7, he had made his name not in international affairs but as a St Louis banker.18 While his staff busied themselves with liaising with the Russians, he maintained a high level of fitness. He was a big man who played a lot of golf. He was also an enthusiastic dancer at Petrograd balls. He practised a set of physical exercises each morning and arranged that no day passed without his devoting several hours to his pastimes. Among them were a partiality for comely young secretaries and a fondness for whisky, which he claimed he was drinking only to please his doctors.19
The other leading Allied diplomats were Joseph Noulens and the Marchese della Torretta. Ambassador Noulens, who arrived in Petrograd in July 1917, was younger than Francis but temperamentally rigid despite his criticism of Buchanan for the same quality. As France’s ex-Minister of War, he hated the revolutionary turbulence in Russia under the Provisional Government.20 Della Torretta, the Italian chargé d’affaires, was still more settled in his ways. It was said that his preference would be to go to sleep and wake up with the Romanovs still in power. Russia’s traumas after the February Revolution left him dumb with incomprehension.
The British and French embassies had built up military missions and intelligence agencies to look after their national interests in wartime. The Americans, coming late into the war, were slow to do the same. But once they were in it, they were determined to win it. By early autumn they were assembling an Information Service which covertly gathered data for Washington’s attention. But there remained a reluctance, felt keenly by Woodrow Wilson, to meddle in Russian internal affairs; and he overruled Senator Root’s advice to grant $5 million for the purposes of propaganda in Russia.21 Wilson was at any rate less disengaged than he appeared to be. Sir William Wiseman, head of the New York station of Britain’s Secret Service Bureau, put the case for an Anglo-American joint intelligence effort to support Russia and its military commitment. He had already made a positive impression on Colonel House.22 Since the US as yet had no serious network of agents it was easy for Wiseman to persuade House and the Secretary of State Robert Lansing to let the British take the lead — and the President on 15 June 1917 sanctioned funds to the value of $75,000. The Foreign Office in London was to supply the same amount.23 The Western Allies were increasingly concerned about Russia’s capacity to go on fighting. They used their missions and agencies to discover whether alternative arrangements might be possible without the Provisional Government.
For their chief covert agent in Petrograd the British picked the distinguished writer W. Somerset Maugham.24 This broke a rudimentary rule of intelligence. Maugham’s renown meant he could never be inconspicuous in the Russian capital. One of his plays was currently in performance there. What is more, Maugham was ignorant about Russian politics and was acquainted with no Russian public figures. He knew no Russian; he had not even mastered the Cyrillic alphabet. In other ways, though, he was a sensible choice. Maugham had wartime experience as an operative working for Mansfield Cumming of the Secret Service Bureau. He had demonstrated steely qualities on missions to France and Switzerland; he summed up individuals and situations and could keep a cool head. He was quietly pleased that the authorities thought him the best man for Russia, and he took the chance to regularize his employment. Until then he had given his services as a patriot, receiving only expenses but no pay. Now he insisted on being remunerated as a professional. He adopted no cover but lived openly in the Russian capital, contacting his former mistress Sasha Kropotkina to gain an entrée into high society. Through her he met Alexander Kerenski and took him out for meals at the fashionable Bear restaurant.
Maugham thought he was picking up gems of information but in truth he discovered nothing closed to Sir George Buchanan. His main contribution was in cheering up Kerenski. But he preferred the company of Boris Savinkov, who was no longer on speaking terms with Kerenski after the Kornilov affair. Savinkov, a former deputy leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Combat Organization that had assassinated Imperial officials before the war, was a fervent militant to the core of his being and now made proposals to crush anti-war agitation at the front and to shelve Kerenski’s plans for the Constituent Assembly election. Victory in the war should be the supreme goal. Maugham liked Savinkov’s idea of forming a strong centre party of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries standing clear of the Kadets and the Bolsheviks. Savinkov proposed recruiting a Czech Corps to reinforce the Allied effort.25 Maugham rushed to get to know the Czechs. Most of them were ex-POWs captured by the Russians earlier in the war. They offered their services to the Allies in the hope of forming an independent state for Czechs and Slovaks after defeating the Central Powers. Maugham came up with an offer of money and supplies. He was not the first to do so. The British and French military missions were touring the Czech and Slovak camps trying to recruit volunteers to fight either in northern France or in the Balkans, establishing their own national contingents under the joint command of the Allies.26
Allied personnel scurried to every public occasion to get a sense of what was going on. Colonels William B. Thompson and Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross went to the Democratic Conference.27 Thompson lavishly subsidized pro-war newspapers in Petrograd, often dipping into his own pockets — he had made his wealth as a businessman before the war.28 And although the Red Cross was meant to be a charitable, non-combatant and apolitical agency, Robins secretly employed informers in the Petrograd garrison; what they told him was not confined to the supply of medicine and the dressing of wounds.29 Robins concluded that the war was dead ‘in the heart of the Russian soldier’.30
Sir George Buchanan could see how badly things were going for the Provisional Government. His own health was frail but, despite withering to a skeletal thinness, he had not lost the forthrightness that once led him to tell Nicholas II that reforms were urgently necessary.31 On 9 October it fell to Buchanan to go with Noulens and Della Torretta and tell Kerenski that he was losing the confidence of Russia’s Western Allies. They disliked interfering in the affairs of a troubled, friendly power, but the Provisional Government had to understand their worries. The Russian Army was falling apart; it no longer constituted any serious threat to the Germans or even to the Austrians. The Allies were reluctant to divert precious resources to Russia at a time when their own forces in northern France were fighting hard. Buchanan delivered the message with firm solemnity. Kerenski, exhausted by all the woes of his rule, bridled at what he heard. He replied in Russian as Foreign Affairs Minister Tereshchenko interpreted for him. For once he was concise, demanding that the stream of aid should be restored. It was Kerenski’s last attempt to persuade the Allies that the eastern front was not a lost cause.32
Colonel Thompson called a meeting of Allied military representatives in his rooms in the Hotel Europe on 3 November 1917. Present were Colonel Alfred Knox, General Henri Niessel and General William V. Judson as well as General Neslukhovski and David Soskice from Kerenski’s office. Thompson also invited his Red Cross colleague Raymond Robins. It was not a pleasant occasion. Knox and Niessel were scathing about the failings of the Provisional Government. Tempers were lost when Niessel called Russia’s soldiers ‘yellow cowardly dogs’ and the Russians soon walked out.33 Knox was usually as forthright as Niessel. He thought Robins should have supported Kornilov’s campaign for a military dictatorship. He highlighted the danger from Lenin and Trotsky: ‘I tell you what we do with such people. We shoot them.’34 Robins retorted: ‘You do if you catch them. But you will have to do some catching. But you are up against several million. General, I am not a military man. But you are not up against a military situation. You are up against a folks’ situation.’35 Suitably translated into Marxist jargon and shorn of its colloquialism, this could have been Lenin speaking. The angry exchange between Knox and Robins was about to be repeated in Western capitals as governments debated their policy on Russia. Should Russians be left to decide their own future or could the Allies pressurize them to continue the war on the eastern front?
Most newspapers in the Allied countries supported the effort to keep Russia in the war. But there were always dissenters, especially among the reporters based in Petrograd. They had diverse reasons for opposing conventional opinion. But one thing united them: their appreciation that the Provisional Government stood no chance of sustaining the military effort. They thought Kerenski was, politically, a dead man walking. They shared a feeling of moral outrage at the sufferings of Russian soldiers who were compelled to confront the German armies without hope of operational effectiveness. And they turned sympathetically to the single big party — the Bolsheviks — that promised to take drastic action to pull Russia out of the war. The Western dissenters became cheerleaders for Bolshevism.
Nobody was more ardent than Arthur Ransome. His early social contacts in London had been in the book trade and he had not shown socialist leanings before leaving for Russia as a freelance author in 1913. From working in publishers’ offices he had started to write books of his own. His Bohemia in London achieved a decent success but then his biography of Oscar Wilde got him entangled with the courts when Wilde’s former lover Lord Alfred Douglas sued him for libel. The court case was a draining experience for Ransome even though he emerged the victor. He had achieved only moderate success before the time of his marriage to Ivy Walker and the birth of their daughter Tabitha. He and Ivy got on badly from the start, and the journey to Russia offered him an escape from her evening rages. He industriously picked up the language and wrote a book that stayed permanently in print. This was Old Peter’s Russian Tales, a retelling of folk stories meant for children but read with equal pleasure by adults. With the onset of war Ransome’s facility in Russian and his zest for adventure permitted a change of tack, and he became a correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian. Steadily his interest in the socialist movement in both Britain and Russia grew. He showed an exceptional talent for listening carefully to his interviewees and relaying their thought in crystal-clear prose.1
Ransome sought out the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders after the fall of the Romanovs. His sympathy with socialism loosened their tongues and they spoke to him in a way they did not dare in public. By late summer 1917 they knew that the Russian Army would not stay in the trenches much longer. When the Constituent Assembly eventually met, there would be huge pressure for the signing of a separate peace if some kind of negotiations with the Central Powers had not already begun.2 Ransome thought this over. He did not question the urgent need for the Allies to defeat Germany. He was a British patriot and his own brother had died in the fighting, but he could see no good in trying to compel Russia to keep its troops on the eastern front since they were already exhausted and defeated. His conclusion was anathema to official circles in London; and British intelligence kept its eyes on him as a dangerous freethinker and opened the letters he wrote to his wife Ivy in England.3 But just as he was starting to annoy the authorities, he announced his desire for a period of English leave. The daily tasks of following the fast-moving political drama in Petrograd had worn him out. When granted permission for a holiday, he took the dangerous ferry journey back across the North Sea and reached Aberdeen on 17 October.4
Ransome told everyone in London willing to listen that Kerenski was doomed. Within days his prophecy had been realized in Petrograd. He kicked himself for having missed the greatest newspaper scoop of his lifetime, and pestered his editors to sanction another assignment in Russia. His enthusiasm was reciprocated: few journalists were better qualified to report on Russian affairs.
Less extravagant in his dismissal of the Provisional Government was the British consul-general in Moscow. Robert Bruce Lockhart had proved himself a sharp-eyed observer of the Russian political stage and, like Ransome, had gone native in Moscow. His Russian contacts gave him a Russian Christian name and patronymic and knew him as Roman Romanovich Lokkart.5 Perhaps his full name in English, Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, was too much of a mouthful for them. Lockhart had arrived in Russia in 1912. No Scot was prouder in saying, as he often did: ‘There is no drop of English blood in my veins.’ He claimed descent from the noble families of Bruce, Hamilton, Wallace and Douglas — and he boasted of a genealogical connection with Boswell of Auchinleck. He was as restless as Ransome, having tried to make a career as a rubber planter in Malaya, where an amorous dalliance with a local princess got him into hot water. He loved writing poems and stories and could easily have become a journalist but instead applied for the Foreign Office and scraped through the entrance exam. He married Jean Turner and brought her out with him on his Russian posting. Ambassador Buchanan took him under his wing as a bright diplomatic prospect even though Lockhart’s politics were to the left of centre in Britain.6
Unhinged by her husband’s philandering, Jean went back to Britain. He treated her departure as a licence to indulge himself. He spent many a night out on the tiles after carousing in the Gypsy encampment on the city outskirts at Strelnaya. He dabbled in the occult with his friend Aleister Crowley.7 But he was not entirely feckless. He read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the original. He steeped himself in Russian poetry and was a regular visitor to the theatre. He was young and fit; on first arriving in Moscow he had played a good game of football for a Russian team. He had plenty of self-confidence and determination. And throughout this time he made himself acquainted with all shades of public opinion in wartime Russia.
By autumn 1917 neither Buchanan nor Lockhart would have bet on the Provisional Government’s survival or the Russian Army’s continuation in the war. But Lockhart was no longer in Moscow when the Bolsheviks seized power. His reason for absence was more dubious than Ransome’s. All his life Lockhart had an attraction for neurotic upper-class women who wanted to throw off convention. Russian high society had plenty of such examples, and it had not been long before the young Scot was conducting an illicit affair with a lady from one of Moscow’s prominent families. Ambassador Buchanan, on being informed, told Lockhart that the embassy could not afford such a scandal in the country of a wartime ally. The discreet solution was to send him back to London on medical grounds. Lockhart went to a Russian doctor who signed an affidavit that he was suffering from anaemic exhaustion.8 Buchanan, it must be said, was no expert in dissembling. Instead of sticking to the agreed story, he told his fellow ambassador Joseph Noulens mysteriously that Lockhart had left against his advice.9
One Briton remained in Russia who was willing to welcome a left-of-centre alternative to Kerenski. This was the Manchester Guardian’s Morgan Philips Price. Throughout the war he had criticized the motives of all the belligerent powers even at the risk of his public standing. Philips Price was a wealthy man from the west country. Educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he had inherited an estate of 2,000 acres near Gloucester and came from a political family. His father was a Liberal MP and he himself was adopted as prospective candidate for the same party, but he was dropped for his strident opposition to the war. Philips Price then joined the Union of Democratic Control. He also wrote The Diplomatic History of the War at manic speed and got it published within weeks of the outbreak of hostilities. He lamented the tragedy of diplomatic failure: ‘But for the outbreak of war there was a reasonable hope that the liberal political elements in Austria and Russia would have gained the day.’10 Soon he came to the attention of C. P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian and he was sent out to Russia as its reporter. He was one of the earliest to warn about the sorry condition of Kerenski’s armed forces and to argue that other Russian political elements should be given consideration by the Allies.
Philips Price quickly became friends with American journalists who thought along the same lines. Quite a number of them had gathered in Petrograd, including John Reed, Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty and Albert Rhys Williams. Unlike Philips Price and Ransome, they worked for newspapers with a predominantly local base and had yet to make an impact in the US public debate on the war. None of them wrote for a Washington or New York daily. But they made up for this in their energy and initiative. They were determined to challenge the Wilson administration’s liaison with the Provisional Government.
John Reed and Louise Bryant, who married in 1916, were well known in US radical circles. Reed had never enjoyed good health, and had known poverty as a child. He lived on his nerves and by his wits. His father was a Progressive Party militant who together with Lincoln Steffens had smashed the Oregon Land Fraud Ring. As the family’s fortunes improved, Reed went to boarding school and on to Harvard. After college he became a journalist and covered the war in Europe before America’s entry.11 He was bitterly hostile to President Wilson’s decision to bring the US into the fighting, and together with his father’s friend Steffens he appeared as witness for the defence in a New York trial in July against the two anarchist anti-war protesters and Russian-Jewish immigrants Emma Goldman and her husband Alexander Berkman.12 Reed criticized a bill going through the US Congress making it a felony to speak or write in such a way as to foster disaffection in the American armed forces.13 The US State Department was understandably edgy about his decision to work in Russia since he could obviously cause trouble for it and for the Kerenski administration there. Before receiving their travel documents, Mr and Mrs Reed had to promise that they would conduct no propaganda in Russia.14
This was not enough to calm the worries of the British Imperial authorities. In August, the ship carrying Reed and Bryant was detained in Halifax, Nova Scotia just as Trotsky’s had been. It took a week before permission was granted for the resumption of the sailing. A similar delay was experienced at Haparanda on the border with ‘Russian’ Finland. Reed and Bryant were furious at their treatment. Only later did Bryant comfort herself with the thought that one of her fellow passengers from New York took five months longer to arrive in Russia.15
The couple reached their destination in September 1917 and had their first experience of Russian revolutionary politics. It was the time of the Kornilov mutiny.16 Whereas Reed had never set foot on Russian soil, it was Bryant’s second visit.17 She too was a fiery critic of the political status quo in the US. Her father was a Pennsylvanian miner who had moved out west for work. Although she made it to the University of Oregon and embarked on a career in journalism, financial circumstances compelled her to seek employment as a teacher of Hispanic children in Salinas, California. Her undergraduate thesis had been on the war against the Indian tribes in Oregon, and in California she took up the cause of the indigenous people. She was also a suffragette who mingled with anarchist militants. Her first marriage quickly fizzled out and, after meeting Reed in Oregon, she followed him to the east coast. By 1917 she was working simultaneously for Metropolitan Magazine and the Philadelphia Public Ledger.18 Bryant had less knowledge than her husband about the war and international relations, but she was no less critical of Woodrow Wilson and wanted to do her bit to change US policy back to one of non-involvement in the Great War. Like her husband, she wrote muscular prose and hit her deadlines.
Others in the American group were Albert Rhys Williams and Bessie Beatty. Rhys Williams, who belonged to the Socialist Party, worked in Russia for the New York Evening Post. Born in Ohio, he was also a former Congregational minister who had obtained leave of absence from his duties so as to go off and report on the war in Europe.19 His Welsh parentage brought him under suspicion as a British spy in Belgium, and he was detained for a while by the German occupation forces. Out of this experience came the book In the Claws of the German Eagle, published in 1917. By then he was working in Petrograd and was instantly attracted to Russian far-left socialists who sought Kerenski’s downfall. Bessie Beatty took to him immediately: ‘He was a decidedly American type, tall, with a pleasant frank face and a delightfully inclusive smile.’20 Beatty herself was a daredevil and a radical. She went to Occidental College in Los Angeles but left without completing her degree; and taking up journalism, she covered the 1912 Nevada miners’ strike and wrote searing articles on prostitution. Events in Russia after the monarchy’s collapse excited her. Throwing up her job as editor ofMcCall’s Magazine, she left San Francisco in April on her trip to Petrograd by the Pacific route. She arrived in early June.21
The last of the Western dissenters based in Russia was the French military attache´ Jacques Sadoul, who arrived in the Russian capital on 1 October 1917. He came on the recommendation of Munitions Minister Albert Thomas, and his assignment was to act as a political observer. Someone who saw him three years later described him as having ‘a “Chaplin” moustache, Norman head, alert yet reposeful eyes, and [being] dressed like a very respectable shop assistant’.22 But in 1917 he wore military uniform. He quickly concluded that most Russians were determined to avoid further involvement in the war and would sooner or later sign a separate peace with the Central Powers. He let Ambassador Noulens know of his radical socialist opinions and stuck out like a sore thumb among most other diplomats.23 Sadoul was a man of some eccentricity. After studying to become a lawyer, he had written a doctoral thesis on tax legislation.24 He also worked for an American businessman who owned a Montana ranch and a Wyoming gold mine. In his free time he rode in the Rocky Mountains. Subsequently he returned to Paris as an Appeal Court advocate. He was brash and ambitious, and gained renown for obtaining lengthy interviews with President Theodore Roosevelt.25 The war shifted him away from the French establishment. He believed there was no end in sight to the military conflict on the western front. Sadoul was a soul looking for its resting place and he began to find it in Russia and in Bolshevism.
What distinguished this group of temporary residents of Russia was their determination to seek sources of information independent of the Provisional Government and its supporters. They quickly made contact with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky gave an hour-long interview to John Reed on 17 October 1917 about the projected dictatorship of the proletariat. This consisted mainly of a description of the evils of the Russian bourgeoisie. According to Trotsky, the Provisional Government was powerless and the Kadets headed the ‘militant counterrevolution’ while the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were fools to think that they had any kind of ‘alliance’ with the middle classes. He called for a ‘Federated Republic of Europe’. He refrained from saying what the proletarian dictatorship would be like. One of his supporters, though, was a certain V. Volodarski, who suggested that the dictatorship would be ‘a loose government, sensitive to popular will, giving local forces full play’.26
The American correspondents raced around Petrograd, often in each other’s company, to get their stories. Reed and Bryant hooked up with Bessie Beatty as they strove to understand the exciting developments taking place. None of them spoke any Russian; they made up for this by taking Alexander Gumberg around everywhere with them. Gumberg was a ‘Russian product of New York’s East Side’ who had returned to Russia after the collapse of the Imperial monarchy.27 Beatty admitted to continued difficulties with the Cyrillic alphabet; and when she published her account The Red Heart of Russia in the following year it was full of misspellings — Zenoviev for Zinoviev, Dydenko for Dybenko and so on.28 Reed wrote podporuchik (second lieutenant) as ‘dodparouchik’.29 Bryant was more punctilious but even she depended heavily on what the communist informants chose to tell her. She was to claim that by the time she left Russia in January 1918 she could read Russian ‘slowly’.30 Beatty was modest about her own progress.31 But she too found Bolsheviks willing to help her. Among them was Georgi Melnichanski, who had been known as George Melcher in New Jersey but now led the metalworkers’ union in Moscow. (Reed had encountered him when covering the Standard Oil strike in 1915.)32 The Latvian Bolshevik Yakov Peters also made himself available. As a member of the London Russian Marxist colony, he had a working knowledge of English; and Bessie Beatty made his acquaintance through Albert Rhys Williams, who was so close to the Bolsheviks as to seem to be on the point of becoming one himself.33
The problem for Rhys Williams as an advocate was his poor Russian. Lenin himself, as Rhys Williams recalled in his memoirs, was aware of this: ‘ “Ah!” he said with sudden animation… “and how goes the Russian language? Can you understand all these speeches now?” “There are so many words in Russian,” I replied evasively. “That’s it,” he retorted: “You must go at it systematically. You must break the backbone of the language at the outset. I’ll tell you my method of going at it.”’34 Williams thought he was about to be let into an extraordinary secret. But Lenin simply counselled him to learn — in sequential order — all the nouns, all the verbs, all the adverbs and adjectives, then the grammar and the rules of syntax. He adjured him to practise ‘everywhere and upon everybody’.35 The worst thing of all, he said, was to go on talking only to Americans. Lenin advised him to put an advertisement in the newspaper for exchange lessons with a native speaker of Russian. He expected immediate improvement: ‘Next time I see you I’ll give you an examination.’36 Rhys Williams was dispirited by this kind of guidance. He felt he had been listening to Lenin’s ‘system of the conquest of the bourgeoisie applied to the conquest of a language, a merciless application to the job’.37
Within a few years the foreign anti-war writers in Russia would acquire the name of ‘fellow-travellers’. They were not yet Bolsheviks — and most of them never became one. None had studied Lenin’s doctrines with any closeness. They had not read Marx. But they increasingly sympathized to a greater or lesser extent with Lenin, Trotsky and their practical purposes. They strongly disapproved of what the Allied governments were doing with Russia. They were caught up in the revolutionary swirl. The old romance of exotic Russia entered their minds and gave their lives a new meaning. They wanted to be the people who explained the complexities and traumas of Russian affairs to readers who barely knew where the country was. In their euphoria they intended to pass on their impressions in whatever way was available. They did not yet know that this would lead them down the road of raising the cheers for a bloody revolutionary dictatorship.
Lenin had obtained sanction for insurrection from the Bolshevik Central Committee at its October meetings but he could not stop worrying. Lodged in a safe apartment on Petrograd’s outskirts, he wrote frantic notes to leading comrades. His suspicion was that they were losing their nerve. If the chance to get rid of Kerenski were to be lost, he believed, there might not be another one soon. With the Ministry of Internal Affairs still searching for him as a German agent, he nonetheless decided to run the risk of taking a tram to the Smolny Institute, where the Petrograd Soviet as well as all the main socialist parties were based, intending to cajole the Bolshevik leadership into an immediate insurrection. Lenin’s only precaution against being recognized was to wrap a bandage round his face. His wild urge to make revolution rubbed out any fear of arrest, and he made for the city centre in an angry mood.
He underestimated quite how much had been done by the night of 6–7 November 1917. Left undisturbed, Trotsky had worked on his plan to ensure that the insurrection coincided with the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets. Kamenev and Zinoviev, whom Lenin had branded as strike-breakers for their exposure of the Central Committee’s decisions, returned to help the leadership. As delegates arrived from the provinces, it was clear that the Bolsheviks by themselves would fail to obtain an absolute majority at the Congress. But they would definitely have the largest delegation and could count on approval from many other delegates. Trotsky acted with panache through the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet; he did everything but announce the times, date and places of the planned action. Kerenski saw what was coming and gave orders to close the bridges over the River Neva and to suppress the Bolshevik newspapers in the capital. This allowed Trotsky to depict his own actions as being of a defensive nature. In the Smolny Institute, where the Congress was scheduled to take place, sat the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders. Too late they were at last considering how they might replace Kerenski. Unlike Trotsky, they had no idea how to accomplish this. The morning of 7 November was full of action. The insurgents seized strategic points around the city on orders from the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Railway stations and the telegraph offices were occupied. Garrisons were placed under supervision.
The Petrograd Soviet met in emergency session that afternoon in the Smolny Institute. Trotsky led for the Bolsheviks by announcing the downfall of the Provisional Government. He then introduced Lenin, who until that point had kept out of sight on the Bolshevik corridor. Lenin, recognizable even though he had shaved off his beard, received a huge ovation and spoke as if the insurrection was complete. Fighting was in fact continuing, but Kerenski was a spent force. When the Congress of Soviets opened in the evening, it was obvious that the other parties could put up no obstacles to the seizure of power. The Bolsheviks accrued support from the floor, including from many Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. After yet another defiant statement by Trotsky, Martov got up to demand negotiations among all the socialist parties. The Congress fell into uproar as Bolshevik responsibility for the street violence was criticized. The Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders walked out, taking scores of their followers with them. Only the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries stayed in their places, but even they refused to join the Bolsheviks in a coalition.
This did not fluster Lenin or Trotsky. Instead they focused on spreading the news that the Provisional Government had been overthrown and that the Council of People’s Commissars — Sovnarkom — had taken power. The Bolshevik leadership had a quick, informal discussion about who should fill the posts. Lenin was to be Sovnarkom’s Chairman. He was the party’s veteran leader and nobody contemplated having anyone else in the supreme office. But Lenin, appreciating Trotsky’s talent and seeing the need to appear gracious, made the gesture of offering the post to him. Lenin must have been relieved when Trotsky refused; and indeed the only problem was that Trotsky at first expressed to reluctance to take over any big political job. He took some persuading before agreeing to become People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. He and Lenin worked closely in tandem. Sovnarkom rapidly issued revolutionary decrees that signalled the new direction of policy being taken after Kerenski’s removal.
The Decree on Land transferred the cultivation of estates owned by monarchy, gentry and Church to the peasantry. The Decree on Press sanctioned the closure of anti-Sovnarkom newspapers. The Decree on Peace called for an end to the Great War. Lenin claimed that ‘the peoples’ of the belligerent powers had a direct interest in this objective. In making an appeal in Sovnarkom’s name, he avoided Marxist jargon. If he wanted to achieve his ends, he needed to win over organizations and groups which as yet had no affiliation with Marxism. Lenin was no close student of Allied diplomacy, but he sensed that the Americans might be more responsive than the French or British to his decree. Consequently he used language reflecting some of President Wilson’s public statements on the kind of peace that was desirable. As Soviet Chairman he aimed to convince opinion in the US that Russia under communist leadership wished the nations of Europe to secure their freedom. He was hoping to edge President Wilson away from his Allied colleagues in Paris and London. He also wanted workers and soldiers to feel that the Soviet government recognized peace as the imperative priority. Most of them were not Marxists. Communist discourse had to take their ways of thinking into account.1
Sovnarkom’s future was uncertain for several days as negotiations began among the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin and Trotsky had never described their preferences with precision, which proved to have been brilliantly devious. Workers and soldiers voting Bolshevik in soviet elections had assumed that this would lead to the formation of a socialist government coalition. Most Bolsheviks felt the same, and it was a basic requirement of several Bolshevik Central Committee members who had taken Lenin’s side at the October meetings.2
Kamenev was eager to bring such a coalition to birth. The Central Committee deputed him to conduct discussions with the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders — and Lenin and Trotsky were impotent to prevent this. The Menshevikled Railwaymen’s Union went on strike to destroy any chance of the Bolsheviks ruling alone. Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders felt strong enough to stipulate that they would join a coalition only on condition that it excluded Lenin and Trotsky. Politics were caught in a storm as Kerenski unexpectedly returned to the outskirts of Petrograd with a Cossack cavalry unit. Garrison troops and the Red Guard were sent out to confront them. A brief conflict followed before the Cossacks were routed and Kerenski fled. This steeled Lenin and his supporters in the Central Committee in standing firm against the demands being made upon them. Their confidence grew when the strike on the railways faded away. The Central Committee resolved to drop the talks with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries; and although overtures continued to be made to the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks were willing to rule by themselves in the interim. Even Kamenev and his sympathizers became willing to cast their lots in with a strategy that excluded those socialists who had co-operated with the Provisional Government.
The Bolsheviks were desperate to spread the news around Russia. The party published newspapers in all the main cities and its local committees could issue proclamations and put up posters. Sovnarkom’s occupation of the telegraph offices enabled it to relay the exact text of decrees.
In city after city in Russia there was a declaration of the transfer of power to the soviets. Workers took control of factories and mines. Peasants were stimulated by the Decree on Land to occupy the landed estates. Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee sent out messages explaining that it was up to the ‘localities’ to make their own revolutions. Non-Russians, who made up half the population of the old empire, were promised national self-determination. Central power remained weak and patchy, and experienced personnel were needed too badly in Petrograd and Moscow for many militants to be spared for work in the provinces. Lenin and his leading comrades felt that history was on their side. The Bolsheviks hoped that their revolution would proceed as much from below as from on high. Difficulties were unavoidable. The parties to the right of the Bolsheviks were not reconciled to being deposited in the wastepaper basket of politics. The middle and upper classes detested the Bolshevik seizure of power. The Orthodox Church was appalled by it. Kerenski’s armed sally would not be the last attempt at counter-revolution. But Lenin and Trotsky trusted that events would validate their strategy. Russia would undergo a socialist transformation and seizures of power by far-left socialists would soon follow all over Europe. A whole new epoch was in the making.
Neither the Allies nor the Central Powers had any interest in helping a regime that was calling for their downfall and an immediate end to the war. Few foreign newspapers greeted the rise of Bolshevism with enthusiasm. What is more, Sovnarkom had no diplomatic service and the Provisional Government’s ambassadors lobbied Allied governments to refuse recognition to the Bolsheviks.
The Western cheerleaders in Petrograd came into their own at this juncture. As John Reed, Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty and Albert Rhys Williams roamed around the city, they understood that events of historic importance were taking place. They had the luck to be on the spot. Within minutes of the fall of the Winter Palace they had entered the building to inspect the scene.3 The Bolsheviks welcomed assistance from the little American group in propagating the news in a positive spirit to foreign countries. Reed and his friends were given passes to enter virtually any public building they wanted.4 They were given privileged use of the international telegraph system, and on 15 November the Military-Revolutionary Committee allowed Reed to send the very first international cable from Petrograd — he could also travel free on the railway network.5 The Americans avidly wrote dispatches telling the story as they saw it. They tried to dispel the impression given in most of the Western press that the Bolsheviks were insincere, bloodthirsty or incompetent. They reported on the ease with which power had been seized. They recapitulated the decrees and endorsed objectives of peace, bread and land. They were acting as Sovnarkom’s window on the world.
Trotsky entranced them, especially Bryant and Beatty. He was an elegant man who was punctilious in his manners and fastidious about his appearance. For years he had denounced Lenin for his divisive tendencies; he was known for his efforts to bring the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks back together before the Great War. In the revolutionary crisis of 1905 he had shown his exceptional qualities. No one spoke more vividly, and he had no need for anything more than a short set of notes before he occupied the platform. Trotsky was a master of Russian prose. He had gone to the Balkan war in 1912–13 as a special correspondent for a Kiev newspaper. His autobiographical fragments sold well. But in writing them he exposed his vanity. Despite his efforts to bring the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks back together in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War, many critics suspected him of being just as egocentric as Lenin. But what surprised everybody in 1917 was how literally he believed in the need for a ruthless proletarian dictatorship. Plenty of Russian Marxists had talked about revolutionary violence without genuinely meaning it. Trotsky meant it — and he found a like-minded comrade in Lenin.
When Beatty met Trotsky in the Smolny Institute on 7 November, she enjoyed feeling ‘his lean hand grasping mine in a strong, characteristic handshake’.6 Louise Bryant left an equally adoring picture:
During the first days of the Bolshevik revolt I used to go to Smolny to get the latest news. Trotsky and his pretty little wife, who hardly spoke anything but French, lived in one room on the top floor. The room was partitioned off like a poor artist’s attic studio. In one end were two cots and a cheap little dresser and in the other a desk and two or three wooden chairs. There were no pictures, no comfort anywhere. Trotsky occupied this office all the time he was Minister of Foreign Affairs and many dignitaries found it necessary to call upon him there.7
Two Red Guards stood on constant duty, but Bryant noted how little he had changed his work habits and availability for interviews.8 Of all Bolsheviks he best understood the importance of talking to foreigners who could take the revolutionary gospel to the world. Bryant recorded: ‘He is the easiest official to interview in Russia and entirely the most satisfactory.’9
Jacques Sadoul of the French military mission agreed with this assessment.10 On 7–8 November he spent hours in the Smolny Institute, and he wrote to his patron Albert Thomas in Paris commending Lenin and Trotsky.11 The Bolsheviks soon treated him as a ‘comrade’. Sadoul bemoaned the lack of information reaching France. He criticized Ambassador Noulens for not being abreast of events; he argued too that the French press was failing in its duty to keep its country in touch with the situation — he thought it disgraceful that he came across only one correspondent from Paris at the Smolny Institute. Not working for a newspaper, Sadoul strove to exert an influence through Albert Thomas. He reported on Trotsky’s belief that the Decree on Peace would induce deep political stirrings in Europe. Even if revolutions did not instantly occur, popular pressure to end the war would grow. Although Sadoul did not expect the Germans to agree to the truce on the eastern front that the Bolsheviks were proposing, his admiration for Lenin and Trotsky was wholehearted: ‘Today Bolshevism is a fact of life. This is my contention. Bolshevism is a force which in my opinion cannot be damaged by any other Russian force.’12
As yet he did not approve of the Bolsheviks ruling by themselves, as he explained on 15 November: ‘What preoccupies me is the urgent need for a Menshevik–Bolshevik concentration in power in the interests of the Allies, Russia and the Revolution: I repeat this daily to Trotsky and to all the Bolsheviks I’ve had contact with.’ Sadoul gave the benefit of the doubt to Bolsheviks and blamed the Mensheviks for rejecting their overtures.13
Trotsky and Lenin were seen to have an equal influence on events. But Lenin concentrated on his work in Sovnarkom and the Central Committee and did not speak to foreign correspondents. Until his beard grew back, he did not look like the Lenin known to us from so many later posters; and few people outside the centre of Petrograd knew what he looked like because Russian newspapers carried no photographs of him.14 To party comrades, though, he was immediately familiar. He had founded the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party in 1903. Although he had sometimes co-operated with the Menshevik faction, he did this only for tactical reasons. He wrote on every big question of Marxist theory: industrial capitalism, land, imperialism and epistemology. His cofactionalists followed him into extremism, and there were times when they themselves objected to his insistence on temporary compromises. Whenever he was thwarted he formed his own sub-faction. He was the most notorious schismatic in the European socialist movement before the Great War. At the beginning of 1917 his band of close supporters was tiny. Russia’s political and economic disintegration as well as its military defeat gave him an opening that was not his own handiwork. He now intended to make the most of the situation.
Lenin was shortish, pedantic and impatient. With his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat, he seemed at times like an angry Sunday preacher. He gave the impression that there was only one answer — his answer — to any complicated question. He was a gambler who trusted his intuitions. He lived for the cause. He was a stickler for party discipline when his ideas were official policy, but he broke all the rules as soon as he was in a minority. Power for himself and the Bolsheviks was important to him but still dearer to his mind was the achievement of a revolutionary dictatorship to cast down capitalism and imperialism worldwide. He and Trotsky formed a bond of trust in the early weeks of Soviet rule.
Trotsky organized the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs from a distance and seldom entered its premises. The priority for him and Lenin was to secure authority in Petrograd. Trotsky liked the anecdote told about him that he intended simply to publish the secret wartime treaties of the Allies and then ‘shut up shop’.15 On the first occasion he had tried to accomplish this, he failed. The officials who had worked for the Provisional Government barred the doors of the old ministry to him. As soon as his entourage forced the locks, there was a mass exodus of personnel and Trotsky discovered that former Deputy Foreign Minister Neratov had made off with the treaties.16 This only temporarily foiled Sovnarkom. Texts of the treaties were discovered and verified, and Trotsky immediately released them for publication on 21 November 1917.17 They confirmed what the Bolsheviks had been saying all year — and indeed the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had said the same thing. Now it was proved beyond fear of contradiction: the Allies had entered the war with ambitions of territorial aggrandizement
Every Allied power was assured of benefit if and when the Central Powers were defeated. In March 1915 it had been agreed that Russia would annex Constantinople and northern Persia while Britain and France would acquire spheres of influence in what subsequently became Iraq, Jordan and Syria. The following month Italy was promised the Trentino as well as territory in Anatolia in return for joining the Allied side. In May 1916 the British and French agreed between themselves how to divide up the Middle East. In August that year France, Britain and Russia offered Transylvania and Dobruja to Romania to secure its adherence to the Alliance. Further deals were done in 1917 satisfying demands by the Japanese, British, French and Russians for the post-war settlement. Soviet newspapers were the first to print the treaties. The content was so sensational that the Western press followed suit — and it was Trotsky’s expectation that workers and soldiers throughout Europe would conclude that the war should be stopped at once. And whereas British and French public opinion had been easy to stir up in favour of war in 1914, the American entry into the conflict was always controversial in the US and President Wilson repudiated expansionist aims. Lenin and Trotsky hoped to prise Washington out of the Anglo-French embrace. Wilson had already insisted on being informed about the Allied treaties. His abhorrence of them was instantaneous; and on a visit to Washington the British Foreign Secretary A. J. Balfour had to express regret at the spectacle of European states striving to distribute countries among themselves as the spoils of war. Wilson refused to be bound by treaties made by others before America had joined the war.18
The question meanwhile arose about what was going to happen in Russia. The decrees streamed thick and fast from Sovnarkom. Workers’ control was approved for industrial enterprises. Universal free education was introduced for children. Church and state were separated. The official calendar was changed from Julian to Gregorian — and many Orthodox Christian believers thought this proved that Lenin or Trotsky was the Antichrist. Religious processions were banned or discouraged. Economic nationalizations were announced. The banks were expropriated. Large industrial concerns were taken into the hands of the revolutionary state — and a further programme of seizures was projected. The entire export and import trade was turned into a state monopoly. Wherever local soviets found the peasantry withholding grain from sale, they dispatched armed workers’ units to take it by force. The People’s Commissariats replaced the old ministries. An entirely new security apparatus, the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka, in its Russian acronym), was established under Felix Dzerzhinski to combat sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity. Lenin deliberately arranged for the Cheka’s operations to lie outside Sovnarkom’s control. Annihilation of resistance to Sovnarkom was the cardinal aim. As they consolidated their power, the Bolsheviks repeated their offer to share power with the Left Socialist- Revolutionaries and a concordat was agreed on 20 December 1917.
All this happened under the grim shadow of war. Sovnarkom had sued for peace on 22 November and dismissed General Dukhonin for refusing to transmit the request to the Germans. The Bolshevik ensign Nikolai Krylenko temporarily took over command. Ludendorff asked General Hoffmann, at the headquarters of the German forces on the eastern front, whether it was possible to negotiate with ‘these people’. Hoffmann said yes. If Ludendorff needed additional troops in northern France, this was the way to get them.19 On 15 December an armistice was agreed along the entire eastern front from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Both sides prepared for talks to be held a week later.
The Bolsheviks at the same time encouraged Russian front-line troops to fraternize with Germans. While urgently seeking to reduce the likelihood of Germany renewing its offensive, Sovnarkom was eager to expand revolutionary activity. Propaganda was distributed across the trenches to German and Austrian soldiers who were urged to stop fighting and overthrow their governments. Sovnarkom also tried to gain control of Ukraine by sending forces to Kiev against the Central Rada, which had started acting like the government of an independent state after Kerenski’s downfall. Conflict raged between Bolsheviks and the Ukrainian administration throughout the winter. The Bolsheviks saw no absolute distinction between internal and external policy. In December 1917 Lenin summoned Finnish ministers to Petrograd and granted independence to their country. The Finns were less than enthusiastic since they worried that any collusion with Sovnarkom would be held against them by the Western Allies. But they acceded to the Soviet offer and returned to Helsinki to celebrate. The Bolsheviks calculated that if the Finns became independent they would cease to mistrust the Russians — and eventually they would acquire a far-left government that would align itself with Sovnarkom. Finland would come back to Russia.
The Soviet leadership tried to make light of its difficulties. The Constituent Assembly election took place in late November and resulted in defeat for the Bolsheviks, who gained less than a quarter of the votes. Lenin had wanted to call off the election rather than risk this outcome, but his advice was rejected because he and his comrades had made great play of being the only party that would convoke the Assembly. The Bolsheviks would have done better if the electoral lists had been drawn up after the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split organizationally from the rest of their party and entered Sovnarkom. In fact no single party achieved an absolute majority. But the rump of the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries emerged with easily the biggest number of seats. When the Constituent Assembly met on 18 January 1918, the Socialist-Revolutionaries took control. Sovnarkom reacted by ordering closure of the proceedings a day later, and Red Guards enforced Lenin’s orders. Lacking the troops to resist, the Socialist-Revolutionary leaders moved off to their political stronghold in the Volga region. In the provincial capital Samara they established the government they had wanted to create in Petrograd. Its name was the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, or Komuch in its Russian acronym. Komuch resolved to take power back from Sovnarkom by armed force.
The Bolsheviks remained calm about this state of affairs even though it was bound to lead to civil war. They had made their revolution. They could not know how long they would last in power. They and their families were aware that danger could be in store for them in Petrograd. Bolshevik leaders joked that they kept their suitcases packed for fear that they might suddenly have to flee. But they were determined to fight to the end for the revolutionary power they had established.
The Bolshevik leaders saw themselves instead as the advance guard of Marxist science and revolutionary progress — they hated being thought of as mere politicians. Abroad, in the months before their propaganda reached foreign far-left socialists, they remained something of a mystery; and unsympathetic newspapers — as the vast majority were in the West — depicted them as a gang of vandals who had exploited the unusual circumstances of Russia’s wartime travail. The Russian adversaries of Bolshevism generally offered the same analysis. The few among them who accepted that Lenin and Trotsky were bright and intelligent nonetheless insisted that they had taken leave of their senses. The general prediction was that Bolshevik rule would be ephemeral. No one thought they stood much chance of holding on to power. Although the Bolsheviks themselves shared the suspicion that their days in government might be numbered, they still believed that their example would be followed elsewhere even if they went down to defeat. They were willing to lay down their lives in the revolutionary cause, convinced that history was on their side — and it was about to be shown that only those observers who took account of the communist mental universe could properly plan ways to counteract it.
Nikolai Bukharin, Bolshevik Central Committee member and young philosopher of communism, offered an ecstatic hymn to the glorious communist future:
The human race is not broken up into warring camps: it is united here by common work and the common struggle with the external forces of nature. Border posts are dug out. Individual fatherlands are eliminated. All humanity without national distinctions is bound together in all its parts and organized into one single whole. Here all the peoples are one great friendly working family.1
Like the Old Testament prophet Isaiah who had rhapsodized about the wolf dwelling with the lamb and the leopard lying down with the kid, Bukharin clearly felt that a great and perfect epoch lay ahead for humankind.
Communist thinkers swaddled their ideas in global clothing. They believed that the Great War was no accident of dynastic rivalries or personal misjudgements. The slaughterhouse of 1914 was the result of economic development reaching a level where profits were insecure without conquest of new foreign markets. European states had scrambled to colonize Africa and Asia in the last years of the nineteenth century. Rising powers like Germany had arrived too late to seize what they thought they deserved, and their governments were under pressure by banks and industries to adopt a belligerent policy towards the established empires. Capitalist economic development required the taking of gambles with assets and elbowing competitors aside. Cabinets had to satisfy the demands of their most powerful businessmen. ‘Finance capitalism’ was the dominant force in the world economy, a case powerfully made by the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding in his 1910 book Finance Capital. Bolsheviks had welcomed the book as scientific proof that capitalism had reached its highest possible stage of development. Economic crises and world wars would occur until such time as socialism took control. It did not matter to the communists in Russia that Hilferding did not share their ideas on violent revolution and dictatorship. They praised his economics while rejecting his politics.
They spat out contemporary European socialism in disgust. They honoured Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and continued to subscribe to the usefulness of earlier writings by Georgi Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky. But they believed that Plekhanov and Kautsky had turned traitors to Europe’s labour movement by their actions since 1914. Plekhanov had supported the Russian military effort and Kautsky had failed to call for Germany’s defeat. Unconditional opposition to the war was shared by the entire Bolshevik leadership.
Bolsheviks marked out their position by calling themselves communists and denouncing most other socialists as ‘social-traitors’ while claiming that they were the only true socialists. Which were they? Communists or socialists? Lenin tried to clear up the confusion in The State and Revolution, which he wrote in 1917 and published the following year. He had no time for any kind of socialism other than Marxism. He also insisted that Marxists for decades had misinterpreted Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and allowed their essential ideas to fall into abeyance. Genuine Marxism according to Lenin was founded on the need for violent revolution and a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ so that capitalism might be supplanted. The dictatorial structure would only be temporary. It would establish a socialist order enshrining the principle of ‘an equal amount of products for an equal amount of labour’. As support grew throughout society, the reliance on force would steadily decrease. A second stage would then begin that would be the ultimate stage in human history: communism. No compulsion at all would be required in communist society. There would be no army, no bureaucracy and no state. Social classes would disappear. Life would proceed on lines set by the people of the entire world with the common good in mind. Although Lenin was not someone who often displayed his poetic side, he looked forward keenly to a time when the universal principle would be ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.
Lenin pinned his arguments to the coat-tails of Marx and Engels. If he could prove to his own satisfaction that his was the correct interpretation of Marxist doctrine, that was quite enough for him. Trotsky and Bukharin were uncomfortable about this. Bukharin felt it important to subject the recent technological and social changes in contemporary capitalism to close scrutiny. Witnessing the latest profusion of inventions, he insisted that well-being and stability would remain out of reach for most people until after a socialist revolution. Trotsky too disdained to hark back endlessly to the founders of Marxism. His forte was to highlight the unfettered profiteering and bottomless human misery brought about by the war.
Bolsheviks agreed that they were living in an era when the downtrodden of the earth would become its rulers. Ivan Zalkind, Trotsky’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, put it like this:
Our revolution is a revolution belonging completely to the workers. Go to Petrograd and see the district soviets, go and see the Red Guards and you’ll notice that it’s above all a workers’ revolution. The peasants and soldiers come only in second place. The bourgeoisie doesn’t exist in this second revolution. The intellectuals who played the primordial role in 1905 today are only supernumeraries. Lenin and Trotsky are merely the spokesmen of the workers. We are currently carrying out a great experiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s no longer a revolution of the sans culottes [as in the French Revolution] but of the penniless.2
Bukharin, too, felt sure that the communists had the world at their feet:
People in [the] communist order don’t sit on one another’s neck. Here there are no rich or parvenus, there are no bosses and subordinates; here society is not divided into classes, one of which lords it over another. But once there are no classes, this means that there are no different sorts of people (poor and rich) with one sort sharpening its teeth against another — the oppressors against the oppressed or the oppressed against the oppressors.3
Lenin admitted that Russia’s factory workers were only a small part of society. Sensing that this infringed his theory of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, he sometimes brandished slogans such as putting power into the hands of ‘the workers and poorest peasants’. Bolshevik writers anyway made clear that the urban ‘proletariat’ did not consist only of the factory workforce. A booklet was issued about domestic servants, who were to be attracted into the revolutionary movement. So too were the unemployed. Communists announced that the days of the privileged few enjoying the ministrations of the poor were coming to an end.4
Trotsky thought that events had validated the revolutionary strategy he had advocated since 1905. In his booklet What Next? he declared:
Throwing off the manacles of capitalist power, the revolution would become permanent, i.e. uninterrupted; it would apply state power not so as to consolidate a regime of capitalist exploitation materially but on the contrary so as to surmount it. Its definitive success along these lines would depend on the successes of the proletarian revolution in Europe. On the other hand, the Russian revolution has been capable of delivering the more powerful thrust to the revolutionary movement in the West the more decisively and bravely it breaks the resistance of its own bourgeoisie. Such was and remains the only real prospect for the further development of the revolution.5
Was this utopian? Trotsky answered no. The true idiocy in his eyes had been the doctrines of rivals like the Mensheviks and Socialist- Revolutionaries who went into coalition with ‘capitalist ministers’. They lacked spirit and clear-sightedness; they were double-dealers. The Bolsheviks were not carrying out a ‘national’ or a ‘bourgeois’ revolution but had started an international socialist one. He declared: ‘And the twentieth century is “our fatherland in time”.’6 Trotsky gave out the slogan: ‘Permanent revolution against permanent carnage!’7
Communism would soon change everything, and communists assumed that Europe was where they stood their best chance of political advance. The continent was the cockpit of world war. Surely the deaths and material privations since 1914 had perfected the conditions for the Marxist case to attract popular support. ‘European revolution’ tripped easily off Bolshevik tongues.
Russian communist ideas about Europe in the party were not those of conventional geography. The school textbooks said it stretched from Portugal to the Urals. This was not what Bolsheviks had in mind when they talked of ‘going’ to Europe despite the fact that Russia had its own large European zone. Bolshevik leader I. I. Kutuzov was to write an account of his westward journey by train from Moscow in the early 1920s. The first stage took him to Latvia. He commented that people started calling him mister rather than comrade when he crossed the frontier. He noticed how clean Riga appeared after his experience of Russian cities. Latvia was impressive enough, but when at last he reached German territory at Eidkunen, Kutuzov’s eye was caught by the almost complete absence of dirt and litter. Even the countryside of Germany was remarkable to his eyes — and all this was before he got to Berlin, a city that surpassed his every expectation in its modernity. To Kutuzov it seemed self-evident: ‘This was the beginning of Europe.’8 And Europe in the Bolshevik imagination was one half of ‘the West’ whose other half lay across the Atlantic in North America.
Bolsheviks took it for granted that socialist revolution in Germany was the key to their survival and success in Russia. Former emigrants like Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin admired the cultural and organizational achievements of the German labour movement. Marx and Engels, the originators of Marxism, had been German. The left wing of the German Social-Democratic Party had broken away to form the Spartakusbund and, as Lenin saw it, proved that the labour movement in Germany retained the potential to effect a seizure of power and a revolutionary transformation. German workers were the flower of the European socialist movement. They were the most educated, skilled labour force in the entire continent. Their discipline at work was legendary. Their commitment to self-improvement at home and at leisure was remarkable. Most of them voted for the socialdemocrats, and the party had 633,000 members in 1909. Bolsheviks were angry when the German Social-Democratic Party’s caucus in the Reichstag voted financial credits for the war effort in mid-1914; but Lenin and his friends put the blame for this ‘betrayal’ on the party leadership. They refused to believe that Germany’s workers would tolerate this situation for ever. The Spartacists, when they obtained their opportunity, would surely prove able to pull them back to the line of revolution — and the great potential of the German proletariat would be fulfilled.
What is more, Bolsheviks were impressed by the steps taken in Germany towards centralized state regulation. Capitalists had never been more closely integrated into planning mechanisms. Trotsky in particular was intrigued by the government’s measures for bringing official order and purpose to the economy. He proposed to use this approach in order to further his revolutionary aims: ‘For the introduction of control over production and distribution the proletariat has had extremely valuable models in the West, above all in the form of Germany’s so-called “war socialism”.’ In Russia this would require the carrying out of ‘an agrarian revolution’. If state economic coordination was going to be introduced it would have to be done in a steady fashion.9
Yuri Larin, a left-wing Marxist who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, was equally inspired by what he read about the German situation. He noted how the state had taken food supplies into its hands and compelled agricultural producers to form unions so as to make them easier to control. Each German region and district was strictly supervised. Transport of goods beyond local borders was forbidden except with official permission. Prices were set for basic products. The entire economy was operated according to a central plan. According to Larin, Germany’s government found itself unable to avoid conceding to demands by urban and rural workers.10 Even so, the war had disrupted and lowered output. Most German people were worse off than before the fighting had started, and the effect of this was registered on socialist leaders who began to demand the forcible expropriation of agricultural land for the benefit of consumption in the cities. It was Larin’s belief that the drift of thinking towards the needs of urban residents would soon be seen in Russia too.11 As he pointed out, Germany’s workers had called for a universal compulsory system of food rationing at the outset of war. Fairness had fallen by the wayside as the propertied classes secured greater supplies than the average. The way forward in Russia as in Germany was to introduce a regime corresponding to the requirements of the people as a whole.12
Larin argued that the best outcome for the workers and everybody else would be the ‘urbanization’ of agriculture. Farms should be set up on the outskirts of cities. The principle should be adopted that ‘agricultural enterprises must be subordinated to direct supervision and administration by the consumers of grain’. The industrial proletariat ought to have a dominant influence.13 Larin pointed out that no warring country was without its economic problems. He predicted high cereal prices for a long period after the war. He could not see how Europe could cope with its problems unless power was being exercised by the workers to ensure a swift expansion of farm output.14 Nikolai Bukharin spelled out how this could be done. Rather than allow peasants to grab and divide up the landed estates he recommended the establishment of large collective farms.15 The peasantry should not be left to decide how to plough, sow and reap — and the same prescription should be applied in every European country. The entire property order in Russia was going to be toppled and Bolsheviks wanted to ensure that the precedent would be followed elsewhere. The purpose was to persuade everybody that material possessions were always withheld from the poor in the most unfair fashion. A Bolshevik called Kii argued that the mystique of private ownership had to be exposed as the deceit that it was. Revolutions were not as difficult to undertake as ‘bourgeois’ social science contended.16
The fundamental ideas of the Bolsheviks were never less than grandiose. They loved cities, industry, the proletariat and central state planning. They believed in the imposition of expertise. They praised order and control. Their priority was to provide what they thought were the basic requirements of civilization: work, health care, social insurance, food, shelter and education. They thought they knew better than the people they intended to serve. In the end — and they thought that the end would come soon — the people would understand and accept their wisdom.
They rejected all counter-ideals as reactionary, pernicious nonsense. They disliked agriculture, handicrafts, the ‘chaos’ of markets, religion, private income and individual freedom. They detested banks — when Ivy Litvinov went into the Hampstead branch of Lloyds to cash a cheque she was treated by Maxim’s comrades as if she had done something immoral. She was not well off. She could not understand why revolutionary militants should be so grim towards her when they themselves aspired to a bourgeois lifestyle.17 But Bolsheviks liked to think they saw through the hypocrisies of middle-class prejudices. They thought marriage to be one of these. When Lenin wed Nadezhda Krupskaya it was only so that the police would allow them to stay together in Siberian exile. Trotsky and Alexandra Sokolovskaya went through a marriage ceremony for the same reason. Bolsheviks dropped and acquired partners with more than average frequency at that time. Their loyalty was to the Revolution. Family took second place to the Revolution in the lives of the militants. The cause was everything.
It was all very well to study the history of Russia and to appreciate the difficulties ahead; but ‘science’ could take the movement for liberation only so far (although it was true that some Bolsheviks had written extensively on the Russian past). The party had to show daring and take risks. An exemplary opportunity was being offered to the political far left in Petrograd. Where Russians went, others would soon follow. There was no time for intellectual doubt.
One big distinction of the Bolshevik leadership lay in their readiness to use massive force to achieve their ends. Ivan Maiski offered a shrewd estimate of Lenin. His leader reminded him of a sentence in the Book of Revelation: ‘So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.’18 Lenin had always been notorious for his fondness for dictatorship and terror. Trotsky had been rather enigmatic. While proposing extreme schemes such as a ‘workers’ government’, he had kept comradely relations with the Mensheviks and criticized the Bolsheviks. In 1917 he revealed that he accepted that a government of workers would indeed need to use severe methods. For once he called on Marx as an authority. It was Marx who had lauded the Jacobin terror with its frequent use of the guillotine in the French Revolution and called it ‘the plebeian method’ of crushing resistance. Trotsky admired the Jacobins for their ‘iron repression’.19 Not all Bolshevik leaders were yet of the same ferocity. Kamenev and Bukharin often questioned the need for severe repressive measures and occasionally did something to moderate them. But they in no way forswore such methods in principle. As time went on, the entire leadership came over to the idea that there could be no revolutionary consolidation without harsh dictatorship and widespread state terror.
Communists cared little for detailed prognostication. They dealt in visions and slogans, in promises and threats and commitments. They talked about ‘class struggle’, ‘class war’ and even ‘civil war’. They paid no attention to details of governance. Adolf Ioffe, one of Trotsky’s close associates, was unusual in writing a booklet about local administration.20 Action took precedence over forethought. Lenin used to quote Goethe to the effect that theory is grey whereas the tree of life is green. (Not that this stopped him being doctrinaire and bookish when explaining his own theoretical vision.) He and others stated endlessly that they were encouraging a ‘revolution from below’. They saw themselves as liberators of the working class. Soon there would be proletarian self-administration. But how this would be combined with the party’s objective of a highly centralized state was never elaborated — there was no serious attempt to ask the question. The Bolsheviks cheerfully smashed institutions to smithereens at the same time as insisting on internal organizational discipline as a permanent requirement. They had no concern about the disruption they were bound to cause. Their refrain was that revolutions were messy. They detested what they called politicking. They were repelled by compromise; they preferred open decisions to a public life of fudges and corruption.
They felt that they were the true Reds of revolutionary Russia. Conservatives and liberals called every Menshevik and Socialist- Revolutionary a Red. But the Bolsheviks were undeniably more radical than their rivals, and so they monopolized political ownership of the colour. But although they displayed an expansive confidence, their doctrines were far from being comprehensive: there were not just marginal gaps in these doctrines but huge, hazardous holes. Like utopians of earlier centuries, they scoffed when this was pointed out to them. They called on their followers to show belief and confidence. They took pride in their willingness to experiment. They regarded themselves as open-minded scientists and humanitarians. When others predicted disaster they shrugged and claimed that advanced capitalism had already brought the world to catastrophe. Something entirely different was due to be tested. It was the dawn of a new epoch.
Bolsheviks liked to think that they were unique in the Russia of 1917. This was not wholly true. In every modern profession there were many practitioners who partook of all or some of the Bolshevik ideals and had the same negative prejudices. Among the other revolutionary parties too there were leaders and militants whose mental world shared territory with Bolshevism. Indeed the communists borrowed much of their thinking from others. The professions had many members who wanted to take control of their sector of public life and set policy in the direction of rapid change. Left-of-centre economists favoured increasing governmental regulation of industry and finance.21 Teachers, scientists, artists and commanders were eager for a chance to transform their occupations by the introduction of new techniques; and they were aware that they needed a strong central government to achieve modernization. There was a welcome for any government that looked as if it would subsidize their activity. What is more, several features of thought in rival parties corresponded to what was intended by the Bolsheviks. The need for the state to play a big part in the running of the economy was widely felt by all socialists and even by liberals. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries continued to regard most Bolsheviks as comrades. The communist determination to turn Russia upside down was shared far beyond the confines of the party.
Much though Bolshevik doctrine pretended to scientific status, it was in fact rooted in blind faith and the Russian revolutionary tradition. Lenin and Trotsky never seriously took account of the dire warnings about the likely result of their project. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries may have shared a lot of their social and economic assumptions but they also issued clear predictions that the horrors of civil war would be the inevitable result if the Bolshevik party somehow managed to hold on to power. They doubted that Europe was on the brink of revolution. They ridiculed Lenin’s promise to regenerate the Russian economy swiftly or at all. They were talking to the deaf. Bolsheviks had made their choice. If there was going to be civil war, it would be of short duration and easily won. There would surely be European socialist revolution and, when Germany acquired its revolutionary government, economic exchange between the Russians and the Germans would guarantee rapid recovery from wartime devastation. It was in this frame of mind that Bolshevik leaders had seized power in Petrograd. Foreigners saw only chaos and weakness in Russia. The Bolsheviks asked them to look through different spectacles and observe the fire being lit for a brilliant new world order.
Lenin’s Decree on Peace set out fresh basic principles for the kind of peace he wanted in the world. Both the Allies and the Central Powers tried to ignore him. The exception was Woodrow Wilson, who was fired by the urge to achieve a lasting peace and saw the defeat of the Central Powers as a prerequisite. Coming before a joint session of the US Congress on 8 January 1918, he declared that the Allies should impose a universal peace involving democracy, free trade, open treaties and national self-determination. He depended on advice and assistance from his confidant Colonel Edward House, who had returned from a tour of the European capitals, and a group of key advisers, known as ‘The Inquiry’; but the impetus came from Wilson himself. Wilson was aiming to prescribe the shape of the post-war world order. His Congress speech was delivered with panache and gained instant fame as the ‘Fourteen Points’. The American press endorsed the President’s words as offering the first great contribution to ending the carnage brought about by the rivalries of ancient European states. Wilson was enabling the US to stand tall among the nations. Many Americans had disliked his decision to enter the war against Germany, but many took pride in his vision of a global framework for peace and freedom.
Wilson’s advocacy of national self-determination disturbed the Western Allies. Lloyd George had his hands full with the consequences of the Easter 1916 rising in Dublin against Great Britain, not to mention growing demands for independence among Indians and other peoples in the British Empire. Clemenceau and Italy’s Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando felt disquiet, too. But they feared annoying a US President who was sending indispensable finance, munitions and troops across the Atlantic. They had always stressed that their war against Germany and Austria-Hungary was a just and moral one. They could hardly speak out against democracy or free trade, and it was difficult to deny the right of nations to determine their own futures. The Western press reported Wilson’s Fourteen Points in detail, and the American embassy gave away many thousands of free copies of a translation on the streets of Petrograd — altogether 5.5 million copies were printed for distribution in the territories of the former Russian Empire.1 This contrasted with the Allied treat- ment of Lenin’s Decree on Peace which appeared abroad in full only in far-left booklets after being translated in Petrograd. The Allied powers had no interest in facilitating its distribution.
The Bolsheviks had to improvise their publicity. Trotsky, with his instinct for propaganda, was frustrated at being unable to write for the foreign press or get his speeches carried by newsreels. In desperation he asked his People’s Commissariat to call in Claude Anet of the Petit Parisien newspaper and offer exclusive stories.2 Nothing came of this. Trotsky had to make do by relying on his existing group of cheerleaders to write whatever they liked for their editors.
The pattern of work became smoother after he took on the young Bolshevik Yevgenia Shelepina as his secretarial assistant. Born in 1894 and educated at grammar school, she was working in the Ministry of Trade and Industry and disapproved of those civil servants who went on strike against the October Revolution. She was seconded to the People’s Commissariat of Labour before being recruited for work with Trotsky in room 67 of the Smolny Institute:
I found [him] in that same room where I used to see him, at the end of the corridor on the third floor. It was differently furnished then. There was just one table in the corner by the two windows. In the little room partitioned off was some dreadful furniture, particularly a green divan with a terrible pillow on it. You see it had been the room of the resident mistress on that floor of the Institute when it was still an Institute for girls. Trotsky sat on one side of the table and I sat on the other. I did not hide from him that I was quite unfit for the work, but that I wanted to do anything I could.3
Shelepina started by calling him ‘comrade Trotsky’ but this only made him laugh, so they addressed each other with conventional politeness as ‘Yevgenia Petrovna’ and ‘Lev Davidovich’. She smartened up Trotsky’s room and requisitioned a functioning typewriter to replace the antique machine on his desk.4
He was still in the habit of writing all his letters in longhand,5 and she wanted to relieve him of this. Since she had not been trained in shorthand, he arranged to dictate on to a phonograph; but he could not get on with this contraption and they reverted to amateurish methods. Shelepina was thrilled at being involved in the work.6
Trotsky wrote frequently to the Petrograd embassies stressing that Sovnarkom was the real power in Russia and deserved official recognition. This was vital if the Bolsheviks were to break down the obstacles to international communication. He had to admit that any diplomatic relations would be of an unusual kind since the Bolsheviks remained open enemies of every state in the world. He insisted that he aimed to have such relations not only with governments but also with ‘socialist-revolutionary parties that are thrusting themselves at overthrowing the existing governments’.7 At the same time he was determined to prevent Allied diplomats from interfering in Russian politics. When he thought that the British embassy was helping the anti-Soviet efforts of Boris Savinkov, he threatened to arrest Sir George Buchanan — if only in conversation with Sadoul.8 He refused to see a contradiction between demanding official recognition and encouraging worldwide subversion.9 Only the Spanish embassy would parley with Trotsky, and its charge´ d’affaires Garrido Cisneros welcomed the Soviet proposal for an armistice and peace negotiations. The rest of the diplomatic corps expressed outrage. But Spain was taking no part in the war and, although Cisneros had blotted his copybook in Allied eyes, nothing of practical consequence resulted.10
Routine work at the People’s Commissariat — in the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs building — was done by Trotsky’s deputy Ivan Zalkind. Zalkind’s professional qualifications were no better than Trotsky’s, but his science doctorate from Algiers University meant that he had fluent French.11 He was even brusquer than the average Bolshevik. France’s diplomats thought that he had a particular dislike for them,12 but he was just as aggressive to every other nationality and seemed to make trouble just for the sake of it. Skinny, myopic, with long silvery hair, he was puny in appearance; British agent George Hill, with no attempt at impartiality, described him as ‘a most unpleasant hunchback with the viciousness of a rat’.13 Zalkind compensated by adopting a quasi-military uniform and contriving to look bold and combative.14 (The sporting of military apparel was a growing trend among Bolsheviks: Party Central Committee Secretary Yakov Sverdlov had a black leather jacket and trousers tailored for him and bought a pair of long black boots and a black leather cap.)
Trotsky and Zalkind set up a Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda for the Commissariat under Boris Reinstein, one of the revolutionaries who had returned from America; and John Reed and Albert Rhys Williams were taken on to the staff to bring ‘American advertising psychology’ to the publications directed at the troops of the Central Powers. There was also a Department of Prisoners-of-War, led by Radek, as well as a Department of the Press. These bodies produced material in German, Hungarian and Romanian.15 Reed, Rhys Williams and others were paid about $50–$60 a month.16 The Propaganda Bureau printed tons of material for dispatch across the trenches of the eastern front. Half a million copies of the German daily newspaper Die Fackel (later called Der Völkfried) were printed. The Hungarian print run was the same, while there were a quarter of a million copies each of the Czech, Romanian and Turkish versions.17 Even Rhys Williams helped out with Die Fackel despite his primitive grasp of German. He and Reed had little Russian but they possessed all the skills needed to sub-edit English translations of Soviet announcements.18 The Decree on Peace was hurriedly translated into German, French and English. Yakov Peters, the Latvian who oversaw the work, admitted that his own fluency in English and even Russian was inadequate — and Reinstein, Reed and Rhys Williams became as active in the Bolshevik cause as it was possible to be without joining the Bolshevik party.19
Allied diplomats tried to make sense of all this for their governments. On 19 November 1917 the American ambassador David Francis issued an appeal to ‘the People of Russia’: ‘I address you because there is no official in the Foreign Office with whom I can communicate, and all of the members of the government or ministry with which I had official relations are inaccessible, being in flight or in prison, according to my best information.’20 He emphasized that the US had signed no secret treaties and he repeated President Wilson’s hope of preserving good relations with Russia.21 On 27 November Sir George Buchanan fired off a telegram saying that it was unrealistic to expect the beaten and exhausted Russians to stay in the war. He proposed a change of policy. Russia should be released from its contractual obligations to keep up the fight on the eastern front. Buchanan argued that this would make a rapprochement between Russia and Germany less likely and might even induce the Russians to continue other kinds of resistance to the Germans.22 He did not recommend recognition for Sovnarkom. The Bolsheviks were not to be allowed privileges until their policies changed. But talks had to be held with them. Buchanan advocated using informal intermediaries for this purpose, and the Foreign Secretary A. J. Balfour agreed.23
The Petrograd ambassadors have a reputation for being stupid old fogeys who lacked the intellectual and cultural depth to understand Soviet communism. Although some were indeed fogeyish and a couple were elderly, none was unintelligent. They thought seriously about Bolshevism as they witnessed it. Italy’s Marchese della Torretta knew about the breakdown of order from direct experience after being robbed late at night on his way back to the Hôtel de l’Europe.24 Leading diplomats, whether they represented the Allies or neutral countries, expressed revulsion at the end to civilities they had thought they could take for granted in Russia. They understood what Lenin and Trotsky wanted to do in the world. They saw from the start that religion, nationhood, civil peace, legality and civic freedoms were under threat. They observed for themselves how ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ brought about state terror. They came from a different world, and they preferred their world, warts and all.
Sovnarkom, however, had kept hold of some bargaining chips. On 28 November Trotsky sent a note to Buchanan saying that if the United Kingdom continued to imprison Chicherin and Petrov, British citizens conducting counter-revolutionary propaganda in Russia would not go unpunished. In gaol, Chicherin had cut his ties with the Mensheviks and become a Bolshevik. He announced that he would return to Russia only ‘as a free man’. He hired a lawyer. He demanded that he should be allowed visits by Joseph King MP; he intimated that he had personal friends including Consul-General Onou in the Russian embassy. He sent demands for the Mensheviks to repay the money he had lent them in the past — and he expressed the wish that his associates should buy him marmalade and golden syrup to supplement the poor prison diet.25 Consul-General Onou flatly refused to help. He thought there were ‘already enough dangerous madmen in Russia’ and did not want to add to the number.26 Chicherin hated having to rise early in the morning. He complained often about the injustice being done to him; but as the weeks passed he repeated that he would strenuously object to being released if the plan was to deport him straight away. When he left Brixton prison, he intended put his affairs in order before moving on to Russia.27
The cabinet in London at first refused to yield to Trotsky’s intimidation even though there seemed no national interest in holding on to Chicherin or bringing him to trial.28 When Buchanan made no reply to Trotsky, the People’s Commissariat indicated that exit visas from Russia would no longer be issued to British subjects, including diplomats; Trotsky also threatened to take ‘counter-revolutionaries’ from Britain into custody.29 When in mid-December Trotsky demanded an interview with Noulens it was difficult to refuse him after he threatened that otherwise he would expel the military mission.30 Trotsky complained that France had sent agents to talk to the Central Rada in Kiev. Noulens replied that the French initiative was simply a reaction to Ukrainian national independence and that the Bolsheviks themselves had decreed the right of non-Russians to secede from the old multinational state. That the current governments in Petrograd and Kiev were enemies was not the fault of the French. Noulens added that the military mission had been instructed to avoid interference in Ukrainian politics and to stay out of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.31
Lloyd George and Balfour soon yielded on the treatment of Chicherin and Petrov, and Buchanan relayed the news to the Soviet authorities. Trotsky exulted: ‘Sir Buchanan [sic] is a practical man with whom one can come to an understanding.’32 By the end of the month Buchanan had also conceded Sovnarkom’s freedom to send its couriers without hindrance to London.33 The British government edged towards putting Anglo-Russian relations on a fresh footing.
On 21 December the War Cabinet approved a memorandum on the Russian question for consultation with the French. Buchanan’s request for sick leave for his vertigo was to be granted, and Sir Francis Lindley would become chargé d’affaires in Petrograd.34 The ambassador’s departure was desirable on political as well as medical grounds: he was too closely associated in the Bolshevik mind with the Kadets to be able to liaise with Sovnarkom. ‘Unofficial agents’ would be used to conduct relations. British diplomacy should emphasize that the United Kingdom would not meddle in Russia’s internal politics or favour a counter-revolution. The Foreign Office would not even highlight its displeasure at Russia opening negotiations with the Central Powers. But the British reserved the right to stay in contact with Ukraine and other parts of the former empire not ruled by the Bolsheviks. Balfour’s idea was for France to take care of Ukraine while Britain busied itself with the other borderlands. He stressed the priority of facilitating the transport of Ukrainian supplies to Romania, and he wanted the Bolsheviks to accept the need to prevent foodstuffs and munitions reaching Germany from its territory.35 The French welcomed the memorandum two days later.36
Every Allied embassy made use of unofficial agents. David Francis turned to Raymond Robins of the Red Cross as his intermediary with the Soviet leadership. Robins had friendly links with the Smolny Institute. He thought it was in the American interest to come to some kind of accommodation with Lenin and Trotsky — and he hoped to make an impact in Washington by influencing what went into Francis’s reports.37 Trotsky felt that he could exploit Robins and encouraged him to get himself appointed to the American Railway Mission to Russia. The restoration of the rail network to a normal working pattern was a priority for the Bolsheviks. If the Americans assisted in this, Trotsky promised to enable the transit of Allied military stocks currently held in Russian warehouses; he told Robins he would make him Assistant Superintendent of Russian Ways and Communications.38 Truly the People’s Commissar would do whatever it took to get the results he wanted. He let Red Cross trains run down to Iasi inside the Romanian sector of the eastern front. He also issued a prohibition on the growing export of Russia’s copper and other goods to Germany via Finland.39
Sovnarkom was being devious. While seeking to keep the Allies sweet, it was anxious to avoid any trouble with the Germans. In the night of 28–29 December, something extraordinary happened, something which had barely seemed possible a few weeks earlier: the German and Austrian diplomatic contingent arrived in Petrograd.
There were two delegations — one stopped at the Hotel Bristol on the Moika and was headed by Rear-Admiral Count Kaiserling and Count von Mirbach… This committee was known as the Naval Delegation and their mission was to discuss means of stopping the naval war in accordance with the armistice treaty. The second delegation was headed by Count Berchtold, German Red Cross representative, and met to consider the exchange of war prisoners. They established themselves at the Grand and the Angleterre. British and French officers were stopping at both these places, which was obviously embarrassing.40
The contingent was sixty strong; the Central Powers meant serious business in Petrograd.41
This turnabout was the product of the recent military truce and the opening of peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk near the eastern front. The Soviet authorities knew about it in advance but everyone else in Petrograd was taken by surprise; and every attempt by the Bolsheviks to lessen the impact was ineffective. The Germans ignored their request that they should remain in their residences. They enjoyed causing embarrassment and openly walked the streets of the capital, renewing old contacts in high banking and industrial circles.42
Mirbach’s previous posting was as Germany’s ambassador in Rome. After obtaining a degree at Heidelberg, he had proceeded to a study course in Oxford. Generations of his family had served the Hohenzollerns.43 Mirbach wore formal attire when presenting himself at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs:
‘Hello!’ [Zalkind] said, ‘what are you doing here?’ The count was abashed. ‘Why, I am just returning your call,’ he said stiffly. Zalkind was amused. ‘Excuse me, Count,’ he said, ‘we are revolutionists and we don’t recognise ceremony. You might have saved yourself the trouble if you had remembered that you are in New Russia.’ He thought a minute. ‘But you can come in,’ he added, ‘and have a glass of tea.’ Von Mirbach did not accept the invitation. He looked down at Zalkind’s rough clothes, his rumpled grey hair and his inspired face. Very awkwardly he got himself out of the alien atmosphere of the [People’s Commissariat].44
The German delegation obdurately affirmed the ways of traditional diplomacy; and when Karl Radek tried to complain about the treatment of far-left socialists in Germany, Mirbach cut him short: German politics was none of Radek’s business.45
The Allied embassies refused to have anything to do with the German diplomats. Ambassador Francis became dean of the corps with Buchanan’s departure on 7 January 1918.46 Early that same month a group of anarchists arrived from Helsinki to speak with him. They protested about the imprisonment of their American comrades Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman and about the projected execution of a San Francisco bomb-thrower. The anarchists threatened to hold Francis personally responsible if any harm came to these comrades. Francis urged Washington to take no notice.47 (He suspected that John Reed had provided the information about Berkman and Goldman.)48 A few days later Zalkind, while passing on a similar threat on behalf of Petrograd anarchists, declined to offer protection for the embassy. Francis asked Robins to intercede with Lenin. Although Zalkind refused to apologize, the contretemps was ended by his replacement by Chicherin, who had just arrived from England.49
Sovnarkom still needed to neutralize the threat of a German invasion while avoiding causing undue offence to the Western Allies. But the communist leaders also aimed to make revolution. They were not always prudent in how they went about this. Russia still had a large number of troops stationed on Romanian territory, and Lenin and Trotsky saw the opportunity to get its agitators to spread the Russian anti-war spirit to the Romanian troops. They hoped that this might lead to revolutionary stirrings. Romania’s Prime Minister Ionel Bratianu had no intention of letting the Bolsheviks dissolve his army from within. Pushed by Germany’s continuing military operations, he was determined to preserve what little power remained to his government in its rump independent territory around Iasi. Lenin and Trotsky saw things from an opposite viewpoint. They were angered by the encroachment of Bratianu’s Romanian Army into Russian-ruled but Romanian-inhabited Bessarabia to form a new Moldavian state.50 Sporadic violence broke out between Russian and Romanian units, and Romania’s beleaguered authorities responded by arresting five thousand Russians on service near Botosani.
The Soviet government was in no mood to tread carefully. Every untoward event near the borders could be the beginning of an invasion. Sovnarkom always suspected the worst — and it was often proved right in these years. Soviet retaliation in this instance was an act unprecedented in modern diplomacy. On 13 January Red troops were ordered into the Romanian embassy in Petrograd to arrest the ambassador Constantin Diamandy and his staff.51
Diamandy’s detention outraged the Petrograd diplomatic corps. When a Russian mob had looted the German embassy at the start of the war, Nicholas II’s government had restored order and shielded the ambassador from harm.52 The Romanian imbroglio was of a different order. If an accredited diplomat could be thrown into prison, was any foreigner safe in Russia under the Bolsheviks? Were not Lenin and Trotsky the barbarians of global politics? Diplomats in Russia aimed to make them appreciate the importance of centuries-old international convention and law while Sovnarkom met to discuss what to do next.53 Francis made the arrangements by phone and the corps went en masse to see Lenin, who was accompanied by Zalkind. Lenin and Zalkind concentrated on the rights and wrongs of the incident in Botosani.54 Francis strenuously objected: ‘No discussion on the subject whatever.’ He pointed out that every diplomat’s person was inviolable. Noulens pitched in and prolonged the discussion, which went on for an hour and a half. Or at least this was how Francis recalled the event. Noulens remembered it differently and said that it was previously agreed that his own superior legal understanding as well as his native fluency in French made it sensible for him to give a lengthy exposition of the scandal that would fall upon the heads of the Bolsheviks if they refused to back down.
When the Belgian minister Désirée tried to join in, Zalkind told him to be quiet. Lenin agreed to put the matter to Sovnarkom, but this failed to stop Serbia’s Ambassador Spalajkovic pointing his finger a yard from Lenin’s face and shouting: ‘You are bandits; you dishonour the Slav race and I spit in your face!’55 Noulens sprang up to calm things down but Zalkind said: ‘Forget it, forget it, Mr Ambassador, we like this brutality of expression better than diplomatic language!’ Negotiations were resumed that evening and Noulens visited Diamandy next day in his underground cell in the Peter-Paul Fortress. The food was foul and Diamandy had not been allowed a knife to cut it. But the final result was positive and Diamandy was released on condition that he speedily left the country.56 Zalkind made mischief by publicly implying that Francis had consented to Diamandy’s incarceration.57 The fragility of dealings between the Bolsheviks and the Western Allies was revealed all too clearly. Each side wanted more than the other was willing to concede. And the communist authorities were willing to risk rupturing relations with the Allied powers. They were pushing their luck while simultaneously dreading the prospect that one side or another in the Great War might somehow contrive to organize an invasion. Sovnarkom was minded to bite before being bitten even though its own teeth were worn down to the gums.
In embassies around the world, the diplomats appointed by the Provisional Government denounced the October Revolution. Ambassador Vasili Maklakov, freshly arrived in Paris from Petrograd, led the way and alerted his colleague Boris Bakhmetev in Washington to the danger that America might recognize the territories breaking away from Petrograd’s control. Maklakov was a prominent Kadet and Bakhmetev had been a Marxist as a young man before withdrawing from party politics. The common nightmare of the ambassadors was the dismemberment of ‘Russia’. Maklakov spoke out against the secession of Ukraine; he argued that the Baltic littoral would always be essential to Russian military security — he demanded the retention of naval bases in Helsinki and Tallinn.1
The Western Allies, angered by the Soviet regime’s withdrawal from the fighting on the eastern front, withdrew their financial credits to Russia while allowing the Provisional Government’s accredited diplomats to continue occupying their embassies and enjoying the immunities of their status.2 Yet they no longer represented a functioning administration and the British cabinet, needing somehow to communicate with Sovnarkom, decided to talk to Maxim Litvinov and Theodore Rothstein, who were among the few Bolsheviks who had stayed behind in Britain.3 A little Bolshevik colony survived in Switzerland, and Vatslav Vorovski informally handled Sovnarkom’s interests in Stockholm;4 but London was the only Western capital to host a leading Bolshevik such as Litvinov, and he now became Sovnarkom’s principal spokesman outside Russia.5 He had begun to attract notice just before the October Revolution and was lionized when he took Ivy out to the theatre in London. The liberal journalist Salvador de Madariaga, an acquaintance, spotted him from a few rows away and moved to sit near him. In the interval he shouted over: ‘Litvinoff, the very man I wanted to meet! What’s going on in Russia?’ Others joined in the conversation and Litvinov told them to look out for the name of Lenin. When the Bolsheviks seized power the next day in Petrograd, Litvinov’s reputation spread across London as the seer of Russian politics.6
In January 1918 Trotsky cabled Litvinov to announce his appointment as Sovnarkom’s very first ‘plenipotentiary’ in a foreign country. Just as they did not like the word ‘minister’, the communists forbore to call Litvinov an ambassador: revolutionary times called for fresh terminology. Litvinov was pleased to have a job that genuinely aided the party’s cause. Exactly what the job should involve, however, was unclear because Trotsky had to be cautious about what he wrote in open telegrams and anyway knew little about British high politics; and Litvinov was imaginative and willing to take initiatives: his time had come at last.
The British War Cabinet discussed Russia on 17 January 1918 and confirmed what Foreign Secretary Balfour had been telling the House of Commons. The Bolsheviks had repudiated their obligations under the treaties of alliance. They had aggravated the jeopardy to Britain and France on the western front by closing down the eastern one. They were stirring up revolutions in the West. The Italians pressed for the Western Allies to sever all relations with them; but Lloyd George and Balfour wished to maintain their para-diplomatic links through Litvinov in Britain and British intermediaries in Russia.7 Balfour expressed the hope that the Bolsheviks might yet cause trouble for the Germans.8 This was not an entirely fantastical consideration. Soviet official policy as yet ruled out signing a separate peace with the Germans, and if the Russo-German negotiations broke down the assumption was that Russia would go back to war with them. Rumours spread around the world. If the British were talking to Litvinov, perhaps the same kind of arrangement might be made in France where Trotsky was said to be planning to appoint another plenipotentiary.9 The British denied that they were granting de facto recognition to Sovnarkom, and Balfour stressed that he would never speak directly with Litvinov or allow him on to Foreign Office premises.10 Litvinov would be used only as a convenient conduit for urgent discussions.11
This, however, was progress for Sovnarkom; the same was true of Chicherin’s release from prison and the permission given for him to return to Russia.12 Litvinov made the most of the situation. He wrote to Konstantin Nabokov demanding that he vacate Chesham House and hand over the official ciphers. Nabokov replied that it was he and not Litvinov who enjoyed official recognition.13 Litvinov did better for himself when he inaugurated contact with the Foreign Office through an official called Rex Leeper, who conferred regularly with him on matters of politics and war. Meanwhile he scrambled together a working office. In fact he had no offices except the rented rooms he lived in, no designated couriers and no codebook.14 But he cheered himself up by producing headed notepaper in Sovnarkom’s name and asserting a claim of appointment to London’s diplomatic corps.15 He did the rounds of public meetings in February 1918, asking how it could be fair for the British government to prefer Nicholas II’s reactionary government to be in power rather than a democratically elected government.16 He was silent about the violent suppression of the Constituent Assembly. He relied on ignorance or undemanding sympathy among his British listeners, and he saw his task as being to turn sympathizers into enthusiasts.
Litvinov also spoke at the Labour Party annual conference and called on the British to ‘speed up your peace’.17 On Chicherin’s instructions, he wrote to the anti-war socialist John Maclean appointing him Soviet consul in Glasgow:
Dear Comrade Maclean,
I am writing to the Russian Consul in Glasgow (I am not sure that there exists such a person) informing him of your appointment and ordering him to hand over to you the Consulate. He may refuse to do so, in which case you will open a new Consulate and make it public through the press. Your position may be difficult somehow, but you will have my full support. It is most important to keep me informed (and through me the Russian Soviets) of the Labour Movement in N. B. [North Britain].18
He thought that the revolution he had missed in Russia was in the offing in the United Kingdom. As Special Branch reported, he actively fomented anti-war feelings among resident or visiting Russians — this included making contact with ship crews in British ports.19
Conservative MPs began to ask questions in the House of Commons about his activities:
Major Hunt asked the Prime Minister whether, in view of the fact that M. Litvinoff is advocating a revolutionary movement in this country, he can now say whether he will be prosecuted or interned?
Lord R. Cecil [Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs]: My right hon. Friend asks me to answer this question. I have nothing to add to the reply given by the Home Secretary on the 14th instant to the hon. Member for Hertford, and to the reply given yesterday to the hon. Member.
Major Hunt: Is it the fact that M. Litvinoff has sent round a document, signed by himself, to the trade unions, advocating revolution, and stating that a social revolution is absolutely necessary if a lasting peace is to be secured, and is that sort of thing to be allowed in the case of an alien when it is not allowed in the case of any of our own people?
Lord R. Cecil: I am afraid I can only repeat the answer I have given. I really have nothing to add to what I have already said on the subject, that the matter is being considered.20
This remained the government’s position over the next few months.
Maxim and Ivy Litvinov were enjoying themselves. At New Year 1918 it was their turn to throw the annual party for the colony. Fifteen sat down to celebrate. In characteristic Russian fashion the guests came with contributions to the feast. Ivy wrote:
They brought whisky (lamenting vodka) and zakuski from the Jewish shops in Soho — short, rotund salted cucumbers, smoked salmon, voblya [which is] a strange fish cured hard as a board which I had difficulty in cutting into strips and which I thought more suitable for a clown to slap another in the face with than for human consumption.21
The cry went up: ‘There’s no caviar, there’s no caviar!’ It might be wartime in a foreign country but the colony expected to dine in the manner to which they were accustomed. Relying on Maxim’s advice and the labour of their red-faced charlady Mrs Bristow, Ivy produced a satisfactory borshch (beetroot soup) followed by roast beef and an immense apple pie.22 The Russians would normally have asked the servants to sit and eat with them but decided that Mrs Bristow would be unable to understand any word that was spoken. She was invited just for the toasts to the New Year and to the Revolution. More toasts followed, including one to Maxim as ‘the First People’s Ambassador of the First Socialist Republic’.23
Soon, along with Ivy, Maxim was attending luncheon and dinner parties in Westminster and Mayfair. On one occasion they were received at Downing Street; unfortunately there is no record as to whether it was at Number 10 or Number 11, but the guest list included Ramsay MacDonald and Bertrand Russell. A fellow guest ventured the question: ‘Wasn’t it a bolt from the blue, Mrs Litvinoff, living quietly in West Hampstead with your husband and baby, suddenly to be plunged into the whirlpool of public events? We immediately imagined you handing your husband his cup of tea at breakfast and him looking up from The Times and through the newspaper.’ Ivy refused to be patronized. ‘It was’, she said firmly but implausibly, ‘what we expected.’24
Intellectuals of the political left courted the Litvinovs. As Ivy recalled, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Charles Roden Buxton as well as Russell made social overtures to Maxim:
It was a pity they felt obliged to invite me too. I was such a chatterbox and Maxim by nature so taciturn and glad to have others do the talking for him. Whatever the subject under discussion I generally managed to get round to psychoanalysis, and people who sincerely wished to discover what the structure of the Soviets was, found themselves diverted into acrimonious wrangles about Freud and even obliged to listen to the relation of my childhood complexes.25
While Ivy had an altercation with Russell her husband ‘was glad to be able to enjoy his lunch in peace’.26 (His calm temperament proved an asset when he served under Stalin in the 1930s as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs.) Maxim was anyway more confident with pen in hand. His pamphlet The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Rise and Meaning derided the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, praising the Bolsheviks as the only party that had the support of the ‘masses’. He defended the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly on the grounds that only Sovnarkom could guarantee that the ‘bourgeois parties’ would not come back to power.27
On 23 January the Manchester Guardian ran an article by an unnamed correspondent, possibly Theodore Rothstein, denying that communism stood for ‘class war’. This alleged mistake was said to result from a mistranslation of the German Klassenkampf, which was better rendered as ‘class struggle’ and was widely used by European socialists without connection with Bolshevism.28 This was an inaccurate presentation of Lenin’s ideas. Since 1914 he had called for the ‘imperialist war’ to be turned into a ‘European civil war’, and by war he meant war and not just struggle.
There was no Bolshevik of Litvinov’s stature in America because all the resident leaders of the Russian far left had departed for Petrograd. The most active advocate of Bolshevism in the US was not a Russian but a Finn, Santeri Nuorteva, who headed the Finnish Information Bureau in New York. The Bureau was an agency of the Provisional Revolutionary Government established by the Red Finns in January 1918 as civil war broke out between the Reds and the Whites in Finland. Bolsheviks kept close ties with the Bureau, which operated as an unofficial embassy for the Reds in Russia as well as Finland. The US Secretary of State Robert Lansing would have nothing to do with Nuorteva, who then reached out to sympathetic officials in the State Department such as William Bullitt, William Irwin and Felix Frankfurter (political discipline under Lansing was much more lax than in Balfour’s Foreign Office). Nuorteva also approached likely journalists such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Although he was later to operate as a cheerleader for Joseph Stalin, at this time Duranty was still wary of associating himself with the Russian communist cause. The Finnish Information Bureau’s Harold Kellock derided him in a letter to Frankfurter: ‘Walter reminds me a bit of a sort of orthodox Virgin Mary who is always fully conscious of being Queen of Heaven. Perhaps he’s a direct descendant “son of the Jewish Revolution”.’29
The weakness of the Soviet propaganda effort in the US induced John Reed and Louise Bryant to volunteer to return to America on Sovnarkom’s behalf. This would undoubtedly involve a certain risk. A Federal Grand Jury had indicted Reed in November 1917 for violating the Espionage Act with his article ‘Knit a Straitjacket for your Soldier Boy’ in the Masses. But Reed did not flinch and on 29 January 1918 the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs appointed him New York consul.30 The State Department retorted that Lenin’s government lacked even de facto recognition.31 Trotsky at this point saw that he was annoying Washington for no good purpose, and he withdrew Reed’s name from his list of appointees. The most important thing was to facilitate Reed’s arrival in the US.32 Reed and Bryant disembarked on 28 April.33 Although the indictment was quietly forgotten, in late May he was arrested in Philadelphia on a charge of inciting a riot.34 Yet again the authorities stepped back from providing him with the publicity of a trial. On release he delivered speeches against the war, sharing platforms with Nuorteva and Masses editor Max Eastman.35 Reed’s articles and pamphlets were disseminated widely in the American labour movement. He thought he had seen the world’s future in Russia, and he recommended it.
The community of foreign sympathizers in Petrograd continued to promote the Soviet cause. The most eccentric was Daily News and Manchester Guardian correspondent Arthur Ransome. Caught in the United Kingdom at the time of the October Revolution, he had returned to Russia on Christmas Day 1917.36 Ransome inspired great affection: every one of his acquaintances, even those who detested Bolshevism, was fond of him. Moura Benckendorff, Lockhart’s mistress, noticed ‘his Bolshevik appearance’ but still felt sorry for him. Thinking that he was not eating well, she ‘stuck a piece of veal in his mouth… and a few radishes in his pocket’.37 Ransome might have preferred something sugary: he loved his ‘sweets’.38
The British intelligence officer George Hill was another who warmed to him: ‘He was a tall, lanky, bony individual with a shock of sandy hair, usually unkempt, and the eyes of a small, inquisitive and rather mischievous boy. He was a lovable personality when you came to know him.’39 Hill and Ransome lived on the same hotel corridor. Only Hill had a bathroom, which he allowed Ransome to use each morning:
Our profoundest discussions and most heated arguments took place when Ransome was sitting in the bath and I wandering up and down my room dressing. Sometimes, when I had the better of an argument and his feelings were more than usually outraged, he would jump out of the water and beat himself dry like an angry gorilla. After that he would not come for his bath for two or three days, then we would meet and grin at each other, I would ask after the pet snake which lived in a large cigar box in his room, and the following day he would come in as usual and we would begin arguing again, the best of friends.40
The species and provenance of the snake remain unknown.
Ransome, an unhappily married man, had fallen in love with a Bolshevik — and British intelligence wondered whether he had become one too.41 The object of his affections was none other than Trotsky’s secretary Yevgenia Shelepina. Hill asked her out to dinner but she refused, claiming she had to work at her desk till late.42 The true reason may well have been her growing fancy for Ransome, and the two were soon conducting an affair. A bit of politics was involved, too. Ransome was sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as well as convinced, from a patriotic viewpoint, that it was in the British interest to have good relations with them and not to bully or subvert Sovnarkom. And Shelepina was anyway a useful source of material for his dispatches home. Her close knowledge of Trotsky’s planning and activity was a priceless asset.
C. P. Scott, Ransome’s editor in Manchester, was not keen on the Soviet revolutionary experiment. While appreciating his reporter’s extraordinary access to the Bolshevik elite, Scott used the old device of muffling a correspondent’s enthusiasms by judicious editing and occasional spiking of reports. At least Ransome kept his job. Louise Bryant lost her contract of employment with the Philadelphia Public Ledger and was in no doubt about the reason. As soon as a reporter tried to tell the news honestly, she claimed, the editor at home disowned him or her.43 Morgan Philips Price complained that his telegrams were being suppressed or emasculated.44 But the cheerleaders kept up their work. Determined to write as they pleased, Bryant and Ransome published booklets on Russia after the October Revolution. Ransome’s Letter to America so pleased Karl Radek at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs that he helped to get it published in the US and supplied his own introduction. Ransome denied that the Allies had any right to compel Russia to do what they wanted. While allowing that the Revolution might fail, he applauded the Soviet order and its appropriateness for Russia; he dismissed the anti-Bolshevik majority in the Constituent Assembly as an ‘indifferent mass’ of people incapable of achieving the decisiveness and popularity of the Bolsheviks.45
Jacques Sadoul and Raymond Robins went on pressing the case for gentle handling of Sovnarkom by their governments. At the beginning of 1918 their chorus was swelled by Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had caught the eye of Lloyd George as someone with an open mind about the Bolsheviks. The Prime Minister decided to send him back to Russia as ‘Agent’ or ‘Head of the British Mission’.46 Before departing, Lockhart spoke to Viscount Milner (Secretary of State for War), Sir Edward Carson (First Lord of the Admiralty), Earl Curzon (Lord President of the Council and soon to become Foreign Secretary), Lord Hardinge (Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) and Sir George Clerk (private secretary to the Acting Foreign Secretary). Lockhart emerged well briefed on the general problems of the British war effort. He also learned that Lloyd George had a low opinion of A. J. Balfour and the Foreign Office, which gave Lockhart an opening for writing reports without inhibition.47 Lockhart’s linguistic competence and political contacts as well as his self-confidence were undeniable. Lloyd George got no sense of Lockhart’s recklessness. Perhaps his own personality and unconventional lifestyle — he took his mistress Frances Stevenson along with him nearly everywhere — blinded him to the risks of sending the Scot back into a post of political responsibility without a senior diplomat like Buchanan to keep an eye on him. Lockhart was like quicksilver, a man who loved the thrills of adventure.
He left for Russia on 14 January 1918 with a letter of recommendation from none other than Maxim Litvinov.48 Only one person in Whitehall poured cold water on his mission. General Sir Nevil Macready, who on learning that Lockhart’s assignment was to help to restore the Russians to the eastern front, said: ‘Don’t the boys in the Foreign Office read history? Don’t you know that when an army of seven million runs away in disorder, it needs a generation before it can fight again?’49 But Lloyd George believed that Raymond Robins was carrying out useful work for the Americans and wanted Lockhart to do the same for the British. He told him simply: ‘Go to it.’50 With Lockhart went his personally chosen team of Captain William Hicks, Edward Phelan and Edward Birse. Hicks had recently worked in Russia as an expert on poison gas; Phelan was scooped from the Ministry of Labour, presumably on the premise that he knew how to talk to far-left socialists. Birse was a Moscow businessman.51 They took the normal wartime route across the North Sea and made for Finland, only to discover that the direct rail line down to Petrograd was broken. Instead they made for Helsinki, where they encountered fighting in the streets between the Red and White Finns. The travellers set off quickly to Russia, reaching the capital on 30 January.52 Lockhart wrote in his diary: ‘Streets in a dreadful state, snow had not been swept away for weeks. Everyone looks depressed and unhappy.’
Among his first steps was to arrange a meeting with Trotsky. He lunched beforehand with Raymond Robins, who told him: ‘Trotsky [is a] poor kind [of] son of a bitch but the greatest Jew since Christ.’ Trotsky tried to convince Lockhart that the Bolsheviks would engage in partisan warfare if the Germans mounted an invasion. Lockhart recorded in his diary: ‘Loud in his blame of the French and said the Allies had only helped Germany by their intrigues in Russia.’53 Robins took a liking to Lockhart and offered him a deal:
Let us assume that I am here to capture Russia for Wall Street and American business men. Let us assume that you are a British wolf and I am an American wolf, and that when this war is over we are going to eat each other up for the Russian market; let us do so in perfectly frank, man fashion, but let us assume at the same time that we are fairly intelligent wolves, and that we know that if we do not hunt together in this hour the German wolf will eat us both up, and then let us go to work.54
From that day onwards they took breakfast together.55
Lockhart slotted himself back into old routines, getting official accreditation as Roman Romanovich Lokkart from the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs even though Britain was withholding recognition from Sovnarkom.56 He was enjoying himself. He saw Trotsky regularly and put the case for Russian military co-operation with the Allies. Sadoul too maintained amicable ties with Trotsky. Ambassador Noulens was later to declare that Sadoul favoured communist Russia over France. Ambassador Francis, he thought, was coming to the same conclusion about Robins. And soon Lockhart’s oddities too were remarked upon.57 Colonel Alfred Knox put things with succinct brutality: ‘[Robins] is a fanatic with the temperament of a hero-worshipping schoolgirl, and while without the mental equipment or the experience to enable him to advise on policy, he is a dangerous companion for anyone as impressionable as Lockhart.’58 General Henry Wilson on behalf of the Imperial General Staff urged the War Cabinet either to stop Lockhart commenting on military questions or, failing that, to recall him from Moscow.59 But Lockhart, Robins and Sadoul were excellent conduits for contact with the Soviet leadership and were still too useful to be dropped.60 The Western Allies needed to make the best of a bad situation. There was a war to be won and it was important to go on cajoling the Russians to stay in the war.