The Bolshevik leaders were optimists. Believing that only a little time was needed for their revolutionary example to be followed abroad, they had agreed to a truce on the eastern front on 15 December 1917. Sovnarkom demobilized the Russian Army — when the formal order went out by wireless on 7 December, the slim chance of having any forces available to repel the Germans disappeared;1 Russia was rendered indefensible as peasant soldiers, rifles over their shoulders, jumped on trains and went back to the villages. Lenin and Trotsky were counting on ‘European socialist revolution’ and felt that the October Revolution depended on their gamble. The Allied powers looked on anxiously. The consequences for their armies on the western front would be deeply damaging if a deal was struck between Germany and Russia. The Germans stood to gain from being able to transfer army divisions from the east as their manpower ran low in northern France. They had already sent experienced troops there while the Russian Army had been falling apart. There could also be economic benefit because Germany wanted access to goods and markets in Russia, Ukraine and the south Caucasus so as to circumvent the British naval blockade of German ports.
Russia and Germany continued to negotiate at the little German-held town of Brest-Litovsk close to the eastern front. The German high command was getting anxious. It badly needed its armies to crush the Western Allies before the Americans could be fully deployed there.2 Each side in Brest-Litovsk expected to achieve its purposes to the detriment of the other. The Germans wanted a separate peace with Russia, the Russians a German communist revolution. Berlin was confident that the talks would be of brief duration since the communists had empty trenches and no soldiers. German commanders and diplomats felt no need for preparations beyond allocating a set of two-storeyed dwellings to house the delegations in the snow-laden town.3
The Germans and their allies — Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Turks — sat down with the Russians in the Officers’ Building on 22 December. Trotsky was needed in Petrograd and so it was his friend Adolf Ioffe who headed the Soviet delegation that departed by rail via Vilnius and Bialystok. Ioffe was from a rich Jewish family from Simferopol in Crimea. His father had a reputation as Minister of Finances Sergei Witte’s ‘favourite Jew’ in the 1890s, and Adolf’s choice of a revolutionary career aroused parental consternation. He had also married young, gaining family consent solely because the girl was Jewish — Ioffe senior had feared that his atheist son might marry outside the ancestral faith. Adolf received a regular financial allowance that enabled him to enrol as a student in the Berlin University medical faculty. Although he worked hard at his studies, the police objected to his activities on behalf of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and expelled him from Germany. He decamped to Vienna where he became a pupil of the psychologist Alfred Adler and made the acquaintance of Trotsky. In 1917 he wrote prolifically and served on the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Although he had no expertise in international affairs, his command of German and familiarity with central Europe were thought an asset for dealing with Germany and Austria-Hungary.4
Travelling with Ioffe in the delegation were Lev Kamenev and a handful of lesser Bolsheviks including the rising official of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, Lev Karakhan. Radek joined them later. Some military officers attended as special advisers; their morale was so low that it was said that they went ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, believing that the Bolsheviks were bent on signing terms that were tantamount to treason. Admiral Altvater was apparently an exception: Trotsky sardonically reported that he ‘was touched by grace and has returned from Brest-Litovsk more Bolshevik than the Bolsheviks on this peace question’.5
Ioffe had a preliminary conversation with the Austrian Foreign Minister Count Ottokar von Czernin and politely rejected his entire worldview. When Czernin commented sceptically on Soviet political expectations, Ioffe leant across and said: ‘I still hope we’ll succeed in calling forth a revolution in your country.’6 Such was the atmosphere when Prince Leopold of Bavaria opened the formal talks on behalf of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. Ioffe spoke for the Russian side and insisted, in the face of Turkish objections, on full publicity for the proceedings in Russia and among the Central Powers. He exploited the occasion by giving an explanation of the purposes behind Lenin’s Decree on Peace. Over the next few days Ioffe and Kamenev completely ignored the big topic at the centre of everyone’s attention: the German demand for Russia to sign a comprehensive peace on the eastern front. The Bolsheviks had vowed to start a ‘revolutionary war’ rather than make a separate settlement with the Germans, so they needed to keep the Central Powers talking and talking. Ioffe expatiated on the complications likely to arise from Soviet economic nationalizations as yet to be announced. He also drew attention to the problems arising from a separate delegation from the Ukrainian Central Rada, which had declared Ukraine’s independence in January but had yet to be recognized by Sovnarkom. Ioffe explained all the niceties with elegance and courtesy.7
The Germans tried to hurry things along but were under instructions to observe diplomatic proprieties. They soon saw that Ioffe, liaising regularly with Trotsky, was hoping to gain time for revolutionary upheavals to occur in Berlin and Vienna. Indicating that their patience was not inexhaustible, they threatened that unless the Soviet leaders submitted quickly to their terms they would face the might of their forces.
Trotsky decided that his presence in Brest-Litovsk had become essential and he joined the talks on 27 December 1917. Smartly attired as usual, he stepped off the train with a bright scarf tucked into a dark fur coat; his shoes were polished as if for an evening ball. He was a virtuoso performer. He spoke in his fluent German whenever he wanted to get his meaning across quickly to the military monoglots. He picked holes in the draft documents produced by the Germans. Why on earth could the translators not see the difference between words like ‘nation’, ‘people’ and ‘state’?8 Over the table from him sat men who had acted haughtily towards Ioffe. Trotsky presented them with a different personality. He appeared indifferent to their threats; and although he was invariably polite he left more than a suspicion that he was treating them condescendingly. They had assumed that he would be embarrassed by the inclusion of the Ukrainian delegates who turned up on the same day as him. Not a bit of it. He accepted their participation, mentioning only that he expected that the territorial allegiance of the Black Sea region would be decided by a plebiscite of its residents.9 Trotsky gave an actor’s display of calm confidence. It was hard to believe that he spoke for a state that was utterly incapable of repelling any German invasion.
His stay in Brest-Litovsk coincided with Lenin’s decision to leave Petrograd for a few days’ holiday in Finland, which provoked the sardonic comment from Jacques Sadoul: ‘And so here we are without a dictator.’10 As soon as Georgi Chicherin arrived from England he deputized for Trotsky at the People’s Commissariat, so that Soviet foreign affairs were entrusted to steadier hands than Zalkind could supply.
Yevgenia Shelepina became Trotsky’s ‘courier extraordinary’. She had grown bored when Trotsky left, and asked Lenin and Stalin for a job that would bring some excitement. Shelepina was depressed by what she saw in Brest-Litovsk:
The town was a dead town. All the houses were broken in some way or other, some with their roofs blown off, others with their walls blown in. Nothing had been done to mend the houses, but the streets had been tidied up, so that there was an oppressive orderliness even in the disorder of the broken town. There were only two or three little shops open, selling necessary things, tobacco and thread, and such things, and then there was a bookstore, over which, of course, Radek spent more time than over all the rest. When he was buying cigarettes, I told him to buy some for me. He told me the permission given him by the Commandant did not allow him to buy any more.11
The signs of distress near the front line surprised her. Time and again she caught sight of ill-kempt Russian POWs being marched around by their captors. Shelepina felt like pulling a gun on the Germans — having run out of cigarettes, she was agitated by the absence of nicotine in her bloodstream. Radek, by contrast, was never without a well-stocked tobacco pouch and called out to the same POWs: he never missed a chance to spread the message of revolutionary socialism.12
Trotsky brought order to the Soviet delegation and raised its morale. He put an end to the growing practice of taking meals with the negotiators of the Central Powers. He saw that if he wanted to maintain a firm bargaining stance, it would not help if his team became too friendly with the Germans. He told his comrades to take greater care with their appearance. The Germans had to feel that Bolsheviks were more than just a rabble from the street.
He had seen enough of conditions near Brest-Litovsk to know how difficult it would be to restore the Russian armed forces. Lenin agreed. Although he went nowhere near the eastern front, he drew the same conclusion from a survey among the armed forces.13 The only hope lay in dragging out the talks and using them as an instrument of propaganda abroad. Trotsky’s slogan for the Bolshevik Committee was ‘neither war nor peace’. The German high command refused to accept this affront to military and diplomatic convention. Annoyed by the Soviet tactics, the Central Powers on 6 February signed a separate peace with the Ukrainian Rada. Whether Trotsky liked it or not, Ukraine could no longer be brought under Soviet rule. The Germans then issued an ultimatum: either the communist leaders accepted the terms on offer or they would face an immediate invasion of Russia. This was intended to bring Trotsky to heel, but he had a surprise of his own for them. When the talks resumed on 10 February, instead of responding to the ultimatum, he declared the state of war between Russia and the Central Powers to be ‘terminated’. The eastern front was no more. The Russians were withdrawing from the armed conflict regardless of the threats being made by the Germans.14
Trotsky’s statement was more than Richard von Kühlmann, Germany’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, could bear. A government facing invasion had sent a plenipotentiary to Brest-Litovsk who refused to indicate his response to the threat of military attack. This was still an age when empires and nations declared war on others before waging it. The Blitzkrieg was invented by Hitler: no diplomat in 1918 felt comfortable about initiating armed conflict in Europe without having completed the formalities of mutual communication. The rest of the world was a different matter, and European powers had marched into Africa and Asia in their pell-mell scramble for colonial conquests in the late nineteenth century. It therefore took some minutes for Kühlmann to collect his thoughts and point out that wars could not end without agreements on borders, trade and a host of other practical matters. Trotsky’s rhetoric would not be allowed to remove the current question on the agenda for Sovnarkom. Was it going to be war or peace? But Trotsky was unbending and curtly announced that his delegation had exhausted the powers invested in it. Then he and his comrades picked up their papers and left the room.15
Since Trotsky’s démarche had not been prearranged with the Party Central Committee or Sovnarkom, he had to return to Petrograd fast so as to argue his case. He knew that he could expect grave criticism from Lenin in the Central Committee. Lenin was no less impatient than Kühlmann about the need to make a clear choice between war and peace. Having disbanded the old Russian Army in December, Sovnarkom set about forming a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army two months later; but the first small, ill-trained units were undeniably in no condition to withstand attack by German military divisions. In Lenin’s view Trotsky was putting the October Revolution in peril. By 14 February the Soviet leadership was noting that the German missions in Petrograd were getting ready to leave the city. This was interpreted as a sign that invasion was imminent. Lenin snarled that a peace treaty had to be signed before all was lost.
The Bolshevik Central Committee met on 17 February and conducted a congested sequence of votes. Lenin made steady but excruciatingly slow progress. Everyone conceded in principle that, under certain conditions, a peace could be signed with Germany. The conditions were not specified; but even Bukharin was recorded as acknowledging that the signing of a separate treaty with the Central Powers should not be entirely dismissed in principle as an acceptable manoeuvre. Nobody any longer held out unconditionally for a policy of revolutionary war. Indeed three out of eleven voters at the Central Committee — Bukharin, Ioffe and Georgi Lomov — abstained from registering their opinion on the matter on the grounds that Lenin had put the question in an incorrect fashion.16 But if they objected to his blunt wording, it is hard to see how else he could have phrased things. The Germans had made clear that the Bolshevik party had to agree to a separate peace treaty or else endure a military offensive. What would Bukharin and his sympathizers do if the Germans were to attack? They answered with their silence, and it became obvious that they at last saw that the idea of revolutionary war throughout Europe was unrealizable.
Trotsky’s hope was that something might be done to elicit practical support from the Western Allies since Russia could no longer defend itself without external assistance. He and the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart met frequently, and Trotsky railed against the United Kingdom’s schemes to assist the enemies of Sovnarkom. His passion seemed sincere to Lockhart, who implored London to ignore the wildness of Bolshevik policies and consider help for the Soviet military effort. Trotsky talked to him ceaselessly about resuming the war against Germany — and Lockhart was persuaded that this would happen sooner or later.17 When Trotsky requested help from the French, Lockhart saw this as ‘sufficient proof’ of his good intentions on the eastern front. Lockhart also passed on Trotsky’s promise to aid the Allied cause by fomenting revolution in Berlin.18
Earlier in the month, Kamenev had been sent off to France on a diplomatic assignment to win favour among the Western Allies. Kamenev was the first leading Bolshevik to leave Russia since the October Revolution. A French reporter left this account of his appearance:
An elongated oval head, myopic blue eyes which are generally soft under a gold-mounted pince-nez and become wilful and penetrative when the discussion is animated. A little goatee, a blazingly blond and strong moustache falling over a mouth which they half cover, long, bulky, straw-coloured eyebrows, light brown hair. From a distance, a surly air but, from close by, a man who is always amiable and smiling.19
Kamenev left Petrograd accompanied by Zalkind, who was designated Soviet plenipotentiary to Switzerland. Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, confirmed in the House of Commons that they could come to London on their way to Paris.20 But, on setting foot in England, Kamenev immediately met with obstacles as the Foreign Office refused point-blank to talk to him and he was ignored by The Times in an attempt to deny him the oxygen of publicity. The Manchester Guardian interviewed him, however, and Kamenev displayed his ebullience by stating that if the Germans marched on Russia the workers would fight them in the streets of Petrograd. He claimed that, even if a separate peace was signed, the cause of the Western Allies would not suffer damage since it would take many months to send back POWs to Germany. He also predicted that Ukraine would never deliver grain to Germany unless promised industrial products in return.21
Kamenev was talking nonsense but received support from the anti-war Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald, who protested against the way that customs officers in Aberdeen had treated him. The sum of £5,000 was removed from his possession until such time as he left British shores and there was a rumour that he was relieved of an Orthodox Russian Bible and a box of matches. Supposedly he was bringing the Bible for Litvinov.22 (This was unlikely since Kamenev and Litvinov were atheists by doctrine and Jews by birth, although possibly the Bible was going to be used for the purpose of encrypting messages to and from Russia.) MacDonald spoke up in the House of Commons for Sovnarkom’s democratic credentials and claimed that the Soviet form of government was the only form of authority with a chance of survival in Russia. Lord Robert Cecil, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, replied that a personal search of Sovnarkom’s envoy was entirely appropriate in the current situation. Mac-Donald kept up his line of questioning. Why were police detectives hanging around Kamenev in London? Why did the authorities allow the allegation to go unchallenged that Litvinov had been mixed up in the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery? In all innocence MacDonald called this a ‘vile slander’. Kamenev wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian denying that the Bolsheviks were apathetic about losing Ukraine. In due course, he asserted, the old multinational state and its peoples would be brought back together.
The French gave a dusty reply to Kamenev’s and Zalkind’s request to cross the English Channel. The two Bolsheviks had no choice but to return to Russia. Yet nothing dampened their mood. Paul Vaucher, correspondent for L’Illustration magazine, travelled on the same boat and noted their complete confidence that the German workers were about to overthrow their rulers.23
Lenin was still some way from victory in the Central Committee — and Kamenev’s absence did not help since he was one of the sturdiest advocates of a separate peace along with Stalin, Zinoviev and Sverdlov. The resistance led by Trotsky and Bukharin remained strong. On 18 February, albeit by the slim margin of seven against six, the Central Committee voted against resuming talks with the Germans.24 By the evening, news was coming through that the Germans had carried out their ultimatum and had advanced to occupy Dvinsk. Trotsky wanted to cable Berlin and Vienna and ask about the further intentions of the Central Powers. Sverdlov and Stalin objected that time was too short for the Bolsheviks to wait for an answer and that the Brest-Litovsk talks had to be resumed immediately.25 The Central Committee, after yet another discussion, overturned its entire previous policy and voted by seven to five for signing an immediate peace with Germany. The decision was to be cabled to the enemy without delay. Lenin and Trotsky were instructed to draft the text. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were to be informed of what the Bolshevik leaders were now planning.26 All this time the menace to Petrograd was growing as German forces moved onward unopposed. The cables received on 19 February were grim. Minsk, Polotsk, Lutsk, Dubno and Rovno fell to the Germans without resistance. Pskov had to be evacuated. The Austrians organized an offensive and took Kamenets-Podolsk; and Romanian armed forces crossed the River Dniester and cut into Ukraine. A Turkish army marched on Trebizond, which had been occupied by the Russians since 1916. Lenin’s dark predictions seemed about to be fulfilled. The Germans, now occupying Mogilëv where the Russians had kept their GHQ in 1917, were poised to seize Petrograd.
Despite this, the Western Allies did not stop hoping to keep Russia in the war. They closely monitored the internal debate of Bolshevik leaders and knew who the main advocates of separate peace with Germany were. Stalin had always been sceptical about the prospects of imminent revolution in the West; and when Lenin began to argue for signing a treaty, Stalin put the case more unconditionally than Lenin felt comfortable with. Zinoviev, Sverdlov and Kamenev too favoured the signature of a separate peace. But it was Stalin who pushed the hardest and there is some evidence that officers of the British Secret Service Bureau decided that something should be done to get rid of him. One of their number, Stephen Alley, later claimed that he had been asked to find a pretext for an interview with Stalin. Once inside Stalin’s office, Alley was to assassinate him. Alley was a brave patriot but saw that any such exploit would end in his own death even if he succeeded in killing Stalin. He therefore rejected the proposal.27 (Only in retrospect was it possible for him to appreciate how much he would have benefited the world if he had snuffed out the life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest mass murderers.)
Only Trotsky among Bolshevik leaders gave any heart to the Western Allies, and the French ambassador phoned him to say: ‘In your resistance against Germany you can count on France’s military and financial support.’28 Noulens was acting on information from Sadoul. Trotsky, though, was not so foolish as to expect a lot from the French. He knew that they could do next to nothing from the other end of Europe to prevent Russia from being overrun by the Germans. He pointedly asked Noulens what scale of support the French had in mind.29
Lloyd George, ever resourceful, tried out a British initiative by striving to entice Sovnarkom with the offer to ship potatoes to Archangel. Lenin was minded to say yes, but for his own reasons. He always wanted to play off one ‘imperialist’ coalition against another. Even a slight rapprochement with the Allies might perhaps strengthen the Soviet bargaining hand at Brest-Litovsk. The ‘Left Communists’ in the Central Committee were appalled. They got their name from opposing the compromises that Lenin had advocated since taking power — and they criticized what they saw as his right-wing policies. It was bad enough for them that he wanted to sign a separate peace, and now he showed he also wished to wheel and deal with the British. For Lenin’s opponents, this was proof that he could no longer be trusted. They demanded the calling of a Central Committee meeting. Lenin used the excuse that only Yakov Sverdlov as Central Committee Secretary could convoke such a meeting and he was nowhere to be found. Sverdlov’s elusiveness was probably a contrived one. Lenin too made himself unavailable. This meant that when the leftists assembled they could not designate it as a meeting of any authoritativeness.30 It was the kind of behaviour that would have thrown Lenin into a rage if anyone had tried it on him.
Although no one now remained under any illusions about German power and aggressiveness, on 22 February Trotsky told the Central Committee that France and Britain were offering military assistance. Trotsky can hardly have pressed his case hard in the light of his earlier sarcasm towards Noulens. Lenin was not present but sent a memorandum in favour of taking ‘potatoes and weapons from the robbers of Anglo-French imperialism’. His words seem to have been ignored since the Central Committee rejected the French military mission’s note without debate. Bukharin said that France’s behaviour merely showed that the Western Allies hoped to turn Russia into one of their colonies. The discussion was mainly between Trotsky and Bukharin. Trotsky won the vote with his suggestion that Russia should not fight a revolutionary war until such time as it had built a decent new army.31 What happened to Lloyd George’s potatoes is lost to history. But Lenin and his supporters had already done what was needed to break up and destroy Bukharin’s opposition; and on 23 February Lenin returned and got the Central Committee to reconfirm its commitment to signing the peace treaty on Germany’s terms.32
The disruption in the Bolshevik party was enormous. Bukharin resigned as editor of Pravda; Trotsky stepped down from the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries abandoned the Sovnarkom coalition and became the main opposition to the Bolsheviks in the soviets. Every political party in Russia denounced Lenin as a traitor. And even among Bolshevik leaders there was a natural reluctance to volunteer to go out to Brest-Litovsk and sign the treaty on the government’s behalf. Lenin, the driving force behind the capitulation to Germany, refused to go. Instead Central Committee member Grigori Sokolnikov agreed to carry out the task.
The signing ceremony was scheduled for 3 March 1918. On 28 February the American embassy took the precaution of sending its personnel by train to Vologda, 370 miles to the east in the direction of Vyatka on the Trans-Siberian line, and the Japanese did the same. Robins and Ransome went with them. Ambassador Francis told everyone he had no intention of getting caught ‘like a rat in a trap’; he planned to move further eastwards if conditions got worse. Vologda, a quiet town with little industry and a scrappy agricultural hinterland, was known mainly as a site of religious pilgrimage; it was far enough away from the big centres of population for the Imperial authorities to have used it as a dumping ground for convicted revolutionaries. European diplomats declined to join Francis there. Instead they took a train north to Finland, reaching Helsinki three days later. All the Allied embassies cut down their staff to a minimum and sent most of their people home.33 Yet Trotsky was still not entirely beaten. On 1 March, as the German high command continued to order its troops eastwards, he instructed the Murmansk Soviet to be ready to take any help from the Allies to halt the advance.34 But then the Germans abruptly halted and the treaty was signed on the day appointed. The Bolsheviks held a Party Congress from 6 March to discuss what had happened. The debates were angry. Despite this, Lenin knew he had internal party victory in his grasp.
Known to the Russians as the ‘obscene peace’, this was a drastic defeat because it meant that the Bolsheviks were giving up the claim to Ukraine and most of the Baltic region. Abundant resources of coal, iron and wheat were handed to the Germans in return for peace, and a quarter of the Russian Empire’s population came under Germany’s sway. It was the most humiliating end to a war for Russians since the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century. The Bolsheviks had made the October Revolution with the expectation of expanding into Europe. Four months later they found themselves penned in a territory little bigger than old Muscovy.
On 21 March 1918 Germany started its great military offensive on the western front after weeks of troop transfers from the east. The French and British were forced back to within forty miles of Paris; it looked as if Ludendorff and Hindenburg might pull off a decisive victory and finish the war.1 Lenin boasted of the ‘breathing space’ achieved by his policy at Brest-Litovsk, but he knew he could not trust the German high command. Soviet leaders understood that if Paris fell to the Germans, it would not be long before they invaded Russia. And were the Germans to tear up the treaty and march on Petrograd, the newly created Red Army could not stop them. Sovnarkom would have to evacuate to the Urals and appeal to the Western Allies for aid. The Bolsheviks could not therefore afford to break ties with Allied representatives in Russia. This meant that Lenin and Trotsky were by no means as hostile to each other as most people thought at the time. Ioffe got other party leaders to support his suggestion that Trotsky be made People’s Commissar for Military Affairs,2 and Lenin followed this up with a personal plea to Trotsky, who made a brief show of demurral before accepting the appointment — and Chicherin took his place at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, at first on a provisional basis.3
Lenin and Trotsky now headed a one-party government. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had walked out of Sovnarkom in protest at the Brest-Litovsk treaty. They kept their seats in the soviets, and many of them continued to work in official capacities, even for the Cheka. But the tension between the two parties was acute.
On 5 March, two days after the ink had dried on the treaty, Raymond Robins asked Trotsky about the consequences for Russia at home and abroad. Despite having handed over his post to Chicherin, Trotsky was happy to give him answers. He himself hoped for American assistance for the Red Army. But Robins asked why the communist leaders had signed the treaty unless they aimed to cease fighting. Trotsky explained that no treaty could involve a permanent commitment, and he did not discount the possibility of moving into active military co-operation with the Allies. Robins believed him but was reluctant to accept that Lenin shared this way of thinking. Trotsky escorted him to the Sovnarkom meeting chamber so that he could ask Lenin for himself, with Alexander Gumberg tagging along as interpreter. Lenin confirmed Trotsky’s words; he said he had an open mind about entering into a ‘military agreement with one of the imperialist coalitions against the other’ since he had no fundamental preference for the Central Powers or the Allies. The cardinal criterion for him was what benefited the Revolution in Russia.4 Lenin had questions of his own for the American authorities. What would the Western Allies do if the Bolsheviks ripped up the treaty? Would the US give military aid? Would Washington help Russia if the Japanese invaded Siberia? Would the United Kingdom send help to Murmansk and Archangel if Russia got into difficulties with Germany?5
Robins asked Ambassador Francis to accept that Lenin and Trotsky were genuinely open to restarting hostilities against Germany. He discussed the matter with Lockhart, who enthusiastically wired London:
Empower me to inform Lenin that the question of Japanese intervention has been shelved; that we will persuade the Chinese to remove the embargo on foodstuffs; that we are prepared to support the Bolsheviks in so far as they will oppose Germany, and that we will invite [Lenin’s] suggestions as to the best way in which this help can be given. In return for this there is every chance that war will be declared between the Bolsheviks and Germany.6
Oliver Wardrop, the UK consul-general in Petrograd, was of similar mind and advised London that the Bolsheviks embodied the only hope that Russia might return to fighting Germany.7 Ambassador Francis too displayed flexibility by cabling the American Railway Mission across the Russo-Chinese frontier in Harbin to get a hundred experts ready for sending into Russia with a view to restoring the rail network — and he kept Washington informed of his action. Even the Times correspondent Harold Williams, a fierce critic of Bolshevism, rushed to alert Lloyd George to the opportunity for a diplomatic initiative on Russia and the Bolsheviks.8
The Bolsheviks maintained a healthy distrust of Germany and decided to shift the Russian capital into the interior, to Moscow. Lenin and most of the other People’s Commissars left Petrograd on 10 March. On arrival, they found that the great clock on the Spasski Gate overlooking Red Square still played ‘God Save the Tsar’ on the hour.9 And if the Germans did invade, the monarchy’s restoration might not be wholly improbable.
Power to ratify or reject the treaty lay with the Fourth Congress of Soviets, which opened in Moscow on 15 March. It was no longer feasible to wait for messages from Washington or London. Lenin grimly told Robins: ‘I shall now speak for the peace. It will be ratified.’10 He had arranged for the foreign missions to attend and hear his speech. In it he mentioned nothing of his recent approaches to the Western Allies and, seeking to keep his party’s spirits up, he asserted: ‘We know that [the German revolutionary] Liebknecht will be victorious one way or another; this is inevitable in the development of the workers’ movement.’11 But on 29 April he had to admit: ‘Yes, the peace we have arrived at is unstable to the highest degree; the breathing space obtained by us can be broken off any day both from the west and from the east.’12 He still could not afford to let the Germans conclude that he intended to challenge the terms of the treaty, but, provoked by criticisms in Russia, he came before the Central Committee to urge that the priority of Soviet diplomacy ought to be ‘to manoeuvre, retreat and wait’.13 This was as far as he could go without alarming Berlin. Many Russians thought that he was more interested in power for himself and his party than in spreading revolution westwards. But Lenin meant what he said: he remained committed to revolutionary expansion whenever the opportunity appeared.
The People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs lost much of its earlier influence. It was obvious that Chicherin would never dominate policy. Lenin and Trotsky wanted him to operate as an expert executant of their wishes, and generally he was willing to comply. Chicherin in any case had his hands full coping with ‘subordinates’ who showed him no deference. The People’s Commissariat seethed with its own disputes. Radek was an unrepentant advocate of ‘revolutionary war’ whereas Karakhan favoured compromise with the Allies. Radek put it about that Karakhan — ‘a donkey of classical beauty’ — was not up to the job. Karakhan thought Radek a hothead who was too sharp-tongued by half. The rivalry suited Lenin, who could play them off against each other — or at least this was how Lockhart assessed the situation.14
Trotsky at any rate was again seeing eye to eye with Lenin; and when the new People’s Commissar for Military Affairs finally left for Moscow on 16 March, he took Lockhart on the same train.15 Sadoul dismissed the Scot as ‘un bon bourgeois’ and regretted that the Allies had sent out no genuine socialist among their diplomats.16 But Lockhart at least counted for more with the Bolsheviks than Robins did. Trotsky disliked Robins for his lack of enthusiasm for the October Revolution and his past association with ‘imperialists’ like President Theodore Roosevelt.17 Lenin felt the same, and when Albert Rhys Williams put in a good word for Robins, Lenin exclaimed: ‘Yes, but Robins represents the liberal bourgeoisie of America. They do not decide the policy of America. Finance-capital does. And finance-capital wants control of America. And it will send American soldiers.’18
Lenin and Trotsky were also sceptical about Lockhart but thought he might come in useful while the Bolsheviks were looking for chances to play off the Allies and Germany against each other. Trotsky was hoping to get assistance as he built up the Red Army. Lockhart was a willing helpmate, assuring London that the Bolsheviks had been ‘wonderfully patient’.19 The Allies could perhaps be persuaded to lend a hand if they judged that the Russians might one day soon break with the Germans. But his words increasingly fell on deaf ears. Foreign Secretary Balfour, while encouraging him to be frank in his reports, complained that he had supplied no evidence of genuine anti-German purposes among the Bolshevik leaders.20 General Alfred Knox, the British military liaison officer in Siberia, was blunt about those Allied representatives who continued to press the case for accommodation with the Kremlin. In a report to London he wrote that Lockhart’s bland commentaries on Soviet politics were ‘criminally misleading’.21
Anti-Bolshevik Russians were angry about liaison between the Allies and the Reds. E. D. Trubetskoi and fellow monarchists warned the French consul-general Fernand Grenard in Moscow that Allied policy was wrong in every way. They stressed that Lenin had not the slightest intention of fighting Germany. If France and Britain continued to indulge Sovnarkom, the result might be to push Russian patriots into seeking help from the Germans. Trubetskoi’s words were ignored and the Allies went on probing the possibilities of cooperation with the Soviet leadership.22
Lenin’s manoeuvres annoyed the German high command. Rudolf Bauer, head of Germany’s military intelligence in Russia, threatened a German occupation of Petrograd unless Sovnarkom showed full compliance.23 But generally there was satisfaction in Germany at the closure of the eastern front. On 7 March the Germans signed a treaty with the White Finnish government and helped General Mannerheim to crush the remnants of the Finnish Reds and eliminate the prospect of socialist revolution in Helsinki. In April they tore up their treaty with the Central Rada in Kiev and installed Pavlo Skoropadskyi as a client ruler. Ukraine became a colony in all but name. The German military campaign stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and was accomplished with ease, enabling the high command to divert men and equipment to the western front. Not only the Allies but also the Bolsheviks hoped that Germany’s onslaught in northern France would prove ineffective. The fate of the October Revolution rested on the resilience of the French and British armies in their cold, wet trenches. If the Germans overwhelmed the Allies, they would rip up the Brest-Litovsk treaty and turn their power against Sovnarkom.
The Western Allies were exasperated by a treaty that allowed the Germans to concentrate their forces against them in northern France. But Soviet leaders were pleased at least that London, Paris and Washington left their diplomats in Russia. President Wilson declined to do anything further to assist Sovnarkom. He replied politely but blandly to overtures from Lenin and Trotsky.24 He was simply being diplomatic. Things did not need to be made worse by an offensive telegram from the White House. Wilson disliked the British and French proposal for the Japanese to intervene in Russia from Siberia. He refused to contemplate a similar expedition by the Americans — and he insisted that in any case the outcome of the Great War was about to be decided on the western front.25
The staff of the European embassies returned from Finland to Russia and joined the Americans and Japanese in Vologda. They all absolutely refused to transfer to Moscow even though they maintained consuls or other representatives there. Bruce Lockhart watched all this from afar: ‘It was as if three foreign Ambassadors were trying to advise their governments on an English cabinet crisis from a village in the Hebrides.’26 He thought no Allied ambassador was up to the task. Francis in his eyes was ‘a charming old gentleman of nearly eighty’ and he recorded that Trotsky dubbed Noulens ‘the Hermit of Vologda’. Noulens supposedly shaped his attitude according to ‘the prevailing policy of his own party in the French Chamber’, whereas Della Torretta spoke Russian but allowed himself to be bullied by Noulens. Rumours proliferated in Vologda’s fetid diplomatic atmosphere; and Lockhart had to chuckle when Noulens, who had heard that the Germans had installed one of Nicholas II’s ministers in power in Petrograd, nervously asked whether the story was true.27 Moves were afoot behind the scenes to send expeditionary forces to protect Allied interests. The British were gathering troops for a landing in the Russian north at Murmansk and the Japanese were planning the same for eastern Siberia. Sovnarkom would receive no prior notice. The idea was to do the deed before anyone noticed, but the Bolsheviks got wind of Japan’s intentions and sought to pre-empt them by making pleas to the other Allies.
In April, the United Kingdom landed a force of 2,500 men in Murmansk, mainly British but also including some French and Serbs.28 Their stated purpose was to protect Allied military supplies from falling into German hands. Trotsky retorted: ‘This is what the wolf said to the hare whose leg it had just snapped.’29 But there was nothing he could do to get rid of the British, and anyway he wanted their help in enhancing Soviet security. The operation in northern Russia had been kept strictly secret out of concern for British popular opinion and also in order to avoid letting Berlin know what was afoot. The troops led by Brigadier General Finlayson had been trained in seclusion in the Tower of London. The force was kept in the dark about its destination when it boarded the train at King’s Cross Station in London; and the officers were informed only when their ship, City of Marseilles, was already at sea. Things went awry early on when Spanish influenza afflicted the crew and the troops. Indian Muslim stokers succumbed first. As it was the month of Ramadan, they had had to fast daily until dusk. Soldiers and then even officers had to shovel coal before the ship docked in Murmansk.30
Lenin and Trotsky were shocked by the British action, but they soon surmounted this. Increasingly the Allied landings appeared a helpful counterweight to Germany’s rapacity. The Bolsheviks had assumed that they would keep control of Crimea; but this did not stop the Germans from invading and imposing their control over the northern coast of the Black Sea. Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinodar, Voronezh and Kursk too fell under German occupation.31 The treaty in March had drawn a line from the Baltic Sea only as far south as Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky, while concentrating on his ploy of ‘neither war nor peace’, had overlooked the need for agreement on Russia’s new frontiers. This was an elementary blunder, and the Russian and Ukrainian governments were still negotiating over the line to be drawn between Russia and Ukraine until well into the autumn. 32 No one in the Central Committee, least of all Lenin, had foreseen the consequences as Russian-inhabited cities continued to fall to the Germans. Nevertheless even the German high command held back from a total invasion. It assisted the Cossack leader General Krasnov in building up an army that one day might be deployable against the Reds. Yet already on 2 April 1918 Stalin was questioning the point of the treaty and mooted the idea of forming an anti-German military coalition with the Ukrainian Central Rada when the Germans seized Kharkov.33 Stalin’s change of stance was a sign of the panic in Sovnarkom. Rather than a breathing space, Brest-Litovsk appeared to have produced an opportunity for suffocation.
The Central Committee met in emergency session on 10 May. Six members were in Moscow and available, and it was the most tumultuous gathering since the discussions of January and February. Sokolnikov, the very man whose hand had signed the treaty, argued that Germany’s recent military actions had breached the terms of the Soviet–German agreements. What lay behind this, according to Sokolnikov, was a confluence of interests between the Russian bourgeoisie and German imperialism. He urged the pursuit of ‘a military agreement with the Anglo-French coalition with the objective of military co-operation on certain conditions’.34 Lenin rebutted this proposal and persuaded the Central Committee to stick by its peace policy. Sokolnikov did not give up. On 24 May he wrote in Pravda: ‘Should Germany break the Brest peace treaty, the Soviet government will have to ask itself whether it should not try and obtain military help from one imperialist power against another. The communists are in no way opposed to such methods as would cause the imperialists to break each other’s heads.’35 This was no more than Trotsky had been thinking since November 1917; it had also been in Lenin’s mind at the time when the treaty was signed. But no one had previously made such a suggestion on the pages of the central party newspaper.
Trotsky appealed for five hundred French officers to assist with the Red Army.36 France’s diplomats and military attachés, with the exception of Sadoul, were sceptical. Georges Petit said: ‘All this sterile and hypocritical blustering ought not to be taken seriously.’ Henri-Albert Niessel of the French military mission went further. After hearing Trotsky blame the Allies for the Brest-Litovsk treaty, Niessel lost his temper and addressed him ‘in a way that no general would dare to speak to a subordinate officer’.37 Niessel’s comrade Jean Lavergne sent officers into Ukraine to cause trouble for the ‘Austro-Germans’. Despite telling Lenin he would assist in training the Red Army, Lavergne doubted that Sovnarkom would meet the French condition that the Reds should demonstrably prepare to fight Germany.38 Trotsky had greater success with the United Kingdom. For advice on a Soviet air force he enlisted the British intelligence officer George Hill and appointed him inspector of aviation, and two or three times a week he laid aside half an hour for Hill to instruct him in aeronautics. Hill relished the queerness of being asked to teach the arts of war to a man who was famous for having opposed militarism throughout Europe. His task was to enable the communists to build up an air force that could take on Germany’s fighter and reconnaissance planes in the event of war.39 Ambassador Francis tried to appear helpful, cabling Robins on 3 May 1918: ‘You are aware of my action in bringing about the aid of the military missions towards organizing an army.’40
This support pleased Trotsky, who asked Lockhart on 5 May to request the help of the British government in building the Red Army and for the dispatch of the Royal Navy to ‘save the Black Sea fleet’. In exchange he promised to allow the large contingent of Czech ex-POWs to proceed to Murmansk and Archangel for shipment across the North Sea to the western front against the Central Powers.41 Serb volunteers had already done this with Soviet consent. Negotiations about the Czechs, based mainly in Penza, had gone on since shortly after the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The Bolsheviks sniffed the danger that the British in the north might treacherously deploy them against the Red Army; they also worried about how the Germans might react to such a deployment of the Czechs.42 Trotsky therefore tried to persuade Czech units to join the Red forces. But the Western Allies had to be appeased if he wanted anything from them, so he sanctioned an arrangement for the Czechs to make their way out of Russia via Vladivostok for onward transportation to Europe.43 Trotsky ignored the taboo against assisting one of the two military coalitions in ‘the imperialist war’. He assured Lockhart that the British force could keep its stores undisturbed in northern Russia.44 The British pushed for more. Rumours grew that the Germans were about to march on Petrograd and there was a danger that the entire Baltic Sea would fall under their control. The Admiralty in Whitehall instructed Francis Cromie, the naval attaché in Petrograd, to explore ways of scuttling the ships as a precaution. On 11 May Cromie set off for Moscow to see whether Trotsky would make trouble; he also spoke to Lockhart and the Red Army General Staff.45
The United Kingdom continued to strengthen its presence at Murmansk in the Russian north, raising its force steadily from the initial strength of 450 officers and men.46 The French took responsibility for the Allies in the south, sending a flotilla to Odessa on the Black Sea and depositing a force there. The Murmansk landings provoked protests but no action from Sovnarkom. Soviet leaders lacked the military strength to remove the British expedition; they also quietly welcomed the arrival of a counterbalance to the Germans. France’s force in Odessa received critical comment but it was far from being at the top of Pravda’s agenda since the Bolsheviks had lost their toehold across Ukraine.
The military position was tricky enough, but Sovnarkom also faced an ever worsening economic situation. Until the Brest-Litovsk treaty it had been possible for old contracts to be fulfilled and new ones drawn up with foreign businesses. Sovnarkom had valuable goods for sale or rent. Lenin had consistently said that foreign capital was essential for industrial reconstruction; he wanted to offer ‘concessions’ in the Russian economy — and Sovnarkom resolved to draw up a plan on non-capitalist principles.47 (Why capitalists should want to invest without any chance of making a profit was not given consideration.) The idea of inviting businesses abroad to invest in Russia had been debated in Soviet governing circles since the beginning of the year.48 It was not widely popular among Bolshevik leaders but Lenin would not let go of it, believing that capitalist powers were inherently greedy. He hoped to inveigle the Americans into doing business in Russia and deflect the military threat from Japan. Lenin suggested that President Wilson might put pressure on Tokyo if Sovnarkom used Siberian concessions as an enticement to American big business.49 The Allies, even if they were willing to prop up Sovnarkom, saw the Russian trade as a growing risk for governments as well as businesses. Platinum was held in large stocks in Russia, and the British government had been negotiating their purchase; but in May 1918 a prosecution was brought in London against a British firm that had sought to buy up Russian platinum through the businessman William Camber Higgs of Petrograd. An Allied economic blockade of the territory under Soviet rule commenced.50
Lenin turned instead to Germany and made an appeal to its industrialists and financiers. The Germans did not make this easy for him. Their ambassador, Count von Mirbach, was exigent and imperious. He was also a stickler for diplomatic propriety. He insisted on presenting his credentials in the time-honoured fashion of diplomacy. This he did to Sverdlov as Chairman of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets. His one concession to the Bolsheviks was to wear only a day suit and not a top hat and tails.51
Mirbach treated Chicherin at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs as an underling. Whenever he wanted to speak to him, he barged into his rooms without ceremony and flung his hat, overcoat and cane on the table. He shot his mouth off in Radek’s office for everybody to hear.52 He intended that the Bolsheviks should feel that Moscow had become part of Germany’s domains. It had taken until 26 April for Mirbach to set up his official residence at 5 Denezhny Pereulok (Money Lane). The German consulate was on the other side of the street at Number 18. The position could not have been more awkward since the French military mission worked and lived on the same street.53 The chauffeurs of the two nations competed to get their limousines ahead of each other. On one occasion they screeched to a halt just three inches apart.54 The efficiency and zest of the Germans impressed onlookers in comparison with the pomaded diplomats of several other embassies.55 Setting the tone, Mirbach paid visits to leading monarchists, including a sister-in-law of Nicholas II.56 He insisted that Sovnarkom should restore money and companies seized from German owners in the war or after the October Revolution.57 Sovnarkom complied, committing itself to punish anyone who tried to obstruct the policy. Russia’s subordination appeared complete.58
The Soviet leadership did not pretend to like the situation, as Pravda made clear: ‘The German ambassador has arrived in the revolutionary capital not as a representative of the toiling classes of a friendly people but as the plenipotentiary of a military gang which with boundless insolence kills, rapes and pillages every country.’59 But rhetoric was one thing, practical resistance entirely another.
Trying to make the best of a bad job, Sovnarkom appointed missions to central Europe on 4 April 1918. Lev Kamenev was the choice for Austria, Adolf Ioffe for Germany and Yan Berzin and Ivan Zalkind for Berne.60 On his way back from the United Kingdom Kamenev had been apprehended on one of the land Islands by the White Finns and the announcement of his Viennese appointment seems to have been a ploy to get the Central Powers to exert their influence to release him. (In fact he was not freed until 17 June 1918 by means of a deal to swap him for half-a-dozen White Finnish officers.)61 It anyway was Ioffe who had the key posting. Berlin was the capital of the power which had forced the ‘obscene peace’ on Russia; but, like Trotsky, Ioffe was willing to suppress his feelings about Brest-Litovsk. He could perhaps salve his conscience by doing what he could to promote the cause of revolutionary internationalism in Berlin. Leonid Krasin and Vladimir Menzhinski went with him. Krasin had been a manager for Siemens-Schuckert in Germany and Russia before the Great War; he had also been involved in the Bolshevik robbery unit after the failure of the 1905–6 revolution. He was hardly a veteran of big business but he was the best qualified among the Bolsheviks. Menzhinski was a trusted Chekist who was assigned to undercover work.
No one could tell what would come out of this hazardous international situation. For nearly two months after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been signed, anything seemed possible — or at least this was the assumption underlying the activity of the politicians and the diplomats. The treaty had solved everything and nothing. Any slight shift in the fortunes of the Allies or the Germans could have immense consequences. The war was not over and any trembling of ‘Soviet power’ could result in the collapse of Bolshevism. The government in Moscow was far from secure and the economy was in free fall.
Even the German leadership was perplexed. The flotsam of many nations was swept around in the Russian tumult. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners had fallen into the hands of the Russians since 1914, and Lenin and Trotsky regarded them as excellent material for revolutionary indoctrination. Many POWs needed no new stimulus to turn against their old governments. The belligerent mood was especially remarkable among Czech and Hungarian captives who wished to return home and overthrow the Habsburg authorities.62 Many had newly developed communist sympathies — this was true of Czechs, Hungarians, Bulgarians as well as Austrians and Germans. The Bolsheviks organized an All-Russia Congress of POW Internationalists in Moscow on 9 April 1918.63 By freeing the military prisoners of Imperial Russia they intended to foster insurrections in Europe. It was the Central Powers which had reason to fear what was afoot. Within days of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, according to Sadoul, German and Austrian volunteers were being sent into Ukraine from Moscow to take up the struggle against the military occupation.64 Prisoner-of-war associations were being formed all over the country — and predictably the Central Powers showed little eagerness to welcome them back across their frontiers.
Robert Vaucher left an account of the Germans freed from detention camps by Sovnarkom:
In the streets of Petrograd the German ex-POWs walk around freely, dressed in new attire several days previously, belted in their blue, green or white pre-war uniforms, fully ornamented with frogging, with braids and with insignia. They parade the length of Nevski Prospect in their flamboyant lion-tamer uniforms with the air of victors and look down on their Austrian allies who are still dressed in their old uniforms which are patched, faded and threadbare.65
Not everyone was eager to go back to Germany, for fear of being mobilized to the trenches of the western front. Nor was the German high command enthusiastic about using them as soldiers until all traces of Bolshevik influence had been removed. The Austrian commanders were still more worried about the contaminating effects of communism.66 Lenin’s peace needed careful handling. The outcome of the Great War was being decided in northern France, but the dismantled eastern front retained its capacity to affect the situation in the western trenches.
While the Allies were gathering intelligence and even plotting the downfall of the new Bolshevik regime, organized opposition — as yet clandestine — to the Bolsheviks was growing. In the early summer of 1918, an informal coalition took shape bringing together anti-Bolshevik politicians in Moscow and Petrograd from the Kadets to right-wing socialists; no effort was made to appeal to monarchists. Leading liberals such as Pëtr Struve joined the enterprise and the National Centre, as it became known, kept up links with the so-called Volunteer Army in Rostov-on-Don as well as with Allied officials across Russia.1 The Volunteer Army was the first of the White forces to be formed and was initially led by Generals Kornilov and Alexeev. The Whites chose their colour to distinguish themselves from the Reds and to suggest that their cause was a pure and just one. The Allies quietly welcomed them as determined enemies of Bolshevism. They also preferred the National Centre to the Right Centre, which included figures like Pavel Milyukov who made overtures to the Germans for help to bring down the Bolsheviks.2 The Allied embassies feared that the Volunteer Army might make the same choice. There was also a Left Centre. Based in Ufa in the Urals, it consisted of socialists and successfully set up a local administration.3 Allied diplomats reported on these processes and kept a lookout for signs that the people of Russia were getting ready to overthrow Bolshevism and re-enter the embrace of the Allies.
In fact the deadliest threat to the Soviet regime as yet came not from Russians but from Czechs. It crystallized when the Czech former POWs journeying in armed batches from Penza to the Pacific coast turned violently against the Bolsheviks.4 The trouble flared up in late May when the Chelyabinsk Soviet tried to disarm the Czechs before allowing them to travel any further. Trotsky had issued an appeal for the Czech volunteers to join the Red Army; he had followed this up with an order that they could proceed to Vladivostok only if they handed over their weapons. Instead the Czechs seized control of Novonikolaevsk and then travelled back westwards as far as Penza to rescue their comrades.5 Opinion was divided in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs about Trotsky’s management of the process. Radek tried to convince Robert Bruce Lockhart that Soviet leaders in Moscow had simply acted out of anxiety about letting the Germans think them indulgent to Allied interests.6 Karakhan was less charit-able, admitting that Trotsky could have handled things with greater understanding.7 Whatever their views, the outcome was a disaster for Sovnarkom as 25,000 Czech troops assembled in the Volga region and put themselves at the disposal of the Komuch government in Samara. They no longer intended to fight on the western front but planned to stay and fight Bolsheviks. Komuch had always been militarily weak, but the Czechs could help to rectify this.
The Allies pretended to be mere spectators of this turnabout. This was less than convincing. The French had been subsidizing and liaising with the Czechs from March to May. The British too had been involved. In essence the Allied leaders wanted the Czech troops to cause trouble and undermine Soviet rule in Siberia — and the Germans, having negotiated Russia’s withdrawal from the war, were annoyed by this.8 The Bolsheviks reeled from blow after blow. Workers grumbled about conditions in factories and mines and demobbed soldiers returned to villages where anger at the state seizures of grain was acute. Peasants in many provinces were on the brink of revolt. Sovnarkom governed only the areas of Russia around Moscow and Petrograd plus the Urals. The Red Army was still a shambles. The Cheka could scarcely cope with the growing number of plots and protests. In the soviets there was unceasing criticism from the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who hated the peace treaty and the turn in agrarian policy towards forcible seizures of grain. Food shortages in the cities worsened. Urban residents with any ties to the land fled to the countryside.
Ambassador Noulens in Vologda hoped that the Bolsheviks were on the brink of collapse. Wanting to make his own assessment, in early June 1918 he paid a return visit to Moscow where he held a meeting with what remained of the French colony. He knew he was under surveillance. At the time he felt his trip was worthwhile since he learned about the various subversive actions being contemplated. But Noulens’ interpreter and confidant was the French reporter René Marchand. It soon became clear that Marchand’s sympathy lay with the Bolsheviks — and indeed he later transmitted everything he knew to the Cheka.9
The rapid westward advance of the Czech troops forced the Kremlin to think again about the Romanovs. Until the winter of 1917–18 the former emperor and his immediate family and retainers had been quarantined in Tobolsk in western Siberia, where they had been dispatched by Kerenski — and the emergencies in Russian affairs meant that few people wondered what was happening to them. But, although they were out of sight, the Bolshevik leaders did not forget about them. On 11 February 1918 Sovnarkom considered a proposal to bring the former emperor to Petrograd to be put on trial;10 but no action followed until 9 March, when Lenin and the government decided instead to move them to Yekaterinburg in the province of Perm for fear that monarchists might try and liberate them in Tobolsk.11 Yekaterinburg was the Soviet administrative centre of the Urals region and a stronghold of Bolshevism; it was also nearer than Tobolsk to Petrograd and Moscow and on the Trans-Siberian railway. Moisei Uritski, head of the Cheka in Petrograd, oversaw the transfer, and the precise place of confinement was left to the Yekaterinburg comrades.12 They picked the large walled mansion of the once-wealthy merchant, Nikolai Ipatev. The transfer and the reasons for it were announced by Sovnarkom in early May.13
Nicholas II whiled away the time by reading novels by Turgenev as well as anti-Semitic tracts. He and his wife behaved as normally as possible while tending to the needs of their son Alexei and their daughters. The Bolsheviks kept up the pressure by changing their guards frequently and making it difficult for the Romanovs to form any friendships with them. Each fresh shift started by uttering obscenities and shunning overtures. At least the food was adequate, but the uncertainty was demoralizing. Sensing that they might be moved again in unpredictable circumstances, the former empress Alexandra and her daughters sewed jewels into their underwear for use as currency in an emergency.
By mid-July the Czechs were within days of reaching Yekaterinburg and the Bolshevik leadership in the Urals were panicking. The fear was that Nicholas Romanov might be freed and used as a rallying symbol of the anti-Soviet cause. The order came from Moscow to liquidate the entire family. Exactly who issued the instructions, and how and when, was deliberately kept unclear. No communist leader wanted to put his signature to a warrant that might later incriminate him. The deed was done early in the morning of 17 July when the Romanovs were ordered from their beds and marshalled in the cellar. Armed men, sodden with drink, stood them against the wall before gunning them down. The news was suppressed: the fear remained in Moscow about the likely reaction in Russia and abroad. Trotsky’s diary records that the Kremlin leaders in Moscow had held a discussion about the plan for liquidation and given their instructions to the Yekaterinburg Bolsheviks. Lenin and Sverdlov were actively involved. Trotsky, tied up with his military duties on the Volga front, heard the story from Sverdlov and was disappointed. Although he had no objection in principle to the killings, he would have preferred to put the ex-emperor on show-trial to publicize the iniquities of the Imperial government. Trotsky never liked missing any propaganda trick.14
Sovnarkom met on the day of the killings to hear Sverdlov’s confidential report.15 Nothing was said in public for several months. It was understood that foreign monarchies, including the Hohenzollerns, would be enraged by what had been done. The Kaiser and the emperor were cousins, and even though their armies had fought each other in 1914–17 the ties of consanguinity still meant much to Wilhelm II. His anger would have been still fiercer if ever he learned that the communists had butchered Nicholas’s wife and children along with him. Empress Alexandra had originally been Princess Alix of Hesse and, although it was impolitic for the Kaiser to enquire about the deposed Nicholas, he could very properly send an emissary to ask Ioffe about Alexandra as a native German and indeed a relative. One of her brothers made the same approach. Lenin hid the full truth from Adolf Ioffe in the German mission, telling Felix Dzerzhinski: ‘Don’t let Ioffe know anything. It will be easier for him to tell lies there in Berlin.’16 Ioffe therefore simply repeated the official story he had heard from Moscow. He prised the facts out of Dzerzhinski only later in the year when the head of the Cheka made a trip incognito to Berlin and Ioffe gained the opportunity to question him directly.17
Even in Russia, most party leaders and militants were kept in the dark. As late as March 1919 Bolsheviks at their Eighth Party Congress were asking why Nicholas II was not being brought back to Moscow for a public trial.18 But by then the Western Allies were able to make an informed guess about the fate of the Imperial family. The American army contingent in Siberia now followed the Czechs to Yekaterinburg and learned from anti-Bolshevik investigators about their preliminary enquiries. It was no longer reasonable to doubt that the Romanovs had been slaughtered. King George V in Britain expressed his acute concern for his cousin Nicky and the family in comments that must have been tinged with guilt since he had turned down Kerenski’s request to grant them asylum in 1917.
The Bolsheviks felt steadily less secure in power, and Czech military actions were not the only cause. Humiliated at Brest-Litovsk, they were forced to give away further territory under German pressure in June. The Germans, worried by the British landings in the Russian north, demanded that Lenin should cede the western segment of the Murmansk area to the Finns. This would provide the contingent of German troops already stationed in Finland with a base to counteract the spread of Allied armed strength in Russia.19 The Bolsheviks gave way: they had no choice short of going to war against Germany. But they were not totally acquiescent. Even some of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries said that no party had done more than the Bolsheviks to assist Ukrainians willing to take up arms against the German occupation of Ukraine.20 Uprisings took place in small towns and villages. (The British officer George Hill helped with this, even though his claim to have led the entire campaign of sabotage was a somewhat exaggerated one.)21 But the Ukrainian forays by Bolsheviks were marginal to the Kremlin’s general line of appeasing the Germans. However arrogantly their diplomats behaved in Moscow, the communist leadership continued to draw a deep breath and overlook any offence.
This was an attitude that infuriated the Allies. Although Bruce Lockhart continued to parley with Trotsky, he no longer believed that Sovnarkom would ever fight Germany. It now made sense for the British to strengthen contacts with the enemies of Bolshevism and lend them their support. Approaches were made to Lockhart by the Volunteer Army and others.22 When a certain Fabrikantov asked him for help in enabling Kerenski to escape from Russia, he ignored protocol and issued him with travel documents under the alias of a Serbian soldier.23 Lockhart also handed over £200,000 worth of Russian rubles to George Hill and Sidney Reilly for delivery to Patriarch Tikhon to help with the Orthodox Church’s resistance to the Soviet government.24 William Camber Higgs, who owned a small British firm in Moscow, facilitated such subventions by cashing cheques drawn on the British Treasury. (George Hill did the same thing as Lockhart but specified the War Office.)25
Lockhart passed on funds to Boris Savinkov for an uprising in Yaroslavl, 155 miles north east of Moscow; Ambassador Noulens, from Vologda, provided finance for Savinkov through Consul-General Grenard and the military attaché Jean Lavergne.26 Savinkov had assembled a Union for the Defence of the Fatherland and Freedom to organize a chain of resistance to Bolshevism on the eastern side of Petrograd and Moscow. As Lockhart reported to London, the immediate objective was to establish a military dictatorship. Savinkov had himself in mind as Minister of the Interior and some well-known general — almost certainly Mikhail Alexeev — as head of a national government; he alerted both the Czech Corps and the Volunteer Army to his plan and co-ordinated his activity with them.27 He also informed Sergei Sazonov, who by then was serving as the chief anti-Bolshevik diplomat attached to the Western Allies in Paris. Lockhart explained to London that Savinkov hoped to stir up a peasant revolt culminating in the execution of Bolshevik leaders. When Lord Curzon, as a member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, received Lockhart’s report he declared Savinkov’s methods to be on the drastic side, but nonetheless wished him well. What Curzon avoided was any promise to augment the British forces of intervention even though Lockhart had spelled it out that Savinkov’s scheme depended on such assistance from the Allies.28 Ambassador Noulens was less straightforward. Wanting to multiply the attacks on Sovnarkom, he advised Savinkov that the Allies were on the very point of undertaking a full invasion; and, although the French had no expeditionary force in the north, Noulens told him that he could count on decisive reinforcement from that direction.29
Noulens achieved his purpose and the insurrection duly occurred on 6 July. As well as Yaroslavl, Savinkov occupied Vladimir, Rybinsk and Murom and proclaimed the overthrow of Soviet rule across Yaroslavl province.30 He restored private trade, promising to regenerate the economy and feed the hungry. He announced that he was acting in concert with anti-Bolshevik governments in Siberia and by the Volga. Savinkov put himself forward as leader of the Northern Army of rebels against communism while affirming his subordination to the command of General Alexeev, who was striving to build up the Volunteer Army in southern Russia.31 But when the Reds moved against the rebels no French or British assistance was made available to relieve Savinkov when he faced defeat. The Allies had never intended to invade — and indeed President Wilson would have opposed any such enterprise. Savinkov had been tricked.32
The timing was awful for the anti-Bolshevik cause in Moscow. The Fifth Congress of Soviets opened in the Bolshoi Theatre on 4 July, and the Bolsheviks gave every sign of determination to fight on and win. The foreign missions sat in the boxes and watched from above. On one side was Mirbach with his Austrian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Turkish colleagues; the head of German intelligence, Rudolph Bauer, was also present. On the other side were the Allied representatives with Lockhart prominent among them; the French and the Americans had places in the upper tier. (Sadoul turned up in a silk hat, frock coat and kid gloves.)33 Lenin spoke for the Brest-Litovsk peace, Trotsky for the Red Army’s preparedness. All Bolsheviks contended that every official policy had merit. No sliver of disagreement appeared between one Bolshevik commissar and another. Maria Spiridonova who led the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, still operating openly under the regime, denounced Sovnarkom at length; her comrade Boris Kamkov declared them to be inhuman scoundrels and, as he looked up at Mirbach’s party, shouted: ‘Down with the assassins!’34 The Bolsheviks at the Congress did not try to silence the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries because they knew that Sovnarkom was guaranteed an absolute majority of votes. If the Germans were worried, they did not show it.
Foreseeing the results of the voting, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee secretly sanctioned terrorist attacks in Russia. The idea was not to kill Lenin or Trotsky but to organize a ‘provocation’ that would wreck the Brest-Litovsk treaty and bring the Bolsheviks back to the path of ‘revolutionary war’. Left Socialist-Revolutionaries thought that they would achieve this simply by assassinating Ambassador von Mirbach. If they were successful, Berlin would break with Moscow immediately.
On 6 July Yakov Blyumkin, an eighteen-year-old Left Socialist-Revolutionary working for the Cheka, entered the German embassy on a false pretext and shot Mirbach. Sovnarkom instantly proscribed the party and arrested several of its leaders. Dzerzhinski, embarrassed by the lapse in state security, sped off to their headquarters only to be taken captive by them. He was liberated thanks to resolute action by the Latvian Riflemen — a force which had gone over en masse to the Bolsheviks from the old Imperial army and quickly formed the effective core of the Red Army. Without their Latvians, the Bolsheviks would have been helpless. Lenin and Radek took a limousine to the German embassy at Denezhny Pereulok to express formal condolences. They were grovelling because they feared that unless they expressed outrage, however insincere, Germany might overrun Russia.35 In Berlin, Ioffe’s first thought was that German agents had killed Mirbach so as to sharpen the conflict between Russia and the Allies. He deduced this from the German Foreign Office’s request for Lenin to put the blame on Allied agents. The Germans called for the killers and their ‘ideological inspirers’ to be caught and punished.36 They also demanded the right to dispatch their own troops into Russia.37 But things calmed down and the leading Bolshevik Anatoli Lunacharski spread the news among the foreign community in Moscow that the emergency was nearly over. This needed doing since the Bolsheviks were worried that the British and French would start a preventive war to save Russia from German occupation.38
Young Blyumkin was nowhere to be found. He had escaped to Ukraine, hoping to return when the Bolsheviks tore up the peace treaty. Frantic to oblige the Germans, the Soviet government ordered the execution of V. A. Alexandrovich, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary who had worked as Deputy Chairman of the Cheka. The German authorities let it be known that they were satisfied with the Bolshevik official reaction. Radek could be relied upon to make the best jokes about the emergency. He told acquaintances that a job could now be found for the generals of Nicholas II’s armed forces: they could be formed into detachments and trained to shed crocodile tears in Mirbach’s funeral cortège.39
The Bolsheviks badly needed a counterweight to German power. Chicherin, who was appointed People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs on a permanent basis at the end of May,40 cabled Ambassador Francis to say that Vologda was unsafe and that the diplomatic corps should move to Moscow. He added: ‘I am sending Radek to Vologda to execute the invitation.’ The word ‘execute’ did not exactly reassure Francis after the Mirbach murder. He replied that he felt secure in the north ‘because we do not fear the Russian people’. Radek, taking Ransome as his interpreter, turned up uninvited; he was sporting a jacket pulled tight with a belt from which hung a conspicuous revolver.41 To Francis this was an attempt to look like a ‘cowboy on the war path’. He told Noulens: ‘Ah, the miserable little Jew! If he comes back to see me with his revolver in his holster, I’ll get mine from out the drawer; I’ll put it on the table and tell him: “Now let’s talk!”’42 Soviet leaders, not for the first or last time, were behaving incautiously. The French were picking up their wireless traffic passing through Petrograd and knew what Radek and Chicherin wrote to each other seated at their Hughes apparatuses — this was the most up-to-date method of telegraph communication, which allowed people to type and exchange messages instantaneously. Radek ought to have avoided mentioning Francis’s predilection for his embassy secretaries; Chicherin was unwise to refer to the false tone of deference he used with the American ambassador. Ambassador Noulens enjoyed passing both these titbits on to Francis.43
Noulens and Francis faced Radek down. The fact that he had tried to stir up the feelings of a 2,000-strong crowd of workers against the Allies did nothing to reassure them. They reasoned that they could too easily end up as Lenin’s hostages if they moved to Moscow. Radek and Ransome returned to Moscow with their tails between their legs.44
After Francis had received cable intelligence that Chicherin had indeed ordered the local soviet to take them hostage, the Western diplomatic corps could see that Vologda was no longer a safe haven. This would have been the last straw for the ambassador even if he had not known that the British force in Murmansk was planning to overthrow the Archangel Soviet. The Bolsheviks had their own intelligence about this and had been executing known enemies in the region. Northern Russia became a theatre of war. Francis already had a secret agreement with the Vologda station master to keep a locomotive and carriages ready for his embassy to leave for Archangel at an hour’s notice. On 29 July he decided that the time had come to flee but, wanting to avoid the appearance of colluding in British military aggression, he changed the destination to Kandalaksha, a few miles south of Murmansk.45 Shortly before boarding he practised a little deceit by wiring Chicherin: ‘We have determined to take your advice.’ Chicherin heard what was really being planned and tried to prevent it: ‘Archangel means leaving Russia.’ He could hardly complain. His own deceit would have delivered Francis into Soviet custody. Chicherin had acted too late and soon all the Americans were sound asleep on a moving train.46
Whatever brittle trust had existed between the Kremlin and the White House now vanished. Raymond Robins had already left for America on 14 May, still convinced that the Western Allies should not attempt a military intervention in Russia unless given Sovnarkom’s explicit sanction — by then his friend Lockhart had come round to recommending an Allied campaign regardless of the Kremlin’s wishes.47 But room for diplomacy through informal mediation had already disappeared. A bleak future of armed conflict loomed on the horizon. The Bolsheviks had dealt with the threat from Germany by signing the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Western Allies had yet to clarify their military intentions — and the communist leaders pondered their own options with heightened concern. They had hoped to crush their Russian enemies before meeting the challenges from abroad. Now they could no longer be confident that the Allied powers would allow them this freedom.
The foreign military campaigns against Soviet rule ran the Cheka ragged across Russia and the borderlands of the old empire. The Germans held Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic region and maintained a force in Finland at its government’s request. The British were in occupation of Murmansk and Archangel. The French presided in Odessa. The Turks were pushing into the south Caucasus. The Japanese and the Americans landed expeditionary forces in eastern Siberia. The ‘intervention’ was multi-angled and highly dangerous. Nor could Soviet security forces ignore the potential for trouble from armed foreigners like the Czech ex-POWs who had been in Russia. The disintegration of the Russian Empire gathered pace as Georgians, Armenians and Azeris rejected the authority of Sovnarkom. The Volga region in south-east Russia was governed by Komuch. Russian anti-Bolshevik armies — the Whites — were stiffening their efforts in south Russia and mid-Siberia. Each of these forces sought to make contact with supporters in the areas under Bolshevik control around Moscow and Petrograd. The Chekists had their hands full with the tasks of combating counter-revolutionary activity over this entire zone. There was little time or personnel to spare on espionage and subversion abroad.
The tasks of governing the Soviet-dominated zone were huge. The Bolsheviks accepted that they had to employ in the People’s Commissariats ‘specialists’ who had worked in the ministries before the October Revolution. Some did this with much reluctance and zealously persecuted anyone they thought to be acting disloyally. Although Joseph Stalin was notoriously suspicious of ‘bourgeois’ experts, he was not alone among Bolsheviks. It was their preference to promote the working class to administrative authority in the ‘proletarian state’. Lenin had said and written this throughout 1917.1 Yet he recognized that years would be needed for workers to acquire confidence and training. While this was happening, the old personnel had to be kept in post under the watchful eye of communist commissars. Lenin and Trotsky were adamant that the Soviet state would collapse without qualified professionals; but they had a problem in securing acceptance for their pragmatism.
Even they, though, did not want to employ former Okhrana officials. Like other communists, they detested what the political police had done to revolutionaries under the Romanovs, and they felt they could not trust any of them. The Soviet Constitution stripped former policemen of civil rights. Since the Chekists refused to employ such people, they had to teach themselves from scratch how to organize intelligence and counter-intelligence — on this as on other practical matters, Marx and Engels had left no handbook of instruction behind. The sole asset that the Bolshevik party possessed was its long experience of struggle against the security police. Clandestine political work had required the Bolsheviks to take precautions against infiltration and provocation. Cool vigilance had been essential. In fact when the Okhrana’s files were opened after the February Revolution, it was shown that police agents had penetrated the revolutionary parties more systematically than anyone had imagined. The Bolsheviks had prided themselves on their conspiratorial prowess. So Lenin was astounded to learn that one of his protégés in the Central Committee, Roman Malinovski, was a paid employee of the Okhrana. When Malinovski imprudently came to Petrograd and threw himself on Sovnarkom’s mercy, Lenin had no compunction about having him executed.2
The Chekists learned some lessons better than others and were notably slow in acquiring technical expertise in code-breaking and encryption. This was something of an oddity. Before 1917 all of them — in the underground, Siberian exile or emigration — had used forms of secret writing for internal party correspondence. Often this involved little more than working with an agreed piece of printed text or list of specific words, and the chemicals they deployed for invisible script might sometimes be no more complex than the contents of a milk bottle. This experience taught them the importance of codes, but their political suspiciousness deprived them of a chance to increase their practical cleverness. Imperial Russia had brought on a brilliant group of cryptographers. None was more remarkable than Ernst Fetterlein, who fled across the Finnish frontier in June 1918. Fetterlein had decrypted the British diplomatic codes in the Great War, giving an invaluable tool to Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the War Ministry in their dealings with London.3 The communist authorities were able to invent only rather primitive codes — and the art of decryption for a while was out of their reach.
They were aware that the security of their wireless communications left much to be desired. It took them years to recover from the loss of many of Russia’s most expert telegraphists, who walked out on them after the October Revolution.4 Bolsheviks could see that they were technically inferior to the Allies, the Germans and the Whites. One way round the problem was to send deceptive messages en clair. This is the only sensible way to interpret a particular conversation on the Hughes telegraph apparatus between Karl Radek in Moscow and Khristo Rakovski in Kiev. With theatrical extravagance, Radek claimed he could see no cloud in the Soviet sky. Lenin was recovering well from illness. The Red Army was conquering all the counter-revolutionary forces ranged against it and would definitely prevent the Czechs from linking up with the Allies. British and French prisoners were being held as hostages and would be summarily shot if trouble started up from Vologda. Radek boasted to Rakovski that things were entirely fine with the Germans.5 Such nonsense can only have been meant to reassure German snoopers that the Bolsheviks were sticking firmly to the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Just possibly Radek was hoping to scare the Allies away from interfering in Soviet affairs — or perhaps he had both purposes in mind at the same time.
Chekist leaders were determined to rectify their lack of effectiveness. One thing they found easy was in recruiting officials. Plenty of Bolsheviks and their supporters had grievances against the middle and upper classes in the light of their personal experience under Romanov rule and were eager to join the security services and liquidate the plots against Sovnarkom.
Felix Dzerzhinski at first glance was not the most obvious man for Lenin to have wanted as head of the Cheka in December 1917. He had no recent acquaintance with underground activity. Born near Minsk, he was a Pole from a noble family and went to a grammar school before being expelled for ‘revolutionary activity’. He was a poet and liked to sing. But political rebellion was his passion; and once he had discovered Marxism, he helped to found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. He detested nationalism, being wary of fellow Poles who wanted their own independent state. He was allergic to internal party polemics — and, like his comrade Rosa Luxemburg, he had despised the shenanigans let loose by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the world of Marxism before the Great War. He was exiled to Siberia in 1897 and again in 1900, but both times he escaped. Shortly after he had married Zofia Muszkat, she was arrested and he was left alone with their baby son. Yet he kept up his revolutionary activities. He had a rough time in prison after his last arrest in 1912, suffering beatings and being held for long periods in manacles — his wrists bore permanent scars. When released at the fall of the monarchy, he was more austere and restrained than before — and he was plagued by bronchitis.
The fact that Dzerzhinski did not want the Cheka post was a recommendation in itself, and Lenin never doubted that he had made the right choice. Dzerzhinski applied a clinical judgement to any situation and had no qualms about ordering mass executions. Józef Pisudski, who led the Poles to national independence in 1919, remembered him generously from their schooldays: ‘Dzerzhinsky distinguished himself as a student with delicacy and modesty. He was rather tall, thin and demure, making the impression of an ascetic with the face of an icon… Tormented or not, this is an issue history will clarify; in any case this person did not know how to lie.’6 The British sculptor Clare Sheridan, who did a bust of Dzerzhinski in 1920, was struck by his demeanour:
His eyes certainly looked as if they were bathed in tears of eternal sorrow, but his mouth smiled an indulgent kindness. His face is narrow, high-cheek-boned and sunk in. Of all his features it is his nose which seems to have the most character. It is very refined, and the delicate bloodless nostrils suggest the sensitiveness of over-breeding.7
Dzerzhinski told her: ‘One learns patience and calm in prison.’8 Sheridan was unusual in coaxing such intimacies out of him since he did not welcome conversations of a personal nature. Dzerzhinski was nobody’s acolyte but he agreed with Lenin about what needed to be done in Russia. Ascetic and dedicated to the case, he would run the Cheka just as Lenin wanted — and he would not be held back by the kind of moral scruples that would have bothered Luxemburg.
Dzerzhinski was not the only Chekist with a reputation for dispensing violence with a degree of distaste. Yakov Peters, his Deputy Chairman, impressed Louise Bryant in the same way: ‘Peters told me at various times that the only people he believed in killing were traitors in his own ranks, people who were grafters and who tried to steal everything, people in a time like that who did not stick to the high moral principle of revolutionary discipline.’9 If terror occurred under Soviet rule, she said, it was carried out by reluctant perpetrators like Peters who were harder on delinquent Bolsheviks than on ‘enemies of the people’. Even George Hill, less friendly than Bryant to Sovnarkom, felt that Peters ‘really hated what he was doing, but felt that it was necessary’.10 But Peters had a darker personality than he revealed to sympathetic foreigners. When living in London he had been involved in the murder of policemen which led to the Sidney Street siege in 1910. Like Dzerzhinski, he would do anything for the Revolution. As time went on, Dzerzhinski and Peters became more enthusiastic about taking the bridle off the Cheka. Enemies of the Bolsheviks did not scruple to use conspiracy and insurrection — an attempt was made on Lenin’s life in December 1917. Chekists wanted to meet fire with fire. They stopped at nothing to uphold the Soviet order while continuing to speak softly with foreigners.
Martyn Latsis, a member of the Cheka Board, called in the Cheka house journal for the class enemies of the Soviet order to be exterminated. He was advocating classocide. It was not enough to suppress capitalism; just as important for Latsis was the requirement to liquidate all living capitalists. But although the legislative framework was permissive in the extreme, Dzerzhinski at first trod carefully and consulted the central party leadership regularly. The coalition between Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries was among the factors holding back the Cheka, but after July 1918 the Bolsheviks were running a one-party state. They faced enemies, foreign and Russian, who were becoming increasingly well organized and well financed. From then onwards the Chekists fired first and asked questions later, if they asked them at all.
The social groups they targeted were named in the Constitution adopted by the Congress of Soviets that July. In the clauses devoted to citizenship, several types of people were deprived of electoral and general civil rights. Aristocrats, priests and policemen were blacklisted, as were industrialists, bankers and landlords. The Constitution declared all the ‘former people’ — chilling phrase — to be suspect. Latsis wanted to victimize all of them. What he said openly, the Chekists quietly practised. When emergencies arose, the custom became to arrest people belonging to these categories and hold them as hostages. Such prisoners were executed whenever the Whites carried out terror against Bolsheviks. The gaols in Moscow and Petrograd were grim, filthy places of confinement and the work of rooting out counter-revolutionary groups brutalized the Chekists in attitude and practice. Their leaders at every level prominently included Jews, Latvians and other non-Russians whose animus against monarchy, Okhrana and Church was highly developed. They did not blanch at orders to terrorize people who had enjoyed privileges before 1917.
One of the great worries of communist leaders was that their enemies might find a way to disrupt the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The anarchists were always out to cause trouble. Four of their number had seized the car of Raymond Robins in April 1918. Robins drew his Browning pistol on them only to be confronted by their own four Brownings. The anarchists stole the vehicle, forcing the chauffeur to do the driving for them. Robins, stranded on the pavement, contacted the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and demanded the return of his car as well as an apology. Chicherin met his indignation with the less than reassuring comment that ‘he had had the same thing happen to himself only a week before’. This infuriated Robins, who said that no other foreign minister in the world would talk so complacently. Robins went next to the Cheka, which is what he should have done in the first place. Dzerzhinski’s people promised that the American’s property would be back with him within a week, and this is exactly what happened.11 On the night of 11–12 April 1918 the Cheka and the Red Army moved decisively against the anarchist strongholds in Moscow. Twenty-six premises were attacked. Sovnarkom used the Latvian Riflemen to carry out a thorough suppression of resistance. By the end of the action they had killed forty anarchists and taken five hundred prisoners.12
Dzerzhinski, humiliated by having been captured in the Left Socialist-Revolutionary rising, resigned as Chairman of the Cheka on 8 July and agreed to resume his post only on 22 August. Eight days later Lenin was wounded in an assassination attempt that came very close to success. Dzerzhinski’s morale again crumbled. In September he took himself off to Berlin. He travelled under the alias of a courier called Felix Damanski, leaving the Cheka in the care of Yakov Peters. Getting away from the scene of his embarrassment, he hoped to do something useful for the international communist cause. Adolf Ioffe refused to go easy on him and asked how the Chekists could mess things up so badly as to let Lenin be shot.13 Another purpose of Dzerzhinski’s trip was to retrieve the shreds of his private life. His wife Zofia had not seen him since before the Great War. After her release from Russian custody, she had moved to Switzerland with their son; from 1918 she was employed in Berne by the Soviet mission. Dzerzhinski slipped over the border to visit his family. He took them to the zoo in Berne and on a boat trip on Lake Lugano. Zofia was later to write a less than reliable account, claiming that her husband unexpectedly came face to face with the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart on the same pleasure steamer.14 In fact Lockhart at that time was in London recuperating from the Spanish influenza.15
The Soviet authorities were not yet making much effort to infiltrate agents into foreign political establishments. If they had looked for a candidate as their master spy in the West it would surely have been Theodore Rothstein, who wrote for the Manchester Guardian in wartime and worked in the War Office press office as a translator.16 Rothstein, an emigrant from the Russian Empire, was one of Lenin’s old acquaintances in London and had taken his side in the original split between Bolshevism and Menshevism. He was also a veteran supporter of causes on the political far left in his country of refuge; no Russian Marxist had a better command of English. When the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd he became a spirited advocate of their ideas. His journalism for the Call newspaper marked him out as a fanatical Bolshevik as he justified communist dictatorship and called for a Revolutionary World War.17 This was never going to make Rothstein popular in the War Office after Sovnarkom had announced that Russia would not continue in the war,18 and it was no surprise when his employment was terminated. According to Basil Thomson of Special Branch, Rothstein’s duties had anyway never given him access to anything of use to an enemy power.19 Rothstein expressed no regret about leaving the civil service. As a revolutionary he was reserving his energy for disseminating Soviet propaganda and money.
Although the Cheka had yet to set up a comprehensive operational network in Europe, there was another ‘abroad’ where Chekists were hard at work. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in October 1917 it was not long before rival governments were established in those territories of the former Russian Empire where resistance to Bolshevism was strong. Sovnarkom took it for granted that such places should come under Moscow’s authority. Chekists were trained to infiltrate with a view to subverting the current rulers and preparing a situation that would make the tasks of the Red Army easier to accomplish.
Activity in Europe was restricted to a few Cheka operatives, Vladimir Menzhinski in Berlin being one of them. Germany and Switzerland were easier places for communication than the Allied countries. Indeed, the breakdown of postal communication with the United Kingdom reduced Yakov Peters to asking friendly Allied intelligence officers to get a British diplomatic courier to carry letters to his wife in London.20 Foreign intelligence operations were anyway not the monopoly of the Cheka. A confusion of agencies sprang up, involving the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and sundry communists returning from Moscow to their native countries. The Russian Communist Party as well as Sovnarkom was plagued by overlaps in functional tasks. Soviet rulers wanted results. They were practical zealots, and as long as it looked as if something positive might come out of their plans they did not bother about institutional propriety. Dzerzhinski was pictured as the spider at the centre of a vast web of international intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Cheka, Sovnarkom and the Central Committee operated alongside each other in energetic activity and no single institution had a monopoly in the tasks of intelligence.
In fact Dzerzhinski and his comrades did not get round to setting up an illegal operations department for work abroad until June 1919: the emergencies in Russia were the priority to be dealt with. (On a point of detail, it must be remembered that none of the Cheka’s operations in Soviet Russia were beyond the law for the simple reason that Sovnarkom had intentionally freed Chekists from legal restraints.)21 But intelligence about foreign governments was vital for the formation of policy. Germany and the Allies constituted a dire threat to Sovnarkom’s survival. Either of them might at any moment invade. Plots by Russians too had to be stamped out or prevented all over the territories under Soviet rule. White conspiracies sprouted up with Allied support. The communist leaders scrabbled around to improve their knowledge of what was going on in Washington, London and Paris. Litvinov and Rothstein ably discharged this task in the United Kingdom for the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In America, Nuorteva and Martens went around canvassing support for the Bolsheviks through the Finnish Information Bureau, and help continued to be made available by sympathizers like Felix Frankfurter.
Probably the best conduit of inside news, though, were informal diplomatic channels. Karakhan and Radek in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs talked at length to influential foreigners in Moscow. Both were charming in their individual ways. Despite offending many people with his brashness and extreme opinions, Radek seemed decidedly winsome to Arthur Ransome, who had his ear to the ground as he sought to track down Allied intentions. Ransome’s pro-Bolshevism was an open secret and agents of the Allies had learned to be cautious in what they said in front of him; indeed his letters and movements were kept under close review even though he was simultaneously working for British intelligence.22 Karakhan was anyhow always the more congenial acquaintance for Allied representatives since he did not disguise his wish for some kind of deal between Soviet Russia, as it was starting to be called,23 and the Western Allies. Lockhart claimed that his favourite commissar was known to like turning up ‘begloved and armed with a box of coronas’.24
The gentlemanly pleasantries disguised the savagery of international relations. While Karakhan and Lockhart puffed on their cigars, they exchanged opinions frankly about the situation. Karakhan rebuked the British for failing to assist the Bolsheviks; he claimed that the Red terror had acquired its wildness because the Allies had isolated and threatened Soviet Russia. Lockhart retorted that Sovnarkom had itself to blame after jeopardizing the Allies by closing down the eastern front. While Britain and France were fighting for national survival, Lenin had chosen to relieve the military pressure on Germany. If the Soviet intelligence effort abroad was frail in the year after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik leadership did not lack access to information about what the Allied powers thought of them. Radek and Karakhan were adept at picking up titbits useful for the formulation of foreign policy. They took what they discovered back to their comrades in the Kremlin. As yet it made little difference to Bolshevik actions. Sovnarkom’s room for manoeuvre between Germany and the Allies was minuscule; and Bolsheviks anyway saw the world around them through ideological spectacles: they assumed the worst in everything communicated to them by Allied diplomats about the intentions of foreign capitalist powers. This was a prudent tactic in the circumstances of the time.
Archangel had acquired strategic importance early in the war when the German submarine fleet turned the Baltic Sea into the most dangerous waters for shipping in the northern hemisphere. The old timber quays on the east bank of the River Dvina became the main destination for cargoes to Russia from Britain; and in summer 1918, when German forces encroached on northern Russia from Finland, the War Department in London gave approval for the British expeditionary force to leave its station in Murmansk and seize Archangel. General Frederick Poole, who commanded the operation, saw it as the first step towards the overthrow of Sovnarkom.
The city was Russia’s oldest port for international commerce. Since the sixteenth century, when England’s Queen Elizabeth I ordered the creation of the Muscovy Company, it had supplied timber and furs to the rest of Europe. Its fortunes dipped in the early eighteenth century when Peter the Great privileged St Petersburg, his new capital, on the Gulf of Finland, and by the outbreak of the Great War Archangel’s population had dwindled to 38,000. Its estuary was navigable for only half the year from May to the end of September. In the winter, temperatures could drop to minus 13° centigrade and wealthy local families put triple glazing in their windows. In the ‘white nights’ of the summer, when there were long hours of daylight, the mosquitoes were a torment for everyone. But Archangel remained a bustling entrepôt and its administration increased the number of quays to the physical limit in the interests of intensifying activity. Ships with draughts as deep as sixty feet could find a berth there. A road ran the length of the city — a whole five miles — parallel to the Dvina. Traders built their mansions and sawmills between the road and river, near enough to the quays to watch over their interests. The pavements were of timber and the industry was timber. Although other goods like tar, pitch, fish and flax were also traded, Archangel was well described as a ‘wooden metropolis’.1
General Poole’s plan was to use the entire province of Archangel as his base for an invasion. The plan was to send a force south up the Dvina to Kotlas which was the terminal of the rail line to Vyatka and the Trans-Siberian railway. His objective was to form an attacking semi-circle pointed at Petrograd and Moscow from the north and east.2 After combining with the Czech Corps in the Urals and the Volunteer Army in southern Russia, he expected to tip the military balance against Sovnarkom.3 The plan had French blessing; and although the Americans wanted no direct part in it, they discreetly indicated that they would not object to anything the British did.4 Optimism was peaking. The Admiralty in London shared Poole’s assumption that he could easily recruit and train an army of Russian volunteers to fight the unpopular and vulnerable regime in Moscow.5
On 26 July 1918 the Allied contingent sailed from Murmansk for Archangel. Poole issued an ultimatum and, more by bluff than anything else, the city fell to him on 2 August as the Red garrison and its political commissar Mikhail Kedrov made a hasty departure.6 Nikolai Chaikovski, the septuagenarian revolutionary who had lived in London until the February Revolution, had agreed to head the Supreme Government of North Russia. (The word ‘supreme’ appeared obligatory for anti-Bolshevik enterprises.) Poole had taken little account of Russian geography and society and Chaikovski was already less than wholly confident. Peasants failed to greet the new administration with enthusiasm and the civil service was weak. The Allies attempted a little economic reform. It was agreed that the anti- Soviet authorities should have access to the funds in Western banks left behind by the Provisional Government and currently claimed by the Bolsheviks. John Maynard Keynes, then working as a Treasury consultant in London, submitted a memorandum explaining how to establish a stable currency in areas outside Soviet control; he recommended a fixed exchange rate between sterling or gold and Archangel rubles.7
The British press hardly mentioned northern Russia beyond noting that ‘a considerable force’ had been landed there.8 When a Labour MP complained about the lack of public disclosure, the government simply refused to comment.9 Months later, Douglas Young, Britain’s consul in Archangel, was to go to the London press and denounce the subterfuge and the violence he had witnessed. While disliking Bolshevism, he contended that the way to deal with Soviet Russia was through diplomacy. Young denied that a few thousand troops seven hundred miles from Moscow could bring down Sovnarkom.10 But at the time a curtain of mystery was drawn over the Archangel operation. The US embassy, having fled Vologda, made its base there as soon as Poole pronounced it safe for Allied personnel.11 A degree of diplomatic fussiness was involved. The Americans still wanted the Soviet government to know that they had not taken part in the occupation of the city. They were merely going there after Poole had seized it. In this way the door was kept open for the US to negotiate with Sovnarkom if a suitable opportunity arose. These nuances had little influence on how the Bolsheviks reacted to Poole’s military action. In their view, the Western Allies had committed a flagrant violation of Soviet Russia’s sovereignty — and they feared that Poole would continue his advance.
Without being reinforced by fresh units, however, Poole could not expand his operations beyond Archangel province. The British government, before sanctioning the seizure of Archangel, had received advice from naval intelligence in Petrograd that at least two army divisions were necessary if the Bolsheviks were to be overthrown. Anything less than that would ‘lead to the impression that operations were not being undertaken seriously’. By contrast, a truly substantial contingent would have an instant strategic impact since the Germans would no longer be able to transfer troops from east to west but would have to move them in the opposite direction, and this would be of benefit to the Allies on the western front.12
But it took the maximum of Allied human and material resources to repel the great German offensive that had begun in March. Poole had to sit tight and pray for victory in northern France. It had appeared that his hopes might be fulfilled on 18 July when the Germans, exhausted by months of attacking, had to fall back at Villers-Cotterêts. The French Army had shown that Germany was not invincible. Celebrations were in order and church bells rang throughout France that Sunday. But the German forces regrouped and the Allied commanders did not believe that two whole divisions could be spared at that crucial moment. Poole disappointedly dropped the idea of attempting a breakthrough to Vyatka. Instead he settled his men in Archangel until such time as the military situation should change either in Russia or in France. He had angered Sovnarkom without endangering its survival, and his force got used to enduring the insect bites in the long summer days.
For weeks, however, the German Foreign Office had been agitating for the communists to take back northern Russia and get rid of the British. Ioffe reported from Berlin that the Germans had offered to undertake a joint military operation.13 Germany’s high command continued to worry that the Allies might succeed in restoring the eastern front — and a war on two fronts was the last thing that Ludendorff and Hindenburg could cope with. Sovnarkom resisted the German invitation until Archangel capitulated to Allied power. On 1 August Chicherin asked Karl Helfferich, who had headed the embassy since Mirbach’s death, about collaborating in an attack on the British in Archangel and Murmansk. Concern about the potential threat from Poole intensified. On 13 August Chicherin put a request to the Germans to carry out an aerial bombardment of Archangel. Moisei Uritski, head of the Cheka in Petrograd, talked to German diplomats about the need to crush the British military platform in the north. Uritski’s stipulation was that German troops should not go via Petrograd. He claimed to be nervous about Russian working-class opinion. More likely he did not entirely trust the Germans despite wanting help from them. If German troops were allowed into Petrograd there was no guarantee that they would leave Soviet rule intact.14
Germany’s intentions were a source of constant worry to the Soviet leaders, and they were right to be concerned. Ruling circles in Berlin had never discounted the notion of invading Russia and throwing out the Bolsheviks. The war party was constantly tempted by this option. As late as June 1918 Ludendorff was saying: ‘We can expect nothing from this Soviet government.’ Enquiries were put in hand about practicalities.15
Ioffe and the Soviet mission in Berlin failed to penetrate such discussions. The German government had allocated to it the Russian embassy building on Unter den Linden. International etiquette required Ioffe to present his credentials in person to the Kaiser; but this was more than Ioffe, a severe opponent of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, would contemplate — and probably the Kaiser was not displeased. Although Ioffe always dressed smartly, in other ways he was far from the diplomatic stereotype. His office was chaotic. He had no idea how to keep financial accounts; he had no clue about the exchange rate and lacked the desire to find out.16 Like other communist veterans, he regarded money with distaste. Nevertheless he continued to employ the German servants inherited from the old embassy.17 Ioffe looked on servants through a Marxist prism of analysis. For him, they were ‘proletarians’ who were winnable to the revolutionary cause. The working atmosphere in the mission was nothing if not relaxed. The tone was set by Ioffe’s young Russian chauffeur who usually arrived in the mornings in his sports kit. This was not a problem until the day when Ioffe had to go to the German Foreign Office and told him to dress more demurely. The chauffeur’s reaction was to don a pair of silk pyjamas.18
Ioffe’s private life was equally chaotic. After the October Revolution, his wife and daughter Nadya lived in Baku until he brought them to Berlin. It was not a happy conjoining. What disconcerted Mrs Ioffe was the presence of the young woman operating as her husband’s personal assistant. This was Maria Girshberg, who had joined the communist party in Petrograd in 1917. Everyone in the Soviet mission knew what was going on. Maria — or Musya as she was known — spent whole days with Ioffe and not always on revolutionary business. The Ioffes fell to arguing into the small hours and little Nadya could hear them through her bedroom wall. Her mother had red eyes every morning. Comrades in the Berlin mission thought he had fallen for a little schemer.19 After the Ioffes took a short holiday in Sweden, the parents began sleeping apart. Musya had become the mistress in every sense.20
But Ioffe’s true passion was revolution. As the man on the spot in Berlin, he thought he knew better than Chicherin. The People’s Commissar liked to work through the night and felt free to contact Ioffe at four in the morning about trivial matters. He also used the telegraph facilities without adopting any security precautions despite the risk of the Germans taking advantage.21 But the main question dividing them was about how to handle Germany. Ioffe thought Chicherin too timid, arguing that the Germans were fully exercised with occupying Poland and Ukraine and were unlikely to go for an open break with Russia. Although Ioffe was no longer hostile to doing deals with ‘German imperialism’, he was crude in the way he treated Germany’s banks and businesses and had no intention of honouring contracts. Nikolai Krestinski, People’s Commissar of Finances, objected that such trickery would find him out.22 But others in the mission such as Lev Krasin and Vladimir Menzhinski took Ioffe’s side when writing to Lenin.23 Krasin was the Bolsheviks’ expert on foreign trade;24 Menzhinski was a Cheka officer marked out for a higher posting. Both denied that the German government would ever assist with Russia’s economic recovery.25 Lenin was so exasperated with Ioffe that for a while he rejected his request to make a trip to Moscow.26 He accused him of trying to run the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs from Berlin and called for ‘ambassador Ioffe’ to cease querying Moscow’s decisions.27
Ioffe told Lenin that ‘you are… very much mistaken if you suppose that Germany is sending its forces to the east with such pleasure’.28 He got nowhere. Lenin had made up his mind and rebuked Ioffe for getting distracted and not writing enough German-language propaganda. Ioffe ignored him and ran the mission according to his own lights.29
In any case there was agreement about much else. Overt activity was only a part of the mission’s duties and Ioffe’s clandestine tasks included the reception of leaders, agents and couriers arriving from Moscow. Among his secret guests at various times were Nikolai Bukharin, Khristo Rakovski and Felix Dzerzhinski. Ioffe welcomed the help of these fellow Bolshevik leftists — all of them had originally objected to the Brest-Litovsk treaty.30 Germany remained in the communist imagination the engine house of European revolutionary transformation. Lenin anyway shared the feeling that the separate peace and the weakness of the Soviet regime should not deter the Bolsheviks from promoting mass insurrection in Berlin. Ioffe helped to co-ordinate agents who dispensed communist literature and financial subsidies to likely supporters. He assisted the Moscow emissaries with their arrangements for onward travel to the rest of Europe.31 The Berlin mission also became the base for propaganda directed at Allied countries. Receiving Moscow’s proclamations on war and revolution, Ioffe sent them on to Britain, Switzerland and Scandinavia; and he obtained permission from the German government to print revolutionary material for dispatch across the lines of the western front to French, British and American troops.32
Many German public figures and organizations felt that it would not be prudent to treat Russia roughly. The liberal politician Gustav Stresemann told Ioffe that if only the Soviet leadership would agree to a proper alliance of some kind with Germany, he would look favourably on the idea of returning all but Poland and the former Baltic provinces to Sovnarkom. Ioffe and Stresemann also discussed how the two countries might help each other economically. But Stresemann was not in power. He could only promise to relay such ideas to Ludendorff and the high command.33
Ludendorff was not disposed to be gentle with the Russians. On 8 August his forces crumpled before a British surge at Amiens.34 Steadily the war was being lost in northern France. There was panic in the German high command as the tactical ingenuity and superior resources of the Allies took their toll. Ludendorff called for a last great effort. With this in mind he resolved to force the Soviet government to yield up further territory and resources. A supplementary treaty was initialled on 10 August on terms that were even more onerous than those of the Brest-Litovsk peace. Sovnarkom was to renounce all claims to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, enabling a further tranche of German troops to be shipped to the western front. The Germans would receive access to the vessels of the Black Sea fleet. They could buy a quarter of Baku’s oil output. The Soviet leaders agreed to pay an indemnity of six milliard marks from their gold reserves. They also undertook to try and expel the British from Archangel and Murmansk and to look kindly on any German military operation to that end. Lenin got almost nothing in exchange except a promise that the Germans would cease offering help to Sovnarkom’s enemies in Russia. Signature of the treaty took place on 27 August.35
This was the apogee of Lenin’s policy of appeasement. Already in June, as a sop to the Germans, he had ceded the western sliver of the Murmansk district to the Finns. This would help German troops in Finland to counteract the spread of Allied power.36 The same readiness to help the Germans was evident in the south Caucasus. At German GHQ in Spa on 2 July it was reported that Ioffe had given ‘a firm guarantee of oil from Baku’.37 Germany expressed its readiness to stop its Turkish allies from invading the area. The Bolsheviks alone could not defend Baku. In return for Germany’s diplomatic help they would sell fuel to Berlin.38 On 29 July Lenin made clear to the Bolshevik leader Stepan Shaumyan in Baku that he was not to accept any military help from the British, who had offered to send troops. Disregard of this order would be treated as ‘insurrection and treason’.39 Lenin and his comrades put a brave face on all this. Pravda usually carried little news about the western front — the British naval attache´ Captain Francis Cromie thought this was ‘by Hun order, of course’.40 But on 17 August the party newspaper suggested that the German setbacks at Villars-Cottereˆts and Amiens made it unlikely that the Germans would now ever be able to invade Russia.41 Even so, Lenin continued to predict trouble for the Allies. On 28 August he declared that the popularity of patriotic defence was in jeopardy in France and that the British working class was about to break with ideas about civil peace.42
His own preoccupation was with the Volga region of Russia. The adherence of the Czech Corps gave heart and strength to the Komuch armed forces in Samara. They pushed north and seized Kazan. This left them only 630 miles from Moscow by rail and river routes. Every available Red unit was rushed down to meet the challenge. Trotsky arrived in August to supervise the army high command and stiffen the morale of the troops. No one was in any doubt that, if the Red Army was forced out of the region, Komuch would pose an acute strategic menace to Moscow. Sovnarkom faced an existential challenge.
The Red Army regrouped at Sviyazhsk up the River Volga from Kazan. It suffered initially from chaotic organization. There were also mass desertions as troops and their commanders decided to have nothing to do with the war between Sovnarkom and Komuch. Military supplies to the Red Army were fragmentary. But the Reds held their line on the Volga and their morale and discipline began to grow. Pravda reported on this as if only Russian factors were in play. But as usual there was an international dimension. The Red Army’s dispositions became possible only because of German consent. The Brest-Litovsk treaty had left the forces of Russia and Germany facing each other in the ‘screens’ arranged along the new Russo-Ukrainian frontier. Few doubted that the Germans could easily sweep aside the Red defences if they so desired. Sovnarkom could not risk leaving the borders unmanned unless it was confident that Germany would not take advantage. Ioffe explored the question with the German Foreign Office on 7 August, and he was gratified when the Secretary of State Paul von Hintze gave an official assurance that Germany would not exploit Soviet Russia’s military difficulties.43 If anything, the Germans were delighted by the Red Army’s efforts. Indeed Chicherin was to claim, a few weeks later, that Germany was insisting that the Reds should liquidate the entire menace of the Czechs in the Volga region. German and Soviet strategic interests were conjoined.44
Lenin and Trotsky needed no pressure to prosecute war against Komuch. Far from fearing civil war in Russia, they actively sought it. They knew that their revolution would not be secure until they won a definitive trial of strength against the anti-communists. The last thing they wanted was some kind of compromise with their enemies. Trotsky sent the following confidential message to Lenin on 17 August 1918:
I consider it unacceptable to let steamers sail [the Volga] under a Red Cross flag. The receipt of grain will be interpreted by charlatans and fools as showing the possibility that agreement can be made and that civil war is unnecessary. The military motives are unknown to me. Air pilots and artillerymen have been ordered to bomb and set fire to the bourgeois districts of Kazan and then Simbirsk and Samara. In these conditions a Red Cross caravan is inappropriate.45
He wanted nothing to intervene between the two combatant sides. Too bad if people in the Volga region were starving. Lenin and Trotsky both believed that the Soviet cause required an unflinching commitment to military practicalities. The Komuch government and its supporters had to be destroyed. Any other priority would be a mere sentimentality. The Bolsheviks were setting Russia on fire and, with German consent, planning to burn out any resistance before it could be consolidated.
Western espionage and subversion in Russia were conducted by some vivid individuals in 1918 and none was more colourful than Sidney Reilly, who arrived in the spring on a mission for British intelligence. Reilly throughout his life told contradictory stories about himself. It is likely — but not absolutely certain — that he came from Ukraine and was at least part Jewish. He was shortish, sallow complexioned and balding. Though his real surname was probably Rosenblum, he ran his commercial affairs under an alias borrowed from his estranged wife Margaret Reilly Callaghan.1 He was attractive to women, and he sought them out with fervour.2 His other passions were fashionable clothes, swanky hotels, good cigars and collecting Napoleonic memorabilia.3 Reilly was a deeply manipulative man and in business was a greedy wheeler-dealer. Commercial partners came and went. They seldom stayed with him for long; many complained of sharp practices and indeed he treated everyone as fair game. No acquaintance ever suggested he had an excess of moral rectitude. Sidney Reilly was a compulsive conman.4
Mansfield Cumming at the Secret Service Bureau trusted his instincts and took risks, and he was often proved right when choosing recruits whom others regarded as unqualified or unsuitable. He ignored the thick sheaf of warnings sent to him about Reilly.5 The Bureau needed Russian-speakers with audacity and initiative, and Reilly fitted that bill. Cumming sent him to Russia via Archangel as agent ST1. Reilly started as he meant to go on, disembarking in Murmansk against orders and without explanation. The British expeditionary force there threw him into the lock-up of the merchant vessel that had brought him out from England. Admiral Kemp asked an intelligence officer, Stephen Alley, to interrogate him. Alley reported: ‘His passport was very doubtful, and his name was spelled Reilli.’ The peculiar spelling was possibly a deliberate one; it may well have been based on the calculation that a strange English version of the name would attract less suspicion since although Reilly claimed to be from Ireland and spoke with perfect grammar his accent was unmistakably from eastern Europe.6 When challenged about his identity, he pulled out ‘a microscopic message in code, which he had secreted under a cork of a bottle of aspirin tablets’. Alley recognized the message and instructed that Reilly be permitted to proceed south as he wished.7
On reaching Moscow in April 1918, Reilly avoided contact with British officials and threw protocol aside. Instead he made straight for the Kremlin where he claimed that he was researching a book on the achievements of the Soviet order. This got him an interview with Lenin’s chief of staff Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. The meeting was an amicable one and Reilly was given use of an official limousine as well as an invitation to attend the May Day celebrations at the Polytechnical Museum where Trotsky was to deliver a speech on the Red Army. The hall was already packed when Reilly and a friend arrived. With their privileged seats on the platform, only a piano separated them from Trotsky. Reilly whispered: ‘This is just the moment to kill Trotsky and liquidate Bolshevism!’8 But a sense of self-preservation intruded and Reilly stayed his hand. Although he had come to Russia with a rather gentle opinion of Bolshevism, a few days in Moscow changed his mind and he began to talk about the Soviet regime with venom.9 It was only then that Lockhart heard that an unidentified Briton had visited the Kremlin to seek an interview with Lenin. He was furious at being bypassed and hauled Reilly in for a stiff lecture on lines of authority.
After clearing the air in this fashion, Lockhart felt he could take Reilly into his confidence about his current plans to bring down the Bolsheviks. Lockhart had gained greater liberty for himself after the British embassy decamped to Vologda — this was, as he liked to put it, his ‘great luck’.10 When he had moved to Moscow with Trotsky, he had specifically demanded authority from London to remain ‘independent’; he insisted in particular that Oliver Wardrop, who served as consul-general, should render him every assistance without being set in authority over him.11 He wanted to be free to pursue his tasks in diplomacy and intelligence without interference.
He also wanted freedom in his private life. Despite having previously been sent home to avoid scandal over an affair with a married woman, he lost no time in finding another lover in Moscow. He first met Maria Benckendorff (née Zakrevskaya) on 2 February 1918 over a game of bridge in Petrograd. On that occasion they only shook hands, but he was smitten by her glamour and vivacity.12 Moura, as she liked to be known, still moved in the old high society that existed before the October Revolution. She was bored by her husband Ioann, who had retreated with their children to his large Estonian estate some weeks earlier.13 Lockhart was looking for excitement and would confess: ‘I fell desperately in love with her.’14 Soon they were having an affair.15 She fell pregnant by him and clearly expected that both she and Lockhart would soon divorce their respective spouses. But it is far from certain that Lockhart would have ended his marriage to Jean, and when Moura miscarried the baby in September, her happiness quickly started to sour.16 Subsequently she came under suspicion of informing for Soviet intelligence — something she was certainly doing by the 1930s.17 But there is no evidence that she already worked for the Chekists in mid-1918. At any rate Lockhart had taken a risk in having an affair with her and giving her the run of his apartment. If he was not spied upon, it was not because he took sensible precautions.
Lockhart and others in the British intelligence network in Moscow had an uninhibited lifestyle. But Sidney Reilly outdid them all. Among his many lovers was a young Russian actress, Yelizaveta Otten, who rented a well-appointed apartment in Sheremetev Lane a few hundred yards north of the Kremlin.18 Yelizaveta’s flatmate Dagmara Karozus was, according to George Hill, another of Reilly’s conquests.19 Dagmara was a German citizen who in 1915 had been investigated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a possible spy. She had sensibly responded by applying for Russian citizenship.20 Then there was Olga Starzhevskaya, who fell head over heels in love with Reilly and foolishly believed they were about to be married. She knew him as a Russian called Konstantin Markovich Massino.21 Starzhevskaya was a typist in the central administration of the All-Russia Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets — no doubt her potential access to important material was her main attraction for him.22 Reilly handed over the money for her to rent and decorate an apartment for them both on Malaya Bronnaya Street.23
Reilly was expert at running his amours in parallel and even employed several of the women as his operatives. Probably Maria Fride was the most useful of them. As a single woman in her early thirties, she had worked as a teacher and nurse.24 Her prime asset was access to her brother Alexander, a lieutenant colonel employed in the communications office of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs.25
There was no uniform pattern of work among the Allied intelligence agencies and the new US network was run noticeably more staidly than the British one. It was centred on the Information Service set up in Russia before the October Revolution and supposedly dedicated to ‘educational and informational work’.26 From March 1918, the head of the Service was the exotically named Xenophon Dmitrievich de Blumenthal Kalamatiano. Kalamatiano was born in the Russian Empire in 1882 and was of Greek and Russian extraction. As a boy he had emigrated with his mother and stepfather to America, where he took a degree in Chicago before returning to his native country for a job with an American tractor company in Odessa. He subsequently moved to Moscow where manufacturing contracts during the Great War made him a rich man. As his business fell off in 1917, he made himself useful to American diplomats trying to understand the situation in Russia.27 The Information Service was the front for a network of thirty-two agents including Kalamatiano. After 1917, apart from gathering intelligence, their task was to make contact with Sovnarkom’s military enemies.28 Kalamatiano started by sending people to the bigger cities adjacent to the vast eastern front, cities stretching from Novgorod in the north to Rostov in the south. He then extended the coverage to Ukraine, Belorussia and the lands of the Baltic coast. When the Allied embassies left for Vologda he stayed behind and registered himself as a Russian citizen, which gave him the cover to continue his operations without going underground.29 And although the American operation was late in getting started, it quickly became an effective one. Kalamatiano obtained material from informers in the Red Army and made contact with the Socialist- Revolutionaries.30 He paid handsomely too — as did the other Allied agencies. Alexander Fride received up to 750 rubles a month from Kalamatiano for his reports.31
The intelligence agencies co-operated with each other, consulting regularly, sharing their findings and sometimes even running the same agents — Alexander and Maria Fride worked simultaneously for the British and the Americans.32 The British and French secret services had plenty of practice in acting together without dropping their guard — each understood that the other might act independently for one reason or another in the national interest. When Noulens had stimulated Savinkov’s ill-fated uprising in Yaroslavl in July he did not tell Lockhart what exactly he was promising to the rebels; and Lockhart was justifiably annoyed that the French had played fast and loose with the anti-Bolshevik resistance, risking and losing Russian lives in an irresponsible fashion.33 The Americans would seem to have been more trusting than was good for them. In early 1918 British agents bought documents purportedly showing that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the paid employees of the Germans. Reilly and Hill took a close look at them and found that most of the documents were produced on a single typewriter despite the claim of the sellers that they originated in places hundreds of miles from each other. The British, they concluded, had purchased expensive forgeries. So what did they do? They put the documents back on the market and let Edgar Sisson of the American Information Service buy them up — and in this way they recouped the financial loss. All was thought fair in wartime when budgets were tight.34
Sisson’s ‘revelations’ failed to gain universal acceptance in the American press. The New York Evening Post made savage criticisms, and Santeri Nuorteva of the Finnish Information Bureau as well as John Reed had the opportunity to do the same in the New York Times.35 The Committee on Public Information under George Creel investigated on the administration’s behalf. Creel was already sympathetic to Sisson and, buoyed by support from Professor Samuel Harper and the National Board for Historical Science, pronounced most of the documents to be genuine. The threat to civilization in both Russia and America was said to come from a ‘German–Bolshevik conspiracy’.36
Not everyone even among the British approved of such tomfoolery. Lockhart had never accepted that Lenin and Trotsky were agents of Germany or any other power. Denying that the Bolsheviks were ‘pro-German’, he reported that he ‘had little faith in documents I have seen which overprove the case for collusion’;37 he also pointed out that the French officials in Moscow shared his suspicions.38 Sisson’s ‘discovery’ interfered with his desire to convince the Allied governments that the Kremlin leadership were acting out of a sense of their own interests. He too wanted to overturn the Bolsheviks but argued that this would best be done in the light of a well-informed analysis.39 The documents bought by Sisson in fact came from former officials of the Okhrana. They had made the forgeries either out of financial greed or because they frantically wanted to steer the Allies away from thinking that any kind of deal could be done with Sovnarkom after the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Lockhart had once been one of those who favoured collaboration, but he quickly abandoned that position. In any case the debate about Sisson’s allegations wasted everyone’s time and energy just when the Allies needed to be clearheaded about what was going on in Russia. All that could be said in favour of Sisson was that he helped to steel US public opinion against unnecessary compromises with the Soviet authorities.
While still pretending to be Trotsky’s best Allied friend, Lockhart himself undertook a number of subversive activities after the Brest- Litovsk treaty — and although he had wide scope to use his initiative, he reported regularly to London and sought the permission of higher authority when he thought he needed it.40 From inside the Bolshevik administration he had a frequent supply of information from Yevgenia Shelepina as well as from a ‘Mr Pressman’.41 He also secretly corresponded with the Volunteer Army in the south and met leaders of the National Centre in Moscow. He even attended an undercover National Centre conference in July and spoke with notable anti- Bolshevik politicians such as Pëtr Struve and with a colonel who represented General Alexeev and the Volunteer Army. Lockhart delivered ten million rubles to the Volunteers, whom he reported as making military progress. He noted that Alexeev was entirely opposed to Pavel Milyukov’s overtures to the Germans. Lockhart now regarded the Volunteer Army as the best option for the Allies to back in Russia so long as the Whites could put aside old political quarrels and foster their political attractiveness to Russian workers. He reported that Struve was intending to travel north to consult General Poole; he also noted that Alexeev expected soon to be able to incorporate battalions of Czechs in his forces.42
The Allied occupation of Archangel worsened Lockhart’s standing with the Bolsheviks, and on 5 August the British consulate in Moscow was raided and several officials were arrested. The French consulate and military mission suffered in the same way. Lockhart was left free; but he felt the need to destroy his ciphers, which made his further diplomatic work in Moscow impractical. (He had got rid of his written files when Mirbach was assassinated.) He also protested loudly to Karakhan, who apologized. Although the Allied officials were quickly released, they all were denied permission to leave Moscow.43
It was in this febrile atmosphere that Lockhart, being no longer able to communicate confidentially with London, resolved to undertake drastic measures of his own. He continued to have secret meetings with representatives of the National Centre and the Volunteer Army. This was dangerous enough for him after the Cheka’s recent raid. But on 14 August he went further by confidentially hosting Colonel Eduard Berzin of the 1st Latvian Heavy Artillery Division at his Moscow apartment. The two of them agreed a plot to dislodge the Latvians serving in the Red Army from supporting Sovnarkom.44 In none of his later accounts did Lockhart explain how he came to approach Berzin. The reason for his reticence is fairly clear. He was to find it inconvenient to admit how deeply embedded he had been in British intelligence work in Russia. Privately, however, he gave a fuller account and acknowledged that Sidney Reilly initiated things by bringing representatives of the Latvians to him — and Lockhart then took over the planning and co-ordination.45
Whereas earlier Lockhart had provided money and encouragement for Russians to carry out subversion, now he was taking a British initiative without consulting any Russian organization. Lockhart arrived at an imaginative agreement with Berzin. The Latvian troops were known as the Soviet government’s praetorian guard. Despite having crushed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and helped to recapture Kazan, the Latvians felt no debt of allegiance to Sovnarkom. George Hill recorded that they were fed up with being used as ‘executioners’ for the Bolsheviks.46 They were the human flotsam of the Great War since it was impossible for them to return home while the Germans held Riga; but the Latvians were increasingly worried that fighting for the Soviet cause would irritate the Western Allies and cost them dearly if the Allied coalition won the war. In any case, why risk life and limb in the service of the Reds? Lockhart himself always denied that he had instigated anything. He claimed that it had been the Latvians who made the approach to him and not the other way round. He also maintained that his proposal had merely been to move the riflemen from Moscow to the side of the British in Murmansk.47 The Cheka would bluntly reject this. The records of their investigation and interrogations indicated that Lockhart proposed to finance the Latvians to enable them to arrest the Soviet leadership and overthrow Bolshevism — and Lockhart in old age admitted to his son that the Soviet version of the episode was essentially correct.48
The scheme for a Latvian coup was not wholly outlandish. For a time, just tens of thousands of Czechs had tipped the balance in the war between Komuch and Sovnarkom. The Latvians occupied sensitive positions of power in Moscow, including the Kremlin itself. They could wreak havoc if they wanted. Of course, they would never get official permission to depart from Moscow. They would have to commandeer a train and probably use force. Soviet authorities would instruct stations on the Moscow–Murmansk line to obstruct their passage. The Red Army was unlikely to be allowed to stand still in the Volga region while the British expanded their influence. Lockhart had at the very least started a conspiracy to disrupt Soviet rule. There was bound to be fighting in Moscow — and he must have hoped that if things went well, his Anglo-Latvian initiative might somehow bring about the downfall of Sovnarkom. There was no other reason for causing mayhem in Moscow.
Lockhart met Berzin again on 15 August. This time Sidney Reilly and Fernand Grenard, the French consul-general, were present.49 Two days later Lockhart gave an affidavit to Latvian rifleman Jan Buikis enabling him to talk to British intelligence officials in Petrograd.50 The plot was thickening as Lockhart sought to lay the groundwork for the coming action. He was aware that the Soviet leadership’s anger at the recent British occupation made his own situation in Moscow precarious. Thinking that the Foreign Office might recall him to London at any moment, he transferred the overseeing of the Latvian arrangement to Reilly. Berzin said that three or four million rubles would be needed to see things through to a successful conclusion. Reilly was given 700,000 rubles to hand over to the Latvians as a first instalment; Lockhart subsequently passed on another 700,000 rubles. Lockhart and Reilly saw each other as rarely as possibly. Both of them had complete trust in Berzin.51
Only at this juncture — according to both Lockhart’s and Hill’s memoirs — was the plot expanded to involve a coup d’état. Although they wrote admiringly about Reilly, they held him personally responsible for this changed objective; and Reilly was dead by the time their books appeared. They claimed that the new idea was for the Latvian military units guarding the Kremlin precinct to surprise the communist leaders at gunpoint in the course of a Sovnarkom session. Hill maintained that there was to have been no killing because Reilly sensed that the Russian people would object to a foreign force cutting down Russia’s government. Reilly supposedly wanted to parade the communist leaders through the streets of Moscow with the aim of humiliating them and showing how vulnerable they were. Lenin and Trotsky would be stripped of their ‘nether garments’ and forced to appear in their shirts alone.52 It is an entertaining but implausible story, and even Hill subsequently claimed to have thought the plan impractical. The idea that Reilly thought he would secure success by removing the underwear of the Soviet leadership is hard to believe. Hill, like Lockhart, knew he was breaking the rules by publishing a personal account of secret intelligence work and probably judged it wise to tenderize his account of British subversive activity in August 1918. Or maybe Hill and Lockhart simply wanted to clear their own names in connection with a conspiracy that went badly wrong.
At any rate a Cheka secret report, collated in 1920 by Yakov Peters from testimonies and interrogations two years earlier, told a very different story: Lenin and Trotsky were to be shot after capture.53 Peters was not writing for general publication but for distribution inside the supreme communist leadership. And indeed even if the Cheka report was a fiction and the account given by Lockhart and Hill was true, there can be no doubt that the outcome of the conspiracy would inevitably have been a violent one. Lockhart had authored a scheme which, however it was activated, would soak Moscow in blood. The Western Allies sensed the coming of victory in northern France. The British Foreign Office and Secret Service Bureau led the way in plotting to prepare a future for Russia free from Bolshevik rule. All Europe including its Russian extremity was to be transformed.
Robert Bruce Lockhart’s fingers were still wrapped around the Latvian conspiracy on 25 August 1918 when he took Sidney Reilly to the US consulate to brief the Americans and French about his plans. The acting consul-general DeWitt Clinton Poole Jr and Xenophon Kalamatiano were present together with the French consul-general Fernand Grenard and the Figaro correspondent René Marchand.1 Reilly later claimed to have felt doubts about whether he had been sensible in going to such a meeting.2 The conversation covered progress with the Latvians and reportedly dwelt on the desirability of co-ordinating Allied undercover activities.3 But Marchand, who had once regretted the fall of Kerenski and the Provisional Government, felt repelled by the conspiracy being set up by Lockhart and Reilly, and he took the silence of Poole and Grenard as proof that they condoned it. He wrote an angry letter to President Poincaré denouncing what agents of the Western Allies were getting up to — he rightly assumed that Poincaré was in the dark about the plot.4 Of much greater importance was the fact that he also went to the communist authorities and told them what he had heard in the American consulate. Marchand became a turncoat.5
The Frenchman assumed that he was the first to inform the Chekists, but in fact they learned of the plot several days earlier. Colonel Berzin told Yakov Peters (another Latvian, as it happened) as soon as Lockhart had made his proposition. Peters consulted Dzerzhinski and the decision was taken to ask Berzin to play along with the British. They hoped that this would lead them to all the British, Russian and Latvian conspirators as well as supply a pile of compromising information on Allied diplomats.6
The Lockhart plot became an open secret at the top of the communist leadership. Ivy Litvinov would later recall:
Very interesting about Lockhart. They had Lockhart in — they arrested him, you know, and nobody here knew why. Oh, yes, being implicated in a plot with White Russians to seize Lenin or something like that. All true but it was all provocation. Yes, Maxime told me. Our people employed, I mean the Soviet people — they were not called Soviet people then — I forget… A certain agent provocateur — I am putting it very primitively, you know — said would you like to take part in a plot… and he said ‘Yes, with pleasure.’ Then they flung him into prison. That’s never been written, you know.7
Allied officials in Russia had seriously underestimated the Bolshevik party’s hard-won expertise in methods of police infiltration and provocation. They had also overrated their own cleverness. In reality they had set a trap whereby they would ensnare themselves rather than the Bolsheviks.
Two events on 30 August induced the Cheka to abandon its stealthy approach. The first was the assassination of Petrograd’s leading Chekist Moisei Uritski by anti-Bolshevik socialist Leonid Kanegisser. Later in the day Lenin gave a couple of stirring speeches to factory workers and was returning to his limousine at the Mikhelson factory when shots were fired at him. Badly wounded, he was hurried to the Kremlin for emergency treatment. For some time it was uncertain whether he would survive. Dora Kaplan, a woman loitering outside the factory for no good reason, was arrested as the culprit and summarily executed. Since she was extremely myopic and mentally very confused, she had almost certainly not committed the crime. But the Bolshevik leaders wanted to show that they meant business. Yakov Sverdlov took command of both the party and the government. A Red terror was proclaimed.
The Cheka took hundreds of Allied officials and residents of Moscow and Petrograd into custody. Chekist officials already had plenty of evidence against prominent Britons, Frenchmen and Americans, and believed that there could well be other intelligence operations they had yet to uncover. Better to wait for more Allied spies and agents to come to light. Better, too, to show the Allies that the Bolsheviks would not be pushed around and were able to look after themselves. The Cheka behaved liked the vanguard of the Soviet order when one of its units raided the apartment of Colonel Henri de Verthamont, head of the French secret service. Verthamont escaped over the rooftops, leaving behind a cache of explosives and other compromising material, but Chekists succeeded in capturing six of his agents. As the news spread, the British broke contact with the French in the hope of being left alone.8 This did not stop the Cheka. Lockhart, who had Moura Benckendorff with him, was arrested at his flat at 3.30 a.m. on 31 August. At first he refused to disclose his name. But the charade could not continue and he yielded to the Chekists. Moura and Major Hicks were also taken into custody.9
Lockhart was promised that there would be no harsh interrogation if he answered the accusations against him.10 It was a gentle confinement by Soviet standards, and Lockhart and Hicks were released on 1 September.11 Next day Lockhart returned to plead with Karakhan for the liberation of Moura and his own servants. Karakhan promised to do what he could. The following morning Lockhart was shocked to read Moscow newspapers ‘full of the most fantastic accounts of Allied conspiracy of which I am said to be the head’. He stood accused of buying up the Latvian Riflemen and conspiring to murder Lenin and Trotsky and blow up bridges around the capital. A further charge was that the Allies aimed to appoint a compliant dictator.12 The details may have erred on the fantastical side; but the truth was that Lockhart was genuinely distressed — both at being rumbled and at the possible public consequences that were likely to flow from this. Events quickened their pace. News came through that Maxim Litvinov had been imprisoned in London so as to ensure the safety of all Britons held in Soviet gaols.13 Then, on 4 September, Lockhart was rearrested.14 This time he was taken inside the precincts of the Kremlin: it was the only area of Moscow where security could be guaranteed, and the Soviet leaders were intent on holding on to their valuable British prize.
His captors yet again handled him with care. He was allowed visits by his lover Moura, now freed from imprisonment, who brought him food and tobacco. They were permitted to write to each other on condition that Peters could vet the letters.15 Peters questioned Lockhart in a seemly fashion before handing him over to Karakhan. He too adopted a gentle approach. It was Karakhan who had issued Lockhart with diplomatic immunity and the two had often conversed. Now state interests and allegiances divided them.16
The two men had a fiery discussion lasting several days. Karakhan put the blame for the Red terror on the British. If the British had not interfered in Soviet affairs, he exclaimed, there would have been no need for the Bolsheviks to let loose the Cheka. He told Lockhart that Lenin had demanded: ‘Stop the terror!’17 Karakhan must have known that Lenin held exactly the opposite opinion at that very time. In a speech at the Cheka Club, no less, Lenin ridiculed the soft-bellied comrades who sought a gentler dictatorship.18 As Lockhart knew, Karakhan was one of the more moderate Bolsheviks. What he said about Lenin was really an indication of the kind of communist regime he himself desired. Lockhart for his part upheld the official British line. By signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty, the Bolsheviks had reneged on Russia’s contractual obligations as one of the Allies and had facilitated the massing of German military strength on the western front. Their foreign policy had put a dagger to the throats of Britain and France; they had only themselves to blame if they found themselves the object of Allied hostility. This, at least, is how Lockhart later described the discussion; the Cheka report suggested that he was less robust in putting his case. What is anyhow clear is that there was no meeting of minds.19
Lockhart attributed his easy treatment to the Soviet appreciation of the growing likelihood of an Allied victory over the Germans. If Germany was defeated, the Allied armies would have the military capacity to advance into Russia. Karakhan asked Lockhart courteously what it would take for Britain and Japan to end their intervention. He claimed that the communist leadership had no concern about the Americans, who were half-hearted about invading; and he judged that the French were too exhausted to be a serious threat. The Kremlin would offer commercial concessions to the United Kingdom, the US and Japan if they would agree to pull out their armed forces. It would even offer an honourable settlement to the Czech Corps and grant free exit from Russia. Conversations with Lockhart continued between 15 and 25 September, and Lockhart thought he was being sounded out as the conduit for a deal with the British. The Soviet leadership had gained a respite through Brest-Litovsk and now wanted some kind of equivalent so as to forestall an all-out British invasion.20 A similar overture was made through Jacques Sadoul to the French government, no doubt without the disrespect that Karakhan had expressed to Lockhart for France’s capacity to strengthen its force of intervention in Odessa.21 This was a pretty desperate idea. Sadoul had long since lost the trust of French diplomats in Russia.
Dozens of Allied officials, including Grenard, the French consul-general, fled to sanctuary with DeWitt Poole in the American consulate. As an additional security measure, Poole ran up the Norwegian flag since Norway was a neutral country in the war and Poole rightly calculated that Soviet leaders would not like to offend the Norwegians.22 Hill was still operating under cover and could not warn Reilly, who was on a trip to see Cromie in Moscow, about what had happened. Reilly’s network of helpers and informants remained vulnerable. When Hill tried to alert them, one of his own ‘girls’ was arrested while visiting one of those working for Reilly.23 Moreover, Marie Fride who also worked for the Americans turned up in the course of the raid. She panicked, inadvertently alerting the Cheka that she too was an Allied agent — and it was her arrest and interrogation that led to the rounding up of the American network.24 Among those brought into custody was Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Fride — Maria’s brother — from the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. Another was former Major General Alexander Zagryazhski.25 On 18 September Kalamatiano himself was caught coming back from a trip to liaise with the Czechs in the Volga region.26
Reilly escaped to London via Tallinn and Stockholm.27 He has sometimes been accused of being a Cheka double agent — or alternatively of being tasked, as a British intelligence officer, with closing down the rival network of US agents. Reilly and Kalamatiano met and talked frequently in the office of British businessman William Camber Higgs.28 The story goes that it was on a visit to Reilly that Colonel Berzin secretly found Kalamatiano’s address. DeWitt Poole, on his departure from Russia later in September, told a British diplomat about circumstantial evidence pointing to the conclusion that Reilly had either compromised Lockhart or ‘even betrayed him’.29 Kalamatiano later noted that people connected exclusively with Reilly were released whereas all but one of his own associates were given prison terms. Such speculation is common in matters relating to the operation of intelligence agencies. But the case remains unproven in this instance. It was simply untrue that the French and American networks in Russia were wrecked beyond repair that September or that the British Secret Service Bureau continued to work undisturbed.30 Lockhart was in prison; Reilly and Hill were in hiding and their teams too had been broken up. The likelihood is that the Cheka had got its result by its own diligent efforts. It did not have or need help from Reilly.
Other Western prisoners in Moscow did not receive the courtesies accorded to Lockhart. And in Petrograd the treatment was still rougher. Captain Francis Cromie, left behind to protect the British embassy residence in Petrograd, barred the way to intruders on 31 August. He killed two of them before himself falling victim to the third.31 The other British and French officials in the city were dragged off to the Peter-Paul Fortress. The cells were already crowded and the sanitary arrangements were abysmal. Rats scurried around the floors; the food was no better than when the Romanian ambassador had been held there. The prisoners suffered from diarrhoea and lack of medicines. The Petrograd Cheka expressed indifference to Allied complaints, but governments of neutral countries in the Great War were horrified by the murder of Russian citizens and soon indicated that they would expel all known Bolsheviks if the executions were not immediately halted.32 The Swiss minister M. Odier became dean of the diplomatic corps after the Allied ambassadors’ departure for Vologda. While asserting that he did not want to interfere in Russian politics, he protested to Zinoviev and Chicherin against the Red terror in Moscow and Petrograd; and he believed that only his vigorous intervention prevented Lockhart from being executed on 4 September.33
The German government was unconcerned about these events. When its Ukrainian puppet administration expressed outrage about the killings, Hintze blandly replied that he did not regard the repressive Soviet measures as terror and anyway did not wish to poke his nose into Russia’s internal affairs:34 the reality was that it suited the Germans that the Soviet leadership were at last turning on Allied officials.
The British government had at first reacted merely by increasing the surveillance over Litvinov in London. When he arrived at the tube station at Charing Cross, respectful policemen would ask: ‘Going home, sir? Goodnight.’ Then they queued for tickets and followed him home to Hampstead.35 A few days later he was arrested and taken off to Brixton prison. The Defence of the Realm Act authorized the arrest without warrant of any person ‘whose behaviour is of such a nature as to give reasonable grounds for suspecting that he has acted, or is acting, or is about to act in a manner prejudicial to the public safety or the defence of the realm’. Seized at the same time were his secretary Mr Wintin and his military adviser Captain Oshmyanski; Nikolai Klyshko, a party comrade and a draughtsman at Vickers Ltd’s engineering business in Croydon, was also imprisoned.36 They were effectively held as hostages to deter maltreatment of Lockhart. No decision was made about what to do if Lockhart was shot. Although Litvinov did not appear very disturbed, it was a truly shocking situation. European politics for centuries had regarded hostage-taking as behaviour only savages indulged in. The British in autumn 1918 felt they had no alternative if they were to keep their officials safe. Taking a diplomat captive was bad enough. But by implicitly threatening to retaliate physically against Litvinov if anything happened to Lockhart and his colleagues, Britain shattered the international consensus.
Lloyd George’s tactic had a rapid impact as Chicherin announced a willingness to exchange Litvinov and others for the arrested Britons.37 Karakhan and Peters made a last-minute attempt to secure Lockhart for the Soviet cause and asked him to consider staying on in Soviet Russia. Sadoul and Marchand were staying, and it would be a great success for Sovnarkom if an official of the British Foreign Office defected. They played on Lockhart’s love affair with Moura. He saw what they were up to, as he was to confide to his notebooks over two decades later: ‘Tempted. But this time heard the referee’s whistle.’38
Lockhart was released from the Kremlin on 1 October. Karakhan and Peters amicably bade him goodbye, and Peters offered to replace the broken valuables in Lockhart’s apartment.39 Lockhart rejected the promise of monetary compensation. He had hardened his heart. Bolshevik Russia was no longer safe for him and he made arrangements to leave — without Moura. First, though, he had to secure the freedom of Major Hicks and get permission for him to marry ‘the Russian lady of his heart’.40 Lockhart’s right-hand man had taken refuge in the American consulate and wanted to take Lyubov Malinina out of Russia with him. This could happen only if they were man and wife. Peters agreed, being ‘highly entertained by the request’;41 he then made a request of his own: ‘I have a favour to ask of you. When you reach London, will you give this letter to my English wife?’ He handed over snapshots to help to identify her before second thoughts occurred to him: ‘No, I shan’t trouble you. As soon as you’re out of here you’ll blaspheme and curse me as your worst enemy.’ Lockhart told him not to be a fool and took the letter, which he duly delivered to its addressee.42
Negotiations proceeded for the safe exit of all Western official personnel from Moscow. It was a tense situation. By then the British and French diplomats had taken refuge in the Norwegian legation. But even though the Bolsheviks were unlikely to attack the building, they held it under siege. The Allied diplomats stiffened their resolve: when water supplies were cut off, a Frenchman adroitly caught the rainwater, which enabled everyone to have a drink.43
Eventually an agreement was reached with the assistance of Swiss diplomats and the Swedish government;44 and Arthur Ransome explained that it would be easier to promote the Soviet cause among British workers if Lenin showed mercy.45 Lockhart and his party left the Russian capital by train in the first week of October; Litvinov had already been released from prison and was living at home with his wife and children. A policeman in ‘a long rubber raincoat’ was posted at their garden gate — he touched his peaked hat on sight of Litvinov.46 As Litvinov finalized his arrangements to return to Russia, he bluntly told Ivy: ‘You would just be a burden to me. I would have to waste days trying to get you settled.’ Ivy felt it hard to disagree even though her uncle Sidney opined: ‘I always said that fellow would abandon her.’47 Having given birth to their second child just months earlier, she was in no physical condition to travel, and Maxim and Ivy agreed that Russia in the middle of civil war and being subjected to foreign military intervention was not an appropriate place for a young family.
The bartering of Lockhart for Litvinov prefigured situations in the Cold War when captured Soviet intelligence agents walked over the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin as their Western counterparts proceeded simultaneously from the other side. The Times in London reported that Litvinov and about thirty of his compatriots departed for Scandinavia on 25 September 1918. They were not to be allowed to reach Russia until Lockhart and the other Allied officials crossed the Russian frontier.48
With Major Hicks and his new wife in the British party at the Finland Station in Petrograd was George Hill, who appeared in uniform for the first time in months; he needed to leave the country in order to arrange a fresh source of funds for his work.49 Lockhart stayed impassive as he bade goodbye to Moura, perhaps so as to avoid transgressing public politesse, and she left the platform an hour before departure.50 When the full group of thirty-one British and twenty-five French nationals crossed into Finland, preparations were made to convey Litvinov and his friends up to the Swedish–Finnish frontier. The British and French arrived in groups. When everyone was assembled the Allied representatives walked over the bridge across the river from Tornio to Haparanda where they boarded a train to Stockholm, arriving there on 9 October.51 Others remained under guard in Russia until Chicherin heard confirmation that Litvinov had reached neutral Norway, but soon the full exchange of officials was completed.
By then a new factor was being considered by the Bolshevik supreme leadership. The Germans were unmistakably losing the war on the western front. With the Western Allies nearing the point of victory, it might prove unhelpful for the Soviet regime to have discriminated against French citizens. On 30 October the Bolsheviks dispatched Sadoul to interview Ludovic Naudeau, a French journalist arrested in the summer. Sadoul’s purpose became clear when he asked Naudeau for his opinion on the Allied military intervention in Russia. The journalist replied that he had supported the arrival of the Allies chiefly out of anti-German motives; but he stressed that he was now out of touch with events. Sadoul was blunt. If Naudeau wanted his freedom he would have to sign a denunciation of the intervention, allowing it to be printed in Izvestiya and Pravda and declaring his endorsement of Soviet principles. Peters of the Cheka had insisted on this as a condition. Naudeau sent Sadoul packing, but it was a sign of the uncertainties of the international situation that the Soviet leadership thought it worth while to try and do a deal with him just as they had sought to entice Lockhart to remain in Russia.52
The Bolsheviks soon reverted to a firmer line. Although Lockhart, Reilly and Verthamont had escaped their clutches, the Cheka had assembled a mass of evidence to put before the Russian public. It also had several prisoners; and although Kalamatiano was not half as culpable as the departed British and French, he was conveniently under lock and key and could serve as the main defendant in a show-trial. The Cheka referred to the ‘Kalamatiano–Lockhart & Co. counter-revolutionary espionage organization’.53 Until then the Americans in Russia had been treated gently. As late as 15 October 1918 a young US consul was released from Butyrki prison whereas his fellow prisoner, a Frenchman captured at Tsaritsyn on the Volga, was refused his freedom.54 The implication was that Americans received softer treatment than the French — at least this was how Lockhart, safely back in Britain, interpreted the development.55
Soon after his return, he received a letter from a distressed Moura Benckendorf, writing from Moscow: ‘I love you, Baby, past all balancing or cool reasoning. I love you more than all the world. If only you knew the longing for you. I lie awake repeating your name, visualising your surroundings, all you, my Baby.’56 On 2 November Lockhart sent a flirtatious reply, saying she was naughty for thinking that his ship might go down in the North Sea. He also mentioned that his wife Jean had nursed him back to health after a bout of Spanish flu, adding: ‘I cannot leave her.’ He had told Jean about Moura — ‘she was very nice’ about it.57 Moura wrote back jealously about how Jean was monopolizing his medical recovery.58 But by then Lockhart had put Moura at the back of his mind, ready to be fetched out only if ever the fancy and opportunity occurred. At the time such a prospect seemed permanently out of reach. Moura was both less sanguine and less fortunate. On 19 April 1919 she wrote to ‘Locky’ that ‘some Esthonians out of revenge’ had murdered her husband.59
The Lockhart Case opened before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal on 25 November 1918. Prosecutor-General Nikolai Krylenko outlined a plot against Soviet rule and a Pravda editorial announced: ‘It is well known that the Allied missions in Russia have tried by means of conspiracies directly through their agents to overthrow the hated Workers’ and Peasants’ government.’60 The art of the showtrial had yet to be refined in Soviet Russia. The authorities fumbled their hand by changing the charges between the original arraignment and the lengthy statement by Krylenko — and Angelika Balabanova, a fair-minded Bolshevik, drew attention to this.61 At the heart of the case was the contention that there had been a violent conspiracy against Sovnarkom and that Lockhart and Reilly had led the plot. In their absence it was Kalamatiano who suffered along with his right-hand man Alexander Fride.62 Altogether there were twenty defendants in court.63 The majority were people who had worked for the Americans or the British. At the second sitting, on 28 November, the Cheka’s deputy leader Peters recited the evidence that implicated Lockhart as the instigator of the plot. He recounted the activities of Reilly and Kalamatiano as well as the amount of foreknowledge in the possession of all the Allied diplomatic personnel.64
The defendant General Zagryazhski, a former military prosecutor and judge, did not deny his association with Kalamatiano but claimed he had acted as an ‘economic informer’ only. Krylenko pressed home his advantage and concentrated his fire on the absent Reilly. When he came to examine Reilly’s lovers — especially Maria Fride and Olga Starzhevskaya — he represented them less as arch-conspirators than as foolish, deceived women.65
The trial ended on 3 December 1918. Kalamatiano and Lieutenant Colonel Fride were to be shot within twenty-four hours. Starzhevskaya received a three-month prison sentence. Zagryazhski, Maria Fride and others were sentenced to forced labour for five years. A captured Czech was also to stay in prison until such time as the Czech Corps ceased fighting against Soviet Russia. The absentees were not forgotten — this was, after all, officially the Lockhart Case. Lockhart, Grenard, Verthamont and Reilly were declared ‘enemies of the working people’ and sentenced to death if ever they were found on Soviet territory.66 The authorities in Washington protested that Kalamatiano had had no involvement in spying activity, but did not retaliate or even apply much pressure on his behalf.67 Kalamatiano was not executed but kept in prison. Possibly the protest had been enough to save him because the communist leadership did not want to freeze their already cool relations with the US. Perhaps, too, they hoped to use Kalamatiano in a future prisoner exchange. Whatever their intentions, the experience shattered Kalamatiano’s nerves. While Reilly occupied a suite of rooms at the Savoy Hotel and Lockhart did the rounds of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, the American faced an indeterminate period in gaol.
The Bolsheviks had broken the British plot against them, but by the time the trial started the situation in the rest of Europe had been transformed. On 11 November 1918 Germany had surrendered on the western front and the Great War was suddenly over. The Soviet authorities had expunged the threat of Allied subversion only to face the still greater potential threat of an Allied invasion. France, Britain and America were masters of the continent. It was uncertain what use they would make of their power — and the rulers of the Kremlin looked nervously westwards as the New Year approached.
On 11 November 1918 an armistice between Germany and the Allies was signed in a railway carriage in Compiègne forest, putting an end to the fighting on the western front. This was the start of a rolling thunder of events. Berlin was in turmoil. The Chancellor Max von Baden had resigned two days earlier, precipitating the Kaiser into abdicating. The German social-democrats seized the opportunity and proclaimed a new republican government with Friedrich Ebert as President and Philipp Scheidemann as Chancellor. In Moscow, the Bolsheviks had not sat idly by. Their first thoughts had been to work out how best to help the political far left in Germany. Indeed they had been making preparations for a sudden end to the Great War since late September when Sverdlov assembled Radek, Bukharin, Kamenev and others to plan an international communist congress in Russia. They decided to ask the Party Central Committee to issue guiding ‘theses’ for this event and make funds available to contact likely sympathizers abroad — and Bukharin and Rakovski meanwhile set out to join Ioffe in the German capital.1
The approach to European revolution, they thought, was quickening. Lenin had already ordered grain stocks to be laid aside for shipment to Germany when the revolutionary upsurge occurred. The Red Army undertook a massive additional recruitment so that Soviet forces could render military assistance for the same eventuality.2Pravda declared: ‘The robber claws of the Prussian brute are too deeply embedded in the western front. The robber has been caught in a tight spring-trap.’3 At the same time the Soviet leaders continued to play things cautiously and earned ridicule from the German Independent Social-Democrats, passionate critics of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, for delivering the gold required by the Russo-German treaties of March and August. Lenin stopped shipments of bullion only when the Central Powers collapsed on the Bulgarian front and the Austrians surrendered to the Allies.4 At that point the Bolsheviks felt free at last to render direct help to the German political far left. Civil war in Russia made it unfeasible to divert any forces into central Europe: the Red Army could not reach the Urals, far less Poland and Germany, at that time. But the Bolsheviks wanted to make an impact. Despite the food shortages in Russia, the Soviet authorities offered to deliver grain for the new German government to distribute;5 and the scheme was finalized to establish the Communist International in Moscow.
The political climate in Germany had been fluid for some weeks before the armistice and the unconditional surrender. Wilhelm II discharged the cabinet installed in 1917, replacing it with ministers willing to work under Chancellor von Baden and negotiate for peace — and the Reichstag was no longer to be treated with public disdain. Even Ludendorff wanted the government to discover what terms might be on offer from the Allies. The last shred of hope among German ministers was that the Americans might moderate the French and British lust for a punitive settlement.
As a step towards conciliating socialists in the Reichstag, Baden released the Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht from prison on 23 October. Pale from the lack of daylight, hair turned to the colours of pepper and salt, Liebknecht was, for Lenin and Trotsky, Germany’s revolutionary hero.6 He fervently believed that military defeat offered an opportunity to move the country by revolution to socialism. Two others headed the Spartakusbund with him: Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. Only Liebknecht was German; Luxemburg was a Polish Jew and Jogiches a Lithuanian one. All three had spent time in prison for denouncing the war effort. Liebknecht now imposed himself upon them as a man of action. Before the Great War he had already been known for his capacity to inspire an audience:
[Liebknecht], a dark man with lively gestures, shot words at us like darts, words which kindled anger and protest against governments which could drag their peoples into the bloody holocaust of war.
[He] was a very good speaker. There was not only the art of the orator in what he said but a ring of truth and sincerity which won us over completely.7
He wanted to take the political struggle on to the streets. Nothing short of insurrection would satisfy him — and he scorned those in the German Social-Democratic Party who urged caution and compromise.
Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary was falling apart, pressed heavily by the Italians from the south. Revolutions erupted in Vienna and Budapest on 31 October. Austria sued for an armistice, which was granted on 3 November; it took a further ten days for the Hungarians to achieve the same result.8 The German high command had long since lost confidence in the benefits of the military coalition with the Habsburgs. Now Germany was on its own.
The Soviet mission in Berlin prepared a banquet for Liebknecht with a view to publicizing his revolutionary agenda. Bukharin was delighted to hear that he was ‘in complete agreement with us’.9 Urgent contact with Russia was needed after Ioffe heard that the Germans were about to sue for peace, and he called Moscow on the Hughes telegraph apparatus. Radek rebuked Ioffe for having failed to encode the message: ‘Are you taking account of the seriousness of your communiqué and its possible consequences?’ But when Ioffe simply repeated what he had said, Radek raced to the Sovnarkom offices, where the news made everyone feel suddenly ‘liberated’.10 The embassies that still remained in Moscow were anxious about the news that came through to them. For the moment the talk among diplomats was focused on what kind of territorial and political settlement might be imposed by the Western Allies; and when Radek told the elderly Austrian ambassador De Potere about Italy’s pretensions in the southern Tyrol, he broke down in tears. Lenin and Sverdlov were ecstatic and asked Radek to draft an appeal to the Austrian working class. Since it was a Saturday evening, as Radek pointed out, the printworkers had gone home. The Hungarian communist leader Béla Kun, who was still in Moscow as an ex-POW, volunteered his fellow former prisoners to do the job if bread and sausages were made available. The atmosphere was euphoric. A crowd of Bolshevik supporters gathered next morning outside the Moscow Soviet on Tverskaya Street and, to their cheers, Lenin appeared on the balcony of the building. The celebrations lasted the entire day.11
Meanwhile in Berlin on 5 November the supporters of the October Revolution gathered outside the Soviet mission to chant their admiration for Lenin and Trotsky.12 This was too much for German ministers, who knew exactly what the Bolshevik party thought of them after a crate being unloaded as part of the Soviet diplomatic ‘pouch’ was dropped at a railway station and insurrectionary propaganda spilled out.13 Ioffe and his mission, including Bukharin and Rakovski, were given twenty-four hours to leave the country; diplomatic relations were severed.14
Their train left for the Polish frontier at six o’clock in the morning.15 It had not yet reached Russia when the radio station at Khodynka north of Moscow intercepted a telegram from Kiel indicating that the German naval garrison had mutinied. Radek tried without success to establish contact with the rebel sailors. Then news was picked up from Allied stations of revolution in Germany as Ebert and Scheidemann took over from Baden. Ioffe’s train had by this point pulled into Borisov, still in German-occupied territory. Using the Hughes apparatus, Radek instructed him to stay put while the Soviet authorities attempted to get his deportation revoked. Radek himself desperately tried to get through to the German Foreign Office:
Radek: Call the people’s plenipotentiary, Mr [Georg] Haase, to the apparatus.
Civil servant: He’s not in the ministry.
Radek: Who’s deputizing for him?
Civil servant: There’s nobody in the ministry. Everyone’s run off.
Radek: I order you in the name of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee on your responsibility before the Berlin Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies!16
Silence followed. There was no such thing as a Berlin Soviet and Radek had no authority to tell anyone in Germany what to do. As usual he was trying his luck.
The German embassy in Moscow later left a message for Radek saying that Berlin had been calling him. Radek consulted Chicherin before sitting down at the Hughes apparatus to communicate with Haase. Unlike Liebknecht, Haase as a leader of the Independent Social-Democrats was no sympathizer with the October Revolution. But he sent courteous greetings and did not rule out the possibility of letting Ioffe back into Germany. Then he added: ‘But knowing that there’s famine in Russia, we ask you to direct the grain which you want to give up for the German revolution for the benefit of the starving in Russia. President of the American Republic Wilson has guaranteed Germany the receipt of grain and fats needed to feed the population in winter.’ It seemed that American capitalist assistance was preferred to proletarian solidarity, which Radek took as a snub. He called Haase the Judas Iscariot of European socialism, and an exchange of insults followed.17 Eventually Haase reverted to practicalities and asked for German embassy staff to be allowed to leave Russia. Radek replied that the German occupation of Ukraine and other territories made Russo-German armed conflict a distinct possibility — and he warned that official diplomatic communications needed to be maintained with Germany if this was going to be avoided.18
Hoping to guarantee that Ioffe’s party came to no harm at Borisov, Sovnarkom detained Germany’s consul-general Herbert Hauschild in Moscow.19 Agreement was reached to swap diplomats on the Lockhart–Litvinov model. Two trains approached each other at Borisov station, and Ioffe was exchanged for Hauschild before proceeding in a second-class carriage to Orsha eighty miles east in Soviet-ruled Russia. His journey ended in Moscow on 24 November.20
The Kremlin leadership declared Friedrich Ebert and the new government in Berlin to be hand in glove with the Western Allies. Lenin suspected that German ministers aimed to secure better peace terms by offering to deploy German forces against Soviet Russia. Sovnarkom, in yet another breach of international law, allowed German and Austrian ex-POWs to occupy the embassy buildings of their countries. De Potere, already demoralized, felt grateful that the intruders left him his own office and bathroom. He did not mind if they brought girlfriends back at night, only drawing the line at their use of his suite as a thoroughfare, and even Radek warmed to him.21 German diplomats were of a different mind, wanting nothing to do with leading Bolsheviks. The exception was the military attaché Schubert who asked for copies of The Communist Manifesto and read Lenin’s State and Revolution from start to finish. At the same time, in Berlin the entire political system was being overhauled. These were strange times — and they were about to get stranger. Soviet leaders watched for any sign that the German situation might start moving their way. They had lost their direct source of information with Ioffe’s expulsion and depended on patchy wireless traffic and on German newspapers brought by rail.
Liebknecht did not let them down as he pressed his arguments in the Spartakusbund in favour of an uprising. At first, Luxemburg and Jogiches took a lot of convincing. Berlin in the winter of 1918–19 was not like Petrograd in October 1917. Ebert and Scheidemann, unlike Kerenski, were not friendless on the political left. What is more, they could call upon the assistance of army regiments as well as of the unofficial armed squads known as the Freikorps. There was still no equivalent of the Russian soviets in Berlin.
Luxemburg had long objected to Lenin’s authoritarian methods inside the labour movement, and she had never liked his penchant for bringing the peasantry into revolutionary politics. From her wartime prison cell she had quickly formed a severe opinion of the October Revolution. She was against the Brest-Litovsk treaty, thinking it damaged the prospects of revolution in Germany. She also objected to what she saw as Lenin’s compromises on the land question and the national question. On dictatorship and terror she was horrified by the reports she received about the Bolsheviks in power. Liebknecht was less sensitive: ‘One can’t make revolution in white gloves. Whoever sincerely wants it must also want the means which guarantee it; there’s no time to lose. Perhaps it will be necessary to pass through rivers of blood and mud to get to the destination. Anyway the German revolution won’t require so many sacrifices.’22 He believed that the Red terror in Russia would be of short duration,23 and he wore down Luxemburg’s doubts with his enthusiasm. She anyway considered Germany ready for its socialist transformation and had long advocated ‘mass action’ on the streets.
The Spartakusbund helped to form workers’ councils in Berlin and announced the holding of a congress. The Bolsheviks received an open invitation and chose some of their leaders to attend, including Ioffe, Rakovski, Bukharin and Radek.24 All of them had opposed Lenin throughout the Brest-Litovsk controversy and were itching to foment revolution in Germany. Although all Bolsheviks agreed that Berlin would be the cockpit of ‘European socialist revolution’, Lenin worried that his ex-opponents would behave irresponsibly on their German trip. He had already written a warning note to Ioffe: ‘Bukharin is loyal but has lunged into “left-wing idiocy” to a devilish extent… Prenez garde!’25 Radek was another object of concern. Lenin had a firm word with him before departure and pointed out that if the Allied armies were to decide to march eastwards, the French commander Franchet d’Espèrey would have a clear route across Hungary and Romania into Ukraine and on to Russia. When Radek replied that French war-weariness would deter any such enterprise, Lenin interjected: ‘They’ll deploy coloured forces. How are you going to conduct agitation among them?’ Radek replied by saying that he would use picture cards, though he added that he thought the Russian winter would prove intolerable for soldiers from Africa.26
Yet Lenin was still determined to assist in the making of a revolution in Germany — and Radek, who had belonged to the German Social-Democratic Party before 1914, was the Soviet leader with the closest acquaintance with the Berlin political scene before the Great War. Lenin told him to behave with caution and avoid forcing the pace.27 Sverdlov handed over 200,000 German marks to cover the delegation’s expenses. He gave little thought to their bodily requirements: they received only kasha (Russian porridge) and honey for the long trip through eastern Europe. Radek was cherished among the party leaders for his sense of humour; but when he said the Hebrews had got better conditions in their flight from the Pharaoh, Sverdlov just told him to stop complaining.28
The first stop for the delegation was an overnight one at Dvinsk where they fraternized with German soldiers from the local soviet and Radek fell asleep with his head resting on Khristo Rakovski’s chest. When the German high command learned of their attempt to suborn its troops, it stopped them from continuing to travel further westwards by train.29 By then the western borderlands of the old Russian Empire were in uproar, and the Bolsheviks were intent on establishing a Soviet republic in Ukraine. Pavlo Skoropadskyi, Germany’s client ruler, was already under threat from nationalists led by Symon Petliura and was overthrown in December. The Soviet leadership in Moscow wanted to resume its revolutionary impetus and, as soon as possible, establish a Red administration in Kiev. Rakovski was chosen to head this attempt, and he abandoned his ambition to make for Berlin.30 Radek, however, was determined to resume the German trip. Getting on a Hughes apparatus in Minsk, he secured permission from Sverdlov and Lenin to proceed in disguise to Berlin. A friend, German communist Felix Wolf, helped with the arrangements, and Radek continued alone on his westward journey by horse-drawn sleigh.31 After crossing Poland he reached Königsberg and jumped on a direct train to Berlin.32
Arriving at the Schlesinger Bahnhof, he bought a copy of the Spartacist newspaper Die Rote Fahne and took a taxi to his hotel before meeting up with the leaders of the German political far left — not only Liebknecht and Luxemburg but also August Thalheimer and Paul Levi. He made contact, too, with his old mentor Leo Jogiches, with whom he had a warm discussion. Jogiches temptingly asked whether he wanted to remain an observer for the Soviet leadership or become an integral member of the Spartakusbund,33 but Radek stuck to his assignment as a Kremlin emissary. Obviously a lot of work had to be done before the Spartacists could lead an insurrection. There had been only fifty of them at the Kaiser’s abdication and they were also in a small minority at the Congress of Workers’ Councils and had many internal disagreements on policy. Furthermore, Luxemburg continued to attack the Bolsheviks for conducting a terror against their enemies. She asked Radek to relay her comments to Moscow and expressed shame that her former comrade Dzerzhinski had agreed to head the Cheka.34
Yet she went along with the other Spartacist leaders in their planning of an uprising in Berlin. A gathering was held with other far-left organizations from 30 December 1918 and the Communist Party of Germany was founded. Everyone present agreed with the Bolsheviks that a new era of human history was at hand. They had held this belief since before the Great War and their disgust at the immense loss of life since 1914 had convinced them that only revolution would prevent another such world war from occurring. Imperialism could not be curbed: it had to be eliminated. Capitalism was at the root of the world’s troubles and it too had to be swept away. No country was more advanced than Germany in industrial and educational skills. Marxism taught that the ‘proletariat’ in the factories and the mines would inevitably lead society into a bright future where oppression and exploitation would be no more. What the Russian workers had done in Petrograd was about to be accomplished — and accomplished with greater success — in the German capital; indeed the Bolsheviks agreed with the Spartacists that Germany’s working class was the readiest in the world for socialism. Conditions in the country were ripe for exploitation and the Spartakusbund intended to catch the new German government by surprise. Workers’ councils would seize power before army or police could stop them, and the entire ‘proletariat’ would rally to the cause of revolution.
The leading Spartacists wanted Soviet comradeship, not tutelage, and felt that the sooner the insurrection was under way in Berlin, the easier it would be to avoid that outcome. Radek teased them that Lenin and Trotsky were revolutionaries of greater stature than anybody in the German Communist Party. As he no doubt intended, this only strengthened their resolve. They deputed a single comrade, Hugo Eberlein, to go Moscow for the international conference being organized by the Bolsheviks. Eberlein received strict instructions to prevent Lenin and his associates from taking control. Meanwhile Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogiches set about planning how to seize the post and telegraph office, the garrisons, government buildings and big printing presses in Berlin.
The day chosen for a general strike and uprising was 5 January 1919. The proclamations had been written. The message went out early to militants in the metalworking factories to come out on to the streets. Liebknecht and his comrades got ready to talk to the crowds. Luxemburg already had a heavy heart, feeling that a serious revolution required more than high hopes. For their part, Ebert and Scheidemann reacted with vigour and called on the army garrisons, along with the Freikorps, to suppress the revolt. Many ex-soldiers of the western front saw the political far left as traitors to the national cause. The fact that several of them were Jewish intensified the hostility. In the eyes of many who had fought in the trenches, Germany had lost the war because people like Liebknecht and Luxemburg had undermined morale in the rear. Fighting was sporadic on the streets, but the rage to settle accounts was intense and it was quickly obvious that the combined action of army and Freikorps would overwhelm all resistance. The insurrection sputtered out almost before it began.
The Freikorps wreaked a terrible vengeance. Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogiches were hunted down and bludgeoned to death. The killers dumped Luxemburg’s body outside the railings of the Zoological Gardens. The symbolism was intentional. The enemies of the Spartacists looked on them as being less than human. Dogs were being given a dog’s death. The Spartacist leaders met their ends with courage and dignity. Of their leaders, only Thalheimer and Levi survived — and it was Levi who delivered the funeral oration for Luxemburg on 2 February.35 Radek went into hiding. On the party’s orders he had spent the year 1917 in Stockholm rather than Petrograd. For all his big talk he had no more experience of organizing a seizure of power than anyone else in Berlin. The German authorities, moreover, were aware of his illicit presence in the country. A search was begun for him, and he was captured on 12 February 1919 and thrown into Moabit prison.
While Ebert and Scheidemann resumed their attempts to bring about political stability and economic recovery, the newly formed German Communist Party sought to rebuild its organizations. It had lost the inspiring leaders who had founded it, but its revolutionary vision remained intact. Others filled the gap left by Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogiches. Their spirits stayed high. German communists continued to despise the new socialist government, a government that accepted responsibility for Germany’s humiliation at the hands of the Allies. The communists foresaw abundant chances to undertake revolution. Like the Bolsheviks in Russia, they believed that Berlin was the city where the future of Europe would be settled. The German working class would surely soon see that Scheidemann and his ministers were collaborating with big business. The communist party offered an alternative vision of internal and foreign policy. Thalheimer and Levi preached the coming doom of capitalism — and they intended by political action to bring forward the date when this would occur.