Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West

17. REVOLVING THE RUSSIAN QUESTION

After their triumph on the western front, the Allies could no longer claim that they were intervening in Russia so as to bring its armed forces back into the fight against Germany. In the United Kingdom, Robert Cecil as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs circulated a memorandum to the King and the War Cabinet spelling out the constraints on British policy. Cecil suggested that a crusade against Bolshevism was impracticable. Allied measures, he argued, should be limited to offering assistance to ‘our Russian friends’ and the Czech Corps.¹

But the survival of the Soviet government meant that the ‘Russian question’ was anything but a historical one. German commanders and diplomats who had cheerfully welcomed their government’s use of the Bolsheviks to ease their tasks in the war now warned against the possibility that Bolshevism might move into the heart of Europe. Until November 1918 Allied politicians had looked on Russians mainly in terms of their potential to restore the eastern front. From being fitfully alarmed by pro-Soviet anti-war propaganda in their own countries, they began to appreciate that the Bolshevik revolutionary example might soon be followed abroad. Talk about the communist ‘contagion’ was growing. It was accentuated by the actions of the Bolsheviks themselves after the German surrender. The borderlands of the old empire underwent revolutions as Moscow supplied personnel to instigate seizures of power in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and proclaim Soviet republics. Fundamental economic and social reforms followed Russia’s model. Once Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius had fallen under their influence, the Bolsheviks tried to extend the revolutionary order from the capitals to other towns and villages. Stalin drafted decrees in December recognizing the new Soviet republics and providing them with financial assistance.² If this could happen so quickly, who was to say that Poland or Germany would not soon fall to the communists? And what was to stop communist influence from spreading still further westwards?

In fact the German capitulation occurred just a little too soon for the Bolsheviks, who had not yet secured their hold on Russia. On 18 November 1918 in Ufa, a city in the Urals, Admiral Alexander Kolchak pushed aside the regional administration led by Socialist- Revolutionaries and declared himself Supreme Ruler. Komuch by then was no more and the Red Army had seized control of the Volga towns. Kolchak, assisted by the remaining volunteers of the Czech Corps, despised the Socialist-Revolutionaries as much as he hated the Bolsheviks. His forces dealt savagely with the Reds and their sympathizers as he undertook his advance through the Urals. His was the first of the White armies to make serious progress and in December he occupied Perm, scattering the Bolsheviks to the winds. In the south, where another White force — the Volunteer Army — was still gathering under General Anton Denikin after the deaths of Generals Kornilov and Alexeev, the hope was that the Allied victory in the west would liberate resources to help against the Bolsheviks. Denikin welcomed the existence of the clandestine National Centre with its liberal and socialist members so that he could win friends in London and Paris.³ The British quickly indicated approval and promised their help. The French made similar noises.⁴ Action followed on 18 December when the French landed troops in Odessa while Britain’s expedition remained in the Russian north. The situation was grim for Bolshevism and getting grimmer.

Although they temporarily gave up territory, the Bolsheviks tightened their grip on the areas under their rule. They had spent the year 1918 in internal disputes, nearly breaking apart as a party over the Brest-Litovsk treaty. There were also regular problems with indiscipline and lack of co-ordination between the various organizational levels. Bolshevik leaders in the provinces as well as in Moscow recognized that this situation had to change if Sovnarkom was going to win the Civil War against the Whites. Agreement was reached on the need for a properly functioning hierarchy. As personnel were drafted into the Red Army, fewer and fewer people were left to take the big decisions. The Party Central Committee established a system of internal sub-committees to facilitate rapid reactions to emergencies. The Political Bureau (or Politburo, as it was known) consisted of five members including Lenin and Trotsky; it quickly became the key agency of central party decision and command. The Bolsheviks were willing to militarize themselves if it helped against Kolchak and Denikin. They had always believed in centralism: now they set about practising it systematically. Gradually, the chaotic conditions in soviets, army, police and trade unions began to improve as the party imposed its institutional supremacy.

The Whites’ strategic aim was simply to advance on Moscow and overrun the Bolsheviks. The Allies were more enigmatic. Lloyd George and Wilson still claimed they simply wanted to see Russia achieve internal peace. Clemenceau, who as French premier exerted authority at President Poincaré’s expense, agreed. The difficulty remained that no Allied leaders recognized the legitimacy of Sovnarkom and the October Revolution — they commonly believed that the Russian people were oppressed by Bolshevik rule.

There were three basic options. The Western Allies — or one or two of them — could decide that Russia, by defecting from their side and relieving the military pressure on Germany, had forfeited the right to be left alone at the end of hostilities. The spectre of communism was haunting Europe. Lenin and his comrades had openly stated their wish to put global capitalism to the torch. They aimed to overturn the American, French and British governments. The Allied powers might reasonably conclude that the way to prevent the communist insurrections was to cauterize the ‘contagion’ by invading Russia. This would require a big army and a concentration of political will. A less demanding option would be to strengthen the Allied expeditions lodged on the periphery of ‘Soviet power’, supplying the Whites with money and arms but holding back from their own direct attack on Moscow and Petrograd. But political opposition and social exhaustion at home might rule out even this possibility. The Great War was over and few people in Britain, France or America had the appetite for yet another far-flung conflict and indeed many were fiercely opposed to the idea. In that case the ultimate option would be to conclude that Russia was a lost cause and to abandon the Russian people to their fate.

But even a policy of non-intervention left problems unresolved. Should Soviet Russia receive official recognition? Should normal trade links be resumed? Several business lobbies in the UK and the US called for a diplomatic and commercial rapprochement. The trade unions meanwhile campaigned against military action, and European socialist parties had leaders and militants who saw a lot of good in the social and economic reforms in Russia.

In the United Kingdom, too, a Hands Off Russia movement grew up, supplied with a rousing booklet by Arthur Ransome. In The Truth about Russia he lamented:

I only know that, from the point of view of the Russian Revolution, England seems to be a vast nightmare of blind folly, by the sea, and beyond that by the trenches, and deprived, by some fairy godmother who was not invited to her christening, of the imagination to realise what is happening beyond. Shouting in daily telegrams across the wires from Russia I feel I am shouting at a drunken man asleep in the road in front of a steamroller… I think it possible that the revolution will fail. If so, then the failure will not mean that it loses its importance… No matter, if only in America, in England, in France, in Germany, men know what it was that failed, who betrayed it, who murdered it. Man does not live by his deeds so much as by the purposes of his deeds.⁵

A crusade against Soviet Russia was anathema to troops who longed for demobilization and shipment home. Powerful resistance grew to making war on communism.

This was certainly the line taken by Labour Party candidates at the hustings before the general election on 14 December 1918. Ramsay MacDonald thought that it had served the Allies right that Lenin had dragged Russia out of the war; he was also sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as fellow socialists, despite being regularly insulted by them in print.⁶ The New Statesman, breaking its wartime silence about how to handle Russia, joined the Daily Herald, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Express in putting pressure on Lloyd George and the government to halt the intervention. Even the Daily Telegraph, usually a supporter of the Coalition, objected to ministers refusing to ventilate their considerations on Bolshevism in parliament or the press. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Milner, was an exception; he openly contended that it would be ‘an abominable betrayal, contrary to every British instinct of honour and humanity’, if the country abandoned those Russians who had supported the Allied forces of intervention — and he confided to ex-chargé d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov that his personal preference was to reinforce the military intervention.⁷ But generally the Coalition MPs avoided the Russian question save only for affirming that a vote for them would help defend the United Kingdom against Bolshevism. Their electoral tactic paid off. When the results were declared on 28 December the Coalition had triumphed.⁸

Robert Bruce Lockhart’s line was more belligerent than Milner’s. Newly returned from Moscow, he was acclaimed as a near-martyr who had done his patriotic duty. In the House of Commons only the Liberal MP Joseph King sounded a discordant note about him. King had got hold of the Soviet version of events and pointed out that Lockhart was no innocent but had tried to suborn the Latvian Riflemen into arresting Lenin and Trotsky.⁹ This isolated clamour drew no response from Lockhart, who maintained his focus on seeking to influence governmental policy; with Germany defeated, he favoured an all-out invasion of Russia. On 7 November, the first anniversary of the October seizure of power in Petrograd, he forwarded a memorandum to the Foreign Office emphasizing the strength that accrued to the Soviet government from its repressive zeal as well as its popularity with workers and peasants. The Bolsheviks were easily the biggest party in Russia; the counter-revolutionary forces were hopelessly divided. Lockhart pointed out that the communist leadership was intent on expanding the revolution into central Europe. He mapped out the various options before recommending military force ‘to intervene immediately on a proper scale’. He proposed sending British troops to Siberia and Archangel. But his idea was that the main offensive should be organized from the south: he called for 50,000 men to be dispatched to the Black Sea to link up with the Volunteer Army.¹⁰

Lockhart predicted success for an invasion at a time when the Red Army was weak and the Allies were not yet exhausted. No time was to be lost.¹¹ Balfour ignored him, and Lockhart sensed a general frostiness in Whitehall:

After a week at home it is perfectly obvious that apart from the relief of having rescued me from the Bolsheviks the Foreign Office is not in the least interested in my account of things. They prefer the reactionaries who have never even seen Bolshevism. Tyrrell and Hardinge are frankly and avowedly hostile and I may even have difficulty in obtaining another job.¹²

W. G. T. Tyrrell served as head of the Political Intelligence Department at the Foreign Office; Charles Hardinge was Permanent Under- Secretary to Balfour. Behind them stood Lord Robert Cecil as Under-Secretary of State. They had disliked Lockhart since early 1918 when he was advising the government to give official recognition to the Bolsheviks. Now they rejected him as a whirligig. Lockhart learned that Tyrrell regarded him as ‘a hysterical schoolboy who had intrigued with the Prime Minister behind the Foreign Office’s back’. This was a reference to Lloyd George’s dispatch of Lockhart to Russia as an antidote to the cautious policy pursued at the time by Balfour. Lockhart reasonably concluded of Tyrrell: ‘Not much hope in this quarter.’¹³

Others, including the King, were more favourably disposed. Lockhart recorded his meeting with George V in his diary for 23 October 1918: ‘The King was very nice and showed a surprising grasp of the situation; he however did most of the talking and during the forty minutes I was with him I didn’t really get much in. He sees pretty well the need for reforms everywhere, and has a wholesome dread of Bolshevism.’¹⁴ Lockhart, originally a proponent of accommodation with Lenin and Trotsky, stayed firmly anti-Bolshevik for the rest of his life.

Winston Churchill refrained from advocating an all-out Allied invasion, but he was the one politician to speak out more strongly than Milner against the Soviet order. In his electoral address to his Dundee constituents on 28 November 1918 he declared: ‘Russia is being reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of Barbarism… Civilisation is being extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troupes of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.’¹⁵ Even for Churchill this was pungent language. When referring to the Germans, mortal enemies of the United Kingdom until a few days previously, he called them ‘barbarian’. But barbarians are human. Churchill’s speech was aimed at dehumanizing the Soviet leaders and their followers as a way of persuading people that the October Revolution had somehow to be overthrown. On another occasion he wildly referred to Bolshevism as a baby that should be ‘strangled in its cradle’. Churchill was fired up on the Russian question, but he usually liked to drop a phial of wit into his fulminations. About Russia he felt no such impulse.

Perhaps Churchill’s monarchist sentiments had an influence. He had stood out against those who called for the hanging of the Kaiser, and anyway he was with Lloyd George in trying to prevent harsh peace terms being imposed on Germany. It was Churchill’s habit to focus obsessively on chosen problems. His colleagues trembled when he was in one of his moods; and everyone remembered his pet military project in 1915–16 to land Allied troops at Gallipoli — people forgot that he thought that insufficient troops had been provided for the task. He was notorious for pushing forward with plans without having thought through how he would cope if things went wrong. When criticism was made, he grew obstinate and put himself beyond debate. Yet behind the frothing schemes and wild rhetoric there was his acuity of vision. His instincts told him that something deeply menacing — indeed evil — was in the making in the east. He knew no more than anyone else in the cabinet about the Soviet leadership and its intentions. But he had enough information to sense that they presented a fundamental threat. If the need arose, he was willing to stand alone and fight for his opinions.¹⁶

In France, the attention paid to revolutionary Russia was less intense for a while. The Great War was barely over and all thoughts were focused on the securing of Allied authority over central Europe. Germany had to be stabilized and peaceful economic recovery facilitated in several countries precariously poised on the brink of famine — and most French politicians sought to punish the Germans for the four years of carnage.

In America the State Department was fitful in its examination of Russian affairs. Ambassador Francis was no longer in northern Russia. By October 1918 his health had collapsed and he travelled to London for medical treatment.¹⁷ Meanwhile Lansing was too busy with German questions to occupy himself with the situation further east in Europe. Inside the State Department, sympathizers with Soviet Russia were acquiring influence. Among them was the young William C. Bullitt, who headed the Far Eastern desk. Already in March 1918 he had held discussions with Santeri Nuorteva of the pro-Soviet Finnish Information Bureau in New York.¹⁸ Bullitt and Nuorteva met and wrote to each other, and Nuorteva was pleased to have found a friend in high places.¹⁹ Bullitt took the line that the October Revolution had a vast importance for world affairs and that American policy ought to be based on an informed acquaintance with Soviet intentions. Yet there was more to it than just that. Bullitt was one of the few Americans outside the labour movement and certain business lobbies who favoured some kind of accommodation with Sovnarkom. He detested the Anglo-French military intervention in Russia and Ukraine and hoped to lessen and reverse his own country’s involvement in such ventures.

Bullitt’s career had started in journalism. He had made a brilliant name for himself with interviews with politicians of the Central Powers that pointed to German complicity in Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia.²⁰ He came from a charmed background of well-to-do Philadelphia lawyers and had degrees from Yale University and the Harvard Law School. During the war he worked in Europe reporting for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and dabbled in writing novels. He married the aptly named socialite Aimee Ernesta Drinker and together they lived the high life until the call came for a posting at the State Department.²¹

Bullitt used his imagination in delving for information about the Russian communist leadership. Whereas others shunned contact with John Reed as a traitor, Bullitt saw him as a man on the spot who could be of use in liaising with Lenin and Trotsky. The ‘awful diplomatic gulf’ had to be closed up. Bullitt had encouragement from the distinguished lawyer Felix Frankfurter in this effort. Frankfurter nominally belonged to the War Department but was really President Wilson’s special diplomatic aide and was keen to get a brief prepared on Russia. Using contacts such as Santeri Nuorteva, Frankfurter planned to send a cable directly to Trotsky. The State Department overruled him, sensing the need to restrain both Frankfurter and Bullitt in case they upset other US activities in Russia and cooperation with the Western Allies. The second-best step was an indirect one. Frankfurter received permission to approach the Red Finns with a view to using them as intermediaries with the Bolsheviks. Yrjö Sirola, their Foreign Minister until their defeat in mid-May 1918 in the Finnish Civil War, knew Lenin well and might be able to improve US–Soviet understanding on one of his trips to Petrograd. While normal diplomacy was failing, other methods had to be tried out.²²

Bolshevism was widely seen as a menace to political stability in North America, although many politicians worried that Wilson’s involvement in global affairs was distracting his administration from urgent domestic problems. Nonetheless, in early 1919 the Senate Committee on the Judiciary set up a sub-committee on Bolshevik propaganda under Senator Lee S. Overman. The stated purpose was to discover the extent of Russian subversion in America, but the proceedings were quickly fanned out to consider the situation in Russia itself. The sub-committee began meeting on 11 February 1919. The atmosphere was set by Attorney-General Alexander Mitchell Palmer who claimed that Russian Bolsheviks had used over a dozen ‘German brewers of America’ to buy up a great American newspaper with the intention of manipulating public opinion.²³ The names of Nuorteva, Reed, Bryant and Rhys Williams cropped up — and it was intimated that the Englishman Ransome had suspect connections with Imperial Germany.²⁴ Details were given of large quantities of Bolshevik material that had flooded into America since late 1917, and the smuggling methods were described.²⁵

The large number of Jews among the pro-Soviet agitators was also a theme of the sub-committee proceedings. Rev. George A. Simons, until recently the superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Petrograd, recounted that Trotsky and other Jewish revolutionary refugees had set out for Russia from New York in 1917. Now, said Simons, admirers of the Soviet model were growing in number in America:

In fact I am very impressed with this, that moving around here I find that certain Bolsheviki propagandists are nearly all Jews. I have been in the so-called People’s House, at 7 East Fifteenth Street, New York, which calls itself also the Rand School of Social Science, and I have visited that at least six times during the last eleven weeks or so, buying their literature, and some of the most seditious stuff I have ever found against our own Government, and 19 out of 20 people I have seen there have been Jews.²⁶

Although Simons denied being anti-Jewish, he stated that he had confidence in the authenticity of anti-Semitic forgeries such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that accused the Jews of a conspiracy to achieve global political dominion. He adjured the Senate to cease thinking of Bolshevism as a fad and treat it as a ‘monstrous thing’ with the capacity to undermine American society.²⁷

His testimony agitated America’s Jews. Lewis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee and Simon Wolf of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations sent in letters protesting against the slur that most Jews were Bolsheviks.²⁸ The journalist Herman Bernstein appeared before the sub-committee to point out that Reed, Bryant, Rhys Williams and Robins were Christians — or rather lapsed Christians. Thus the threat to American political stability consequently had nothing to do with religion.²⁹

The Soviet sympathizers themselves were then called to testify. Louise Bryant was first. She defended her husband’s work for the Bolsheviks in 1917–18 on the grounds that he was seeking to provoke revolution in Germany — and she claimed that this conformed to America’s wartime interests. But she had to admit to having acted as a Bolshevik international courier.³⁰ Her interrogation was lengthy and hostile and she complained of being treated worse than the earlier witnesses. John Reed received an equally severe questioning. Under pressure he acknowledged that he hoped for revolution in America. He added that he hoped for this to happen by peaceful due process and without the violence that had typically accompanied revolutions.³¹ Next up was Albert Rhys Williams, who rebuked the critics of Bolshevism; he laid claim to an open mind about whether the Soviet order was ‘a successful form of government’, and he denied advocating it for the USA. He affected to believe that the communist leadership were considering the idea of convoking a Constituent Assembly again.³² Raymond Robins was less enthusiastic about Soviet rule but continued to advocate trade with Soviet Russia.³³

A few days later it was the Senate Committee on Public Information that called on Reed and Bryant to give an account of themselves. Reed admitted to having worked for the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in publishing Soviet newspapers in multi-language editions. The Senators had done their homework and compelled him to admit to having promised the State Department in 1917 that he would not get involved in Russian politics. But Reed argued that he had not given his word under oath — and he lied that he had received no money from the Soviet government and was not in communication with it.³⁴

When asked about atrocities under Bolshevik rule, he and Bryant cast doubt on the veracity of the reports. Bryant argued against America’s right to intervene in Russia; but when pushed by the Committee, she refused to approve or disapprove of ‘Bolshevist interference in American affairs’. She spoke up for the Cheka’s Yakov Peters, calling him ‘an aesthetic young man’ and disclaiming any knowledge of his murky activities in London before 1914.³⁵ When Albert Rhys Williams took the stand, he too was open about the fact that he had been in the employ of the ‘Trotzky–Lenine government’. He stated that, when leaving Russia in June 1918, he had an assignment to set up a propaganda bureau in New York but assured the Committee that this had not come to pass. By staying on in Russia five months after the Reeds had departed, moreover, he had seen more brutality than they had. But he rejected reports of the killing of innocents by the communists, whom he declared to have ‘a sublime faith in the people’. He professed his abhorrence of violence and his feeling that if the communist experiment were to take place in the US, the means could and should be entirely peaceful.³⁶

Politicians and reporters were deepening a debate that had begun with the October Revolution. Bolshevik rule and the consequences for Western policy were a divisive topic, and it was far from being the case that the advocates of conciliation with Soviet Russia were confined to the labour movement. Business interests too were beginning to make themselves felt.³⁷ On the other side of the debate, of course, there were political, commercial and ecclesiastical lobbies that wanted Russia and its communist rulers kept in strict quarantine. Dispute was often angry and seldom less than spirited. In Britain and France the press led the way in inviting public exchange; this also happened in the US, where the committees of the Senate gave additional propulsion to the process. Steadily the Russian question was rising up the public agenda. At a time when national governments had to concentrate their efforts on economic recovery, Russia and its communism could still not obtain priority of attention. But it was increasingly obvious that the revolutionary tide might at any moment surge across Russian frontiers into Europe, and many people in those countries as well as in North America doubted that their leaders had yet found sound measures to deal with this prospect — and the disarray of the Western powers on the Russian question at the Paris Peace Conference in the first half of 1919 was to do little to dispel these concerns.

18. THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE

On 4 December 1918 President Wilson boarded the SS George Washington to cross the Atlantic and attend the Paris Peace Conference. He ignored advice from Robert Lansing, who said he would dilute his influence by going to France instead of dictating his wishes from a distance.¹ But Wilson held the Allied purse strings and controlled fresh military power, whereas Lansing was only his Secretary of State. He and not Lansing occupied the White House and he insisted on going to France. A terrible war had been brought to a close; a second one must be prevented.

Although Wilson was being lionized on the Paris boulevards, he cut an unimpressive figure in the closed proceedings of the conference. His ‘Fourteen Points’ had prescribed no practical policy, only a set of objectives. Even his ideas about Germany lacked exactitude and he made things worse by forbidding his delegation to carry out preparatory discussion and drafting.² He recognized his own lack of detailed knowledge about European controversies. His habit was to defer to Allied committees of experts, and Clemenceau and Lloyd George were adept at imposing their projects.³ Wilson’s ultimate passion was to gain approval for a League of Nations. The other delegations offered a flattering opinion of this project, and whenever they wished to obstruct one of his ideas they used the device of suggesting that only the League could resolve its complexities. The President forfeited advantage by never even raising his voice. His failing health was also finding him out and he simply lacked the energy for political disputes. He guarded his own counsel; even his confidant Colonel House had lost influence. French and British leaders saw that the President was a fading force and got used to agreeing the plans in advance of meeting him and gaining his imprimatur.

‘Reparations’ were on the lips of nearly every French politician except those few who sympathized with Lenin. Clemenceau aimed to make Germany incapable of striking France ever again. John Maynard Keynes offered this portrait:

[Clemenceau] carried no papers and no portfolio, and was unattended by any personal secretary, though several French ministers and officials appropriate to the particular matter in hand would be present round him. His walk, his hand and his voice were not lacking in vigour, but he bore nevertheless, especially after the attempt upon [his life], the aspect of an old man conserving his strength for important occasions. He spoke seldom, leaving the initial statement of the French case to his ministers or officials; he closed his eyes often and sat back in his chair with an impassive face of parchment, his gray gloved hands clasped in front of him. A short sentence, decisive or cynical, was generally sufficient… ⁴

Clemenceau behaved with elaborate courtesy, always asking Wilson for his opinion. But this was a feint: he wanted Germany punished.

In this environment there was little scope for the Western Allies to give careful consideration to Russia and its communist leadership. French, British, American and Italian forces were masters of the continent. They were determined to finish their business in central Europe first and foremost. The Allied Supreme War Council, founded on Lloyd George’s initiative in November 1917 to oversee military strategy as well as plans for peace, did not entirely ignore the Russian question but quickly found it difficult to handle. There was no opportunity even to hear representations from Russia without offending one group or another. The Supreme Council (as it became known) began by keeping Sergei Sazonov, the tsar’s Minister of Foreign Affairs till 1916 and now fulfilling the same role for the White Russians, at arm’s length.⁵

On 16 January 1919, Lloyd George spoke in the Council of Ten — representing the main victor powers — at the Quai d’Orsay. While arguing that something had to be done about Russia, he depressingly stipulated:

Firstly, the real facts are not known;

Secondly, it is impossible to get the facts, the only way is to adjudicate the question; and

Thirdly, conditions in Russia are very bad; there is general misgovernment and starvation. It is not known who is getting the upper hand, but the hope that the Bolshevik Government would collapse had not been realized.⁶

Intervention on an adequate scale would mean an occupation: ‘The mere idea of crushing Bolshevism by a military force is pure madness.’ And in any case it was almost inevitable that Allied troops would mutiny against any order to deploy them in yet another war, and a permanent blockade was objectionable since it would lead to mass starvation. The chances of the Whites overthrowing the Bolsheviks were therefore not the brightest. Lloyd George therefore felt it preferable to call the various sides in Russia’s armed struggles to the negotiating table in Paris and get them to agree on a definitive settlement under the eyes of the victor powers.⁷

President Wilson agreed. In a memorandum of 19 January 1919, he urged the need to pull out the Allied expeditions as soon as possible: he had no intention of letting himself be ‘led further into the Russian chaos’. This was the dominant opinion in the US delegation expressed by General Tasker Bliss and Herbert Hoover. When Bliss heard of Marshal Foch’s proposal for a multinational army to invade Russia after the signing of the German peace treaty, he argued for American financial power to be brought to bear against it. Most countries in Europe, including France, were bankrupt. Even the United Kingdom would ruin its economy if it started a Russian crusade. Bliss argued that the US should use its economic strength to enforce the withdrawal of troops from Russia.⁸ Hoover too opposed the idea of an American invasion, telling Wilson that ‘our people at home’ would look askance at US soldiers being assigned to assist the reactionary Whites. Kolchak and Denikin, he maintained, had a poor reputation in America and Wilson would be wise to take account of public opinion. Hoover added that the arrival of American soldiers in Russia would have the counter-productive result of uniting the Russians behind Lenin and Trotsky. His advice was to put aside the Russian question until such time as peace prevailed in the rest of the world. Diplomatic pressures were desirable; big armies were not.

But Allied officials who thought military intervention was the solution were still vociferous — and demanded to be heard. Joseph Noulens had left Archangel in mid-December, and on 20 January 1919 he addressed the conference with a plea for the violent overthrow of Soviet tyranny and terror since the communists were enemies of the Entente.⁹ The Danish ambassador Harald Scavenius took the same line. As the latest of the foreign diplomats to leave Petrograd he was up to date with recent news and stressed Moscow’s intention to spread its revolution abroad by whatever means came to hand.¹⁰

President Wilson would have none of this, however, and determined instead to send an emissary to Moscow to explore whether the Soviet leadership was willing to end the Civil War. William C. Bullitt came into the reckoning. Impressed by his State Department reports on Europe, Wilson had included him in the American delegation to Paris and made him head of the Division of Current Intelligence Summaries.¹¹ The President thought him just the person, despite his lack of diplomatic experience, to go and talk directly to Lenin. Wilson and Bullitt agreed that peace could come to Russia if the contending ‘Russian factions’ were put in a room together and asked to settle their disputes. Lansing gave his assent to the dispatch of Bullitt even though he lacked any optimism about the outcome.¹² The Council of Ten convened on 21 January to discuss Wilson’s proposal. Lloyd George gave his support, arguing that the Bolsheviks would lose influence if the Russian people felt that they had received a fair hearing in Paris. Clemenceau objected. Averse in principle to negotiating with Bolsheviks, he warned that Bolshevism was already spreading westwards. But when Wilson and Lloyd George combined against him he was forced to give way.¹³

Wilson’s spirits were rising. W. H. Buckler, an attaché at the US embassy in London, discussed American peace proposals with Litvinov in Stockholm. Even though Litvinov had to leave for Russia — together with Vatslav Vorovski and Arthur Ransome — when Sweden broke relations with Sovnarkom in January 1919, he had responded enthusiastically to Buckler, and the President was excited by the report he received.¹⁴ Litvinov now wrote to Wilson indicating that American companies could do good business in Russia. He urged Americans to hear the arguments of all the belligerents in the Civil War. He promised that Soviet communists, in the event of a peace being agreed, would desist from subversive propaganda in the West. He warned that a White military victory would open the door to the Romanov dynasty’s restoration. He expressed confidence in ‘the good will of the American Government’.¹⁵ Litvinov’s letter impressed Wilson and Lloyd George, and the proposal for a conference of Russia’s warring sides was prioritized. The Prime Minister had wanted to summon the Russians to Paris whereas the President preferred to assemble them on the largest of the so-called Princes Islands — Büyük Ada or Prinkipo — in the Sea of Marmara off the coast of Constantinople; Lloyd George gave way to him.¹⁶

The impetus for a Russian conference appeared unstoppable until Winston Churchill, the recently appointed Secretary of State for War, arrived in the French capital on 14 February. This happened to be the date when Wilson, who was constitutionally obliged to limit the duration of his foreign stays, was scheduled to leave for the US. Harold Nicolson, a member of the British delegation, recorded:

Meet Winston Churchill in the hotel passage. ‘Hello,’ I say to him. ‘Have you come over to hurry us up?’ Things are very slow at the Paris Peace Conference.

‘No,’ Churchill answers. ‘I have come to get myself an army.’¹⁷

Towards the end of that long day at the conference, Churchill caught sight of Wilson rising to leave for the Gare du Nord and asked: ‘Could we not have some decision about Russia?’¹⁸ Wilson rested his hand on Clemenceau’s chair and said that he was putting his hopes in holding peace talks off the Turkish coast. He was willing to go there in person. Although his priority was to get out of Russia entirely, he commented that if his Russian initiative came to nothing he would ‘do his share with the other Allies in any military measures that they considered necessary and practicable to help the Russian armies now in the field’.¹⁹

Even Churchill still stopped short of calling for an Allied crusade — the quips he made in conversation tended to disguise this. His preferred alternative was to give aid to the Whites while forming an alliance of the states on Russia’s borders, and General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, supported him on this. Wilson was strongly suspicious of Lloyd George, sometimes finding him ‘pronouncedly Bolshevist’.²⁰ Careful husbandry of resources would be essential for Churchill’s scheme and he suggested withdrawing British forces from the south Caucasus and assuring Turkey of London’s friendly intentions. The United Kingdom’s huge post-war surplus of munitions should be delivered to the Whites along with a contingent of British officers.²¹

Churchill aimed to get the Allies to establish a Council on Russian Affairs and ascertain what resources could be made available for action of every kind — military, political and economic — in Russia. Balfour liked the idea, and Churchill went back to Lloyd George to argue that, if the Prinkipo project fell apart, the Allies would be in a position ‘to take a definite decision’.²² Behind this measured statement lay Churchill’s desire for action. If the Bolsheviks rejected the call for an armistice in their Civil War, he wanted the Allied powers to declare and increase military support for the Whites. Lloyd George wrote to his private secretary Philip Kerr expressing displeasure. Churchill was becoming a pest. The Prime Minister wanted to avoid political trouble and an unsustainable budget at home; he required proper evidence that the Russians wanted foreigners to interfere in matters relating to their governance. He probably also felt the need to guard against Churchill trying to increase the size of the Allied forces in Russia; and he knew his friend too well to believe that he would quietly abide by whatever policy emerged from the Allied Supreme Council.²³

On 22 February 1919, Bullitt set off for Russia with his friend Lincoln Steffens. Both were pro-Soviet and had grandiose ideas about what they could achieve, even though Lansing’s letter of assignation specified only ‘the purpose of studying conditions, political and economic’ — Wilson had characteristically left the drafting to the State Department.²⁴ Bullitt was anyway not of a mind or character to defer to Lansing. His ambition was to settle the Russian question on terms acceptable to the Soviet authorities, and he thought well of Lenin even before encountering him. In his pocket he had Colonel House’s written assurance that if the Sovnarkom agreed to the American terms, the US would resume trade with Russia, institute a food-relief scheme and withdraw Allied troops. Bullitt had orders to avoid discussing the paying off of Russian state loans. The British were to be informed of the negotiating tactics but not the French. Wilson and Lansing knew that Clemenceau would make a fuss about the need to raise the grievances of French investors.²⁵ Bullitt consulted Philip Kerr before departing. In this way he felt satisfied that whatever he accomplished would enjoy endorsement from Lloyd George and Balfour.²⁶

It was Bullitt’s first trip to Russia; he spoke no Russian and his understanding of Russia’s politics was less than deep. Yet he suffered no deficit of confidence in his talks with the Soviet leadership. With his flimsy acquaintance with Bolshevik history he was convinced that they were men of their word and open to peaceful compromise.²⁷ Lenin and Chicherin warned that if they were to sign an armistice, they needed ‘a semi-official guarantee’ that the Americans, British and French would enforce it on the White side as well.²⁸ The week of conversations was thrilling for Bullitt, who thought he had obtained a watertight deal he could take back to Wilson and Lloyd George in Paris. He and Steffens left Moscow on 15 March, escorted by Arthur Ransome and Bill Shatov.²⁹

But back in Paris things did not turn out as Bullitt expected. George Hill was there on a Secret Service Bureau assignment, under orders to put his special knowledge of Russia at the disposal of the British delegation.³⁰ When he discovered that Bullitt was pressing the case for recognizing the Soviet government, Hill contacted the anticommunist reporter Henry Wickham Steed — and the two of them conferred with Sidney Reilly, who was in France after a brief trip to Russia.³¹ Steed had information that Lloyd George was close to approving Wilson’s ideas on Russia. He was determined to thwart such an outcome. On 28 March 1919 the Daily Mail published an editorial by him fulminating against Lloyd George for betraying the White Russians and falling victim to a conspiracy by ‘international Jewish financiers’ and Germans to assist the communists in holding on to power in Moscow.³² The tirade shook Lloyd George. When he breakfasted with Bullitt that morning, he said that the Mail’s editorial made it impossible for him to support the proposals he had brought back from Russia: ‘As long as the British press is doing this kind of thing how can you expect me to be sensible about Russia?’³³ Bullitt had no greater success with his patron Woodrow Wilson. The Prinkipo project was scuppered before ever coming before the Allied Supreme Council.

Bullitt had overestimated his right to speak in the President’s name. He was also credulous about Moscow. If Lenin was willing to call a truce in the Civil War and attend a conference, it was only because the Red military position was bad at the time. Sovnarkom would have benefited from another breathing space. Only a fool could believe that Lenin would not rip up an agreement when it suited him. It was equally unlikely that Kolchak would remain content with what he held in the Urals or that Denikin would stay put in southern Russia; and the National Centre leaders had no hesitation in rejecting ‘artificial’ attempts at peace-making.³⁴ They knew their Lenin and Trotsky better than Bullitt did.

Wilson was not without his devious side and was already giving consideration to Kolchak’s request for military supplies. William Phillips, Assistant Secretary of State during Lansing’s absence in Paris, wanted to take the side of the Whites and help them to victory. Wilson and Lansing asked for time to consult General William S. Graves who led the US expeditionary force that had landed in eastern Siberia in August 1918. When Graves answered positively about Kolchak, Wilson authorized financial credit to be provided to the White Army for 260,000 rifles on condition that Kolchak pledged to prevent a return to power of the Romanovs, hold free elections and honour Russian state debts. Kolchak gave his assent, and weapons, clothing and food were shipped to Siberia, albeit surreptitiously since Republican Congressmen were already criticizing the administration for interfering in the Civil War. The US administration hit on the device of using Boris Bakhmetev, the Provisional Government’s ambassador to Washington. Bakhmetev retained the right of access to the bank accounts of the Provisional Government. Collaboration with him obviated the need to apply for funds and permission from the US Congress.³⁵

Wilson at the same time remained adamantly opposed to an Allied invasion. Francis, after surgery in London, accompanied the President back to New York. He proposed sending 100,000 US troops to Petrograd to oversee fresh elections.³⁶ Francis was to recall how he explained the obstacles:

The President replied that he had mentioned my recommendation to Lloyd George and that Lloyd George’s expression was, if he should order any British soldiers to go to Russia they not only would object but refuse to go. The President furthermore stated that he had mentioned the same subject to Clemenceau, and he had met the reply that if Clemenceau should order French troops to go to Russia they would mutiny, but the President said he would give further consideration to my recommendation.³⁷

Whether this was the real reason for American inactivity is doubtful. Wilson knew that so large a contingent would be practically an invasion force, and he wanted nothing to do with it. He preferred Hoover’s idea of offering food aid to Soviet Russia on condition that Lenin promised to cease fomenting revolution across his borders.³⁸ There was no objection from Britain and France, and Wilson invited the Norwegian polar explorer and philanthropist Fridtjof Nansen to head the relief mission to Russia. It was Nansen who radioed the proposal to Lenin in April 1919.

The Russians replied on 14 May, welcoming the offer of food supplies but refusing to cease fighting.³⁹ By then Kolchak was on the retreat. Lenin was not covetous of foreign grain at the expense of throwing away victory over a White army. Nor was Kolchak any more enthusiastic about Wilson’s initiative. He judged that the difficulty of crushing communism would increase if food relief arrived under a communist administration. The White Russian ambassador Sergei Sazonov cabled from Paris advising him to be more tactful in his dealings with the Allies. Kolchak’s response was to ask Sazonov to come to Omsk and see the Russian situation for himself.⁴⁰

Churchill had so agitated Lloyd George that the Prime Minister asked him to provide a paper costing the military options for Russia. Churchill havered, arguing that the Allies needed to fix a clear political line before he could offer any financial accountancy.⁴¹ This pleased Lloyd George, who felt he was denting Churchill’s aggressive inclinations. The French leaders were as anti-Bolshevik as Churchill. In public, Clemenceau and Poincare´ denounced the iniquities of Bolshevism — and they were eloquent about the Soviet expropriation of funds belonging to hundreds of thousands of French investors. But privately they admitted that a war against Soviet Russia would be as onerous for France as Lloyd George saw it would be for the United Kingdom. France had defeated Germany at the cost of ruining the French economy and could not start another big war. And when Béla Kun established a communist regime in Budapest in March 1919 the limits of Allied power were made manifest. American officials in Paris suggested to Marshal Foch that the Hungarians should not be left to their fate at Kun’s hands. Foch’s reply killed off any illusion about France’s preparedness to intervene. He said that he would need a minimum of 350,000 troops to invade and occupy — and he could no longer muster so many soldiers.⁴²

Captain T. T. C. Gregory of the American Relief Administration scoffed that ‘a battalion and a bugle under the Stars and Stripes’ would be quite enough to do the job.⁴³ Whether this was overly optimistic did not matter; Wilson was never going to agree to such an expedition. The President was exhausted and under attack from all quarters. His former admirer William C. Bullitt resigned from the State Department on 17 May 1919. In his letter of resignation, he told the President that the Allied peace settlement could never hold — it was unfair to so many countries. Bullitt went on to say that the President should have ‘made your fight in the open’ and kept faith with the millions of people who had been willing him to stick by his principles.⁴⁴ He wrote to Lansing more respectfully but ended with a plea against both the German peace terms and America’s entry into the League of Nations: he could see no good coming from either.⁴⁵

The German treaty was the first to be concluded at the Peace Conference. Clemenceau had worn down Wilson sufficiently to persuade him to accept terms that were deeply shocking for most Germans. Vast reparations were to be paid and war guilt was to be admitted; and Germany and Austria, regardless of what their peoples wanted, were forbidden to merge into a single German state. Wilson had considered lining up with Lloyd George against Clemenceau in order to soften the treaty, but the negotiations behind the scenes proved fruitless. Tired out and drained of practical ideas, Wilson gave up the struggle and, whereas the British and French experts remained active, American influence declined as the President faded.⁴⁶ The treaty was solemnly signed in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919. The choice of place was deliberate. It had been there in 1871 that the French had been humiliated by the victorious Prussians. Germany had become a pariah power, its only consolation being that German ministers knew exactly what the Allies were demanding of them. Soviet Russia, the other pariah power, still had no idea what the Allied intentions towards it might ultimately be.

19. EUROPEAN REVOLUTION

While the Allied powers had been conferring in Paris, they were troubled by some of the news that reached them from central Europe. Their fear grew that communism might spread across Europe; and although the German government had crushed the Spartacists in Berlin in January 1919, the fact that an insurrection had even been attempted was a worrying sign that the political far left could exploit a situation where unemployment and food shortages were on the rise. Germany was unlikely to be the only country which experienced such disorder. The victor powers felt anxious about the peace.

The Bolshevik leaders in Moscow drew comfort from exactly the same situation. Having made their own revolution by taking advantage of Russia’s wartime disintegration, they remained convinced that European sympathizers would soon emulate them — and although they had not wished for the death of Rosa Luxemburg, her untimely removal meant that Lenin and his Politburo could more easily dominate Comintern. Lenin was in buoyant mood, predicting revolutions that would set the continent on fire. Despite all the military difficulties faced by the Bolsheviks in the Urals, he expressed disdain for the Allied expeditionary forces in Russia. He told Arthur Ransome that Lloyd George might just as well send his soldiers to a communist university.¹ He predicted that if the captured conscripts witnessed Bolshevism at work they would quickly turn into Bolsheviks themselves. The Soviet authorities put Boris Reinstein — a former emigrant to America — in charge of propaganda among British POWs who were allowed to stroll around the streets of Moscow.² After intercepting a letter from a Private A. J. Fardon who had exchanged captivity for a job in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, and seemed to be rather taken with the Soviet model, the Directorate of Military Intelligence in London grew worried about the Soviet tactic — and it was irritated with Ransome for facilitating Private Fardon’s correspondence with his family.³

Ransome had also riled Lenin by saying that, while communism could succeed for the Russians, it had no chance of doing the same in Britain. Lenin replied:

We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had abortive typhoid, and was going about with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe is already there.⁴

When Ransome quipped that any British political disturbances were merely the sign of an abortive revolution, Lenin swatted him aside:

Yes, that is possible. It is, perhaps, an educative period, in which English workmen will come to realize their political needs, and turn from liberalism to socialism. Socialism is certainly weak in England. Your socialist movement, your socialist parties… when I was in England I zealously attended everything I could, and for a country with so large an industrial population they were pitiable, pitiable… a handful at a street corner… a school class… pitiable… But you must remember one great difference between Russia of 1905 and England of today. Our first Soviet in Russia was made during the revolution. Your shop-stewards committees have been in existence long before. They are without programme, without direction, but the opposition they will meet will force a programme on them.⁵

Lenin stood by his ideas of historical inevitability. Where Russians had gone, the British would surely follow whether Ransome agreed or not.

The Allied governments knew only too well that this was Lenin’s objective and could see that he and his comrades had attracted foreign sympathizers in Moscow who might return home and stir up revolution. The French were the first to take preventive action when Jacques Sadoul indicated a desire to assume a role in public life in Paris and only a bout of typhus held him back in the winter of 1918–19. He planned to tell his compatriots what he knew — or thought he knew — about the Soviet order. He also aimed to divulge information about France’s actions in Russia. Attacks on him appeared in the French press. Sadoul suspected that ministers had instigated them so as to keep him in Moscow and pre-empt a political scandal.⁶ When the French Socialist Party adopted him as a candidate in the national elections in honour of his struggle against Allied armed military intervention in Russia, the government in Paris forestalled him by setting up a court-martial for treason. He was tried in absentia and, in November 1919, sentenced to death for treason.⁷

The next attempt at communist revolution occurred not in Paris or London but in Munich. Soldiers had returned from the western front angry and exhausted. Unemployment was growing and food shortages increased. Resentment at the Allies’ demands was on the rise. Strikes and demonstrations spread and the Russian idea of workers electing their own councils was copied. Kurt Eisner, Bavaria’s Prime Minister, tried to dampen the fire. His moderating influence was not widely appreciated. Indeed, he was hated at both extremes of the political spectrum, and on 21 February 1919 a fiery young aristocrat gunned him down. The assassination encouraged Max Levien, a leader of the Munich Workers’ Council, to think that there would never be a better or more necessary time to seize power. Born and raised in Russia, Levien had come to Germany to take a degree in zoology and unlike other political emigrants he stayed in central Europe after the fall of the Romanovs. His political partner was Eugen Leviné, who hailed from St Petersburg and had studied in Heidelberg after being exiled to Siberia. Their German associates were heavily represented in the liberal professions. They were fervent admirers of the October Revolution, and Levien and Leviné put themselves forward as the Lenin and Trotsky of the political far left in southern Germany.

On 7 April 1919 they proclaimed the Bavarian Council Republic. Factories and large commercial enterprises were expropriated. Church, aristocracy and bourgeoisie were threatened. Patrols were instituted around the city’s central districts. Telegrams of victory were sent to Moscow. Lenin replied congratulating the insurrectionaries; yet again he thought he had the proof that communism would spread quickly and easily to the rest of Europe.

The fact that Levien and Leviné were of Jewish parentage and were Russian passport-holders did not go unremarked in Munich. In the eyes of Eugenio Pacelli, the papal nuncio who in 1939 would become Pope Pius XII, Levien was ‘a young man, about thirty or thirty-five, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.’⁸ The nuncio described the female communists as filthy sluts and he associated Levien and Leviné with dirt, slipperiness and even bestiality. Pacelli’s prejudices were shared by many Christians in those years, and the Council Republic was widely regarded as a foreign disease. But the leaders of the Council Republic, by mixing exclusively with people who shared their political extremism, failed to detect the revulsion that millions of Germans felt for their creed. Nor did they appreciate how the disruption of social and economic stability that had enabled their seizure of power was only a temporary phenomenon. Retaliation was inevitable. But Levien and his comrades underestimated their enemies’ capacity to do them damage — and at a time when Kolchak was threatening Moscow, there was no chance of armed support from the Red Army.

The Bavarian Council Republic lasted only as long as it took for the national government in Berlin to organize an attack. Levien and Levine´ were breathtakingly naive. Believing that common criminals were simply victims of the old Imperial order, they released all convicts from prison. (Neither Lenin nor Trotsky was ever tempted into such silliness.) The subsequent wave of robberies and murders in Munich made it a terrible place to live. The economic emergency intensified as businesses closed down. Levien and Leviné had no idea how to restore employment, and their period in power was characterized by a collapse of industry and commerce.

In May 1919 the Freikorps assembled in Bamberg 150 miles to the north and moved on Munich alongside regular army units. Known communists were shot in the streets. The official tally was six hundred deaths, but the reality could well have been twice that. The fighting was over within a few hours as workers’ militias quickly laid down their arms. Levien escaped to Vienna until he took refuge in Soviet Russia in June 1921. Leviné, a less worldly person, saw it as his duty to remain with his comrades in Munich. Arrested with the writer Ernst Toller, he was tried for sedition. He was resigned to his fate: ‘We communists are all dead men on leave.’⁹ He was executed after being found guilty of complicity in the shooting of hostages. The lamps of communism had failed to illumine central Europe. Although Soviet leaders were disappointed, they observed that German politics remained volatile and that the national government could not deal with its enemies on the political far left without bringing in the army and paramilitary forces. The economy was in tatters. Even if the Munich experiment had proved unsuccessful, this did not mean that workers in Germany and elsewhere in central Europe would not eventually find the ingredients to produce a revolutionary order.

Hungarian communists gave grounds for optimism from 21 March 1919, when they swept to power in Budapest with a communist dominated coalition. The revolution was quickly spread to the entire country — or at least to those parts of Hungary left to the Hungarians by the Allies. Lenin and Trotsky greeted it with the same warmth as they had shown to the Bavarian Council Republic. Béla Kun, the Hungarian revolutionary leader, was a zealot for the Soviet order. He had spent time in Russia after being captured with the armies of Austria-Hungary on the eastern front. As an ex-POW he formed a Hungarian communist group in Moscow in March 1918, returning to Budapest as soon as the Great War was over. Kun had worked as a journalist and wrote lively pamphlets against the Western Allies and the prospect of a humiliating peace. He now found he had a talent for oratory, too. The unstable government that was striving to moderate the Allied terms threw him into prison. But when the social-democrats entered the cabinet they liberated Kun as a comrade on the political left. He walked straight from the cells into a ministerial post. He had been badly beaten while incarcerated and his face showed the wounds that he had received and fully intended to avenge.¹⁰

Like his friend and fellow communist Tibor Szamuely, Kun was a fanatic. Solidarity with Soviet Russia was proclaimed and reports of Bolshevik achievements were carried in the Budapest newspapers. The Red flag was hoisted on public buildings. Trade unions received a generous quota of free tickets to the theatres. The banks, mines and big textile factories were nationalized. Kun established a security police that soon gained notoriety for its terror against ‘class enemies’. Szamuely assembled the ‘Lenin Boys’ whom he sent into the villages to seize the harvest and impose a system of collective farms. (The same thing was happening in the Ukrainian countryside; but whereas in Ukraine it was against the instructions of Moscow, in Hungary it was on Kun’s orders.) Churches were desecrated and priests and landlords were arrested or murdered. When peasants objected to the violence, the Lenin Boys turned on them too. The communization of Hungarian society was undertaken at a faster pace even than in Russia after the October Revolution. Blood flowed copiously.

Such popularity as Kun retained lay in his unequivocal rejection of the Allies’ schemes for Hungary. The Western Allies planned to reward Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia with territory that until then had been part of Hungary. Hungary would become a third of its previous size. As a result even Hungarians who were wary of Kun’s communist internationalist doctrines lent him their support. The communist leadership were willing to act rather than merely grumble.

Recruiting left-of-centre commanders from the Imperial armed forces, Kun mobilized the troops to fight for every patch of ‘Hungarian’ soil. He vowed to repel the growing incursions by Romanian and Czechoslovak troops. He paraded foreign POWs through the streets of Budapest. Hungary’s interests, he implied, were safe in his hands. Although he disliked the Hungarian national flag, he yielded when Ferenc Julier, Chief of the General Staff, told him that without it there might be trouble in getting an army into the field against the Romanians.¹¹ Kun was cunning in his interviews for the foreign press, pretending to be much more moderate than he really was and claiming that it would be years before any truly communist policies would be applied. For a while he was successful and the communist regime threw back the Romanian and Czech invaders in April 1919.¹² Its Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia, taking several towns before meeting effective resistance. It closed the Danube to shipping, and Austrian attempts to break the river blockade were disrupted ‘by the Hungarian Bolshevists who would fire on boats’.¹³ The Orient Express continued to run across Hungary from Romania, but Red Guards with their fixed bayonets and grenade belts made crossing the border an unpleasant experience.¹⁴

The Allies reacted with an economic blockade designed to bring Kun and Szamuely to their knees.¹⁵ Food supplies were depleted. The only solution according to Kun was to expropriate more grain, vegetables and meat from the villages. Clashes with the peasantry intensified as civil war broke out.

Kun and Szamuely had always seen their ultimate salvation in international revolution. They begged Lenin and Trotsky to send a contingent of the Red Army from newly conquered Ukraine.¹⁶ Little did the communist leaders in Moscow and Budapest know that American forces were intercepting Hungarian wireless traffic.¹⁷ So nothing that Kun wrote in his telegrams was truly confidential.¹⁸ It was no secret, of course, that the Soviet leaders, if the opportunity arose, were intent on helping to spread communist revolution west-wards. The Bolshevik party’s entire foreign policy had been built on this foundation. Just occasionally there were surprises for the Allied powers, such as when the Austrian security agency claimed to have discovered a secret plan of Kun’s for a communist seizure of power in Vienna. This may have been a case of counter-intelligence officers trying to prove their usefulness to Austria’s new social-democratic government.¹⁹ It would seem that the Americans later used their intercepted information to prevent Kun from heading to Switzerland as an envoy of Lenin and Trotsky.²⁰ Old ‘Austria-Hungary’ was boiling up with political conflicts that could spill over the new national borders. It appeared that anything might happen, and it frequently did.

Lenin and Trotsky did not dismiss Kun’s requests out of hand, and their Red Army high command began to examine how it might lend assistance to Hungary. It quickly became obvious that a campaign across the Ukrainian frontier would put the Red Army in danger from Kolchak and Denikin. If Russians marched westwards, they might find there was no Soviet homeland to return to. With regret they turned down Kun’s request.²¹

By late summer, the Hungarian Red Army faced rebellion throughout Hungary and threats on the northern borders. Desertions grew in number. The last slim hope of the Kun government vanished on 4 August when Romanian forces, after weeks of fighting in the north of the country, stormed into Budapest. Although they were delighted that a power in the region had overthrown communism, the Western Allies did not approve of what happened next. The Romanian military force was a law unto itself and the Bucharest authorities exercised no restraint over it. Red Hungarian terror was replaced with a White Romanian one, and Hungarian groups emerged seeking revenge on the communists who had tormented them for months. Chaos ensued when the Romanians reduced the police service to six hundred policemen. Attacks on Jews in the streets and in their houses became frequent. The economy fell apart entirely and food became scarce in the capital even for those who had possessions to barter.²² The Romanians stripped the occupied territories of their flour, sugar, medicine and even its railway locomotives.²³ Famine spread across the country.²⁴

US officials were aware that communism remained a threat in central Europe — and not only in Hungary. Herbert Hoover, director of the American Relief Administration, wrote to Woodrow Wilson on 28 March 1919:

Politically the Bolsheviki most certainly represent a minority in every country where they are in control. The Bolsheviki… [have] resorted to terror, bloodshed and murder to a degree long since abandoned even among reactionary tyrannies… [They have] embraced a large degree of emotionalism and… thereby given an impulse to [their] propaganda comparable only to the impulse of large spiritual movements.²⁵

Hoover’s remedy was to counteract Marxism’s appeal by shipping American food relief to central Europe. Europe had depended on grain exports from Russia before the Great War. Hoover argued that American farmers would benefit from filling the gap.²⁶ America had an over-abundance of agricultural produce. Credits should be advanced so that European countries could buy stocks.²⁷

Hoover argued that no better way existed to demonstrate capitalist superiority over communism than to bring the bread of life from the world’s healthiest market economy and help industry and agriculture to recover. He saw that wherever food was short there was a danger of cities toppling into communist hands. American philanthropy, however, came with strings. Hoover stipulated that the recipient governments should maintain order and keep the political far left out of power. Revolutionary disturbances in Vienna were enough for him to suspend aid to Austria temporarily; and he held back supplies from Hungary underr Kun.²⁸ Meanwhile his American Relief Administration transported cereals, medicines, sugar, tinned meat and fish to Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. His efforts in central Europe after the Great War were extraordinary in the face of much obstruction from the French and British, who continued to blockade Germany at the risk of outright mass starvation in 1919. When he learned that American grain cargoes were held up at European ports, Hoover angrily intervened by stressing that he had President Wilson’s full support. Undoubtedly the strain took a toll on him — J. M. Keynes described him admiringly as ‘a weary Titan’ and ‘an exhausted prize-fighter’.²⁹ But Hoover got his way and the French and British stopped being obstructive — and the blockade of Germany was lifted.

Food aid for Germany might help the Allies to avert communist revolutionary advances but it was by no means sufficient in itself. Even incarcerated in Berlin’s Moabit prison, Karl Radek refused to believe that capitalism had a long-term future. From August 1919 he was allowed visitors; he held what he called a salon in his cell as politicians and reporters queued to meet the exotic Bolshevik.³⁰ Another rather unexpected visitor was one of Germany’s leading industrialists, Walter Rathenau, who agreed that any return to the old capitalist order in Europe was impossible. Rathenau spoiled this for Radek by adding that his published oeuvre refuted Marx’s theories as well as Lenin’s prediction of a German proletarian revolution. Radek was also visited by the journalist Maximilien Harden, who came and asked Radek to write a piece for his weekly Die Zukunft. General von Reibnitz, an aristocratic member of the officer corps, arrived with his proposal for a Soviet–German rapprochement and even a German revolution on the Soviet model; and the British reporter Morgan Philips Price, the friend he had made in Petrograd, paid a visit to update him on events in the United Kingdom.³¹

At the same time, Radek was keeping up a secret correspondence with the German communist movement. Ruth Fischer, an Austrian Marxist, was a fount of information for him on her visits to the prison. Not all her news was cheering. Germany’s communist leaders were heading for a split at their party congress in Heidelberg. Austrian communists were discussing how to organize a seizure of power in Vienna, but they had not got far in their preparations.³² Radek wrote a critical pamphlet on the German Communist Party and replied to Karl Kautsky’s attack on Bolshevik rule in Russia. Both works were published by a friendly press in Berlin.³³ Despite having heard of the difficulties for the revolutionary cause in central Europe, he remained confident that the continent was on the brink of revolutionary transformation.

The activities of the Italian political far left also helped to keep his spirits up. Unlike Hungary and Germany, Italy was one of the victorious powers. Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando had attended the Paris Peace Conference just long enough to secure the cession of the Trentino to Italy before returning to Rome. The big cities of the north, Milan and Turin, were shaken by strikes in the large industrial factories. Appeals for quiet negotiation in the national interest fell on deaf ears. Workers elected factory councils that in summer 1919 began to seize control of whole enterprises. The Italian Socialist Party was divided over how to deal with the crisis, and a split was in the making as the radicals expressed solidarity with the October Revolution in Russia. Comintern sent Nikolai Lyubarski as an agent to hasten this outcome with finance and advice.³⁴ The young Sardinian militant Antonio Gramsci saw the factory councils as the embryo of a revolutionary administration that could assume power throughout the country. As editor of L’Ordine Nuovo (‘The New Order’) in Turin, he urged Italian workers to overturn capitalism and move towards self-rule. Orlando’s government positioned troops into the factories before Gramsci and his comrades could realize their objective — and the embers of revolt were put out in the course of the following year.

At the time nobody could yet be sure that communism had been finally cauterized in Europe. Attempt after attempt had been made at launching a revolution that would join hands with the Soviet political experiment. Each time — in Berlin, in Munich, in Budapest and in Turin and Milan — it had been thwarted. But the conditions that provided communist organizations with an opportunity to challenge their governments had still to be eliminated. In many European countries the discontent with living and working conditions remained deep and wide, and far-left militants turned increasingly to Comintern for their guidance and inspiration. What had happened in Petrograd in 1917 might still take place elsewhere. This was one thing about which there was agreement between the Bolsheviks and the leaders of the Western Allies.

20. THE ALLIES AND THE WHITES

As the Paris Peace Conference moved to its close, the need for the Allies to define their Russian policy became urgent. They at last did this on 27 May 1919, when Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando and the leader of the Japanese delegation Saionji Kinmochi conferred in Woodrow Wilson’s residence to draft a message to Kolchak — wherever east of the Urals he was to be found. None of the Allied leaders thought any good could come from negotiating with Sovnarkom. But they also wanted to assure themselves that the Whites were a tolerable alternative worthy of support.

They told Kolchak that it had ‘always been a cardinal axiom of the Allied and Associated Powers to avoid interference in the internal affairs of Russia’. They stressed that Allied intervention had always been limited to assisting those Russians who ‘wanted to continue the struggle against German autocracy and to free their country from German rule’ and to rescue the legion of Czech troops. Now that the war was over they remained willing to do what they could for Russia and help it towards ‘liberty, self-government and peace’. The terms on which they would offer this help were clearly set out. If Kolchak wanted assistance from the Western Allies, he had to promise to call elections to a Constituent Assembly or reconvene the old one. He had to guarantee universal civic freedoms and reaffirm his recognition of Russia’s foreign debts. He had to accept the independence of Poland and Finland. Other borderlands of the former Russian Empire — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Caucasus and central Asia — were to be promised autonomy. Any disputes over territory would have to be referred for adjudication to the League of Nations.¹

Kolchak replied through the French diplomats attached to his headquarters. He assented to Constituent Assembly elections and added that he would step down from power after military victory if this would help. He declared that he was willing to recognize Russian state debts. While accepting that Poland should be free, however, he limited himself to a vague readiness to discuss other international questions at a later date. Although this lay short of wholehearted compliance it satisfied the Western Allies, who wrote back sympathetically on 12 June.² They wanted democracy in Russia, but their greater wish was to bring down Bolshevism; to do so they were more than willing to work with White Russian commanders who had little genuine democratic inclination.

By then, however, the White cause was in terrible straits. Kolchak’s advance was halted at Ufa and the Red counter-offensive broke up his forces in June. Just weeks earlier he had appointed Yevgeni Miller to lead White forces in northern Russia; but Miller, based in Archangel with few troops, could do little more than wait on events. Kolchak’s situation worsened through the summer, and he retreated stage by stage along the Trans-Siberian railway, taking a vast gold reserve with him. He was pushed steadily eastwards, with no realistic hope of recovery, while his troops were attacked en route by the region’s peasants. Meanwhile Denikin had decided that he at last had adequate forces to make his thrust northwards from southern Ukraine. He divided his Volunteer Army into two groups — while one fought its way along the River Volga, the other attacked through central Ukraine. Like Kolchak, Denikin had the simple basic objective of reaching and occupying Moscow with all possible speed. The Red Army, relieved of the threat from the Urals, redeployed its main strength against him and in October 1919, fighting alongside Ukrainian peasant irregulars, decisively defeated Denikin outside Orël, in the border area between Russia and Ukraine, and steadily withdrew to the Ukrainian south.

All this time the Whites pleaded with the Allies to strengthen their military presence in north Russia, southern Ukraine and mid-Siberia. But French commanders in Ukraine fretted about the worsening situation for their troops. General Philippe Henri d’Anselme had never had confidence in France’s expedition and in April decided that evacuation was the only option. His troops were demoralized: few wanted to fight the Red Army and military discipline was breaking down.³ He sent a telegram to Clemenceau saying that it no longer made sense to talk of France’s ‘army of the East’. The longer the troops stayed by the Black Sea, the graver the discontent among them. D’Anselme proposed instead that the French should train and equip the Romanian army, lending it an officer cadre. The Allies should also send food to Romania so that the Romanian people would be sufficiently well fed to provide useful soldiers.⁴ Clemenceau, who was equally anti-Soviet and anti-German, was not pleased, but he was unable to act against the advice from generals on the spot. French military withdrawal was only a matter of time.

Lloyd George was also contemplating the withdrawal of the British expedition from northern Russia. Never having been an enthusiastic interventionist, he had concluded that the time had come to evacuate Archangel and Murmansk. The British labour movement was united against sending troops there and the Hands Off Russia campaign gathered strength on the political left.⁵ The troops themselves yearned to be demobbed; any orders for eastward deployment would almost certainly lead to mutinies. And many businessmen wanted to re-enter Russian markets.

Churchill, however, stood out from the national consensus and continued to favour increased support for the Whites and to oppose any resumption of trade with the areas of Russia under Soviet rule. When he made a fuss in the cabinet, Lloyd George wrote a gentle reprimand:

I wonder whether it is any use my making one last effort to induce you to throw off this obsession which, if you forgive me for saying so, is upsetting your balance. I again ask you to let Russia be, at any rate for a few days, and to concentrate on the quite unjustifiable expenditure in France, at home and in the East, incurred by both the War Office and the Air Department.⁶

The Prime Minister’s mind was on British economic recovery since he saw that the country’s finances could not withstand another war. But he left the expedition where it was for some months. Apart from anything else, the outcome of the Civil War in Russia was in the balance and Lloyd George had no wish to undermine the chances of the Whites. Most Liberal and nearly all Conservative MPs supported the presence of the United Kingdom’s troops in Russia as did the two great newspaper proprietors, Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere.

A sprinkling of parliamentarians challenged this orthodoxy. Labour MPs, many of them having been elected for the first time and not yet experienced in the ways of the House, were quiet on the Russian question; but a small group of independent voices — Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, Commander J. M. Kenworthy and Cecil Malone (who chose not to use his rank after leaving the forces) — criticized the government’s policy; they were favourably reported in the Manchester Guardian, the new Labour Daily Herald and Lord Beaver- brook’s Daily Express.⁷ Churchill ignored the press criticisms of him until the Daily Express printed a letter from Lieutenant Colonel Sherwood Kelly on 6 September 1919 alleging that the Secretary for War had misled the country about British army operations in Russia.⁸ Kelly, a holder of the Victoria Cross, had returned from service in Archangel disgusted by what he saw as governmental duplicity. The expedition had been told that its purpose was limited to protecting British military stores. Kelly accused Churchill and fellow ministers of deceitfully organizing a covert offensive to overthrow Sovnarkom. Obliged to defend both himself and the cabinet against charges of deceit, Churchill denied pursuing a policy of invasion.⁹

The Americans, like Lloyd George, wanted to help the Whites without actually sending their troops to fight alongside them. This had to be undertaken with discretion. The American labour movement was agitating for official recognition of Soviet Russia and a growing business lobby wanted the US to penetrate the Russian market while foreign affairs were moving towards isolationism. Senator Hiram Johnson from California asked why American boys were being shot in Russia. President Wilson and Secretary Lansing let the British and French take any blame for action against Soviet Russia while licensing their own confidential assistance to anti-Bolshevik forces. In Siberia the Cossack ‘strongman’ Semënov, whose army was notorious for its arbitrary violence, nonetheless received US finance and supplies. And when Semënov was defeated by the Reds, the Americans turned to Admiral Kolchak, whose officers were only a little less brutal. After Kolchak went the way of Semënov, Wilson rose from his sick bed to approve help for the White general Nikolai Yudenich, who in autumn 1919 led his North-Western Army in an offensive against Petrograd.¹⁰ The Whites had to agree to pay for the supplies they needed. They could not very well object. They understood that if they wanted to have their country back, they had to meet the going price.

Yet Kolchak was exceptional among the White commanders in possessing a large supply of gold bullion; and even he could hardly carry out physical transactions from the middle of Siberia. The Whites found a way round the problem by drawing on funds registered abroad in the Provisional Government’s name. They had the blessing of the unofficial Russian Foreign Delegation which formed itself in Paris to press for support against the Bolsheviks and included ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Sazonov and ex-Ambassador Vasili Maklakov. Boris Savinkov, who had left Russia after the suppression of his July revolt, joined them at the end of 1918; he was followed from Archangel a year later by Nikolai Chaikovski.¹¹ The former diplomats in the Allied countries — Sergei Sazonov, Boris Bakhmetev and Vasili Maklakov — made the Provisional Government’s accounts available to the White armies, holding their noses as they did so. Sazonov and his friends had no illusions about the reactionary inclinations of the White officer corps, and they complained frequently about the political ineptitude of its commanders. But the Whites embodied Russia’s sole chance of eliminating Bolshevism and the diplomats could not risk letting them lose the Civil War because nobody would disburse the money to pay for arms.

The Allied governments favoured this financial solution knowing that Russian accounts held in western Europe and the US were in healthy balance. Predictably there was some reluctance about this in France, but Clemenceau restricted himself to a strong public reminder that French loans to previous Russian governments should be honoured; he also refrained from any raid on the funds controlled by former Ambassador Maklakov after he received them from the Germans at the end of the Great War.¹² The situation was still easier for former Ambassador Bakhmetev in America, where in December 1918 he had $8,000 million at his disposal.¹³ He also exercised authority over the military supplies bought by Nicholas II’s administration which were still awaiting dispatch from the US.¹⁴ Bakhmetev began to make fresh purchases, informing General Yudenich that three thousand rifles had been bought from the US War Ministry for his use.¹⁵ Yudenich had realized that if he ever succeeded in occupying Petrograd, its citizens were likely to be suffering from starvation; he therefore pressed for food as well as guns and consented to Herbert Hoover commissioning six ships to sail to Tallinn with food supplies. Hoover made Yudenich sign a financial guarantee; and he suggested that, if Yudenich could not hand over the funds, he should apply to Sazonov for funding from the Russian governmental accounts held in Paris.¹⁶

The Allies were not acting out of altruism. While hoping for a White victory, they looked forward to the restoration of a private-enterprise economy in Russia that would benefit their nations — and they aimed to get first bite of the Russian economic cherry. With this in mind, the British set up a Department of Overseas Trade in the Foreign Office, and made John Picton Bagge their commercial secretary in Odessa.¹⁷

The Allied powers set about facilitating international commerce in the areas under White control. The trading conditions were not of the easiest kind. The economy of the former Russian Empire had been terribly disrupted in 1917–18. Although business deals continued to be conducted outside the Soviet-occupied territory, corruption and fraud were widespread. Entrepreneurs in Russia and Ukraine lacked financial credit and Western banks were understandably wary of underwriting projects to trade with them.¹⁸ But many businessmen from Russia who were currently based abroad were willing to take chances by re-entering Russian and Ukrainian markets. Vladimir Bashkirov in Paris was one of them. Seeing that he would make no progress in France, he liaised with Bakhmetev’s embassy in Washington with a view to restarting the Pacific trade with Vladivostok. The Siberian Creameries Co-operative Union welcomed such initiative and planned to send its products across the ocean to the US ports of Seattle and San Francisco.¹⁹ Western Siberia had exported huge quantities of yoghurt and butter to Germany before 1914; and the Union now looked east for new markets in America, at least until Kolchak started his headlong retreat in summer 1919. The difficulties were immense. It was hard to find shipping companies willing to sail for Vladivostok even though the arms and equipment for the Whites had been assembled in Seattle for transit.²⁰ Civilian categories of goods were still more difficult to move to and from Siberia. But there were glimmerings of a future very different from the one which Lenin and Trotsky intended for Russia.

Yudenich did not rely entirely on Paris for his funds. Before starting the North-Western Army’s offensive, he created a financial consultative committee to help until money reached him from the ambassadors. Emil Nobel was a leading committee member who, together with other oil company owners, put up a loan to tide Yudenich over the campaign. It was a scheme of mutual advantage. If the companies were ever to reclaim their assets in Baku, they needed the White armies to be properly financed to do the fighting.²¹

Appreciation of the difficulties facing the Whites earned them a degree of sympathy — and a blind eye was turned to the evidence that White commanders aimed to conquer all the territories once ruled by the Romanovs. This is what the slogan of ‘Russia One and Indivisible’ meant to them. The Whites played along with Allied demands to the extent of expressing semi-compliance with their commitment to make concessions to the peoples of the borderlands of the former Russian Empire. But they failed to follow this up with action. When General Gustaf Mannerheim, the Finnish army leader, came to Paris to propose an alliance against Sovnarkom and the Red Army, he was sent packing. The Whites flatly refused to recognize Finland’s independence. Sazonov’s reaction was characteristic: ‘We shall get along without them, because Denikin will be in Moscow in two weeks.’²² Denikin himself was furious with the Allies for recognizing the Finnish government and said that war would come of it.²³ The White armies preferred to fight alone rather than compromise their objective of reconstituting Russia complete with all its territorial appendages. Allied governments reinforced this recalcitrance of the Whites by refusing to give official recognition to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and in the Estonian case they put pressure on Tallinn to provide Yudenich with freedom for his military preparations on Estonian soil.

At the British War Office, Churchill energetically removed impediments to the Whites’ procurement of supplies. Eighteen aeroplanes were shipped to the North-West Army.²⁴ Tanks were also made available. Yudenich, though, faced a different kind of shortage as a commander. Operating from newly independent Estonia rather than Russia itself, he had a problem in recruiting Russian troops. Conscription being impossible, he asked the Allies to enable volunteers to leave the POW camps in Germany; he badly needed experienced officers, and again Churchill was helpful.²⁵ E. L. Spears, who had headed intelligence operations for a while in northern Russia, put him in touch with Boris Savinkov when he came over from Paris for discussions.²⁶ Churchill and Savinkov took to each other. Savinkov also had a meeting with Lloyd George but immediately sensed the Prime Minister’s ambivalence about increasing the assistance to the Whites. Churchill was obviously the best hope of the Whites, although Savinkov complained that he had an alarming tendency to regard the Russians as British subjects. When pointing to a map of Russia with Denikin’s regiments marked with flags, Churchill declared: ‘Here, this is my army.’²⁷ This was not a good way to win the respect of a Russian patriot, but Savinkov restrained himself. Churchill’s delusions of grandeur did not matter so long as he continued to support the White cause.

The labour movements in Europe remained an obstacle to such efforts since dockers were militantly opposed to British and French assistance to the anti-Bolshevik armies. Germany was another potential source of supplies for the Whites; its military equipment was cheap after the Great War and there was plenty of it on sale. But German workers persistently held up such exports to Russia and Ukraine.²⁸ As it happened, this mattered less to Denikin than to other White armies because he could buy material channelled clandestinely through Salonika and Alexandria where no trade union was likely to hold things up.²⁹

One crucial piece of assistance came free of charge: Western intelligence reports. After the Allies withdrew their diplomatic corps from Russia they usually relocated their espionage networks to wherever the White military headquarters were operating at the time, whether in southern Russia, mid-Siberia or Estonia. The British with their immense empire had established the world’s most comprehensive cable system and could tap into almost any message whenever they wanted.³⁰ Allied and White networks shared a lot of the information they were gathering. Denikin could rely on being told what the French and British military missions learned from their capitals and from their own secret agencies in Russia and Ukraine.³¹ Yudenich too obtained material from ministries in Paris and London.³² He received information of high quality about the political and social situation in Russia and Ukraine,³³ and he usually got the data he needed on the latest deployments and appointments in the Red Army.³⁴ And although the commanders of the Whites — Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Miller — had their disputes, they did not let them escalate to the point of disrupting each other’s military operations. Each White army used its team of radio telegraphists to keep the others informed of their plans, and Sazonov in Paris was also included in the exchange of telegrams.³⁵

The Whites conducted a deep surveillance of planning and conditions in the Red Army. Denikin’s agency was called Azbuka (or ABC). Its operatives received a wide licence from him for its spying activity — they even kept an informant inside the National Centre despite the fact that it was firmly allied to his Volunteer Army. Azbuka’s penetration of Ukraine had been deep ever since 1918;³⁶ and as the Volunteer Army grew in strength, the agency increased its geographical range and reported in detail on what Russia’s workers thought about the Bolsheviks and on how the peasants were reacting to Soviet rule.³⁷ In 1918, the technical specialists working for Azbuka had often even succeeded in intercepting conversations between Bolshevik leaders on the Hughes telegraph apparatus;³⁸ they had also been well informed about exchanges between the Germans and the Soviet authorities.³⁹ In 1919 they regularly picked up Moscow’s confidential news broadcasts to local Bolshevik administrations across Russia and caught Soviet messages going to and from European radio stations.⁴⁰

Nonetheless these advantages in intelligence and equipment did Yudenich no good when he started his offensive in October 1919. Kolchak was fleeing eastwards through Siberia with his beaten army; Denikin was hastily withdrawing to the Ukrainian south. The Red Army was free to concentrate on the military threat emerging from Estonia. And even though Zinoviev, the Bolshevik leader in Petrograd, began to panic, the Politburo in Moscow reacted swiftly. Trotsky and Stalin were dispatched to head the political co-ordination of defence. Stern measures were taken against the middle classes across the city. A preventive terror was organized. Stalin ordered that formerly wealthy citizens should be paraded in a line in front of the Red defences so that they would be the first to be hit by the artillery fire of the North-Western Army. Trotsky travelled away from the city outskirts and saw military action while stiffening the resolve of his troops and commanders.⁴¹ As the Whites advanced from Estonia into Russia, they gave a good account of themselves and for a few days the battle for Petrograd lay in the balance. But the Red Army had the resources and experience it needed. Yudenich’s offensive collapsed and he was quickly forced into retreat with his men and equipment.

A young Russian observed them as they streamed back towards Estonian territory:

We saw a vast column on the move. They had arrived by the same branch line as us and disembarked at the same place. There were at least 2000 of them, wearing British greatcoats and accompanied by light artillery and machine guns. Obviously something was wrong at the front, and either the Reds had broken through it or outflanked it at Luga. The rumour was that Pskov too was about to surrender.⁴²

The rumour was all too true; and although the Civil War was not yet over in the old borderlands, Russia itself was firmly in the hands of the communists. Bolshevik celebrations in Petrograd and Moscow were long and vigorous.

21. WESTERN AGENTS

The Allied intelligence agents operating in Russia had worked long and hard to prevent the Red victory. None of them failed to appreciate the shortcomings of the Whites; indeed their reports frequently highlighted the urgent need for the White commanders to improve their military potential by paying greater attention to the political and social concerns of people living in the zones they occupied. Western espionage and subversion were conducted in difficult conditions — and the absence of normal diplomatic relations between Soviet Russia and the Allies meant that they had to be imaginative in their activities.

Agents operated in a wide variety of guises. At one end of it, there was the spy Sidney Reilly, who gathered information illicitly and co-organized a plot to overthrow communist rule. Robert Bruce Lockhart, his superior, had covertly initiated that conspiracy while working openly for the British government and enjoying something like official accreditation from the Kremlin. The Allied powers also sent military missions that secretly paid Russians to gather intelligence and carry out subversion. Jean Lavergne busied himself in this way for the French. But military missions were always suspect to the Bolsheviks, and the Allies had to turn to less formal agents for contact with the communist leadership. Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross was the US embassy’s main intermediary. He was an American patriot who sincerely believed that a rapprochement between the US and Lenin’s Russia was in the interests of both countries. The British reporter Arthur Ransome, a Secret Service Bureau informant, shared this conviction; he warmed to the Bolsheviks while rejecting the idea of transplanting their ideas and system to Britain. And the French embassy made similar use of Jacques Sadoul before deciding that he was more trouble than he was worth when he identified himself unconditionally with the Bolshevik cause.

The Lockhart Case was a breaking point for the Western agencies. As even unconventional kinds of diplomacy were made impossible, the Allied embassies packed their bags and left Russia altogether; and the Bolshevik leaders, scarred by the experience of Lockhart’s trickery, became warier. Nonetheless Ransome continued to be made welcome on his visits and his reports to the British secret service on Kremlin politics retained their immediacy, whereas Robins never returned to Russia. Sadoul stayed in Moscow, but as a convicted deserter and traitor he lost direct contact with French public life.

The West’s intelligence networks quickly restored their operations after the damage done by the Cheka raids of September 1918, but it no longer made sense to keep Moscow or Petrograd as their main bases. Allied agents had already renounced any tendencies towards flamboyance. This came hard for a man like George Hill who liked to mix jollity with danger. On arrival in Russia in late summer 1917 he had spent evenings with young grand dukes in the Gypsy encampment at Strelnaya.¹ He had a chum called Colonel Joe Boyle, a Canadian, who was a former US amateur heavyweight boxing champion and used his fists whenever provoked — or even just when he imagined that someone had tried to provoke him.² Hill and Boyle disapproved of the October Revolution. But they offered their services to the Bolsheviks in getting the trains moving again around the Moscow regional network because the Western Allies still hoped to keep Russia in the war. Adolf Ioffe, who worked at that time in the Petrograd Soviet’s Military-Revolutionary Committee, gratefully signed personal affidavits for them — he overlooked the carping tone of Boyle’s insistence that they should be addressed by their military ranks rather than as Comrade Boyle and Comrade Hill.³

Their greatest escapade had involved them in transporting the Romanian gold reserve and crown jewels across Russia and Ukraine to Iasi in eastern Romania at the request of Ambassador Diamandy in December 1917. The Romanians had deposited them in Moscow for safekeeping in time of war. Boyle and Hill travelled down from Petrograd by train no. 451 in the carriage of the former empress.⁴ The valuables were held in the Russian state vaults, and permission to move them had to be obtained from Moscow’s military commandant Nikolai Muralov. Since it was a time when the Bolsheviks and the Allies were still trying to avoid a rupture, Muralov gave his consent. Boyle and Hill prudently packed the valuables into wicker baskets to avoid untoward attention as they moved the heavy load across Moscow to their waiting train. The next stage of the journey involved a route through the lines of Russian and Ukrainian forces ranged against each other near Bryansk.⁵ No sooner had this danger been surmounted than the engine became caught in a snowdrift 120 miles north of Kiev. As if this was not bad enough, the crew was hit by shots fired by a Ukrainian army detachment which decided that they were Russian invaders — this was indeed a time of chaotic uncertainty. Boyle and Hill intervened to keep the train moving onwards to Kiev and some temporary safety before attempting the last stage of the journey to Romania.⁶

They used subterfuge and a degree of compulsion, including holding a gun to their driver’s head, as they left for the Ukrainian–Romanian border. Arriving at Iasi on 24 December after a trip of nine days they received the thanks of Prime Minister Ionel Bratianu. The King bestowed the Grand Cross of the Crown of Romania on Boyle and the Order of the Star of Romania on Hill.⁷

Returning to Moscow, Hill lived a double life after the Brest-Litovsk treaty. While helping Trotsky to set up a Soviet air force, he established a secret network of informants and couriers across Russia and Ukraine.⁸ He also liaised with Savinkov.⁹ In the same weeks he sponsored and led irregular units in night raids on German army camps on Ukrainian territory. Hill blew up gasometers in towns where the Germans were garrisoned — and he supervised the sabotage of coal mines by pouring sand into their pumping systems.¹⁰ When the nature of his activities came to the notice of the German secret service, it dispatched an agent to assassinate him at the Moscow Aviation Park. Hill spotted the danger at the last moment. He fought off the agent in an alleyway, leaving him with a bleeding head and triumphantly stealing his Mauser.¹¹ The Germans made another attempt by putting a time bomb in his office. Hill’s sixth sense of jeopardy helped him and he got rid of the device before it exploded.¹² Not all his couriers were as lucky. Two of them were discovered and executed on their way to Murmansk; a further six perished in another of his operations.¹³

After the Allies had seized Archangel, Hill heard that Trotsky had given the order for his arrest.¹⁴ He went undercover. Until then he had worn uniform but now he burned his English clothes. He had several young women working for him. He appreciated their skill in using ciphers and sewing messages into clothing — the messages were produced with the use of a dictionary and coding card. Hill kept a bottle of petrol within reach in case of a Cheka raid when he would need to destroy evidence.¹⁵ Along with three of his women he rented premises as the supposed owner of a sewing business and assumed the false identity of George Bergmann, pretending to be a Russian of Baltic-German descent.¹⁶ For some days he stayed indoors to let his beard grow and told the neighbours he was recovering from a bout of malaria. Then he found a job at a cinematograph studio as a film developer. With a ginger beard and hands discoloured by chemicals, he could easily walk around Moscow unidentified. Regular employment entitled him to a ration card, which meant that he could get food without flaunting his money and attracting undesirable attention. The hours of work — from six in the evening till eleven at night — enabled him to work as a spy during the hours of daylight.¹⁷ The other bonus of the job was that he was able to view the latest official newsreels before release.¹⁸

Throughout the summer of 1918, Hill created two chains of informers and couriers: one stretched south to the Black Sea, the other went north to the White Sea.¹⁹ In Moscow, he maintained eight clandestine apartments for his operatives.²⁰ By the autumn he was running a hundred couriers.²¹ For his northern chain he organized a route out to Vyatka from Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway, then up the branch line to Kotlas and beyond.²² Although this quickened the delivery of reports, it still took twelve to fifteen days to get a message to the British base in Archangel.²³ Hill also paid acquaintances at the Khodynka radio station north of Moscow to send marconigrams direct to the War Office in London for onward transmission to the Russian north — it was not the Cheka but German counter-intelligence which put an end to this dodge.²⁴

In October 1918, Hill left with the Lockhart party for Finland but was ordered to go back into northern Russia to help repair the recent organizational damage instead of returning immediately to the United Kingdom. Mission completed, he reached London on Armistice Day.²⁵ Despite his tiredness, he received an assignment to go to southern Russia with Sidney Reilly in December. Reilly had been running his own separate operation concurrently with Hill’s earlier in the year. Now they joined forces. Their instructions were to make for the Volunteer Army’s headquarters at Rostov-on-Don disguised as merchants seeking to restore international trade.²⁶ Arriving shortly before the New Year, they bridled at the condescension shown them by British military officers.²⁷ Hill and Reilly had a lengthy discussion with Generals Denikin and Krasnov; but since the telegraph system was in some chaos at the time, Hill went down to Odessa to communicate with London before leaving for England with the written report.²⁸ He thought poorly of Denikin’s political set-up and felt he had a lot to learn about ruling a country. On the military side, Reilly was damning about the Volunteer Army’s readiness. The equipment and provisioning left much to be desired, and Reilly predicted a hard struggle ahead for Denikin.²⁹ Hill’s mood fell further in Odessa. The French high command had signalled the city’s low point on their global priorities list by garrisoning the city with troops from their Senegalese colony.³⁰ When he got back to London, Hill conveyed his impressions in person to the Foreign Office and the War Office and to the many MPs who contacted him.³¹

He returned yet again to southern Russia after his stay at the Peace Conference, visiting General Denikin in Yekaterinodar.³² Reilly went back to tending his business interests while paying attention to the Soviet scene from afar. Seeing a chance of making money if the Whites won the Civil War, he wrote to John Picton Bagge in Odessa claiming that the British were being left behind by the French in preparing for this. He commented on how the French government had helped to set up a Paris agency for future commercial, industrial and financial activity in Russia.³³ Reilly wrote a lengthy memorandum on ‘The Russian Problem’, arguing the need to bang together the heads of Denikin and the leaders of Finland, Poland and the other ‘bordering states’ with a view to bringing down Bolshevism in Moscow.³⁴

Mansfield Cumming’s willingness to gamble in selecting agents for the Secret Service Bureau was not confined to Maugham, Hill and Reilly. One of his inspired choices was Paul Dukes, who until 1914 had worked as a répétiteur at the Imperial Mariinski Theatre and helped conductor Albert Coates with preparations for Stravinsky’sNightingale.³⁵ Dukes’s father was a Congregational minister and staunch anti-Papist who often had to change incumbencies because deacons objected to his authoritarian style of leadership.³⁶ Paul, a sickly child, showed an early talent for music. The Rev. Dukes had a future in mind for him as a chapel organist, but Paul rebelled in his mid-teens and ran away from home with less than four pounds in his pocket. He worked his way from Holland to Poland by teaching English, and his earnings enabled him to enrol as a student at the St Petersburg Conservatoire.³⁷ Young Dukes lodged for a while with Sidney Gibbes, tutor to the Imperial family, who sometimes took him to Nicholas II’s residence at Tsarskoe Selo. When war broke out, the British embassy employed him to produce daily wartime summaries of the Russian press for Ambassador Buchanan.³⁸

In February 1917, according to his own account, Dukes became ‘a fiery revolutionary’ and took to the streets against the Romanovs.³⁹ Evidently his friendship with Gibbes had not turned him into an admirer of Nicholas II. Soon afterwards he returned to London to work for the novelist John Buchan at the Department of Information. One of his assignments was to go to Paris under the alias of Dr Robinson to examine Bolshevik correspondence intercepted by the French secret services.⁴⁰

Steadily the scope of his ambition was widening and Buchan proved an understanding boss, allowing Dukes to return to Russia to report on the general situation under cover of a job with the YMCA in Samara and another with the Boy Scouts on the Siberian border.⁴¹ (The YMCA worked closely with the American authorities and set up facilities for the US military expedition to Siberia.)⁴² Dukes discharged his tasks impressively and, when Buchan recommended him for more serious clandestine work, a message was sent calling him back to London.⁴³ As yet he was unaware of what awaited him at the interview in Mansfield Cumming’s office in July 1918.⁴⁴ The office was like nothing Dukes had seen before. On his desk Cummings kept a bank of six telephones, numerous model aeroplanes and submarines, various test tubes and a row of coloured bottles.⁴⁵ Dukes talked so nervously that Cumming was going to fail him as an effete musician until he expressed an interest in the collection of firearms displayed on the wall. Cumming sat him down again and restarted the interview.⁴⁶ The outcome was that Dukes received twenty-four hours to think over the invitation to become an agent.⁴⁷ When he accepted, Cumming brightly enjoined him: ‘Don’t go and get killed.’ The Secret Service Bureau expected its men to learn on the job, and Dukes was disconcerted to find that the training course lasted no longer than three weeks.⁴⁸

His first task was to go to Russia and gather information on ‘every section of the community’, on the scale of support for the communists, on the adaptability of their policies and on the possibilities for a counter-revolution. No Briton knew the streets of Petrograd better and he was raring to go. Cumming let his new agent ST25 decide for himself the best way of getting back on to Russian soil.⁴⁹ He started his journey on 3 January 1918 by boarding an American troopship bound for northern Russia. Trying to make his way on foot to Petrograd, he found that the Soviet authorities were guarding the roads to the south. So instead he went to Helsinki, from where he took a train across the Russian border. Having visited Moscow, he moved to Smolensk and Dvinsk near the German front. In February he went to Samara, where the Socialist-Revolutionary leadership had established their anti-Bolshevik government. In his diary he mentioned Arthur Ransome, Yevgenia Shelepina and Harold Williams as being among his acquaintances — a politically broad bunch of people. By the end of June he was in Vologda for a few days before going up to Archangel, Kandalaksha and Pechenga and making his way back to London on 15 July.⁵⁰

Dukes did not stay for long. On 12 August he left again for Archangel on a Russian trip that lasted till early October, when he made for Britain’s intelligence base in Stockholm. After a brief respite it was back into Russia for another assignment until early December. A trip to Helsinki followed before he went on yet another Russian mission.⁵¹ One of his jobs was to support the National Centre in Moscow. Its leaders were at first reluctant to accept British money since they wanted their efforts to stay strictly in Russian hands, but the financial assistance from Kolchak had broken down and they agreed to take Dukes’s cash. Dukes also met with the Tactical Centre, a clandestine political body which had formed itself to challenge Bolshevik rule throughout Russia, and made contact with Yudenich’s North-Western Army. Although none of these organizations was effective in its subversive activity, each supplied him with valuable intelligence about conditions in Soviet Russia. This partnership came to an end when the Cheka penetrated the National Centre and the Tactical Centre and arrested many of the leaders.⁵² His informants obtained illicit material for him from the offices of Sovnarkom.⁵³

Dukes showed physical courage and, doubtless helped by his theatrical experience, a talent for disguise. Piecing together the stories he told her, his widow later called him the Scarlet Pimpernel of the October Revolution. He even enlisted in the Red Army. By volunteering, he knew he could join a regiment led by a commander who was a secret anti-Bolshevik.⁵⁴ This was not the quixotic move it might seem:

Apart from greater freedom of movement and preference over civilians in application for lodging, amusement, or travelling tickets, the Red soldier received rations greatly superior both in quantity and quality to those of the civilian population. Previous to this time I had received only half a pound of bread daily and had had to take my scanty dinner at a filthy communal eating house, but as a Red soldier I received, besides a dinner and other odds and ends not worth mentioning, a pound and sometimes a pound and a half of tolerably good black bread, which alone was sufficient, accustomed as I am to a crude diet, to subsist on with relative comfort.⁵⁵

Dukes travelled about Russia under the alias of artillery commander V. Piotrovski.⁵⁶ The runaway pianist became a Red Army officer who filed regular reports to London from whatever place he was moved to.

He had just as many adventures as Hill. Whereas Dukes was modest and discreet in his memoirs, it would seem that he personally rescued two of the former emperor’s nieces, making himself into a human bridge across a dyke at one point. A couple of Englishwomen also owed their lives to him, as did a merchant called Solatin who had tumbled from wealth and influence to destitution after 1917. Dukes and his couriers ran fearful risks — at least one of them was trapped and shot by the Cheka. He was once pursued so hotly that he hid in a tomb in a graveyard. The sight of him emerging from it next morning terrified a passer-by.⁵⁷ But he was not just the Pimpernel. His couriers helped him finance counter-revolutionary enterprises and gather information that was urgently needed in London — and one of his subordinates fondly recorded him as having been a person of great decency.⁵⁸ The reports that Dukes relayed to the Secret Service Bureau were concise and vivid. He treasured the spectacle of striking workers who sang the Marseillaise while carrying a banner that read: ‘Down with Lenin and horse meat, up with the Tsar and pork!’⁵⁹

Whatever may explain the disarray of Western policy and activity in Russia, it was not the absence of efficient spying networks. In 1918 the British were already picking up Soviet cable traffic to Europe — and when in June they came across a message from Trotsky to Litvinov, they kept it for their own information and prevented it from reaching Litvinov.⁶⁰ In the following year a Government Code and Cypher School was created on Lord Curzon’s recommendation and quickly proved its worth. Among its employees was the leading former Russian Imperial cryptanalyst Ernst Fetterlein, who provided his services after escaping Soviet Russia. Fetterlein was the first director of the School and scarcely any wireless traffic from Moscow was invulnerable to his attention and that of his Russian colleagues.⁶¹

Although it had been the American spy network that suffered worst in the Cheka raids of September 1918, the US never let up in its activity in wireless interception. Chicherin conducted a lively traffic with Baron Rosen in Berlin seeking a rapprochement between Germany and Soviet Russia; he had no inkling that the Americans were regularly scrutinizing these exchanges.⁶² The German Foreign Office was divided into two factions, one supporting an alliance and the other wanting to postpone any decision. The first faction saw the communist governments of Russia and Hungary as offering good trading opportunities for Germany; its advocates supposed that this was achievable on the agreed basis that communism would not be exported into German cities and that Lenin would come to terms with a ‘social-democratic or democratic government’. At a time when Denikin’s forces were trampling Red resistance in southern Russia and Ukraine it was not implausible to think that Sovnarkom might come to such an accommodation. Against this proposal for foreign policy stood the second faction, which contended that Germany’s future interest lay in supporting the Whites and earning their permanent gratitude for making life difficult for the Bolsheviks.⁶³

Western intelligence agencies generally offered a sound analysis of conditions in Soviet Russia. They reported that the Red Army, weak in its early months, was getting stronger. This came through the reports of all the British agents. It was also the opinion of people in French intelligence like the wonderfully named Charles Adolphe Faux-Pas Bidet who had helped to expel Trotsky from France in 1916. He was therefore a marked man when undertaking a mission to Russia in 1918 and was swiftly arrested. Trotsky enjoyed the opportunity of interrogating him, using sarcasm rather than threats against his former tormentor. When released on 17 January 1919, Faux-Pas Bidet at his debriefing duly emphasized the growing strength of Soviet rule.⁶⁴

While most agents agreed on this burgeoning strength, Arthur Ransome went further and insisted that the Bolsheviks were nowhere near as bloody as they were painted. This caused controversy in British governing circles, and Bruce Lockhart wrote in the London Morning Post that he should keep quiet because he had been out of Russia for half a year.⁶⁵ Lockhart went round claiming to be a diplomat pure and simple and Ransome — agent S76 — affected to be just a journalist: neither disclosed their work for the Secret Service Bureau. As it happened, the Secret Service Bureau shared Lockhart’s reservations about Ransome but concluded, on balance, that he did ‘quite good work for us’. Ransome was therefore sanctioned to return on the pretext of collecting Bolshevik pamphlets for the British Museum. His British handlers assumed they could filter out the pro-Soviet bias from his reports and obtain something useful for themselves since no one else could get as close to the Kremlin leaders.⁶⁶ Ransome, resourceful as ever, made the best of a bad job by using Lockhart’s criticism as a sort of passport to secure interviews with the supreme party leadership. He had missed the October Revolution, but no correspondent after 1917 shuttled quite so easily between Russia and the West.⁶⁷

The results of Western intelligence activity were mixed, through no fault of the agents themselves. There is in fact no evidence that Churchill or Curzon took up the anti-Soviet cause because they were decisively influenced by the secret reports of Dukes, Reilly and Hill or by the Times articles of Harold Williams. Churchill and Curzon were political militants against the Bolsheviks from the moment they heard of the October Revolution, and their belligerence was only reinforced by material forwarded to them as ministers. Similarly it is impossible to show that Lloyd George softened his treatment of Russia as the result of Ransome’s purrings. Undoubtedly the energetic secret agents and decryption experts of the Allied powers supplied their political masters with information of high quality. In trying to influence politics, they were motivated by patriotism and a sense of adventure (and, in Reilly’s case, by financial greed). All of them but Ransome detested communism — and even Ransome did not want it for Britain. But although they often tried to be backseat drivers, the holders of supreme public office — Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau — took little notice unless the received advice conformed to what they themselves wanted.

22. COMMUNISM IN AMERICA

Europe’s radical socialists, enthused by the October Revolution and the founding of Comintern, broke away from the old parties of the left. In Italy the Socialist Party burst apart over questions of war, international solidarity and revolutionary struggle. The same happened in France as the socialists lost their far-left wing to communism. Out of these ruptures came the French Communist Party and the Italian Communist Party, which were immediately admitted to Comintern.

Communist organizations also began to sprout across the Atlantic. The US political scene was a peculiar one. No country in the world had more refugees from the Russian Empire. Most of them had no intention of making the long trip back to Russia or its borderlands, but their interest in what happened there was intense. On the east coast, especially in New York, many Russian Jews warmed to a government promising to build a society without social or national discrimination. They were not the only immigrants whose communities provided fertile ground for communist evangelism. Finns, Serbs and Poles too were responding to the appeal to make America a better place for the poor who lived and worked in the industrial cities. The US melting pot had not yet rendered them deaf to militants who suggested that far-left political policies would improve their lives. Although those who joined groups dedicated to communism were a small minority, they made a lot of noise with increasing confidence. The American authorities grew concerned about the possibility that Soviet-style ideas might take root. Conditions in the manufacturing and mining districts could be gruelling. The Socialist Party of Eugene Debs had for years shown the potential that existed to challenge the political establishment, and in June 1918 Debs himself was arrested for campaigning against America’s entry into the Great War. Now that a communist state existed in Russia, there was reason to worry that communists would cause still greater trouble.

The first steps in American communist organization were taken in August 1919 when the Communist Labor Party was formed after a split in the Socialist Party. A few days later the rival Communist Party of America was set up. Despite alarming the US authorities, the two creations failed to gain Moscow’s complete approval since Comintern liked to be able to deal with a single communist party in each country. The Bolsheviks themselves had been notorious splitters before 1917, but now they put all this behind them and called for centralism and discipline. The American disarray annoyed them. The Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party engaged in ceaseless polemics. At the same time they shared an admiration for Lenin and Trotsky, the October Revolution and Soviet Russia. They praised industrial and agrarian reforms under Sovnarkom’s rule. They depicted Lenin’s foreign policy as being oriented towards peace; they believed that only communists could put a permanent end to war. They showered plaudits on Trotsky and the Red Army and represented the Bolsheviks as innocent victims of reactionary internal and external forces. The American communists regarded dictatorship and terror as a necessity forced on Russian communists by the military situation. They esteemed the way the Soviet authorities had pulled Russia together with centralism, discipline and order.

Yet from their inception they were consumed by hostility to each other. Charles Ruthenberg, leader of the Communist Party of America, proclaimed: ‘We affirm our opposition to unity with the Communist Labor Party.’¹ The two organizations fought a bitter struggle as each carried banners and pasted up posters in defence of Soviet Russia in separation from the other. They celebrated May Day as an occasion to gain support for the Russian communist cause. They sold booklets by Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders. They turned up to hear John Reed and Louise Bryant speaking at Madison Square Garden about their experiences in Petrograd and Moscow. They rejoiced at living in an age which they thought would give birth to a world communist society. But they never considered uniting to help bring that about.

While the two American communist organizations expended energy on their rivalry, the Finnish Information Bureau in New York led by Ludwig Martens and Santeri Nuorteva since 1918 retained some usefulness for the Soviet government — and in the following year Martens and Nuorteva received instructions from Chicherin to run a Bureau of Information on Soviet Russia from the same offices.² In truth the Finnish and Soviet Russian Bureaux were a single operation. On 27 May 1919 Maxim Litvinov wrote to Martens: ‘The aim of rapprochement with America has run like a red thread through all our foreign policy this last year.’ The Soviet leadership by then were aiming their economic concessions policy at the US in preference to other countries. Martens and Nuorteva were turning into political salesmen. They even contended that if the Americans were to assume responsibility for Russian state debts, the Kremlin was willing to turn over vast territories to them.³ Obviously this was an initial bargaining ploy: if President Wilson showed the slightest interest, full negotiations could begin. At the same time the Information Bureau maintained its pressure on Boris Bakhmetev to vacate the Russian embassy building in Washington and hand over the funds under its control.⁴ Things seemed to be looking brighter for the communists when the espionage case against John Reed was abandoned.⁵ The charges had been linked to his anti-war activity in 1917 and although he remained an irritant for the US authorities he would have brought any court into ridicule if proceedings were instituted against him so long after the end of the war. The better option seemed to be to pull him in when he attempted anything directly subversive on behalf of the American communist movement.

On 12 June 1919 the Information Bureau suffered a police raid which yielded compromising material on Martens and Nuorteva. Cash had flowed into the Bureau from an unidentified source thought to be the Soviet government — and Martens had been able to replenish the Bureau’s account as expenditure continued, keeping the balance between $5,000 and $9,000. Nuorteva had regular contact with subversive organizations; he also accepted invitations to give public speeches. The Information Bureau sought contact with groups in favour of revolution throughout North America, including Mexico. Martens and Nuorteva simultaneously campaigned for the resumption of full diplomatic and commercial relations between Russia and the US.⁶

The police leaked their findings to the press and the New York Times led the attack on the Bureau by reporting that Martens had been registered in England as a ‘Hohenzollern subject’.⁷ This kind of comment was meant to identify him as a German alien. In fact Martens was a Russian of German descent, born and brought up in the Russian Empire. The same newspaper claimed that the Bureau had compiled a list of Americans to be arrested in Russia. There was also a report that the Bureau had received a letter promising $10,000 for spreading revolutionary propaganda across the Mexican border. As was admitted by the New York Times, the Bureau resisted the offer, suspecting that it came from an agent provocateur. But this did not persuade the newspaper to let up in its campaign and its editorials continued to lambast the Bureau.⁸ Yekaterina Breshkovskaya, a veteran Socialist-Revolutionary refugee widely known abroad as the ‘grandmother of the Russian Revolution’, received space to assert that Lenin and Trotsky were Germany’s stooges and that the German officer corps was running the Red Army.⁹ This was complete nonsense, but the editor was hoping to play on the prejudices of those Americans who might have a sneaking sympathy for Russian communists but had become hostile to the Germans since the war.

The Bureau hit back by beginning court proceedings for the return of its papers — an option that would have been denied them under Bolshevik rule.¹⁰ Martens and Nuorteva had lived for years in the US, making considerable careers for themselves as émigrés. Martens had been vice-president of the Weinberg and Posner engineering company; Nuorteva had been a successful journalist and in 1907 had been elected to the Finnish Sejm. They knew the ways of the American establishment and had funds for suitable legal advice in pursuit of Soviet ends.

Martens and Nuorteva also made commercial approaches to big American firms and were in correspondence with Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan Jr and Frank A. Vanderlip. They promised ready finance, to the value of $200 million, if a deal could be quickly sealed.¹¹ By spring 1919 the Information Bureau had produced its shopping list of Russia’s requirements, presumably on instructions from Moscow, stating that Sovnarkom wanted to enter the US market and purchase railway equipment, agricultural and factory machinery, mining and electrical equipment, cars and lorries, printing presses, tools, typewriters, textile goods, chemicals, shoes, clothing, medicines, canned meats and fats. The only large industrial item missing from their list was military supplies — this must have been thought too likely to provoke a response that would damage the chances of procuring the other items at a time when American troops remained on active service in northern Russia and Siberia. Martens and Nuorteva simultaneously dangled Russian natural and agricultural products before the eyes of American manufacturers. The Soviet authorities, they claimed, had grain, flax, hemp, timber, minerals, furs, hides and bristles for immediate sale. This was an implausible idea in a year of growing food shortages in Russia, and wheat and rye exports in particular would have been hard to organize in the face of peasant revolts. At any rate the Bureau publicized Soviet official willingness to deposit $200 million in gold in European and American banks to cover the initial deals.¹²

Its determination was rewarded in September 1919 when a contract was drawn up with the Antaeus Export and Import Company which wanted to buy furs from Petrograd. Another deal was put together for Soviet Russia to import pork and corned beef via the National Storage Company.¹³ While the British and French governments continued to ban trade with the territory under Soviet rule, a small breach in the Allied economic barriers was achieved in America.

This phenomenon inevitably made the US authorities edgy about the spread of communist influence from Russia. With President Wilson ailing, Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer sprang into action — had the President been in better health he might have asked him to be more cautious. On 8 November 1919 the Department of Justice arranged for two hundred ‘Russian Bolsheviki’ to be taken into custody and an official announcement was made: ‘This is the first big step to rid the country of these foreign trouble makers.’¹⁴ All were alleged to belong to the Union of Russian Workers as irreconcilable subversives. Bomb-making materials were said to have been found as well as Red flags, revolvers, printing presses and banknotes ready for circulation. A further sequence of raids was organized in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo. The Union of Russian Workers, which had been founded by Bill Shatov (though in 1917 he left to join the Bolsheviks in Petrograd), was among the organizations targeted. The most prominent detainees were the anarchist leaders Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who were accused of having invalid immigration and naturalization papers — and it was emphasized that they were hostile to political elections and the market economy.¹⁵

Palmer revelled in the publicity stirred up by his raids; it was widely believed that he had fixed his sights on standing for the Presidency in the near future. His officials indicated that a further search was under way to lay hands on five hundred leading ‘Red sympathizers’ across the country.¹⁶ On 1 December 1919 Charles Ruthenberg, secretary of the Communist Party of America, was arrested in Chicago.¹⁷

Although a mass deportation of ‘Russian Reds’ was in the offing, Nuorteva and Martens were spared arrest — an omission which did not go without adverse comment.¹⁸ An editorial in the New York Times was headed ‘The Plot against America’:

The testimony of Ludwig Martens before the Lusk committee puts an end to his pretensions as an Ambassador from Soviet Russia. He is not even in the status of an unrecognized Ambassador. His errand here is not diplomatic in any sense. He is here as an enemy of the United States, as the agent of conspirators in Russia who are planning to bring about a bloody revolution in this country and destroy its Government by force.¹⁹

Nuorteva spoke up for his comrade with the odd claim that Martens had no objection to being deported. Just as bizarrely, Nuorteva added: ‘But if he goes he will take a million residents in this country of Russian origin with him. The Soviet Russia Republic [sic] has eighty-seven vessels ready to bring them back as soon as the way is open. All they want is to be landed in some safe place where the Soviet Government is in control. Petrograd would suit us.’²⁰ The press campaign intensified as William C. Bullitt was reported as having had contact with Nuorteva and Martens. The newspapers, at least those not under socialist ownership, aimed to demonstrate that an international conspiracy was at work; and the fact that Bullitt had worked for the State Department and the White House gave a piquant menace to the media assault.²¹

Martens claimed that the Soviet leaders generally limited themselves to ‘affirmative propaganda’; but when pressed, he admitted that the Bolsheviks had employed terror. The New York Times pointed out that Lenin and Trotsky believed in violent revolution everywhere. One of its editorials went further by levelling the charge that the October 1917 seizure of power was effected ‘largely by men from America who went to Russia’.²² With the exception of Trotsky and Bukharin, it was a fantastic exaggeration to assert that ex-residents of New York had supplied the vanguard of the October Revolution. But the newspaper did not feel the need to stick to provable facts. Wild claims were the norm.

Although Ruthenberg was soon released from prison, 249 communist and anarchist leaders who were held on Ellis Island were loaded on to an old transport ship, the Buford, and deported on 21 December 1919. The ship was popularly known as ‘The Red Ark’. Their ultimate destination was Soviet Russia and the entire group sang the Internationale before embarkation. They refused to be demoralized, believing that their punishment was yet another sign that the American capitalist class was starting to panic. They elected Berkman as their spokesman, who said that he expected to be greeted by old friends in Moscow. His wife Emma Goldman declared: ‘I do not consider it a punishment to be sent to Soviet Russia. On the contrary, I consider it an honor to be the first political agitator deported from the United States.’ With her flair for publicity she left nobody in doubt about her confidence: ‘Incidentally, I am coming back. The plan we have considered, which I am going to work on particularly, is the immediate organization in Soviet Russia of the Russian Friends of American Freedom. I insist that I am an American. This practice of deportation means the beginning of the end of the United States Government.’²³

Further deportations followed as Palmer, abetted by a young J. Edgar Hoover in the Bureau of Investigation in the Department of Justice, broke up the early communist groupings, and the organization of support for Comintern became downright dangerous for militants even though they succeeded in producing political literature and holding public meetings, albeit on a smaller scale than before. Nobody could be sure that the authorities would not strengthen the measures against the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party by means of lengthy terms of imprisonment for people who could not easily be deported. The communist Linn A. E. Gale fled to Mexico City and took his Journal of Revolutionary Communism with him. He recommended exile as a way of avoiding ‘the most savage and brutal penalties’ that he predicted would be applied by ‘the minions of capitalism’.²⁴ But somehow the remaining militants reassembled their links and resumed activity; and the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of America, cajoled by Moscow, agreed in principle to unification with the Communist Labor Party in mid-March 1920.²⁵ The number of members was in the tens of thousands and was geographically patchy — in 1920 the Communist Labor Party had only 4,525 members and most of these lived on the eastern side of the country.²⁶ Discipline, moreover, was shaky. A furore occurred in the same year when Jay Lovestone, a leading young activist, appeared in court as a witness for his friends and forswore any adherence to Leninist principles to save them from a potentially heavy sentence.²⁷

The militants recognized the need to bring order into their affairs. If they wanted to join Comintern they would have to demonstrate a capacity to be as dedicated and dynamic as the Bolsheviks. The Communist Party of America laid down its guidelines as follows:

Don’t betray Party work and Party workers under any circumstances.

Don’t carry or keep with you names and addresses, except in good code.

Don’t keep in your rooms openly any incriminating documents or literature.

Don’t take any unnecessary risks in Party work.

Don’t shirk Party work because of the risk connected with it.

Don’t boast of what you have to do or have done for the Party.

Don’t divulge your membership in the Party without necessity.

Don’t let any spies follow you to appointments or meetings.

Don’t lose your nerve in danger.

Don’t answer questions if arrested, either at preliminary hearings or in the court.²⁸

Gradually a spirit of conspiratorial comradeship was implanted. Recruits were expected to accept the guidelines or risk being shunned or expelled.

The desirability of such precautions was obvious if the communist revolutionaries were going to make any progress in the US. A ‘Red scare’ billowed as newspaper editors united against the spread of ideological contagion from the east. Attorney-General Palmer had displayed his combative disposition, and many groups of employers were delighted. Politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties were equally pleased to support him. Industrial strikes were increasingly treated as tantamount to treason and the police used much violence.

In December 1921 a founding Convention was at last held for the united Workers’ Party of America, bringing together the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party and placing it under Comintern’s authority. Comintern immediately set out its priorities. American communists were to infiltrate and manipulate as many organizations as possible in the US, including associations of farmers and ‘Negroes’ — indeed the line of recruitment was drawn only at the Ku Klux Klan. Moscow stressed that the Workers’ Party had to break out of the confines of the party’s immigrant ethnic supporters. Key matters for agitation were to involve a campaign against the current legal restrictions on organizing strikes. Illegal activity was not to be abandoned by the Workers’ Party — in fact the undercover leaders and militants were to be regarded as ‘the real Communist Party’ and were to have permanent precedence over the broad open party. No duty was to be regarded as superior to the calls for support for Soviet Russia. While revolution in the US remained the dream for American communists, their primary obligation was to do whatever was required to sustain the October Revolution in Moscow.²⁹ Although factionalism continued to plague the Workers’ Party of America, this served only to strengthen the Russian hold on its affairs. Whenever a dispute arose it was Comintern headquarters which gave the decisive ruling.

The Soviet leaders were not as wise about America as they thought they were; ideas that worked for communism in Russia did not always find a suitable environment in New York. Max Eastman, Trotsky’s admirer and confidant, prepared a memo for him and Lenin, pointing out that capitalism was not on the verge of collapse in America and American workers were not in ‘a revolutionary frame of mind’. He asked for Comintern to take better account of this. Eastman had a number of organizational bugbears. He denied that Comintern’s emphasis on conspiratorial methods was a sensible one. He also objected to the national and ethnic associations that were still permitted in the party. The ‘Slavic federation’ was deeply distasteful for him.³⁰ He jibbed at the endless celebrations of Lenin, the October Revolution and the Red Army and called for American specificities to be analysed and acted upon. He was not alone in sensing that the Workers’ Party of America would get nowhere if it was a ‘hip-hip-hurrah society’ for the celebration of the good news from Russia.³¹ Consequently America had less to fear from American communism than American political leaders thought. It was a paradoxical situation. If he had but known it, Attorney-General Palmer would have been pleased that American communists were doing such an effective job of rendering the Workers’ Party ineffectual.

The Soviet communist leaders in Moscow reinforced the phenomenon. They felt sure that they knew what was best for communism in every country, and they sprayed their advice worldwide. American communists seldom rebelled against Moscow for long. If there was discontent, it was ultimately resolved by forced submission or expulsion from the Workers’ Party. American communism was swaddled from birth in Russian clothing that constricted its growth.

23. SOVIET AGENTS

As the world communist movement emerged into the light in Europe and North America, the Cheka steadily discovered how to operate from the shadows. This was slow work as the Chekists felt their way. But the Politburo had a crucial need for a network of secret agents in the West if it wanted to achieve its political and economic purposes abroad. The Chekist leadership had to start their operations almost from scratch. And the fact that Soviet Russia was the declared enemy of absolutely every other state in the world meant that its foreign activity was under constant close scrutiny. In such an environment it is impressive how much the Chekists managed to achieve.

Intelligence agencies are predictably shy about releasing the names of their employees. This has often opened the door to speculation, and one of the enduring controversies from the early Soviet years is about whether Sidney Reilly was a Cheka agent.¹ Suspicion enveloped him after the temporary destruction of the Allied intelligence networks in autumn 1918. DeWitt Poole, acting consul-general for the Americans in Moscow, had left Russia with the rest of the American diplomatic personnel in those weeks. He had formed a poor opinion of Reilly and sounded an alarm when talking things over with Sir Mansfeldt Findlay at the UK embassy to Norway. Poole recounted the rumours that Reilly was a Cheka agent provocateur. Although the evidence was no more than circumstantial, it worried Findlay enough for him to place it before the Foreign Office and the Secret Service Bureau. Poole’s concerns had sprouted from the discrepancy between what Lockhart had discussed with him and what Reilly had apparently enacted. He wanted the British to investigate the possibility that Reilly had betrayed Lockhart.² Kalamatiano, the American secret service leader in Russia, languished in Soviet custody and Poole naturally felt sore about this. Poole had confidence in Lockhart and mistrusted Reilly. It did not cross his mind that Lockhart too might have been less than frank with him in Moscow.

Although Lockhart had private reservations about Reilly’s personal integrity,³ he never queried his political allegiance. Reilly expressed outrage at the insinuations against him and complained to Lockhart, a few weeks after they returned from the Russian capital, about ‘those unfortunate libels’.⁴ Like Lockhart, he called for a hard line to be taken on Soviet Russia; he described Lloyd George as being soft-headed about Bolshevism and planning to use philanthropy as a ‘panacea for all social evils’. He thought the British cabinet failed to understand the menace to civilization that would soon spread abroad if it was not stamped out in Moscow.⁵ He rejected the view that the Soviet order was an unworkable or weak one. Having seen it in motion in Russia, he had no doubt that it could be made operational elsewhere.⁶

Was this the play-acting of a double agent? Reilly’s patron Mansfield Cumming probed the possibility by asking Commander Ernest Boyce, an old Russia intelligence hand, to conduct an internal enquiry. Boyce’s researches revealed a brash man with a chaotic personal life. Reilly did everything to excess; he was abstemious only with drink. He loved women, and it was rare for him to limit himself to a single girlfriend — and on his return to London he went around with a tart who rejoiced in the nickname of Plugger.⁷ Reilly was a bigamist, never having divorced his first wife Margaret, who tracked him down and squeezed money out of him in return for her silence. He was a gambler who often risked everything in the casino as in the rest of his life.⁸ When he had money he spent it ostentatiously, and high society paid him the attention he craved. He bought a flower for his buttonhole daily at Solomons in St James’s Street. He took a suite at the Savoy Hotel and, when this palled, he moved to the Ritz. Reilly seemed the quintessential man about town.⁹

Commander Boyce’s enquiry into Reilly extended to having lunch with Robert Bruce Lockhart and his wife Jean at the Langham Hotel in Regent Street in December 1918. He arranged for Jean to arrive earlier than her husband so as to do a bit of judicious questioning. Jean told him that ‘Bertie’ believed that Reilly would always ‘work for the highest bidder’.¹⁰ But even this revelation merely suggested that Reilly was nothing more than a money-grubbing rascal rather than a Chekist, and Cumming felt safe in sending him on yet another Russian mission together with George Hill.¹¹ But the whisperings against him continued and it may well have been on his return to London that Cumming called in George Hill and Paul Dukes and set up a separate enquiry.¹² Although Reilly was cleared, Cumming refused to grant him a fixed appointment, offering the excuse that the Foreign Office was the source of the hostility. At any rate the Secret Service Bureau continued to use Reilly for foreign assignments and throughout his time in London he continued to fire off tirades against Lloyd George’s softening of Allied policy on Russia. If he had been a Soviet mole, it is difficult to see why his handlers would have approved of this behaviour at a time when Sovnarkom hoped to turn Western public opinion in favour of diplomatic recognition and commercial acceptance. It is still not impossible that Reilly took money from the Bolsheviks at some other time. But whether he did or not, he could never be a reliable double agent: Reilly’s first and last loyalty was to himself and his financial interests.

The Soviet authorities were still finding their way in the activities they promoted abroad. They were juggling two priorities. One was to stir communist parties into life and revolution; the other was to agitate for trade with Russia. At the very time that the Bolsheviks were trying to arrange deals with Western big business they were also sending people and funds to undermine capitalism. This ‘contradiction’ did not worry the Politburo. Communist leaders assumed that if their best hope was fulfilled — revolution — then it would no longer matter what sums had been given or promised to businessmen in the West. And if things went wrong for communism in Europe, at least Sovnarkom would possess signed contracts to facilitate Russian economic recovery from the years of fighting. Often the same agents were stirring up politics while reassuring businessmen. The Politburo lived comfortably with the paradox. Bolshevik leaders accepted that ‘history’ was messy and that twists and turns in policy were essential if communism was to triumph. They thrived on the ‘contradictions’ in world affairs. If Bolsheviks lower down the party did not yet appreciate this situation, surely eventually they would do so — and the prestige and authority of Lenin and his close comrades were deployed to ensure that this came about.

The Soviet agents fostered organizational splits in the parties of the political far left so as to win recruits for Comintern. They sent funds and instructions abroad. They gathered reports on discussions among the great powers. They organized propaganda in translation. As agreements were signed with Western countries, the plenipotentiaries working for People’s Commissariats conducted clandestine activity behind the screen of their legal work. Comintern recruited people from the new communist parties for espionage and subversion on the Kremlin’s behalf. In June 1919 the Cheka at last set up an illegal operations department for work abroad.¹³ The pace of international activity was steadily being increased. Agents were sent to all continents in the revolutionary cause.

Bolsheviks were expert at spiriting funds across frontiers. They had to be: they had committed themselves to international subversion, and governments and police forces everywhere took them at their word. Russia no longer had diplomatic recognition in any country after the closure of the German, Swiss and Scandinavian missions in the winter of 1918–19.¹⁴ This meant among other things that the Russian plenipotentiaries and couriers lost the facilities associated with diplomatic bags. They carried money on their persons for political purposes at their destinations. This was a hazardous undertaking since countries bordering on Russia teemed with policemen under orders to lay their hands on Kremlin agents, who were marked men and women when passing through customs points. The maintenance of the Allied economic blockade around the territory under Soviet rule aggravated the problem, and trade between Russia and its neighbours fell to a small fraction of what it had been before 1914. (During the Great War there had been a substantial exchange of goods even with Germany via neutral Sweden.) Agents who went on foreign trips to buy goods for Sovnarkom had to bring back what they could pack in suitcases because they could not make wholesale purchases for dispatch as rail freight. They restricted themselves to bringing back medicine, saccharine and other easily carried products.¹⁵

Alternative options were quickly found. Since 1917 Sovnarkom had confiscated a huge quantity of extremely valuable jewels that were small, light and easily exchangeable for cash — and they were used even before the withdrawal of diplomatic privileges. Louise Bryant was one of the couriers. She agreed to the work after her baggage had been seized in Finland on a journey from Petrograd in the winter of 1917–18. When she asked at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs how to avoid such trouble in future, Ivan Zalkind replied: ‘Why, I’ll make you a courier for the Soviet government!’ The advantage was that she could have her bags sealed with wax and the customs men — at least in Scandinavia — would not touch them. This was how she took official material to ‘the Bolshevik minister’ Vatslav Vorovski on her next trip to Stockholm. The only drawback was that hoteliers treated her with suspicion as a Soviet agent and she found it hard to get a room for the night.¹⁶ Women were the perfect couriers because they could wear the valuables discreetly round their necks and on their arms. When Yevgenia Shelepina made her final departure from Russia with her future husband Arthur Ransome in 1922 she transported diamonds and pearls worth 1,039,000 rubles by arrangement with Chicherin.¹⁷

Courier work was not an exclusively female occupation. When Francis Meynell, a director of the London Daily Herald, agreed to transport two strings of pearls to the United Kingdom he hid them in a jar of butter; and on one occasion he carried jewels inserted into a box of chocolate creams.¹⁸ Meynell advertised his sympathies so widely that Special Branch asked the Secret Service Bureau to keep an eye on him.¹⁹ The same authorities were watching over People’s Commissar Leonid Krasin when he entered the United Kingdom with jewels in his luggage to the value of over seven million rubles.²⁰ It was an open secret that many couriers were on assignments that involved more than carrying messages, money or jewellery. Some of them became involved in pro-Soviet organizations; others helped to arrange the circulation of revolutionary literature.²¹ The difference between a courier, an agent and an activist was often a blurred one. The Special Branch in London knew what was going on but refrained from arguing for stoppage of the courier facilities. British counter-intelligence found it more convenient to use Soviet emissaries as a way of surveying the political left in the United Kingdom than to block their entry into the country.

In January 1920 John Reed received a million rubles’ worth of diamonds for disbursal in the US. His American comrade Kristap Beika (alias Comintern official John Anderson) received a similar amount. The emergent US communist movement would not lack financial support. The record of such assignments kept by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in 1919–20 referred to several other countries, including Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy and France.²² It was not a perfect system, as the heads of Soviet diplomatic missions made clear in their reports to the Kremlin. Yan Berzin in Switzerland in 1918 was disgusted by the quality of couriers sent out to him, claiming that several of them had given speeches in favour of the Mensheviks as they passed through central Europe.²³ Nor was every courier distinguished by basic honesty. Just as they could cross borders in one disguise, so they could abandon their communist errand and run off with the valuables that had been entrusted to them. Lenin huffed and puffed about morality and penalties. But it was difficult at long range to impose discipline on unruly agents until such time as communist parties were able to act as enforcers, and even then the system was vulnerable to abuse.

The Soviet missions were also active in translating and publishing communist writings. When Yan Berzin arrived in Berne as Soviet plenipotentiary in May 1918 he rushed Bolshevik texts into print in German and French. A group of local translators was employed, and a small publisher was found outside the city so as to avoid governmental interference. Lenin’s The State and Revolution received priority alongside his The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, and Trotsky’s From the October Revolution to the Brest Peace Treaty quickly appeared. Books by Radek, Philips Price and Sadoul went to press. Profit was not the aim. Moscow was willing to shower whatever finance was required to spread the doctrines of communism.²⁴

It was not always necessary to do this through communist agents. When George Lansbury went to Moscow in February 1920 and mentioned that his Daily Herald was in financial trouble he was offered money to save the newspaper from falling into the hands of socialists who opposed the Soviet regime. He addressed the Moscow Soviet and commended communists on their achievements in economic reconstruction.²⁵ As part of the deal he agreed to help publish translated booklets by the Russian communist leadership. The Bolsheviks were people of the printed word. There were marvellous orators among them but their basic premise was that thorough indoctrination required books to be made available for study — and somehow a flow of revolution would proceed from them. Chicherin told Litvinov to give the funds to the Swedish communist Fredrik Ström for handing over to Lansbury. The scheme worked as the newspaper moved leftwards and advocated direct political action in Britain.²⁶ The Daily Herald’s dependence on Soviet money became public knowledge after Fetterlein decrypted the telegrams. Lansbury — an early Soviet dupe — denied trying to hide anything shameful, alleging that he was only counteracting a discreet boycott by British paper suppliers.²⁷ A Christian socialist, he wrote that everything was fine in Russia because there was no religious persecution. Even the Bolsheviks laughed when they heard about it.²⁸

Another urgent task for the Cheka and the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs was to make sense of public opinion in the West. Before 1917 Lenin and Trotsky had assumed that politics merely reflected big economic interests. They had generally thought that the outstanding foreign enemies of the October Revolution — Churchill, Curzon or Clemenceau — were mere puppets of industrial and financial lobbies in London and Paris. As soon as they came to power they recognized the need to take personalities seriously in international politics. They courted the good opinion of Woodrow Wilson in 1918–19. Despite considering him a capitalist scoundrel, they did not dismiss the possibility that he might be induced to depart from the line preferred by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Lenin in particular followed the ages-old tradition of clever rulers in seeking to divide and influence the enemies of his government.

A lot of what the Kremlin needed to know could be plucked from the air either by its agents or by the telegraphists they bribed. The gigantic Nauen radio station, twenty-four miles to the west of Berlin, had two masts 850 feet high. It was the biggest installation in the world and could transmit signals as far as New York. Soviet leaders regarded it as their ‘window on Europe’. There were only undulating hills and no mountains between the Russian and German capitals and Soviet telegraphists had no problem in getting hold of news of political and military importance for the Bolsheviks.²⁹ The People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs used a more traditional method by scrutinizing the Western press for information.³⁰ Its diplomats examined the newspapers for important news and sent the material back to Moscow.³¹ The practical usefulness of their reports was diminished by the fact that they applied the same ideological filter as Lenin and Trotsky. Although Yan Berzin commented on the disastrous impact on Western opinion of Trotsky’s handling of the Czech Corps and warned Soviet leaders to take account of the international perspective before acting so precipitately, he undercut his own sound advice by assuring Moscow that he had the evidence that ‘proletarian revolution is uninterruptedly growing in all countries’.³²

The fact that he wrote in this fashion from the stable Swiss capital shows that information was only as good as the Bolsheviks were willing to let it be. They allowed nothing to interfere with their belief that the West was teetering on the revolutionary brink. They had to keep comforting each other with lines from their credo. Otherwise the world would take on an altogether bleaker appearance in their eyes.

Arthur Ransome reinforced their preconceptions. The Kremlin knew that he was no mere journalist since a Cheka report in March 1921 stated that ‘Lloyd George’s group’ had sent Ransome on his latest mission to Moscow.³³ (Soviet leaders were wrong on one detail: they were under the mistaken impression that this was the first time that Ransome came to them with the sanction of the British government.) Whether Ransome mentioned to the Kremlin that he was the emissary of a specific group is not known, but it was anyhow an open secret that several British ministers were displeased about the moves by Lloyd George for a rapprochement with Soviet Russia. The communist leaders had always given a warm welcome to Ransome because his books burnished their image. They also saw him as someone who could explain the British political scene to them. Ransome duly complied and gave an account of the factions in ruling circles, one led by Lloyd George and the other by Curzon and Churchill. He added the names of Paul Dukes and Harold Williams as protagonists on the anti-Soviet side along with Leslie Urquhart, George Hill and Sir George Buchanan.³⁴ This was not a bad summary of the leadership and opinion-formers on the Russian question in the United Kingdom, providing information beyond what could be gleaned from The Times and the Manchester Guardian.

Ransome went outside the boundaries of his brief as a British agent when disclosing to the Cheka what he knew about those people in Soviet Russia who were obstructing the progress towards a trade treaty with the United Kingdom. He mentioned Simon Liberman, a Menshevik expert and ex-businessman working in the timber industry, in this connection. He also gave encouragement to the Bolsheviks in their global rivalry with Britain by suggesting that Muslims in Asia were responding better to Soviet than to British ‘diplomatic influence’.³⁵ Getting into his stride, he commented that France might be willing to resort to military measures in the Baltic Sea if this would help to bring down the Soviet government.³⁶ Evidently the gangly, eccentric Englishman had his own bias about Western politics and readily deployed it. And he could not stop himself pandering to the ideological prejudices of the Soviet leaders he met. In his references to Liberman, he was even putting an innocent Russian economic official in jeopardy of arrest by spreading unfounded rumours about him. The best that may be said is that Ransome was perhaps only acting like many newspaper reporters in seeking to butter up a politician so as to get information out of him or her. At any rate it was not his finest hour.

Liberman had already been out of favour with Dzerzhinski, who questioned his loyalty at the start of his employment in the Soviet administration in November 1918. But they patched up their disagreements at the end of 1920 and Dzerzhinski supported him.³⁷ Ransome came near to messing everything up for Liberman. Truly he could be a dangerous acquaintance for Russians who were not Bolsheviks. British intelligence in any case constantly monitored his political allegiance even while using his services. The Manchester Guardian’s editor C. P. Scott was asked for a guarantee that he would not print anything from Ransome that was detrimental to British national interests. Only then was Ransome allowed to go on his Russian mission.³⁸ The Secret Service Bureau never felt it could drop its guard with him, especially after learning that he had told Russians that a particular British official was ‘an agent of the British government’.³⁹ In Britain he continued to talk up the Soviet cause at the drop of a hat.⁴⁰ Such was Ransome’s intimacy with the Kremlin leadership that Litvinov took the trouble to wire him about how to avoid the latest travel difficulties.⁴¹ But the Secret Service Bureau persisted with Ransome, finding him useful because of ‘his friendship with the Bolchevik [sic] leaders’ and his capacity to supply ‘a lot of most valuable stuff’.⁴² A fellow British intelligence operative put the problem about agent S76 succinctly: ‘He will report what he sees, but he does not see quite straight.’⁴³

Lenin and Trotsky saw things no straighter. Having seized power in Petrograd in a spirit of millennial optimism, they could not afford to let themselves think that capitalism might survive and flourish around the world. They sieved out information that might deflate their optimism, preferring the news that pointed to trouble for the post-war settlement in Europe. They looked keenly for disturbances in central Europe. Viewed from the Kremlin, Western countries appeared ripe for Soviet-style revolutions.

24. THE ALLIED MILITARY WITHDRAWAL

The Soviet communist leadership may have magnified the prospects of ‘European revolution’ but it did not invent them out of nothing. Country after country to the west of Russia was experiencing disorder and discontent. Russia itself emerged under Bolshevik rule from years of civil war and foreign armed intervention. The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will. The Western Allies had not had properly agreed strategic aims since at least 1917, when America joined them.

After the defeat of Yudenich’s North-Western Army outside Petrograd in October 1919, Denikin and the Volunteer Army became the last hope for the White cause. Yudenich tried to transfer his men in British vessels to southern Russia. Denikin himself was allowing the Volunteer Army to rest after the forced retreat to Crimea; his troops needed time for recovery and re-equipment. The French expeditionary force had departed Odessa in April 1919; the Americans who had landed in Siberia spent the second half of the year straggling eastwards from Omsk. Lloyd George had then ordered the British withdrawal and in August 1919 General Henry Rawlinson went to northern Russia to discuss evacuation. His plan was for a complete pull-out by mid-October, but he failed to persuade General Yevgeni Miller’s small White force to accompany the departing British troops — and even General Poole continued to say that he himself could advance on Kotlas and Vologda if reinforcements were made available to him.¹ While continuing to supply equipment and military advisers to Denikin’s beleaguered forces, the United Kingdom now left the fighting entirely to the Russians. Although the Japanese maintained their armed occupation in eastern Siberia, the foreign military intervention against Soviet rule was all but over.² The Allied Supreme Council still refused to make peace with the Bolsheviks; instead it resolved in late December to create a cordon sanitaire between Russia and central Europe. Bordering states would be helped to defend themselves and keep Bolshevism in quarantine behind Russian lines.³

Lloyd George was rumoured to want to go further and negotiate a peace treaty with the communists regardless of the other Allies.⁴ But on 16 January 1920 the Supreme Council limited itself to resolving to lift its economic blockade; and this decision was confirmed at its London meeting on 26 February.⁵

Litvinov delightedly told the Press Association in Copenhagen that the Allied powers would soon have to make ‘a formal and unqualified peace’ with Soviet Russia.⁶ Bolshevik commentators had always said that greed would bring foreign capitalists to press for a resumption of trade. Even so, the ending of the Allies’ blockade was only a decision in principle, which was not the same thing as help from the government in facilitating the making of contracts and financial transfers. If Western businessmen dealt with the men of the Kremlin, they would be doing so at their own risk. The Allied powers still worried about Sovnarkom’s commitment to revolutionary expansion and about the activities of its agents and supporters in the West; they were equally agitated by the nationalization of foreign property in Russia since the October Revolution. Furthermore, the Bolsheviks hung on to Western prisoners — and their governments demanded their release before any trading could be sanctioned by treaty. The Allies were angry, too, about the Soviet disregard for the rule of law. Western leaders — or most of them — had yet to be convinced that Sovnarkom would allow businesses to operate without political interference. The French, indeed, were incensed by any suggestion that entrepreneurs of the Allied countries should re-enter Russia.

The Estonian government feared a Red Army invasion after Yudenich’s crushing defeat. Ministers had no confidence in the Allied Supreme Council and its talk about a regional barrier under Western tutelage. They looked after themselves by beginning talks with Moscow in November.⁷ Soviet Russia had its own pragmatic reasons for a Baltic settlement. If Tallinn became an entrepôt for Russian international commerce, Estonia could be its window on to the West. When the world learned of the profits to be made, other foreign states would surely see the advantage of recognizing Sovnarkom.⁸ Wanting to appease its powerful neighbour, Estonia ordered the disarming of Yudenich’s forces on its territory.⁹ Clothes and equipment were taken from the North-Western Army.¹⁰ A Soviet–Estonian truce was agreed while the discussions continued — and there was nothing the Allied missions in Tallinn could do to halt the process: independent Estonia was acting independently.¹¹ And on 4 February 1920 the Estonian government signed a diplomatic and commercial treaty with Soviet Russia.¹²

The Kremlin advertised its plan to pay for imports with its gold reserves and to sell Russian natural resources to the highest bidders. Western businessmen flocked to Tallinn. Many were not distinguished by their honesty, but all of them were willing to take the gamble of investing in Russia’s international trade. In fact the goods traffic to Petrograd outweighed what went in the opposite direction by a factor of ten to one. Urban Russia remained unproductive and the villages were no longer covering the country’s requirements. Flax and veneers were practically all that the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade could lay its hands on for sale abroad.¹³ According to the Estonians, a third of Russian imports consisted of agricultural machinery and equipment.¹⁴ Traditionally Russia had exported food, paper and leather to Europe, but now these items had to be bought abroad.¹⁵ The Estonians were happy to oblige. Estonia had barely started to recover from war and revolution and its ministers now judged it in the national interest to enable the Russians to acquire the products they wanted. The transit fees were too valuable to be ignored.

Soviet leaders continued to press for recognition by the Allies. At the end of 1919 Litvinov affected surprise that the Bullitt proposals of earlier months had not been acted upon. This was nonsense: Lenin on his side had never been genuinely committed to ending the Civil War except with a Red victory. Litvinov was really trying to appeal to all those lobbies in the West which might be tempted to trade with Soviet Russia. And a sequence of events appeared to confirm that the ice was beginning to crack. In mid-January 1920 Radek was released from German custody and sent back to Russia across Poland. He had by then decided that the ‘European socialist revolution’ was not going to happen very quickly, but he thought that his own liberation indicated the growing willingness of German ministers to adopt a gentler line in their Russian policy. The Soviet leadership made its own moves in the same period. On 7 March the Cheka resolved upon a mass release of seventy-four prisoners with English names from its prisons and camps.¹⁶ The purpose was easy to guess. The Bolsheviks had identified the United Kingdom as the likeliest of the great powers to come to an accommodation immediately after the war. A show of goodwill might be useful before negotiations commenced.

But even though Lloyd George was eager for commerce to be resumed, it would take time for him to clear away the political obstacles. The next move for Soviet leaders was therefore to set their caps at Sweden. The Swedes themselves wanted a share of the Russian trade and had industrial products for sale. Lev Krasin, who in 1918 had served in the Soviet mission in Berlin, joined Litvinov in Stockholm on 1 April 1920. While Litvinov handled the diplomacy, Krasin would lead any talks on trade. Krasin himself was viewed favourably in Europe — by some at least. The Manchester Guardian had picked him out as a man to be trusted, its Moscow correspondent W. T. Goode offering this warm portrait: ‘In the prime of his powers, sparkling with energy, Krassin [sic] is a well-set-up man, with black hair and full beard, a dark but bright complexion, and an engaging man. He is supremely competent, and his personality and conversation convey that impression swiftly to those with whom he speaks.’¹⁷ Having worked in Germany and Russia before 1917 as a manager in the Siemens-Schuckert company, Krasin had an intimate experience of industry. His post in 1920 was as People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade. His assignment abroad was to help start the Russian economic recovery by selling off manufacturing and mining concessions. Concentrating on the Scandinavians, Krasin now set out to drive a wedge into world ‘capitalist imperialism’ as Lenin had demanded. The plan was to use foreign capital for the benefit of communism in Russia.

For this to happen, a degree of subterfuge was required. Most countries were still reluctant to hold talks with Bolshevik Russia, so Sovnarkom sent out its envoys in the guise of leaders of the Russian co-operative movement.¹⁸ It was blatant hypocrisy. Bolsheviks in Russia treated co-ops as suspect organizations that sheltered enemies of the October Revolution. But foreigners who spoke to Krasin could now more easily shrug off criticism that they were talking to a communist state official. An atmosphere of friendliness and confidence was fostered in Scandinavia as the negotiations got under way. Swedish and Danish entrepreneurs put pressure on their government to facilitate trade agreements. The race was joined to re-enter the Russian trade. It was won by Denmark, which signed a treaty on 1 May. A copy was forwarded to the Allied embassies in Copenhagen so that political leaders might understand that any slowness in settling with Soviet Russia would lose them a lot of money.¹⁹ Krasin was pleased by how quickly Armstrong Whitworth, one of Britain’s largest metallurgical companies, sent people to Scandinavia to open talks with a view to agreeing a contract. And as a queue of Western businessmen lined up to meet him, he was kept very busy.²⁰

The next stage of the Soviet leadership’s plan was to send a section of their trade delegation to London to negotiate a treaty with Lloyd George. There was a temporary halt in proceedings when the British refused Litvinov a visa on account of his anti-war propaganda activity two years earlier.²¹ The Soviet delegation reacted by cancelling all talks with British businessmen and threatened to call off any trip to the United Kingdom.²² But this was only a bluff since Krasin had never been one of Litvinov’s admirers. Having always found Litvinov pedantic and painful to work with, he was more than content to proceed to London without him.²³ In any case, the priority for the Soviet leadership was to start up the talks. And when Theodore Rothstein was refused permission to enter the United Kingdom there was no reaction from Moscow.²⁴ Moreover, the British for their part wanted to appear flexible and allowed Litvinov’s friend Nikolai Klyshko to return to the United Kingdom as Krasin’s interpreter and chief of staff. Klyshko had worked for Vickers Ltd before the war, his English was good and he had plenty of British personal contacts.²⁵

Sovnarkom had been officially committed to its concessions policy since mid-1918, but it was only now, in peacetime, that it stood any chance of being implemented. Krasin was empowered to put up mines, forests, railways and telephone networks for auction to the highest bidders in the West. The sole stipulation in the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy was that no foreign firm should gain a monopoly. Economic necessity called for instant action and Russian industrial recovery would benefit from external assistance.²⁶ Lenin and Trotsky promoted the initiative, inviting the world’s capitalists to make their profits again in Russia so that the communist party might rebuild Russia’s shattered economy. Before 1917 they had denounced the Nobel Oil Company as the greedy and ruthless exploiter of the petrochemical resources of the Baku fields. But oil was almost the only means of industrial employment in Azerbaijan, so Lenin now wanted the Nobel family to come back with their technical expertise and financial resources. He was also ready to welcome Krupp, a company reviled by communists as a supporter of German militarism, to southern Russia to regenerate agriculture. Having handed the landed estates to the Russian peasantry in the October Revolution, he intended to grab them back so that foreign capitalists could modernize them and make profits for themselves and for the Kremlin.²⁷

Trotsky was equally active in this cause and knew how to appeal to foreign businesses. When he gave an interview to the American reporter Lincoln Eyre, he emphasized that Russia aimed to re-enter the world economy and buy foreign machinery.²⁸ One of Trotsky’s protégés, the dapper Viktor Kopp, was reported as being in Berlin and Copenhagen.²⁹ Kopp duly did the rounds of Krupp, Voss and other leading industrial companies. The overtures had a tempting logic. The Paris Peace Conference had severely restricted the size of the German armed forces for the foreseeable future. German metallurgical enterprises had expanded immensely in 1914–18 in response to the state’s military requirements, and Krupp and its rivals had yet to find a substitute purchaser of its armaments. By treating Soviet Russia as a pariah state, the Allied powers freed it to act entirely as it wished; and there was nothing in the Versailles treaty to stop German industry from signing contracts with the Russian communist leadership: Kopp had the authority to negotiate on this basis. Moscow had not abandoned its ultimate revolutionary goals. But until such time as the German Communist Party seized power in Berlin, Trotsky was happy to use Germany’s capitalism to enhance Soviet military security.

Lloyd George had no intention of letting the Germans overtake the British, but his ideas were opposed by Churchill, who wrote to him on 24 March 1920: ‘Since the Armistice my policy would have been “Peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny.” Willingly or unavoidably, you have followed something very near the reverse.’³⁰ While eschewing Churchill’s combative rhetoric, the other Western governments bridled at Lloyd George’s softness towards communist Russia. French ministers were the first to express doubts about any accommodation with Soviet commercial requests. They continued to draw attention to the losses incurred by France’s private bondholders as the result of Lenin’s unilateral annulment of Russian state debts. In America opinion was divided and the political situation was unstable. Woodrow Wilson was chronically ill and no longer handled the main diplomatic levers, and no clear policy emerged from the State Department.

The British cabinet proceeded with caution. Lloyd George wanted to keep a good bargaining position and could see that over-eagerness would be counter-productive. The Kremlin leaders were to be made to appreciate that they would get no treaty unless they complied with his demands. Lloyd George also needed to avoid unduly annoying the French government or alarming Washington — and he hoped to placate the Conservative MPs in his governing coalition. Nonetheless he remained confident that trade with Russia was in Britain’s best interests. He was being strenuously lobbied by influential business sectors as well as by the moderate political left in favour of a treaty. The Prime Minister believed that Russia’s reincorporation into the world community of nations would enhance peace, employment and prosperity in Britain and the rest of Europe. He also thought that the Russian people would drop any lingering preference for communism once there was a resumption of trade. When goods flowed into Soviet territory it would quickly become obvious that capitalism was better at producing a decent standard of living. Communism would shrivel in the Russian ground as Soviet rule collapsed. Although Lloyd George did not predict how this outcome would be achieved, he was confident that capitalism would introduce a fatal infection into Lenin’s regime. The Bolsheviks, he considered, would ultimately pay dearly for his fanaticism and the globe would be rid of the pestilence of the October Revolution.

Krasin arrived in London on 27 May 1920.³¹ Among the sticking points was the Soviet government’s desire to make its purchases in gold. The British government continued to contest the Bolshevik seizure of foreign assets in Russian bank vaults; the bullion stocks in Red hands were widely considered to be tainted and it was going to be tricky for Lloyd George to get round the problem without public controversy. Krasin also had to answer questions about Russia’s outstanding state loans, which had been unilaterally annulled by Sovnarkom on 3 February 1918. The New York Times characterized the emerging British policy as ‘buying off a dangerous enemy’.³² French newspapers also complained that the Soviet delegation’s decision to make for London and avoid Paris showed that Lloyd George was betraying the joint responsibilities of the Allies.³³ Yet public opinion in France was no more hopeful about the Americans. The suspicion was that if the British decided to withdraw from the Russian talks, Washington might step in quickly and sign a commercial treaty with Moscow.³⁴

It was not just politicians in Britain and abroad who had doubts about Krasin; many businessmen too were not happy to welcome him. Krasin learned this directly when he was harangued in his hotel by an entrepreneur who been arrested by the Cheka and forced to hand over his English pounds for rubles, a currency without exchange value abroad.³⁵ A court case was also brought against Krasin for trying to sell Russian timber to a British firm. The plaintiff claimed that his own stocks of timber had been seized without compensation in 1918 and the communist authorities were making illicit profit from them. Although the case moved sluggishly through the judicial system, no one was in any doubt about the possible consequences. If judgement went against the Soviet government, a torrent of such cases might be let loose as disgruntled owners and investors sought financial redress.³⁶ Krasin’s travails continued when the British industrialist Leslie Urquhart began to pester him. Urquhart had advocated the maintenance of business links with Russia after October 1917; but in mid-1918, on a trip to Moscow, he was threatened with imprisonment as a spy. If he had not been fluent in Russian, he might not have been able to extricate himself and repair to safety in northern Russia, from where he departed for the United Kingdom. He was less fortunate with his property because the communists had expropriated his large Russian mining and smelting company — and Urquhart did not intend to let Krasin forget this.³⁷

Lloyd George’s life would have been easier if the influential business lobby in favour of resuming trade had been willing to come into the open. But no company chairman wanted to push the case too hard in public. Sovnarkom’s record in ripping up property rights, persecuting religion and conducting a Red terror was notorious. The men of business were using the Prime Minister as their battering ram without putting their shoulders to the charge. As for the British labour movement, its sympathies with all or some of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s policies made it less than helpful in persuading the doubters. If an Anglo-Soviet commercial treaty was going to be realized the impetus had to come from the government. Lloyd George was willing to give this a try — and Soviet leaders were hoping that he would succeed.