Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West

25. BOLSHEVISM: FOR AND AGAINST

From November 1919 a group of leading British anti-Bolsheviks met together in the Savoy Hotel and the Café Royal for ‘Bolo Liquidation Lunches’. Bolo was the slang term for Bolshevik used by British and American officials at that time. Those seated around the table included Stephen Alley, Paul Dukes (who signed the menu in Cyrillic script), George Hill, Rex Leeper, John Picton Bagge and Sidney Reilly. All were old Russia hands and were connected with the Foreign Office or the Secret Service Bureau. As ardent foes of communism, they organized the lunches to discuss how to toughen British policy and bring down Lenin and the Soviet order.¹

Paul Dukes, when his cover was blown in Russia, began to write articles for the London Times. He recounted the terrible food shortages and blamed them on Soviet economic policies rather than war or the weather.² He ridiculed the idea that the workers and peasants were on the side of the Bolshevik party and said that the public displays of joy on May Day were an artificial confection. He pointed out that Bolsheviks treated their critics, including factory labourers, as counter-revolutionaries. He hailed the spread of peasant rebellions against communist rule and wished the Greens well in their struggle with the Reds.³ (The Greens were peasant partisans who fought the Reds and Whites with equal ferocity.) The final article in his series depicted the intimidation, fraud and lying propaganda involved in a local soviet election he had witnessed.⁴ He called on the Western political left to shed its illusions: ‘Bitterly as they revile the bourgeoisie, the Bolshevist leaders reserve their fiercest hatred and their last resources of invective and derision for all other Socialists — Russian, English, German, and American alike. They are never spoken of otherwise than as “social-traitors”.’⁵ Dukes bragged that he had visited Russia not as an accredited journalist but as a private traveller who had conversed with every section of the Russian people — he of course omitted to mention his employment by the Secret Service Bureau.⁶

According to Dukes, the ‘National Centre Party’ enjoyed support across the whole political spectrum, apart from monarchists and communists. The National Centre, however, was not a party but a combination of public figures of diverse political opinions. Dukes was deliberately misleading his readers to win their sympathies. He also made the unfounded claim that ‘the large majority of socialists have joined [the party]’ and were in productive contact with General Denikin.⁷ Although Dukes did admit that the so-called National Centre Party aimed to install a temporary dictatorship, he declared that democracy was its ultimate aim. The peasants would be left in possession of the land. The Soviet separation of Church and state would endure and the universal educational provision introduced by the Bolsheviks would be maintained. The National Centre Party would hold elections to a National Assembly and had no desire to restore the survivors of the Romanov dynasty to power. By focusing on the National Centre Party and exaggerating its status as a rallying point for anti-Soviet opinion in Russia, Dukes downplayed the extremism of the officers in Denikin’s forces. If anything united the Whites, in fact, it was Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism. They despised all liberals and socialists; they believed that democratic institutions had been tried and found wanting between February and October 1917. The political future they wanted would have little space for politicians, and Russia’s fate would have been grim and chaotic under their rule.

Dukes reminded his readers that the leadership in the Kremlin had set up a Communist International with the purpose of subverting governments in Europe and North America.⁸ His pronouncements did not go unnoticed by the Bolsheviks. When he joined the Christian Counter-Bolshevist Crusade and began to speak at its meetings, supporters of Soviet Russia attended his appearances to heckle.⁹ Dukes responded that since he had served in the Red Army he was speaking from personal knowledge; but in February 1920 his speech at a public meeting in Westminster Hall led to an affray that the police had to quell.¹⁰ When the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestiya accused him of subversive machinations he at last admitted to having been in charge of British intelligence operations in Russia, but he still held that he had only been gathering information.¹¹ Dukes received a knighthood for his services in December 1920 — George V had in fact wanted to award the Victoria Cross but was overruled by the army chiefs of staff who insisted that the medal could be received only by members of the armed services.¹²

Conservative and liberal figures such as Professor Bernard Pares at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies joined Dukes in signing a letter to The Times denouncing Soviet outrages.¹³ Dukes also wrote to the Manchester Guardian protesting against its indulgent editorial line on Soviet Russia — he was angered by the mild critique of communist rule offered by its reporter W. T. Goode, announcing his own credentials as follows: ‘I was at Moscow at the same time as Professor Goode, and I left Russia later than he. I was not, however, a guest of the Bolshevik Government, but, knowing the language thoroughly, lived as a Russian amongst the Russians. My object was to study the effects of Bolshevism on the people.’¹⁴ Although this was another of his misleading descriptions of what he had done in Russia, he efficiently made his point that it was inadequate to find the October Revolution and its leaders merely ‘interesting’ instead of offering a basic analysis of the revolutionary order. According to Dukes, Goode had praised the new educational system while failing to mention that schools had been compelled to stop teaching morality; he had also overlooked the antipathy of Russians to their Bolshevik rulers and their policies and ideology.

America had few writers on the anti-Soviet side of the debate with the direct experience of Soviet Russia that Dukes could muster. Dukes tried to do something about this by going on an American lecture tour in February 1921.¹⁵ While there he supported the attacks on Bolshevik rule made by Princess Cantacuzène, who before 1917 had belonged to the highest social circles. She printed her reminiscences of the October Revolution in the Saturday Evening Post, republishing them in a book. She condemned the daily illegalities in Petrograd, picking out Trotsky for harsh criticism.¹⁶ Her fellow Princess Catherine Radziwill, a best-selling author, concentrated on the secret deals between the Bolsheviks and the German government, but her research methods were less than exemplary since she felt entirely free to invent conversations and incidents involving Lenin and Trotsky.¹⁷

The Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov produced a steadier work, which appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, about Bolshevism’s foreign pretensions. Looking at Soviet efforts to spread revolution abroad, he noted the Russian linkage to the communist episodes in Budapest and Munich and sounded an alarm about Comintern. Milyukov stressed that ‘Mr Lenin’ and ‘Mr Trotsky’ were open about their global ambition; and he argued that the Bolsheviks had planned to use President Wilson’s proposal for a Prinkipo peace conference as a way of securing a diplomatic presence in Washington, London and Paris. He mentioned the huge grain fund and military resources gathered by Sovnarkom for future use in the revolutionary cause in central Europe.¹⁸ He wanted to depict himself as the constant Russian patriot and therefore omitted any reference to his own less than illustrious record in 1918 when he had sought Germany’s military assistance in overturning the Bolsheviks. He declared that the Hands Off Russia campaign was damaging the interests of his country and the world.¹⁹ He regretted the way the European and American socialist parties, despite deep disagreements with Bolshevism, were urging their governments to grant recognition to Sovnarkom.²⁰ He warned, too, against listening to prominent American and British sympathizers with Bolshevism.²¹

Milyukov’s book was all but ignored on both sides of the Atlantic. In frustration he wrote to the London Times, repudiating criticism of the White armies and their commanders. He insisted that Alexander Kerenski was wrong to advise against support for Kolchak and Denikin and intimated that if only Kerenski had taken a stronger line in 1917, Russia might have been spared its later torment.²² This was not the fairest of comments. If it was true that Kerenski had had a genuine chance in summer 1917, Milyukov had been given his own in the spring of that year. Russian political refugees all too frequently subsided into internal polemics. Disputes were bitter as conservative and liberal writers re-examined the events between the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolsheviks with the same intense disputatiousness that had made the émigré socialist colonies notorious before the Great War.

Such a reputation had also begun to attach itself to those in the West who were outspoken in their support for the Whites. On 17 July 1919 Winston Churchill had given a talk at the British-Russian Club in London and paid tribute to the achievements of the Russian Imperial army on the eastern front, saying that its valour had saved Paris from the Germans in 1914–15. The Secretary of State for War was on sparkling form: ‘Some people are inclined to speak as if I were responsible, as if I was at the bottom of all this trouble in Russia.’ When the laughter had subsided Churchill explained that he believed in the ‘inherent weakness of Bolshevism’. The Red Army, he declared, was weaker than many supposed. He fulminated against Lenin and Trotsky but did not confine himself to the Russian question. Turning to Hungary, he described the communist leader Béla Kun as ‘another fungus, sprung up in the night’. European civilization was under threat. He summarized his standpoint as follows: ‘Russia, my lords and gentlemen, is the decisive factor in the history of the world at the present time.’²³ Using extravagant vocabulary as usual, Churchill had a clear understanding of communism’s threat to the freedoms fully or partially available in the West; and, ignoring the reproaches of Lloyd George, he gave encouragement to active anti-Bolsheviks in London.²⁴

Friends of the Bolsheviks meanwhile queued up to extol what was happening in Russia. Arthur Ransome’s Russia in 1919 was a rapidly written memoir that described the communist leaders in the blandest personal terms, Ransome blithely acknowledging that he was not going to cover the Red terror.²⁵ And although Morgan Philips Price mentioned the terror in his own account, he claimed that it had lasted only six weeks. He chose instead to stress the sustained awfulness of the White terror while praising the Soviet system of government.²⁶ Ivy Litvinov, when left behind in London by Maxim, published a booklet in the same spirit. Drawing on Maxim’s notes, she asked what worth there could ever be in the Constituent Assembly. She accused the Whites of worse violence than anything done by the Reds, stating: ‘As a matter of fact, the Soviet regime has been much less sanguinary than any known in history.’²⁷

But of all the books about the new regime, whether favourable or otherwise, the one with the greatest impact was John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, which appeared in March 1919.²⁸ His chapters concentrated on the brief period before and after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and were based on his own notes and memories as well as on his file of Le Bulletin de la Presse issued daily by the French Information Bureau.²⁹ He offered what he called ‘intensified history’, but he was also providing disguised propaganda. Reed claimed that until the October Revolution Russia had been an ‘almost incredibly conservative’ country: he entirely overlooked the surge of revolutionary action that had taken place in factories, garrisons and villages long before the Bolsheviks took over. The ‘masses’ appeared in his pages only when listening to speeches by Lenin and the other communist leaders. Reed wrote about the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries only to indicate how little they understood the scale of the external and internal emergency in Russia. Lenin and Trotsky were his heroes, and Kerenski was depicted as an incompetent fool: no attempt was made to explain the rationale for the Provisional Government’s policies. Reed wrote: ‘It is still fashionable… to speak of the Bolshevik insurrection as an “adventure”. Adventure it was, and one of the most marvellous mankind has ever embarked upon, sweeping into history at the head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple desires.’³⁰ Bolshevism and popular opinion according to Reed were one and the same thing.

He threw himself into the tasks of public speaking and writing for the socialist press; he also prepared a tendentious memorandum for the State Department denying that any parties other than the Bolsheviks had the slightest following. He wrote that the entire social structure in Russia had been transformed because the bourgeoisie had been dispossessed and turned into proletarians. He claimed that the former middle classes could freely ‘organize in the Soviets, but only to defend their [new] proletarian interests’. The truth was different. The Soviet Constitution expressly deprived those classes of civic rights. Reed stated that the USA was the foreign partner of choice for Sovnarkom because the British and the French had been unremittingly hostile. He added that it was in the Russian interest for Germany to be defeated in the Great War. The reality was that Lenin and Trotsky hoped for anti-capitalist risings across Europe and North America. Reed dropped his tactful tone just once, when saying of the Russians: ‘As for President Wilson, they don’t believe a word he says.’³¹ Reed wanted the US to recognize Soviet Russia and stop persecuting Bolsheviks in America — and he urged American politicians to get the Japanese to withdraw from eastern Siberia.³²

Together with Max Eastman, he also produced a booklet that included translated pieces by Lenin and Chicherin. Lenin’s contribution was his ‘Letter to American Workingmen’. The booklet was distributed in a somewhat abridged edition ‘in deference to an extremely literal interpretation of the Espionage Act’. Eastman wrote an imaginary conversation between Lenin and President Wilson. This was wholly to Wilson’s disadvantage, with Lenin putting awkward questions to Wilson and exposing him as wealthy, ignorant, insincere and dangerous.³³ Eastman was a communist sympathizer although he did not belong to an organized communist group. He was not alone in taking this position. The outstanding example in France was the novelist Henri Barbusse, who contended that the Bolsheviks had ‘attenuated their implacable rigidity’ and were adapting to ‘the life of an innumerable, young people’.³⁴ Barbusse implied that France had a superior civilization to Russia: he urged everyone not to expect too much of the Russians. But he insisted that, after a poor start, communism in Russia was changing for the better.

Reed and the other pro-Bolshevik commentators were not the only proponents of conciliation with the Russian communist leaders. A leading American critic of Soviet rule was John Spargo, whose comments were all the more persuasive inasmuch as he was a socialist friend of Georgi Plekhanov.³⁵Russia as an American Problem, appearing in mid-November 1919, held that Bolshevism was an ‘inverted tsarist regime’ and an enemy of democracy.³⁶ But Spargo argued that the Germans remained bent on the economic domination of Russia and that Japanese objectives were not dissimilar.³⁷ He urged America to get involved before it was too late. US businessmen could help Russia back on its feet by trading in its natural resources. Exports of gold and timber would enable Russians to pay for the capital equipment vital for economic recovery. America should send some of its own experts and make financial credits available.³⁸ He admitted that there were uncompromising extremists among the Soviet leadership, but suggested that Lenin and a few others were demonstrating a readiness for internal reform. Spargo had vociferously supported the White armies until their defeat in the Civil War; but when the Reds achieved military victory he judged that the resumption of international commerce was the surest way to erode Bolshevism’s grip on the country.³⁹

In fact the person who gave the most effective succour to Moscow was the economist John Maynard Keynes. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published late in 1919, Keynes said that Clemenceau had been eaten up with a desire for vengeance on Germany. He thought Wilson was an innocent abroad whose intelligence was overstated, while Lloyd George seemed to lose his political compass when confronted by a Clemenceau on the rampage. Keynes took all Western leaders to task for their treatment of Germany,⁴⁰ arguing that the Versailles treaty was a Carthaginian peace which had ruined the chances of recuperation and guaranteed chronic political instability. Territory had been grabbed from the Germans, reparations imposed.⁴¹

Keynes sombrely predicted that a devastated Russia and an exhausted Germany would draw close; he argued that it could not be excluded that ‘Spartacism’ would win out in Berlin.⁴² But even if the political far left fell short of victory, he wrote, there could still be an alliance between German capitalism and Russian communism — and the British, Americans and French would be the losers unless they changed their policy. Keynes hailed the work of Herbert Hoover and the American Relief Administration — Hoover had condemned the treaty as too harsh while it was being negotiated, and Keynes called him ‘the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation’.⁴³ Cheap grain shipments from the US Midwest were currently saving eastern and central Europe from famine. This vital relief, though, would not continue for ever and it behoved the Allies to enable the restoration of Russian cereal exports. Keynes claimed that without them there could be no European economic recovery or political stabilization. He insisted that since the Allies could not yet supply Russia with the agricultural implements needed to regenerate its farming, Germany would be doing everyone a service by trading with Moscow. The world had an interlinked economy and Keynes wanted policy to be adjusted in the light of this.⁴⁴

He wrote his book in a spasm of fervour in autumn 1919 and it came out amid controversy at the end of the year. Few other works by him around that period had quite the same punch. The book was an instant best-seller in many languages, but disparagers quickly appeared in abundance. A London Times editorial applauded the Cambridge academic for his cleverness and erudition but denied that the Germans had been treated too severely. Supposedly Keynes was urging a policy that would ‘place Germany in effective control of Russia as a recompense for having let loose a war in which one of her principal objects was the economic enslavement of Russia’.⁴⁵ The reviewer in the New York Times was blunter still, calling the book a ‘revolting melodrama’. Keynes had allegedly practised ‘the highly perfect art of slurring those who helped to win this war’.⁴⁶ The French authorities and press were similarly negative.⁴⁷ Only on the left did Keynes experience a warm reception. The Manchester Guardian praised him for his ‘conspicuous courage’.⁴⁸ From donnish obscurity Keynes rose to international fame, leaving no one indifferent regardless of whether they liked or disliked his analysis of the Versailles treaty.

Soviet communist leaders acclaimed the book. Ioffe said it exactly coincided with his own opinions.⁴⁹ Even Lenin, who only reluctantly cited authors hostile to Marxism in his writings, welcomed The Economic Consequences of the Peace; but if he was flattered by Keynes’s reference to his ‘subtle mind’, he did not say so.⁵⁰ Bolsheviks were delighted to witness one of the world’s most brilliant economists agreeing that a punitive peace had been inflicted on Germany and a disastrous blockade on Russia. While they waited for revolutions to roll out across Europe, they could at least enjoy watching others spreading their propaganda for them.

26. LEFT ENTRANCE

From late 1919 Sovnarkom denied accreditation to journalists of unfriendly foreign newspapers.¹ Dispatches had to be submitted in advance to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Marguerite E. Harrison of the Associated Press noted that the official Soviet reviewer of Western press coverage mysteriously lost or delayed sanctioning the articles he disliked. He confessed: ‘Mrs Harrison, your article is perfectly correct in every particular, but I prefer Mr Blank’s article. It is more favourable to us. If they both came out in the American press at the same time it might produce a bad impression. I will send his first and hold yours for twenty-four hours.’² Meanwhile a Central Bureau for the Service of Foreigners was created in the Russian capital with the idea of arranging evenings of cultural uplift for favoured reporters, and Party Central Committee member Anatoli Lunacharski helped out by compèring a concert by the State Stradivarius Quartet playing Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Debussy.³

Such efforts had only patchy success with the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who arrived in Russia early in 1920 after being deported from America. In line with the idea of winning friends who could influence international opinion, the Soviet authorities made a fuss of them and gave them rooms in a good Moscow hotel. Goldman had modified her doctrines of anarchism to the point where she no longer advocated non-violence as an absolute principle. But she was never likely to become a Bolshevik and indeed she remarked on the poverty, bureaucracy and fanatical intolerance that prevailed under Soviet rule. Communist functionaries filled their days with meetings with trade union activists and factory workers who would reliably spout the official Bolshevik line; but, as word of her presence got around Moscow, Russian anarchists made contact and told her of the persecution they had suffered since the October Revolution. By December 1921 she and Berkman had had enough and left Russia for good. They decamped to the Latvian capital Riga, where they could write freely about the oppression they had witnessed. Joseph Pulitzer published their work in his New York World magazine and Goldman later integrated their articles into her book My Disillusionment in Russia.⁴

Soviet leaders hoped for better luck with their efforts to influence the British political left. On 10 December 1919 the Trades Union Congress demanded ‘the right to an independent and impartial enquiry into the industrial, economic and political conditions of Russia’, aiming to send a joint delegation of the TUC, the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party to see things for themselves.⁵ The Supreme Allied Council decided that no harm would be done, and on 27 April 1920 the delegation left for Scandinavia en route for Petrograd.⁶ Lenin remained unconvinced that this was a good idea and called for a press campaign to denounce the projected ‘guests’ of Soviet Russia as ‘social-traitors’. Chicherin pleaded for the trip to happen without any molestation, and Lenin for once gave way.⁷

The British Labour delegation reached Petrograd on 11 May for their six-week trip.⁸ Off the train stepped Margaret Bondfield, H. Skinner and A. A. Purcell for the TUC; Ben Turner, Mrs Philip Snowden and Robert Williams for the Labour Party; and Clifford Allen and R. C. Wallhead for the Independent Labour Party. Dr Leslie Haden Guest and C. Roden Buxton travelled as secretaries and interpreters.⁹ Bertrand Russell joined them later after undergoing a special interview by British officials in London and overcoming Litvinov’s initial reluctance to issue him a visa in Stockholm.¹⁰ The delegates felt they were breaking through to a different world. As Ethel Snowden put it: ‘We were behind the “iron curtain” at last!’¹¹ It is widely assumed that this phrase was coined by Winston Churchill, in his speech at Fulton, Missouri in 1946, as the Cold War started between the USSR and the USA. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels had in fact used it a year earlier as the Red Army swept into Romania.¹² But though it was she who had coined it, Mrs Snowden’s meaning was quite different from Churchill’s. She believed that a curtain of ignorance separated the countries of the West from Soviet Russia. She denied that the Russian communists were a threat to Britain’s security — and she opposed any project to renew British armed intervention or giving material assistance to the enemies of Bolshevism.¹³

She and her companions were alert to the risk of being treated like a ‘royal family’ and manipulated for Bolshevik purposes.¹⁴Chicherin made a prediction at a banquet of welcome: ‘We instructed ourselves whilst the process of creating a new Russia was going on. When you return to England you also will have to learn while building, and then, in the near future, you will be able to greet us as we greet you tonight.’¹⁵ Mrs Snowden tartly noted: ‘As propagandists there is surely no race and no class to surpass the Russian Communists.’¹⁶ The repeated singing of the Internationale at the banquet got on her nerves.¹⁷ She also disliked the pomposity of official gatherings. Propaganda was unconvincing on the lips of ill-fed youngsters and she found it ‘unspeakably funny tripping from the unaccustomed lips of sober-speeched Britons, anxious not to be outdone in the delivery of explosive perorations’.¹⁸

John Clarke, travelling with fellow Scot Willie Gallacher in July 1920 to the Comintern Congress, recorded a conversation on the slow train journey south from Murmansk to Petrograd. It was a time when the Red Army and the Polish Army were fighting for supremacy in Ukraine and Poland:

Gallacher: ‘Poles, Poles, are they defeated?’

Red Army soldier: ‘Ne upony mio!’ (I don’t understand.)

Gallacher: ‘Poles — defeated?’

Soldier: ‘Ne upony mio!’

Gallacher: ‘Poles — beaten — defeated — beaten?’ (A little fisticuff display.)

Soldier (stoically): ‘Ne upony mio!’

Gallacher: ‘Poles beaten! y’ken, beaten — washed oot — up the pole?’

Soldier (with loud guffaw): ‘Ne upony mio!’

And so on, ad infinitum.¹⁹

Clarke was known for his humour, but he could see that his efforts were lost on an audience of four hundred peasants near Kandalaksha. His political minder had to interpret for them. Although Clarke spoke hardly any Russian, he astutely noticed that the Kandalaksha peasants spoke a dialect so distant from standard Russian that they probably could not understand even the minder.²⁰ Gallacher and Clarke took over for themselves and simply used ‘prehistoric gesture-language’.²¹

Generally the Soviet leadership was keen to keep visiting foreigners away from any Western resident who might puncture their warm illusions about Soviet Russia. Associated Press correspondent Marguerite Harrison, for example, was told to stay away from H. G. Wells.²² But Bolshevik connivances were erratic, and Harrison was allowed to consort with Bertrand Russell.²³ She tagged along on the Labour delegation’s trip to the Volga region:

Our tour was a most luxurious one throughout, giving no idea of the ordinary hardships of travel in Russia at the present time. We had a special sleeper, with all the former comforts including spotless linen, and electric lights, a dining car where we had three good meals a day, service and appointments being very nearly up to peace time standards.²⁴

The cosseting of body and mind worked with Robert Williams, who declared that the experiences of the delegates would encourage them to argue for the removal of the economic blockade of Russia.²⁵ In Samara, he stated that the British working class was pleased by every Red military triumph.²⁶ The delegation’s interim report claimed that the ills of Soviet Russia — malnutrition and disease — were all the product of external factors. Policies of blockade or intervention should be put aside and official recognition granted.

Most of the other Britons resisted the blandishments and manipulation. Tom Shaw MP and Ben Turner bridled at the suggestion that the government of the United Kingdom was actively supporting the Polish invasion;²⁷ and when Mrs Snowden disparaged the Soviet order, the Russian hosts downgraded her from ‘Comrade’ to ‘Madame’.²⁸ The disappointment of the British delegation was summed up by one of its members who composed an irreverent new stanza for ‘The Red Flag’ as an antidote to Soviet boastfulness:

The people’s flag is palest pink,

It’s not so red as you may think;

We’ve been to see, and now we know

They been and changed its colour so.²⁹

Lenin gave up an hour and a half of his time to some of the visitors despite his long-felt contempt for the leaders of British labour. While living in London, he said that George Bernard Shaw was ‘a good man fallen among Fabians’.³⁰ About Sidney Webb he offered the opinion that he had ‘more industry than brains’.³¹ Lenin predicted that when British workers set up soviets, Ramsay MacDonald would do his utmost to halt the revolution in its tracks.³² His attitude to Bertrand Russell is unlikely to have been any different. For his part Russell was repelled by Lenin’s passion for violence while Ethel Snowden was shocked by his ignorance about Britain; she explained to him that communism in England was constituted by ‘only a handful of extremists’ who had abandoned the older socialist organizations.³³ Trotsky was too busy with his military duties for the delegates to be granted an interview with him, but he was present when the delegates were treated to a performance of an opera by Borodin. Russell managed a brief chat with him in the interval and formed a poor impression. He never explained the reason for this. But Mrs Snowden revealed that one of the delegates was introduced to Trotsky as a conscientious objector who had spent the Great War in prison. Trotsky commented: ‘We can have nobody here who preaches peace and wants to stop the war.’³⁴ He can only have been talking about Russell. Until that moment Mrs Snowden had envisaged Trotsky as ‘the greatest of pacifists’ in the Great War. She now knew better.³⁵

Yet she, too, stood up and applauded when he resumed his seat in the old Imperial box for the next act of the opera. Conquering her distaste for the Internationale, she sang along with everyone else.³⁶ But the mood passed, and she was glad to leave Russia with the rest of the delegation at the end of their lengthy trip. Their departure was not uniformly easy. According to H. V. Keeling, some of them were compelled to sign a form promising not to attack the Soviet communists or else they would not be allowed to leave the country.³⁷ Clifford Allen’s case was still more serious since he had fallen ill with pneumonia, exacerbated by the fact that he already suffered from TB, but his exit visa request was refused. Russell and Haden Guest pleaded with Chicherin. There was then a furious row because Chicherin insisted on Allen being examined by two Soviet doctors who would not be available for a couple more days. Russell recalled: ‘At the height of the quarrel, on a staircase, I indulged in a shouting match because Chicherin had been a friend of my Uncle Rollo and I had hopes of him. I shouted that I should denounce him as a murderer.’ Russell fancifully suspected that the Soviet authorities believed that the anti-Bolsheviks among the delegates wanted Allen to die en route to Britain so that he could not deliver a favourable report on Bolshevik rule.

The dispute resolved, the entire delegation made its way back to Britain where a meeting of welcome was held at the Albert Hall in London and Margaret Bondfield spoke of being impressed by ‘the stupendous nature of the drama’ of the communist revolution.³⁸A brisk discussion ensued over the next few weeks. The Social-Democratic Federation announced disapproval of Soviet tyranny: ‘[The] realization of Socialism is only possible on the basis of democracy. Every other path leads to ruin.’ Mrs Snowden added: ‘When you get down to the bottom the dictatorship of the proletariat means the dictatorship of about six men aided by an extraordinary commission.’³⁹ She rushed a booklet into print:

Do not, gentle visitor, when you meet the great man, fall victim to this twinkling eye and make the mistake of thinking it betokens a tender spirit. I am sure Lenin is the kindest and gentlest of men in private relationships; but when he mentioned his solution of the peasant problem the merry twinkle had a cruel glint which horrified.⁴⁰

On the other side stood Messrs Purcell, Skinner, Turner, Wallhead and Williams, who appealed to trade unionists to refuse to produce anything for use against Soviet Russia.⁴¹ Purcell called on skilled workers to volunteer for work there.⁴² John Clarke declared that Mrs Snowden was too middle class to understand the October Revolution and its greatness; he likened her to an ‘abandoned strumpet, harlot, and prostitute of the streets [who] sells her voluptuous merchandise to the very beings who disease her’.⁴³

The dispute intrigued H. G. Wells, who made his own journey of exploration in September 1920. As a friend of Maxim Gorki he could count on a warm reception and Gorki lent him his assistant Moura Benckendorff — Lockhart’s lover in 1918 — as an interpreter. He was fed and watered to his satisfaction;⁴⁴ and his speech to the Petrograd Soviet was reported in Pravda, presumably because he called for Russia to be left without foreign interference.⁴⁵ When Wells interviewed Lenin, they talked about the future of Russian towns, Russian electricity and a little about Russian peasants.⁴⁶ Such topics did not unduly threaten the intellectual defences of the ‘dreamer in the Kremlin’. Whereas Wells would snipe at Russell for over-dramatizing his account, he himself missed a chance to put Lenin under serious scrutiny.

Another Briton, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, was more perceptive when meeting Soviet leaders. She had long felt a penchant for Russia: ‘I was insatiably interested, I loved Slavs, Slav music, Slav literature, Slav art and decoration, and had always, since childhood, been drawn to Russia.’ She regarded Russians as ‘the most mystic, the most barbarous and the most romantic’ people in the entire universe. In August 1920, she made the acquaintance of Lev Kamenev in London. Unencumbered by his wife’s company on his British trip and amiably fluent in French, he offered to sit for her and they hit it off splendidly.⁴⁷ An adventurous widow, she showed him the sights of the capital, taking him to the Tate Gallery and Hampstead Heath. With plenty of free time, Sheridan also escorted him to Hampton Court where they spent the evening on the river. Kamenev invited her to the Café Royal and to the Ritz before suggesting:

‘Why don’t you come to Russia?’

‘How can I?’ I asked. And he made the wondrous reply:

‘I will take you with me when I go, and I will get Lenin and Trotzki [sic] to sit to you.’⁴⁸

The fact that it would be a paid assignment was an additional attraction for Sheridan, who had debts at the time. She readily agreed, needing only to work out where to deposit her children before departure.⁴⁹

The one person she had to keep this secret from was her cousin Winston Churchill. At a recent lunch with her, he had exclaimed that Bolshevism was a crocodile and that ‘either you must shoot it, or else make a detour round it so as not to rouse it’.⁵⁰ Sheridan quietly used her personal contacts in the Foreign Office to get visas for Norway and Sweden. Kamenev and the Soviet group — accompanied by Sheridan — made their way by train to the Newcastle ferry.⁵¹ In Norway, Maxim Litvinov held things up, suspecting that she was a spy.⁵² Not only was she a close relative of the West’s great Red-baiter but she also had no record of involvement in radical politics. But Kamenev would not be put off and when Ivy Litvinov made friends with her and chatted about common friends, Maxim relented.⁵³

In Moscow, Sheridan was given rooms in the sumptuous mansion built by the Kharitonenko family on Sophia Embankment on the opposite side of the River Moskva from the Kremlin.⁵⁴ (It became the British Embassy in 1931.) It had been sequestrated by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, and among the other foreigners staying there at the time were H. G. Wells, Washington B. Vanderlip and Theodore Rothstein.⁵⁵ Sheridan finished several fine busts — those of Lenin, Zinoviev and Dzerzhinski were outstanding; but it was Trotsky who most appealed to her. She was not the first British woman to succumb to his charisma; even Ethel Snowden had been won over: ‘Physically he was a remarkably fine-looking man; a Jew, dark and keen, with penetrating eyes, and a quiet manner suggestive of enormous reserves of strength. He was in an officer’s uniform which fitted him extremely well.’⁵⁶ At first, though, Trotsky was standoffish toward Sheridan until Litvinov secured his co-operation.⁵⁷ Sheridan had got accustomed to things being cancelled or delayed in Moscow and was consequently surprised when Trotsky’s official car arrived to pick her up at the appointed time. She later heard an apocryphal story that Trotsky had shot an unpunctual chauffeur with his own revolver. She was delayed by a punctilious sentry at the entrance to the building, which made her late through no fault of her own. This did not save her from being rebuked, albeit not executed, by the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs.

He soon became charm incarnate and obviously liked being sculpted. The fact that the artist was a glamorous, uninhibited woman was a further stimulus:

He looked up suddenly and stared back, a steady unabashed stare. After a few seconds I said I hoped he did not mind. His galanterie was almost French!

‘I do not mind. I have my revanche in looking at you et c’est moi qui gagne!’

He then pointed out that he was quite asymmetrical, and snapped his teeth to show that his underjaw was crooked. He had a cleft in his chin, nose and brow, as if his face had been moulded and the two halves had not been accurately joined. Full face he was Mephisto, his eyebrows slanted upwards, and the lower part of his face tapered into a pointed and defiant beard. His eyes were much talked of; they had a curious way of lighting up and flashing like an electric spark; he was alert, active, observant, moqueur, with a magnetism to which he must have owed his unique position.⁵⁸

And so it went on. ‘ “Vous me caressez avec des instruments d’acier!” he said as I measured him with the callipers.’⁵⁹ At the start of the next sitting, on a cold evening, he ‘kissed my frozen hands and placed two chairs for me by the fire, one for me and one for my feet’.⁶⁰ When she asked him to loosen his collar, he ‘unbuttoned his tunic and the shirt underneath, and laid bare his neck and chest.’⁶¹

Despite rarely offering a smile, he flirted with her more and more: ‘Even when your teeth are clenched and you are fighting with your work, vous êtes encore femme.’⁶² She replied: ‘I had expected you to be most unamiable, and I am surprised to find you otherwise. I wonder how I will describe you to people in England who think you are a monster.’ He said: ‘Tell them… tell them that “lorsque Trotzki embrasse, il ne mord pas!” ’ But he added: ‘Much as I like you and admire you as a woman, I assure you that if I knew you were an enemy, or a danger to our revolutionary cause, I would not hesitate to shoot you down with my own hand.’ Sheridan ‘found this vaunted ruthlessness most attractive’.⁶³ When she showed him pictures of her work, he expressed admiration for her bust of Asquith: ‘You have given me an idea — if Asquith comes back into office soon (there is a rumour that he might bring in a coalition with labour and recognise Russia) I will hold you as a hostage until England makes peace with us.’ Sheridan responded that her cousin Winston was more likely to form any new government; she also told him: ‘But if you said you would shoot me, Winston would only say “shoot”… Winston is the only man in England who is made of the stuff that the Bolsheviks are made of. He has fight, force, and fanaticism.’⁶⁴

Clare Sheridan attracted a lot of attention on her return to Britain, when she published the first of several memoirs of her time in Russia, and during her subsequent book tour of the USA; but she was not taken very seriously, except by the Hands Off Russia people.⁶⁵ This was partly her own fault; she had always claimed to be apolitical. But what did irk her was the icy attitude of Cousin Winston, who refused to speak to her. She called him heartless and disloyal, saying that she had been on the same kind of adventure he would have once undertaken. Churchill assured her of his friendship but still reproved her for her dalliance with ‘these fiends in human form’.⁶⁶ This was conciliatory enough for her to ask him to put in a good word for her to become the UK ambassador to Moscow — she reminded him that he had once said he would vote for her if ever she stood for parliament.⁶⁷ Nothing, of course, came of this overture.

Whereas Sheridan’s gushing recollections had little impact, the report of the Labour delegation received attentive scrutiny in both Britain and America. But being the product of collective authorship, it was somewhat insipid; and being focused on economic and social policies, it touched on communist politics only indirectly:

Whether, under such conditions, Russia could be governed in a different way — whether, in particular, the ordinary processes of democracy could be expected to work — is a question on which we do not feel ourselves competent to pronounce. All we know is that no practical alternative, except a virtual return to autocracy, has been suggested to us; that a ‘strong’ Government is the only type of Government which Russia has yet known; that the opponents of the Soviet Government when they were in power in 1917, exercised repression against the Communists.⁶⁸

Apparently democracy and civic freedoms were all right for the British but not necessarily appropriate for Russians. And the report ended with the comment: ‘We cannot forget that the responsibility for these conditions resulting from foreign interference rests not upon the revolutionaries of Russia, but upon the Capitalist Governments of other countries, including our own.’⁶⁹

The individual accounts by visitors were much less bland. H. G. Wells wrote up his thoughts in Russia in the Shadows: ‘Ruin: that is the primary Russian fact at the present time.’⁷⁰ He did not attempt an analysis of Bolshevism, and he could not resist a satirical aside:

A gnawing desire drew up on me to see Karl Marx shaved. Some day, if I am spared, I will take up shears and a razor against Das Kapital; I will write The Shaving of Karl Marx.

But Marx is for the Marxists merely an image and a symbol, and it is with Marxists that we now are dealing.⁷¹

Yet Wells also insisted that the communist order had more support in Russia than any of its Russian opponents, either on Russia’s soil or abroad, were ever likely to gather.⁷²The Times gave his account a backhanded compliment:

The merit — and it is a real merit — of Mr H. G. Wells’s book on Bolshevist Russia is that it tells us nothing new, either about Russia or about himself. It adds the evidence of one more sympathiser with communist ideals to the testimony of so many other witnesses with similar leanings on the utter and dismal breakdown of the Bolshevist system.⁷³

Wells had gone out to Russia with a favourable opinion of communism; his disillusionment carried weight.

Bertrand Russell’s book The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism described a similar reaction: ‘I went to Russia a communist, but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.’⁷⁴ Russell had done his homework and peppered his conversation with Lenin with awkward questions. He interpreted Bolshevism as a secular religion. About Lenin he reported:

I think if I had met him without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith — religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr’s hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical. He has as little love of liberty as the Christians who suffered under Diocletian, and retaliated when they acquired power. Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with wholehearted belief in a panacea for all human ills. If so, I cannot but rejoice in the sceptical temper of the Western world.⁷⁵

Russell refused to exercise any toleration of intolerance. He also turned on the Western socialists who suppressed mention of what they saw with their own eyes on trips to Moscow. Communist harshness, he argued, could not be explained away by the military intervention of Britain and France. Although war and blockade had undoubtedly made things worse, the fundamental cause lay in the doctrines of the Bolshevik leaders.

Nonetheless Russell’s hostile testimony was inconsistent with some of his private comments. He wrote to his friend Ottoline Morrell from Stockholm:

I was stifled and oppressed by the weight of the machine as by a cope of lead. Yet I think it the right government for Russia at this moment. If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky’s characters should be governed, you will understand. Yet it is terrible. They are a nation of artists, down to the simplest peasant; the aim of the Bolsheviks is to make them industrial and as Yankee as possible. Imagine yourself governed by a mixture of Sidney Webb and [British Ambassador to Washington] Rufus Isaacs, and you will have a picture of modern Russia.⁷⁶

Whereas The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism was a work of lasting value, Russell was tempted into silliness when corresponding with his clever London friends; and his prescription for the ‘nation of artists’ was condescending at best, callous at worst. His mistress Dora Black, soon to be his second wife, was even sillier. She had always given intellectual approval to the Soviet order and did not modify her ideas when she subsequently made her own trip to Russia — Russell had refused to take her with him. Black enjoyed shocking him by saying that ‘she liked Russia just about as much as [he] had hated it’. She scoffed at his opinions as ‘bourgeois and senile and sentimental’.⁷⁷

The disagreement between the future spouses was a microcosm of the debates about Soviet Russia on the political left. Quite apart from out-and-out communists, the Bolsheviks had many admirers — and the degrees of approval varied from individual to individual. But there were also plenty of detractors who saw very clearly that the communist revolutionary project could bring the entire labour movement into disrepute. However many delegations went to Moscow, the disagreement was likely to remain.

27. THE SPREADING OF COMINTERN

The British Labour delegation had been remarkably incurious about global revolution in their talks with Soviet leaders. Whether out of naivety or politeness, they barely mentioned Comintern and its activities abroad. Although Ethel Snowden knew that Lenin had a ‘great interest’ in insurrections around the globe, she still did not discuss this with him when she had the chance. In Moscow she gained the impression that Comintern was a pretty feeble organization, and she claimed that this was how Russian communist acquaintances felt. They had told her that the policy of excluding weak or wavering groups on the European political far left ‘would so restrict [Comintern’s] members that it could not become effective as it is’.¹ And with that, Mrs Snowden moved on to topics closer to her heart. Most fellow members of the Labour delegation did not even mention Comintern in their reports. This obviously made it easy for Soviet leaders to sidestep the topic. Whereas they had endlessly asked questions about Bolshevism in Russia, they failed to enquire about Bolshevik ambitions in Europe.

But those ambitions were very real and, since the First Comintern Congress in 1919, Comintern had been the main agency used to realize them. There was indeed no other option while the Red Army and Cheka were tied down in the Civil War. Funds were disbursed to find zealots in every country who would split with the socialists and social-democrats and set up a communist organization. World revolution was an openly stated objective. The Kremlin was in charge from the start and knocked back the objections of Hugo Eberlein, the Spartacist delegate, who did not see why the Russians should boss everyone around. Eberlein objected to the March 1919 gathering calling itself a formally constituted congress. He thought that the cart was being put before the horse, arguing that the global map should be densely dotted with communist parties before any congress could take place.² Eberlein got nowhere; Lenin and his comrades simply reverted to tricks they had used before the Great War. They stuffed the ‘delegations’ with trusted foreigners, including several who were living permanently in Russia — Boris Reinstein was allowed to attend for the American Socialist Party and Khristo Rakovski for the Balkan Revolutionary Social-Democratic Federation. There were thirty-four voting delegates and the Bolsheviks had assured themselves a majority on all matters: Eberlein was the only person even to abstain in the vote for the formal proclamation of Comintern.

Even if Rosa Luxemburg had been present, it is far from certain that she could have successfully counteracted the psychological cunning of the Bolsheviks. The Congress delegates were taken to Petrograd to visit the places of communist glory in 1917. They went to the Finland Station where Lenin and Trotsky had arrived from abroad. They wandered the corridors of the Smolny Institute. They gazed at the Winter Palace. The effect was to dazzle them with the achievements of the Soviet order. The foreign delegates came away with the impression that the Bolsheviks were giants walking the earth. Bright applause greeted Lenin and Trotsky whenever they appeared. Lenin delivered the introductory report and offered ‘theses’ on bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship. Bukharin supplied a ‘platform’ and Trotsky a ‘manifesto’. Trotsky also gave a spirited speech on the Red Army, praising the achievements of ‘socialist militarism’. (This kind of belligerence disconcerted Arthur Ransome but did not put an end to his admiration for Trotsky.) The official drafts and orations won a warm reception. Reports by foreign delegates on revolutionary possibilities abroad invariably supported the line marked out by the Bolshevik leaders, who got the Congress they had planned for.³

Lenin and Trotsky performed with a commendable display of modesty and humour, as exemplified by an incident on the last day of the proceedings. After the singing of the Internationale it was time for the official photographs, but Trotsky had stepped down from the stage. The photographer complained loudly till the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs returned. There was much merriment when someone joked that Soviet Russia had installed the Dictatorship of the Photographer.⁴

It was ultimately intended that Comintern would be run by its Executive Committee, but until everything was sorted out it was agreed to hand authority to ‘comrades of the country where the Executive Committee is’.⁵ The natural assumption was that either Trotsky or Lenin would chair the Comintern Executive Committee. But this was impractical since Trotsky needed to travel to the front lines of the Civil War and Lenin had onerous duties in Sovnarkom and the Politburo. It was decided to give the Comintern post to Zinoviev, which was something of a surprise since he had originally opposed the seizure of power in Petrograd in 1917. But Zinoviev had made up for this by showing solidarity with Lenin ever since. Although he ran the Petrograd administration, he was ambitious to prove himself on the international stage and there was no obviously better candidate among the Russians. He set about his new job by demanding lavish funding from the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow. His request was met, and when the Executive Committee met for the first time on 26 March 1919 Zinoviev announced that credit facilities to the value of one million rubles had been opened for Comintern.⁶ In May the budget was raised to three million.⁷ Despite the size of these sums, much of Comintern’s activity was carried out in the traditions of the pre-revolutionary political underground. When Lenin decided that a million pounds sterling had to be transferred to Zinoviev in Petrograd, the Party Central Committee Secretary Yelena Stasova physically took it by train from Moscow.⁸

The founding documents — theses, platform and manifesto — were evasive about Comintern’s purposes. One objective alone was clearly set out: world revolution. How Comintern would attain it was left unspecified apart from through the establishment of communist parties and the promotion of revolutionary struggle. The interests of Soviet Russia were to be taken into account in every foreign operation; this did not need to be spelled out since everyone already agreed on it. Comintern refrained from admitting that its purse strings were held by the Bolshevik leadership. Nor was anything said about the requirement to submit all big decisions in advance to the scrutiny of the Bolsheviks. The fact that Zinoviev chaired the Executive Committee was not thought enough by itself: the Russian Communist Party expected to initiate policy, with Zinoviev carrying out whatever the Politburo demanded of him. Comintern was going to send out its agents to distribute money and attract followers. Communist parties had to be created. Newspapers needed to be started and printing presses acquired. The message of communism had to be disseminated to the working classes. Trotsky and the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs had begun this work in 1917–18. Comintern was empowered to intensify and expand it.

The set-up had the advantage of deflecting the attention of foreign governments from the People’s Commissariat. Chicherin had until then been sending out ‘plenipotentiaries’ who were already suspected — usually quite reasonably — of subversive activity. Ostensibly Comintern was based on Russian territory by historical accident. The Bolshevik leaders could pretend to have no authority over revolutionary actions designed to bring down capitalism around the globe.

But although Chicherin could now mask Soviet pretensions abroad, he could not make them disappear. The People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs conducted business for a state that needed to spread the message of revolution to foreign working classes if Sovnarkom was to survive the hostility of world capitalism. At the same time — until fraternal revolutions took place in powerful countries — Chicherin had to conciliate those governments willing to grant diplomatic recognition and open their economies to trade with Russia. Comintern’s open espousal of proletarian insurrection and dictatorship inevitably complicated his overtures. The work was made no easier by Zinoviev’s poaching of personnel from the People’s Commissariat. Even Litvinov and Vorovski were seconded to fulfil tasks for Comintern.⁹ This was bound to render them still more suspect in the eyes of states abroad and put obstacles in the path of Soviet diplomacy. Gradually Chicherin achieved agreement that Comintern should publicly be kept separate from the People’s Commissariat. Zinoviev saw the sense in this and asked to keep his own couriers rather than share them with Chicherin.¹⁰ In May 1919 the Politburo also ruled that Comintern alone should conduct illegal work abroad, and a ban was introduced on Soviet embassy personnel engaging in efforts that broke local law.¹¹

The separation of functions was never as neat in reality, and the Politburo muddled everything again by appointing Litvinov to oversee the Comintern budget.¹² From Litvinov downwards, Soviet diplomats abroad remained in active contact with revolutionaries committed to insurrectionary violence. Chicherin, in fact, had no basic objection. His only stipulation was that embassy officials should carry out their clandestine functions without getting caught. He wanted world revolution no less fervently than Zinoviev.

By July 1920, when the Second Comintern Congress took place, there had been much organizational progress. The Germans already had a communist party and the French and Italians were well on their way to establishing theirs. Advances in America and Britain were slower as the Executive Committee put militants under pressure to form a single party in each country. The path towards this end was being smoothed by Comintern’s money, which always went to communists who toed the Russian line. Comintern leaders picked the British Socialist Party as the likeliest instrument for the Soviet cause in the United Kingdom. Being to the left of the Labour Party, it was a stalwart of the Hands Off Russia movement; and like all groups on the political extreme left, it was experiencing the torments of internal struggle — in this case between factions led by E. C. Fairchild and John Maclean. Their conflict was gradually surmounted through the intervention of Theodore Rothstein acting on Moscow’s orders. Rothstein’s own influence had risen through his close ties with the Kremlin, and he received a hearing before British militants which began the process that ended in splitting the British Socialist Party and creating the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920.¹³

The Second Comintern Congress imposed a universal scheme for communist parties to be organized on the Bolshevik model. The parties were to be centralized, hierarchical and disciplined. They had to recognize Comintern as the supreme authority on every matter of importance. ‘Internationalism’ was to take precedence over national concerns.

Yet Comintern had a long way to go in the cause of creating communist parties everywhere, and delegates came to Moscow devoted to the cause but not yet leading large organizations. Their ways were rough and ready. The communist organization in Mexico chose three comrades, including the American political refugee Linn A. E. Gale, to represent it at the Second Congress. None of them, however, could go. As chance had it, the Japanese communist Keikichi Ishimoto was passing through Mexico City on his way to Moscow via the United States and Norway. Gale, who was himself not Mexican but an American in exile, warmed to Ishimoto as being ‘quite young but a fine, sincere fellow’. Gale and his comrades decided to transfer their credentials to him for use in the Congress proceedings.¹⁴ The fact that Mexico’s national representation passed so casually into the hands of an obscure Japanese says a lot about the haphazardness of the arrangements. In Brazil it was Comintern which took the initiative. Its agent, a certain Ramison, searched Rio de Janeiro for militants who might found a communist party. He made his first approach to Edgard Leuenroth, who bluntly refused. Pressed to give his reasons, Leuenroth exclaimed: ‘Because I’m not a Bolshevist!’¹⁵ Ramison, though, knew that Comintern did not mind who created parties as long as they were created, and he eventually found people who would start the process for him. In Moscow, Zinoviev had confidence that the Executive Committee could cope with any difficulties that might arise. There would be many zigzags on the road to world revolution and the Bolshevik leaders were masters of the art of political manoeuvring.

In July 1921 the Politburo set up a world trade union agency — Profintern — in parallel to Comintern. It was to be an international centre for unions that rejected working inside the capitalist system. Communists would lead and inspire Profintern, challenging the broader labour movement to fortify the resistance to governments and employers. In its first pronouncement Profintern made an open declaration of its hostility to the entire order of capitalism around the world.

The Soviet authorities were not just looking to Europe and America. In September 1920 Zinoviev organized a Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku. As the capital of Azerbaijan, the new Soviet republic, it appeared the best place for the communist leadership to signal to Muslim peoples that Moscow wanted to befriend national liberation movements. Joint action against the imperial powers was proposed. The treaty of Sèvres in August 1920 subjected the Middle East to British and French control, and the communist leaders in Moscow intended to exploit existing regional resentments as well as those which might arise as the result of the treaty. They also aimed to cause trouble for the United Kingdom in India. If Indians overturned British rule, the entire empire might fall apart — and the French imperial edifice might well collapse soon afterwards. Communism’s militant atheism was a barrier to the recruitment of followers since religious belief and affiliation was well-nigh universal in Asia. In Baku, therefore, care had to be taken to avoid giving offence to Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and other believers; and communist speakers were under orders to avoid showing disrespect for popular traditions. The ‘peoples of the East’ were instead to be won over by the promise that Comintern could help them to break off the shackles of imperialism and modernize their economies and cultures. Communism would benefit from European and US capitalists losing their grip on the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Zinoviev, Radek and Kun gave rousing speeches at the ceremonial meeting of welcome. The Azerbaijani communist leader Nariman Narimanov, himself an Azeri, opened the first full session.¹⁶ Although Narimanov was a communist through and through, he argued that the Congress should unite behind a common struggle: ‘I say that we are now faced with the task of kindling a real holy war against the British and French capitalists.’¹⁷ Radek was also fiery, asking: ‘How is it that a little handful of British are able to keep under their heels hundreds of millions of Indians?’¹⁸ The speeches were translated instantaneously into Turkish and Persian. Enver Pasha, a prominent figure in the military campaign under Mustafa Kemal to salvage Turkey’s independence after the Ottoman defeat in the Great War, sent passionate greetings to the Congress and wished the Red Army well.¹⁹ John Reed, recently returned from the US, denounced American imperialism.²⁰ A Council for Propaganda and Action was elected with its base in Baku and the audience rose to sing the Internationale.²¹ Zinoviev closed the proceedings with a modification of one of Karl Marx’s most famous slogans. From Baku onwards, he announced, the words of The Communist Manifesto needed to be changed to: ‘Workers of all lands and oppressed peoples of the whole world, unite!’²²

If Comintern was to be effective as the means of bringing millions to the revolutionary cause, however, it had to counteract any assumption that peaceful methods of struggle were sufficient for success. When Lenin learned of objections to violent methods among the British Labour delegation to Russia in 1920, he issued an open letter to the workers of the United Kingdom defending the use of terror and the suppression of press freedom under Soviet rule. Such mechanisms, he argued, constituted ‘the defence of the working class against [its] exploiters’. He contended that freedom of the press was merely ‘the freedom of the wealthy to conspire against those who laboured’.²³ He also felt it important to note that ‘England’ and its allies had carried out a ‘White terror’ in Finland, Hungary, India and Ireland. Somewhat condescendingly, he said he had explained this so frequently over the years that he found it ‘not very joyful’ to have to repeat himself.²⁴ This was less than graceful; it was also a wild exaggeration because the British had instigated no killing of communists in Finland or Hungary. But Lenin was a practical revolutionary. It would do no harm if a piece of rhetoric swelled the ranks of support for Comintern.

When a particular national situation was not yet ripe for insurrection it was still possible for communists to render assistance to the Soviet cause. In 1920 Comintern issued a May Day appeal suggesting that peace was impossible under capitalism and calling for the obstruction of troops and supplies going to the anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. Henriette Roland-Holst, the Secretary of Comintern’s Amsterdam Bureau, recommended the resumption of trade with Russia. She admitted that this would involve private business but argued that Russia needed Western manufactures and that the West needed Russian grain. She suggested that European workers would benefit from the stimulus given to post-war economic recovery.²⁵

Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev hammered out their message that the Bolsheviks were heroically carrying out the practical objectives of socialism. What Comintern said about capitalist exploitation and imperial oppression was anyway in line with traditional doctrines of socialist, social-democratic and labour parties the world over. There was immense war-weariness after 1918, and most militants thought the biggest danger to peace lay in the temptation for the victor powers to undertake a crusade against the Bolsheviks. Whenever objections were raised against Lenin’s policies on terror and dictatorship it was always tempting for radical socialists to argue that the regime in Moscow had been forced to act harshly by the vicious ring of counter-revolutionary armies, Russian and foreign, that was meant to throttle it in 1918–19. The hope was that Bolshevik doctrines and practices would steadily become more moderate if Russia was left alone by foreign armies and permitted to trade with the rest of the world.

Not every Comintern militant was content with the way things were being propelled by Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev. Among the critics was John Reed. When talking to friends, he made no secret of his growing distaste for Bolshevik manipulation of the international labour movement. He mixed readily with communist leaders in Russia and witnessed the condescending attitude they had to foreign communists. This attitude was not confined to Lenin and other Politburo members. Yan Berzin, the Soviet plenipotentiary in Switzerland, told Zinoviev that ‘[Zeth] Höglund and all the other Scandinavian ditherers are people without energy or initiative, but nevertheless it’s necessary to operate precisely through them for the moment.’²⁶

Reed had come late in his young life to the political far left and brought along with him an idealism about acceptable methods. He looked askance at the discrediting of Sovnarkom’s critics. He objected that so many officials were being promoted to high office in Comintern simply because they obeyed Zinoviev. He saw no signs of Bolshevik authoritarianism fading from Russian politics. The Bolshevik leaders knew of Reed’s second thoughts about them and were already wondering what to do about him when, on his way back from Baku, he contracted typhus. He and Zinoviev had never got on either personally or politically. Yet when Reed died in October 1920 he received a magnificent funeral and his remains were interred below the walls of the Kremlin. Although his wife Louise Bryant had been shocked by the poor quality of care he received from Russian doctors and nurses, she bore no grudge. The interment, however, rankled. She told fellow reporter Marguerite Harrison: ‘John was a real American. I know he would have wanted to be buried on American soil.’²⁷ In death he was turned into an unquestioning communist hero who remained of use in propaganda for a Comintern which he had come to despise.

Comintern had yet to grow to its mature size and strength, but its dominant features were already clearly delineated. The Russian Communist Party had called it into existence and was exercising parental control. Moscow had the funds, determination and cunning to maintain its dominance. Bolsheviks had made the October Revolution, whereas all the attempts to set up communist regimes elsewhere as yet had failed. The Kremlin planned to maintain its grip in directing communist strategy and operations.

28. TO POLAND AND BEYOND

The Western Allies might have withdrawn their expeditions from Russia and Ukraine but Russian communist leaders had to maintain their vigilance about potential threats from abroad. Foreign powers had intervened in Soviet Russia since 1918 and every Bolshevik thought that they could return on an anti-communist ‘crusade’. If the Allied powers did not do this by themselves, they might employ the forces of Russia’s bordering states — Finland, Poland or Romania were surely open to being used in this fashion. Travelling around the Baltic in the winter of 1918–19, Adolf Ioffe warned Trotsky that the Poles might soon invade.¹

From spring 1919 there had been serious clashes between Red forces and the Polish army across the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks had established a joint Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Republic in February with its two capitals in Vilnius and Minsk. By its creation, communist leaders disclaimed any association with Russian ‘chauvinism’ and strove to prove their tolerance of all nations. The Poles saw things differently. Although ostensibly the new republic was independent, it was led by Bolsheviks who remained subject to the discipline of the centralized communist party in Moscow. The ‘Litbel’ republic, moreover, was a clear and present threat to Poland’s security. Józef Pilsudski, the Polish commander-in-chief, ordered military action in April. Vilnius fell immediately, followed by Minsk in August. Since Trotsky’s Red Army was then engaged in finishing off the White armies of Kolchak and Denikin, the Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Republic was incapable of defending itself. Polish forces in the same months were also involved in heavy fighting with Soviet Ukraine. Thus the entire area of the old western borderlands was under contestation.²

The Western Allies appreciated the dangers. The Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski approached them in September 1919 with an offer to attack Soviet Russia in return for subsidizing his armed forces. Clemenceau had the Allied Supreme Council with him in rejecting any such idea and the British instead proposed the establishment of an eastern Polish frontier short of Grodno, soon to be known as the Curzon Line (even though Lord Curzon, who had recently become Foreign Secretary, played no part in drafting it).³

Pilsudski, however, thought the Allies naive in believing that the Bolsheviks would abide by any such settlement, and he continued to work on his strategy of exploiting Moscow’s moment of weakness by expanding the territory under Warsaw’s control. Aiming to set up a federation with the Ukrainians he agreed a pact with anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura. The coming together of Poland and Ukraine would improve their chances against a resurgent Russia or Germany. Pilsudski rejected any alliance with the Russian Whites because the White commanders believed in ‘Russia one and indivisible’ and refused to commit themselves to Polish independence. General Yudenich, entirely failing to understand Poland’s national sensitivities, expressed annoyance when the Poles refused to cross the River Berezina to render assistance.⁴ But while Pilsudski had hopes of Kiev, Lenin’s mind was fixed on Berlin. Germany’s current government was always going to suffer criticism for having acceded to the treaty of Versailles. Berlin was pulled in all directions by political tension. The far right acted first. On 17 March 1920 a coalition of Freikorps and other paramilitary groups led by Wolfgang Kapp attempted a putsch. Lenin cabled Stalin to speed up the defeat of the Whites in Crimea because he wanted to have the Red Army available to intervene in a German civil war since revolution in Germany was always the communist objective.⁵

But Kapp’s putsch quickly fizzled out when the German government mobilized the army and trade unions against him; and the Russian communist leadership shifted its focus back to internal affairs, especially economic recovery. On 23 April Soviet Russia offered a territorial compromise to Poland, proposing a border line which would have handed all Belorussia to the Poles. Pilsudski interpreted this as a sign of weakness and decided that this was the best opportunity to crush Bolshevism in the borderlands and create the federation he desired.⁶ Information available to Pilsudski from intercepts of Soviet wireless traffic indicated that the Red Army was being prepared for its own campaign in the west. This made Pilsudski think that he needed to strike before he could be struck,⁷ and on 26 April the Polish Army advanced into Ukraine where peasant rebellions against the communist authorities were intensifying. Conscription had been onerous. Grain had been seized without compensation. Bolshevik zealots in some provinces had even forced villagers into collective farms. Pilsudski aimed to pull Ukraine out of the grasp of its Red conquerors and counteract Russia’s influence over the entire region. Ukrainian popular opinion was not consulted. Pilsudski and Petliura wanted to accomplish their purposes before the Soviet government had a chance to act.

The Polish army made a lightning advance. By 7 May, to its surprise, it had reached and occupied Kiev. The Reds had been concentrating on finishing off the Volunteer Army in Crimea and Trotsky issued a proclamation declaring the determination of both party and army to drive out the Poles.⁸ He called it a war imposed on the Bolsheviks and demanded a resolute effort to defend Russia and Ukraine against the enemy. He appealed for help from Imperial officers who had avoided siding with the Red or White cause in the Civil War. In this he was successful; Poles were the historic national foe and General Alexei Brusilov led the way in volunteering his services in sending Pilsudski packing.

Pilsudski knew that, for Poland to be truly secure, the communist dictatorship in Moscow had to be dislodged. He permitted Boris Savinkov, who respected Poland’s right to independence, to base his Russian Political Committee in Warsaw.⁹ He also allowed the White general Stanislav Bulak-Balakhovich, who had fought for the North-Western Army under Yudenich, to operate on Polish soil.¹⁰ These manoeuvres were kept secret from all but the most consistent anti-communists abroad. In Britain, Winston Churchill was in the know. But Pilsudski was generally hoping to effect territorial and political change before those who — like Lloyd George — sought a commercial treaty with Soviet Russia could do anything to stop him.¹¹ Soviet leaders as usual assumed that the Allied powers had organized the Polish offensive. They failed to understand the scope for initiative available to Pilsudski as well as his fear that unless he took action the Allies might cage him inside policies that injured Poland’s interests. The Polish commanders and politicians were intent on redrawing the map of Europe without delay and eliminating the menace of Bolshevism. Too much consultation with the Western Allies might undermine this purpose.

This did not mean that the Poles lacked Allied assistance — and the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs monitored the pages of the Western press for evidence of such a connection.¹² Newspapers from The Times through to the Labour-owned Daily News were followed with care. Especially alarming was a report in L’Humanité, the French communist publication, about the presence of French military cadres in Poland. Already in February 1920 there were 732 French officers, including nine generals, on active service there. L’Humanité added that British arms exports had reached Poland in the winter, taking this as proof that ‘the West’ was engaged in a criminal war against Soviet Russia.¹³ Evidence was adduced that an ‘American officer’ had been conducting sabotage behind the Soviet lines.¹⁴ The monitoring department in the People’s Commissariat noted that the New Statesman had stated categorically that Lloyd George could have stopped Poland from going to war but instead had chosen to send armaments to Warsaw — his way of getting round the obstacle of ‘English’ popular opinion, which was hostile to an Anglo-Russian war, even a small one. The People’s Commissariat saw Lloyd George as Pilsudski’s partner in international villainy.¹⁵ Stalin put it memorably, saying that the invasion of Ukraine was the ‘third campaign of the Entente’.¹⁶

The French officers supplied to help with the training of the Polish Army included the young Charles de Gaulle. Released from German captivity at the end of the Great War, he gave lectures in Poland on military doctrine and methods and joined a Polish combat unit in July 1919. Such links left no doubt in Moscow that France was seeking the demise of Soviet Russia.¹⁷

Then there was the Kosciuszko Squadron of volunteer US aviators formed by Colonel Cedric Fauntleroy in January 1920 at Prime Minister Paderewski’s request. President Wilson gave his consent without putting anything into writing because he wished to maintain the pretence that America had withdrawn from European conflicts.¹⁸ The dozen American airmen were daredevils who swooped over enemy lines on their dangerous missions, developing a new technique of ‘low level bombardment with frontal fire power’.¹⁹ The most ebullient of them was Merian Cooper. Shot down in flames and badly wounded in the Great War, he refused to accept his Distinguished Service Cross on the grounds that he did not deserve anything for saving his own life. He then offered himself for work with Hoover’s American Relief Administration in Lwów. As fear of Red offensives grew in 1919, he received permission to join the Polish armed forces and joined in their Ukrainian incursions.²⁰ ‘Coop’ was shot down on 13 July 1920 and captured by the Reds. The Polish press announced his death but in fact he was held in a Soviet prison until he escaped about ten months later. He was not the only daredevil in the Kosciuszko Squadron. In March 1921 the Washington Post was to report the awarding of medals to its members at the Polish legation in Washington.²¹

The British too were involved. Paul Dukes, now under the cover of an assignment for The Times, shuttled between Kraków and western Europe liaising with Polish military commanders such as Generals Gustaw Zygadlowicz and Lucjan Zeligowski.²² Not bothering to disguise his presence, he was photographed with the Polish Women’s Death Battalion and was with the Polish army when it retook Grodno at the end of the war.²³ Sidney Reilly joined Dukes on his mission in October 1920, and the two of them met up with Savinkov.²⁴ Savinkov regarded Reilly as one of the great anti-Bolsheviks and ‘a knight without fear or reproach’, and this was the beginning of a warm friendship.²⁵

But if the Poles failed to hang on to Ukraine, Allied assistance would not be enough in itself. The Politburo now diverted nearly all its forces to fight Pilsudski, and Kiev fell back into Red hands on 13 June 1920. The Polish positions crumbled in central and western Ukraine over the weeks that followed; on 12 July the Red Army reached what Lenin called ‘the ethnographic frontier of Poland’. The Bolsheviks exulted. The Party Central Committee aimed at ‘the Sovietization of Poland’, and on 17 July Trotsky ordered the Red Army Supreme Command to chase the Poles deep behind the Curzon Line.²⁶ Warsaw was the first big target. Leading Bolsheviks in Latvia and Georgia criticized the decision, not out of respect for Polish independence but from a desire for Trotsky to invade their own countries before he moved into Poland.²⁷ This discussion was kept secret from the Second Comintern Congress since Lenin thought that many foreign delegates were ‘nationalists and pacifists’ who could not be trusted with the information. He noted that the ‘English’ comrades had been aghast at his advice to seek the overthrow of the British government: ‘They made the kind of faces that I reckon even the best photograph couldn’t capture.’²⁸ He had no wish to ask what they thought of an offensive using ‘bayonets to probe whether the social revolution of the proletariat had matured in Poland’.²⁹

On 23 July the Politburo created a Provisional Revolutionary Committee for Poland. Diplomatic duplicity was to be deployed. Britain and France would be assured that the Soviet government was willing to enter peace talks, but this was just a diplomatic manoeuvre to deflect attention from the Red advance on Warsaw. Lithuania was to be told that it had nothing to fear from Russia.³⁰ This too was insincere because the Bolsheviks wanted to Sovietize the entire Baltic region in due course. But they wanted to limit the number of enemies until the Red Army had dealt with the Poles.

Trotsky told his troops that the objective was not to subjugate Poland but to give power to the ‘working Polish people’ in their own land. He denied that Russia had started or even wanted the war.³¹ The Politburo hoped to attract Polish workers and poor peasants by a series of exemplary measures. Banks and factories would be nationalized in the future area of occupation. A terror would be initiated against landlords, clergy and commanders. Lenin was at his most bloodthirsty when urging Dzerzhinski and the Cheka to send squads into the Polish countryside with a view to seizing and hanging class enemies — the same tactics he had called for in Russia in summer 1918. Communists who had been brought up in Poland were not convinced that the Politburo knew what it was doing; they raised a cry about the strength of Polish national sentiments in all social classes. Stalin added that the Volunteer Army under Pëtr Wrangel in Crimea continued to constitute a serious danger to Soviet rule. But Lenin overrode such pessimism. The opportunity had arisen to spread the revolution westwards and he was going to take it — and Trotsky was only too happy to oblige. The time for ‘revolutionary war’ had arrived.

Poland was not the only prize in the minds of Soviet leaders. Lenin wrote to Stalin: ‘Zinoviev and Bukharin as well as myself think it would be appropriate to stimulate a revolution immediately in Italy. My personal opinion is that this requires the Sovietization of Hungary as well as perhaps Czechia [Czechoslovakia] and Romania.’³² On 10 August the Politburo approved Trotsky’s proposal for Comintern Congress delegates to go home and prepare for revolution. Confident of success, he asked for a hundred German communists to be assigned to the front line to conduct propaganda — he assumed that they would soon be talking to Germans in Germany.³³

Lenin appreciated that the French and British would not sit on their hands while Berlin ripped up the Versailles treaty. He devised a scheme for a coalition of the far left and the far right in Germany. Although the Freikorps and their sympathizers detested communism and had bloodily crushed the Spartacists, they agreed with Comintern that the Western Allies had reduced their country to slavery. Lenin urged German communist leaders to line up with them to reclaim freedom for their country.³⁴ The alliance would be strictly provisional. He expected that, once Germany regained its full independence, there would be civil war while the communists and the right-wing paramilitaries fought it out for supremacy.³⁵ He predicted that a proletarian dictatorship on the Soviet model would emerge from this. He said nothing in public, but Radek referred to the basic idea in Pravda. Lenin and Radek had no scruples about exploiting the services of anti-communists so long as the ultimate result might be a communist seizure of power. Strategic flexibility was essential. Lenin had to admit that any alliance with the political far right would be an ‘unnatural’ one, and communist leftists in Germany justifiably doubted that he would have accepted such a strategy for Russia in 1917. Having joined the communist movement in their country because they despised the compromises favoured by the other socialists, they shunned Lenin’s advice to negotiate with the butchers of Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

Soviet leaders anyway accepted the likelihood of a second Great War when the Western Allies crossed the German border in full strength to suppress any government that refused to recognize the treaty of Versailles. But Lenin and his comrades felt they simply had to force a breach in Russia’s international quarantine. As the Red Army advanced into Poland there was already a great deal of political unrest in Germany and the government was worried about more than just the German communists. Ministers feared that the Independent Social-Democratic Party might collude in a coup d'état in Berlin, especially after Arthur Crispien — one of the leaders of the Independent Social-Democrats — threatened as much in the Reichstag.³⁶

Lenin had already discussed with Stalin how best to organize a system of Soviet-style states stretching from the Rhineland to the Pacific. Trotsky stayed out of the debate, having talked throughout the Great War about the achievability of a United States of Europe. But Lenin now wanted a single federation of communist republics linking Europe and Asia. In this way, Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine would join up with Soviet Germany and Soviet Poland. Stalin was sceptical, telling Lenin that the German people were unlikely to want membership of a communist federation founded and led by Russians. Lenin had omitted to take the national factor into consideration. Stalin’s counter-proposal was to establish not one but two federations, the first being based in Moscow and the other in Berlin. Such federations would of course be headed by parties united under the Communist International, and Stalin implicitly proposed that this was a sufficient safeguard against disunity and strife. He offered the idea in good faith only to receive a furious rebuke from Lenin, who accused him of succumbing to nationalism. Stalin was affronted; he wrote back exclaiming that Soviet leaders had to be intelligent about the challenges that they had to surmount if they were to communize central Europe.³⁷

The dispute soon blew over as Lenin focused his attention on the campaign for Warsaw. He and the Politburo turned down Sergo Ordjonikidze’s plan for ‘a military force to be sent into Persia’ in mid-August.³⁸ Nor did they see any need to recall the Soviet delegation they had sent to London, which from the beginning of August was reinforced by the arrival of Politburo member Kamenev. The idea was that Krasin would continue to lead the talks on trade while Kamenev handled the diplomacy about war and peace in whatever way the changing situation demanded.³⁹ Lenin and Trotsky were keeping their options open; and Trotsky, while directing the Red Army to break through to Germany, asked the Politburo to use diplomatic means to secure a rail route across Poland for the shipment of arms from German businesses — Central Committee member Alexei Rykov was then given the task of buying the weaponry. The Politburo agreed.⁴⁰ The fight was on for supremacy in central Europe. As the Reds hurtled towards Warsaw, Soviet leaders felt no inhibition about simultaneously planning to crush the German capitalist elites and do big business with them.

The British sought to prevent any such outcome by announcing a diplomatic initiative for peace between Russia and Poland. Kamenev and Krasin called at 10 Downing Street for talks with Lloyd George and the Conservative Party leader Andrew Bonar Law on 4 August;⁴¹ but the results were inconclusive, and the next day Kamenev set out Soviet objections in a letter to Lloyd George.⁴² A further meeting lasting five hours was held on 6 August. This time Churchill was in attendance for a while as Lloyd George and Bonar Law debated with Kamenev and Krasin, and an agreement was reached which was to be relayed to Moscow. Lloyd George hoped to have Lenin’s reply before he met the French Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand in Kent the following day.⁴³ The British government wanted an immediate armistice. To the French, though, this seemed intolerable as it would lend respectability to a bandit regime, and Lloyd George felt compelled to back down; he also felt that the Poles had to some degree brought the Soviet invasion on themselves by their Ukrainian campaign.⁴⁴ He tried to demonstrate his open-mindedness in foreign policy by receiving a Labour Party delegation and listening to their demands for non-interference in Russia. He replied that he could not forget that the Bolsheviks were undemocratic and adduced the latest statements of Bertrand Russell, who had opposed the Great War but then turned against the Soviet leadership. Trade union leader and Labour Party militant Ernie Bevin urged the Prime Minister to ignore French pressure and threatened trouble if military force or supplies were sent to Pilsudski.⁴⁵ Lloyd George replied that he had broken with Soviet Russia because Lenin had abandoned the Allies, although he insisted that if Lenin now wanted peace he could have it.⁴⁶

The political temperature in the United Kingdom rose still higher when an influential group in the Independent Labour Party called for Churchill’s impeachment as Secretary of State for War.⁴⁷ Churchill issued a quick rebuttal:

It is not the British who are making war, but the Russian Bolshevists. They are at this moment invading Poland and trampling down its freedom. They are doing their best to light the flames of war in Persia, Afghanistan, and, if possible, in India. Their avowed intention is to procure by violence a revolution in every country… My sole object has been, and will be, to keep such hateful foreign oppression far from our native land.⁴⁸

While denying he had any wish for a Western crusade against Soviet Russia, he urged that the talks on any commercial treaty be suspended immediately.⁴⁹

Not even Lloyd George was willing to see Poland defeated, and he had already stated that the British would go to war again if the Red Army occupied Warsaw.⁵⁰ As a result he was relieved when reports indicated that Pilsudski’s headlong retreat had stopped in the Polish capital. Pilsudski declared that Warsaw would be defended to the last man, and he had grounds for confidence. The Reds were exhausted by their hot pursuit of the Polish army; their supply lines were frail and over-stretched and their equipment inadequate. Their commander in the northern sector, Mikhail Tukhachevski, found it hard to co-ordinate his advance as Warsaw came within range. Exposing the naivety and wrong-headedness of Lenin’s rationale for the war, Poles of all classes saw the Reds as Russian invaders rather than internationalist liberators. They waited for the enemy on the eastern side of the River Vistula where Pilsudski had time to organize them. He also had the advantage that Stalin, the leading commissar in the southern sector of the Red advance, ignored orders to divert his armies from outside Lwów and reinforce the strategic thrust at the Polish capital. It would probably have made little difference if Stalin had shown greater compliance since Tukhachevski’s forces were rapidly torn apart by the resurgent Polish army. By 19 August the Reds were conducting a general retreat from the Vistula. Central Europe was saved from Sovietization.⁵¹

The scale of the defeat outdid anything suffered by the Reds in the Civil War after Kolchak’s initial success at the end of 1918. There was nothing they could do but fall back and sue for a truce. The Politburo convened on 1 September. Trotsky, the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, gave a gloomy account of the campaign and recommended agreeing to a ‘compromise peace’ — a quaint formulation for acceptance of defeat. Peace talks would be requested with the Poles in Riga.⁵² At the next Politburo meeting, five days later, Chicherin pressed for peace to be signed fast with Latvia and Lithuania.⁵³ It was plain to the leadership that Moscow had to content itself with the territory won in the Civil War or else risk losing everything. Kamenev left for Russia on 11 September.⁵⁴ He had had a last meeting with Lloyd George a day earlier and, together with Krasin, had become acquainted with the latest British terms for a trade treaty. On peace, there was no longer anything he could do. Pilsudski and Paderewski were now the men who set the agenda.⁵⁵

When the Party Conference met later in the month, Lenin was frank about the ‘gigantic, unprecedented defeat’. He acknowledged that it was the product of a Polish ‘patriotic upsurge’ rather than action or assistance by the Western Allies. Soviet Russia had to accept that the Poles were unlikely to agree to the frontier proposed earlier by Lord Curzon. Galicia had to be delivered to Poland and the boundaries shifted to the east of the Curzon Line.⁵⁶ Lenin added: ‘This undoubtedly means that a mistake was committed: you see, we had victory in our hands and we let it slip from our fingers.’⁵⁷ He asked forgiveness, admitting that the Politburo should have halted the Red advance in eastern Galicia and been content with gaining a base for a future offensive — ‘a little push’ into Hungary across the Carpathians.⁵⁸ Now that peace negotiations were under way the priority had to be the regeneration of the Soviet economy. He expressed doubt that the Bolsheviks could succeed without foreign industrial investment. Communism, he declared, could not be built solely by ‘Russian forces’.⁵⁹

29. TRADE TALKS ABROAD

The Polish war punctuated a year of talks on a trade treaty between Soviet Russia and the United Kingdom. The British government played its hand with some caution. Its ministers were determined to prevent foreigners from stirring up revolution and on 16 July 1920 deported Santeri Nuorteva of the Russian Soviet Bureau, as the front organization was known by then — who had landed in Liverpool from New York. Nuorteva was carrying a ‘diplomatic passport’ stamped by his comrade Ludwig Martens. Back in New York, the Russian Soviet Bureau blustered that Canadian contracts to the value of six million dollars would be cancelled.¹ Martens attended a gathering of 8,000 supporters in Madison Square Garden where he wanted to call on the US government to permit the transport of medical supplies to Russia. He received fifteen minutes of applause before he could start speaking. The Internationale was sung. Martens haltingly read out his speech in English before giving a vivid delivery in Russian: ‘There is much talk of Bolshevist propaganda against America. There is no such thing. But there is propaganda against Soviet Russia.’² This was of no help to Nuorteva in England, where Lloyd George had to be seen to be standing up to communism to placate the Conservative MPs in the governing coalition. Rejecting pleas on Nuorteva’s behalf, he said that his papers were not in order and that normal procedures had been followed.³

Yet rather than sending Nuorteva back to America, Lloyd George allowed him to travel on to the Estonian capital, from where he would be able to reach Russia.⁴ Nor did Lloyd George object to Kamenev and Krasin coming to London.⁵ Things had changed since Kamenev’s fruitless visit in 1918. Lloyd George was giving communists a chance to show that they deserved admittance inside the perimeter of formal international relations. Lenin understood this. Worrying that Kamenev and Krasin might get over-excited, he warned them against summoning far-left socialists to get arms for the British working class.⁶

The dominant theme in the talks with Kamenev and Krasin at 10 Downing Street on 4 and 8 August was the Soviet military advance on Warsaw.⁷ But after demanding peace and security for Poland, Lloyd George and Bonar Law also took the opportunity to set out their conditions for future trade with Soviet Russia. They insisted that Soviet leaders should cease their political subversion and ideological propaganda in the United Kingdom and its empire. Kamenev affected to understand and agree. But the evidence from telegrams between Moscow and London told a different story, evidence that was eagerly published in The Times.⁸ Ernst Fetterlein at the Government Code and Cypher School had decrypted the intercepts between Lenin and Kamenev, which were then leaked to the press. Lloyd George disliked what he learned from Fetterlein about the Kremlin’s basic intentions and told Kamenev that there was no prospect of resuming Anglo-Russian trade unless Lenin changed his posture.⁹The Times also alleged that Kamenev had a hand in Moscow’s delivery of the secret subsidy to the Daily Herald and was in regular contact with the Council of Action, which the Labour Party and the trade unions had established on 5 August as part of a campaign to prevent Britain from intervening in the Soviet–Polish war. Other newspapers soon took the same line that Kamenev had come as a diplomat and behaved as a subversive. All this angered Lloyd George and he rebuked Krasin and Kamenev for breaking their word that they would not interfere in British politics. He told Kamenev that if he did not quickly leave the United Kingdom, he would be deported.¹⁰

Lloyd George grew more truculent when news reached London of the Red Army’s defeat east of Warsaw. Kamenev accepted that he was no longer persona grata in the United Kingdom. Before he departed he sent an open letter to the Prime Minister claiming that the government was exploiting ‘paltry and unproved’ charges supplied to it by secret police agents; he also deplored the French government’s decision to recognize Wrangel rather than Lenin as the leader of Russia. Kamenev worried that the Allies might rediscover their enthusiasm for military intervention, but in fact Lloyd George was being crafty. Nobody in Whitehall really thought Kamenev was worse behaved than Krasin, yet Krasin was allowed to keep his New Bond Street office and continue the trade talks.¹¹ The truth was that the Prime Minister still desired some kind of commercial treaty with Soviet Russia. By making a fog of the situation he alleviated the criticism in the press. Lacking the military or political means to eliminate Bolshevism, he was doing what he thought was the next best thing by undermining the Soviet order through a resumption of commercial contacts. Lloyd George saw himself as the mole-catcher who would grub out communism.

Like the other Liberals in his governing coalition, he wanted to avoid giving any impression that ministers were out to provoke an armed clash with Soviet Russia. He also needed to show himself as a friend of the British working man, which would be difficult if he threatened a so-called proletarian government elsewhere in Europe. He was also straining to promote Britain’s economic recovery from the post-war recession. Industrialists who had done good business in Russia before 1914 were lobbying him for a resumption of trade with the Russians. National economic self-interest was put forward in justification, and Lloyd George acted with confidence that more people would eventually support him than were writing to The Times to denounce him.

Krasin still goaded the British by mentioning the progress being made by the rest of his negotiating team elsewhere in Europe. Among the experts on banking and railways he had left behind in Stockholm was Professor Yuri Lomonosov, once a monarchist but now a supporter of the October Revolution. Lomonosov was involved in Sovnarkom’s offer to sell its gold reserves in exchange for locomotives, carriages and rail track, and industrial companies in Sweden competed for the contracts being dangled in front of them.¹² Originally the Soviet intention had been to make such purchases in Germany, but this was scuppered when the Allied powers reaffirmed their ban on deals involving Russian gold of disputed ownership. The Germans, having lost the war, had to comply with what the Allies demanded. Sweden, which had been neutral in the Great War and was therefore unaffected by the Paris peace treaties, was the next best option for the Bolsheviks. An agreement was drafted and, with Krasin’s consent, a provisional deal for one thousand locomotives was signed on 22 October 1920. Gold was already in place in Tallinn to complete the agreement. Sovnarkom was delighted at this latest breach in the wall of Russia’s economic isolation. It was consequently odd that it should be Krasin who raised an objection. He belatedly expressed the fear that the Allies would compel Sweden to withhold any railway exports under the terms of the contract. He thought there was a risk of depleting Russian gold reserves for the benefit of Swedish business partners but not for Sovnarkom.¹³

There was another snag, and it was a big one. Swedish industry lacked the capacity to manufacture so much railway equipment with any rapidity. The Stockholm deal would depend on Sweden’s metallurgical companies quietly buying around eight hundred locomotives from Germany.¹⁴ Business of this surreptitious nature had gone on between Russia and Germany throughout the Great War when German entrepreneurs established ‘Swedish’ electrical companies to trade with Russian firms in products essential to Russia’s military effort. Another wartime dodge had been for German enterprises to stick Scandinavian markings on goods made in Germany. So the Johann Faber works, which had sold pencils in the Russian Empire for decades, simply rebranded its output with Danish insignia; and German razors found their way into Russia emblazoned with the motto: ‘To a Brave Russian Soldier for Distinguished Service’.¹⁵

The ratification of the Swedish contract was scheduled for 18 December, and Krasin had yet to be convinced. The Stockholm members of his negotiating team went to London to plead with him. Krasin was not overly receptive. His talks with the British had never been easy and the Swedish initiative might cause complications. On balance, he thought, a firm, open treaty with Britain was preferable to a dubious set of arrangements in Sweden. He was not being unnecessarily difficult; he bore a huge responsibility. Soviet Russia was economically shattered, and the Politburo would judge his efforts unkindly if he allowed unprofitable deals to be brokered. He was known as pragmatic but on this occasion he spoke to his team like the most ruthless Bolshevik, saying that they should be shot for the deal they were recommending. One of them replied: ‘It’s fortunate, Leonid Borisovich [Krasin], that you’ve been saying this to me in London rather than in Moscow. Right now, just listen to me. There will always be time to shoot us later.’¹⁶ Such was the grim humour of communist dictatorship, volunteered by a non-communist seeking to demonstrate his honesty and loyalty. After three hours of discussion Krasin finally gave his approval, admitting that his team had done a good job in Stockholm.¹⁷

Worries about the Allied reaction had never deterred Lenin and Trotsky; and as the outstanding figures in the Soviet communist leadership, they felt freer to follow their instincts in negotiating with foreigners. Lenin met his first businessmen from abroad in summer 1920 when a certain Washington B. Vanderlip arrived from America. Vanderlip pretended to be a scion of the exceedingly wealthy Frank D. Vanderlip and his business dynasty and also suggested that he could speak on behalf of Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio who, as the Presidential candidate for the Republican Party, was in favour of resuming trade with Russia. Although Vanderlip had nothing like the wealth or connections he claimed, he knew a bit about Russia since he had prospected for gold in Siberia at the turn of the century.¹⁸ He also had the gift of the gab, and Lenin fell for his blandishments to such a degree that the Soviet authorities signed a provisional deal for him and his backers to take up a vast mining concession in Kamchatka in the Soviet Far East. In November 1920 he fetched up in Stockholm, where he boasted that his company had leased 400,000 square miles in Siberia for sixty years. Vanderlip claimed that he was helping the Soviet government to purchase American goods to the value of $3,000,000,000 which would be paid for with Russian gold and other natural resources.¹⁹

The New York Times immediately warned against Vanderlip’s personal credentials and about the dangers and morality of dealing with the communist government;²⁰ and Senator Harding was not pleased on reading in the press about the ex-prospector’s claim to be his business intimate.²¹ Lenin incompetently increased American concerns by stating in public that he had granted the Kamchatka concession deliberately so as to play off America and Japan against each other.²² He naively assumed that no Westerner would read the Russian communist press. He was equally stupid in September when telling H. G. Wells that the Vanderlip deal was the first step towards a US–Russian defensive alliance against Japanese aggression in Siberia. Lenin said that he looked forward to allowing the Americans to build a naval station on the Soviet Pacific coast and signing long-term economic concessions with American companies.²³ Theodore Rothstein, who was doing the interpreting, failed to stop him from blurting out these ideas and pleaded with Wells to keep quiet about what he had heard: ‘He is wonderful. But it was an indiscretion…’ Wells gave his word of honour, only to break it in his book Russia in the Shadows: the conversation proved too juicy for him to discard.²⁴ The world received a lesson that the Soviet rulers could be wily in protecting their interests. Evidently, too, the artful Lenin could be a bungler when his tongue ran away with him.

Vanderlip meanwhile performed like a snake-oil salesman: ‘I have joined the frontiers of Russia and America, making a broad band of republicanism around the world from Atlantic to Atlantic.’ He called on the US Congress to regularize trade relations without delay.²⁵ Mining, timber-felling and fur-pelt production had made fortunes for entrepreneurs in Siberia before the Great War. The region’s general potential was famously under-exploited. Vanderlip continued his approaches to west-coast investors asking them to join his scheme and making it seem like a licence to print money; and soon he inveigled the Standard Oil Co. to purchase a quarter of his shares.²⁶ The impetus towards a commercial treaty with Soviet Russia was gathering strength. On 4 January the Manchester Guardian reported that the US authorities were on the point of lifting their restrictions; its source was said to be ‘a Moscow wireless message’.²⁷ The Soviet leadership was probably trying to bounce countries into restoring commercial links.²⁸ Just as the Kremlin intended, the Republican Party in the US pricked up its ears. Senator Joseph I. France of Maryland led his colleagues in advocating official recognition of Soviet Russia. When the order was given to deport Ludwig Martens in early 1921, Senator France publicly protested and called for an end to the economic blockade.²⁹ In his eyes simply no American interest was being served by ostracizing the Russian communist regime.

On 26 January his campaign bore fruit in the Senate when Henry Cabot Lodge convened the Committee on Foreign Relations to hold hearings on Russia.³⁰ Senator France, as a prosperous man of affairs, spoke his mind; but the witnesses were chosen mainly from the American labour movement. This was deliberate. Lodge and France wanted to appear as if they had the interests of working men and women at the forefront of their minds — and they allowed plenty of time for them to argue that trade with Russia would boost industrial production and employment. The trade unionists spoke with admiration for Vanderlip’s Kamchatka initiative. They pointed out that a treaty would open the way for the US import of Russian raw materials and export of American manufactured goods. Senators asked briefly about the dictatorship established by the Bolsheviks, then dropped the matter. They were somewhat more persistent in questioning the labour movement’s representatives about their attitude to democracy in America. The unionists were ready for this and presented themselves first and foremost as US patriots. Yet this failed to convince several members of the Senate Committee. Under further interrogation, some witnesses declined to repudiate the potential benefits of introducing Bolshevism to the American political scene, and Alexander L. Trachtenberg from the Socialist Party admitted to favouring the ‘nationalisation of property’.³¹

This was not what Senators Lodge and France wanted to hear; they knew they would be thwarted in their objective of changing US foreign policy if the idea got around that labour movement leaders were crypto-communists. (They really should have done more research on Trachtenberg, who wanted his Socialist Party to become an affiliate of Comintern.)³² Lodge and his colleagues were happier when witnesses quoted H. G. Wells and his arguments for a trade treaty. They also liked it when John Spargo was cited as warning that America was falling behind Britain in looking after its economic interests;³³ and under Republican leadership the Committee took the unusual step of including the entire report of the British Labour delegation to Russia in its published proceedings. The thinking behind this was obvious. The Labour delegation argued for the resumption of commercial links, and this was exactly what Lodge and Cabot sought for America.³⁴ Fortunes could be made in Russia. America should not miss out on the lucrative opportunities.

The divergences among the Allied powers — or rather their governments — were getting wider. The French were resolute in their stand against dealing with Soviet Russia while Lenin refused to recognize obligations for the foreign loans incurred by Russian governments before October 1917. The Americans, through the Senate hearings, were only just beginning to consider whether to change policy. Even in the United Kingdom the situation was fluid. The British were still talking to Krasin, and no one outside the negotiations could yet tell whether they would produce a signed agreement. But the Western Alliance was practically at an end. Indeed Allied leaders took only one big decision jointly about Russia. This was reached on 24 January 1921 when the Allies granted their de jure recognition of Estonia and Latvia as independent states.³⁵ The signal was being given that the Russian Whites were a lost cause. Until then the Allies had avoided contradicting the ambition of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Wrangel to reconstitute ‘Russia One and Indivisible’. They now accepted that at least two new Baltic states deserved official acceptance. As the remnants of Wrangel’s forces clambered on boats for Constantinople in November 1920, they left behind the battlefields of defeat and looked to the future without solace. Their paymasters and advisers abandoned them.

The Bolshevik leadership and the Whites were in agreement on one thing: the desirability of gathering back the territories of the Russian Empire. The recent military defeat in Poland ruled out speedy action to the west of Russia, and the Kremlin set about assuring Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that it had only peaceful intentions towards them. The south Caucasus was a different matter. Azerbaijan fell to the Red Army in April 1920, Armenia in December that year; like Ukraine, they were quickly turned into Soviet republics. For a while, the Georgians remained under Menshevik rule, but on 26 January 1921 the Party Central Committee decided to correct this anomaly with a plan to provoke a diplomatic breach with Georgia with a view to organizing an invasion.³⁶

The same day, the Central Committee examined the latest reports from London. Lloyd George was proving amenable even though the legal status of Russian gold had still presented difficulties as recently as December.³⁷ But although Krasin had done well with the Prime Minister, the judicial system was another matter. Mr Justice Roche in the same month found in favour of the Briton who had lost his timber in Sovnarkom’s nationalizing campaigns of two years earlier and was seeking to impound a Soviet cargo of veneer about to be unloaded in the United Kingdom. Roche’s judgment endangered any contract entered into by Krasin, and the New York Times warned that this could also have adverse consequences for any American businessmen tempted to trade with communist Russia.³⁸ The oil of the south Caucasus was another contentious matter. Two British companies, the Baku Consolidated Oilfields and the gloriously named Spies Petroleum Co., had suffered the nationalization of their assets when the Red Army marched into Azerbaijan — some of their staff were thrown into prison. The companies raised a hue and cry when Krasin offered to make these assets available to other British enterprises.³⁹ The disgruntled Leslie Urquhart also continued to make trouble for Soviet negotiators by denouncing the London talks in The Times.⁴⁰

Even so, the Prime Minister was willing to keep the talks going. With a little more compromise on the Soviet side it might soon be possible to conclude a trade treaty. A small working party was created in Moscow to examine questions about Russia’s foreign debts in case Krasin needed to give some sort of commitment to recognizing them.⁴¹ Better to sign a half-good treaty than to lose the chance of any treaty at all. But when Lloyd George kept up the pressure on Krasin for the Bolsheviks to refrain from conducting their propaganda and subversion in the British Empire, Krasin affected outrage. If the government in Russia were to accept such a clause, he asked, what was to be done about Secretary for War Winston Churchill’s contributions to the Western press?⁴² Churchill doubtless caused annoyance to the Kremlin. But his commentary was never published in Moscow, and Krasin understood full well that Lloyd George simply wanted a reciprocal understanding that the British and the Russian authorities would not interfere in each other’s politics. Krasin could easily — if insincerely — give this guarantee. Almost without anyone expecting it, the muddled negotiations began to look as if they might end in a treaty.

30. THE ECONOMICS OF SURVIVAL

Although the Bolsheviks believed they were close to concluding trade negotiations with Britain and faced no immediate military threat, the domestic situation was far from easy. Until the winter of 1920–1 it looked as if the Kremlin would indefinitely maintain its wartime economic system which involved the forcible requisitioning of grain from the peasantry without compensation. Previous attempts to modify this policy, first by Trotsky and then by Lenin, met with furious objections from the rest of the leadership. In February 1920, indeed, Lenin himself had led those who shouted down Trotsky as a promoter of capitalism. At the end of the same year he received his own come-uppance when he recommended a milder scheme of his own.¹

The party had been distracted by an internal dispute between Lenin and Trotsky about what limits to place on the freedoms of trade unions in peacetime, but the leadership could not ignore the growing danger of serious insurrection for long. Industrial strikes had broken out in most cities. There was discontent in every garrison, and mutinies were not unknown. And the peasants grew ever more hostile to a government that seized their harvests. On 8 February 1921 the Politburo came to its senses when reports reached Moscow about the crescendo of rural revolts. Western Siberia and Ukraine — Russia’s bread basket — were ablaze. If their crucial agricultural contribution was threatened, the cities would starve. The final straw for the Soviet leaders was a rebellion led by Socialist-Revolutionary A. S. Antonov throughout Tambov province in the mid-Volga region. Having won the Civil War, the Bolsheviks were on the point of losing the peace. The Politburo urgently needed to offer some concessions to the peasants. The solution was obvious: the authorities had to stop seizing the whole agricultural ‘surplus’ from the villages and introduce a tax-in-kind, allowing them to make a profit from what was left of their harvest after meeting their fiscal obligation. A corner of private trade would be restored to them through this New Economic Policy.

Still troubled by the wrangling over the unions, Lenin was keenly aware that the New Economic Policy would be even more divisive. He and the rest of the Politburo were determined to keep the proposals strictly confidential until all the details had been worked out. The same degree of caution was exercised over the London trade talks, with Pravda keeping its reports deliberately vague. Lenin had delayed reopening his campaign on concessions until December 1920 at the Congress of Soviets, where he cited the Kamchatka deal with Vanderlip as the model. But his ideas had met with a stormy reaction from Bolsheviks, and he reverted to discussing the matter behind closed doors; but he had no doubt that the collapse of Soviet oil production made it crucial to attract foreign companies back to Baku.² This was deeply uncongenial to Azerbaijani communist leaders who remembered the Nobel Brothers’ Petroleum Co. and other enterprises for their careless attitude both to the health of workers and to the environment. Lenin’s blandishments to Western petrochemical companies would flood the republic with capitalism. Soviet leaders were naturally nervous about changes in policy that could touch off a split in their fiery party.

The discussions continued long into the New Year, and on 5 February 1921 the Politburo asked Kamenev and Rykov to enquire whether concessions were simply the best way to reverse the decline in Azerbaijani oil output.³ If Baku industry was to be restored, rapid action was required — and there was no evidence that the communist leaders in Azerbaijan had any idea how they would raise their own capital to begin the process. At a further discussion, nonetheless, the votes in the Politburo were split and the matter was referred to the Party Central Committee rather than risk a dispute throughout the party.⁴ This deflected the debate to a wider circle of party leaders as regional officials got to hear about what was being proposed. The Central Committee itself was divided but eventually decided to pronounce concessions acceptable in principle if the ‘mortal danger’ of the slump in production could be prevented (although it was recognized that foreign companies might not wish to operate again in Baku). Lenin had won the debate, but it was only by a slim majority that he did so; and nobody could be sure that the rest of the party would not raise objections when the decision became public knowledge.⁵

In London, despite reports of continued objections to a trade treaty appearing regularly in The Times,⁶ there was an air of expectancy. Krasin had signed contracts with British companies in advance of a settlement between the two governments, and Yorkshire textile factories queued to sell cloth to Russia.⁷ Businessmen travelled from the United Kingdom to Tallinn to sign their Russian deals using Sweden as the umbrella for their business and readying themselves for what was expected to be an enormous expansion of commerce.⁸

The British government refused to give way on certain of its demands. Soviet Russia had to cease all hostile activities, including propaganda, in the territories of the British Empire. Britons in Russian captivity had to be immediately released; in return the British would repatriate the Russians they had incarcerated. Chicherin, however, told Krasin to resist any pressure because Britain’s hold on its empire in the East was no longer as strong as it had been. Lenin was blunter still: ‘That swine Lloyd George has no scruples of shame in the way he deceives. Don’t believe a word he says and gull him three times as much.’⁹ But Chicherin and Lenin soon calmed down since they knew that they would lose the deal if they rejected the British conditions, and Lenin remained pessimistic about Russia’s capacity for independent economic recovery without foreign assistance. His sudden explosions were characteristic. When Soviet officials went abroad on missions he frequently accused them of appeasing foreigners and quietly forgot how he had succumbed to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk. At any rate Krasin could show that the British government was willing to overlook the entire question of loans made to Russia’s previous governments; and since Lloyd George was not driving the hardest of bargains, Sovnarkom empowered Krasin to strike the deal.

Since the débâcle near Warsaw, the Red Army had stood aside as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania proclaimed their borders and confirmed their independence. Adolf Ioffe led the Soviet delegation in the peace negotiations with Poland in Riga. The Poles had given up their hope that any Russian force could bring down the Bolsheviks. Wrangel’s army felt the full strength of a Red Army which was no longer being asked to fight a campaign on Polish territory. Crammed into Crimea, the Volunteer Army was in a desperate plight by early November 1920 and Wrangel ordered a mass evacuation, along with hundreds of thousands of civilian fugitives, across the Black Sea. The Russian White cause had gone down to comprehensive defeat. The Polish leadership recognized its incapacity to drive the Reds out of Ukraine and settled for a lot less than Poland’s April 1920 war aims. It was no longer convenient for the Poles to host Russian forces, and Pilsudski told Bulak-Balakhovich and his troops to leave the country.¹⁰ The Polish border would stay as it had been established in war by October 1920, hundreds of miles east of the Curzon Line. The Central Committee ordered the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to press for a peace treaty with all speed.¹¹

The prospect of peace between Soviet Russia and Poland proved disastrous for Menshevik-ruled Georgia because it freed the Red Army to cross into Georgian territory from Armenia. The campaign began on 15 February 1921. Tiflis fell ten days later and a Georgian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. Almost the entire territory of the Russian Empire south of the Caucasus was drawn back under Moscow’s control — just a few slivers of land were ceded to Turkey, which the Kremlin was seeking to placate at a time when it could not contemplate any military initiative abroad.

Hoping to reduce the intensity of all external threats, on 26 February Russia signed a friendship treaty with Persia. The newly appointed Soviet ambassador to Tehran was none other than Theodore Rothstein. Meanwhile Krasin had returned to Moscow to discuss the finalization of the trade agreement with the British. He gave an interview to Louise Bryant, denying that Soviet Russia was in any way a menace to other countries: ‘After all, the talk of the Third International is exaggerated and ridiculous. We haven’t enough people in Russia to meet our needs. We are not fools enough to send our best people abroad when they are needed here to develop Russia. The best means for the world to get rid of this bogy of Bolshevik propaganda is to begin vigorous trade.’¹² In her report, Bryant stressed that a freshly signed treaty with Afghanistan put aside the ‘imperialist’ legacy of old Russia. She predicted an end to the ‘English’ domination of the region and reported that Soviet emissaries in Kabul received an unusual amount of diplomatic freedom.¹³ Not long afterwards, Chicherin announced that Turkey too was aspiring to better relations with Soviet Russia.¹⁴ Step by step, the communist leadership were improving their security. None of the world’s great powers had yet concluded a treaty with Soviet Russia, but the chances were steadily improving.

But more trouble was brewing off the coast of Petrograd. On 28 February the Soviet naval garrison on the nearby island of Kronstadt assembled to demand an end to communist oppression. Mikhail Kalinin and other Bolshevik leaders held a meeting with them the next day. The list of grievances was a long one. The sailors objected to the Bolshevik political monopoly. They demanded free soviet elections and an end to police terror; they denounced the blocking detachments on city outskirts which stopped the ‘sack men’ from bringing food supplies from the countryside for illicit sale. Kalinin failed to calm the situation and soon there was open mutiny in Kronstadt. Trotsky, who had spent the winter months polemicizing about the trade unions, lamented the lack of a proper plan to retake Kronstadt and — on 5 March — co-signed a military order with Commander-in-Chief S. S. Kamenev. If the mutineers refused to heed their warnings, the full force of the Red Army would be deployed against them with air support.¹⁵ When Kronstadt held fast to its rebellion, measures were put in hand to suppress it two days later. The symbolism was clear to everyone. The Kronstadters had formed part of the backbone of Bolshevik political and military support in 1917. Now they were turning on Lenin and his party for betraying their hopes. Neither side saw room for compromise.

The Tenth Party Congress opened on 8 March in the shadow of these events. The Politburo by then had clear ideas on the desirable direction of policy and asked Lenin to explain its proposals. The peasantry was to be allowed to sell some of its grain harvest for private profit. The trade unions were to be subjected to greater state control, but not to the degree demanded by Trotsky. Peace was to be ratified with Poland. Foreign concessions were to be encouraged and the draft trade agreement with the United Kingdom confirmed. Lenin stressed the need for the party to deal mercilessly with threats to its power. Peasant revolts and the Kronstadt mutiny alike had to be crushed. Internal party discipline had to be tightened while communists were conducting a retreat from wartime economic policy. Lenin demanded a ban on party factions and denounced the Workers’ Opposition, which called for workers and peasants to have decisive influence on economic decision-making, as a ‘deviation’ from Bolshevik principles. Every single one of these proposals was contentious. But the worse the news about Kronstadt became, the easier it was for Lenin and his group in the leadership to impose their will on the Congress. A consensus developed about the urgent need to fight for the common cause. Even the Workers’ Oppositionists overlooked their verbal mauling by Lenin and volunteered for service in the military operation against Kronstadt. A quarter of the 717 full delegates immediately left the Congress in Moscow and travelled north.¹⁶

Although Trotsky spoke at the Congress at some length about the trade unions and a little about the proposed agrarian reform,¹⁷ he stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin over Kronstadt and handed the military command to Tukhachevski while warning the Politburo that the mutiny should be liquidated before the spring thaw. Once the ice melted, the rebel sailors would again be able to make contact with foreign countries and the trouble could severely worsen. Tambov province was far from the prying eyes of the Allies, but Kronstadt lay in the Gulf of Finland and was easily approachable from abroad by vessels. Trotsky charged the Central Committee with failing to understand the gravity of the situation.¹⁸

The Party Congress ended on 16 March with victory for the ascendant group on nearly every big question of policy even though the debates were sometimes fiery. Communists from Azerbaijan repeated their objections to leasing the Baku oilfields to foreigners. But the tightness of the scheduling at the Congress disabled those wishing to express dissent, and the New Economic Policy was raced through to confirmation almost before anyone had time to read the draft decree. The discussion on Anglo-Soviet trade was left until last, and Kamenev barely had time to introduce it before the entire proceedings were brought to a close and everyone stood to sing the Internationale. Lenin had dominated the proceedings and his friends in the leadership gained an easy majority of seats in the election of the Central Committee. And despite banning internal party factions, Lenin behaved as if he headed one both by reducing the number of Trotsky’s followers and by clearing them out of the Secretariat. Trotsky in Lenin’s opinion needed to suffer for having inflicted an unnecessary dispute about the trade unions on the party. Only then could they again start to work in mutual trust. Lenin regarded this as a priority: the communist leaders faced far too many emergencies for them to fall out.

It was on the very same day in London that the trade talks reached completion with the signing of an agreement by Leonid Krasin and the President of the Board of Trade Robert Horne. While Sovnarkom celebrated, its Russian enemies were justifiably downcast: Lloyd George had rescued the Bolsheviks just at the point when they might have lost everything.¹⁹ The Red Army stormed into Kronstadt on 17 March. The Tambov revolt was in full spate. Other provinces in Ukraine, the Volga region and western Siberia were up in arms against the Bolshevik commissars. If the Allies wanted to undermine the Soviet dictatorship, this was a disastrous moment to choose to come to terms with Sovnarkom and prop up its economy. Anti-Bolsheviks looked on in dismay and their misfortunes increased when the Poles signed the treaty of Riga on 18 March. The Politburo had weathered the storm. On 19 March its members examined the latest draft of its decree to abolish grain requisitioning and the next day confirmed the manifesto to be issued to the peasants in pursuit of its support.²⁰ The Bolsheviks had survived a winter of acute emergency by the skin of their teeth — and the British cabinet played not the least part in the denouement.

Lloyd George’s insouciance about Soviet revolutionary pretensions was exposed for what it was a few days later, on 24 March, when the German Communist Party called for a general strike with a view to instigating an insurrection in Berlin. Inspiration for this action came from certain communist leaders in Moscow. Chief among them were Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek. Apparently leaving Lenin and Trotsky in the dark, they dispatched Béla Kun to the German capital as Comintern’s plenipotentiary. Kun was still smarting from the collapse of his revolutionary government in Hungary and ardently desired to assist the Berlin comrades in overthrowing Germany’s social-democratic government. The thoughtful German communist leader Paul Levi tried to argue against this. He remembered all too clearly what had happened in January 1919 when the Spartacists, lacking popular support, had tried to seize power and had been crushed by government, army and Freikorps. Levi was anxious to avoid a repetition of that disaster.

Kun, however, had come to Berlin invested with the prestige and authority of a Comintern official; he saw to it that Levi was treated as a troublemaker who was breaking party discipline. He relied on the fact that the German communists had joined the party because they thought Germany was ready for communization. They yearned to reproduce the kind of revolution the Bolsheviks had started in Russia in October 1917. Kun drew together Ernst Thalmänn and a group of young leaders with an impulsive desire to take to the streets. Strikes and demonstrations were organized. Proclamations were issued. Rifles were acquired for use when the time came. The German communist leadership rapidly grew in confidence and ordered its supporters to begin what became known as the March Action. It was soon obvious that Kun’s plans were based on fantasies. A majority of the working class had no wish to see the elected social-democratic government overturned. At least in Munich in March 1919 there had been a semblance of soviets. There was no equivalent whatsoever in Berlin. Even Kun’s failed Hungarian communist republic had attracted support from a large number of workers. In Berlin in early 1921 the social-democrats were more popular than the communists. The communist party was small and inexperienced and, when it came out on the streets, the Reichswehr and police forced it to withdraw in defeat on 31 March.

In Moscow the Bolsheviks were horrified. If Lenin and Trotsky had been given any advance notice about the March Action they certainly did not admit to it. In fact, they were angry with the bunglers in Russia and Germany. Radek and Bukharin had never had a reputation for sagacity, and Zinoviev was forever trying to make up for his doubts in 1917 about the seizure of power in Petrograd. Although the Politburo refrained from reprimanding them, they in return were compelled to accept and endorse Comintern’s criticism of the German Communist Party. A scapegoat had to be found. With absolutely no justification — and as a way of bringing Germany’s communists to heel for the future — Lenin targeted Paul Levi. Levi was the very man who had endeavoured to stop the March Action before it could begin. But he had breached party discipline whereas the bunglers had behaved with perfect loyalty.

The Soviets already had a reputation for oppression at home and subversion abroad. The March Action, following so soon after the Kronstadt mutiny, forced them to strengthen their propaganda efforts. Louise Bryant faithfully relayed Trotsky’s words to the International News Service. He pretended that the revolutionary sailors of 1917 had left Kronstadt long before, adding that the mutiny was largely the work of White naval officers who had taken refuge at Tallinn and then spread their influence to the remaining garrison.²¹ Trotsky insisted, too, that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were acting like ‘the banana peel on which the working class would slip into counter-revolution against the Soviets’.²² Bryant compliantly treated Kronstadt as a minor distraction. In her series of dispatches, she declared that American firms could make huge profits if they started trading with Russia. America’s industrial goods would be exchanged for Russian raw materials. It could be a relationship of perfect equilibrium.²³ Bryant probably knew nothing about conditions in the ‘disciplinary colony’ at Ukhta north of the Arctic Circle where the ‘Kronstadt bandit sailors’ were sent on Politburo orders after the leaders of their mutiny were executed.²⁴ She had also not been in Berlin recently and had no direct acquaintance with the pointless loss of workers’ lives on the streets there. She knew of the concerns of her late husband John Reed about Soviet Russia, and as a foreign journalist she had the opportunity to explore them; but she entirely failed to take it.

As winter gave way to spring, the prospects for communist rule were as yet unclear. Economic compromise and political ruthlessness had prevailed over the massive popular resistance. The Bolsheviks had yielded the minimum necessary to maintain their power. They had won the Civil War but did not yet have a lasting plan for the peace. Their policies were not a coherent programme of action, and they had not ironed out the creases in external and internal policy. The Bolsheviks had never been more confused about their general strategy. Their new measures were extricating them from an immediate emergency. But the party had yet to demonstrate that such measures offered a way to realize communism in Russia, far less in the rest of the world.

31. THE SECOND BREATHING SPACE

The New Economic Policy is usually credited with the regeneration of Russia’s economy in 1921, but in fact the enabling legislation for agrarian reform was not passed until April that year. Months were then spent in convincing the peasantry that the authorities were in earnest about permitting private local trade in grain. Three years of forcible expropriation, compulsory labour and endless conscriptions in the Civil War had fostered rural distrust and hatred. It was months into 1922 before the Tambov rural revolt was suppressed. There was famine throughout the Volga region. The Soviet regime had to deploy the Red Army simply to get peasant households to complete the spring sowing.

But the long-awaited Anglo-Soviet trade agreement did indeed foster genuine recovery. Petrograd once again became Russia’s chief port. Tallinn lacked enough warehouses for the sudden upsurge in traffic — and after Germany’s defeat of course there was no longer any need to rely on Archangel.¹ In April 1921 Pravda reported that Soviet officials were already buying rice, jam, salt beef, vegetables and herring from the United Kingdom. With the British trade under way again, the Kremlin hoped that American and Canadian commercial links would soon be in place. Nonetheless, the economic emergency was still acute. Russia had once had more than enough coal to supply the country’s needs. Now it had to be imported.² The first priority, though, was to lubricate the wheels of exchange between factory and village. Trotsky called for an import strategy that gave precedence to goods that the peasantry needed. In this way he aimed to stimulate agricultural activity and make the New Economic Policy a success, and he was willing to forgo the purchase of big capital goods for a while and requested that the remainder of the gold reserve should be used for such purposes. Timber, oil and grain should be exported to make up for any shortfall — and Trotsky was not deflected from this strategy by the fact that the Volga peasantry was suffering from malnutrition.³

Communist hopes of a trade treaty with the US were dispelled by the new administration under President Warren G. Harding, who had won the election in the previous year. On 25 March 1921 Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes reaffirmed the policy established under Woodrow Wilson that Soviet Russia lacked the necessary conditions for economic co-operation. Litvinov’s overtures were brusquely rebuffed.⁴ It was Herbert Hoover, recently appointed Secretary of Commerce, who best explained the official standpoint. He denied that Sovnarkom was a legitimate power and predicted that Russian economic recovery would not occur while the communists held capitalism in a vice. The New Economic Policy did nothing to change his mind. He reasoned that the Bolsheviks could not be trusted while they sought financial credits from America despite refusing to guarantee private property as a right under the law.⁵ He also doubted that the Soviet regime could export anything much except gold, platinum and jewellery.⁶ This did not stop him from welcoming news that American businesses were signing independent deals with the Soviet government. Shoes and farm equipment were being sold in vast quantities to Russia.⁷ But if firms conducted business with the communists, they had to do so at their own risk. Hoover was not going to stop American firms trading with Russia, but he was not going to help them either.

Krasin, fresh from his success with the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement, urged that Soviet Russia and the US should agree to disagree about each other’s political order. He repeated that America could do itself a favour by supplying the industrial machinery, railway stock and countless spare parts that Russia needed for its economic recovery. Russia had the wherewithal to pay, and Krasin denied that Soviet gold was tainted. Furs, wool, bristles, leather and oil were already available for direct trade, and Sovnarkom was inviting tenders from foreign companies for concessions in timber-felling, fisheries and metal mining. Krasin depicted Russia as an Eldorado waiting to be rediscovered.⁸

Yet while Krasin painted an enticing picture for foreigners, the Soviet leadership hardened their measures against their own rebellious citizens. Strikes were settled by negotiation, but communist officials typically retaliated against identified troublemakers when things had settled down.⁹ The Red Army was given no rest. Mikhail Tukhachevski was put in charge of suppressing the Tambov peasant revolt. He denied himself no ruthless method in achieving this objective, deliberately applying terror in those districts where resistance was stubborn — and the Kremlin was kept fully abreast of his progress.¹⁰ Other military units were distributed across southern Russia, Ukraine and western Siberia. Wherever the communist authorities faced armed resistance, they reacted with force. And following behind the infantry and cavalry were teams of propagandists to explain the merits of the New Economic Policy to the peasantry. The villagers were told that in return for their political obedience they would receive the freedom to trade their harvest for their own profit after meeting any fiscal requirements — and the government promised to hasten the delivery of industrial goods for peasant households. First the stick, then the promise of carrots.

Nevertheless there remained much unease among Bolsheviks about the New Economic Policy, and a dispute exploded at the Party Conference in May 1921. Lenin was left alone to defend the Politburo measures. He was usually not one to indulge in self-pity — one of his mottoes was: ‘Don’t whinge!’ Even so, he indicated that the widespread incidence of physical ill health in the leadership had placed an undue burden on him. Trotsky had a mysterious chronic ailment and Zinoviev was recovering from two heart attacks; neither was passed fit enough to go to the Conference. (In fact Zinoviev did attend fleetingly to defend his reputation over the March Action.) Kamenev was also out of action because of a cardiac condition. Bukharin had been convalescing until a few days before the opening of proceedings and Stalin was laid low by acute appendicitis. It was true that Tomski, Central Committee member and head of the Soviet trade unions, had been politically active; but Lenin was annoyed with him because he had given unapproved assurances to trade unions about their freedom from party control — and Lenin for a while campaigned for his removal from the Central Committee.¹¹ Lenin was often described as a dictator and in the spring 1921 he indeed came close to being the supreme leader of Soviet Russia; but this was only because so few fellow leaders were available and willing to work co-operatively.

After getting this off his chest, Lenin led the line in defence of the New Economic Policy. Had he not done so, it is open to question whether the official measures would have survived intact.¹² In the Civil War, Bolsheviks had grown accustomed to thinking that forcible requisitioning of agricultural produce accorded with the communist way of life. The restored markets and the deals with foreign capitalists were anathema to them. Although Lenin had got away with little criticism and short debates at the Congress in March, now at the Conference he had to withstand fierce, sustained assault. But his critics had little to offer as an alternative beyond calling for greater state regulation and planning. In Russia’s current circumstances this would be hugely difficult. It would also be risky. The Conference could not bring itself to overturn a leader who had brought them through the October Revolution and the Civil War. Lenin swiftly sensed the mood and cheered everyone up by declaring that private entrepreneurship was only going to be temporary. He assured them that he was still committed to bringing about communism in Russia.

International affairs were easier for him to handle. Ernst Thalmänn, freshly arrived from Berlin, claimed that German workers were turning to the communists in impressive numbers despite the defeat of the March Action.¹³ Indeed Béla Kun wanted the Russian Communist Party to applaud the Action. He and Zinoviev infuriated Trotsky by going around hinting that Lenin and the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs were divided on this question. Lenin agreed to support Trotsky, issuing a rebuke to those responsible for the débâcle in Germany. Radek was ordered to toe the line in his report on the Comintern. Obediently he explained that the main reason for the defeat was poor leadership. According to Radek, objections to the plan for insurrection by Paul Levi had rendered the German communists ineffective, but other German leaders were also astonishingly inept. Nonetheless Radek also argued that the Comintern had to prepare itself to exploit turbulent situations as they arose, suggesting that the current stabilization of European capitalism would be vulnerable to future shocks. He was following the recent analysis by Trotsky as well as that by the Hungarian communist Jeno Varga; he also cited J. M. Keynes in arguing that the Paris peace settlement was inherently unstable. Radek contended that the US was the only power with reason for confidence. Even victor powers like Britain, France and Italy had difficulties. Rivalries among capitalist states were ineradicable.¹⁴

This was close to vindicating an early attempt to organize another German insurrection, and Lenin intervened for the sake of clarity, commenting: ‘Of course, if revolution arrives in Europe we’ll change policy.’ But he insisted that no one could make a sensible guess about when this might occur.¹⁵ The Soviet press immediately set about relaying the message that Moscow’s international priority was for trade with the big capitalist countries — and articles on revolutionary war disappeared.

Senator Joseph I. France continued to offer hope to the Politburo. In May 1921, convinced that America’s interests lay in trading with Russia, he set forth for Moscow to see things for himself. He gave an interview to the New York Times before he left in which he sketched out his intentions: ‘It is not a matter of personal opinion, political or economic. Approval will be a matter of practical politics. We did not approve of the regime of the late Czar. We do not need to approve of the Soviet. There are many of my colleagues in the Senate of whom I do not have to approve.’¹⁶ Trotsky asked Litvinov to set up a meeting with him.¹⁷ Litvinov had in fact been disinclined to let him into the country, but Krasin had persuaded Lenin and Chicherin that it would be folly to admit Washington B. Vanderlip while closing the frontier to the Senator.¹⁸ Yet Soviet bureaucrats shared a lingering distaste for dealing with prominent ‘bourgeois’ politicians. On his journey from Riga, Senator France was allotted a crowded, second-class carriage and compelled to obtain his own sleeping bag.¹⁹ He was forbidden to bring his personal assistant or interpreter with him or even to raise questions about the detention of Americans in Russian prisons.²⁰

Even so, he obtained his interview with Lenin in Moscow and put a warmer case for US–Soviet relations than he had dared to express publicly in America. Afterwards, Lenin told Chicherin:

I have just finished a conference with Senator France… He told me how he came out for Soviet Russia at large public meetings together with Comrade Martens. He is what they call a ‘liberal’, for an alliance of the United States plus Russia plus Germany, in order to save the world from Japan, England, and so on, and so on.²¹

Senator France returned to the US an enthusiast for full diplomatic recognition: ‘I found that the Russian Government was handling the situation in a statesmanlike way.’²² His endorsement of Lenin and Trotsky was unconditional. He even swallowed the official Soviet account of the Kronstadt mutiny, pinning responsibility on Colonel Edward W. Ryan of the American Red Cross for having fomented trouble among the sailors.²³

One American entrepreneur who followed Vanderlip’s example and interested himself in business in Russia was Dr Armand Hammer of the Allied Drug and Chemical Corporation. In November 1921, Hammer signed a deal for an asbestos concession in the Urals. The terms involved him handing over 10 per cent of all output to the Soviet government.²⁴ The US press quickly published its suspicions. Also involved in the business was Hammer’s father Julius, who by then was serving a sentence in New York State’s Sing Sing prison for carrying out an abortion. Julius Hammer was also known to have belonged to the Russian Soviet Information Bureau run by Martens and Nuorteva. Then it came out that other directors of Hammer’s corporation had no knowledge of any deal with the Soviet government and that the business had no interest in producing asbestos.²⁵ Armand Hammer was a wily individual and his liaison with the Soviet leadership was to bring him riches in the years ahead. Nor did he confine himself to commerce, carrying out secret political errands for the Kremlin and virtually becoming its intelligence agent. His success in conducting private business in Russia under Bolshevik rule also convinced others that it was safe to sign contracts despite Herbert Hoover’s warnings.²⁶

Even Leslie Urquhart dropped his campaign against Sovnarkom. When he saw that he might never get his Russian property back under Soviet rule, he approached his old adversary Krasin in June 1921 to examine what kind of deal he too might be able to negotiate.²⁷ In July he spoke to the annual general meeting of his Russo-Asiatic Consolidated Co. and recommended a change of heart:

My discussions with Mr Krassin [sic] have been of a practical, helpful, and very friendly nature. (Cheers.) I mention this because in ordinary circumstances it would have been very difficult for the representatives of two such antagonistic systems as those of Capitalism and Communism as applied to economics to find a basis of understanding. Capitalism stands for the right of property and economic freedom, while Communism is the absolute negation of both these principles.²⁸

Lenin and Krasin hoped that such positive endorsements would have a gold-rush effect on the minds of Western entrepreneurs. The Urquhart question was discussed repeatedly in the Politburo for over a year. Soviet leaders understood that if they could agree an appropriate arrangement with the Scottish mining magnate they could use it as the model for other concessions.²⁹

Herbert Hoover did not give up on Russia either. In summer 1921 he responded warmly to an appeal from the Russian novelist Maxim Gorki for famine relief in Russia and Ukraine. The American Relief Administration was closing its offices in Europe. Gorki asked Hoover to divert its activities eastwards rather than back across the Atlantic. Hoover said that he still needed basic assurances from Sovnarkom. American prisoners in Russia had to be released. The relief administrators from America had to be able to travel freely, organize the local committees and have control of the food brought on to Soviet soil.³⁰

The fly in the ointment was an allegation that the American Relief Administration had acted dishonestly in its earlier work in Europe. Captain T. C. C. Gregory, one of Hoover’s officials in 1919, claimed in the New York magazine World’s Wealth that the Administration had tried to subvert Béla Kun’s government in Hungary. Sovnarkom’s sympathizers in the US informed Moscow of the controversy, and Gregory’s article was reproduced in Soviet pamphlets.³¹ Trotsky feared that Hoover’s philanthropic mission might be the first manoeuvre in a campaign of Western military intervention.³² On a visit to Odessa he declared:

But here it must be remembered that we are not Hungary. We are not a young Soviet republic. We have been tempered in the struggle against counter-revolution. We have our own special organs, we have the Cheka. The Cheka isn’t loved, but we don’t love counter-revolution. And we say to Hoover: ‘There is risk in your enterprise.’³³

Trotsky advised vigilance against Americans bearing gifts. Lenin agreed and wrote to Molotov, the Party Central Committee Secretary, that the American Relief Administration was not to be trusted. He recommended that Trotsky, Kamenev and Molotov should monitor the Administration’s activities on a daily basis. Indeed, he went further and wanted Hoover ‘punished’. In his opinion, Hoover and his subordinates were ‘scoundrels and liars’ who should be instantly deported or arrested if ever they meddled in Soviet internal affairs.³⁴

Hoover cursed Gregory whenever his name came up in conversation.³⁵ He also issued an order for the strict avoidance of all interference in Russian politics.³⁶ But this came too late to prevent embarrassment for him in America. Walter W. Liggett of Russian Famine Relief — a pro-Soviet organization — made play with what Gregory had written. Officials in the American Relief Administration had to defend themselves in the press; and George Barr Baker, who directed the operations in Russia, pointed out that Liggett’s political accusations brought no succour to the starving people who would die without food shipments from the US.³⁷

This had the desired effect and the Soviet leadership anyway soon came round to understanding what a wonderful offer was being made to them. Hoover was proposing to bring food and medicine for free, only asking Sovnarkom to pay for seedcorn.³⁸ Trotsky told Louise Bryant:

The ARA organization which has rendered incalculable aid to the hungry masses of Russia was at the same time most naturally a highly skilful feeler projected by the ruling elements of America into the very depths of Russia. More than any other European country [sic] America has seen us as we really are; it remains for us to wait till the public opinion of the propertied classes of America will digest the collected data and will draw from it appropriate deductions.³⁹

This was hardly an unconditional endorsement; and it indicated that the Politburo had reasons other than humanitarian ones for accepting American assistance. The Politburo in fact failed to prioritize efforts of its own to alleviate the famine. Revenues from exports were being earmarked for industrial investment rather than grain purchases. The Soviet leaders talked as if they cared about the peasantry but the reality was that the Politburo was more interested in restoring Russian industrial and military power. If thousands of peasants died of starvation, so be it.

As the Soviet regime consolidated its rule, efforts by Russians to bring down the Bolsheviks were weakening. The Cheka efficiently liquidated several anti-communist groups it discovered in Petrograd and Moscow. The indefatigable Boris Savinkov had tried to link up with them; he had also tried to raise finance from the industrialist Alexei Putilov. This caused little bother to the Chekists, who imprisoned or executed the activists in Russia.⁴⁰ On 13 June 1921 Savinkov as self-styled Chairman of the Russian Evacuation Committee liaised with Sidney Reilly in organizing an Anti-Bolshevik Congress in Warsaw — the meeting was small enough to be held in a private apartment on Marszalkowski Street. The discussion touched on the general international situation as well as the fate of the White movement, the position of the émigrés and the attitude of the Western Allies.⁴¹ But in October Savinkov was expelled from Warsaw by the Polish authorities under pressure from Moscow after the treaty of Riga. In this way the last great enthusiast for a crusade against Soviet Russia with active Russian participation was compelled to leave for western Europe.⁴² The Cheka prided itself on having eliminated all counter-revolutionary organizations from Soviet territory. The Kremlin’s reach now seemed to extend well beyond that territory.

In capital cities across Europe, Russian political emigrants gathered. In Paris there was a National Unification congress led by the conservative Pëtr Struve, the liberal Konstantin Nabokov and the ex-Bolshevik Grigori Alexinski.⁴³ Paul Dukes continued his public campaigning against the Bolsheviks and went off on an American lecture tour in February 1921. In November, on his return, he picked up his links with Sidney Reilly and Boris Savinkov; he also met up with Harold Williams.⁴⁴ But all their efforts were the triumph of hope over realism. No government in Europe or North America any longer had the stomach for an anti-Bolshevik military operation.

As the Allied governments stood back, the international race to make profits in Soviet Russia began in earnest. Since French official policy rendered this next to impossible, the Association Financière, Industrielle et Commerciale Russe turned its eyes to New York for help, the idea being to engage with individuals close to ‘the outstanding public figure of the United States, Mr Hoover’. It was believed that the American Relief Administration might somehow offer cover for Russia’s old economic elite to find their way back into trade with new Russia.⁴⁵ Sidney Reilly had been among the first to notice the Association’s ambitions. With an eye for the main course he was determined to gain a slice of the profits seemingly on offer and was actively engaged in buying up products in Europe on behalf of the British government. Wrangel’s intelligence officers noticed that he had some kind of ‘link with the Bolshevik delegation in London’. His financial dishonesty in pre-war Russia was common knowledge by then. Even without access to information about the British Secret Service Bureau’s enquiry about him, the White officers commented that Reilly was almost certainly an assumed name; and London’s Russian political circles gave him a wide berth despite the opportunity offered by his connections with the British establishment.⁴⁶

For a while at least, the Soviet leadership resigned themselves to ‘peaceful cohabitation’ with capitalist countries. Lenin used this term in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor. In Soviet Russia itself it was Adolf Ioffe who popularized it and called for ‘co-operation’ with ‘bourgeois republics’.⁴⁷ But Ioffe laid down a qualification, insisting that this policy would make sense only if it were guaranteed that no military threat would be directed at Moscow. The Red Army would show good faith by pulling back from its stations on Russian borders. Capitalists would trade with Russia not out of altruism or even mere greed but because the world economy could not now recover without access to the huge natural resources that lay between Smolensk and Vladivostok. Communists could therefore wait on events. The struggle between Labour and Capital would not cease around the globe, and ‘world proletarian revolution’ remained the party’s objective. But every Bolshevik leader had learned that compromises had to be made if Bolshevik rule was to be sustained.⁴⁸

Soviet rule, as every Russian knew and foreign visitors soon discovered, was chaotic at its lower levels. Official policy was one thing and the reality was frequently very different. Corruption was pervasive. Even transport was never better than uncertain; and when William J. Kelley of the American Relief Administration tried to make his way from Riga to Moscow at the end of 1921, he had to bribe the train driver to give him logs to keep himself warm at the lengthy unscheduled stops on the journey.⁴⁹ What is more, Bolsheviks often baulked at the party’s official encouragement of the purchase of concessions by foreigners. William H. Johnston, president of the International Association of Machinists, was held up in Latvia and could not even get a visa for his trip to Moscow.⁵⁰ None of these difficulties caused surprise in the American administration, which had warned its country’s entrepreneurs about the dangers of doing business in Russia. They had only themselves to blame if they found that Soviet conditions offered a less than congenial experience. Official US opposition to a trade treaty remained in place; Herbert Hoover was implacable — and he ensured that no American concession, including Vanderlip’s well-known Kamchatka venture, could be operated on a grand scale in Siberia unless and until the Washington authorities gave their blessing.⁵¹

There was still a lot for the Soviet leadership to do if economic recovery was to continue, and the growing rivalry between Lenin and Trotsky had the potential to open up yet another damaging controversy. They disagreed about the pace and orientation of industrial growth. Trotsky wanted to prioritize investment in heavy industry and introduce mechanisms for central state economic planning. Lenin feared that this would disrupt the reconciliation with the peasantry; his own preference was to grant freedom for private workshops to produce for the rural requirements.⁵² For the moment, at least, Lenin had the greater support in the Politburo and Central Committee — and the political situation settled down. The October Revolution survived the first full year of peace.

32. THE UNEXTINGUISHED FIRE

The Bolsheviks had kept their hardness and had kept their faith. Even the pseudonyms they chose for themselves signified unyielding intent. Stalin was a name taken from the Russian word for steel, Molotov was a derivation of hammer. Their generation had been born and brought up in years when armed force was used the world over to expand empires and transform economies. Bolsheviks absorbed this toughness of spirit into their own doctrines and practices. They saw how industrialists, financiers and landowners had become masters of the earth. They learned from the ruthlessness and optimism they witnessed. Like the capitalists they detested, they took chances. The October Revolution had always been a gamble. But it had been successful for them, even though the price was paid by millions of Russians in death, tears and famine. Communists proved themselves flexible. Although they hated compromise, they became adept at scraping off the minimum of skin from their ideology. Bolshevism was founded on the idea that humankind is infinitely plastic, infinitely malleable. The rulers of Soviet Russia aimed to reconstruct the entire edifice of life for the benefit of the working class — and if workers did not yet understand where their best interests lay, the communist party would simply carry out the Revolution on their behalf.

Bolshevik leaders and militants, even if they had not read Lenin’s The State and Revolution or Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, believed that the October Revolution required the party, the Cheka and the Red Army to exercise a severe dictatorship. The Bolsheviks were known for their dictatorial inclinations long before the experiences of 1917; and although they had looked forward to enabling ‘the people’ to liberate themselves from capitalism, they had always believed in the need for a framework of authoritarian control to bring this about. By the end of the Civil War, the use of mass terror, arbitrary dispensation of justice and political discrimination against groups in society deemed to be inimical had become the norm. The upper and middle classes — the burzhui — were treated as ‘former people’ and stripped of the rights of citizenship along with priests and ex-policemen, and it was a rare ex-businessman who dared to go around town dressed in his pre-revolutionary finery.¹ Although peasants and artisans gained some freedom to sell their goods and services, the communists’ ultimate objective had not changed. The entire economy would one day be owned, planned and regulated by powerful agencies of the state. Bolsheviks were engineers of the soul. They intended to manufacture a new collectivist mentality throughout society and were willing to wade through seas of blood to achieve their purposes.

The Bolsheviks still aimed to provide everyone with an abundance of material and cultural well-being. Schooling and health care were already free of charge. Wherever possible, housing was made available to the poor. Trade unions could take up the grievances of individual labourers. Party militants set about promoting working-class youngsters to posts of authority. The dream was to make the ‘proletarian state’ ever more proletarian.

The American journalist Anna Louise Strong, arriving in Russia at the outset of the New Economic Policy, bore witness to the preserved ideals. She reported that even entrepreneurs could be found imbued with enthusiasm for Bolshevism. In her account of a trip to the famine-afflicted Volga region she wrote in note form:

The little East-side Jew whom I met in Samara, the heart of the famine, and who went with me as interpreter to organize village kitchens. Speaking English with a vile accent and physically most unattractive. Then I learned that he was manager of two little factories which had just reopened, making doors and windows for the repairing of Samara. He was a machinist; he was so proud of the two or three machines he had put together, down in a country where even plain nails were not to be had.²

Despite being a communist party member, he was proud of having obtained official permission to put his workers on to piecework. This way they earned the equivalent of fifteen dollars per month. He himself received only rations and lodgings; beyond that point, he worked for free. His wife had to work too, and his offspring had to be fed in a state children’s home. But he did not complain. He was ‘eager and energetic and happy to be building Russia’.³

Strong may well have been, and indeed almost certainly was, one of those many foreigners who fell for a self-serving story. But the situation in Russia was anyway complicated. Its people were emerging from a period of military and political turmoil and trying to come to terms with the often convoluted ways of understanding and practising communism that were being set before them.

Ivy Litvinov directed a questioning gaze at the ambivalent lifestyles of most veteran Bolsheviks. Her scepticism began when she joined Maxim from London in Copenhagen in 1920: ‘You see, we lived in grand hotels and he wore fur coats and smoked enormous cigars and things like that. I’d never seen him so plutocratic, and we had cars all the time.’⁴ But she also recalled an earlier incident which was in his favour. When he took the train for Moscow from Petrograd the railway officials gave him an empty carriage to himself. Discovering that other passengers had been ejected to accommodate him, he insisted on their reinstatement.⁵ Litvinov was far from being the only Soviet leader to undergo a ragged process of embourgeoisement. Krasin was a case in point. Attending a private dinner given in his honour by leading bankers at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon, he let himself go and said: ‘Communism as we have tried it has proved a failure and it must be modified.’ Some of the waiters were radical socialists and, overhearing these startling comments, halted work in the kitchen for a while.⁶ But the International News Service judged that ‘Krasin was just kidding the bankers along for the benefit of [Soviet] business.’ Even so, there was an increasing and unmistakable tendency for communist leaders to enjoy the pleasures of the old upper classes. Litvinov and Krasin were sincere communists; but although they were not sybaritic, they were starting to accept privilege as their right.

The American reporter Frank Mason saw Karl Radek as resistant to the sartorial drift of the Soviet elite and noted that he dressed ‘like a movie picture Bolshevic [sic]’. Mason commented: ‘You could pick him out without hesitation even were he seated in a room filled with stage anarchists.’ Radek had a fuzzy brown fringe of a beard, his hair was untroubled by a comb, and curls framed a face that was ‘delicate, almost womanly’. He wore a soiled fur-lined jacket and long, black-leather breeches.⁷

Ivy Litvinov resented the communist milieu she found in Moscow. She disliked being introduced to everybody as Maxim’s marital adjunct and deposited with the wives of Soviet leaders who only wanted to talk about children or clothing.⁸ In the early 1920s the Litvinovs were living in the Kharitonenko House.⁹ Ivy’s great new friend was Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent Bolshevik whom she loved for her kindness and vivacity.¹⁰ This was not all that helpful for her husband’s career since Kollontai had emerged as a harsh critic of the Politburo and an advocate of the Workers’ Opposition. But the two women also came together for other reasons. Ivy was a devotee of D. H. Lawrence and, believing in free love, discovered a fellow spirit in Alexandra who scandalized most Russian communists with her uninhibited sexual liaisons. Ivy and Alexandra got on splendidly. They confided in each other about their disillusionment with communist leaders; and Ivy, despite admiring Lenin in many ways, came to believe he was ‘a wrong-headed saint’.¹¹

Her distaste for the Kharitonenko House surprised Maxim, who had written enticingly to her in London: ‘If you ever come here, your eyes will bulge.’¹² Ivy thought the antique furniture hideous, although she herself shopped in expensive stores and hired governesses for her children;¹³ but she was shocked by the disparity between the conditions of the Moscow poor and the comfortable life of the elite: ‘I saw a woman in Red Square, sort of, just fall down. People just went like that round her, nobody stopped. Oh, of course… I thought everyone was a peasant because all the women wore shawls, you see, I was quite sure everybody was peasants, which was sort of not so untrue.’¹⁴ Although Ivy was no communist, she had expected more of communists:

I thought I was going to the land of Socialism. You see I thought these thoughts so often, I remember exactly. And one thing I thought: how lovely — you see things have always had me in their power. I can’t cope with them. And it’s so lovely to throw them away every now and then. Get rid of them. And I somehow thought for some unknown reason: now I’m going to a land where ‘things’ — I suppose I meant property — won’t mean so much… I very soon discovered that there never had been a place where they mattered so much.

The collapse of manufacturing output made people cling to whatever they possessed and few families could afford what they saw in shop windows.¹⁵

The Bolsheviks had spent the year 1917 denouncing the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks for their denial of the immediate achievability of Russian socialism. Now Bolsheviks presided over the return of markets, and it was their New Economic Policy which had led to the emergence of both fur-coated urban spivs in the cities and well-off peasants — often known as ‘kulaks’ — in the villages. Although open political opposition was no longer possible, the anti-Bolshevik militants spread their message in other ways. Satirical song was one of these. A Socialist-Revolutionary ditty went as follows:

Denied the freedom to stand against the Bolsheviks in elections, Sovnarkom’s enemies faced constant adversity if they continued the political struggle. Eventually, in 1922, the patience of the Soviet authorities would be exhausted when the surviving Socialist-Revolutionaries were put on show-trial in 1922; and Lenin wanted to do the same to the Mensheviks.¹⁷

Yet the communist elite never lost their basic unease about the New Economic Policy. They feared that the reintroduction of capitalism, albeit with severe restrictions, might be the start of counterrevolution by stealth. Ivy Litvinov recalled how badly her husband Maxim had reacted to Lenin’s policy: ‘[He] was terribly depressed. Afterwards I supposed he knew it had to be, but how depressed he was; he felt everything had been sold, you know… he was so terribly, terribly depressed.’¹⁸ Bolshevik wives thought and wrote as Bolsheviks and it did not usually occur to them to depict personal moods in their accounts: the bigger revolutionary cause was everything. But Ivy Litvinov was not typical. She was British, possessed little interest in politics and had the eyes and ears of a novelist; and the depression her husband experienced was almost certainly widely shared.

Some Russians nonetheless dreamed that the scope for profit-making might eventually benefit Russia. For them, the New Economic Policy was a first and very desirable breach in the wall of doctrinaire communism. They hoped that the remaining restrictions on the operation of a private market economy would eventually be removed. They were carried away in their speculation. Perhaps the Bolshevik party was undergoing a permanent internal change, dropping its fanatical ideology for a more realistic appreciation of what could be accomplished. In Harbin, across the Siberian frontier in Manchuria, émigré Russian intellectuals became convinced that the Bolsheviks were turning into nationalists. And it is true that Bolshevism as it emerged from the Civil War was committed to gathering back the lands of the Russian Empire under central control. The Bolsheviks unquestionably wanted Russia to be a great military power once more. They also wanted to create an advanced industrial society and spread universal education. They were the most ambitious modernizers the country had known since Peter the Great. Some people regarded them, beneath their red banners, as national champions who were capable of succeeding where tsars, conservatives, liberals and socialists had failed.

Undoubtedly there were leanings in this direction in the Bolshevik leadership, and the émigrés in Harbin were right that the Soviet state was far from being immune to pressures to move away from its violent, oppressive zealotry. Ex-Ambassador Vasili Maklakov in Paris agreed. He could not see how the Bolsheviks could survive without making allowance for the nationally minded elements in the Red Army that had enabled victory in the Civil War.¹⁹ In Russia too it was murmured that the October Revolution was gradually being ‘straightened out’ and ‘moderated’ and ‘civilized’. Across the professions there were people who welcomed communism’s modernizing zeal for Russia without being communists. Teachers felt free to experiment with fresh pedagogical ideas. Economists were attracted by opportunities to plan and regulate production and supply. Scientists welcomed the promise of abundant resources as and when they became available. It was common knowledge that Soviet Russia was a ruthless police state that boasted of its ruthlessness. Russian émigré and Western optimists took Lloyd George’s line, believing that it was better to shake hands and do business with Lenin and Trotsky than to face them across military fronts.

The German government had reasons of its own to go further than Lloyd George when the European powers met in Genoa in April 1922 to settle Europe’s outstanding international questions. Chicherin attended instead of Lenin, who was thought likely to be assassinated. Trotsky stayed away for the same reason. The Soviet delegation got nowhere with the Western Allies because France refused to deal with Russia until such time as it recognized its obligations to those whose property and investments had been seized by Sovnarkom. The Russians and Germans drew the obvious conclusion: they were both pariah states. Having found plenty of points of mutual advantage, they travelled further down the Italian coast to Santa Margherita and Rapallo where the discussions were fast and fruitful; and a treaty was signed that gave full diplomatic recognition to Russia and opened avenues to the import and export business. Sovnarkom saw its chance to entice German companies to sign big commercial contracts. Secret arrangements were also made for the Germans to evade the military restrictions imposed by the treaty of Versailles by organizing and training their armed forces on Soviet soil, where the Red Army would benefit by seeing and copying up-to-date techniques.

The Bolsheviks had vanquished their enemies at home and begun to neutralize the threats from abroad, and Lenin’s firm leadership had been crucial to the survival of the Soviet order. The economy was recovering and society was beginning to recuperate from years of war and disruption. But in January 1924 Lenin died and in the ensuing power struggle it was Stalin who emerged victorious. In his own rough way he introduced radical changes, beginning with a programme of economic deprivatization. Forced-rate industrialization was instigated. State ownership, state regulation and state planning were spread to every corner of production and distribution. The old ‘specialists’ were replaced by newly trained and promoted Red operatives. The few outlets for cultural criticism were abolished. Compromise with the national aspirations of the many non-Russian peoples of the USSR was ended. Open-ended educational initiatives were replaced by rote learning. Factional dissent was banished from the party not just by decree but also in practice. Trials were organized of prominent figures thought likely to obstruct or undermine Stalin’s programme and the penal network of labour camps sucked in victims who never numbered fewer than a million. The Cheka, which was subsumed in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (or NKVD), acquired at least the same importance as the Bolshevik party.

This not only took the world by surprise — it was also widely thought to be an internal phenomenon, safely quarantined from other countries. Yet Soviet foreign policy had not lost its potential to destabilize politics in Europe. As ex-Ambassador Boris Bakhmetev observed, Bolshevism ultimately had to expand westwards or risk withering away. Militarism was inherent in its situation whether it liked it or not.²⁰ The Kremlin’s rulers needed foreign revolutions for their own security since the treaties with capitalist governments could bring only temporary relief — and the possibility of an anti-Soviet crusade was a permanent one. The Bolsheviks were anyway convinced that global capitalism was vulnerable to profound inner instabilities, inevitably leading to world wars and economic depression that would offer opportunities for communist political expansion. Comintern continued to send agents, advice and finance around the globe. Under its guidance dozens of new communist parties promoted the cause of socialist revolution. There had been another, equally disastrous attempt at insurrection in Germany in 1923. Apart from an initial objection by Stalin, it had been supported by the entire Politburo. There were also attempts at urban risings in Estonia and Bulgaria. Despite such disappointments, the communist leaders in Moscow did not give up hope of foreign revolutions — and Germany remained the great target.

Publicly they continued to pretend that the German Communist Party would have to make revolution without external assistance. This was just as misleading as the notion that the Comintern was independent of Moscow. Behind closed doors the Soviet leadership accepted that they would have to send in the Red Army to support any German revolution that might break out. The Western Allies would never tolerate the existence of a communist state in the heart of Europe and would oppose any attempt to contravene the treaty of Versailles. There was unlikely to be a ‘European socialist revolution’ without yet another great European war.²¹ Revolution in Berlin would be the first step towards a continental bloodbath. Bolshevik leaders thought this a price worth paying in the Marxist revolutionary cause. Small wonder that the peoples of eastern and east-central Europe refused to take a casual approach to the possibility that communism might soon be on the march again. Owners of businesses worried for their property; priests and their congregations fretted that spiritual freedom might be crushed. Millions of people yearned simply for peace. The Bolsheviks had no intention of giving them rest.

So a first Cold War took place between the USSR and the Allies even before 1945. Obviously the Iron Curtain that Ethel Snowden had in mind in 1920 was not the same as the one that stretched down the middle of Europe after 1945. What she mainly meant was Russia’s isolation from the world rather than a political, ideological and military stand-off between two global military and political coalitions. Yet the potential for the first Cold War to turn into an even bigger and more dangerous one was already present — and it became a reality when the Soviet Union became a great power by dint of the country’s industrialization in the 1930s and its victory on the eastern front against the Third Reich in 1944–5.

The October Revolution had lasted longer than most observers had thought possible back in 1917. After breaking the spine of the Wehrmacht in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, the Red Army was the first armed force into Berlin in 1945. The spread of communism that had been the dream of Lenin and Trotsky was fulfilled as Stalin communized the entire eastern half of Europe. Immediately he directed the USSR’s new industrial might at achieving military parity with the US. The two great military coalitions of NATO and the Warsaw Pact avoided all-out war with each other. Instead there was a second Cold War involving intensified political, economic and ideological competition — and by the 1970s a quarter of the globe’s land area was governed by communist states. The tensions between the USSR and the US frequently came close to military clashes, but mercifully the two sides held themselves back from the brink. When deep structural reforms were undertaken in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Cold War began to fade in ferocity, and on the very last day of 1991, seventy years after Lenin and Trotsky had seized power in Petrograd, the USSR collapsed under the pressures of its own internal transformation.

From 1917 through to 1991 the West had dealt with Soviet Russia in a confused fashion. There was endless controversy. Some foreigners became communists and worked for revolutionary change in their countries; others aimed at a peaceful coexistence with Russia and hoped that trade and cultural contacts would steadily erode Bolshevik extremism. Another trend of thought regretted that any such compromise was made. There were few advocates of an anti-Soviet crusade in the 1920s, but many argued for the reimposition of an economic quarantine.

The history of the USSR proceeded by sharp twists and turns that nobody could predict in the early years of the Soviet communist dictatorship, and the temptation must be avoided to judge the naivety of contemporaries with the privilege of hindsight. They faced a difficult situation. The war between the Allies and the Central Powers demanded the full attention of the combatant countries. No Allied government was willing to recognize the Soviet revolutionary state, and normal diplomatic relations were suspended. The obvious weaknesses of Bolshevik rule, however, made it sensible for foreign powers to query the capacity of the Bolsheviks to survive. Nor was it easy to adopt genuinely effective methods to bring down the Soviet government or counteract its external menace. All Western leaders wanting a tougher line to be taken on Bolshevism had to cope with obstruction by their labour movements and with pressures from political and commercial lobbies. In any case, their military expeditions were constantly too small to overturn communism. The Whites, even with Allied assistance, were ultimately no match for the Reds; and Western attempts at outright subversion failed. But this does not mean that the Soviet victory was preordained. Not at all: the Bolsheviks came close to being overturned by their own peasants, sailors and workers in early 1921; and Russian and Western critics of Lloyd George had some justification in complaining that he chose that precise moment to sign a trade treaty, helping to bail out the Soviet economy.

After all the excuses are made for them, however, Western political leaders undeniably had abundant information about the purposes and potential of Soviet communism — and if Winston Churchill could always see Soviet Russia for what it was, other politicians could have done the same. The West’s diplomats and intelligence officers served them well. And when the diplomats left Russian soil, the spies and telegraphists as well as the journalists filled most of the gaps in international reportage: communism was never obscured from view for the leaders who took the big decisions. It is true that the information was often patchy and even contradictory, but it was good enough for judgements to be made. Yet the politicians acted on reports only when the content suited them. They behaved largely on the basis of instinct and preconception. Policy was quickly decided and intellectual self-doubt was suppressed.

Soviet leaders, too, trusted their intuition and accepted only such counsel as fitted their prejudices. There was still heavier pressure on them than on Western leaders to act quickly and decisively. The Revolution was ceaselessly threatened. Every Bolshevik knew that inactivity in foreign and security matters was not a safe option. Even a treaty with one or more of the Western Allies could bring only temporary relief. Soviet Russia, they thought, would remain vulnerable until such time as a Soviet Germany existed. Communists interpreted everything that happened to them after 1917 through the prism of their long-held suppositions. They saw the maleficent hand of the West in every setback for the October Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin agreed at least about this. Victory in the Great War placed the Allies in dominion over the world, and it was their Allied businessmen who reaped the advantage. Soviet Russia had to be on its guard against a crusade to bring down the communist order. The Kremlin was alert to any opportunity to manoeuvre among the victor powers; but at a time when the world seemed to spin on a revolutionary axis, the ideological core of communist thinking remained a fixed one.

Looking out on the world in the early 1920s, the communist leaders breathed more easily than they had done a few months earlier. Western leaders for a while turned their faces away from the Russian question. They had failed to supplant communism in 1917–21 and now they had many other dilemmas of their own to resolve. They hoped that Russia’s tumult would stay within Russian borders. For many years it did. But when the Red Army crossed Poland into Germany in 1945, it came with even greater menace to its neighbours and the rest of the world.