The Russian Revolution

14

The Revolution Internationalized

To obtain an armistice now means to conquer the whole world.

—Lenin, September 1917¹

Although in time the Russian Revolution would exert an even greater influence on world history than the French, initially it attracted much less attention. This can be explained by two factors: the greater prominence of France and the different timing of the two events.

In the late eighteenth century, France was politically and culturally the leading power in Europe: the Bourbons were the premier dynasty on the Continent, the embodiment of royal absolutism, and French was the language of cultured society. At first, the great powers were delighted with the way the Revolution destabilized France, but they soon came to realize that it posed a threat also to their own stability. The arrest of the King, the September 1792 massacres, and the appeals of the Girondins to foreign nations to overthrow their tyrants left no doubt that the Revolution was more than a mere change of government. There followed a cycle of wars which lasted for nearly a quarter of a century, ending in a Bourbon restoration. The concern of European monarchs for the fate of the imprisoned French king is understandable given that their authority rested on the principle of legitimacy and that once this principle was abandoned in favor of popular sovereignty none of them could feel safe. True, the American colonies had proclaimed democracy earlier, but the United States was an overseas territory, not the leading continental power.

Since Russia lay on its periphery, half in Asia, and was overwhelmingly agrarian, Europe never considered her internal developments relevant to its own concerns. The turmoil of 1917 was generally interpreted to mark Russia’s belated entry into the modern age rather than a threat to the established order.

This indifference was enhanced by the fact that the Russian Revolution, having occurred in the midst of the greatest, most destructive war in history, struck contemporaries as an episode in that war rather than as an event in its own right. Such excitement as the Russian Revolution generated in the West had to do almost exclusively with its potential effect on military operations. The Allies and the Central Powers both welcomed the February Revolution, although for different reasons: the former hoped that the removal of an unpopular tsar would make it possible to reinvigorate Russia’s war effort, while the latter hoped it would take Russia out of the war. The October coup was, of course, jubilantly welcomed in Germany. Among the Allies it had a mixed reception, but it certainly caused no alarm. Lenin and his party were unknown quantities whose Utopian plans and declarations no one took seriously. The tendency, especially after Brest-Litovsk, was to view Bolshevism as a creation of Germany which would vanish from the scene with the termination of hostilities. All European cabinets without exception vastly underestimated both the viability of the Bolshevik regime and the threat it posed to the European order.

For these reasons, neither in the closing year of World War I nor following the Armistice, were attempts made to rid Russia of the Bolsheviks. Until November 1918 the great powers were too busy fighting each other to worry about developments in remote Russia. Here and there, voices were raised that Bolshevism represented a mortal threat to Western civilization: these were especially loud in the German army, which had the most direct experience with Bolshevik propaganda and agitation. But even the Germans in the end subordinated concern with the possible long-term threat to considerations of immediate interest. Lenin was absolutely convinced that after making peace the belligerents would join forces and launch an international crusade against his regime. His fears proved groundless. Only the British intervened actively on the side of the anti-Bolshevik forces, and they did so in a halfhearted manner, largely at the initiative of one man, Winston Churchill. The effort was never seriously pursued, because the forces of accommodation in the West were stronger than those calling for intervention, and by the early 1920s the European powers made their peace with Communist Russia.

But even if the West was not much interested in Bolshevism, the Bolsheviks had a vital interest in the West. The Russian Revolution would not remain confined to the country of origin: from the instant the Bolsheviks seized power, it acquired an international dimension. Its geopolitical position alone ensured that Russia could not isolate herself from the World War. Much of Russia was under German occupation. Soon the British, French, Japanese, and Americans landed token contingents on Russian soil in a vain attempt to reactivate the Eastern Front. More important still was the conviction of the Bolsheviks that their revolution should not and could not be confined to Russia, that unless it spread to the industrial countries of the West it was doomed. On the very first day of their rule in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks issued their Peace Decree, which exhorted workers abroad to rise and help the Soviet Government “bring to a successful resolution … the task of liberating the laboring and exploited masses from all slavery and all exploitation.”²

Although couched in the novel language of class conflict, this was a declaration of war on all the existing governments, an intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign countries that would be often repeated then and later. Lenin did not deny that such was his intent: “We have thrown down a challenge to the imperialist plunderers of all countries.”³ Every Bolshevik attempt to promote civil war abroad—with appeals, subsidies, subversion, and military assistance—internationalized the Russian Revolution.

Such incitement of their citizens to rebellion and civil war by a foreign government gave the “imperialist plunderers” every right to retaliate in kind. The Bolshevik Government could not promote revolution outside its borders in disregard of international law and appeal to the same international law to keep foreign powers from intervening in its own internal affairs. In fact, however, for reasons stated, the great powers did not avail themselves of this right: no Western government, either during World War I or after it, appealed to the people of Russia to overthrow its Communist regime. Such limited intervention as occurred in the first year of Bolshevism was motivated exclusively by the desire to have Russia serve their particular military interests.

On March 23, 1918, the Germans launched their long-awaited offensive on the Western Front. Since the armistice with Russia, Ludendorff had transferred half a million men from the East to the West: he was prepared to sacrifice twice that many lives to gain victory. The Germans employed a variety of tactical innovations, such as attacking without preparatory artillery barrages and throwing into critical engagements specially trained “shock troops.” They concentrated the brunt of the attack on the British sector, which came under immense pressure. Pessimists in the Allied command, among them General John J. Pershing, feared that the front would not withstand the force of the assault.

The German offensive worried the Bolsheviks as well. Although in official statements they pronounced plague on both “imperialist blocs” and demanded an immediate suspension of hostilities, in fact they wanted the war to go on. As long as the great powers were busy fighting one another, the Bolsheviks could consolidate their gains and build up the armed force they needed to meet the anticipated imperialist crusade, as well as to crush domestic opposition.

Even after they had signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers, the Bolsheviks wanted to maintain good relations with the Allies because they had no certainty that the “war party” would not ultimately prevail in Berlin, causing the Germans to march into Russia and remove them from power. The German occupation in March of the Ukraine and the Crimea increased such apprehensions.

We have noted previously Trotsky’s requests to the Allies for economic aid. In mid-March 1918, the Bolsheviks made urgent appeals for assistance in forming a Red Army and possibly intervening in Russia to stop a potential German invasion. Lenin entrusted the task of dealing with the Allies to Trotsky, the newly appointed Commissar of War, while he concentrated on Soviet-German relations. All of Trotsky’s initiatives, of course, were sanctioned by the Bolshevik Central Committee.

The Bolsheviks decided early in March to proceed in earnest with the formation of an armed force. But like all Russian socialists, they saw the professional army as a breeding ground of counterrevolution. To create a standing army staffed with officers of the ancien régime meant courting self-destruction. Their preferred solution was a “nation in arms,” or a people’s militia.

Even after taking power, the Bolsheviks continued to dismantle what was left of the old army, depriving the officers of the little authority they still retained. Initially, they ordered that officers be elected, and then abolished military ranks, vesting the power to make command appointments in soldiers’ soviets.⁴ Under the incitement of Bolshevik agitators, soldiers and sailors lynched many officers: in the Black Sea Fleet such lynchings turned into wholesale massacres.

At the same time, Lenin and his lieutenants turned their attention to creating their own armed force. As his first Commissar of War, Lenin chose N. V. Krylenko, a thirty-two-year-old Bolshevik lawyer, who had served in the Imperial Army as a lieutenant in the reserves. In November, Krylenko went to Army Headquarters at Mogilev to replace the Commander in Chief, General N. N. Dukhonin, who had refused to negotiate with the Germans and was barbarously murdered by his troops. He appointed as the new Commander in Chief General M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, a brother of Lenin’s secretary.

Professional officers actually proved to be much more willing to cooperate with the Bolsheviks than the intelligentsia. Brought up in a tradition of strict apoliticism and obedience to those in power, most of them dutifully carried out orders of the new government.⁵ Even though the Soviet authorities have long been reluctant to make known their names, those who promptly recognized Bolshevik authority included some of the highest officers of the Imperial General Staff: A. A. Svechin, V. N. Egorev, S. I. Odintsov, A. A. Samoilo, P. P. Sytin, D. P. Parskii, A. E. Gutov, A. A. Neznamov, A. A. Baltiiskii, P. P. Lebedev, A. M. Zaionchkovskii, and S. S. Kamenev.⁶ Later on, two tsarist ministers of war, Aleksis Polivanov and Dmitrii Shuvaev, also donned uniforms of the Red Army. At the end of November 1917, Lenin’s military adviser, N. I. Podvoiskii, requested the General Staffs opinion whether elements of the old army could serve as the nucleus of a new armed force. The generals recommended that healthy units of the old army be used in this manner and that the army be reduced to its traditional peacetime strength of 1.3 million men. The Bolsheviks rejected this proposal in favor of an entirely new, revolutionary force, modeled on that fielded by France in 1791—that is, a levée en masse, but composed entirely of urban inhabitants, without peasants.⁷

Events, however, would not wait: the front continued to crumble and now it was Lenin’s front—as he liked to say, after October the Bolsheviks had become “defensists.” There was talk of creating an armed force of 300,000 to serve as the foundation of the new Bolshevik army.⁸ Lenin demanded that this force be assembled and made combat-ready in a month and a half to meet the expected German assault. This order was reconfirmed on January 16 in the so-called Declaration of Rights, which provided for the creation of a Red Army to “ensure the full power of the toiling masses and prevent the restoration of exploiters.”⁹ The new Worker-Peasant Red Army (Raboche-Krest’ianskaia Krasnaia Armiia) was to be an all-volunteer force, made up of “tried revolutionaries,” who were to be paid fifty rubles a month and be bound by “mutual guarantees” (krugovaia poruka) by virtue of which every soldier would be personally responsible for the loyalty of his comrades. To command this projected army, the Sovnarkom created on February 3 an All-Russian Collegium of the Red Army, chaired by Krylenko and Podvoiskii.¹⁰

Official government announcements justified the creation of a new, socialist army with the need of Soviet Russia to repulse the assault of the “international bourgeoisie.” But this was only one of its stated missions, and not necessarily the most important. Like the Imperial Army, the Red Army had a dual function: to fight foreign enemies and to preserve internal security. In an address to the Soldiers’ Section of the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918, Krylenko declared that the foremost task of the Red Army was to wage “internal war” and ensure “the defense of Soviet authority.”¹¹ In other words, it was primarily to serve the purpose of civil war, which Lenin was determined to unleash.

The Bolsheviks also charged their armies with the mission of spreading civil wars abroad. Lenin believed that the final triumph of socialism required a series of major wars between “socialist” and “bourgeois” countries. In a moment of uncharacteristic candor he said:

The existence of the Soviet Republic alongside the imperialist states over the long run is unthinkable. In the end, either the one or the other will triumph. And until that end will have arrived, a series of the most terrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois governments is unavoidable. This means that the ruling class, the proletariat, if it only wishes to rule and is to rule, must demonstrate this also with its military organization.¹²

When the organization of the Red Army was announced, an editorial in Izvestiia welcomed it as follows:

The workers’ revolution can triumph only on a global scale and for its enduring triumph requires the workers of various countries to offer each other mutual assistance.

And the socialists of that country where power has first passed into the hands of the proletariat may face the task of assisting, arms in hand, their brothers struggling against the bourgeoisie across the border.

The complete and final triumph of the proletariat is unthinkable without the triumphant conclusion of a series of wars on the external as well as domestic fronts. For this reason, the Revolution cannot manage without its own, socialist army.

“War is father of everything,” said Heraclitus. Through war lies also the road to socialism.*

There are many other statements, some explicit, others veiled, to the effect that the Red Army’s mission involved intervention abroad, or, as the decree of January 28, 1918, put it, “providing support to the coming socialist revolutions in Europe.”¹³

All this lay in the future. For the time being, the Bolsheviks had only one reliable military force, the Latvian Rifles, whom we have encountered in connection with the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the security of the Kremlin. The Russian army formed the first separate Latvian units in the summer of 1915. In 1915–16, the Latvian Rifles were an all-volunteer force of 8,000 men, strongly nationalistic and with a sizable Social-Democratic contingent.¹⁴ Reinforced with Latvian nationals from the regular Russian units, by the end of 1916 they had eight regiments totaling 30,000 to 35,000 men. This force resembled the Czech Legion, concurrently formed in Russia of prisoners of war, although their destinies were to be quite different.

In the spring of 1917, the Latvian troops reacted favorably to Bolshevik anti-war propaganda, hoping that peace and the principle of “natural self-determination” would allow them to return to their homeland, then under German occupation. Although still more driven by nationalism than socialism, they developed close ties with Bolshevik organizations, adopting their slogans against the Provisional Government. In August 1917, Latvian units distinguished themselves in the defense of Riga.

The Bolsheviks treated the Latvians differently from all the other units of the Russian army, keeping them intact and entrusting to them vital security operations. They gradually turned it into a combination of the French Foreign Legion and the Nazi SS, a force to protect the regime from internal as well as foreign enemies, partly an army, partly a security police. Lenin trusted them much more than Russians.

Early plans to create a Worker-Peasant Red Army came to naught. Those who enlisted did so mainly for the pay, which was soon raised from 50 to 150 rubles a month, and the opportunity to loot. Much of the army was riffraff made up of demobilized soldiers, whom Trotsky would later describe as “hooligans” and a Soviet decree would call “disorganizers, troublemakers, and self-seekers.”¹⁵ Contemporary newspapers are filled with stories of violent “expropriations” carried out by the early troops of the Red Army: hungry and ill paid, they sold uniforms and military equipment, and sometimes fought each other. In May 1918, having occupied Smolensk, they demanded that Jews be expelled from Soviet institutions in the name of the slogan “Beat Jews and Save Russia.”¹⁶ The situation was so bad that the Soviet authorities occasionally had to request German troops to intervene against mutinous Red Army units.¹⁷

Things could not go on like this and Lenin reluctantly began to reconcile himself to the idea of a professional army urged on him by the old General Staff and the French military mission. In February and early March 1918 discussions were held in the party between proponents of a “pure” revolutionary army, composed of workers and democratically structured, and those who favored a more conventional military force. The debate paralleled the one that went on concurrently between advocates of worker control of industry and advocates of professional management. In both instances, considerations of efficiency overruled revolutionary dogma.

On March 9, 1918, the Sovnarkom appointed a commission to provide in a week a “plan for the establishment of a military center for the reorganization of the army and the creation of a mighty armed force on the basis of a socialist militia and the universal arming of workers and peasants.”¹⁸ Krylenko, who had led the opposition to a professional armed force, resigned as Commissar of War and took over the Commissariat of Justice. He was replaced by Trotsky, who had had no military experience, since, like nearly all the Bolshevik leaders, he had dodged the draft. His assignment was to employ as much professional help, foreign and domestic, as required to create an efficient, combat-ready army that would pose no threat to the Bolshevik dictatorship either by defecting to the enemy or by meddling in politics. Concurrently, the government created a Supreme Military Council (Vysshyi Voennyi Soviet), chaired by Trotsky. The council’s staff consisted of officials (the commissars of War and the Navy) and military professionals from the Imperial Army.¹⁹ To ensure the complete political reliability of the armed force, the Bolsheviks adopted the institution of “commissars” to supervise military commanders.²⁰

Trotsky continued military negotiations with the Allies. On March 21, he sent General Lavergne of the French military mission the following note:

After a conversation with Captain Sadoul, I have the honor to request, in the name of the Council of People’s Commissars, the technical collaboration of the French military mission in the task of reorganizing the army which the government of soviets is undertaking.

There followed a list of thirty-three French specialists in all branches of the military, including aviation, navy, and intelligence, whom the Russians wanted detailed to them.²¹ Lavergne assigned three officers from his mission as advisers to the Commissar of War: Trotsky allotted them space near his office. The collaboration was handled very discreetly and is not much talked about in Soviet military histories. Later on, according to Joseph Noulens, Trotsky asked for five hundred French army and several hundred British naval officers; he also discussed military assistance with the U.S. and Italian missions.²²

Organizing a Red Army from scratch, however, was a slow procedure. In the meantime the Germans were advancing southeast into the Ukraine and adjacent areas. In these circumstances, the Bolsheviks undertook to explore whether the Allies would be prepared to help stop the German advance with their own troops. On March 26, the new Commissar of Foreign Affairs, George Chicherin, handed the French Consul General, Fernand Grenard, a note requesting a statement of Allied intentions in the event Russia turned to Japan to help repel German aggression, or to Germany against Japan.²³

The Allied ambassadors, established in Vologda, reacted skeptically to the Bolshevik approaches, which were made through Sadoul. They doubted whether the Bolsheviks really intended to deploy the Red Army against the Germans: as Noulens put it, its more likely use was to serve as a “Praetorian Guard” to solidify their hold on Russia. One can imagine their thoughts as they listened to Sadoul’s impassioned plea on Moscow’s behalf:

The Bolsheviks will form an army, well or badly, but they cannot do it seriously without our assistance. And, inevitably, someday this army will stand up to Imperial Germany, the worst enemy of Russian democracy. On the other hand, because the new army will be disciplined, staffed by professionals and permeated with the military spirit, it will not be an army suited for a civil war. If we direct its formation, as Trotsky has proposed to us, it will become a factor of internal stability and an instrument of national defense at the Allies’ disposal. The de-Bolshevization which we will thus accomplish in the army will have reverberations in the general policies of Russia. Do we not see already the beginnings of this evolution? One must be blinded by prejudice not to see, through the unavoidable brutalities, the rapid adaptation of the Bolsheviks to a realistic policy.²⁴

This plea must be one of the very earliest claims on record that the Bolsheviks were “evolving” toward realism.

For all their suspicions, the Allied ambassadors did not want to reject the Soviet request out of hand. Communicating frequently with their governments as well as with Trotsky, they reached on April 3 an understanding among themselves on the following principles: (1) the Allies (without the United States, which refused to go along) will assist the organization of the Red Army, with the proviso that Moscow reintroduces military discipline, including the death penalty; (2) the Soviet Government will consent to Japanese landings on Russian soil: the Japanese forces, meshed with Allied units sent from Europe, will form a multinational force to fight the Germans; (3) Allied contingents will occupy Murmansk and Archangel; (4) the Allies will refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Russia.*

While these talks were in progress, on April 4 the Japanese landed a small expeditionary force in Vladivostok. Its ostensible mission was to protect Japanese citizens, two of whom had recently been murdered there. But it was widely and correctly believed that the true objective of the Japanese was to seize and annex Russia’s maritime provinces. Russian military experts pointed out that the collapse of transport and the breakdown of civic authority in Siberia precluded the movement of hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops, with the vast logistic support they required, to European Russia. But the Allies persisted in this plan, promising to dilute the Japanese expeditionary force with French, English, and Czechoslovak units.

At the beginning of June, the English landed 1,200 additional troops at Murmansk and 100 at Archangel.

Lenin did not give up hope of American economic aid to supplement the military help promised by France. The United States continued to profess amity for Russia even after the Brest Treaty had been ratified. The Department of State notified the Japanese that the United States continued to regard Russia and her people as “friends and allies against a common enemy” although she did not recognize her government.²⁵ On another occasion Washington declared that in spite of “all the unhappiness and misery” which the Russian Revolution had caused, it felt for it “the greatest sympathy.”²⁶ Curious to know what these friendly professions meant concretely, Lenin on April 3 again asked Robins to sound out his government on the possibility of economic “cooperation.”²⁷ In mid-May, he gave him a note for Washington which stated that the United States could replace Germany as the principal supplier of industrial equipment.²⁸ Unlike German business circles, the Americans showed little interest.

It is impossible to determine how far Bolshevik collaboration with the Allies might have gone, or even how seriously it was intended. The Bolsheviks, aware that the Germans knew of their every step, may well have made these overtures to force Germany to observe the terms of the Brest Treaty or risk pushing Russia into Allied arms. Be that as it may, the Germans came around and assured the Bolsheviks that they had no hostile intentions. In April the two countries exchanged diplomatic missions and made ready for talks on a commercial agreement. In mid-May, Berlin, abandoning the hard line advocated by the generals, advised Moscow it would occupy no more Russian territory. Lenin publicly confirmed these assurances in a talk he gave on May 14.²⁹ They paved the way for a Russo-German rapprochement. “When it emerged in the course of German-Russian relations that Germany did not intend to overthrow [the Bolsheviks], Trotsky gave up” the idea of Allied assistance.* From now on, relations between the Bolsheviks and the Allies rapidly deteriorated, as Moscow moved into the orbit of Imperial Germany, which seemed about to win the war.

83. Kurt Riezler.

Rebuffed by Moscow, the Allied missions in Russia had to confine themselves to desultory talks with pro-Allied opposition groups. Noulens, who was the most active in this regard, viewed Russians much like his German counterpart, Mirbach, as inept and passive, waiting on foreigners to liberate them. The Russian “bourgeoisie” impressed him as utterly devoid of initiative.³⁰

In the second half of April 1918, Russia and Germany exchanged embassies: Ioffe went to Berlin, and Mirbach came to Moscow. The Germans were the first foreign mission accredited to Bolshevik Russia. To their surprise, the train in which they traveled was guarded by Latvians. One of the German diplomats wrote that the reception given them by the Muscovites was surprisingly warm: he thought that no victor had ever been so welcomed.³¹

The head of the mission, Count Mirbach, was a forty-seven-year-old career diplomat with considerable experience in Russian affairs. In 1908–11 he had served as counselor in the German Embassy in St. Petersburg and in December 1917 headed the mission to Petrograd. He came from a wealthy and aristocratic family of Prussian Catholics.† A diplomat of the old school, he was dismissed by some colleagues as a “rococo count,” ill suited to deal with revolutionaries, but his tact and self-control earned him the confidence of the Foreign Office.

His right-hand man, Kurt Riezler, a thirty-six-year-old philosopher, also had much experience in Russian affairs.* In 1915, he played a part in Parvus’s unsuccessful attempt to secure Lenin’s cooperation. Posted to Stockholm in 1917, he served as the principal intermediary between the German Government and Lenin’s agents, whom he paid subsidies from the so-called Riezler Fund for transfer to Russia. He is said to have assisted the Bolsheviks in carrying out the October coup, although his exact role in it is not clear. Like many of his compatriots, he welcomed the coup as a “miracle” that could save Germany. At Brest he advocated a conciliatory policy. Temperamentally, however, he was a pessimist who thought Europe was doomed no matter who won the war.

The third prominent member of the German mission was the military attaché, Karl von Bothmer, who reflected the views of Ludendorff and Hindenburg. He despised the Bolsheviks and believed Germany should be rid of them.³²

None of the three German diplomats knew Russian. All the Russian leaders with whom they came into contact spoke fluent German.

The Foreign Office instructed Mirbach to support the Bolshevik Government and under no conditions to enter into communication with the Russian opposition. He was to inform himself of the true situation in Soviet Russia and of the activities there of Allied agents, as well as to lay the groundwork for the commercial negotiations between the countries stipulated by the Brest Treaty. The German mission, twenty diplomats and an equal number of clerical staff, took over a luxurious private residence on Denezhnyi Pereulok, off Arbat, the property of a German sugar magnate who wanted to keep it out of Communist hands.

Mirbach had been to Petrograd several months earlier and must have known what to expect: even so, he was appalled by what he saw. “The streets are very lively,” he reported to Berlin a few days after his arrival,

but they seem populated exclusively by proletarians; better-dressed people are rarely to be seen—it is as if the previous ruling class and the bourgeoisie had vanished from the face of the earth.… The priests, who previously had made up a goodly part of the public, have similarly disappeared from the streets. In the shops one can find mainly dusty remains of previous splendors, offered at fantastic prices. Pervasive avoidance of work and mindless idling are the characteristics of this overall picture. Since the factories are at a standstill and the soil remains largely uncultivated—at any rate, that was the impression we gained from our trip—Russia appears headed for a still greater catastrophe than the one inflicted on her by the [Bolshevik] coup.

Public security leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, one can move about freely and alone in the daytime. In the evening, however, it is no longer advisable to leave one’s house: one hears the frequent sounds of shooting and there seem to be continuous smaller and larger clashes …

Bolshevik mastery over Moscow is maintained, first and foremost, by the Latvian battalions. It depends furthermore on the numerous automobiles which the government has requisitioned: these constantly race across the city, delivering the troops, as they are needed, to endangered spots.

Where these conditions will lead cannot be determined as yet, but one cannot deny them for the moment the prospects of a certain stability.³³

Riezler was equally depressed by Bolshevik-ruled Moscow: he was struck most by the pervasive corruption of Communist officials and their loose habits, especially their insatiable demand for women.³⁴

In mid-May, Mirbach met with Lenin, whose self-confidence surprised him:

Lenin, in general, believes with rocklike firmness in his star and professes, over and over again, in an almost insistent manner, to a boundless optimism. At the same time, he also concedes that even though his regime still remains intact, the number of its enemies has grown and the situation calls for “more intense attention than even one month ago.” He bases his self-confidence above all on the fact that the ruling party alone disposes of organized power, whereas all the other [parties] agree only in rejecting the existing regime; in other respects, however, they fly apart in all directions and have no power to match that of the Bolsheviks.* ³⁵

After one month in the Soviet capital, Mirbach began to experience misgivings about the viability of the Bolshevik regime and the wisdom of his government’s basing its entire Russian policy on it. He continued to believe that the Bolsheviks were likely to survive: on May 24, he warned the Foreign Office against Bothmer and the other military men who predicted the imminent collapse of the Soviet regime.³⁶ But aware of the activities of Allied diplomatic and military personnel in Russia and their contacts with the opposition groups, he worried that should Lenin fall from power, the Germans would be left without any source of support in Russia. He favored, therefore, a more flexible policy combining reliance on the Bolsheviks with political insurance in the form of openings to the anti-Bolshevik opposition.

On May 20, Mirbach sent home the first pessimistic report on the situation in Soviet Russia and the dangers confronting German policy there. Popular support for the regime, he wrote, had greatly eroded in recent weeks: Trotsky was said to have referred to the Bolshevik Party as a “living corpse.” The Allies were fishing in these muddied waters, generously distributing funds to the SRs and Mensheviks-Internationalists, Serbian prisoners of war, and Baltic sailors. “Never was corruptible Russia more corrupt than now.” Thanks to Trotsky’s sympathies for them, the Allies had increased their influence over the Bolsheviks. To prevent the situation from getting out of hand, he required money to renew the subsidies to the Bolsheviks which the German Government had terminated in January.³⁷ Funds were needed to prevent both a shift of the Bolsheviks toward the Allies and a Bolshevik collapse followed by a power seizure by the pro-Allied SRs.³⁸

This report, followed by others couched in progressively gloomier tones, did not go unheeded in Berlin. Early in June, Kühlmann reversed himself and authorized Mirbach to initiate talks with the Russian opposition.³⁹ He also allocated to him discretionary funds. On June 3, Mirbach cabled to Berlin that to keep the Bolsheviks in power he needed 3 million marks a month, which the Foreign Ministry interpreted to mean a total of 40 million marks.⁴⁰ Kühlmann, who concurred that preventing the Bolsheviks from switching to the Allies “would cost money, probably a great deal of money,” approved the transfer of this sum to the Moscow embassy for secret Russian work.⁴¹ It cannot be established exactly how this money was spent. Only about 9 million was actually allocated: it appears that about one-half of that sum went to the Bolshevik Government and the rest to their opponents, mainly the anti-Bolshevik Provisional Government of Siberia, centered in Omsk, and the Kaiser’s favorite anti-Bolshevik, the Don Cossack ataman, P. N. Krasnov.*

The stumbling block confronting the Germans in their effort to reach the anti-Bolshevik opposition was Brest. No political group other than the Bolsheviks would accept this treaty, and even the Bolsheviks were divided. As Mirbach had observed, atrocious as conditions were in Soviet Russia, no non-Bolshevik Russian would purchase German help against the Bolsheviks if the price was acceptance of the Brest Treaty. In other words, to gain support from anti-Bolsheviks, Germany had to agree to substantial treaty revisions. In Mirbach’s opinion, the opposition might acquiesce to the loss of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, but not to the surrender of the Ukraine, Estonia, and probably Livonia.⁴²

Mirbach entrusted to Riezler the delicate task of dealing with Russian opposition groups under the noses of the Cheka and Allied agents. Riezler dealt mainly with the so-called Right Center, a small conservative circle formed in mid-June by respected political figures and generals who had concluded that Bolshevism posed a greater threat to Russia’s national interests than Germany and were prepared to come to terms with Berlin to be rid of it. Although they claimed solid contacts with financial, industrial, and military circles, they really had no significant following, because the overwhelming majority of politically active Russians regarded the Bolsheviks as a creation of Germany. The leading personality of the Right Center was Alexander Krivoshein, Stolypin’s director of agriculture, a decent and patriotic man who might have made an acceptable figurehead in a Russian Government installed by the Germans, but who, being a typical bureaucrat of the ancien régime, was more used to obeying orders than giving them. Involved also was General Aleksei Brusilov, the hero of the 1916 offensive. Through intermediaries, Krivoshein informed Riezler that his group was prepared to overthrow the Bolsheviks and had the military means to do so but in order to act required Germany’s active support.⁴³ For such collaboration to materialize, the Germans had to consent to changes in the Brest Treaty.

The Germans had little respect for the Russian opposition, even as they negotiated with it. Mirbach thought the monarchists “lazy,” while Riezler spoke scornfully of the “moans and whines of the [Russian] bourgeoisie for German aid and order.”⁴⁴

Ioffe arrived in Berlin with his mission on April 19. German generals, correctly anticipating that Russian diplomats would engage mainly in espionage and subversion, wanted the Soviet Embassy located at Brest-Litovsk or some other city away from Germany, but the Foreign Office overruled them. Ioffe took over the old Imperial embassy at Unter den Linden 7, which the Germans had maintained in immaculate condition throughout the war. Over it he unfurled the red flag emblazoned with hammer and sickle. Subsequently, Moscow opened consulates in Berlin and Hamburg.

Initially, Ioffe’s staff consisted of 30 persons, but it kept on expanding, and in November, when the two countries broke relations, numbered 180. In addition, Ioffe gave employment to German radicals to translate Soviet propaganda materials and carry out subversive missions. He maintained constant cable communications with Moscow: the Germans intercepted and decoded some of this traffic, but the bulk of it remains unpublished.*

The Soviet diplomatic representation in Berlin was no ordinary embassy: rather it was a revolutionary outpost deep in enemy territory, whose main function was to promote revolution. As an American journalist later put it, Ioffe acted in Berlin in “perfect bad faith.”⁴⁵ Judging by his activities, he had three missions. One was to neutralize the German generals, who wanted the Bolshevik Government removed. This he accomplished by appealing to the interests of the business and banking community and negotiating a commercial treaty that gave Germany unique economic privileges in Russia. His second task was to assist revolutionary forces in Germany. The third was to collect intelligence on domestic conditions.

Ioffe carried out revolutionary activities with remarkable brazenness. He counted on German politicians and businessmen developing such an overriding interest in subjugating Russia to their economic exploitation that they would persuade the government to overlook his violations of diplomatic norms. In the spring and summer of 1918, he engaged mainly in propaganda, working closely with the Independent Socialist Party’s extreme left wing, the Spartacist League. Later, as Germany began to disintegrate, he supplied money and weapons to stoke the fires of social revolution. The Independent Socialists, having turned into an affiliate of the Russian Communist Party, coordinated their activities with the Soviet Embassy: on one occasion, Moscow sent an official delegation to Germany to address that party’s convention.⁴⁶ For this work, Ioffe was allocated by Moscow 14 million German marks, which he deposited with the German bank of Mendelssohn and withdrew as the need arose.*

84. A. Ioffe.

Ioffe opened branches of the Soviet Berlin Information Bureau in a number of German provincial cities as well as in neutral Holland, from where propaganda was fed to Allied media.⁴⁷

In 1919, Ioffe recounted, with evident pride, his accomplishments as Soviet representative in Berlin:

The [Soviet Embassy] directed and subsidized more than ten left-socialist newspapers … Quite naturally, even in its informational work, the plenipotentiary representation could not confine itself only to “legal opportunities.” The informational material was far from limited to that which appeared in print. All that the censors struck out, and all that was not presented to them, because it was assumed beforehand that they would not pass it, was nevertheless illegally printed and illegally distributed. Very frequently it was necessary to utilize the parliamentary tribune: the material was passed on to members of the Reichstag from the Independent faction [of the Social-Democratic Party], who used it in their speeches; in this way it got into the papers anyway. In this work one could not confine oneself to Russian materials. The [Soviet mission], which had superb connections in all strata of German society and its agents in various German ministries, was much better informed even about German affairs than the German comrades. The information which it received it eventually passed on to the latter, and in this manner many machinations of the military party became in good time public knowledge.

Of course, in its revolutionary activity the Russian Embassy could not confine itself to information. In Germany there existed revolutionary groups which throughout the war had conducted underground revolutionary work. Russian revolutionaries, who had more experience in this kind of conspiratorial activity as well as greater opportunities, had to work, and indeed did work, in concert with these groups. All of Germany was covered with a network of illegal revolutionary organizations: hundreds of thousands of revolutionary pamphlets and proclamations were printed and distributed every week in the rear and at the front. The German Government once accused the Russians of importing into Germany agitational literature and, with an energy worthy of better application, searched for this contraband in the baggage of couriers, but it never entered its mind that that which the Russian Embassy brought into Germany from Russia represented only a drop in the sea compared to what was printed with the help of the Russian Embassy inside Germany.

In sum, according to Ioffe, the Russian Embassy in Berlin “worked constantly in close contact with German socialists in preparing the German revolution.”⁴⁸

It further served as a channel for distributing revolutionary literature and subversive funds to other European countries: through it passed a steady stream of couriers (between 100 and 200 was the German estimate) carrying diplomatic pouches for dispatch to Austria, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. Some of these “couriers,” after arriving in Berlin, vanished from sight.⁴⁹

The German Foreign Office received frequent protests from military and civil authorities concerning these subversive actions,⁵⁰ but it refused to act, tolerating them for the sake of what it perceived to be higher German interests in Russia. When once in a while it ventured to object to some especially outrageous behavior on the part of the Soviet mission, Ioffe had an answer ready. As he explains:

The Brest Treaty itself furnished the opportunity for its circumvention. Since the contracting parties were governments, the prohibition on revolutionary action could be interpreted to apply to governments and their organs. It was thus interpreted by the Russian side, and every revolutionary action which Germany protested against was at once explained as the action of the Russian Communist Party and not of the government.⁵¹

Ioffe’s operations in Germany made the timid attempts of Mirbach and Riezler in Moscow to communicate with the opposition look like a harmless flirtation.

From the point of view of Moscow’s immediate interests, no less important than promoting revolution in Germany was gaining the support of German business circles so they would act jointly to block the anti-Bolshevik forces there.

Big business interests in Germany could hardly wait to lay their hands on Russia: and because they knew that only the Bolsheviks would allow them to do so, they turned into the most enthusiastic supporters of the Bolshevik regime. In the spring of 1918, following the signing of the peace treaty, numerous German Chamber of Commerce organizations petitioned their government to reopen commercial relations with Soviet Russia. On May 16, Krupp hosted in Düsseldorf a conference of prominent German industrialists, among them August Thyssen and Hugo Stinnes, to discuss this subject. The conference concluded that it was imperative to stop the penetration of “English and American capital” into Russia and to take steps that would enable German interests to establish there a dominant influence. Another business conference, held the same month under the auspices of the Foreign Office, stressed the desirability of Germany’s taking control of Russian transport, a goal facilitated by Moscow’s request for German help in reorganizing its railroads.⁵² In July, German businessmen sent a trade delegation to Moscow. The bankers lionized Ioffe on his arrival in Berlin. “The director of the Deutsche Bank frequently visits us,” Ioffe boasted to Moscow, “Mendelssohn has long sought a meeting with me, and Solomonssohn has already come three times under various pretexts.”⁵³

Such commercial zeal enabled Moscow to transform influential circles of German industry and finance into a friendly lobby. Here, the Bolsheviks reaped the advantages of superior knowledge. They were intimately familiar with the internal situation of Germany and with the mentality of her elite. Independent Socialists supplied them with sensitive information with which to exploit conflicts in German circles. The Germans with whom they dealt knew next to nothing about the Bolsheviks and did not take them or their ideology seriously. They adapted themselves to this situation with consummate skill, taking on a protective coloring that gave them a non-threatening appearance: it was a very sophisticated example of political mimicry. The tactic which Ioffe and his associates pursued was to pose as “realists” who spouted revolutionary slogans but in reality desired nothing better than a deal with Germany. This tactic had an irresistible attraction for hardheaded German businessmen because it confirmed their conviction that no person in his right mind could take Bolshevik revolutionary rhetoric seriously.

How this deception worked is illustrated by the meetings Ioffe held in the summer of 1918 with Gustav Stresemann, a right-wing German politician, and other public figures of a liberal and conservative orientation. He was assisted by Leonid Krasin, who before and during the war had held high executive positions with Siemens and Schuckert and enjoyed excellent connections in Germany. At an informal talk on July 5, the two Russians assured the Germans that not only Lenin but also the pro-Allied Trotsky desired German “backing.” Given the anti-German mood in Russia, a formal treaty of alliance between the two countries would be premature, but that mood could change if Germany pursued correct policies. One step in this direction would be for the Germans to share some of the grain which they were shipping from the Ukraine. It would also be helpful if the Germans gave Moscow guarantees that they did not intend to resume military operations on the Eastern Front: this would enable Moscow to concentrate its armed forces on expelling the British from Murmansk and crushing the uprising of the Czech Legion, which had recently erupted in Siberia. Germany stood to reap great benefits from good relations with Russia, since the Russians could provide her with all the raw materials she needed, including cotton, petroleum, and manganese. The Germans had no reason to worry about Moscow’s revolutionary propaganda: “under the existing circumstances the Maximalist [Bolshevik] Government was prepared to give up its Utopian goals and pursue a pragmatic socialist policy.”⁵⁴

Ioffe and Krasin put on a brilliant show. If the Germans had been better informed, less arrogant, and less captivated by geopolitical fantasies, they would have seen through it. For the Russians were offering them commodities available only in areas outside their control—Central Asia, Baku, and Georgia—and minimizing the radicalism of their government, which, far from giving up “its Utopian goals,” was at this very time entering its most radical phase. But the deception worked. Stresemann thus summarized his impressions:

It seems to me … that we have every inducement to establish a far-reaching economic and political understanding with the present government [of Russia], which, at all events, is not imperialistic and can never come to terms with the Entente, if only because by defaulting on Allied loans it erected an insurmountable barrier between itself and the Entente. If this opportunity is missed and the present Russian government falls, then any successor will, in any event, be more favorable to the Entente than the present rulers and the danger of a new Eastern Front … will draw palpably nearer.… If our opponents see that we and Russia are drawing together they will also give up the hope of defeating us economically—they have long ago given up the hope of military victory—and we will be in a position to withstand any assault. By cleverly exploiting this factor, we will also be able to raise the spirit of the country to the victorious heights of the past. I would, therefore, greatly welcome it if these efforts were to gain also the support of the Supreme Military Command.⁵⁵

The German Foreign Office shared these sentiments. An internal memorandum prepared by a member of its staff in May described the Soviet leaders as “Jewish businessmen” with whom Germany should be able to come to terms.⁵⁶

In this friendly atmosphere, the two countries initiated in early July talks on a commercial agreement. Signed on August 27—immediately after the “Black Day” of the German armies on the Western Front which convinced even Ludendorff the war was lost—this so-called Supplementary Treaty established between the two countries a relationship that fell just short of a formal alliance.

As if the situation in Russia were not complicated enough, in the spring a further complication arose in the shape of a revolt of Czechoslovak former prisoners of war that deprived the Bolsheviks of control of vast regions in the Urals and Siberia.

During their successful campaign against the Austro-Hungarians in 1914, Russian armies had captured hundreds of thousands of prisoners, including 50,000 to 60,000 Czechs and Slovaks. In December 1914, the Imperial Government offered these prisoners, many of them passionately anti-German and anti-Magyar, an opportunity to form their own legion and return to the front to fight alongside Russian troops. Few Czechs took advantage of this offer; most were afraid that the Central Powers would treat members of this legion (called Druzhina) as traitors and, in the event of capture, put them to death. Even so, in 1916 there were two Czechoslovak regiments in existence: the nucleus of the future army of independent Czechoslovakia. Thomas Masaryk, the head of the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris, conceived the idea of forming the prisoners of war as well as civilians domiciled in Russia and elsewhere into a regular national army to fight on the Western Front. He initiated negotiations with the Imperial Government for the evacuation of the Czech POWs to France, but Petrograd proved uncooperative.

He resubmitted the proposal to the Provisional Government, which reacted favorably. The formation of Czech military units proceeded apace, and in the spring of 1917, 24,000 Czechs and Slovaks, organized in a corps, fought on the Eastern Front, distinguishing themselves in the June 1917 offensive. It was planned to transport these units and the remaining POWs in Russian camps to the Western Front, but the Bolshevik coup intervened.

In December 1917, the Allies recognized the Czechoslovak Corps in Russia as a separate army serving under the Supreme Allied Council. The following month, Masaryk returned to Russia to negotiate once again, this time with the Bolsheviks, the troops’ evacuation to France. By now, the matter had acquired considerable urgency because the conclusion of a treaty between the Central Powers and the Ukraine made it likely that the Germans would occupy the Ukraine, where most of the Czechoslovaks were interned. The Bolsheviks delayed their decision until after the signing of the Brest Treaty: finally, in mid-March, when relations with the Allies were at their warmest, they gave their consent.⁵⁷

Masaryk and the Allied command had originally intended to evacuate the Czechoslovaks through Archangel and Murmansk. But because the railroad lines to the northern ports were threatened by Finnish partisans and there was the additional danger of German submarines, it was decided to embark them at Vladivostok. Masaryk instructed the commanders of what became known as the Czech Legion to adopt a policy of “armed neutrality”⁵⁸ and under no circumstances to interfere in domestic Russian affairs. Because the territory which the Czechoslovaks had to traverse en route to Vladivostok was in a state of anarchy, Masaryk arranged with the Bolshevik authorities that his men would carry enough weapons to defend themselves.

The Czechoslovaks were well organized and eager to leave. As soon as the Bolsheviks gave them permission, they formed battalion-sized units, 1,000 men strong, each to fill a special train or, as it was known in Russia, echelon. When the first echelon reached Penza, it received a telegram from Stalin, dated March 26, 1918, which listed the conditions under which the evacuation was to proceed. The Czechoslovaks were to travel not as “combat units” but as “free citizens” carrying such arms as were required for their protection from “counterrevolutionaries.” They were to be accompanied by commissars provided by the Penza Soviet.⁵⁹ The Czechoslovaks were unhappy over this order, behind which they suspected German pressure, because they had no confidence in the ill-trained and radicalized pro-Bolshevik forces, prominent among whom were fanatical Communists recruited from Hungarian and Czech POWs. Before leaving Penza, they reluctantly surrendered some weapons, kept a few openly, and concealed the rest. The evacuation then resumed.

Although they were strongly nationalistic and, therefore, unhappy with the Bolsheviks for signing a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers, in their political views the Czechoslovaks stood solidly to the left of center: one historian estimates that three-quarters of them were socialists.⁶⁰ Following Masaryk’s orders, they ignored the approaches of both the Volunteer Army and the Bolsheviks, the latter using Czech Communists as intermediaries.⁶¹ They had a single purpose in mind: to get out of Russia. Even so, they could not entirely avoid becoming entangled in Russian politics because they were traversing a territory in the grip of a civil war. As they passed towns along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, they established contact with local cooperatives, which provided them with food and other necessities: these happened to be largely in the hands of SRs, Siberia’s dominant party. At the same time, they had occasional altercations with the urban soviets and their “international” military units, composed mostly of Magyar POWs, who wanted the Czechoslovaks to join the Revolution.

85. Armored train of Czech Legion in Siberia: June 1918.

The involvement of the Czech Legion in Russian affairs at the end of May 1918 was not a deliberate reversal of the policy of neutrality. It began when the Germans, displeased at the prospect of tens of thousands of fresh and highly motivated Czechoslovaks reinforcing Allied troops on the Western Front, asked Moscow to halt their evacuation. Moscow issued an order to this effect, but it had no way of enforcing it and the legion continued on its way.⁶² Next, the Allies became involved. Following the understanding reached in early April about the formation of an Allied force on Russian territory, they concluded there was no point in transporting the Czech Legion halfway around the world to France when it could remain in Russia and join this force, for which the Japanese were to furnish the bulk of the manpower. On May 2, the Allies, largely on British insistence, decided that the units of the legion located west of Omsk would not continue to Vladivostok but would proceed north, to Murmansk and Archangel, and there await further orders.⁶³ Moscow did not object, but the decision caused great unhappiness among the Czechoslovaks.

And now an unexpected event upset everyone’s plans. On May 14, at the western Siberian town of Cheliabinsk, an altercation occurred between Czech soldiers and Hungarian POWs who were being repatriated. As best as can be reconstructed, a Hungarian threw an iron bar or some other metal object at Czechs standing on the railway platform, seriously injuring one of them. A fight broke out. When the Cheliabinsk Soviet detained some Czechoslovaks involved in the disturbance, others seized the local arsenal and demanded the immediate release of their comrades. Bowing to superior force, the soviet yielded.⁶⁴

Up to this point, the Czechoslovaks had no intention of taking up arms against the Bolshevik Government. In fact, the whole trend of Czechoslovak politics had been one of friendly neutrality. Masaryk was so sympathetic that he urged the Allies to grant the Soviet Government de facto recognition. As for the troops of the legion, the Communist Sadoul wrote that their “loyalty to the Russian Revolution was incontestable.”⁶⁵

All this would now change because of one mindless act of Trotsky’s. As the newly appointed Commissar of War, Trotsky wanted to act the part, although he had virtually no troops under his command. This ambition in no time transformed a body of well-disposed Czechoslovaks into a “counterrevolutionary” army which in the summer of 1918 presented the Bolsheviks with the most serious military threat since they had taken power.

As soon as Trotsky learned what had transpired at Cheliabinsk and that the Czechs had convened a “Congress of the Czechoslovak Revolutionary Army,” he ordered that the representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council in Moscow be placed under arrest. The frightened Czech politicians agreed to all of Trotsky’s demands, including complete disarmament of the legion. On May 21, Trotsky ordered that all further movement of the legion eastward must cease: its men were to join the Red Army or be pressed into “labor battalions”—that is, become part of the Bolshevik compulsory labor force. Those who disobeyed were to be confined to concentration camps.* On May 25, Trotsky followed with another order:

All soviets along the railroad are instructed, under heavy responsibility, to disarm the Czechs. Any Czech along the railroad line found in possession of weapons is to be executed on the spot. Any military train [echelon] containing a single armed Czech is to be unloaded and [its personnel] placed in a prisoner-of-war camp.⁶⁶

It was a singularly inept command, not only because it was unnecessarily provocative but because Trotsky had no means of enforcing it: the Czech Legion was far and away the strongest military force in Siberia. At the time, it was widely believed that Trotsky acted under German pressure, but it has been established since that the Germans bore no responsibility for these May orders.⁶⁷ It was Trotsky’s very un-Bolshevik disregard of the “correlation of forces” that sparked the Czechoslovak rebellion.

The Czechoslovaks on May 22 rejected Trotsky’s order to disarm:

The Congress of the Czechoslovak Revolutionary Army, assembled at Cheliabinsk, declares … its feelings of sympathy with the Russian revolutionary people in their difficult struggle for the consolidation of the Revolution. However, the Congress, convinced that the Soviet Government is powerless to guarantee our troops free and safe passage to Vladivostok, has unanimously decided not to surrender its arms until it receives assurance that the Corps will be allowed to depart and receive protection from counterrevolutionary trains.⁶⁸

In communicating this decision to Moscow, the Czechoslovak Congress said that it had “unanimously decided not to surrender arms before reaching Vladivostok, considering them a guarantee of safe travel.” It expressed the hope that no attempts would be made to impede the departing Czechoslovak troops, since “every conflict would only prejudice the position of the local soviet organs in Siberia.”⁶⁹ The Allied instructions for units of the legion to be rerouted to Murmansk and Archangel were simply ignored.

When Trotsky’s instructions became known, 14,000 Czechoslovaks had already reached Vladivostok, but 20,500 were still strung out along the length of the Trans-Siberian and railroads in central Russia.* Convinced that the Bolsheviks intended to turn them over to the Germans and threatened by the local soviets, they seized control of the Trans-Siberian. But even while so doing, they reaffirmed that they would have no dealings with anyone fighting the Soviet Government.⁷⁰

86. General Gajda, Commander of the Czech Legion.

Once the Czechoslovak troops took over the railroads Bolshevik authority in the cities along them crumbled; and as soon as that happened, the Russian rivals of the Bolsheviks moved in to fill the vacuum. On May 25, the Czechoslovaks occupied the railroad junctions at Mariinsk and Novonikolaevsk, which had the effect of cutting Moscow off from rail and telegraph communications with much of Siberia. Two days later, they took over Cheliabinsk. On May 28 they seized Penza, on June 4 Tomsk, on June 7 Omsk, and on June 8 Samara, the latter of which was defended by the Latvians. As their military operations expanded, the Czechoslovaks centralized the command, choosing as their chief the self-styled “General” Rudolf Gajda, an ambitious adventurer, whose considerable military talents were not matched by political sense. His men had unbounded confidence in him.†

Although not directed against it, the Czechoslovak rebellion presented the Bolshevik Government with its first serious military challenge since the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Despite months of talk, the Red Army existed largely on paper. Bolshevik effectives in Siberia consisted of a few thousand “Red Guards” and a like number of pro-Communist German, Austrian, and Hungarian POWs. This motley force, without central command, was no match for the Czechoslovaks. Desperate, the Soviet Government asked Berlin at the end of June for permission to arm German prisoners of war in Russia for use against them.⁷¹

It was the Czechoslovak rebellion that finally forced the Bolsheviks to tackle the formation of an army in earnest. The ex-tsarist generals on the Supreme Military Council had been urging them all along to give up the idea of an all-volunteer force composed exclusively of “proletarian” elements and go over to general conscription. Given Russia’s population structure, in a conscript army peasants would constitute the overwhelming majority. Lacking any realistic alternatives, Lenin and Trotsky now overcame their aversion to a regular army with a professional officer corps and a mass of peasant conscripts. On April 22 the government ordered all male citizens aged eighteen to forty to undergo an eight-week course of military training. The ruling applied to workers, students, and peasants not engaged in “exploitation”—i.e., not employing hired labor.⁷² This was the first step. On May 29 Moscow ordered general mobilization to be carried out in phases. First to be called to colors would be workers from Moscow, Don, and Kuban, born in 1896 and 1897; they were to be followed by workers from Petrograd; then the turn would come for railroad workers and white-collar employees. They were to serve six months. Peasants were as yet unaffected. In June, soldiers’ pay was raised from 150 to 250 rubles a month, and the first attempt was made to outfit them with standard uniforms.⁷³ At the same time, the government began the voluntary registration of ex-officers of the Imperial Army and opened a General Staff Academy.⁷⁴ Finally, on July 29, Moscow issued two further decrees, which laid the foundations of the Red Army, as it has been known since. One introduced compulsory military service for all males aged eighteen to forty.⁷⁵ Under the provisions of this decree, over half a million men were to be conscripted.⁷⁶ The second ordered the registration of all officers of the old army (born in the years 1892 to 1897 inclusive) in designated areas, under threat of punishment by Revolutionary Tribunals.⁷⁷

Such was the origin of the Red Army. Organized with the assistance of professional officers, and soon commanded almost exclusively by them, in structure and discipline it not unnaturally modeled itself on the Imperial Army.⁷⁸ Its only innovation was the introduction of political “commissars,” posts entrusted to dependable Bolshevik apparatchiki, who were to be responsible for the loyalty of the command at all levels. Addressing the Central Executive Committee on July 29, Trotsky, with the bluster that made him so unpopular, assured those worried about the reliability of the former tsarist officers, now called “military specialists,” that any who contemplated betraying Soviet Russia would be shot out of hand. “Next to every specialist,” he said, “there should stand a commissar, one on the right and another to the left, revolver in hand.”⁷⁹

The Red Army quickly became the pampered child of the new regime. As early as May 1918, soldiers were receiving higher pay and bread rations than industrial workers, who loudly protested.⁸⁰ Trotsky reintroduced spit and polish along with traditional military discipline. The first parade of the Red Army, held on May 1 at Moscow’s Khodynka Field, was a dispirited affair, dominated by Latvians. But in 1919 and the years that followed, Trotsky staged on Red Square meticulously organized and ever more elaborate parades that brought tears to the eyes of the old generals.

The Czechoslovak revolt presented the Bolsheviks with not only a military challenge but also a political one. The cities of the Volga-Ural region and Siberia were crowded with liberal and socialist intellectuals who lacked the courage to stand up to the Bolsheviks but were prepared to exploit any opportunity provided by others. They concentrated in Samara and the Siberian city of Omsk. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly some seventy SR deputies traveled to Samara to proclaim themselves Russia’s rightful government. Omsk was the headquarters of more centrist elements, led by the Kadets: the politicians here were content to isolate Siberia from Bolshevism and the Civil War. As soon as the Czech Legion had cleared the Bolsheviks out of the principal towns along the central Volga and in Siberia, these intellectuals began to stir.

After the legion had taken Samara (June 8), the deputies of the Constituent Assembly, who under the Bolsheviks had led a conspiratorial existence, emerged into the open and formed a Committee of the Constituent Assembly (Komitet Uchreditel’nogo Sobrania, or Komuch), headed by a five-person directorate. Its program called for “All Power to the Constituent Assembly” and the abrogation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In the weeks that followed, Komuch issued edicts that conformed to the program of Russian democratic socialism, including the abolition of limitations on individual liberty and the dissolution of Revolutionary Tribunals. Komuch reinstated, as organs of general self-government, the old zemstva and Municipal Councils, but it also retained the soviets, ordering them to hold new elections. It denationalized the banks and expressed a readiness to honor Russian state debts. The Bolshevik Land Decree, copied from the SR agrarian program, was kept in force.⁸¹

While Komuch saw itself as a replacement of the Bolshevik regime, the Siberian politicians in Omsk had more modest regional objectives. They organized in areas which the Czechoslovaks had cleared of Bolsheviks, and on June 1, 1918, proclaimed themselves the Government of Western Siberia.

The Czechoslovaks at first showed no sympathy for the Russian opponents of the Bolsheviks.⁸² When the SRs approached them for support, they refused, on the grounds that their sole mission was to ensure safe and prompt transit to Vladivostok. Wish it or not, however, they could not avoid becoming involved in Russian politics because to realize their objective they had to deal with the local authorities, which meant increased relations with Komuch and the Siberian Government.⁸³

When the Czechoslovaks rebelled, Moscow believed that they were acting under instructions from Allied governments. Communist historians have adhered to this version, although there is no evidence to support it. On the French side, we have the word of a historian who had seen all the pertinent archival materials that “nothing indicates the French were the instigators of the [Czechoslovak] uprising.”⁸⁴ This confirms the view of Sadoul, who tried at the time, without much success, to convince his friend Trotsky that the French Government bore no responsibility for the Czechoslovak armies.⁸⁵ In fact, initially at least, the Czechoslovak rising was a disagreeable surprise for the French because it upset their plans to bring the legion to the Western Front.⁸⁶ Nor is there evidence of British involvement. Communist historians later tried to pin the blame on Masaryk, who actually was the unhappiest of all, because the Czechoslovak entanglement in Russian affairs interfered with his plan to assemble in France a national Czech army.*

But whatever the historical truth, in the heat of events it was as natural for Moscow to see the Allied hand behind General Gajda as it was for the Czech Legion to see German pressure in the orders to have it disarmed. The Czechoslovak affair destroyed such chance as existed of Bolshevik economic and military cooperation with the Allies and pushed Moscow—not entirely unwillingly—into German arms.

Until June 1918, the generals were the only influential party in Germany that demanded a break with the Bolsheviks. They were overruled by the industrialists and bankers who worked hand in glove with the Foreign Office. But now the generals found an unexpected ally. After the Czechoslovak uprising, Mirbach and Riezler lost all faith in the viability of Lenin’s regime and urged Berlin still more strongly to seek an alternate base of support in Russia. Riezler’s recommendations were based not only on impressions; he had firsthand knowledge that the forces on which the Bolsheviks counted to stop the Czechoslovaks were about to desert them. On June 25, he advised Berlin that although the Moscow Embassy was doing all it could to help the Bolsheviks against the Czech Legion and domestic opponents, the effort seemed futile.⁸⁷ What he had in mind became known only years later. To persuade Lieutenant Colonel M. A. Muraviev, the commander of the Red Army on the Eastern Front in the civil war to fight the Czechs, Riezler had to bribe him.† Even more troubling was the growing reluctance of the Latvians to continue fighting for the Bolsheviks. Sensing that the fortunes of their Bolshevik patrons were on the decline and afraid of being isolated, they contemplated switching sides. It took more of Riezler’s money to persuade them to help suppress Savinkov’s uprising in Iaroslavl in July.⁸⁸

Meanwhile, the Czechs were capturing one city after another. On June 29 they seized Vladivostok and on July 6 Ufa. In Irkutsk, they ran into Bolshevik resistance, but they overcame it and on July 11 occupied the town. By this time, the entire length of the Trans-Siberian with its feeder lines in eastern Russia, from Penza to the Pacific, was in their hands.

The unimpeded Czechoslovak advance and the threat of defections from Bolshevik ranks filled Mirbach and Riezler with the gloomiest forebodings. Their fear was that the Allies would take advantage of the crisis to engineer an SR coup which would bring Russia back into the Allied fold. To prevent the catastrophe, Riezler urged Berlin to make approaches to the liberal and conservative Russians, represented by the Right Center, the Kadet Party, the Omsk Government, and the Don Cossacks.*

The alarming reports from the Moscow Embassy, added to the complaints of the military, moved the German Government to put the “Russian question” once again on the agenda. The question it faced can be formulated as follows: whether to stick with the Bolsheviks through thick and thin because (1) they devastated Russia so thoroughly as to remove her as a threat for a long time to come and (2) by acquiescing to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty they placed at Germany’s disposal the richest regions of Russia; or else to drop them in favor of a more conventional but also more viable regime that would keep Russia within the German orbit, even if this meant giving up some of the territories acquired at Brest-Litovsk. Advocates of these respective positions disagreed over the means. Their objectives were identical—namely, so to weaken Russia that she would never again help France and England “encircle” Germany and, at the same time, lay her wide open to economic penetration. But whereas the anti-Bolshevik party wanted to attain these objectives by carving Russia up into dependent political entities, the Foreign Office preferred to do so by using the Bolsheviks to drain the country from within. Settling this matter one way or another was a matter of some urgency in view of the unanimous opinion of the Moscow Embassy that the Bolsheviks were about to fall.

No one in the German Government desired the Bolsheviks to stay in power for long: the dispute was over the short term, the duration of the war. The difficulty of resolving the dispute was compounded by the volatility of the Kaiser, who one day fulminated against the “Jewish” Bolsheviks and wanted an international crusade against them and the next spoke of the same Bolsheviks as Germany’s best partners.

Ludendorff pressed to have the Bolsheviks liquidated. They were treacherous: “we can expect nothing from this Soviet Government even though it lives at our mercy.” He was especially worried by the “infection” of German soldiers with Bolshevik propaganda, which, following the transfer of hundreds of thousands of troops from the east, spread to the Western Front. He wanted to weaken Russia and “claim it [for Germany] by force.”⁸⁹

The Moscow Embassy sided with the military, but it recommended revisions in the Brest Treaty as a price of winning support from respectable Russian political groupings.

The contrary point of view was advanced by Kühlmann and the foreign service (except for the Moscow Embassy) with the backing of many politicians and most of the German business community. A Foreign Office memorandum, drafted in May, formulated an argument for continued collaboration with the Bolsheviks:

The pleas for German help which issue from diverse sources in Russia—mainly from reactionary circles—can best be explained by the fear of the propertied classes of the Bolshevik threat to their possessions and assets. Germany is to play the role of the bailiff who chases the Bolsheviks out of the Russian house and restores the reactionaries, who will then pursue against Germany the very same policy which the tsarist regime pursued in the last decades.… In regard to Great Russia, we have only one overriding interest: to promote the forces of decomposition and to keep the country weak for a long time to come, exactly as Prince Bismarck had done in regard to France after 1871….

It is in our interest soon genuinely to normalize relations with Russia in order to seize the country’s economy. The more we mix in this country’s internal affairs, the wider will grow the chasm that already separates us from Russia.… It must not be overlooked that the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was ratified only by the Bolsheviks, and not even by all of them.… It is, therefore, in our interest to have the Bolsheviks remain at the helm for the time being. In order to stay in power, they will, for now, do all they can to maintain toward us the appearance of loyalty and to keep the peace. On the other hand, their leaders, being Jewish businessmen, will before long give up their theories in favor of profitable commercial and transport practices. Here we must proceed slowly but purposefully. Russia’s transport, industry, and entire national economy must fall into our hands.⁹⁰

With such thoughts in mind, Kühlmann advocated a strict hands-off policy in Russia. In response to what apparently was a Bolshevik inquiry, he wanted to assure Moscow that neither the Germans nor the Finns had any designs on Petrograd: such assurances would make it possible to shift Latvian troops from west to east, where they were desperately needed to fight the Czech Legion.⁹¹

For those who believe that some days are more “historic” than others, June 28, 1918, should loom as one of the most historic of modern times, for it was on that day that the Kaiser, with one impulsive decision, saved the Bolshevik regime from the sentence of death which it was in his power to pass. The occasion was a report on the Russian question forwarded to him at his headquarters. He had before him two memoranda, one from the Foreign Office, signed by Chancellor Georg von Hertling, the other from Hindenburg. The rapporteur, Baron Kurt von Grünau, represented the Foreign Office on the Kaiser’s staff. Anyone with experience in such matters is aware of the power which a rapporteur wields on such occasions. When he presents to the chief executive policy options which require the latter to make a choice on the basis of very imperfect knowledge of the facts, he can, by subtle manipulation, push the decision-maker in the direction he favors. Grünau made full use of this opportunity to advance the interests of the Foreign Office. To a large extent, the Kaiser made his critical decision as a result of the manner in which Grünau presented the policy options to him:

It was an essential trait of the impulsive nature of the Kaiser, who was ruled by momentary moods and sudden flashes, to identify himself with the first arguments which an adviser presented to him, to the extent that they appeared to him to be conclusive [schlüssig]. So it happened on this occasion, too. Counselor Grünau succeeded in informing the Kaiser of the telegram from Hertling [with Kühlmann’s recommendations] just before placing in front of him Hindenburg’s preference. The Kaiser immediately declared himself in agreement with the Chancellor and stated in particular that the Germans were to undertake no military operations in Russia, that the Soviet Government be informed that it could safely withdraw troops from Petrograd and deploy them against the Czechs, and finally, “without foreclosing future opportunities,” that support be extended to the Soviet Government as the only party that accepted the Brest Treaty.⁹²

The immediate effect of the Kaiser’s decision was to enable Trotsky to transfer Latvian regiments from the western border to the Volga-Ural front. Since they were the only pro-Bolshevik military units capable of combat, this action saved the Bolshevik regime in the east from total collapse. At the end of July, the 5th Latvian Regiment and elements of the 4th engaged the Czechoslovaks near Kazan, the 6th attacked them at Ekaterinburg, and the 7th suppressed an anti-Bolshevik uprising of armed workers at Izhevsk-Botkin. These operations turned the tide of battle in the Bolsheviks’ favor. In a telegram to Ioffe which German intelligence intercepted, Chicherin stressed how helpful it was for Soviet Russia to be able to withdraw troops from the German front and throw them against the Czechoslovaks.⁹³

The long-term effect of the Kaiser’s verdict was to enable the Bolsheviks to weather the most critical period in their history. It would have cost the Germans no effort to seize Petrograd and only a bit more to occupy Moscow, both cities being virtually undefended. Then they could have repeated their Ukrainian operation and placed a puppet government over Russia. No one doubted their ability to do so. In April, when the Bolsheviks had been in a stronger position, Trotsky told Sadoul that they could be removed by a party backed by the Germans.⁹⁴ The Kaiser’s decision at the end of June ended this possibility permanently: six weeks later, when their offensive in the west ground to a halt, the Germans were no longer in a position to intervene decisively in internal Russian affairs. The knowledge that the Germans continued to back the Bolsheviks also disheartened the Russian opposition. Relaying the Kaiser’s wishes to Moscow, Kühlmann instructed the embassy at the end of June to continue collaborating with Lenin. On July 1, Riezler broke off talks with the Right Center.⁹⁵

With the approach of summer 1918, the Left SRs grew restless. Romantic revolutionaries, they craved perpetual excitement: the ecstasy of October, the intoxication of February 1918, when the nation rose to repel the German invasion, unforgettable days celebrated by their poet, Alexander Blok, in the two most famous poems of the Revolution, “The Twelve” and “Scythians.” But this was all in the past, and now they found themselves partners of a regime of calculating politicians, who made deals with the Germans and the Allies, and invited the “bourgeoisie” back to run factories and lead the armed forces. What happened to the Revolution? Nothing the Bolsheviks did after February 1918 pleased them. They despised the Brest Treaty, which in their eyes made Germany the master of Russia and Lenin a lackey of Mirbach’s: instead of consorting with the Germans, they wanted to arouse the masses against these imperialists, with bare hands if need be, and carry the Revolution into the heart of Europe. When the Bolsheviks, disregarding their protests, signed and ratified Brest, the Left SRs quit from the Sovnarkom. They opposed no less vehemently the policy adopted by the Bolsheviks in May 1918 of sending armed detachments of workers to the villages to extract grain, since it caused bad blood between peasants and workers. They objected to the reintroduction of capital punishment and saved many lives by having their members veto every death sentence passed on political prisoners by the Collegium of the Cheka. Inexorably, they came to regard the Bolsheviks as traitors to the Revolution. As their leader, Maria Spiridonova, put it: “It is painful now … to realize that the Bolsheviks, with whom until now I have worked side by side, alongside whom I have fought on the same barricade, and with whom I have hoped to fight the glorious battle to the end, … have taken over the policies of the Kerensky government.”⁹⁶

In the spring of 1918, the Left SRs assumed toward the Bolsheviks the same attitude that the Bolsheviks had adopted in 1917 toward the Provisional Government and the democratic socialists. They posed as the conscience of the Revolution, the incorruptible alternative to a regime of opportunists and compromisers. As the Bolshevik influence among industrial workers waned, the Left SRs became a dangerous rival, for they appealed to the same anarchic and destructive instincts of the Russian masses which the Bolsheviks themselves had exploited on the road to power but once in power did all they could to quell. They enjoyed support among some of the rowdiest urban elements, including radical Petrograd workers and the sailors of what had been the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. Essentially, they appealed to the very groups which had helped bring the Bolsheviks to power in October and now felt betrayed.

On April 17–25, the Left SRs held a congress in Moscow. It claimed to represent over 60,000 members. Most delegates wanted a clean break with the Bolsheviks and their “komissaroderzhavie” (“rule of the commissars”).⁹⁷ Two months later (June 24), at a secret meeting, the Central Committee of the Left SR Party decided to raise the banner of rebellion.⁹⁸ The “breathing spell” purchased by Brest was to be brought to an end. They would introduce at the forthcoming Fifth Congress of Soviets, scheduled for July 4, a motion calling for the abrogation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and a declaration of war on Germany. If it failed to pass, the Left SRs would initiate terroristic provocations to bring about a breach between Russia and Germany. The resolution adopted by that meeting read as follows:

The Central Committee of the Left SR Party, having examined the present political situation of the Republic, resolves that in the interest of the Russian as well as the International Revolution, an immediate end must be put to the so-called breathing spell created by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

The Central Committee believes it to be both practical and possible to organize a series of terrorist acts against the leading representatives of German imperialism. In order to realize this, the forces of the party must be organized and all necessary precautions taken so that the peasantry and the working class will join this movement and actively help the party. Therefore, at the instant of the terrorist act all papers should make known our participation in the events in the Ukraine, in the agitation among the peasants, and in the blowing up of arsenals. This must be done after Moscow gives a signal. Such a signal may be an act of terrorism or it can take another form. In order to distribute the forces of the party, a committee of three (Spiridonova, Maiorov, and Golubovskii) has been appointed.

In view of the fact that, contrary to the wishes of the party, this may involve a collision with the Bolsheviks, the Central Committee makes the following declaration: We regard our policy as an attack on the current policy of the Council of the People’s Commissars, but definitely not as a fight against the Bolsheviks themselves. As it is possible that the Bolsheviks may take aggressive counteraction against our party, we are determined, if necessary, to defend our position with force of arms. In order to prevent the party from being exploited by counterrevolutionary elements, it is resolved that our new policy be stated clearly and openly, so that an international socialist-revolutionary policy may subsequently be inaugurated in Soviet Russia.⁹⁹

As this resolution indicates, the Left SRs intended in many ways but one to emulate Bolshevik actions in October 1917: the one crucial difference being that they did not aspire to power. That was to be left in Bolshevik hands. The Left SRs wanted only to compel the Bolsheviks to abandon their “opportunistic” policies by provoking Germany to attack Soviet Russia in reaction to anti-German terrorism. The plan was entirely unrealistic: it gambled on the expectation that the Germans would impulsively give up the immense benefits they had gained at Brest, and altogether ignored the common interest linking Berlin and Moscow.

Spiridonova, the most powerful personality on the three-person Left SR committee, was possessed of a courage that in earlier centuries characterized religious martyrs, but nothing remotely resembling common sense. Foreigners who observed her during these days left very uncomplimentary accounts. For Riezler she was a “dried-up skirt.” Alfons Paquet, a German journalist, saw her as

87. Maria Spiridonova, second from left.

a tireless hysteric with a pince-nez, the caricature of Athena, who, while speaking, always seemed to be reaching out for an invisible harp, and who, when the hall would burst into applause and rage, would impatiently stamp her feet, lifting the fallen shoulder straps of her dress.¹⁰⁰

Immediately after the decision, the Left SRs went to work. They sent agitators to the military garrisons in Moscow and its suburbs: some of these they won to their side, the rest they succeeded in neutralizing. Left SRs working in the Cheka assembled a military force to fight in the event the Bolsheviks counterattacked. Preparations were made to carry out a terrorist act against the German Ambassador: his assassination was to serve as the signal for a nationwide rising. Emulating Bolshevik tactics on the eve of October, the Left SRs did not conceal their plans. On June 29, their organ Znamia truda carried on its front page an appeal to all able-bodied Left SRs to report no later than July 2 to their party’s regional offices; regional committees of the party were instructed to give them military training.¹⁰¹ The next day, Spiridonova declared publicly that only an armed uprising could save the Revolution.¹⁰² It remains an inexplicable mystery how Dzerzhinskii and his Latvian associates in the Cheka could have ignored these warnings and let themselves be caught by surprise on July 6.

A partial, but only partial, answer to this question is provided by the fact that several of the conspirators worked in the directing organs of the Cheka. Dzerzhinskii had chosen as his deputy a Left SR, Petr Aleksandrovich Dmitrievskii, popularly known as Aleksandrovich, in whom he had complete faith and entrusted with broad authority. Other Left SRs employed by the Cheka and involved in the conspiracy included Iakov Bliumkin, whose responsibility was counterespionage and penetration of the German Embassy, the photographer Nicholas Andreev, and D. I. Popov, the commander of a Cheka cavalry detachment. These individuals hatched a conspiracy within the headquarters of the secret police. Popov assembled several hundred armed men, mostly pro-Left SR sailors. Bliumkin and Andreev assumed responsibility for assassinating Mirbach. The two familiarized themselves with the building of the German mission and took photographs of the escape route they were to take after killing the ambassador.

The troika which supervised these preparations planned to stage the uprising on either the second or the third day of the Fifth Congress of Soviets, scheduled for the evening of July 4. Spiridonova was to introduce a motion calling for the abrogation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and a declaration of war on Germany. Since the Mandate Committee, which determined the representation at the congress, had generously allotted them 40 percent of the seats, and it was known that many Bolsheviks opposed Brest, the Left SR leaders thought they stood a good chance of winning a majority. If, however, they failed, they would raise the banner of rebellion with a terrorist act against the German Ambassador. July 6 was a favorable day for action because it happened to fall on St. John’s Day (Ivanov den’), a Latvian national holiday which the Latvian Rifles were to celebrate with an outing at Khodynka Field on the outskirts of Moscow, leaving behind only a skeleton staff to protect the Kremlin.*

As subsequent events were to show, the situation in Moscow was so tenuous that had the Left SRs wanted to seize power they could have done so with even greater ease than the Bolsheviks in October. But they emphatically did not want the responsibility of governing. Their rebellion was not so much a coup d’état as a coup de théâtre, a grand political demonstration intended to galvanize the “masses” and revive their flagging revolutionary spirit. They committed the very error that Lenin was forever warning his followers against, that of “playing” at revolution.

When the Congress of Soviets opened at the Bolshoi Theater, the Left SRs and Bolsheviks at once flew at each other’s throats. Left SR speakers accused the Bolsheviks of betraying the Revolution and instigating a war between city and village, while the Bolsheviks charged the Left SRs with trying to provoke a war between Russia and Germany. The Left SRs introduced a motion calling for an expression of no confidence in the Bolshevik Government, the abrogation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and a declaration of war on Germany. The Bolshevik majority defeated the motion, whereupon the Left SRs walked out.¹⁰³

According to Bliumkin, in the evening of July 4 Spiridonova requested him to come see her.¹⁰⁴ She said that the party wanted him to assassinate Mirbach. Bliumkin asked for twenty-four hours to make the necessary preparations. These included procuring for himself and Andreev a document bearing a forged signature of Dzerzhinskii requesting for the two men an audience with the German Ambassador, two revolvers, two bombs, and a car belonging to the Cheka chauifeured by Popov.

Around 2:15–2:30 p.m. on July 6 two representatives of the Cheka presented themselves at the German Embassy on Denezhnyi Pereulok. One identified himself as Iakov Bliumkin, an official of the Cheka counterintelligence service, the other as Nicholas Andreev, a representative of the Revolutionary Tribunal. They showed credentials signed by Dzerzhinskii and a secretary of the Cheka authorizing them to discuss “a matter of direct concern to the ambassador.”¹⁰⁵ This turned out to be the case of a Lieutenant Robert Mirbach, believed to be a relative of the ambassador, whom the Cheka had detained on suspicion of espionage. The visitors were received by Riezler and an interpreter, Lieutenant L. G. Miller. Riezler told them that he had the authority to speak on Count Mirbach’s behalf, but the Russians refused to deal with him, insisting that Dzerzhinskii had instructed them to speak personally with the ambassador.

The German Embassy had for some time been receiving warnings of possible violence. There were anonymous letters and suspicious incidents, such as visits by electricians to inspect lighting fixtures that were in perfect working order and strangers taking photographs of the embassy building. Mirbach was reluctant to meet with the visitors, but since they produced credentials from the head of the Cheka he came down to see them. The Russians said he might be interested in the case of Lieutenant Mirbach. The ambassador replied that he would prefer that the information be provided in writing. At this point, Bliumkin and Andreev reached into their briefcases and pulled out revolvers, which they fired at Mirbach and Riezler. All their shots missed. Riezler and Miller dropped to the floor. Mirbach rose and tried to escape through the main living room to the upstairs quarters. Andreev ran after him and fired at the back of the head. Bliumkin threw a bomb into the middle of the room. The two assassins jumped out of the open windows. Bliumkin injured himself, but he managed to follow Andreev and climb a two-and-a-half-meter-high iron fence surrounding the embassy building to reach the automobile which waited outside with its engine running. Mirbach, who never regained consciousness, died at 3:15 p.m.¹⁰⁶

The embassy staff feared that the assault on its ambassador signaled a general attack. The military personnel assumed responsibility for security. Attempts to communicate with the Soviet authorities proved of no avail because the telephone lines had been cut. Bothmer, the military attaché, rushed to the Metropole Hotel, the seat of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. There he told Karakhan, Chicherin’s deputy, what had happened. Karakhan contacted the Kremlin. Lenin received the news around 3:30 p.m. and immediately notified Dzerzhinskii and Sverdlov.¹⁰⁷

Later that afternoon, a procession of Bolshevik notables visited the German Embassy. The first to arrive was Radek, with a sidearm which Bothmer describes as the size of a small siege gun. He was followed by Chicherin, Karakhan, and Dzerzhinskii. A squad of Latvian Rifles accompanied the Bolshevik notables. Lenin remained in the Kremlin, but Riezler, who assumed charge of the embassy, insisted that he appear in person with an explanation and apology. It was a most unusual demand for a foreign diplomat to make of a head of state, but such was the influence of the Germans at the time that Lenin had to obey. He came to the embassy, accompanied by Sverdlov, around 5 p.m. According to German witnesses, he displayed a purely technical interest in the tragedy, asking to be shown the place where the murder had been committed, the exact arrangement of the furniture, and the damage caused by the bomb. He declined to view the body of the deceased. He offered an apology which, in the words of one German, was as “cold as a dog’s snout” and promised that the guilty would be punished.¹⁰⁸ Bothmer thought that the Russians looked very frightened.

When they fled, the assassins left their papers behind, including the document which had gained them admission to the embassy. From this material and information supplied by Riezler, Dzerzhinskii learned that the gunmen had presented themselves as representatives of the Cheka. Thoroughly alarmed, he set off for the Pokrovskii Barracks, which housed the Cheka Combat Detachment on Bol’shoi Trekhsviatitel’skii Pereulok 1. The barracks were under Popov’s control. Dzerzhinskii demanded that Bliumkin and Andreev be turned over to him, under the threat of having the entire Central Committee of the Left SR Party shot. Instead of complying, Popov’s sailors arrested Dzerzhinskii. He was to serve as a hostage to guarantee the safety of Spiridonova, who had gone to the Congress of Soviets to announce that Russia had been “liberated from Mirbach.”¹⁰⁹

These events took place in a torrential rain, accompanied by thunder, which soon enveloped Moscow in a thick fog.

On his return to the Kremlin, Lenin was horrified to learn that Dzerzhinskii was a prisoner of the Cheka: according to Bonch-Bruevich, when he heard this news “Lenin did not turn pale—he turned white.”¹¹⁰ Suspecting that the Cheka had betrayed him, Lenin, through Trotsky, ordered it dissolved. M. Ia. Latsis was to organize a fresh security police.¹¹¹ Latsis raced to the Cheka headquarters at Bolshaia Lubianka to find that this building, too, was under Popov’s control. The Left SR sailors who escorted him to Popov’s headquarters wanted to shoot Latsis on the spot: he was saved by the intercession of the Left SR Aleksandrovich.¹¹² It was a comradely gesture that Latsis would not reciprocate a few days later when the roles were reversed and Aleksandrovich fell into the hands of the Cheka.

That evening, the sailors and soldiers affiliated with the Left SRs went into the streets to take hostages: they stopped automobiles from which they removed twenty-seven Bolshevik functionaries.

At the disposal of the Left SRs were 2,000 armed sailors and cavalry, eight artillery guns, sixty-four machine guns, and four to six armored cars.¹¹³ It was a formidable force, given that the bulk of Moscow’s Latvian contingent was relaxing in the suburbs and that soldiers of the Russian garrisons either sided with the rebels or professed neutrality. Lenin now found himself in the same humiliating predicament as Kerensky the previous October, a head of state without an armed force to defend his government. At this point, had the Left SRs so desired, there was nothing to prevent them from seizing the Kremlin and arresting the entire Bolshevik leadership. They did not even have to use force, for the members of their Central Committee carried passes giving them access to the Kremlin, including the offices and private apartments of Lenin.¹¹⁴

But the Left SRs had no such intentions and it was their aversion to power that saved the Bolsheviks. Their aim was to provoke the Germans and arouse the Russian “masses.” As one of the Left SR leaders told the captive Dzerzhinskii:

You stand before a fait accompli. The Brest Treaty is annulled; a war with Germany is unavoidable. We do not want power: let it be here as in the Ukraine. We will go underground. You can keep power, but you must stop being lackeys of Mirbach. Let Germany occupy Russia up to the Volga.¹¹⁵

So instead of marching on the Kremlin and overthrowing the Soviet Government, a detachment of Left SRs, headed by P. P. Proshian, went to the Central Post and Telegraph Office, which it occupied without resistance and from where it sent out appeals to Russian workers, peasants, and soldiers as well as the “whole world.”* These appeals were confused and contradictory. The Left SRs took responsibility for the murder of Mirbach and denounced the Bolsheviks as “agents of German imperialism.” They declared themselves in favor of the “soviet system” but rejected all other socialist parties as “counterrevolutionary.” In one telegram, they declared themselves to be “in power.” In the words of Vatsetis, the Left SRs acted “indecisively.”¹¹⁶

Spiridonova arrived at the Bolshoi Theater at 7 p.m. and delivered a long and rambling speech to the congress. Other Left SR speakers followed. There was total confusion. At 8 p.m. the delegates learned that armed Latvians had surrounded the building and sealed off the entrances, whereupon the Bolsheviks left. Spiridonova asked her followers to adjourn to the second floor. There she jumped on a table and screamed: “Hey, you, land, listen! Hey, you, land, listen!”¹¹⁷ The Bolshevik delegates, assembled in a wing of the Bolshoi, could not decide whether they were attacking or under attack. As Bukharin later told Isaac Steinberg: “We were sitting in our room waiting for you to come and arrest us.… As you did not do it, we decided to arrest you instead.”¹¹⁸

It was high time for the Bolsheviks to act; but hours went by and nothing happened. The government was in the grip of panic, for it had no serious force on which to rely. According to its own estimates, of the 24,000 armed men stationed in Moscow, one-third were pro-Bolshevik, one-fifth unreliable (i.e., anti-Bolshevik), and the rest uncertain.¹¹⁹ But even the pro-Bolshevik units could not be moved. The Bolshevik leadership was in such desperate straits it considered evacuating the Kremlin.¹²⁰

At 5 p.m., I. I. Vatsetis, the commander of the Latvian Rifles, was summoned by N. I. Muralov, the commander of the Moscow Military District, to his headquarters. Also awaiting him there was Podvoiskii. The two briefed Vatsetis on the situation and asked him to prepare a plan of operations. At the same time, they told the shocked Latvian that another officer would be put in charge of the operation. This lack of confidence was almost certainly due to the Kremlin’s knowledge of Vatsetis’s dealings with the German Embassy. After attempts to find another Latvian to take command had failed, Vatsetis offered his services, guaranteeing success “with his head.” This was communicated to the Kremlin.*

Around 11:30 p.m. Lenin called to his office the Latvian political commissars attached to Vatsetis’s headquarters and asked whether they could vouch for the commander’s loyalty.¹²¹ When they responded affirmatively, Lenin consented to having Vatsetis put in charge of the operation against the Left SRs, but as an added precaution had four political commissars attached to his staff, instead of the usual two.

At midnight, Vatsetis received a call to meet with Lenin. This is how he describes the encounter:

The Kremlin was dark and empty. We were led into the meeting hall of the Council of People’s Commissars and asked to wait.… The fairly spacious premises in which I now found myself for the first time were illuminated by a single electric bulb, suspended from under the ceiling somewhere in the corner. The window curtains were drawn. The atmosphere reminded me of the front in the theater of military operations.… A few minutes later the door at the opposite end of the room opened and Comrade Lenin entered. He approached me with quick steps and asked in a low voice: “Comrade, will we hold out till the morning?” Having asked the question, Lenin kept on staring at me. I had become accustomed that day to the unexpected, but Comrade Lenin’s question took me aback with its sharp formulation.… Why was it important to hold out until the morning? Won’t we hold out to the end? Was our situation perhaps so precarious that my commissars had concealed from me its true nature?¹²²

88. Colonel I. Vatsetis, commander of Latvian Rifles, as an officer in the Imperial Army.

Before answering Lenin’s question, Vatsetis requested time to survey the situation.¹²³ The city had fallen into the hands of the rebels, except for the Kremlin, which stood out like a fortress under siege. When he arrived at the headquarters of the Latvian Division, his chief of staff told Vatsetis that the “entire Moscow garrison” had turned against the Bolsheviks. The so-called People’s Army (Narodnaia Armiia), the largest contingent of the Moscow garrison, which was undergoing training to fight the Germans alongside French and British troops, had decided to remain neutral. Another regiment had declared itself in favor of the Left SRs. The Latvians were all that was left: one battalion of the 1st Regiment, one battalion of the 2nd, and the 9th Regiment. There was also the 3rd Latvian Regiment, but its loyalty was in doubt. Vatsetis could also count on a Latvian artillery battery and a few smaller units, including a company of pro-Communist Hungarian POWs, commanded by Béla Kun.

With this information in hand, Vatsetis decided to delay the counterattack until the early hours of the morning, when the Latvian units would have returned from Khodynka. He dispatched two companies of the 9th Latvian Regiment to retake the Central Post and Telegraph Office, but they either proved inept or else defected, for the Left SRs managed to disarm them.

At 2 a.m. Vatsetis returned to the Kremlin:

Comrade Lenin entered by the same door and approached me with the same quick steps. I took several paces toward him and reported: “No later than twelve noon on July 7, we shall triumph all along the line.” Lenin took my right hand into both of his and, pressing it very hard, said, “Thank you, comrade. You have made me very happy.”¹²⁴

When he launched his counterattack at 5 a.m. in humid and foggy weather, Vatsetis had under his command 3,300 men, of whom fewer than 500 were Russians. The Left SRs fought back ferociously, and it took the Latvians nearly seven hours to reduce the rebel centers and release, unharmed, Dzerzhinskii, Latsis, and the remaining hostages. Vatsetis received from Trotsky a bonus of 10,000 rubles for a job well done.¹²⁵

On July 7 and 8 the Bolsheviks arrested and questioned the rebels, including Spiridonova and other Left SR delegates to the Congress of Soviets. Riezler demanded that the government execute all those responsible for the murder of his ambassador, including the Central Committee of the Left SR Party. The government appointed two commissions, one to investigate the Left SR uprising, the other to look into the disloyal behavior of the garrison. Six hundred and fifty Left SRs were taken into custody in Moscow, Petrograd, and the provincial cities. A few days later it was announced that 200 of them had been shot.¹²⁶ Ioffe told the Germans in Berlin that among those executed was Spiridonova. This greatly pleased them, and the German press played up the executions. The information was false: but when Chicherin issued a denial, the German Foreign Office used its influence to keep it out of the newspapers.¹²⁷

In reality, the Bolsheviks treated the Left SRs with most unusual forbearance. Instead of carrying out a mass execution of those who had fought them arms in hand, as they would do a few days later in Iaroslavl, they briefly interrogated the prisoners and then had most of them released. They executed twelve sailors from Popov’s detachments as well as Aleksandrovich, whom they had caught at a railroad station trying to escape. Spiridonova and one of her associates were taken to the Kremlin and placed in a makeshift prison under Latvian guard. Two days later she was moved to a two-room apartment in the Kremlin, where she lived in relative comfort until her trial in November 1918. The Bolsheviks did not outlaw the Left SR Party and allowed it to bring out its newspaper. Pravda, referring to the Left SRs as “prodigal sons,” expressed the hope that they would soon return to the fold.¹²⁸ Zinoviev lavished praise on Spiridonova as a “wonderful woman” with a “heart of gold” whose imprisonment kept him awake at night.¹²⁹

Neither before nor after did the Bolsheviks show such leniency to their enemies. Indeed, this unusual behavior has led some historians to suspect that the murder of Mirbach and the Left SR uprising had been staged by the Bolsheviks, although it is difficult to find a motive for such elaborate deception or an explanation of how it could have been concealed from the participants.¹³⁰ The explanation, however, does not require any resort to conspiratorial theories. In July the Bolsheviks found themselves in what seemed a hopeless situation, under attack by the Czechs, facing armed rebellion in Iaroslavl and Murom, abandoned by Russian workers and soldiers, unsure even of the loyalty of the Latvians. They were not about to antagonize the followers of the Left SR Party. But above all, they feared for their lives. Radek surely did not speak only for himself when he confided to a German friend that the Bolsheviks treated the Left SRs so leniently from fear of their revenge.¹³¹ The ranks of that party were indeed filled with fanatics who thought little of sacrificing themselves for their cause: fanatics like Spiridonova herself, who in a letter to the Bolshevik leaders from prison came close to expressing regret that she had not been executed since her death might have brought them to their “senses.”¹³² Mirbach’s successor, Karl Helfferich, also was of the opinion that the Bolsheviks were afraid to liquidate the Left SRs.¹³³

In November 1918, the Revolutionary Tribunal tried the Left SR Central Committee, most of whose members had fled or gone underground. Spiridonova and Iu. V. Sablin, who did stand trial, received one-year terms. Spiridonova did not serve out her sentence; she was sprung from the Kremlin prison by the Left SRs in April 1919.* She spent the rest of her life in and out of prison. In 1937, she was condemned to twenty-five years for “counterrevolutionary activity”: in 1941, as the German armies approached Orel, where she was imprisoned, she was taken out and shot.¹³⁴ Neither of Mirbach’s assassins lived to a ripe old age. Andreev died of typhus in the Ukraine the following year. Bliumkin led an underground existence until May 1919, when he turned himself in. Having repented, he was not only forgiven but admitted into the Communist Party and appointed to Trotsky’s staff. In late 1930 he had the bad judgment to carry messages to his followers in Russia. He was arrested and executed.¹³⁵

In the wake of the July uprising the Left SRs split into two factions, one of which approved of it, the other of which disowned it. In time, both factions dissolved in the Communist Party, except for a minuscule group which went underground.¹³⁶

Dzerzhinskii was suspended from his job. Officially, he resigned as chairman and member of the Cheka to serve as a witness in the forthcoming trial of Mirbach’s assassins,¹³⁷ but since the Bolsheviks did not normally observe such legal niceties and no such trial took place, this was merely a face-saving formula. His suspension was almost certainly due to Lenin’s suspicion that he had been implicated in the Left SR conspiracy. Latsis directed the secret police until August 22, when Dzerzhinskii was reinstated.

The Left SRs failed dismally not only because they had no clear objective and rebelled without being willing to assume responsibility for the political consequences, but also because they had completely miscalculated Bolshevik and German reactions. As it turned out, the two had much too much at stake to allow themselves to be provoked by the murder of an ambassador (which was followed by the assassination of Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn by Left SRs in the Ukraine). The German Government virtually ignored the killing of Mirbach, and the German press, under its instructions, played it down. Indeed, in the fall of 1918, the two countries moved closer than ever. The Bolsheviks were very fortunate in their choice of opponents.

By a remarkable coincidence another anti-Bolshevik rebellion broke out on the very same day, the morning of July 6, in three northeastern cities, Iaroslavl, Murom, and Rybinsk. It was the work of Boris Savinkov, the best organized and most enterprising of the anti-Bolshevik conspirators.

Born in Kharkov in 1879, Savinkov received his secondary education in Warsaw, following which he enrolled at the University of St. Petersburg.¹³⁸ There he became embroiled in student disorders, including the university strike of 1899. He joined the SRs and quickly rose to a leading position in its Combat Organization, in which capacity he carried out major terrorist missions, including the assassinations of Plehve and Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich. In 1906 his terrorist activities came to a halt when the police agent Evno Azef betrayed him to the Okhrana. Sentenced to death, Savinkov managed to flee abroad, where he remained until the outbreak of the February Revolution, writing novels about the revolutionary underground. The war awakened in him patriotic impulses. He served in the French army until February 1917, when he returned to Russia. The Provisional Government appointed him a front-line commissar. Savinkov grew increasingly nationalistic and conservative, and, as we have seen, in the summer of 1917, while serving as acting director of the Ministry of War under Kerensky, he worked with Kornilov to restore discipline in the armed forces. Surrounded by an aura of romantic adventure, articulate and persuasive, he made a strong impression on whomever he cared to impress, including Winston Churchill.

In December 1917, Savinkov made his way to the Don, where he participated in the formation of the Volunteer Army. At Alekseev’s request, he returned to Bolshevik Russia to make contact with prominent public figures.¹³⁹ His mission was to enlist those officers and politicians who, regardless of party affiliation, wanted to continue fighting the Germans and their Bolshevik minions. By virtue of his radical past and more recent patriotic record, Savinkov was ideally suited for this task. He spoke with Plekhanov, N. V. Chaikovskii, and other socialist luminaries known to follow a “defensist” line, but he had little success in enlisting them because, with a few exceptions, they preferred to wait for the Bolsheviks to collapse on their own rather than collaborate with nationalistic officers. Plekhanov refused even to receive him, saying: “I have given forty years of my life to the proletariat and it is not I who will shoot at workers even if they take the false path.”¹⁴⁰ He had better success with demobilized officers, especially those who had served in the elite Guard and Grenadier Regiments.

His main problem was shortage of money: he was too poor even to afford a streetcar ticket. To build up a military force he had to pay allowances to his officers, most of whom were equally destitute, since no one dared to give them employment. To obtain funds, Savinkov turned to the representatives of the Allies. His private plans called for assassinating Lenin and Trotsky as a prelude to a coup against the Bolshevik regime. But he realized that the Allies did not much care who governed Russia, as long as she fought the Central Powers. Indeed, at this very time (March—April 1918) the French were assisting Trotsky organize the Red Army. Savinkov, therefore, concealed from the Allied representatives his true political objectives and presented himself as a patriotic Russian whose sole purpose was to restore Russia’s military capabilities and resume the war against Germany.

The first to help was Thomas Masaryk. The Czech leader’s motives in assisting Savinkov are obscure because in early 1918 he was negotiating with the Bolsheviks for the evacuation of his men from Russia and he could have had no conceivable interest in becoming involved in anti-Bolshevik activity. In his memoirs he writes that he had agreed to meet with Savinkov out of curiosity and was very disappointed to see a man seemingly unable to grasp the distinction between a “revolution” and a “terrorist act,” whose moral standards did not rise above the “primitive level of a blood vendetta.”¹⁴¹ But this could well have been hindsight. What is certain is that in April 1918 Masaryk gave Savinkov his first money, 200,000 rubles.¹⁴² A likely explanation for this transaction is that Savinkov, an expert at dissimulation, persuaded Masaryk that the money would be used to help Alekseev’s Volunteer Army build up an anti-German force in central Russia.

Savinkov also contacted Lockhart and Noulens. Lockhart reacted skeptically to Savinkov’s proposal to build an anti-German army under the very noses of the Bolsheviks, but he too came under Savinkov’s spell, and might have helped him were it not that he received categorical instructions from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour “to have nothing whatever to do with Savinkov’s plans, and avoid inquiring further into them.”¹⁴³

Noulens, a leading advocate of the idea of forming on Russian territory a multinational anti-German army, proved more helpful. He found Savinkov most impressive:

He had a curious expression of impassivity, with a fixed gaze that shone from under his barely open Mongol eyelids, with permanently sealed lips, as if meant to conceal all his secret thoughts. By contrast, his profile and complexion were Western. It appeared that in him combined all the energy of one race and all the cunning and mystery of the other.¹⁴⁴

At the beginning of May, Noulens gave Savinkov 500,000 rubles, which he followed with additional subsidies, for a total of up to 2,500,000.¹⁴⁵ As best as can be ascertained, these funds were to be used for military purposes, mainly the expenses of the Volunteer Army but also for some work behind German lines on behalf of Allied military intelligence.¹⁴⁶ There exists no reliable evidence that Noulens conspired with Savinkov to overthrow the Bolshevik regime or that he was even acquainted with Savinkov’s revolutionary plot.* Noulens extracted from Savinkov a promise that he would coordinate his action with the other Russian parties, presumably the pro-Allied National Center, but Savinkov broke this promise because he did not trust the latter to keep his plans secret. Grenard wrote in his memoirs that when Savinkov raised the banner of rebellion in July 1918, he “acted on his own in violation of the promises he had given to undertake nothing except in concert with the other Russian parties.”¹⁴⁷

89. Boris Savinkov.

With the help of Czech and French money, Savinkov expanded recruiting activities and by April 1918 enrolled in his organization, the Union for the Defense of the Fatherland and Freedom (Soiuz Zashchity Rodiny i Svobody), over 5,000 members, 2,000 of them in Moscow, the remainder in thirty-four provincial towns.† Most were officers, for Savinkov planned armed action and had little use for intellectuals and their endless chatter (boltovnia). As his deputy he chose a forty-two-year-old professional artillery officer and graduate of the Imperial General Staff School, Lieutenant Colonel A. P. Perkhurov, a man with a distinguished war record and of legendary courage.

Savinkov had a program, or rather several programs, but he attached to them little importance because political discussions tended to divide and divert his followers from the task at hand. His stress was on patriotism. One program of the Union was divided into immediate and long-term objectives.* The immediate objective was to replace the Bolsheviks with a reliable national authority and create a disciplined army to fight the Central Powers. The long-term objective was vague. Savinkov spoke of holding fresh elections to the Constituent Assembly, presumably after the war, to give Russia a democratic regime. In recollections, published in Warsaw in 1923, he stressed that his organization enrolled representatives of all the parties, from monarchists to Socialists-Revolutionaries.¹⁴⁸ Savinkov could be all things to all men and it would be futile to expect from him a specific, formal plan for the future: it is certain only that he stood for firm national authority and the pursuit of the war, much as did Kornilov. To be admitted to Savinkov’s Union, one only had to be committed to fighting the Germans and the Bolsheviks.

Savinkov structured his organization on a military model, drawing on his terrorist experience to conceal it from the Cheka. Under his command were several dozen skeletal “regiments” in Moscow and the provincial cities, staffed by professional officers. These units were isolated from one another and known only to their immediate superiors, so that in the event of arrest or betrayal the Cheka could not capture the entire organization.¹⁴⁹ This arrangement passed its test in mid-May, when a woman who had been jilted by one of the Union’s members denounced it to the police. Following her lead, the Cheka discovered the Union’s headquarters in Moscow, disguised as a medical clinic. It seized over 100 members (they were executed in July), but even though this discovery forced the Union to suspend its activities for two weeks, the Cheka failed to capture Savinkov or to liquidate his organization.¹⁵⁰

Perkhurov had under him 150–200 officers, working in an elaborate command structure: there were departments responsible for recruitment, intelligence and counterintelligence, relations with the Allies, and the principal branches of the armed forces (infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineering).¹⁵¹ The Cheka later complimented Savinkov and Perkhurov on running their organization with “clocklike precision.”¹⁵²

Savinkov built up an organization but he had no concrete strategic plan. By June, he came under mounting pressure to act. Because the Czechs and the French had suspended their subsidies, his money was running out, and the nerves of his followers were becoming frayed from the constant danger of betrayal. According to his testimony, he initially contemplated striking at Moscow, but he gave up this idea out of fear that the Germans would respond by occupying the capital.¹⁵³ In view of persistent rumors, confirmed to him by French representatives, that the Allies would make additional landings at Archangel and Murmansk in early July, he decided to stage his uprisings in the region of the middle or upper Volga, from where he could establish contact with both the Czechoslovak armies and the Allied forces at Murmansk. His plan called for cutting the Bolsheviks off from the northern ports as well as Kazan and areas to the east.

In 1924, when he stood trial before a Soviet court, Savinkov claimed he had received from the French a firm commitment that if his men managed to hold out for four days, they would be relieved by an Allied force from Archangel, following which the combined Franco-Anglo-Russian army would advance on Moscow. Without such a promise, he said, his uprising made no sense.¹⁵⁴ He further claimed that Consul Grenard gave him a cable from Noulens that the Allied landings would take place between July 3 and 8 and that it was essential for him to move during that time.¹⁵⁵ According to the testimony he gave at his trial, he coordinated all activities with the French mission.

Unfortunately, one can never take Savinkov’s statements at face value, not only because as an experienced conspirator he rarely told the full truth but also because he was quite capable of telling outright lies. Thus, at one time he claimed credit for Fannie Kaplan’s attempt on Lenin’s life (see below, this page), with which he is known to have had no connection; he also stated that in July 1918 he had acted on orders of the Moscow National Center, which happens to be untrue as well.¹⁵⁶ The Bolsheviks liked to link all resistance to them with foreign conspiracies to incite native xenophobia. It is almost certain that after his arrest in Soviet Russia in 1924, Savinkov struck a deal with the Bolshevik prosecutor to place the blame for his abortive coup of 1918 on the French, for now that the Allied archives for the period have been made available to scholars, no evidence has come to light to support this allegation. If the French mission indeed had not only authorized him to stage an anti-Bolshevik rebellion but demanded it, as he alleged, and further promised to help him capture Moscow, such an enterprise would certainly have left documentary evidence. Since none exists, one must conclude that Savinkov lied, perhaps in the hope of saving his life. As we have noted, Savinkov’s main liaison with the French, Grenard, attested that he acted “on his own.”*

Savinkov chose as the principal locus of his uprising Iaroslavl, and this for two reasons. One was the city’s strategic location, on the railroad linking Archangel with Moscow, which facilitated both offensive and defensive operations. The other had to do with the fact that Perkhurov, whom Savinkov had sent to reconnoiter, brought from Iaroslavl encouraging reports of popular support.¹⁵⁷

The final operational plans were drawn up at the end of June, when the Czech uprising was at its height. Perkhurov, who was to command the Iaroslavl operation, had barely ten days to organize. Savinkov undertook personally to direct a secondary uprising in nearby Rybinsk; a third action was scheduled at Murom, on the Moscow-Kazan railroad. Savinkov is said by Perkhurov to have told his officers that he had firm promises of Allied assistance from Archangel, and that if they managed to hold out for four days, they would be relieved.¹⁵⁸

Savinkov scheduled the Iaroslavl rising for the night of July 5–6, which preceded only by hours the time at which the Left SRs staged their rebellion. The coincidence notwithstanding, there is nothing to indicate that the two events had been coordinated. The Left SRs and Savinkov pursued entirely different aims, the former intending to leave the Bolsheviks in power, while Savinkov intended to overthrow them. Furthermore, it is inconceivable that the Left SRs would have had any dealings with a representative of the “counterrevolutionary” generals. Had he known of their plans, Savinkov would surely have followed his first inclination and staged a coup in Moscow rather than in Iaroslavl. This lack of coordination, about which Lenin spoke to Mirbach, was typical of the anti-Bolshevik opposition and a major reason for its ultimate failure.

To confuse the enemy and force him to scatter his forces, Savinkov and Perkhurov scheduled their rebellions at staggered times, with the Rybinsk operations to commence during the night of July 7–8 and the one at Murom the following night.

Perkhurov, who despite having little time had prepared the Iaroslavl rebellion with great precision, caught the Bolshevik authorities completely by surprise.¹⁵⁹ The action began at 2 a.m. on July 6, when a detachment of officers seized key points in the city: the arsenal, militia headquarters, the bank, and the post office. Another detachment proceeded to arrest leading Bolshevik and soviet officials, some of whom it is said to have shot. Officers employed as instructors in a local Red Army school promptly sided with the rebels, bringing along several machine guns and an armored car. Perkhurov proclaimed himself commander of the Iaroslavl Branch of the Northern Volunteer Army. These initial operations met with almost no resistance, and by daybreak the center of the city was in rebel hands. Soon others went over to the rebels, among them members of the militia, students, workers, and peasants: a Communist historian estimates that of the 6,000 participants in the Iaroslavl uprising, only 1,000 or so were officers.¹⁶⁰ It was a genuine popular rebellion against the Bolshevik regime, in which the peasants from the nearby villages proved especially helpful. The rebels tried to enlist for their cause German POWs who happened to have been passing through Iaroslavl en route home, but they met with refusal, following which they interned the Germans in the city theater. On July 8 Perkhurov informed them that his forces considered themselves at war with the Central Powers.¹⁶¹

Whereas the Murom and Rybinsk uprisings, each involving 300–400 men, collapsed in a matter of hours, Perkhurov held out for sixteen days. The pro-Bolshevik forces, gathered in the suburbs, counterattacked the following night, but failed to recapture the city. They then subjected it to intense artillery bombardment, which destroyed the water supply, with disastrous consequences for the rebels because the Reds controlled access to the Volga River, the only alternative source. After a week or so of inconclusive fighting, Trotsky placed in charge of the Iaroslavl operation A. I. Gekker, an ex-captain of the Imperial Army who had gone over to the Bolsheviks on the eve of the October coup. Gekker attacked the city with infantry, artillery, and airplanes. In the heavy shelling, most of the city, with its celebrated medieval churches and monasteries, was gutted.¹⁶² The rebels, so short of water they scooped it up from gutters, finally had to give up. On July 20, their representatives approached the German Repatriation Commission and declared they wished to surrender: since they were at war with Germany, they expected to be treated as prisoners of war. The head of the German commission accepted these terms and promised not to turn the rebels over to the Red Army. On July 21, the rebels laid down their arms and for a few hours Iaroslavl was under the occupation of German POWs. That evening, however, confronted with an ultimatum from the Bolsheviks, the Germans broke their promise and turned over to them the prisoners. The Red Guards sorted out some 350 officers, ex-officials, affluent citizens, and students, marched them out of town and had them shot.¹⁶³ It was the first mass execution by the Bolsheviks. One consequence of the Iaroslavl uprising was that Moscow ordered indiscriminate arrests of former Imperial officers: many of them were shot without a trial even as others were being inducted into the Red Army.

90. Lieutenant-Colonel A. P. Perkhurov.

Savinkov managed to escape from Rybinsk. He later joined Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s armies and organized raids behind Bolshevik lines. After Kolchak’s defeat, he fled to Western Europe, where he kept busy organizing anti-Bolshevik movements and smuggling agents into the Soviet Union. In August 1924, under the illusion that he could play an important role in post-Leninist Soviet Russia, he allowed himself to be lured by the GPU (the successor to the Cheka) into illegally crossing the frontier. He was promptly arrested. At a public trial later that year, he confessed to all his crimes, stressing the alleged involvement of the Allies in his subversive activities and pleading for mercy. His death sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. He died the following year in jail under highly suspicious circumstances: officially, he was said to have committed suicide, but it is more likely that he was killed by the GPU—according to some accounts, by being pushed from a window.¹⁶⁴

Perkhurov also joined Kolchak’s forces, where he was raised to the rank of general and earned the sobriquet Perkhurov-Iaroslavskii. Captured by the Bolsheviks, he managed to disguise his identity and obtain a commission in the Red Army. His true identity was discovered in 1922. Tried by a Military Collegium of the Supreme Tribunal he was sentenced to death: in prison, he was made to write his confessions, which were subsequently published.¹⁶⁵ Rather than kill him in its dungeons, the GPU sent him to Iaroslavl, where on the fourth anniversary of the uprising he was paraded through the streets, taunted by the crowds and pelted with rocks, following which he was executed.¹⁶⁶

Riezler, who took charge of the German Embassy, was regarded by some of his colleagues as confused and absentminded.¹⁶⁷ He spent less time on routine diplomatic affairs and more on negotiations with Russian opposition groups, which Berlin had instructed him to terminate on July 1. He did so out of an unalterable conviction that the Bolsheviks would not last and Germany needed contacts with their potential successors. His first reaction to Mirbach’s murder was to urge severance of relations with Moscow;¹⁶⁸ this advice was rejected, and he was instructed to continue helping the Bolsheviks. In September 1918 he would state, without elaborating, that the Germans had on three occasions used “political” means to help save the Bolsheviks.¹⁶⁹

While carrying out his government’s directives, Riezler bombarded the Foreign Office with cables that the Bolsheviks were a spent force. On July 19, he wired:

The Bolsheviks are dead. Their corpse lives [sic!] because the gravediggers cannot agree on who should bury it. The struggle which we presently wage with the Entente on Russian soil is no longer over the favors of this corpse. It has already turned into a struggle over the succession, over the orientation of the Russia of the future.¹⁷⁰

While he agreed that the Bolsheviks were rendering Russia harmless for Germany, by the same token they were rendering it useless.¹⁷¹ He recommended that Germany take charge of the “counterrevolution” and assist bourgeois forces in Russia. He thought it would require minimum effort to be rid of the Bolsheviks.

Acting on his own, Riezler laid out the groundwork for an anti-Bolshevik coup. The first step was to station a battalion of uniformed Germans in Moscow. Their ostensible mission would be to protect the embassy from future terrorist acts and to assist the Bolsheviks in the event of another rebellion; their true purpose would be to occupy strategic points in the capital if Bolshevik authority collapsed or Berlin decided the time had come to remove them from power.¹⁷²

Germany agreed to dispatch a battalion to Moscow but only if the Soviet Government gave its approval. It also authorized Riezler to initiate discreet talks with the Latvian Rifles to sound them out about their intentions. Riezler, who had established good contacts with the Latvians, asked if they were prepared to defect. He was told they were. Vatsetis, the Latvian commander, describes as follows his thinking in the summer of 1918:

Strange as [it may sound], at the time it was believed that central Russia would turn into a theater of internecine warfare and that the Bolsheviks would hardly hold on to power, falling victim to the hunger and the general discontent in the country’s interior. One could not exclude the possibility of a move on Moscow by the Germans, Don Cossacks, and White Czechs. This latter version was at the time especially widespread. The Bolsheviks had under their authority no military power capable of combat. The units, over whose formation M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, the Military Director of the Supreme Military Council, labored so intelligently and cleverly, owing to the hunger in the western zone of European Russia, scattered in search of food, turning into robber bands dangerous to Soviet authority. Such armies—if one can apply to them this honorable title—fled at the very sight of the German helmet. On the western border instances occurred of German forces being called upon to pacify mutinous Red units.… In connection with all these speculations and rumors, I was extremely troubled by the question of what would happen to the Latvian regiments should there be further German intervention and should the Cossacks and White armies make an appearance in the center of Russia. Such a possibility was then seriously contemplated: it could have led to the complete annihilation of the Latvian Rifles …¹⁷³

From his talks, Riezler learned that the Latvians were anxious to return to their German-occupied homeland, and if guaranteed amnesty and repatriation, would at least stay neutral in the event the Germans intervened against the Bolsheviks.¹⁷⁴

Riezler also resumed conversations with the Right Center. Its new representative, Prince Grigorii Trubetskoi, Imperial Russia’s wartime Ambassador to Serbia, pleaded for prompt German assistance to rid Russia of Lenin. He posed several conditions for the cooperation of his group: the Germans should allow the Russians to assemble their own military force in the Ukraine, so that Moscow would be liberated by Russians, not Germans; a pledge to revise the Brest Treaty; no pressure on the government that would replace the Bolsheviks; and Russia’s neutrality in the World War.¹⁷⁵ Trubetskoi claimed that his group had contact with 4,000 combat-ready officers, who only needed weapons. Time was of the essence: the Bolsheviks were engaged in a regular “manhunt” for officers, executing dozens every day.¹⁷⁶

By the time Mirbach’s successor, Karl Helfferich, arrived in Moscow (July 28), Riezler had a plan for a full-fledged coup d’état. Once the German battalion took over Moscow (the Latvian Rifles guarding the city having been previously neutralized with pledges of amnesty and repatriation), it would take little to bring about a collapse of the Bolshevik Government. This would be followed by the installation of a Russian Government completely dependent on Germany, on the model of Hetman Skoropadski’s regime in the Ukraine.¹⁷⁷

Riezler’s plans came to naught. Their key provision, the installation of a German battalion in Moscow, was vetoed by Lenin and dropped by Berlin. Yielding to Hindenburg’s pressure, Wilhelmstrasse sent a note to the Soviet Government, which Riezler handed to Chicherin in the evening of July 14. It assured the Soviet Government that in proposing to send a uniformed detachment to Moscow, Germany had no intention of infringing on Soviet sovereignty: its only purpose was to ensure the safety of its diplomatic personnel. Furthermore, the note went on, should there be another anti-Bolshevik uprising, this force could help the Soviet Government to quell it.¹⁷⁸ Chicherin communicated the German note to Lenin, who was resting out of town. Lenin immediately saw through the German ploy. He returned to Moscow that night and consulted with Chicherin. This was an issue on which he was not prepared to yield: he would give the Germans almost anything they wanted as long as they did not threaten his power. The following day he addressed the Central Executive Committee on the German note.¹⁷⁹ He hoped, he said, that Germany would not insist on its proposal because Russia would rather fight than allow foreign troops on her soil. He promised to provide all the personnel needed to ensure the security of the German Embassy. Then he held out the bait of extensive commercial relations as a means of inducing German business interests to exert pressure on his behalf: it materialized in the form of the Supplementary Treaty concluded the following month. It is doubtful that Lenin could have stood up to the Germans had they been truly determined: he was now even weaker than in February, when he had capitulated to their every demand. But he was not put to the test, because the Foreign Office, apprised of his reaction, quickly dropped Riezler’s proposal. It instructed Riezler “to continue supporting the Bolsheviks and merely [maintain] ‘contact’ with the others.”¹⁸⁰

Nor did Riezler have better luck with his proposal to win the neutrality of the Latvians with promises of amnesty and repatriation. This plan was scuttled by, of all people, Ludendorff, who feared “contaminating” Latvia with Bolshevik propaganda. The new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Admiral Paul von Hintze, who succeeded Kühlmann and was even more committed to collaboration with Lenin, needed to hear no more: he instructed the Moscow Embassy to suspend talks with the Latvians.¹⁸¹

To be prepared in the event of a Bolshevik collapse, the Foreign Office worked out its own contingency plans. If pro-Allied SRs seized power in Russia, the German army would strike from Finland, seize Murmansk and Archangel, and occupy Petrograd as well as Vologda. In other words, if the pessimists proved correct, rather than deliver the Bolsheviks a coup de grace and replace them with other Russians, Germany would march in and presumably restore them to power.¹⁸²

Helfferich arrived in Moscow determined to implement the pro-Bolshevik policy of his government. But he quickly discovered that the embassy staff opposed it almost to a man. The briefings which he received on the evening of his arrival and such limited personal observations as he was able to make caused him to change his mind. On the afternoon of July 31, on his only venture outside the heavily guarded embassy compound during his brief stay in Moscow, he paid a visit to Chicherin to protest the murder by Left SRs of Field Marshal Eichhorn in the Ukraine and the continuing Left SR threats to embassy personnel. At the same time he assured him that the German Government intended to continue its support. He later learned that a few hours after his conversation with Chicherin, a meeting took place in the Kremlin at which Lenin told his associates that their cause was “temporarily” lost and that it had become necessary to evacuate Moscow. While this meeting was in progress, Chicherin arrived to say that Helfferich had just assured him of German backing.*

The mood in the Kremlin was already desperate enough when on August 1 it received news that a British naval force had opened fire on Archangel. This shelling marked the beginning of large-scale Allied intervention in Russia. Moscow, which had much less reliable intelligence on Allied intentions than on those of Germany, was certain the Allies intended to advance on Moscow. It now completely lost its head and flung itself into German arms.

It will be recalled that in March 1918 the Allies had discussed with the Bolshevik Government the landing of troops on Russian soil in the north (Murmansk and Archangel) and the Far East (Vladivostok) to protect these ports from the Germans as well as to secure bases for the projected Allied force in Russia. In return, they were to help organize and train the Red Army. The Allies, however, were slow to act. They did land token detachments in the three port cities and they assigned a few officers to Trotsky’s Commissariat of War, but they had no large forces to spare at a time when the full brunt of the German offensive was upon them. The United States alone had the necessary manpower, but Woodrow Wilson opposed involvement in Russia, and as long as this was the case, nothing could be done.

The prospect of reactivating the Eastern Front improved substantially at the beginning of June when Wilson, impressed by the Czechoslovak uprising, experienced a change of heart. Feeling that the United States had a moral obligation to help the Czechs and Slovaks repatriate, he yielded to British entreaties and agreed to provide troops for the Murmansk-Archangel expedition as well as for Vladivostok. American forces assigned to the operation were under strict orders not to interfere in internal Russian affairs.¹⁸³

When it learned of Washington’s decision (June 3), the Supreme Allied Council at Versailles ordered the dispatch of an Allied expeditionary force to Archangel under the command of the British general F. C. Poole. Poole’s instructions were to defend the port city, make contact with the Czech Legion and with its help take control of the railway south of Archangel, and organize a pro-Allied army. Nothing was said of fighting the Bolsheviks: Poole’s troops were told, “We do not meddle in internal affairs.”¹⁸⁴

These Allied decisions have been subsequently criticized on the grounds that no serious German threat existed to the northern Russian ports and that in any event German forces in Finland capable of such action were withdrawn in early August and sent to the Western Front. The implication of these criticisms is that the true reason for the expeditions to northern Russia was to overthrow the Bolshevik regime.¹⁸⁵ The charge cannot be sustained. It is known from German archives that the German High Command was indeed considering operations against the ports, either with its own troops or jointly with Finnish and Bolshevik forces. Such an operation made very good sense because control of Murmansk and Archangel would have enabled Germany to deny the Allies access to Russia and thus frustrated plans to reactivate the Eastern Front. Berlin opened negotiations to this end in late May 1918 with Ioffe. These talks eventually broke down, partly because of the inability of the Bolsheviks and Finns to agree on the terms of collaboration and partly because the Germans insisted on occupying Petrograd as a base of operations, to which the Russians would not consent.¹⁸⁶ But the Allies could not have foreseen this, any more than they could have known in June that two months later the Germans would withdraw troops from Finland. There is no evidence to indicate that in sending troops to Russia in 1918 the Allies intended to overthrow the Bolshevik Government. The British, who played a key role in the operation, expressed, both publicly and privately, complete lack of concern about the nature of the government administering Russia. Prime Minister David Lloyd George put the matter bluntly at the meeting of the War Cabinet on July 22, 1918, when he declared that it was none of Britain’s business what sort of a government the Russians set up: a republic, a Bolshevik state, or a monarchy.¹⁸⁷ The indications are that President Wilson shared this view.

The Allied expeditionary force, initially 8,500 troops, 4,800 of them Americans, landed at Archangel on August 1–2. On August 10, General Poole received instructions “to cooperate in restoring Russia with the object of resisting German influence and penetration” and to help the Russians “take the field side by side with their Allies” for the recovery of their country.¹⁸⁸ He was further instructed to establish communications with the Czech Legion, so as to jointly secure railroads leading to the east and organize an armed force to fight the Germans.¹⁸⁹ While the language of these instructions could be interpreted to mean broader, more ambitious objectives than those stated in the June 3 directive, they provide no basis for the claim that the “future of the North Russian expedition would be in fighting the Bolsheviks, not the Germans.”¹⁹⁰ At the time, the Bolsheviks appeared as, and indeed in considerable measure were, partners of the Germans: they took money from them, and more than once told the Germans that only the state of Russian public opinion prevented them from signing with them a formal alliance. The British and French, through their agents in Moscow, were informed of the role which the German Embassy played in keeping the Bolsheviks afloat. To disassociate—let alone contrast—Allied actions in 1918 against the Bolsheviks from those against the Germans, therefore, is to misunderstand both the perceptions and the mood of the time. If Poole’s mission were to fight the Bolsheviks, he certainly would have been given unequivocal instructions to this effect and he would have established communication with opposition groups in Moscow. Of this, there is no evidence. The evidence which does exist indicates, on the contrary, that the task of the Allied expeditionary force in the north was to open a new front against the Germans in cooperation with the Czechoslovaks, the Japanese, and such Russians as were willing to join. It was a military operation intimately connected with the final stages of the World War.

Following the occupation of Archangel, a second Allied force, commanded by British Major General C. C. M. Maynard, landed in Murmansk, which had had a small British contingent since June. Maynard’s force in time grew to 15,000 men, of which 11,000 were Allied troops and the remainder Russians and others. According to Noulens, the Archangel-Murmansk expeditionary force (then 23,500 men strong) nearly sufficed to reactivate the Eastern Front, a task which in the opinion of the Western military mission required 30,000 men.¹⁹¹

Unfortunately for the Allies, by the time they had finally deployed sufficient troops in the north, and this happened only in September, the Czech Legion ceased to exist as a viable offensive force.

As we have seen, the Czechoslovaks originally resorted to arms to ensure unimpeded passage to Vladivostok. In June, however, their mission changed because the Allied command came to regard them as the vanguard of the projected Allied army on the reactivated Eastern Front.¹⁹² In a message to the Czechoslovak troops on June 7, General Čeček thus defined their mission:

Let it be known to all our brothers that on the basis of the decision of the Congress of the [Czechoslovak] Corps, in agreement with our National Council and by arrangement with all the Allies, our corps is designated as the vanguard of the forces of the Entente, and that the instructions issued by the staff of the Army Corps have as their sole purpose creating an anti-German front in Russia jointly with the entire Russian nation and our allies.¹⁹³

In accord with these plans, in early July, the Czechoslovak commanders assigned their troops missions for which they had neither the capability nor the motivation.

To establish a front against the Germans, the Czechoslovaks had to redeploy from a horizontal line, running from west to east, to a diagonal one, running from north to south, along the Volga and the Urals.¹⁹⁴ Accordingly, the Czechoslovak forces still in western Siberia, some 10,000–20,000 strong, launched offensive operations to the north and south of Samara. On July 5, they captured Ufa, on July 21, Simbirsk, and on August 6, Kazan. The assault on Kazan marked the high point of their operations in Russia. After they had compelled a severely depleted 5th Latvian Regiment of 400 men defending the city to retreat, the Czechs captured a gold hoard of 650 million rubles of the Imperial Russian Treasury, evacuated there by the Bolsheviks in February. It enabled them to conduct large-scale military campaigns without resorting to taxation or forced food extractions.

The Czechoslovaks fought with vigor and skill. But they were meant to be only the vanguard—the vanguard of what? The Allies did not stir to help, although they were generous enough with instructions and advice. Nor were anti-Bolshevik Russians more helpful. Prodded by the Allies, the Czechoslovaks tried to unite the Russian political groupings in the Volga region and Siberia, but this proved a hopeless undertaking. On July 15, representatives of Komuch and the Omsk government conferring in Cheliabinsk failed to reach agreement. Disagreements also racked a second Russian political conference held on August 23–25. The squabbling of the Russians exasperated the Czechs.

Komuch attempted to raise an army to fight alongside the Czechoslovaks and the other Allies, but it had only limited success. On July 8, it announced the formation of a volunteer People’s Army (Narodnaia Armiia) under the overall command of General Čeček. But as the Bolsheviks had also found out, a Russian army could not be created on a voluntary basis. Especially galling was Komuch’s experience with the peasants, who, although violently anti-Communist, refused to enlist on the grounds that the Revolution had freed them of all obligations to the state. After inducting 3,000 volunteers, Komuch went over to conscription and in the course of August recruited 50,000–60,000 men, of whom only 30,000 had weapons and only 10,000 were trained for combat.¹⁹⁵ The military historian General N. N. Golovin estimates that at the beginning of September the pro-Allied contingent in western Siberia consisted of 20,000 Czechoslovaks, 15,000 Ural and Orenburg Cossacks, 5,000 factory workers, and 15,000 troops of the People’s Army.¹⁹⁶ This multinational force had no central command and no political leadership.

In the meantime, Trotsky was energetically building up forces in the east. The Kaiser’s pledge of late June not to imperil Soviet Russia allowed him to shift Latvian regiments from the west to the Urals, where they were the first to engage the Czechoslovaks. He then proceeded to press into the Red Army thousands of former tsarist officers and hundreds of thousands of conscripts. He reintroduced and freely applied the death penalty for desertion. The Red Army’s first successes against the Czechoslovaks were won by the Latvians, who on September 7 retook Kazan and five days later Simbirsk. The news of these victories brought jubilation to the Kremlin: for the Bolsheviks they marked a psychological turning of the tide.

But all this lay in the future. On August 1, when the Kremlin received news of Allied landings in Archangel, the situation looked hopeless. In the east, the Czechoslovaks were capturing city after city and had full control of the middle Volga region. In the south, Denikin’s Volunteer Army, headed by the Don Cossacks under General Krasnov, was advancing on Tsaritsyn, capture of which would allow it to link up with the Czechoslovaks and create an uninterrupted anti-Bolshevik front from the middle Volga to the Don. And now a sizable Anglo-American force was assembling in the north, apparently to launch an offensive into the interior of Russia.

The Bolsheviks saw only one way out of their plight and that was German military intervention. This they decided to request on August i, the day after Helfferich had given Chicherin undertakings of continued German support. The meeting at which this decision was made is described in Communist sources as a session of the Sovnarkom, but as there exists no record of a meeting of the cabinet on that day, it is virtually certain it was made personally by Lenin, probably in consultation with Chicherin. The Russians were to propose to the Germans joint military action against Allied and pro-Allied forces: the Red Army, composed at this time essentially of Latvian units, would take up positions to the northeast of Moscow to defend it from the anticipated Allied assault, while the German Army would advance from Finland against the Anglo-American expeditionary force and from the Ukraine against the Volunteer Army. This decision is known to us mainly from the memoirs of Helfferich, who late on August 1 received another unexpected visit from Chicherin. The Commissar of Foreign Affairs told him that he had come directly from a meeting of the cabinet to request, on its behalf, German military intervention.* According to Helfferich, Chicherin said:

In view of the state of public opinion, an open military alliance with Germany is not possible; what is possible is actual parallel action. His government intended to concentrate its forces in Vologda to protect Moscow. It was a condition of parallel action that we not occupy Petrograd: it was preferable that we avoid Petropavlovsk as well. In effect, this approach meant that in order to enable it to defend Moscow, the Soviet Government had to request us to defend Petrograd.

The Bolshevik proposal meant that German forces, from the Baltic areas and/or from Finland, would enter Soviet Russia, establish lines of defense around Petrograd, and advance on Murmansk and Archangel to expel the Allies. But this was not all.

[Chicherin] was no less worried about the southeast.… Under my questioning, he finally spelled out the nature of the intervention that was requested of us: “An active assault against Alekseev, no further [German] support of Krasnov.” Here, as in the case of the north and for the same reasons, what was possible was not an overt alliance but only de facto cooperation: but this was a necessity. With this step, the Bolshevik regime requested the armed intervention of Germany on the territory of Great Russia.¹⁹⁷

Helfferich forwarded to Berlin the Bolshevik request, which he summarized as calling for “silent [Bolshevik] tolerance of our intervention and actual parallel action.”¹⁹⁸ Along with it he sent a pessimistic assessment of the situation in Russia. The main source of Bolshevik authority, he wrote, was the widespread belief that it enjoyed the support of Germany. But such a perception did not constitute a sound basis on which to conduct policy. He recommended that Germany pursue talks with those anti-Bolshevik groups which were not pro-Entente, among them the Right Center, the Latvians, and the Siberian Government.¹⁹⁹ He was of the opinion that if Germany did nothing more than demonstratively withhold support from the Bolsheviks, their opponents would rise and topple them.

Once again the advice of the Moscow Embassy was overruled, this time by Hintze. The Bolsheviks were not friends, he conceded, but they “abundantly” took care of German interests by helping to paralyze Russia militarily.²⁰⁰ He was so displeased with Helfferich’s recommendations that on August 6 he had him recalled to Berlin; the ambassador never returned to his post, which he had held less than two weeks. Hintze then liquidated the troublesome German Embassy, ordering it to leave Moscow so that it could no longer interfere with German-Soviet relations. A few days after Helfferich’s departure, the embassy packed up and left, first for Pskov and then for Revel, both of which were under German occupation. Without a German mission in Russia, the center of Soviet-German relations shifted to Berlin, where Ioffe served as his government’s spokesman and principal negotiator of the commercial and military accords which the two countries concluded at the end of August.*

The abortive efforts of some Germans to topple the Bolsheviks had an epilogue. In early September, the German Consul General in Moscow, Herbert Hauschild, had a visit from Vatsetis. The Latvian officer, who had just been appointed Commander in Chief of the armed forces of Soviet Russia, told Hauschild that he was not a Bolshevik but a Latvian nationalist, and that if his men were promised amnesty and repatriation they would place themselves at the disposal of the Germans. Hauschild informed Berlin, which ordered him to drop the matter.*

The Brest Treaty called for a supplementary accord to regulate Russo-German economic relations.

The Germans were very eager to resume trade with Russia, their major commercial partner before 1914, when Russia had purchased from them nearly one-half of her imports. They wanted foodstuffs, first and foremost, as well as other raw materials, and they wished to establish a near-monopoly on Russia’s foreign trade. In June 1918, Moscow provided the Germans with a list of goods which it claimed to have available for export: it included grain, of which, in reality, it had none to spare. Krasin painted a dazzling picture of the vast markets that Soviet Russia could provide for German manufactured goods, and to prove it, negotiated with his old employer, Siemens, for imports of electrical equipment. None of the proposals had any basis in reality: they were bait to serve political ends. The Germans soon grew impatient with Soviet Russia’s failure to provide the promised goods. In June Dr. Alfred List, who had come to Moscow on behalf of the Bleichröder Bank, told Chicherin that the delays in Russian deliveries brought disappointment to those German circles “among which Great Russia could find the most likely sympathy for her political strivings.”²⁰¹ Lenin was well aware that he could use such “circles”—bankers and industrialists—to neutralize other Germans, mainly among the military, who wanted to be rid of him. He therefore closely monitored the negotiations for the Supplementary Treaty, to which he attached the highest political importance.

The talks opened in Berlin at the beginning of July. The Soviet delegation was headed by Ioffe, who had the assistance of Krasin and various specialists sent by Moscow. The Germans fielded a large delegation of diplomats, politicians, and businessmen. The key person on the German side seems to have been a Foreign Ministry official named Johannes Kriege, whom the historian Winfried Baumgart calls the “gray eminence” of Germany’s policy toward Bolshevik Russia.²⁰² Ioffe was under instructions to be very accommodating to German demands, but if the Germans became unreasonable, he was to make them understand that there were limits to Russia’s compliance. As Ioffe confirmed to Lenin from Berlin: “[our] whole policy must center on demonstrating to the Germans that if they push us too far we will have to fight and then they will get nothing.”²⁰³

91. A German-Russian love affair: contemporary Russian cartoon.

Considering the complexity of the issues involved, agreement was reached speedily. The Germans made harsh demands. Ioffe managed to wring some concessions from them, but even so the accord, known as the Supplementary Treaty, signed on August 27, gave Germany most of the advantages. At issue were territorial and financial matters.*

Concerning territorial questions, Germany pledged not to interfere with the relations between Russia and her border regions: this clause repudiated specifically the efforts of the German military to create, under the name “Southern Union,” a protectorate over the Caucasus and the adjoining Cossack regions.²⁰⁴ Russia acknowledged the independence of the Ukraine and Georgia, and further agreed to surrender Estonia and Livonia, neither of which she had conceded in the Brest Treaty. In return, Russia obtained transit rights to the Baltic ports which she had lost. The Germans had initially demanded Baku, the center of Russia’s petroleum industry, but they eventually consented to leave it in Russia’s hands in exchange for a promise of one-quarter of Baku’s annual production. Baku had been occupied by a British force sent from Persia in early August: the German willingness to leave the city to the Bolsheviks was contingent on the Bolsheviks’ expulsion of the British.²⁰⁵ The Russians also undertook to remove the Allied force from Murmansk, while the Germans agreed to evacuate the Crimea and make some minor territorial adjustments on Russia’s western border.

In the financial settlement, Russia agreed to pay Germany and German nationals full compensation for the losses which they had suffered in consequence of measures taken by the tsarist and Soviet governments, as well as for the costs which Germany claimed to have incurred for the upkeep of the Russian prisoners of war. The Germans estimated this sum to be between 7 and 8 billion deutsche marks. After Russian counterclaims had been taken into account, it was reduced to 6 billion: of this, 1 billion was to be paid by Finland and the Ukraine. Russia undertook to repay, over eighteen months, half of the 5 billion deutsche marks it owed by transferring to Germany 24.5 tons of gold, an agreed-upon quantity of rubles, and 1 billion rubles’ worth of merchandise. The other half Soviet Russia was to repay from the proceeds of a forty-five-year loan floated in Germany. These payments were to satisfy all German claims, governmental as well as private, against Russia. Moscow reconfirmed the provisions of Brest by virtue of which it was to return to their German owners all nationalized and municipalized properties, including confiscated cash and securities, and allow them to repatriate these assets to Germany.

Although upon coming to power the Bolsheviks had condemned secret diplomacy in the strongest terms and made many secret treaties of the “imperialist powers” public, where their own interests were involved they showed no aversion to such practices. There were three secret clauses attached to the Supplementary Treaty, signed by Ioffe for Russia and Hintze for Germany: these became public knowledge only years afterward and have not been published to this day in the Soviet Union. They formalized Germany’s acceptance of Moscow’s requests of August 1 for German military intervention.

One of these secret provisions elaborated Article 5 of the Supplementary Treaty, in which the Russians undertook to expel the Allies from Murmansk. The clause specified that if the Russians were unable to do so, the task would be accomplished by a combined Finno-German force.*

To work out the plan of this operation, the commander of the Petrograd Military District, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, went at the end of August to Berlin at the head of a delegation of the Commissariat of War.²⁰⁶ He agreed that the projected assault on Murmansk would be carried out by German troops; as previously proposed, the mission of the Russian forces would be to intercept the British in the event they advanced on Moscow from Archangel. The two sides clashed over Petrograd. Ludendorff insisted that the Germans had to occupy Petrograd as a base of operations against Murmansk, but Moscow would have none of it. To minimize the bad impression that the movement of German troops across Russian territory would produce, Moscow suggested a variety of deceptive measures, one of which had the German troops serving under the “nominal” command of a Russian officer.²⁰⁷ The actual commander, the Russians agreed, would be a German general: at one point the Soviet side suggested for the part Field Marshal August von Mackensen, the Adjutant General of the Kaiser, who had dealt Russian forces a crushing defeat in Galicia in 1915.²⁰⁸ The operation was being mounted when Germany surrendered.²⁰⁹

The second secret clause, even more sensitive because it involved German action not against foreign forces but against Russians, confirmed German acceptance of the Bolshevik request to initiate operations against the Volunteer Army. The Germans committed themselves to such action in the following words:

Germany expects Russia to apply all the available means to suppress immediately the insurrections of General Alekseev and the Czechoslovaks: Russia, on the other hand, recognizes [nimmt Akt] that Germany, too, will proceed with all available forces against General Alekseev.*

This commitment the Germans also took seriously. On August 13, Ioffe communicated to Moscow that after the Supplementary Treaty had been ratified, the Germans would take energetic measures to crush the Volunteer Army.²¹⁰

Germany promised to intervene against the British and Denikin’s army in response to Soviet requests. The third secret clause came at German insistence and was forced on the unwilling Russians. It obliged the Soviet Government to expel from Baku the British force that had been there since August 4. As in the case of the other two clauses, it stipulated that if Soviet forces proved unequal to the task, the Wehrmacht would assume responsibility, † This provision was also not implemented, because the Turks occupied Baku on September 16, before the German forces were ready to move.

The three secret clauses ensured that if Germany had not collapsed, she would have secured not only an economic but also a military stranglehold on Soviet Russia.

In his report on the Supplementary Treaty to the Reichstag (of course, omitting mention of the secret clauses), Hintze asserted that it laid the basis for Russo-German “coexistence” (Nebeneinanderleben).²¹¹ Chicherin used similar language to the Central Executive Committee on September 2, which unanimously ratified the treaty: despite the “profoundest difference between the Russian and German systems and the basic tendencies of the two governments,” he stated,

peaceful coexistence [mirnoe sozhitel’stvo] of the two nations, which is always the object of the strivings of our worker and peasant government, is at present also desirable for the ruling circles of Germany.²¹²

This is one of the earliest recorded uses in an official statement of the term “peaceful coexistence,” which the Soviet Government would dust off after Stalin’s death.

The two governments now drew steadily closer: one week before Germany’s collapse, they were in a state of de facto political, economic, and military alliance. Hintze was fanatically committed to the support of the Bolsheviks. In early September, when Moscow unleashed its Red Terror, in which thousands of hostages were massacred, he prevented the German press from publishing full accounts of these atrocities sent by correspondents in Russia, for fear of creating public revulsion injurious to further collaboration.²¹³

In September, at Moscow’s request, Germany began to supply Soviet Russia with fuel and weapons. In response to an urgent appeal for coal, the Foreign Office arranged in the second half of October for twenty-five German ships to sail for Petrograd with 70,000 tons of coal and coke. Only about one-half or less managed to reach its destination before the shipments were suspended because the two countries broke off relations. The fuel unloaded in Petrograd went to plants manufacturing weapons for the Red Army.²¹⁴

In September, Ioffe requested 200,000 rifles, 500 million bullets, and 20,000 machine guns. Under pressure from the Foreign Office, Ludendorff gave his reluctant consent, after managing to remove machine guns from the list. This deal did not materialize, due to the departure of Hintze and Chancellor Hertling: the new Chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, was much less enthusiastic about a pro-Bolshevik policy.²¹⁵

Despite the looming defeat of the Central Powers, Moscow punctiliously fulfilled the financial obligations of the Supplementary Treaty. On September 10, it shipped to Germany gold worth 250 million deutsche marks as the first payment of compensation, and on September 30, a second installment of 312.5 million deutsche marks, partly in gold and partly in rubles. The third installment, due on October 31, it did not pay because by then Germany was on the verge of surrendering.

The Bolsheviks believed in the victory of their German friends as late as the end of September 1918. Then things happened which forced them to change their mind. The resignation on September 30 of Chancellor Hertling, followed by the dismissal a few days later of Hintze, removed their most loyal supporters in Berlin. The new Chancellor, Prince Maximilian, requested President Wilson to use his good offices to arrange for an armistice. These were unmistakable symptoms of a looming collapse. Lenin, who at this time was recovering at a dacha near Moscow from wounds suffered in an attempt on his life (see below, this page), at once stirred into action. He instructed Trotsky and Sverdlov to convene the Central Committee to discuss urgent questions of foreign policy. On October 3 he sent to the Central Executive Committee an analysis of the situation in Germany in which he spoke glowingly of the prospects for an imminent revolution there.²¹⁶ At his recommendation, the CEC on October 4 adopted a resolution in which it “declare[d] to the entire world that Soviet Russia will offer all its forces and resources to aid the German revolutionary government.”²¹⁷

The new German Chancellor found such brazen appeals to subversion intolerable. By now even the Foreign Office had its fill of the Bolsheviks. At an interagency meeting in October, the Foreign Office for the first time agreed to a break with Moscow. A memorandum drafted by its staff toward the end of that month justified the change in policy as follows:

We who are in bad odor for having invented Bolshevism and for having let it loose against Russia should now, at the last moment, at least cease to extend any longer a protective hand over it, in order not to forfeit also all the sympathies of future Russia …²¹⁸

Germany had ample justification for breaking with Moscow, inasmuch as Ioffe, who even in the spring and summer of 1918 had pursued subversive activities on its soil, now openly stoked the fires of revolution. As he later boasted, at this time his embassy’s agitational-propagandistic work

increasingly assumed the character of decisive revolutionary preparation for an armed uprising. Apart from the conspiratorial groups of Spartacists, in Germany, and specifically in Berlin, there existed since the January [1917] strike—of course, illegally—soviets of workers’ deputies.… With these soviets the embassy maintained constant communication.… The [Berlin] Soviet assumed that an uprising would be opportune only when the entire Berlin proletariat was well armed. We had to fight this. We had to demonstrate that if one awaited such a moment then no uprising would ever occur, that it is sufficient to arm only the vanguard of the proletariat.… Nonetheless, the striving of the German proletariat to arm itself was entirely legitimate and sensible and the embassy assisted it in every way.²¹⁹

This assistance took the form of money and weapons. When the Soviet Embassy departed, it inadvertently left behind a document showing that between September 21 and October 31, 1918, it had purchased, for 105,000 deutsche marks, 210 handguns and 27,000 bullets.²²⁰

The declaration of the supreme soviet legislative body that it intended to assist the triumph of a revolutionary government in Germany, and Ioffe’s efforts to implement this intention, should have sufficed for a break of diplomatic relations. But the German Foreign Office wanted more incontrovertible grounds and to this end it provoked an incident. Aware that Soviet couriers had for months brought to the embassy agitational materials for distribution in Germany, it arranged for a diplomatic box from Russia to drop and break, as if by accident, while being unloaded at a Berlin railroad station. This was done on the evening of November 4. Out of the damaged crate flew a shower of propaganda material exhorting German workers and soldiers to rise and overthrow their government.²²¹ Ioffe was told he would have to leave Germany at once. Although he displayed appropriate indignation, before departing for Moscow he did not forget to leave Dr. Oskar Cohn, a member of the Independent Socialist Party and a virtual resident of the Soviet mission, 500,000 deutsche marks and 150,000 rubles, to supplement the sum of 10 million rubles previously allocated “for the needs of the German revolution.”*

On November 13, two days after the armistice on the Western Front, Moscow unilaterally abrogated both the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the Supplementary Treaty.²²² The Allies also had Germany renounce the Brest Treaty as part of the Versailles settlement.²²³

The Russian Revolution was never a national event confined to Russia: from the moment the February Revolution broke out, but especially after the Bolsheviks seized Petrograd, it became internationalized and this for two reasons.

Russia had been a major theater of war. Its unilateral withdrawal from the war affected the most vital interests of both belligerent blocs: for the Central Powers it raised the hope of victory, for the Allies the specter of defeat. As long as the war continued, therefore, neither party could be indifferent to what happened to Russia: geographic location alone prevented Russia from escaping the maelstrom of global conflict. The Bolsheviks contributed to their country’s involvement in this conflict by playing off the two belligerent blocs against each other. In the spring of 1918, they discussed with the Allies the formation on their territory of an anti-German multinational army, they agreed to the occupation of Murmansk, and invited help in building the Red Army. In the fall, they requested German military intervention to free the northern ports from the Allies and to crush the Russian Volunteer Army. Time and again, the Germans had to intervene, with political support and money, to prevent the Bolshevik regime from collapsing. Helfferich, referring to the Soviet regime’s crisis of July–August 1918, conceded in his memoirs that “the strongest supporter of the Bolshevik regime during this critical time, even if unconsciously and unintentionally, was the German Government.”²²⁴ In view of these facts, it cannot be seriously maintained that foreign powers “intervened” in Russia in 1917–18 for the purpose of toppling the Bolsheviks from power. They intervened, first and foremost, in order to tip the balance of power on the Western Front in their favor, either by reactivating the front in Russia, in the case of the Allies, or by keeping it quiescent, in the case of the Central Powers. The Bolsheviks actively participated in this foreign involvement, and invited it now from this party, now from that, depending on what their momentary interests called for. German “intervention,” which they welcomed and solicited, very likely saved them from suffering the fate of the Provisional Government.

Second, the Bolsheviks from the outset declared that national borders in the era of socialist revolution and global class war had become meaningless. They issued appeals to foreign nationals to rise and overthrow their governments; they allocated state funds for this purpose; and where they were in a position to do, which for the time being was mainly Germany, they actively promoted revolution. By challenging the legitimacy of all foreign governments, the Bolsheviks invited all foreign governments to challenge theirs. If in fact no power chose to avail itself of that right in 1917–18, it was because none of them had an interest in so doing. The Germans found the Bolsheviks serving their purposes and propped them whenever they ran into trouble; the Allies were busy fighting for their lives. The question posed by one historian—“How … did the Soviet government, bereft of significant military force in the midst of what was until then mankind’s most destructive war, succeed in surviving the first year of the revolution?”²²⁵—answers itself: this most destructive war completely overshadowed Russian events. The Germans supported the Bolshevik regime; the Allies had other concerns.

Hence, it is misleading to see foreign involvement in Russia in 1917–18 in terms of hostile “intervention.” The Bolshevik Government both invited such intervention and aggressively intervened on its own account. Although the great powers, yearning for a return to normalcy, were reluctant to acknowledge it, the Russian Revolution never was a purely internal affair of Russia, important only insofar as it affected the outcome of the war. Russia’s new rulers made certain that it would reverberate around the globe. The November 1918 armistice offered them unprecedented opportunities to organize revolutions in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and wherever else they could do so. Although these efforts failed for the time being, they ensured that the world would know no respite and no return to pre-1914 life.

One further thing needs to be said about foreign involvement on Russian soil during 1918. In all the talk of what the Allies did in Russia, which really was not very much, it is usually forgotten what they did for Russia, which was a great deal. After Russia had reneged on her commitments and left them to fight the Central Powers on their own, the Allies suffered immense human and material losses. As a result of Russia’s dropping out of the war, the Germans withdrew from the inactive Eastern Front enough divisions to increase their effectives in the west by nearly one-fourth (from 150 to 192 divisions).²²⁶ These reinforcements allowed them to mount a ferocious offensive. In the great battles on the Western Front in the spring and summer of 1918—St.-Quentin, the Lys, the Aisne, the Matz, the Marne, and Château-Thierry—the British, French, and Americans lost hundreds of thousands of men. This sacrifice finally brought Germany to her knees.* And the defeat of Germany, to which it had made no contribution, not only enabled the Soviet Government to annul the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and recover most of the lands which it had been forced to give up at Brest but also saved Soviet Russia from being converted into a colony, a kind of Eurasian Africa, which fate Germany had intended for her.

This point is vigorously and persuasively argued by Brian Pearce in How Haig Saved Lenin (London, 1987).

*Izvestiia, No. 22/286 (January 28, 1918), 1, emphasis added. Heraclitus actually said something slightly different: “Strife [not war] is the father and the king of all; some he has made slaves, and some free.”

* Joseph Noulens, Mon Ambassade en Russie Soviétique, II (Paris, 1933), 57–58; A. Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les Relations Franco-Soviétiques, 1917–1024 (Paris, 1981), 59. Noulens wanted to add a further condition that Allied citizens be granted in Russia “the same advantages, privileges, and compensations” that German nationals had received in the Brest Treaty, but he had to drop this demand: Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les Relations, 59.

*Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918 (Vienna-Munich, 1966), 49. There is no basis whatever for Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff’s claim (Les Relations, 60) that it was Noulens who deliberately “ruptured” a looming accord between the Allies and Moscow by giving, at the end of April, an admittedly tactless newspaper interview in which he justified Japanese landings in Vladivostok. The Bolsheviks were not that easily insulted.

†On him, see Wilhelm Joost, Botschafter bei den roten Zaren (Vienna, 1967), 17–63, which is not entirely reliable.

*His papers were edited by Karl Dietrich Erdmann: Kurt Riezler: Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente (Göttingen, 1972). This edition has come under criticism from some German scholars for liberties alleged to have been taken with the texts. See further K. H. Jarausch in SR, XXXI, No. 2 (1972), 381–98.

*It deserves note that neither then nor later in private conversation did Lenin claim popular support as a source of strength: he rather saw it in the disunity of his opponents. In 1920 he told Bertrand Russell that two years earlier he and his associates had doubted they could survive the hostility which surrounded them. “He attributes their survival to the jealousies and divergent interests of the different capitalist nations, also to the power of Bolshevik propaganda”: Bertrand Russell, Bolshevism (New York, 1920), 40.

*The Bolshevik Government received from the Germans monthly subsidies of 3 million marks in June, July, and August: Z. A. B. Zeman, ed., Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915–1918 (London-New York, 1958), 130.

*A selection of Ioffe’s dispatches to Lenin appears in ISSSR, No. 4 (1958), 3–26, edited by I. K. Kobliakov.

*Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 352n. Ioffe says that although he maintained contacts with all German parties, from extreme right to extreme left, he studiously avoided relations with the Social-Democrats, the party of “social traitors”: VZh, No. 5 (1919), 37–38. This policy, pursued on Lenin’s instructions, anticipated Stalin’s policies fifteen years later, which, by forbidding the German Communists to cooperate with the Social-Democrats against the Nazis, has been widely blamed for making possible Hitler’s rise to power.

*This seems to be the earliest mention of concentration camps in Soviet pronouncements.

*M. Klante, Von der Wolga zum Amur (Berlin, 1931), 157. Sadoul, who may have received his information from Trotsky, distributed the legion at the end of May differently: 5,000 in Vladivostok, 20,000 between Vladivostok and Omsk, and another 20,000 west of Omsk, in European Russia: J. Sadoul, Notes sur la Révolution Bolchevique (Paris, 1920), 366.

†A medical assistant in the Austro-Hungarian army, he had been promoted to the rank of captain in the Czechoslovak Corps. In 1919, he fought in the armies of Admiral Kolchak. After Czechoslovakia gained independence, he served as chief of staff, until his arrest on charges of betraying military secrets, of which the courts acquitted him. Later still, he collaborated with the Nazis.

*“One is reduced to the conclusion that external instigation or encouragement, either from the Allies or from the central headquarters of the underground Whites, played no significant part in the decision of the Czechs to take arms against the Soviet power. The outbreak of these hostilities was a spontaneous occurrence … desired by none of the parties concerned”: G. F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton, N.J., 1958), 164.

†Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 227; Erdmann, Riezler, 474; Alfons Paquet in Winfried Baumgart, ed., Von Brest-Litovsk zur deutschen Novemberrevolution (Göttingen, 1971), 76. Muraviev defected anyway in early July and died at the hands of his troops.

*Erdmann, Riezler, 711–12. Riezler included the Kadets among Germany’s potential allies because their leader, Miliukov, then living in the Ukraine, had come out in favor of a pro-German orientation. Other Kadets remained true to the Allies.

* According to their commander, I. I. Vatsetis, by that time most of the Latvian units had been dispatched to the Volga-Ural Front: Pamiat’, No. 2 (1979), 16.

*V. Vladimirova in PR, No. 4/63 (1927), 122–23; Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 554–56; Krasnaia Kniga VChK, II (Moscow, 1920), 148–55. Proshian had served as Commissar of Post and Telegraphs earlier in the year.

*It is known from Riezler’s recollections (Erdmann, Riezler, 474) that the German Embassy had to bribe the Latvians to move against the Left SRs.

*Before her escape, Spiridonova addressed a long letter to the Bolshevik Central Committee. It was published the following year by her followers under the title Otkrytoe pis’mo M. Spiridonovoi Tsentral’nomu Komitetu partii bol’shevikov (Moscow, 1920). The Hoover Institution Library has a copy.

*On May 24, the French Consul General in Moscow, Grenard, who served as intermediary between the French Ambassador and Savinkov, advised Noulens that Savinkov was planning to stage an anti-Bolshevik uprising in the middle of June in the Volga area. That Noulens needed this information, not quite correct in any event, confirms his claim that he had not been involved in Savinkov’s plot: Noulens, Mon Ambassade, II, 109–10. The Grenard dispatch is in the Archive of the French Foreign Ministry, Guerre, Vol. 671, Noulens No. 318, May 24, 1918.

†Boris Savinkov, Bor’ba s Bol’shevikami (Warsaw, 1923), 26. A. I. Denikin, Ocherki Russkoi Smuty, III (Berlin, 1924), 79, claims that the actual figure was 2,000–3,000.

*Krasnaia Kniga VChK, I (Moscow, 1920), 1–42. At his trial in 1924 (Boris Savinkov pered Voennoi Kollegiei Verkhovnogo Suda SSSR, Moscow, 1924, 46–47), Savinkov denied having had a formal program.

* A recent study by Michael Carley, Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War, 1917–1919 (Kingston-Montreal, 1983), 57–60, 67–70, places rather more direct responsibility on the French, but it confuses general assistance given Savinkov with involvement in his uprising.

*Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 237–38. It seems that Lenin was planning to move the seat of government to Nizhnii Novgorod: Ibid., 237, note 38. In 1920, Lenin told Bertrand Russell that two years earlier neither he nor his colleagues had believed their regime stood a chance of surviving. Bertrand Russell, Bolshevism: Practice and Theory (New York, 1920), 40.

*In his brief recollections of this episode—apparently its only mention in Soviet literature—Chicherin, while confirming Helfferich’s account, indicates that the matter was settled by Lenin personally: “Lenin i vneshniaia politika,” Mirovaia politika v 1924 godu (Moscow, 1925), 5. See also his article in Izvestiia, No. 24/2059 (January 30, 1924), 2–3.

*Kurt Riezler, who at this point fades from the picture, returned after the war to his professorship in Frankfurt. When Hitler took power, he emigrated to the United States, where until his death in 1955 he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

*Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 315–16. Vatsetis served as Soviet CIC until the summer of 1919, when he was arrested on charges of participating in a “counterrevolutionary conspiracy.” After being released, he taught at the Soviet Military Academy. In 1938, during a classroom break, he was rearrested and soon afterward executed: Pamiat’, No. 2 (1979), 9–10.

At about the same time the Cheka, then directed by the Latvians M.I. Latsis and Ia. Kh. Peters, engaged in a classic Russian police provocation. It sent a Latvian officer to Lockhart to say that his men were ready to abandon the Bolsheviks. Lockhart turned them over to the British intelligence agent Sidney Reilly, who gave them a considerable sum of money. This ploy was later used to justify Lockhart’s arrest. See IA, No. 4 (1962), 234–37, and Uldis Germanis, Oberst Vacietis (Stockholm, 1974), 35.

*The text of the treaty, minus one of the three secret clauses, is reproduced by J. Wheeler-Bennett in Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace (New York, 1956), 427–46.

*This clause was first published in Europäische Gespräche, IV, No. 3 (1926), 149–53. It is reproduced in Wheeler-Bennett, Forgotten Peace, 436.

* Europäische Gespräche, IV, No. 3 (1926), 150. Ioffe’s acceptance: Europäische Gespräche, 152. Cf. H. W. Gatzke in VZ, III, No. 1 (January 1955), 96–97.

†Baumgart, Ostpolitik, 203. This third secret clause became public knowledge only after World War II. It was first published by Baumgart in Historisches Jahrbuch, LXXXIX (1969), 146–48.

*Ioffe in VZh, No. 5 (1919), 45. Because of his close association with Trotsky, Ioffe later fell into disgrace: he committed suicide in 1927. See Lev Trotskii, Portrety revoliutsionerov (Benson, Vt, 1988), 377–401.

*This point is vigorously and persuasively argued by Brian Pearce in How Haig Saved Lenin (London, 1987).