Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (17 page)

The species and provenance of the snake remain unknown.

Ransome, an unhappily married man, had fallen in love with a Bolshevik – and British intelligence wondered whether he had become one too.
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The object of his affections was none other than Trotsky’s secretary Yevgenia Shelepina. Hill asked her out to dinner but she refused, claiming she had to work at her desk till late.
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The true reason may well have been her growing fancy for Ransome, and the
two were soon conducting an affair. A bit of politics was involved, too. Ransome was sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as well as convinced, from a patriotic viewpoint, that it was in the British interest to have good relations with them and not to bully or subvert Sovnarkom. And Shelepina was anyway a useful source of material for his dispatches home. Her close knowledge of Trotsky’s planning and activity was a priceless asset.

C. P. Scott, Ransome’s editor in Manchester, was not keen on the Soviet revolutionary experiment. While appreciating his reporter’s extraordinary access to the Bolshevik elite, Scott used the old device of muffling a correspondent’s enthusiasms by judicious editing and occasional spiking of reports. At least Ransome kept his job. Louise Bryant lost her contract of employment with the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
and was in no doubt about the reason. As soon as a reporter tried to tell the news honestly, she claimed, the editor at home disowned him or her.
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Morgan Philips Price complained that his telegrams were being suppressed or emasculated.
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But the cheerleaders kept up their work. Determined to write as they pleased, Bryant and Ransome published booklets on Russia after the October Revolution. Ransome’s
Letter to America
so pleased Karl Radek at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs that he helped to get it published in the US and supplied his own introduction. Ransome denied that the Allies had any right to compel Russia to do what they wanted. While allowing that the Revolution might fail, he applauded the Soviet order and its appropriateness for Russia; he dismissed the anti-Bolshevik majority in the Constituent Assembly as an ‘indifferent mass’ of people incapable of achieving the decisiveness and popularity of the Bolsheviks.
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Jacques Sadoul and Raymond Robins went on pressing the case for gentle handling of Sovnarkom by their governments. At the beginning of 1918 their chorus was swelled by Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had caught the eye of Lloyd George as someone with an open mind about the Bolsheviks. The Prime Minister decided to send him back to Russia as ‘Agent’ or ‘Head of the British Mission’.
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Before departing, Lockhart spoke to Viscount Milner (Secretary of State for War), Sir Edward Carson (First Lord of the Admiralty), Earl Curzon (Lord President of the Council and soon to become Foreign Secretary), Lord Hardinge (Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) and Sir George Clerk (private secretary to the Acting Foreign Secretary). Lockhart emerged well briefed on the general problems of the British
war effort. He also learned that Lloyd George had a low opinion of A. J. Balfour and the Foreign Office, which gave Lockhart an opening for writing reports without inhibition.
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Lockhart’s linguistic competence and political contacts as well as his self-confidence were undeniable. Lloyd George got no sense of Lockhart’s recklessness. Perhaps his own personality and unconventional lifestyle – he took his mistress Frances Stevenson along with him nearly everywhere – blinded him to the risks of sending the Scot back into a post of political responsibility without a senior diplomat like Buchanan to keep an eye on him. Lockhart was like quicksilver, a man who loved the thrills of adventure.

He left for Russia on 14 January 1918 with a letter of recommendation from none other than Maxim Litvinov.
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Only one person in Whitehall poured cold water on his mission. General Sir Nevil Macready, who on learning that Lockhart’s assignment was to help to restore the Russians to the eastern front, said: ‘Don’t the boys in the Foreign Office read history? Don’t you know that when an army of seven million runs away in disorder, it needs a generation before it can fight again?’
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But Lloyd George believed that Raymond Robins was carrying out useful work for the Americans and wanted Lockhart to do the same for the British. He told him simply: ‘Go to it.’
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With Lockhart went his personally chosen team of Captain William Hicks, Edward Phelan and Edward Birse. Hicks had recently worked in Russia as an expert on poison gas; Phelan was scooped from the Ministry of Labour, presumably on the premise that he knew how to talk to far-left socialists. Birse was a Moscow businessman.
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They took the normal wartime route across the North Sea and made for Finland, only to discover that the direct rail line down to Petrograd was broken. Instead they made for Helsinki, where they encountered fighting in the streets between the Red and White Finns. The travellers set off quickly to Russia, reaching the capital on 30 January.
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Lockhart wrote in his diary: ‘Streets in a dreadful state, snow had not been swept away for weeks. Everyone looks depressed and unhappy.’

Among his first steps was to arrange a meeting with Trotsky. He lunched beforehand with Raymond Robins, who told him: ‘Trotsky [is a] poor kind [of] son of a bitch but the greatest Jew since Christ.’ Trotsky tried to convince Lockhart that the Bolsheviks would engage in partisan warfare if the Germans mounted an invasion. Lockhart recorded in his diary: ‘Loud in his blame of the French and said the
Allies had only helped Germany by their intrigues in Russia.’
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Robins took a liking to Lockhart and offered him a deal:

Let us assume that I am here to capture Russia for Wall Street and American business men. Let us assume that you are a British wolf and I am an American wolf, and that when this war is over we are going to eat each other up for the Russian market; let us do so in perfectly frank, man fashion, but let us assume at the same time that we are fairly intelligent wolves, and that we know that if we do not hunt together in this hour the German wolf will eat us both up, and then let us go to work.
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From that day onwards they took breakfast together.
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Lockhart slotted himself back into old routines, getting official accreditation as Roman Romanovich Lokkart from the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs even though Britain was withholding recognition from Sovnarkom.
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He was enjoying himself. He saw Trotsky regularly and put the case for Russian military co-operation with the Allies. Sadoul too maintained amicable ties with Trotsky. Ambassador Noulens was later to declare that Sadoul favoured communist Russia over France. Ambassador Francis, he thought, was coming to the same conclusion about Robins. And soon Lockhart’s oddities too were remarked upon.
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Colonel Alfred Knox put things with succinct brutality: ‘[Robins] is a fanatic with the temperament of a hero-worshipping schoolgirl, and while without the mental equipment or the experience to enable him to advise on policy, he is a dangerous companion for anyone as impressionable as Lockhart.’
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General Henry Wilson on behalf of the Imperial General Staff urged the War Cabinet either to stop Lockhart commenting on military questions or, failing that, to recall him from Moscow.
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But Lockhart, Robins and Sadoul were excellent conduits for contact with the Soviet leadership and were still too useful to be dropped.
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The Western Allies needed to make the best of a bad situation. There was a war to be won and it was important to go on cajoling the Russians to stay in the war.

PART TWO

SURVIVAL

9. TALKS AT BREST-LITOVSK

The Bolshevik leaders were optimists. Believing that only a little time was needed for their revolutionary example to be followed abroad, they had agreed to a truce on the eastern front on 15 December 1917. Sovnarkom demobilized the Russian Army – when the formal order went out by wireless on 7 December, the slim chance of having any forces available to repel the Germans disappeared;
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Russia was rendered indefensible as peasant soldiers, rifles over their shoulders, jumped on trains and went back to the villages. Lenin and Trotsky were counting on ‘European socialist revolution’ and felt that the October Revolution depended on their gamble. The Allied powers looked on anxiously. The consequences for their armies on the western front would be deeply damaging if a deal was struck between Germany and Russia. The Germans stood to gain from being able to transfer army divisions from the east as their manpower ran low in northern France. They had already sent experienced troops there while the Russian Army had been falling apart. There could also be economic benefit because Germany wanted access to goods and markets in Russia, Ukraine and the south Caucasus so as to circumvent the British naval blockade of German ports.

Russia and Germany continued to negotiate at the little German-held town of Brest-Litovsk close to the eastern front. The German high command was getting anxious. It badly needed its armies to crush the Western Allies before the Americans could be fully deployed there.
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Each side in Brest-Litovsk expected to achieve its purposes to the detriment of the other. The Germans wanted a separate peace with Russia, the Russians a German communist revolution. Berlin was confident that the talks would be of brief duration since the communists had empty trenches and no soldiers. German commanders and diplomats felt no need for preparations beyond allocating a set of two-storeyed dwellings to house the delegations in the snow-laden town.
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The Germans and their allies – Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Turks – sat down with the Russians in the Officers’ Building on 22 December. Trotsky was needed in Petrograd and so it was his friend Adolf Ioffe who headed the Soviet delegation that departed by rail via Vilnius and Bialystok. Ioffe was from a rich Jewish family from Simferopol in Crimea. His father had a reputation as Minister of Finances Sergei Witte’s ‘favourite Jew’ in the 1890s, and Adolf’s choice of a revolutionary career aroused parental consternation. He had also married young, gaining family consent solely because the girl was Jewish – Ioffe senior had feared that his atheist son might marry outside the ancestral faith. Adolf received a regular financial allowance that enabled him to enrol as a student in the Berlin University medical faculty. Although he worked hard at his studies, the police objected to his activities on behalf of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and expelled him from Germany. He decamped to Vienna where he became a pupil of the psychologist Alfred Adler and made the acquaintance of Trotsky. In 1917 he wrote prolifically and served on the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Although he had no expertise in international affairs, his command of German and familiarity with central Europe were thought an asset for dealing with Germany and Austria-Hungary.
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Travelling with Ioffe in the delegation were Lev Kamenev and a handful of lesser Bolsheviks including the rising official of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, Lev Karakhan. Radek joined them later. Some military officers attended as special advisers; their morale was so low that it was said that they went ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, believing that the Bolsheviks were bent on signing terms that were tantamount to treason. Admiral Altvater was apparently an exception: Trotsky sardonically reported that he ‘was touched by grace and has returned from Brest-Litovsk more Bolshevik than the Bolsheviks on this peace question’.
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Ioffe had a preliminary conversation with the Austrian Foreign Minister Count Ottokar von Czernin and politely rejected his entire worldview. When Czernin commented sceptically on Soviet political expectations, Ioffe leant across and said: ‘I still hope we’ll succeed in calling forth a revolution in your country.’
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Such was the atmosphere when Prince Leopold of Bavaria opened the formal talks on behalf of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. Ioffe spoke for the Russian side and insisted, in the face of Turkish objections, on full publicity for the proceedings in Russia and among the Central
Powers. He exploited the occasion by giving an explanation of the purposes behind Lenin’s Decree on Peace. Over the next few days Ioffe and Kamenev completely ignored the big topic at the centre of everyone’s attention: the German demand for Russia to sign a comprehensive peace on the eastern front. The Bolsheviks had vowed to start a ‘revolutionary war’ rather than make a separate settlement with the Germans, so they needed to keep the Central Powers talking and talking. Ioffe expatiated on the complications likely to arise from Soviet economic nationalizations as yet to be announced. He also drew attention to the problems arising from a separate delegation from the Ukrainian Central Rada, which had declared Ukraine’s independence in January but had yet to be recognized by Sovnarkom. Ioffe explained all the niceties with elegance and courtesy.
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