Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (28 page)

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Lockhart, being no longer able to communicate confidentially with London, resolved to undertake drastic measures of his own. He continued to have secret
meetings with representatives of the National Centre and the Volunteer Army. This was dangerous enough for him after the Cheka’s recent raid. But on 14 August he went further by confidentially hosting Colonel Eduard Berzin of the 1st Latvian Heavy Artillery Division at his Moscow apartment. The two of them agreed a plot to dislodge the Latvians serving in the Red Army from supporting Sovnarkom.
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In none of his later accounts did Lockhart explain how he came to approach Berzin. The reason for his reticence is fairly clear. He was to find it inconvenient to admit how deeply embedded he had been in British intelligence work in Russia. Privately, however, he gave a fuller account and acknowledged that Sidney Reilly initiated things by bringing representatives of the Latvians to him – and Lockhart then took over the planning and co-ordination.
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Whereas earlier Lockhart had provided money and encouragement for Russians to carry out subversion, now he was taking a British initiative without consulting any Russian organization. Lockhart arrived at an imaginative agreement with Berzin. The Latvian troops were known as the Soviet government’s praetorian guard. Despite having crushed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and helped to recapture Kazan, the Latvians felt no debt of allegiance to Sovnarkom. George Hill recorded that they were fed up with being used as ‘executioners’ for the Bolsheviks.
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They were the human flotsam of the Great War since it was impossible for them to return home while the Germans held Riga; but the Latvians were increasingly worried that fighting for the Soviet cause would irritate the Western Allies and cost them dearly if the Allied coalition won the war. In any case, why risk life and limb in the service of the Reds? Lockhart himself always denied that he had instigated anything. He claimed that it had been the Latvians who made the approach to him and not the other way round. He also maintained that his proposal had merely been to move the riflemen from Moscow to the side of the British in Murmansk.
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The Cheka would bluntly reject this. The records of their investigation and interrogations indicated that Lockhart proposed to finance the Latvians to enable them to arrest the Soviet leadership and overthrow Bolshevism – and Lockhart in old age admitted to his son that the Soviet version of the episode was essentially correct.
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The scheme for a Latvian coup was not wholly outlandish. For a time, just tens of thousands of Czechs had tipped the balance in the war between Komuch and Sovnarkom. The Latvians occupied sensitive
positions of power in Moscow, including the Kremlin itself. They could wreak havoc if they wanted. Of course, they would never get official permission to depart from Moscow. They would have to commandeer a train and probably use force. Soviet authorities would instruct stations on the Moscow–Murmansk line to obstruct their passage. The Red Army was unlikely to be allowed to stand still in the Volga region while the British expanded their influence. Lockhart had at the very least started a conspiracy to disrupt Soviet rule. There was bound to be fighting in Moscow – and he must have hoped that if things went well, his Anglo-Latvian initiative might somehow bring about the downfall of Sovnarkom. There was no other reason for causing mayhem in Moscow.

Lockhart met Berzin again on 15 August. This time Sidney Reilly and Fernand Grenard, the French consul-general, were present.
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Two days later Lockhart gave an affidavit to Latvian rifleman Jan Buikis enabling him to talk to British intelligence officials in Petrograd.
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The plot was thickening as Lockhart sought to lay the groundwork for the coming action. He was aware that the Soviet leadership’s anger at the recent British occupation made his own situation in Moscow precarious. Thinking that the Foreign Office might recall him to London at any moment, he transferred the overseeing of the Latvian arrangement to Reilly. Berzin said that three or four million rubles would be needed to see things through to a successful conclusion. Reilly was given 700,000 rubles to hand over to the Latvians as a first instalment; Lockhart subsequently passed on another 700,000 rubles. Lockhart and Reilly saw each other as rarely as possibly. Both of them had complete trust in Berzin.
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Only at this juncture – according to both Lockhart’s and Hill’s memoirs – was the plot expanded to involve a coup
d’état
. Although they wrote admiringly about Reilly, they held him personally responsible for this changed objective; and Reilly was dead by the time their books appeared. They claimed that the new idea was for the Latvian military units guarding the Kremlin precinct to surprise the communist leaders at gunpoint in the course of a Sovnarkom session. Hill maintained that there was to have been no killing because Reilly sensed that the Russian people would object to a foreign force cutting down Russia’s government. Reilly supposedly wanted to parade the communist leaders through the streets of Moscow with the aim of humiliating them and showing how vulnerable they were. Lenin and Trotsky would be stripped of their ‘nether garments’ and forced to
appear in their shirts alone.
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It is an entertaining but implausible story, and even Hill subsequently claimed to have thought the plan impractical. The idea that Reilly thought he would secure success by removing the underwear of the Soviet leadership is hard to believe. Hill, like Lockhart, knew he was breaking the rules by publishing a personal account of secret intelligence work and probably judged it wise to tenderize his account of British subversive activity in August 1918. Or maybe Hill and Lockhart simply wanted to clear their own names in connection with a conspiracy that went badly wrong.

At any rate a Cheka secret report, collated in 1920 by Yakov Peters from testimonies and interrogations two years earlier, told a very different story: Lenin and Trotsky were to be shot after capture.
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Peters was not writing for general publication but for distribution inside the supreme communist leadership. And indeed even if the Cheka report was a fiction and the account given by Lockhart and Hill was true, there can be no doubt that the outcome of the conspiracy would inevitably have been a violent one. Lockhart had authored a scheme which, however it was activated, would soak Moscow in blood. The Western Allies sensed the coming of victory in northern France. The British Foreign Office and Secret Service Bureau led the way in plotting to prepare a future for Russia free from Bolshevik rule. All Europe including its Russian extremity was to be transformed.

15. A VERY BRITISH PLOT

Robert Bruce Lockhart’s fingers were still wrapped around the Latvian conspiracy on 25 August 1918 when he took Sidney Reilly to the US consulate to brief the Americans and French about his plans. The acting consul-general DeWitt Clinton Poole Jr and Xenophon Kalamatiano were present together with the French consul-general Fernand Grenard and the
Figaro
correspondent René Marchand.
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Reilly later claimed to have felt doubts about whether he had been sensible in going to such a meeting.
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The conversation covered progress with the Latvians and reportedly dwelt on the desirability of co-ordinating Allied undercover activities.
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But Marchand, who had once regretted the fall of Kerenski and the Provisional Government, felt repelled by the conspiracy being set up by Lockhart and Reilly, and he took the silence of Poole and Grenard as proof that they condoned it. He wrote an angry letter to President Poincaré denouncing what agents of the Western Allies were getting up to – he rightly assumed that Poincaré was in the dark about the plot.
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Of much greater importance was the fact that he also went to the communist authorities and told them what he had heard in the American consulate. Marchand became a turncoat.
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The Frenchman assumed that he was the first to inform the Chekists, but in fact they learned of the plot several days earlier. Colonel Berzin told Yakov Peters (another Latvian, as it happened) as soon as Lockhart had made his proposition. Peters consulted Dzerzhinski and the decision was taken to ask Berzin to play along with the British. They hoped that this would lead them to all the British, Russian and Latvian conspirators as well as supply a pile of compromising information on Allied diplomats.
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The Lockhart plot became an open secret at the top of the communist leadership. Ivy Litvinov would later recall:

Very interesting about Lockhart. They had Lockhart in – they arrested him, you know, and nobody here knew why. Oh, yes, being implicated in a plot with White Russians to seize Lenin or something like that. All true but it was all provocation. Yes, Maxime told me. Our people employed, I mean the Soviet people – they were not called Soviet people then – I forget . . . A certain agent provocateur – I am putting it very primitively, you know – said would you like to take part in a plot . . . and he said ‘Yes, with pleasure.’ Then they flung him into prison. That’s never been written, you know.
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Allied officials in Russia had seriously underestimated the Bolshevik party’s hard-won expertise in methods of police infiltration and provocation. They had also overrated their own cleverness. In reality they had set a trap whereby they would ensnare themselves rather than the Bolsheviks.

Two events on 30 August induced the Cheka to abandon its stealthy approach. The first was the assassination of Petrograd’s leading Chekist Moisei Uritski by anti-Bolshevik socialist Leonid Kanegisser. Later in the day Lenin gave a couple of stirring speeches to factory workers and was returning to his limousine at the Mikhelson factory when shots were fired at him. Badly wounded, he was hurried to the Kremlin for emergency treatment. For some time it was uncertain whether he would survive. Dora Kaplan, a woman loitering outside the factory for no good reason, was arrested as the culprit and summarily executed. Since she was extremely myopic and mentally very confused, she had almost certainly not committed the crime. But the Bolshevik leaders wanted to show that they meant business. Yakov Sverdlov took command of both the party and the government. A Red terror was proclaimed.

The Cheka took hundreds of Allied officials and residents of Moscow and Petrograd into custody. Chekist officials already had plenty of evidence against prominent Britons, Frenchmen and Americans, and believed that there could well be other intelligence operations they had yet to uncover. Better to wait for more Allied spies and agents to come to light. Better, too, to show the Allies that the Bolsheviks would not be pushed around and were able to look after themselves. The Cheka behaved liked the vanguard of the Soviet order when one of its units raided the apartment of Colonel Henri de Verthamont, head of the French secret service. Verthamont escaped over the rooftops, leaving behind a cache of explosives and other compromising material, but Chekists succeeded in capturing six of his agents. As the news spread, the British broke contact with the
French in the hope of being left alone.
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This did not stop the Cheka. Lockhart, who had Moura Benckendorff with him, was arrested at his flat at 3.30 a.m. on 31 August. At first he refused to disclose his name. But the charade could not continue and he yielded to the Chekists. Moura and Major Hicks were also taken into custody.
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Lockhart was promised that there would be no harsh interrogation if he answered the accusations against him.
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It was a gentle confinement by Soviet standards, and Lockhart and Hicks were released on 1 September.
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Next day Lockhart returned to plead with Karakhan for the liberation of Moura and his own servants. Karakhan promised to do what he could. The following morning Lockhart was shocked to read Moscow newspapers ‘full of the most fantastic accounts of Allied conspiracy of which I am said to be the head’. He stood accused of buying up the Latvian Riflemen and conspiring to murder Lenin and Trotsky and blow up bridges around the capital. A further charge was that the Allies aimed to appoint a compliant dictator.
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The details may have erred on the fantastical side; but the truth was that Lockhart was genuinely distressed – both at being rumbled and at the possible public consequences that were likely to flow from this. Events quickened their pace. News came through that Maxim Litvinov had been imprisoned in London so as to ensure the safety of all Britons held in Soviet gaols.
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Then, on 4 September, Lockhart was rearrested.
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This time he was taken inside the precincts of the Kremlin: it was the only area of Moscow where security could be guaranteed, and the Soviet leaders were intent on holding on to their valuable British prize.