Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (3 page)

Lenin and Trotsky after the Russian Civil War successfully tempted several foreign countries into trading with Russia. But the conventional idea that this marked the end, for a while, to Soviet expansionist schemes is utterly wrong. Comintern, on orders from Moscow, tried in March 1921 to overthrow the German government. The communist action in Germany was undertaken despite the knowledge that this would bring British and French armies on to German soil to restore their continental dominance. Although the Party Politburo spoke the rhetoric of peace for Europe, its members had mentally prepared themselves for another European war.

Yet there was no German communist revolution in the inter-war period despite Comintern’s intensive efforts. The Soviet leadership underestimated the resilience of anti-communist groups and feelings across Germany – just as they had overlooked Polish nationalism when marching on Warsaw in 1920. No matter how good the information that was available to politicians, it was only as useful as they allowed it to be. Lenin and Trotsky had already fixed their view on the world and its future. They were convinced that Europe was on the threshold of communist revolution and that it needed only a slight nudge from them to make all this happen. The ‘masses’ in the communist imagination would break off their chains and rise in revolt. Bolshevik leaders filtered the contents of reports they received from the West. Their informants themselves, being communists, pre-filtered a lot of it before sending material on to Russia. Political ideology was involved, but Lenin and Trotsky anyhow had little time for basic reflection. And although they adjusted policy to changing circumstances, they still did this within the setting of their general preconceptions. They led a party which objected whenever they abandoned established doctrine. They themselves were ardent believers in the communist cause. They had given their lives to it and, despite being agile in their political manoeuvres, kept any practical compromises to a minimum.

The Allied leaders too had their own prior assumptions. Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George were in receipt of plentiful information from diplomats, reporters and agents – far more informants operated for them in Russia than the Soviet leaders could yet deploy in the West; but it was one thing for governments to obtain reports and an entirely different one to know what to do next. While being
grateful for the fast flow of material, every Western leader had to contend with witnesses contradicting each other. Understandably, leaders who were already dealing with horrendous difficulties in their own countries and throughout central Europe worked as much by instinct and preconception as by steady analysis of the reports placed on their desks. Lloyd George in particular went his own way in his pursuit of Britain’s post-war economic recovery, stealing a march on France and America by authorizing the 1921 trade agreement with Soviet Russia. He had an exaggerated belief in the erosion of communism that would result in Russia. As a result he donated a breathing space to Lenin for his New Economic Policy, decisively enabling the Soviet state to restore its economy and stabilize its control over society.

This book takes up an international vantage point on Soviet Russia and the West. The foreigners who reported, denounced, eulogized, negotiated, spied on, subverted or attacked Russia in 1917–21 rest in their graves. The Russians – Reds and Whites – who fought over Russia’s future in their Civil War are long gone. Lenin’s mausoleum still stands on Red Square in Moscow, a monument to an October Revolution that shook the world’s politics to its foundations. His corpse remains there because Russian public opinion is not ready for its removal. What happened in Petrograd in late 1917 transfigured global politics in the inter-war period. Out of the maelstrom of revolutionary Russia came a powerful state – the USSR – which defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War and for decades after 1945 was locked in the contest of the Cold War against the US and its allies. The October Revolution gave rise to questions which remain important today, questions that find expression in the polarities of democracy and dictatorship, justice and terror, social fairness and class struggle, ideological absolutism and cultural pluralism, national sovereignty and armed international intervention. This is a cardinal reason why the history of Soviet Russia and the West continues to command attention.

PART ONE

REVOLUTION

1. TROUBLING JOURNEYS

In March 1917, while Europe was convulsed by the Great War, news of a revolution in Russia began to spread abroad. It started in Petrograd, the capital, with an outburst of industrial conflict. Strikes had taken place in the two previous winters and the army and political police had dealt with them efficiently. Workers determined to bring down the Imperial monarchy walked out of the factories and joined demonstrations. Emperor Nicholas II was at GHQ in Mogilëv, five hundred miles away, and saw no reason for concern. This time, however, the strikers did not simply go home, but massed on the streets and goaded the militants of clandestine revolutionary parties into joining them. When the army garrisons were mobilized to restore order, the troops went over to the side of the workers. The popular mood was fiercely radical. Workers and soldiers elected their own Petrograd Soviet (or Council) to press for their cause. Suddenly the Russian capital became ungovernable. Alert at last to the magnitude of the emergency, the emperor sought to abdicate in favour of his haemophiliac young son Alexei. When counselled against this, he suggested that his brother Mikhail should take the throne, but this compromise was angrily rejected by those demonstrating on the streets. They would be satisfied only by the removal of the Romanov dynasty, and they had Petrograd at their mercy.

The end for the Romanovs, when it came, was abrupt. It was also unexpectedly peaceful. On 15 March Nicholas II’s nerve suddenly cracked and he stood down, allowing a Provisional Government to take power. It was led by the liberal Georgi Lvov with Pavel Milyukov as Foreign Affairs Minister and Alexander Guchkov as Minister for Military Affairs. Most of the cabinet’s members were liberals, with Guchkov as the sole representative of moderate conservative opinion. There was but one minister on the political left. This was the Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski, a young lawyer who became Minister of Justice.

The Petrograd Soviet, led by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, gave its blessing to this arrangement. The Mensheviks were a Marxist faction dedicated to the ultimate objective of socialist revolution; but they believed that the country had not yet reached the level of modernization necessary to socialism, and they shuddered at the thought of burdening themselves with responsibility for governance in wartime. The Socialist-Revolutionaries looked for support more to the peasants than to the workers. But they too were influenced by Marxism and they shared the judgement of the Mensheviks. Together these two socialist organizations could easily have taken power in the Russian capital. Instead they gave approval to Lvov’s cabinet on condition that he agreed to renounce Nicholas II’s expansionist aims and fight only a defensive war. They also demanded the realization of a full range of civic reforms. Lvov agreed. He understood that, without the Petrograd Soviet’s consent, the Provisional Government would be still-born. So began an uneasy system of rule known as dual power.

The press in Paris and London initially held back from reporting what was going on. The war against the Central Powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria – was poised on a knife edge, and France and the United Kingdom wanted nothing done that might damage Russia’s fighting capacity. The Russians had joined the French and the British in the Triple Entente that had taken Serbia’s side in its dispute with Austria-Hungary in mid-1914. The Entente powers, usually known as the Allies, were joined by Japan, Italy and others. Two great military fronts, the western and the eastern, stretched across Europe. The early successes fell to Germany as its armies pressed into northern France and Russian-ruled Poland. But quickly the Great War became a conflict fought from trenches as the fronts were stabilized and neither the Central Powers nor the Allies appeared able to devise methods to break the stalemate until December 1916 when the flexible offensive of General Alexei Brusilov resulted in a Russian advance. The French and the British, worn down on the western front, acclaimed Russia’s military achievement at the time; and when telegrams arrived reporting the political disturbances in Petrograd, the governments in Paris and London avoided any semblance of interference. Not until 19 March 1917, when the Provisional Government was already in office, did the press report that Nicholas II had abdicated.
¹

What happened in Russia had been predicted for years but few
revolutionary emigrants had expected the final moments to be so orderly. Ivan Maiski, a left-wing Menshevik resident in London, raced around calling on fellow emigrants and ‘congratulating’ startled English passers-by. The cry went up among the comrades: ‘To Russia!’
²
Another of the émigrés was Maxim Litvinov, who phoned his wife Ivy at a nursing home in Golders Green after the birth of their son Misha. Litvinov belonged to the Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxists, led by Lenin, which regarded the Mensheviks as disgraceful moderates; and he was no armchair revolutionary, having helped to launder the money stolen by Bolsheviks in the sensational Tiflis bank robbery in 1907. Ivy shared Maxim’s delight: ‘Darling it means we’re not refugees any more.’
³
Litvinov was so elated that he tried to shave with his toothpaste and got into the bath without having turned on the water. He had waited for revolution all his adult life. Now it had happened, and his hands trembled with excitement as he read the newspapers.
⁴
‘The colony’ of Russian Marxists assembled to confer about the situation: ‘[They] began to feel the compulsion to meet every day in each other’s rooms, talking, exclaiming, surmising, looking from face to face, and their wives, unwilling to miss a word, popped the dishes into the cold oven, too impatient even to take them out to the scullery.’
⁵
The small world of Russian political emigrants bubbled with exhilaration.

Litvinov felt he had to do something, almost anything, for the revolutionary cause in Russia. His mind was bursting with frustration. While Petrograd was in political ferment, he was stuck hundreds of miles away in London. As a Bolshevik, he regarded the war as an ‘imperialist’ conflict between two coalitions of greedy capitalists. Most Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries thought the same. But no socialist organization in Russia, not even the Bolsheviks, had yet fixed its policy on how to end the war – it would take months before some degree of clarity emerged on this matter.

In a burst of zeal, Litvinov met up with British socialists who opposed the Allied war effort. The Labour anti-war MP Ramsay MacDonald received them in the House of Commons. MacDonald naturally did not share the British government’s hope that the fall of the Romanovs would increase Russian combativeness on the eastern front. In fact he was predicting the opposite.
⁶
But although he was courteous enough, he disappointed Litvinov by providing no notion about what ‘he was going to do about the Revolution’.
⁷
Litvinov called next day at the Russian embassy in Chesham House and was
received by the chargé d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov. He asked why the staff had not yet taken down the portraits of the Imperial family.
⁸
He enjoyed rubbing up the old regime’s officials the wrong way. Nabokov stood his ground and behaved with dignity. He had never disguised his sympathy with the Russian liberals and was hoping to receive the trust of Lvov and his cabinet. Instead the Provisional Government gave the London embassy to former Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Sazonov.
⁹
But as Sazonov failed to arrive, Nabokov continued to head the embassy.

On 31 March the Labour Party held a celebration of the revolutionary events at the Albert Hall. Ten thousand people attended and Ramsay MacDonald was the main speaker. Others on the platform included Israel Zangwill, who spoke on behalf of the Russian Jewish refugees in London’s East End. The audience adopted Russian custom and bared their heads before observing a silence in honour of ‘the countless sacrifices which the Russian people have made to win their freedom’.
¹⁰
It was an occasion that nobody present would forget. The Romanovs were gone and freedom had arrived in Russia. There was talk of a brotherhood of the Russians and the British no longer poisoned by the existence of tsarist despotism.

Most of the revolutionary emigrants in central and western Europe were impatient to return to Russia. The only routes available to them were across the North Sea, either directly to Archangel and onward by rail to any number of Russian cities or to Scandinavia and then by a longer railway journey looping over northern Sweden and Finland south to Petrograd.
¹¹
Britain’s Royal Navy had penned Germany’s large fleet in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven for the duration of the war. The result was that transport to Sweden or Norway from the rest of Europe became a British prerogative, and even the French government had to seek authority to send ships eastwards. The big Russian revolutionary colonies in Paris, Geneva and Zurich therefore had to cross the English Channel if they aimed to go home. London was turned for the first time into the largest centre for Russian political emigrants.
¹²
Excitement grew about the chance of a trip to Scandinavia, and the passenger ferries from the French ports to Dover were kept busy with Slavic passengers. The editorial board of
Nashe slovo
, a Russian Marxist anti-war newspaper based in Paris, was stripped bare by the exodus; the same happened to the émigré revolutionary press in Switzerland. The place to shape opinion was
Petrograd. Nowhere else mattered, and the emotional tug on the minds of émigrés was seldom resistible.