Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (30 page)

The bartering of Lockhart for Litvinov prefigured situations in the Cold War when captured Soviet intelligence agents walked over the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin as their Western counterparts proceeded simultaneously from the other side.
The Times
in London reported that Litvinov and about thirty of his compatriots departed for Scandinavia on 25 September 1918. They were not to be allowed to reach Russia until Lockhart and the other Allied officials crossed the Russian frontier.
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With Major Hicks and his new wife in the British party at the Finland Station in Petrograd was George Hill, who appeared in uniform for the first time in months; he needed to leave the country in order to arrange a fresh source of funds for his work.
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Lockhart stayed impassive as he bade goodbye to Moura, perhaps so as to avoid transgressing public politesse, and she left the platform an hour before departure.
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When the full group of thirty-one British and twenty-five French nationals crossed into Finland, preparations were made to convey Litvinov and his friends up to the Swedish–Finnish frontier. The British and French arrived in groups. When everyone was assembled the Allied representatives walked over the bridge across the river from Tornio to Haparanda where they boarded a train to Stockholm, arriving there on 9 October.
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Others remained under
guard in Russia until Chicherin heard confirmation that Litvinov had reached neutral Norway, but soon the full exchange of officials was completed.

By then a new factor was being considered by the Bolshevik supreme leadership. The Germans were unmistakably losing the war on the western front. With the Western Allies nearing the point of victory, it might prove unhelpful for the Soviet regime to have discriminated against French citizens. On 30 October the Bolsheviks dispatched Sadoul to interview Ludovic Naudeau, a French journalist arrested in the summer. Sadoul’s purpose became clear when he asked Naudeau for his opinion on the Allied military intervention in Russia. The journalist replied that he had supported the arrival of the Allies chiefly out of anti-German motives; but he stressed that he was now out of touch with events. Sadoul was blunt. If Naudeau wanted his freedom he would have to sign a denunciation of the intervention, allowing it to be printed in
Izvestiya
and
Pravda
and declaring his endorsement of Soviet principles. Peters of the Cheka had insisted on this as a condition. Naudeau sent Sadoul packing, but it was a sign of the uncertainties of the international situation that the Soviet leadership thought it worth while to try and do a deal with him just as they had sought to entice Lockhart to remain in Russia.
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The Bolsheviks soon reverted to a firmer line. Although Lockhart, Reilly and Verthamont had escaped their clutches, the Cheka had assembled a mass of evidence to put before the Russian public. It also had several prisoners; and although Kalamatiano was not half as culpable as the departed British and French, he was conveniently under lock and key and could serve as the main defendant in a show-trial. The Cheka referred to the ‘Kalamatiano–Lockhart & Co. counter-revolutionary espionage organization’.
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Until then the Americans in Russia had been treated gently. As late as 15 October 1918 a young US consul was released from Butyrki prison whereas his fellow prisoner, a Frenchman captured at Tsaritsyn on the Volga, was refused his freedom.
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The implication was that Americans received softer treatment than the French – at least this was how Lockhart, safely back in Britain, interpreted the development.
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Soon after his return, he received a letter from a distressed Moura Benckendorf, writing from Moscow: ‘I love you, Baby, past all balancing or cool reasoning. I love you more than all the world. If only you knew the longing for you. I lie awake repeating your name, visualising your surroundings, all you, my Baby.’
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On 2 November
Lockhart sent a flirtatious reply, saying she was naughty for thinking that his ship might go down in the North Sea. He also mentioned that his wife Jean had nursed him back to health after a bout of Spanish flu, adding: ‘I cannot leave her.’ He had told Jean about Moura – ‘she was very nice’ about it.
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Moura wrote back jealously about how Jean was monopolizing his medical recovery.
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But by then Lockhart had put Moura at the back of his mind, ready to be fetched out only if ever the fancy and opportunity occurred. At the time such a prospect seemed permanently out of reach. Moura was both less sanguine and less fortunate. On 19 April 1919 she wrote to ‘Locky’ that ‘some Esthonians out of revenge’ had murdered her husband.
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The Lockhart Case opened before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal on 25 November 1918. Prosecutor-General Nikolai Krylenko outlined a plot against Soviet rule and a
Pravda
editorial announced: ‘It is well known that the Allied missions in Russia have tried by means of conspiracies directly through their agents to overthrow the hated Workers’ and Peasants’ government.’
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The art of the showtrial had yet to be refined in Soviet Russia. The authorities fumbled their hand by changing the charges between the original arraignment and the lengthy statement by Krylenko – and Angelika Balabanova, a fair-minded Bolshevik, drew attention to this.
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At the heart of the case was the contention that there had been a violent conspiracy against Sovnarkom and that Lockhart and Reilly had led the plot. In their absence it was Kalamatiano who suffered along with his right-hand man Alexander Fride.
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Altogether there were twenty defendants in court.
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The majority were people who had worked for the Americans or the British. At the second sitting, on 28 November, the Cheka’s deputy leader Peters recited the evidence that implicated Lockhart as the instigator of the plot. He recounted the activities of Reilly and Kalamatiano as well as the amount of foreknowledge in the possession of all the Allied diplomatic personnel.
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The defendant General Zagryazhski, a former military prosecutor and judge, did not deny his association with Kalamatiano but claimed he had acted as an ‘economic informer’ only. Krylenko pressed home his advantage and concentrated his fire on the absent Reilly. When he came to examine Reilly’s lovers – especially Maria Fride and Olga Starzhevskaya – he represented them less as arch-conspirators than as foolish, deceived women.
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The trial ended on 3 December 1918. Kalamatiano and Lieutenant
Colonel Fride were to be shot within twenty-four hours. Starzhevskaya received a three-month prison sentence. Zagryazhski, Maria Fride and others were sentenced to forced labour for five years. A captured Czech was also to stay in prison until such time as the Czech Corps ceased fighting against Soviet Russia. The absentees were not forgotten – this was, after all, officially the Lockhart Case. Lockhart, Grenard, Verthamont and Reilly were declared ‘enemies of the working people’ and sentenced to death if ever they were found on Soviet territory.
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The authorities in Washington protested that Kalamatiano had had no involvement in spying activity, but did not retaliate or even apply much pressure on his behalf.
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Kalamatiano was not executed but kept in prison. Possibly the protest had been enough to save him because the communist leadership did not want to freeze their already cool relations with the US. Perhaps, too, they hoped to use Kalamatiano in a future prisoner exchange. Whatever their intentions, the experience shattered Kalamatiano’s nerves. While Reilly occupied a suite of rooms at the Savoy Hotel and Lockhart did the rounds of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, the American faced an indeterminate period in gaol.

The Bolsheviks had broken the British plot against them, but by the time the trial started the situation in the rest of Europe had been transformed. On 11 November 1918 Germany had surrendered on the western front and the Great War was suddenly over. The Soviet authorities had expunged the threat of Allied subversion only to face the still greater potential threat of an Allied invasion. France, Britain and America were masters of the continent. It was uncertain what use they would make of their power – and the rulers of the Kremlin looked nervously westwards as the New Year approached.

16. THE GERMAN CAPITULATION

On 11 November 1918 an armistice between Germany and the Allies was signed in a railway carriage in Compiègne forest, putting an end to the fighting on the western front. This was the start of a rolling thunder of events. Berlin was in turmoil. The Chancellor Max von Baden had resigned two days earlier, precipitating the Kaiser into abdicating. The German social-democrats seized the opportunity and proclaimed a new republican government with Friedrich Ebert as President and Philipp Scheidemann as Chancellor. In Moscow, the Bolsheviks had not sat idly by. Their first thoughts had been to work out how best to help the political far left in Germany. Indeed they had been making preparations for a sudden end to the Great War since late September when Sverdlov assembled Radek, Bukharin, Kamenev and others to plan an international communist congress in Russia. They decided to ask the Party Central Committee to issue guiding ‘theses’ for this event and make funds available to contact likely sympathizers abroad – and Bukharin and Rakovski meanwhile set out to join Ioffe in the German capital.
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The approach to European revolution, they thought, was quickening. Lenin had already ordered grain stocks to be laid aside for shipment to Germany when the revolutionary upsurge occurred. The Red Army undertook a massive additional recruitment so that Soviet forces could render military assistance for the same eventuality.
²
Pravda
declared: ‘The robber claws of the Prussian brute are too deeply embedded in the western front. The robber has been caught in a tight spring-trap.’
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At the same time the Soviet leaders continued to play things cautiously and earned ridicule from the German Independent Social-Democrats, passionate critics of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, for delivering the gold required by the Russo-German treaties of March and August. Lenin stopped shipments of bullion only when the Central Powers collapsed on the Bulgarian front and the Austrians surrendered to the Allies.
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At that point the Bolsheviks
felt free at last to render direct help to the German political far left. Civil war in Russia made it unfeasible to divert any forces into central Europe: the Red Army could not reach the Urals, far less Poland and Germany, at that time. But the Bolsheviks wanted to make an impact. Despite the food shortages in Russia, the Soviet authorities offered to deliver grain for the new German government to distribute;
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and the scheme was finalized to establish the Communist International in Moscow.

The political climate in Germany had been fluid for some weeks before the armistice and the unconditional surrender. Wilhelm II discharged the cabinet installed in 1917, replacing it with ministers willing to work under Chancellor von Baden and negotiate for peace – and the Reichstag was no longer to be treated with public disdain. Even Ludendorff wanted the government to discover what terms might be on offer from the Allies. The last shred of hope among German ministers was that the Americans might moderate the French and British lust for a punitive settlement.

As a step towards conciliating socialists in the Reichstag, Baden released the Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht from prison on 23 October. Pale from the lack of daylight, hair turned to the colours of pepper and salt, Liebknecht was, for Lenin and Trotsky, Germany’s revolutionary hero.
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He fervently believed that military defeat offered an opportunity to move the country by revolution to socialism. Two others headed the Spartakusbund with him: Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. Only Liebknecht was German; Luxemburg was a Polish Jew and Jogiches a Lithuanian one. All three had spent time in prison for denouncing the war effort. Liebknecht now imposed himself upon them as a man of action. Before the Great War he had already been known for his capacity to inspire an audience:

[Liebknecht], a dark man with lively gestures, shot words at us like darts, words which kindled anger and protest against governments which could drag their peoples into the bloody holocaust of war.

[He] was a very good speaker. There was not only the art of the orator in what he said but a ring of truth and sincerity which won us over completely.
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