Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (37 page)

The Allies reacted with an economic blockade designed to bring Kun and Szamuely to their knees.
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Food supplies were depleted. The only solution according to Kun was to expropriate more grain, vegetables and meat from the villages. Clashes with the peasantry intensified as civil war broke out.

Kun and Szamuely had always seen their ultimate salvation in international revolution. They begged Lenin and Trotsky to send a contingent of the Red Army from newly conquered Ukraine.
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Little did the communist leaders in Moscow and Budapest know that American forces were intercepting Hungarian wireless traffic.
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So nothing that Kun wrote in his telegrams was truly confidential.
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It was no secret, of course, that the Soviet leaders, if the opportunity arose, were intent on helping to spread communist revolution west-wards. The Bolshevik party’s entire foreign policy had been built on
this foundation. Just occasionally there were surprises for the Allied powers, such as when the Austrian security agency claimed to have discovered a secret plan of Kun’s for a communist seizure of power in Vienna. This may have been a case of counter-intelligence officers trying to prove their usefulness to Austria’s new social-democratic government.
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It would seem that the Americans later used their intercepted information to prevent Kun from heading to Switzerland as an envoy of Lenin and Trotsky.
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Old ‘Austria-Hungary’ was boiling up with political conflicts that could spill over the new national borders. It appeared that anything might happen, and it frequently did.

Lenin and Trotsky did not dismiss Kun’s requests out of hand, and their Red Army high command began to examine how it might lend assistance to Hungary. It quickly became obvious that a campaign across the Ukrainian frontier would put the Red Army in danger from Kolchak and Denikin. If Russians marched westwards, they might find there was no Soviet homeland to return to. With regret they turned down Kun’s request.
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By late summer, the Hungarian Red Army faced rebellion throughout Hungary and threats on the northern borders. Desertions grew in number. The last slim hope of the Kun government vanished on 4 August when Romanian forces, after weeks of fighting in the north of the country, stormed into Budapest. Although they were delighted that a power in the region had overthrown communism, the Western Allies did not approve of what happened next. The Romanian military force was a law unto itself and the Bucharest authorities exercised no restraint over it. Red Hungarian terror was replaced with a White Romanian one, and Hungarian groups emerged seeking revenge on the communists who had tormented them for months. Chaos ensued when the Romanians reduced the police service to six hundred policemen. Attacks on Jews in the streets and in their houses became frequent. The economy fell apart entirely and food became scarce in the capital even for those who had possessions to barter.
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The Romanians stripped the occupied territories of their flour, sugar, medicine and even its railway locomotives.
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Famine spread across the country.
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US officials were aware that communism remained a threat in central Europe – and not only in Hungary. Herbert Hoover, director of the American Relief Administration, wrote to Woodrow Wilson on 28 March 1919:

Politically the Bolsheviki most certainly represent a minority in every country where they are in control. The Bolsheviki . . . [have] resorted to terror, bloodshed and murder to a degree long since abandoned even among reactionary tyrannies . . . [They have] embraced a large degree of emotionalism and . . . thereby given an impulse to [their] propaganda comparable only to the impulse of large spiritual movements.
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Hoover’s remedy was to counteract Marxism’s appeal by shipping American food relief to central Europe. Europe had depended on grain exports from Russia before the Great War. Hoover argued that American farmers would benefit from filling the gap.
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America had an over-abundance of agricultural produce. Credits should be advanced so that European countries could buy stocks.
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Hoover argued that no better way existed to demonstrate capitalist superiority over communism than to bring the bread of life from the world’s healthiest market economy and help industry and agriculture to recover. He saw that wherever food was short there was a danger of cities toppling into communist hands. American philanthropy, however, came with strings. Hoover stipulated that the recipient governments should maintain order and keep the political far left out of power. Revolutionary disturbances in Vienna were enough for him to suspend aid to Austria temporarily; and he held back supplies from Hungary underr Kun.
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Meanwhile his American Relief Administration transported cereals, medicines, sugar, tinned meat and fish to Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. His efforts in central Europe after the Great War were extraordinary in the face of much obstruction from the French and British, who continued to blockade Germany at the risk of outright mass starvation in 1919. When he learned that American grain cargoes were held up at European ports, Hoover angrily intervened by stressing that he had President Wilson’s full support. Undoubtedly the strain took a toll on him – J. M. Keynes described him admiringly as ‘a weary Titan’ and ‘an exhausted prize-fighter’.
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But Hoover got his way and the French and British stopped being obstructive – and the blockade of Germany was lifted.

Food aid for Germany might help the Allies to avert communist revolutionary advances but it was by no means sufficient in itself. Even incarcerated in Berlin’s Moabit prison, Karl Radek refused to believe that capitalism had a long-term future. From August 1919 he was allowed visitors; he held what he called a salon in his cell as
politicians and reporters queued to meet the exotic Bolshevik.
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Another rather unexpected visitor was one of Germany’s leading industrialists, Walter Rathenau, who agreed that any return to the old capitalist order in Europe was impossible. Rathenau spoiled this for Radek by adding that his published oeuvre refuted Marx’s theories as well as Lenin’s prediction of a German proletarian revolution. Radek was also visited by the journalist Maximilien Harden, who came and asked Radek to write a piece for his weekly
Die Zukunft
. General von Reibnitz, an aristocratic member of the officer corps, arrived with his proposal for a Soviet–German rapprochement and even a German revolution on the Soviet model; and the British reporter Morgan Philips Price, the friend he had made in Petrograd, paid a visit to update him on events in the United Kingdom.
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At the same time, Radek was keeping up a secret correspondence with the German communist movement. Ruth Fischer, an Austrian Marxist, was a fount of information for him on her visits to the prison. Not all her news was cheering. Germany’s communist leaders were heading for a split at their party congress in Heidelberg. Austrian communists were discussing how to organize a seizure of power in Vienna, but they had not got far in their preparations.
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Radek wrote a critical pamphlet on the German Communist Party and replied to Karl Kautsky’s attack on Bolshevik rule in Russia. Both works were published by a friendly press in Berlin.
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Despite having heard of the difficulties for the revolutionary cause in central Europe, he remained confident that the continent was on the brink of revolutionary transformation.

The activities of the Italian political far left also helped to keep his spirits up. Unlike Hungary and Germany, Italy was one of the victorious powers. Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando had attended the Paris Peace Conference just long enough to secure the cession of the Trentino to Italy before returning to Rome. The big cities of the north, Milan and Turin, were shaken by strikes in the large industrial factories. Appeals for quiet negotiation in the national interest fell on deaf ears. Workers elected factory councils that in summer 1919 began to seize control of whole enterprises. The Italian Socialist Party was divided over how to deal with the crisis, and a split was in the making as the radicals expressed solidarity with the October Revolution in Russia. Comintern sent Nikolai Lyubarski as an agent to hasten this outcome with finance and advice.
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The young Sardinian militant Antonio Gramsci saw the factory councils as the
embryo of a revolutionary administration that could assume power throughout the country. As editor of
L’Ordine Nuovo
(‘The New Order’) in Turin, he urged Italian workers to overturn capitalism and move towards self-rule. Orlando’s government positioned troops into the factories before Gramsci and his comrades could realize their objective – and the embers of revolt were put out in the course of the following year.

At the time nobody could yet be sure that communism had been finally cauterized in Europe. Attempt after attempt had been made at launching a revolution that would join hands with the Soviet political experiment. Each time – in Berlin, in Munich, in Budapest and in Turin and Milan – it had been thwarted. But the conditions that provided communist organizations with an opportunity to challenge their governments had still to be eliminated. In many European countries the discontent with living and working conditions remained deep and wide, and far-left militants turned increasingly to Comintern for their guidance and inspiration. What had happened in Petrograd in 1917 might still take place elsewhere. This was one thing about which there was agreement between the Bolsheviks and the leaders of the Western Allies.

20. THE ALLIES AND THE WHITES

As the Paris Peace Conference moved to its close, the need for the Allies to define their Russian policy became urgent. They at last did this on 27 May 1919, when Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando and the leader of the Japanese delegation Saionji Kinmochi conferred in Woodrow Wilson’s residence to draft a message to Kolchak – wherever east of the Urals he was to be found. None of the Allied leaders thought any good could come from negotiating with Sovnarkom. But they also wanted to assure themselves that the Whites were a tolerable alternative worthy of support.

They told Kolchak that it had ‘always been a cardinal axiom of the Allied and Associated Powers to avoid interference in the internal affairs of Russia’. They stressed that Allied intervention had always been limited to assisting those Russians who ‘wanted to continue the struggle against German autocracy and to free their country from German rule’ and to rescue the legion of Czech troops. Now that the war was over they remained willing to do what they could for Russia and help it towards ‘liberty, self-government and peace’. The terms on which they would offer this help were clearly set out. If Kolchak wanted assistance from the Western Allies, he had to promise to call elections to a Constituent Assembly or reconvene the old one. He had to guarantee universal civic freedoms and reaffirm his recognition of Russia’s foreign debts. He had to accept the independence of Poland and Finland. Other borderlands of the former Russian Empire – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Caucasus and central Asia – were to be promised autonomy. Any disputes over territory would have to be referred for adjudication to the League of Nations.
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Kolchak replied through the French diplomats attached to his headquarters. He assented to Constituent Assembly elections and added that he would step down from power after military victory if this would help. He declared that he was willing to recognize Russian state debts. While accepting that Poland should be free, however, he
limited himself to a vague readiness to discuss other international questions at a later date. Although this lay short of wholehearted compliance it satisfied the Western Allies, who wrote back sympathetically on 12 June.
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They wanted democracy in Russia, but their greater wish was to bring down Bolshevism; to do so they were more than willing to work with White Russian commanders who had little genuine democratic inclination.

By then, however, the White cause was in terrible straits. Kolchak’s advance was halted at Ufa and the Red counter-offensive broke up his forces in June. Just weeks earlier he had appointed Yevgeni Miller to lead White forces in northern Russia; but Miller, based in Archangel with few troops, could do little more than wait on events. Kolchak’s situation worsened through the summer, and he retreated stage by stage along the Trans-Siberian railway, taking a vast gold reserve with him. He was pushed steadily eastwards, with no realistic hope of recovery, while his troops were attacked en route by the region’s peasants. Meanwhile Denikin had decided that he at last had adequate forces to make his thrust northwards from southern Ukraine. He divided his Volunteer Army into two groups – while one fought its way along the River Volga, the other attacked through central Ukraine. Like Kolchak, Denikin had the simple basic objective of reaching and occupying Moscow with all possible speed. The Red Army, relieved of the threat from the Urals, redeployed its main strength against him and in October 1919, fighting alongside Ukrainian peasant irregulars, decisively defeated Denikin outside Orël, in the border area between Russia and Ukraine, and steadily withdrew to the Ukrainian south.