Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (58 page)

In capital cities across Europe, Russian political emigrants gathered. In Paris there was a National Unification congress led by the conservative Pëtr Struve, the liberal Konstantin Nabokov and the ex-Bolshevik Grigori Alexinski.
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Paul Dukes continued his public campaigning against the Bolsheviks and went off on an American lecture tour in February 1921. In November, on his return, he picked up his links with Sidney Reilly and Boris Savinkov; he also met up with Harold Williams.
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But all their efforts were the triumph of hope over realism. No government in Europe or North America any longer had the stomach for an anti-Bolshevik military operation.

As the Allied governments stood back, the international race to make profits in Soviet Russia began in earnest. Since French official policy rendered this next to impossible, the Association Financière, Industrielle et Commerciale Russe turned its eyes to New York for help, the idea being to engage with individuals close to ‘the outstanding public figure of the United States, Mr Hoover’. It was believed that the American Relief Administration might somehow offer cover for Russia’s old economic elite to find their way back into trade with new Russia.
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Sidney Reilly had been among the first to notice the Association’s ambitions. With an eye for the main course he was determined to gain a slice of the profits seemingly on offer and was actively engaged in buying up products in Europe on behalf of the British government. Wrangel’s intelligence officers noticed that he had some kind of ‘link with the Bolshevik delegation in London’. His financial dishonesty in pre-war Russia was common knowledge by then. Even without access to information about the British Secret Service Bureau’s enquiry about him, the White officers commented that Reilly was almost certainly an assumed name; and London’s Russian political circles gave him a wide berth despite the opportunity offered by his connections with the British establishment.
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For a while at least, the Soviet leadership resigned themselves to ‘peaceful cohabitation’ with capitalist countries. Lenin used this term in an interview with the
Christian Science Monitor
. In Soviet Russia
itself it was Adolf Ioffe who popularized it and called for ‘co-operation’ with ‘bourgeois republics’.
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But Ioffe laid down a qualification, insisting that this policy would make sense only if it were guaranteed that no military threat would be directed at Moscow. The Red Army would show good faith by pulling back from its stations on Russian borders. Capitalists would trade with Russia not out of altruism or even mere greed but because the world economy could not now recover without access to the huge natural resources that lay between Smolensk and Vladivostok. Communists could therefore wait on events. The struggle between Labour and Capital would not cease around the globe, and ‘world proletarian revolution’ remained the party’s objective. But every Bolshevik leader had learned that compromises had to be made if Bolshevik rule was to be sustained.
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Soviet rule, as every Russian knew and foreign visitors soon discovered, was chaotic at its lower levels. Official policy was one thing and the reality was frequently very different. Corruption was pervasive. Even transport was never better than uncertain; and when William J. Kelley of the American Relief Administration tried to make his way from Riga to Moscow at the end of 1921, he had to bribe the train driver to give him logs to keep himself warm at the lengthy unscheduled stops on the journey.
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What is more, Bolsheviks often baulked at the party’s official encouragement of the purchase of concessions by foreigners. William H. Johnston, president of the International Association of Machinists, was held up in Latvia and could not even get a visa for his trip to Moscow.
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None of these difficulties caused surprise in the American administration, which had warned its country’s entrepreneurs about the dangers of doing business in Russia. They had only themselves to blame if they found that Soviet conditions offered a less than congenial experience. Official US opposition to a trade treaty remained in place; Herbert Hoover was implacable – and he ensured that no American concession, including Vanderlip’s well-known Kamchatka venture, could be operated on a grand scale in Siberia unless and until the Washington authorities gave their blessing.
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There was still a lot for the Soviet leadership to do if economic recovery was to continue, and the growing rivalry between Lenin and Trotsky had the potential to open up yet another damaging controversy. They disagreed about the pace and orientation of industrial growth. Trotsky wanted to prioritize investment in heavy industry and introduce mechanisms for central state economic planning. Lenin
feared that this would disrupt the reconciliation with the peasantry; his own preference was to grant freedom for private workshops to produce for the rural requirements.
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For the moment, at least, Lenin had the greater support in the Politburo and Central Committee – and the political situation settled down. The October Revolution survived the first full year of peace.

32. THE UNEXTINGUISHED FIRE

The Bolsheviks had kept their hardness and had kept their faith. Even the pseudonyms they chose for themselves signified unyielding intent. Stalin was a name taken from the Russian word for steel, Molotov was a derivation of hammer. Their generation had been born and brought up in years when armed force was used the world over to expand empires and transform economies. Bolsheviks absorbed this toughness of spirit into their own doctrines and practices. They saw how industrialists, financiers and landowners had become masters of the earth. They learned from the ruthlessness and optimism they witnessed. Like the capitalists they detested, they took chances. The October Revolution had always been a gamble. But it had been successful for them, even though the price was paid by millions of Russians in death, tears and famine. Communists proved themselves flexible. Although they hated compromise, they became adept at scraping off the minimum of skin from their ideology. Bolshevism was founded on the idea that humankind is infinitely plastic, infinitely malleable. The rulers of Soviet Russia aimed to reconstruct the entire edifice of life for the benefit of the working class – and if workers did not yet understand where their best interests lay, the communist party would simply carry out the Revolution on their behalf.

Bolshevik leaders and militants, even if they had not read Lenin’s
The State and Revolution
or Trotsky’s
Terrorism and Communism
, believed that the October Revolution required the party, the Cheka and the Red Army to exercise a severe dictatorship. The Bolsheviks were known for their dictatorial inclinations long before the experiences of 1917; and although they had looked forward to enabling ‘the people’ to liberate themselves from capitalism, they had always believed in the need for a framework of authoritarian control to bring this about. By the end of the Civil War, the use of mass terror, arbitrary dispensation of justice and political discrimination against groups in society deemed to be inimical had become the norm. The
upper and middle classes – the
burzhui
– were treated as ‘former people’ and stripped of the rights of citizenship along with priests and ex-policemen, and it was a rare ex-businessman who dared to go around town dressed in his pre-revolutionary finery.
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Although peasants and artisans gained some freedom to sell their goods and services, the communists’ ultimate objective had not changed. The entire economy would one day be owned, planned and regulated by powerful agencies of the state. Bolsheviks were engineers of the soul. They intended to manufacture a new collectivist mentality throughout society and were willing to wade through seas of blood to achieve their purposes.

The Bolsheviks still aimed to provide everyone with an abundance of material and cultural well-being. Schooling and health care were already free of charge. Wherever possible, housing was made available to the poor. Trade unions could take up the grievances of individual labourers. Party militants set about promoting working-class youngsters to posts of authority. The dream was to make the ‘proletarian state’ ever more proletarian.

The American journalist Anna Louise Strong, arriving in Russia at the outset of the New Economic Policy, bore witness to the preserved ideals. She reported that even entrepreneurs could be found imbued with enthusiasm for Bolshevism. In her account of a trip to the famine-afflicted Volga region she wrote in note form:

The little East-side Jew whom I met in Samara, the heart of the famine, and who went with me as interpreter to organize village kitchens. Speaking English with a vile accent and physically most unattractive. Then I learned that he was manager of two little factories which had just reopened, making doors and windows for the repairing of Samara. He was a machinist; he was so proud of the two or three machines he had put together, down in a country where even plain nails were not to be had.
²

Despite being a communist party member, he was proud of having obtained official permission to put his workers on to piecework. This way they earned the equivalent of fifteen dollars per month. He himself received only rations and lodgings; beyond that point, he worked for free. His wife had to work too, and his offspring had to be fed in a state children’s home. But he did not complain. He was ‘eager and energetic and happy to be building Russia’.
³

Strong may well have been, and indeed almost certainly was, one
of those many foreigners who fell for a self-serving story. But the situation in Russia was anyway complicated. Its people were emerging from a period of military and political turmoil and trying to come to terms with the often convoluted ways of understanding and practising communism that were being set before them.

Ivy Litvinov directed a questioning gaze at the ambivalent lifestyles of most veteran Bolsheviks. Her scepticism began when she joined Maxim from London in Copenhagen in 1920: ‘You see, we lived in grand hotels and he wore fur coats and smoked enormous cigars and things like that. I’d never seen him so plutocratic, and we had cars all the time.’
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But she also recalled an earlier incident which was in his favour. When he took the train for Moscow from Petrograd the railway officials gave him an empty carriage to himself. Discovering that other passengers had been ejected to accommodate him, he insisted on their reinstatement.
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Litvinov was far from being the only Soviet leader to undergo a ragged process of
embourgeoisement
. Krasin was a case in point. Attending a private dinner given in his honour by leading bankers at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon, he let himself go and said: ‘Communism as we have tried it has proved a failure and it must be modified.’ Some of the waiters were radical socialists and, overhearing these startling comments, halted work in the kitchen for a while.
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But the International News Service judged that ‘Krasin was just kidding the bankers along for the benefit of [Soviet] business.’ Even so, there was an increasing and unmistakable tendency for communist leaders to enjoy the pleasures of the old upper classes. Litvinov and Krasin were sincere communists; but although they were not sybaritic, they were starting to accept privilege as their right.

The American reporter Frank Mason saw Karl Radek as resistant to the sartorial drift of the Soviet elite and noted that he dressed ‘like a movie picture Bolshevic [
sic
]’. Mason commented: ‘You could pick him out without hesitation even were he seated in a room filled with stage anarchists.’ Radek had a fuzzy brown fringe of a beard, his hair was untroubled by a comb, and curls framed a face that was ‘delicate, almost womanly’. He wore a soiled fur-lined jacket and long, black-leather breeches.
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Ivy Litvinov resented the communist milieu she found in Moscow. She disliked being introduced to everybody as Maxim’s marital adjunct and deposited with the wives of Soviet leaders who only wanted to talk about children or clothing.
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In the early 1920s the Litvinovs were living in the Kharitonenko House.
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Ivy’s great new
friend was Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent Bolshevik whom she loved for her kindness and vivacity.
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This was not all that helpful for her husband’s career since Kollontai had emerged as a harsh critic of the Politburo and an advocate of the Workers’ Opposition. But the two women also came together for other reasons. Ivy was a devotee of D. H. Lawrence and, believing in free love, discovered a fellow spirit in Alexandra who scandalized most Russian communists with her uninhibited sexual liaisons. Ivy and Alexandra got on splendidly. They confided in each other about their disillusionment with communist leaders; and Ivy, despite admiring Lenin in many ways, came to believe he was ‘a wrong-headed saint’.
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