Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (15 page)

Sovnarkom was being devious. While seeking to keep the Allies sweet, it was anxious to avoid any trouble with the Germans. In the night of 28–29 December, something extraordinary happened, something which had barely seemed possible a few weeks earlier: the German and Austrian diplomatic contingent arrived in Petrograd.

There were two delegations – one stopped at the Hotel Bristol on the Moika and was headed by Rear-Admiral Count Kaiserling and Count von Mirbach . . . This committee was known as the Naval Delegation and their mission was to discuss means of stopping the naval war in accordance with the armistice treaty. The second delegation was headed by Count Berchtold, German Red Cross representative, and met to consider the exchange of war prisoners. They established themselves at the Grand and the Angleterre. British and French officers were stopping at both these places, which was obviously embarrassing.
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The contingent was sixty strong; the Central Powers meant serious business in Petrograd.
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This turnabout was the product of the recent military truce and
the opening of peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk near the eastern front. The Soviet authorities knew about it in advance but everyone else in Petrograd was taken by surprise; and every attempt by the Bolsheviks to lessen the impact was ineffective. The Germans ignored their request that they should remain in their residences. They enjoyed causing embarrassment and openly walked the streets of the capital, renewing old contacts in high banking and industrial circles.
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Mirbach’s previous posting was as Germany’s ambassador in Rome. After obtaining a degree at Heidelberg, he had proceeded to a study course in Oxford. Generations of his family had served the Hohenzollerns.
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Mirbach wore formal attire when presenting himself at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs:

‘Hello!’ [Zalkind] said, ‘what are you doing here?’ The count was abashed. ‘Why, I am just returning your call,’ he said stiffly. Zalkind was amused. ‘Excuse me, Count,’ he said, ‘we are revolutionists and we don’t recognise ceremony. You might have saved yourself the trouble if you had remembered that you are in New Russia.’ He thought a minute. ‘But you can come in,’ he added, ‘and have a glass of tea.’ Von Mirbach did not accept the invitation. He looked down at Zalkind’s rough clothes, his rumpled grey hair and his inspired face. Very awkwardly he got himself out of the alien atmosphere of the [People’s Commissariat].
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The German delegation obdurately affirmed the ways of traditional diplomacy; and when Karl Radek tried to complain about the treatment of far-left socialists in Germany, Mirbach cut him short: German politics was none of Radek’s business.
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The Allied embassies refused to have anything to do with the German diplomats. Ambassador Francis became dean of the corps with Buchanan’s departure on 7 January 1918.
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Early that same month a group of anarchists arrived from Helsinki to speak with him. They protested about the imprisonment of their American comrades Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman and about the projected execution of a San Francisco bomb-thrower. The anarchists threatened to hold Francis personally responsible if any harm came to these comrades. Francis urged Washington to take no notice.
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(He suspected that John Reed had provided the information about Berkman and Goldman.)
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A few days later Zalkind, while passing on a similar threat on behalf of Petrograd anarchists, declined to offer protection
for the embassy. Francis asked Robins to intercede with Lenin. Although Zalkind refused to apologize, the contretemps was ended by his replacement by Chicherin, who had just arrived from England.
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Sovnarkom still needed to neutralize the threat of a German invasion while avoiding causing undue offence to the Western Allies. But the communist leaders also aimed to make revolution. They were not always prudent in how they went about this. Russia still had a large number of troops stationed on Romanian territory, and Lenin and Trotsky saw the opportunity to get its agitators to spread the Russian anti-war spirit to the Romanian troops. They hoped that this might lead to revolutionary stirrings. Romania’s Prime Minister Ionel Bratianu had no intention of letting the Bolsheviks dissolve his army from within. Pushed by Germany’s continuing military operations, he was determined to preserve what little power remained to his government in its rump independent territory around Iasi. Lenin and Trotsky saw things from an opposite viewpoint. They were angered by the encroachment of Bratianu’s Romanian Army into Russian-ruled but Romanian-inhabited Bessarabia to form a new Moldavian state.
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Sporadic violence broke out between Russian and Romanian units, and Romania’s beleaguered authorities responded by arresting five thousand Russians on service near Botosani.

The Soviet government was in no mood to tread carefully. Every untoward event near the borders could be the beginning of an invasion. Sovnarkom always suspected the worst – and it was often proved right in these years. Soviet retaliation in this instance was an act unprecedented in modern diplomacy. On 13 January Red troops were ordered into the Romanian embassy in Petrograd to arrest the ambassador Constantin Diamandy and his staff.
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Diamandy’s detention outraged the Petrograd diplomatic corps. When a Russian mob had looted the German embassy at the start of the war, Nicholas II’s government had restored order and shielded the ambassador from harm.
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The Romanian imbroglio was of a different order. If an accredited diplomat could be thrown into prison, was any foreigner safe in Russia under the Bolsheviks? Were not Lenin and Trotsky the barbarians of global politics? Diplomats in Russia aimed to make them appreciate the importance of centuries-old international convention and law while Sovnarkom met to discuss what to do next.
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Francis made the arrangements by phone and the corps went en masse to see Lenin, who was accompanied by Zalkind.
Lenin and Zalkind concentrated on the rights and wrongs of the incident in Botosani.
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Francis strenuously objected: ‘No discussion on the subject whatever.’ He pointed out that every diplomat’s person was inviolable. Noulens pitched in and prolonged the discussion, which went on for an hour and a half. Or at least this was how Francis recalled the event. Noulens remembered it differently and said that it was previously agreed that his own superior legal understanding as well as his native fluency in French made it sensible for him to give a lengthy exposition of the scandal that would fall upon the heads of the Bolsheviks if they refused to back down.

When the Belgian minister Désirée tried to join in, Zalkind told him to be quiet. Lenin agreed to put the matter to Sovnarkom, but this failed to stop Serbia’s Ambassador Spalajkovic pointing his finger a yard from Lenin’s face and shouting: ‘You are bandits; you dishonour the Slav race and I spit in your face!’
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Noulens sprang up to calm things down but Zalkind said: ‘Forget it, forget it, Mr Ambassador, we like this brutality of expression better than diplomatic language!’ Negotiations were resumed that evening and Noulens visited Diamandy next day in his underground cell in the Peter-Paul Fortress. The food was foul and Diamandy had not been allowed a knife to cut it. But the final result was positive and Diamandy was released on condition that he speedily left the country.
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Zalkind made mischief by publicly implying that Francis had consented to Diamandy’s incarceration.
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The fragility of dealings between the Bolsheviks and the Western Allies was revealed all too clearly. Each side wanted more than the other was willing to concede. And the communist authorities were willing to risk rupturing relations with the Allied powers. They were pushing their luck while simultaneously dreading the prospect that one side or another in the Great War might somehow contrive to organize an invasion. Sovnarkom was minded to bite before being bitten even though its own teeth were worn down to the gums.

8. THE OTHER WEST

In embassies around the world, the diplomats appointed by the Provisional Government denounced the October Revolution. Ambassador Vasili Maklakov, freshly arrived in Paris from Petrograd, led the way and alerted his colleague Boris Bakhmetev in Washington to the danger that America might recognize the territories breaking away from Petrograd’s control. Maklakov was a prominent Kadet and Bakhmetev had been a Marxist as a young man before withdrawing from party politics. The common nightmare of the ambassadors was the dismemberment of ‘Russia’. Maklakov spoke out against the secession of Ukraine; he argued that the Baltic littoral would always be essential to Russian military security – he demanded the retention of naval bases in Helsinki and Tallinn.
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The Western Allies, angered by the Soviet regime’s withdrawal from the fighting on the eastern front, withdrew their financial credits to Russia while allowing the Provisional Government’s accredited diplomats to continue occupying their embassies and enjoying the immunities of their status.
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Yet they no longer represented a functioning administration and the British cabinet, needing somehow to communicate with Sovnarkom, decided to talk to Maxim Litvinov and Theodore Rothstein, who were among the few Bolsheviks who had stayed behind in Britain.
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A little Bolshevik colony survived in Switzerland, and Vatslav Vorovski informally handled Sovnarkom’s interests in Stockholm;
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but London was the only Western capital to host a leading Bolshevik such as Litvinov, and he now became Sovnarkom’s principal spokesman outside Russia.
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He had begun to attract notice just before the October Revolution and was lionized when he took Ivy out to the theatre in London. The liberal journalist Salvador de Madariaga, an acquaintance, spotted him from a few rows away and moved to sit near him. In the interval he shouted over: ‘Litvinoff, the very man I wanted to meet! What’s going on in Russia?’ Others joined in the conversation and Litvinov told them to
look out for the name of Lenin. When the Bolsheviks seized power the next day in Petrograd, Litvinov’s reputation spread across London as the seer of Russian politics.
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In January 1918 Trotsky cabled Litvinov to announce his appointment as Sovnarkom’s very first ‘plenipotentiary’ in a foreign country. Just as they did not like the word ‘minister’, the communists forbore to call Litvinov an ambassador: revolutionary times called for fresh terminology. Litvinov was pleased to have a job that genuinely aided the party’s cause. Exactly what the job should involve, however, was unclear because Trotsky had to be cautious about what he wrote in open telegrams and anyway knew little about British high politics; and Litvinov was imaginative and willing to take initiatives: his time had come at last.

The British War Cabinet discussed Russia on 17 January 1918 and confirmed what Foreign Secretary Balfour had been telling the House of Commons. The Bolsheviks had repudiated their obligations under the treaties of alliance. They had aggravated the jeopardy to Britain and France on the western front by closing down the eastern one. They were stirring up revolutions in the West. The Italians pressed for the Western Allies to sever all relations with them; but Lloyd George and Balfour wished to maintain their para-diplomatic links through Litvinov in Britain and British intermediaries in Russia.
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Balfour expressed the hope that the Bolsheviks might yet cause trouble for the Germans.
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This was not an entirely fantastical consideration. Soviet official policy as yet ruled out signing a separate peace with the Germans, and if the Russo-German negotiations broke down the assumption was that Russia would go back to war with them. Rumours spread around the world. If the British were talking to Litvinov, perhaps the same kind of arrangement might be made in France where Trotsky was said to be planning to appoint another plenipotentiary.
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The British denied that they were granting
de facto
recognition to Sovnarkom, and Balfour stressed that he would never speak directly with Litvinov or allow him on to Foreign Office premises.
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Litvinov would be used only as a convenient conduit for urgent discussions.
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