Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (2 page)

Scholars in the San Francisco Bay area gave me ideas and discussed aspects of the research: Robert Conquest, David Holloway, Norman Naimark, Yuri Slezkine and Amir Weiner. It was a pleasure to try out some of the ideas for the book with them in convivial circumstances.

In Britain, Roy Giles shared his expertise on intelligence matters and Simon Sebag Montefiore helped to steady my instincts about the book’s argument and orientation. My literary agent David Godwin has been unfailingly supportive about this project. As usual it was a joy to talk over ideas with him. My thanks go, too, to Norman Davies and Ian Thatcher for answering specific questions. Andrew Cook kindly shared several products of his sleuthing in the UK archives about British intelligence in 1918; Harry Shukman did the same with his copies of British official papers on Georgi Chicherin. I am grateful to both Andrew and Harry as well as to Michael Smith for answering questions on various research topics – and to Angelina Gibson for assistance with the Bulgarian language. Thanks are due to John Murphy of the British Broadcasting Corporation, who alerted me to material in Oxford on Allied politics and intelligence while we worked together on a radio programme about the British plot of 1918. Richard Ramage, Administrator and Librarian of the Centre of Russian and Eurasian Studies, was patient and helpful with my frequent enquiries about our library holdings at St Antony’s College.

Harry Shukman cheerfully agreed to examine the entire first draft, and his expertise in Moscow and London history are much appreciated. Likewise Katya Andreyev, at short notice, went through the chapters; I had talked with her about several themes and am grateful for her agreeing to look over what I did with the advice. Roland Quinault generously read the draft while on his travels in the US and gave advice on British political history. Georgina Morley, my editor at Macmillan, went through the draft with imaginative care and prompted many amendments of style and content; and I have yet again been very fortunate in working with Peter James as copy-editor. My wife Adele Biagi, above all, looked at the draft not once but twice. Like me, she caught the contagion of interest in British politics and intelligence in the early Soviet period. Her deft, insightful touch with the chapters saved me from innumerable misjudgements and infelicities.

Some last technical points. I have been flexible about transliteration, using a simplified variant of the US Library of Congress scheme. But the conventional renderings of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Benckendorf and others are retained. So too are the ‘Anglo-Russian’ variants of certain Polish and Latvian names such as Felix Dzerzhinsky and Yakov Peters whenever the individuals were notably Russified in their culture. The names of certain institutions, too, are simplified. For example, the People’s Commissariat for Army and Navy Affairs appears as the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. The book uniformly uses the Gregorian calendar even though the Russians in Russia officially used the older Julian one until January 1918. I recognize that this makes for one big oddity inasmuch as the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 is universally known as the October Revolution, but it would surely be perverse after all these years to start calling it the November Revolution. For purposes of concision, the US is referred to as one of the Allies even though it formally called itself an Associated Power.

Robert Service

March 2011

INTRODUCTION

The story of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 has been told a thousand times and usually the focus is on Russian events to the exclusion of the global situation. There is nothing wrong with examining ‘October’ and its consequences in such a fashion. But this book is an attempt to see things in a different light. The early years of Bolshevik rule were marked by dynamic interaction between Russia and the West. These were years of civil war in Russia, years when the West strove to understand the new communist regime while also seeking to undermine it; and all through that period the Bolsheviks tried to spread their revolution across Europe without ceasing to pursue trade agreements that might revive their collapsing economy. Looking at this interaction in detail reveals that revolutionary Russia – and its dealings with the world outside – was shaped not only by Lenin and Trotsky, but by an extraordinary miscellany of people: spies and commissars certainly, but also diplomats, reporters and unofficial intermediaries, as well as intellectuals, opportunistic businessmen and casual travellers. This is their story as much as it is the story of ‘October’.

The communist leaders believed that their revolution would expire if it stayed trapped in one country alone; they were gambling on their hope that countries elsewhere in Europe would soon follow the path they had marked out in Russia. The October Revolution happened in Petrograd – as the Russian capital St Petersburg had been renamed to do away with its Germanic resonance – while the Great War between the Allies and the Central Powers raged across Europe, and until November 1918 the world’s powers gave little thought to revolutionary Russia except when examining how its situation could be exploited to their advantage. The Germans had signed a separate peace with Lenin’s government at Brest-Litovsk in March that year in order to redeploy their army divisions in the east to serve on the western front against France, Britain and the US; the
French and British meanwhile increased their efforts to bring Russia back into the fight against Germany even if this meant bringing down the communist government. When peace came to Europe after the German surrender, the ‘Russian question’ was transformed in content as Western politicians at last gave priority to preventing the contagion of communism from spreading beyond the Russian borders into the heart of Europe. Sporadic revolutionary outbreaks in Germany, Hungary and Italy occurred but, to the frustration of the Russian communist leadership, petered out in failure. The Western Allies meanwhile undertook direct military intervention in Russia as well as the subsidizing of the anti-communist Russian armed forces. But in late 1919, when these enterprises ran into difficulty, they withdrew their expeditionary forces. Communist Russia had survived its first international trial of strength.

At the same time the Russian communists were engaged in efforts to export their revolution. In 1918 they sent emissaries, including some of their most prominent leaders, to subvert Germany. In the following year they also founded the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow which aimed to create communist parties abroad and destroy global capitalism. In 1920 they sent the Red Army itself into Poland. And although Lenin and Trotsky were disappointed when ‘the European revolution’ did not take place as they had expected, they remained convinced that their original gamble would end in triumph.

I stumbled upon the idea for the book when looking at personal papers of the British intelligence agent Paul Dukes. His memoirs are an outstanding eyewitness account of conditions under early communist rule. Dukes on one of his spying missions enlisted with the Red Army and reported what he saw with the mind of an outsider. This led me to investigate other examples of reportage by foreigners, ranging from lively pro-Soviet cheerleaders like the newspaper correspondents John Reed and Arthur Ransome to the sombre attack on communism by Bertrand Russell in 1920. Then I found that the diplomats, too, had recorded many important things in their telegrams and autobiographies. This, I freely admit, was something of a surprise since I had shared the widespread idea that they were a rather slow-witted and incompetent bunch. From there it was only a short hop to investigating the entrepreneurs who lined up to restart the Russian trade in 1920–1. Such sources provide opportunity for a fresh insight into the history of communist Russia and supplement
the abundant documentation that has become available in Moscow in recent years. Russian history cannot be written satisfactorily on the basis of Russian archives alone.

Other discoveries came to hand as this material was brought under scrutiny. I had taken it for granted that the Reds and the White Russians – and for that matter the Allies – knew rather little about each other. As Ethel Snowden first put it in 1920 on her visit to Petrograd and Moscow, an ‘iron curtain’ appeared to have been built along the frontiers of Russia. In fact the telegraphists, decoders and spies on every side did an effective job for their masters. Their activity filled large gaps in information by providing timely, accurate reports in the absence of conventional diplomacy after 1917. The Red Army was well informed about the White armies and vice versa. And although the White armies were separated from each other by huge distances, they could usually make contact through wireless messages. They were also helped by access to Soviet telegraph traffic which was intercepted by the British, French and Americans. The Reds lost a lot of Russia’s experts in communication and decryption who fled into obscurity or abroad soon after the October Revolution, but they increasingly made up for this failing. This was consequently a period when each side found out enough about the others to be able to formulate plans and policy on the basis of genuine knowledge – and the spies, telegraphists and decoders were as important in this process as the diplomats.

No realistic calculus of military power in Europe favoured the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. Their weak and ill-equipped Red Army would have stood no chance against the Germans if they had invaded Russia in 1918. Russia would have been equally vulnerable if the Western Allies had concerted an all-out invasion in the years that immediately followed. The communists were fortunate that external factors inhibited foreign great powers from marching into east-central Europe and overthrowing the revolutionary state. They were equally lucky that states abroad increasingly found it advantageous to end Russia’s economic isolation: trade treaties were signed first with Estonia and Scandinavia in 1920 and then with the United Kingdom in the following year.

When the communists led by Lenin and Trotsky took power in Petrograd, they could not be certain that their government would last more than a few days. But this did not dent their optimism. If the Russians could so easily cast down capitalism, it would surely not be
long before others did the same. The communists declared that imperialism, nationalism and militarism were about to be liquidated everywhere. Bolsheviks outlined their project in global terms. The working classes of the world were about to achieve liberation from every kind of oppression. Industrial societies would start to pay, feed, clothe and educate properly those who had suffered down the generations. Governments would tumble. The market economy would be eliminated. An end would be put to war and people would administer their affairs without hindrance from kings, commanders, priests and policemen. Communism was on the point of spreading itself worldwide. Soon there would be no government, no army, no bureaucracy on the face of the earth.

But even while aiming at world revolution, the communist leaders saw the sense in hedging their bets. They knew that the great powers, if they wanted, could conquer Russia without much difficulty. The Kremlin went on talking to its foreign enemies for fear of an international crusade being organized against it. Its fear was not misplaced. In 1918 the communists knew full well that the Western Allies in the Great War – France, Britain and America – were supplying finance and advice to the anti-communist Russian forces. In the August of that year they discovered an outright conspiracy by the British – later known as the Lockhart Plot – to disrupt and possibly even to overturn Soviet rule in Moscow. Yet the Kremlin never broke off attempts to negotiate with the West. All the Allied diplomats had left the country before the end of the first full year after the October Revolution when the communist leadership put British, French and American officials on trial. (Robert Bruce Lockhart, architect of the conspiracy, was by then in London and safe from Lenin’s clutches.) Yet the Russian economy had been destroyed by war and revolution and the Bolshevik government needed foreign trade for its survival – and communist emissaries continued to make overtures for the resumption of commercial and diplomatic links with the advanced industrial countries, which culminated in the Anglo-Soviet trade treaty of March 1921.

The political rupture between Soviet Russia and the West in autumn 1918 made it difficult for both the communists and the Allies to gather information and explain their purposes. At first after the October Revolution, Western ambassadors had used unofficial intermediaries while refusing official recognition to Lenin’s government. In this way the Allies had continued to negotiate with the communists
in Petrograd and Moscow, and the governments in London and Washington also liaised discreetly with the designated representatives of the Soviet authorities.

But just as Soviet Russia played its double game of diplomacy and revolution, so the Western Allies persisted with their schemes to bring down Lenin and Trotsky. A lot of this has been kept a secret for almost a century. Western diplomats were deeply involved in subversive activity but full disclosure would have embarrassed subsequent governments in the West, governments which wanted to appear as clean as the driven snow in the way they conducted their political and military rivalry with the USSR. They preferred to suggest that all the skulduggery took place on the Soviet side. Yet the British conspiracy in 1918, even though it was bungled, was a serious project to undermine communist rule – and it is hard to see why so much of the documentation should remain officially classified. In any event, Allied espionage and subversion did not end with the exodus of the diplomatic corps when the plot was exposed. Intelligence operations were quickly resumed both to finance the anti-Bolshevik White Russians and to gather information; and although these failed to dislodge the communist government, they certainly provided data of value to Western governments.

The British, French, Japanese and Americans had sent military expeditions after the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March 1918, but they never moved out from the periphery of the old empire and were anyway much too small to overthrow Lenin and Trotsky. The battles on the western front constrained what could be done until the end of the war in November that year. Subsequently, none of the Allies was willing to organize an invasion of Russia. Both economic and political considerations held them back. Even Winston Churchill, the arch-advocate of the White cause, had no idea how to do more in Russia than the Allied powers actually did. Yet Russia continued to attract attention. Attempts were made to restore the links of international trade outside the Soviet-occupied zones. The French had their plans for southern Ukraine. American entrepreneurs, especially those on the west coast, were eager to do business in Siberia. British intelligence agent Sidney Reilly characteristically planned to pull off big commercial deals in post-communist Russia, and others in Britain wanted to do the same. Food supplies to Russia were another instrument which the American government contemplated using against the communists. In 1919 initiatives were taken both to offer grain to Lenin on
political conditions and to send it to feed the regions of Russia that came into White hands.