Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (25 page)

Probably the best conduit of inside news, though, were informal diplomatic channels. Karakhan and Radek in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs talked at length to influential foreigners in Moscow. Both were charming in their individual ways. Despite offending many people with his brashness and extreme opinions, Radek seemed decidedly winsome to Arthur Ransome, who had his ear to the ground as he sought to track down Allied intentions. Ransome’s pro-Bolshevism was an open secret and agents of the Allies had learned to be cautious in what they said in front of him; indeed his letters and movements were kept under close review even though he was simultaneously working for British intelligence.
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Karakhan was anyhow always the more congenial acquaintance for Allied representatives since he did not disguise his wish for some kind of deal between Soviet Russia, as it was starting to be called,
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and the Western Allies. Lockhart claimed that his favourite commissar was known to like turning up ‘begloved and armed with a box of coronas’.
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The gentlemanly pleasantries disguised the savagery of international relations. While Karakhan and Lockhart puffed on their cigars, they exchanged opinions frankly about the situation. Karakhan rebuked the British for failing to assist the Bolsheviks; he claimed that the Red terror had acquired its wildness because the Allies had isolated and threatened Soviet Russia. Lockhart retorted that Sovnarkom had itself to blame after jeopardizing the Allies by closing down the eastern front. While Britain and France were fighting for national survival, Lenin had chosen to relieve the military pressure on Germany. If the Soviet intelligence effort abroad was frail in the year after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik leadership did not lack access to information about what the Allied powers thought of them. Radek and Karakhan were adept at picking up titbits useful for the formulation of foreign policy. They took what they discovered back to their comrades in the Kremlin. As yet it made little difference to Bolshevik actions. Sovnarkom’s room for manoeuvre between Germany and the Allies was minuscule; and Bolsheviks anyway saw the world around them through ideological spectacles: they assumed the worst in everything communicated to them by Allied diplomats about the intentions of foreign capitalist powers. This was a prudent tactic in the circumstances of the time.

13. GERMANY ENTREATED

Archangel had acquired strategic importance early in the war when the German submarine fleet turned the Baltic Sea into the most dangerous waters for shipping in the northern hemisphere. The old timber quays on the east bank of the River Dvina became the main destination for cargoes to Russia from Britain; and in summer 1918, when German forces encroached on northern Russia from Finland, the War Department in London gave approval for the British expeditionary force to leave its station in Murmansk and seize Archangel. General Frederick Poole, who commanded the operation, saw it as the first step towards the overthrow of Sovnarkom.

The city was Russia’s oldest port for international commerce. Since the sixteenth century, when England’s Queen Elizabeth I ordered the creation of the Muscovy Company, it had supplied timber and furs to the rest of Europe. Its fortunes dipped in the early eighteenth century when Peter the Great privileged St Petersburg, his new capital, on the Gulf of Finland, and by the outbreak of the Great War Archangel’s population had dwindled to 38,000. Its estuary was navigable for only half the year from May to the end of September. In the winter, temperatures could drop to minus 13° centigrade and wealthy local families put triple glazing in their windows. In the ‘white nights’ of the summer, when there were long hours of daylight, the mosquitoes were a torment for everyone. But Archangel remained a bustling entrepôt and its administration increased the number of quays to the physical limit in the interests of intensifying activity. Ships with draughts as deep as sixty feet could find a berth there. A road ran the length of the city – a whole five miles – parallel to the Dvina. Traders built their mansions and sawmills between the road and river, near enough to the quays to watch over their interests. The pavements were of timber and the industry was timber. Although other goods like tar, pitch, fish and flax were also traded, Archangel was well described as a ‘wooden metropolis’.
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General Poole’s plan was to use the entire province of Archangel as his base for an invasion. The plan was to send a force south up the Dvina to Kotlas which was the terminal of the rail line to Vyatka and the Trans-Siberian railway. His objective was to form an attacking semi-circle pointed at Petrograd and Moscow from the north and east.
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After combining with the Czech Corps in the Urals and the Volunteer Army in southern Russia, he expected to tip the military balance against Sovnarkom.
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The plan had French blessing; and although the Americans wanted no direct part in it, they discreetly indicated that they would not object to anything the British did.
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Optimism was peaking. The Admiralty in London shared Poole’s assumption that he could easily recruit and train an army of Russian volunteers to fight the unpopular and vulnerable regime in Moscow.
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On 26 July 1918 the Allied contingent sailed from Murmansk for Archangel. Poole issued an ultimatum and, more by bluff than anything else, the city fell to him on 2 August as the Red garrison and its political commissar Mikhail Kedrov made a hasty departure.
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Nikolai Chaikovski, the septuagenarian revolutionary who had lived in London until the February Revolution, had agreed to head the Supreme Government of North Russia. (The word ‘supreme’ appeared obligatory for anti-Bolshevik enterprises.) Poole had taken little account of Russian geography and society and Chaikovski was already less than wholly confident. Peasants failed to greet the new administration with enthusiasm and the civil service was weak. The Allies attempted a little economic reform. It was agreed that the anti- Soviet authorities should have access to the funds in Western banks left behind by the Provisional Government and currently claimed by the Bolsheviks. John Maynard Keynes, then working as a Treasury consultant in London, submitted a memorandum explaining how to establish a stable currency in areas outside Soviet control; he recommended a fixed exchange rate between sterling or gold and Archangel rubles.
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The British press hardly mentioned northern Russia beyond noting that ‘a considerable force’ had been landed there.
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When a Labour MP complained about the lack of public disclosure, the government simply refused to comment.
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Months later, Douglas Young, Britain’s consul in Archangel, was to go to the London press and denounce the subterfuge and the violence he had witnessed. While disliking Bolshevism, he contended that the way to deal with Soviet Russia was through diplomacy. Young denied that a few
thousand troops seven hundred miles from Moscow could bring down Sovnarkom.
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But at the time a curtain of mystery was drawn over the Archangel operation. The US embassy, having fled Vologda, made its base there as soon as Poole pronounced it safe for Allied personnel.
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A degree of diplomatic fussiness was involved. The Americans still wanted the Soviet government to know that they had not taken part in the occupation of the city. They were merely going there after Poole had seized it. In this way the door was kept open for the US to negotiate with Sovnarkom if a suitable opportunity arose. These nuances had little influence on how the Bolsheviks reacted to Poole’s military action. In their view, the Western Allies had committed a flagrant violation of Soviet Russia’s sovereignty – and they feared that Poole would continue his advance.

Without being reinforced by fresh units, however, Poole could not expand his operations beyond Archangel province. The British government, before sanctioning the seizure of Archangel, had received advice from naval intelligence in Petrograd that at least two army divisions were necessary if the Bolsheviks were to be overthrown. Anything less than that would ‘lead to the impression that operations were not being undertaken seriously’. By contrast, a truly substantial contingent would have an instant strategic impact since the Germans would no longer be able to transfer troops from east to west but would have to move them in the opposite direction, and this would be of benefit to the Allies on the western front.
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But it took the maximum of Allied human and material resources to repel the great German offensive that had begun in March. Poole had to sit tight and pray for victory in northern France. It had appeared that his hopes might be fulfilled on 18 July when the Germans, exhausted by months of attacking, had to fall back at Villers-Cotterêts. The French Army had shown that Germany was not invincible. Celebrations were in order and church bells rang throughout France that Sunday. But the German forces regrouped and the Allied commanders did not believe that two whole divisions could be spared at that crucial moment. Poole disappointedly dropped the idea of attempting a breakthrough to Vyatka. Instead he settled his men in Archangel until such time as the military situation should change either in Russia or in France. He had angered Sovnarkom without endangering its survival, and his force got used to enduring the insect bites in the long summer days.

For weeks, however, the German Foreign Office had been agitating
for the communists to take back northern Russia and get rid of the British. Ioffe reported from Berlin that the Germans had offered to undertake a joint military operation.
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Germany’s high command continued to worry that the Allies might succeed in restoring the eastern front – and a war on two fronts was the last thing that Ludendorff and Hindenburg could cope with. Sovnarkom resisted the German invitation until Archangel capitulated to Allied power. On 1 August Chicherin asked Karl Helfferich, who had headed the embassy since Mirbach’s death, about collaborating in an attack on the British in Archangel and Murmansk. Concern about the potential threat from Poole intensified. On 13 August Chicherin put a request to the Germans to carry out an aerial bombardment of Archangel. Moisei Uritski, head of the Cheka in Petrograd, talked to German diplomats about the need to crush the British military platform in the north. Uritski’s stipulation was that German troops should not go via Petrograd. He claimed to be nervous about Russian working-class opinion. More likely he did not entirely trust the Germans despite wanting help from them. If German troops were allowed into Petrograd there was no guarantee that they would leave Soviet rule intact.
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Germany’s intentions were a source of constant worry to the Soviet leaders, and they were right to be concerned. Ruling circles in Berlin had never discounted the notion of invading Russia and throwing out the Bolsheviks. The war party was constantly tempted by this option. As late as June 1918 Ludendorff was saying: ‘We can expect nothing from this Soviet government.’ Enquiries were put in hand about practicalities.
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Ioffe and the Soviet mission in Berlin failed to penetrate such discussions. The German government had allocated to it the Russian embassy building on Unter den Linden. International etiquette required Ioffe to present his credentials in person to the Kaiser; but this was more than Ioffe, a severe opponent of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, would contemplate – and probably the Kaiser was not displeased. Although Ioffe always dressed smartly, in other ways he was far from the diplomatic stereotype. His office was chaotic. He had no idea how to keep financial accounts; he had no clue about the exchange rate and lacked the desire to find out.
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Like other communist veterans, he regarded money with distaste. Nevertheless he continued to employ the German servants inherited from the old embassy.
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Ioffe looked on servants through a Marxist prism of analysis. For him, they were ‘proletarians’ who were winnable to the
revolutionary cause. The working atmosphere in the mission was nothing if not relaxed. The tone was set by Ioffe’s young Russian chauffeur who usually arrived in the mornings in his sports kit. This was not a problem until the day when Ioffe had to go to the German Foreign Office and told him to dress more demurely. The chauffeur’s reaction was to don a pair of silk pyjamas.
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Ioffe’s private life was equally chaotic. After the October Revolution, his wife and daughter Nadya lived in Baku until he brought them to Berlin. It was not a happy conjoining. What disconcerted Mrs Ioffe was the presence of the young woman operating as her husband’s personal assistant. This was Maria Girshberg, who had joined the communist party in Petrograd in 1917. Everyone in the Soviet mission knew what was going on. Maria – or Musya as she was known – spent whole days with Ioffe and not always on revolutionary business. The Ioffes fell to arguing into the small hours and little Nadya could hear them through her bedroom wall. Her mother had red eyes every morning. Comrades in the Berlin mission thought he had fallen for a little schemer.
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After the Ioffes took a short holiday in Sweden, the parents began sleeping apart. Musya had become the mistress in every sense.
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