‘PASS, COMRADE RELINSKY,’ said the Lett soldier on guard at the corner of the street.
I passed. The soldier did not trouble to examine my papers. He knew me. I was Comrade Relinsky of the Tcheka-Criminel – a communist and a comrade. With the canaille in the street it was different. The papers of many of them would be found not to be in order. Fully half of them would be hauled off to the Butyrsky.
I turned into the Tverskoy Boulevard, ruinous, deserted, desolate, strewn with dirt and litter. It was a beautiful day in Moscow – the time midsummer 1918.
A lean, pitiful scarecrow of an object, starved, emaciated, hungry, was standing at the corner of the boulevard. He gave me one frightened glance when he heard the Lett address me as a comrade. Then he shuffled hastily away, pitifully trying to disguise his poor attempt at speed.
It was gloriously warm. The boulevard was bathed in delightful sunlight. It seemed wrong somehow that the sun should shine and the world go on, when here in Moscow so much shame was being wrought. Was heaven then indifferent? Could the sun look unblinkingly on the lurid sins of man?
Halfway down the boulevard I passed another human wreck, an old, old man, with long silver hair and a straggling grey beard. He was crying. His shoulders shook with convulsive sobbing. The shameless tears trickled down his thin, furrowed old cheeks.
‘What is the matter, diedushka?’ I asked him.
‘I am hungry,’ sobbed the old man. ‘For two days I have stood in the queues and got no food. Lord, have mercy on us, what is to become of us all?’
At the next corner the usual food queue was waiting. It had been there when I had passed in the morning, three hours before, long, silent, listless, apathetic, like a snake torpid with starvation. The people would come early and line up there, very early, because there was never enough bread to go round. Starvation menaced the city. There were far too many mouths to fill. But the Bolsheviks were steadily reducing the surplus population. Everywhere everything spoke of dearth and stagnation. The peasants got no profit from bringing food into the city. They were rewarded only by a sense of having done their duty. The reward was inadequate. The peasants tilled and sowed for themselves only. Moscow was a city of the damned.
Near the Cheremeteff Pereulok a fitful attempt was being made to clear the litter from the dirty streets. A gang of men and women were working there, men with well-bred, scholarly faces, women dignified and refined. By them, keeping guard, was a workman covered in bandoliers and with a holster at either hip. They were members of the bourgeoisie; they had been stock-brokers, lawyers, schoolmistresses, when there had been stocks, laws and schools in Russia. Being bourgeoisie they were made to work for the new taskmasters. They were tired, emaciated, starving, weary. It was great fun to keep them from the food queues. A dead horse lay at one side of the road. It had dropped there from sheer exhaustion and starvation when it had become too weak to go on. It had been left there. The carcase had now been there for several days.
The comrade with the bandoliers and the revolvers called a greeting to me for he knew me. I was Comrade Relinsky of the Tcheka-Criminel. I returned his greeting and passed on, picking my way carefully over the filthy street.
The Cheremeteff Pereulok was in the shade. It was a relief to turn into it from the white glare of the main street. I stopped at No. 3. I turned round. Nobody else was in the street. I was unobserved.
I slipped into the house and mounted the stairs. They were dirty and covered with litter and stunk abominably. The whole house was deathly silent. It might have been deserted – in the hands of the housebreakers probably. As a matter of fact it was a large block of flats, more than 200 altogether, and all of them were occupied by more than one family. I came to a halt before a door, listening and looking very carefully up and down the stairs before I knocked. The door opened about half an inch and the point of a nose might be seen peering round it.
‘Is that you, Dagmara?’ I asked.
‘M. Constantine.’ There came the sound of a chain being removed, the door opened, and I slipped in. The door closed quietly behind me.
I was M. Constantine, Chief of the British secret intelligence service in Soviet Russia.
• • •
In the spring of 1918, on returning from a mission, I found my superiors awaiting me with some impatience. I was instructed to proceed to Russia without delay. The progress of affairs in that part of the world was filling the Allies with consternation. Following the breakdown of Kerenski’s abortive administration and the accession of the Bolsheviks to power, Russia had ceased hostilities against Germany. Germany, relieved of all apprehension in the East, was attacking on the West with reinforced troops and redoubled ardour.
Of course the part played by Germany in the Russian breakdown was well known and my instructions were to counter, as far as possible, the work being done by the German agents, and to report on the general feeling in the Russian capital. My superiors clung to the opinion that Russia might still be brought to her right mind in the matter of her obligations to the Allies. Agents from France and the United States were already in Moscow and Petrograd working to that end.
After my experiences as an espionage agent in Germany, my Russian task seemed safe and easy. I knew Petrograd as a man does know the city in which he has lived from childhood to middle age. I was returning home after an absence of only two years. I had many friends in the city. I knew where I could go when I arrived there. I knew upwards of a score of people on whose co-operation I could implicitly rely. In short the whole mission promised to be the very antithesis of my adventures in Germany, where I had to keep up a perpetual disguise, where any moment might be my last, where often I had no idea where to turn or what to do next.
Accordingly it was Sidney Reilly who arrived quite openly in Petrograd to visit his birthplace and the cari luoghi of his youth.
I had not been prepared for the full extent of the change which had come over my birthplace. Petrograd, which once could challenge comparison with any city in the world, bore a ruinous and tumbledown aspect. The streets were dirty, reeking, squalid. Houses here and there lay in ruins. No attempt was made to clean the streets, which were strewn with litter and garbage. There was no police except for the secret police which held the country in thrall, no municipal administration, no sanitary arrangements, no shops open, no busy passengers on the pavements, no hustle of traffic on the roads. The place had sunk into utter stagnation, and all normal life seemed to have ceased in the city.
When I had last been in Petrograd in 1915, food had been scarce and bread queues a feature of the landscape. Now, in 1918, the bread queues were still there, but there was no food at all. The great mass of the people was starving.
It was impossible to obtain any sort of conveyance. Carriages were not to be had for love nor money, if there were any of either at that time in Russia. I had already determined on my first port of refuge: the house of an old friend, Elena Michailovna, who lived in the Torgovaya Ulitza. It was a longish distance from the Fontanka, where I had been landed, but I walked there with as good a grace as I could muster. Everybody I passed avoided my glance and shuffled by with obvious suspicion and terror. Petrograd was in a state of panic. Slowly the atmosphere of horror, exuded from the very walls and pavements, seemed to grip at my heart, until I was in a mood to start at a shadow, and to my mingled embarrassment and amusement I was in a cold bath of perspiration when finally I reached my goal.
Watching that I was not observed I slipped into the house. It might have been a necropolis I entered and my footfall awoke a thousand echoes. I stopped at the well-remembered door and rapped upon it, my knock reverberating strangely through the silent building. I had to knock three times before I heard answering footsteps creeping silently, stealthily, on the other side of the door.
After another pause I knocked again and this time the door opened very silently, very slowly, very little upon its hinges.
The silence was unnerving, but it was Elena Michailovna’s voice, which asked in tones of subdued alarm:
‘Who is there?’
‘It is I, Sidney Georgevitch,’ said I.
A gasp of surprise answered me. A chain rattled, and the door was opened a little wider.
‘You,’ gasped Elena Michailovna incredulously. ‘You – back again in Petrograd,’ and she began to sob quietly with relief.
And thus I came back to Petrograd.
I had already worked out a plan of campaign.
The first thing I did when I had billeted myself was to get into touch with some of the members of my old Petrograd set, whom I thought might be of service. I had to proceed with caution. Some might be fled, others dead, others under suspicion. It was not even impossible that some, despairing of the future, might have joined the Bolsheviks.
However, as it happened, my lucky star was in the ascendant. The man on whose assistance I set more store than on that of all my other potential allies was immediately procurable. Grammatikoff was not only a scholar and a thinker, but a man of character. He had been long acquainted with me and his loyalty was above suspicion. It was a queer moment when I heard his voice over the wire. Two years had passed since last I spoke to him, and in those two years Russia had been turned upside down. It made our friendship seem immensely ancient somehow, as if we were survivors of a forgotten civilisation.
In pursuance of my policy of appearing in my own person, I fixed an appointment with him at his office and went round to see him openly. Grammatikoff gave me a very graphic and terrible account of the position of affairs in Russia. The new masters were exercising a regime of bloodthirstiness and horror hardly equalled in history. The most ignorant and the most vile, everybody who conceived that they had a grievance against society were in the ascendancy. Russia, Grammatikoff said, was in the hands of the criminal classes and of lunatics released from the asylums. Nobody did any work. There was a growing want of all the necessaries of life. People were starving. The vast majority were prepared to rise in revolt, but there was nobody to lead them. The terror of the Tcheka was heavy on every man.
All the higher officials of the Tcheka are members of the Communist Party, and the names of some of them are known. But who are its servants what man shall say? The man who has been your friend from infancy, the woman you love, nay, your parents or your children may be in the service of the Tcheka against you. It is a terrible, a gruesome, ghastly thing. Nobody trusts anybody any more; no man dares commit a secret even to his bosom friend. Some of its work is done by provocateurs, men who deliberately foment counter-revolutionary plots, and when they have engineered a conspiracy, which is just about to burst into open flame, betray it to their masters. The streets run with blood, and one more counter-revolutionary plot is discovered and avenged.
In the foul cells of the Butyrsky at Moscow sit scores of the wretched victims of the Tcheka. The ‘investigators’ employ every diabolical device, every ghastly torture ever invented by the fiendish ingenuity of man to wring from them a confession or a betrayal. They are held under examination without rest or food until the reason goes, and in their madness they reveal their complicity in plots, real or imaginary, against the Bolshevik power.
Such is the Tcheka, which ministers to the preachers of the foulest and most horrible gospel known in the history of the world. Such are the means by which, unless it is checked and that soon, Bolshevism will master every country in the world. And it can only be checked by an organisation as subterranean, as secret, as mysterious, as ferocious and inhuman as itself.
In Petrograd, however, I was but a bird of passage. The capital of Russia and the headquarters of Bolshevism were located in Moscow, whither I was now ready to proceed. But here an unforeseen difficulty interposed. Travelling by railway between Petrograd and Moscow was only possible on a pass, and passes were forbidden to all but officials. ‘Divide et impera’ was the Bolshevik motto.
In this difficulty I was able to avail myself of Grammatikoff’s assistance. Grammatikoff had charge of a fine library, and among the Bolsheviks then in Moscow was the bibliophile General Brouevitch. Brouevitch had approached Grammatikoff with an offer to buy some of his books. At my suggestion Grammatikoff offered, if Brouevitch would secure him a pass, to come to Moscow, bringing me with him. The Bolshevik general was charmed and Grammatikoff and myself set out for Moscow under official favour. And Moscow was a city of the damned.
Something like this, I thought, hell must be – paved with desolation, filth, squalor, fiendish cruelty, abject terror, blood, lust, starvation. The Bolsheviks were masters of Russia.
A city of the damned. Slowly it sank into stagnation; hoardings went up to cover dust and rubble and ruin, or did not go up and left dust and rubble and ruin naked. There had been looting at first, but now there was nothing left to loot. The rabble had been riotous, full of the lust of blood and destruction. Now the rabble was cowed and frightened, except for the few that were Bolsheviks. Everywhere was starvation, food queues that had forgotten to be clamorous, dearth, stagnation. And over all silent, secret, ferocious, menacing, hung the crimson shadow of the Tcheka. The new masters were ruling in Russia.
A city of the damned. Bolshevism, the new bantling of slow time, had been baptised in the blood of the bourgeoisie. Among its leaders were those who had been before oppressed by society – whatever they were, criminals, assassins, murderers, gunmen, desperadoes. The more serious their crimes had been, the heavier the penalties hanging over their heads at the time when all prisoners in the state prisons were released, the greater was their grievance against society and the greater was their welcome to the ranks of Bolshevism. A man who could read and write was eyed askance; the illiterates were obviously of the oppressed, and now their time had come.
The premium put on ignorance among the high Bolshevik officials was of the greatest value to the British secret service. Many of my agents operated with passports which were something more than dubious, and which were frequently scanned with an air of great knowingness by Commissars, who could neither read nor write.
The hated bourgeoisie, many of whom had been among the prime movers in the revolution of the previous year, were put to work for the new masters. There they were cleaning the streets beneath the watchful eye of an armed workman. In each block of flats there had been constituted a committee of servant girls, yard-keepers, cleaners, porters, who beneath the new banner of liberty ceased to do any work, and carried off from the flats of their erstwhile masters and mistresses such furniture as they coveted for the better decoration of their own apartments. For furniture, of course, belonged not to yourself, but to the community. At any moment a party of comrades might arrive and make their choice out of your belongings.
Here and there, pathetic attempts were made to carry on as if nothing in particular had happened, spasmodic attempts at retaining some of the decencies of civilisation, which flickered precariously for a time, and then – blackness.
And everywhere there was a current of murmuring, of bitterness, of counter-revolution.
The Bolsheviks laid this at the door of the Allied missions. There were still at this time representatives of civilised countries in the City of the Terror. A German embassy was resident there in charge of Count von Mirbach, and in opposition a British mission led by Mr Bruce Lockhart. There was an American consulate under Poole and a French under Grenard. Furthermore there were Allied agents in the city, an American Kalamatiano and a French de Vertemont. But though I had been informed of their presence I judged it best to keep clear of them, thinking that my mission could be best fulfilled if I worked on my own, and employed the assistance of Russian accomplices only.
Brouevitch received Grammatikoff and myself very graciously. Grammatikoff introduced me by my own name, informing him that, though English by nationality, I had been born in Russia and lived there all my life, and was in fact to all intents and purposes Russian. I corroborated this story and added that I was very interested in Bolshevism, the triumph of which had brought me back to Russia.
Brouevitch listened to this declaration which, after all, was quite true, with great complacency, and in response to my request gave us every facility for studying Bolshevism in its cradle.
Nobody could be more officious on our behalf than Brouevitch. It was he who enabled us to attend a meeting of the Soviets in the Grand Theatre, where Lenin in his address made a revealing distinction between the leaders and the rank and file of the Communist Party.
‘The period of destruction is over,’ said Lenin. ‘The bourgeoisie is extinct, Korniloff is dead, the White Army has crumbled away, Koltchak has been finally repulsed. We must now begin the construction of the socialist state. If we have not the socialist discipline, if we do not construct the socialist state, the capitalists and imperialists of the entire world will fall upon us. We,’ said Lenin, with a sweep of his arm embracing all the occupants of the stage at the Grand Theatre at Moscow, ‘we will have to make our terms, you’ – with a gesture towards the crowded auditorium, where the deputies or the local soviets had their seats – ‘you will perish.’
‘You say that the bourgeoisie is extinct,’ cried Gay, the notorious anarchist, ‘you say that the reign of terror can stop and the period of reconstruction begin. Well, here is a story: a man was very ill and the doctor said to his wife, “Madam, we can do no more for your husband. All the evidence of science shows that he will be dead tomorrow.” By chance the lady met the doctor again two years after, and said to him, “Doctor, my husband is still alive!” “Yes, you think he is alive,” replied the doctor. “For you he is alive. For science he is dead.”’
The reign of terror went on. The bourgeoisie continued to be shot down by the hundred. The Tcheka struck, struck, struck again and again. The streets ran with blood. Of the obscene and ghastly horrors of the Butyrsky, mercifully we can form no estimate.
‘All the Bolsheviks are sadists at heart,’ said to me the last doctor to practise in Moscow.
It soon became obvious that Brouevitch intended to be obliging to the point of embarrassment. We were permitted to go nowhere unattended, and, so that we should not be unduly embarrassed, our watchers had instructions to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Wherever we went we were followed. It became obvious that, if I were to carry out the mission on which I was engaged, I must disappear.
It was not difficult for us to find somebody to accompany Grammatikoff back to Petrograd in my place. Moscow was full of people who were anxious to leave it, and our only task was to light on someone who bore a passable resemblance to me. Both Grammatikoff and myself had friends in the city, and could call on assistance from many quarters. Indeed my visits to one or two old friends were known to Brouevitch and the substitution was made with greater ease than might have been anticipated.
When the morning arrived I watched from safe concealment Grammatikoff and the pseudo-Sidney Reilly set off from the station. I knew that hidden eyes were watching them, that unseen spies were dogging their footsteps, and I prayed that they might reach their destination without their secret being discovered. By the greatest good fortune the day was squally and my representative with his nose appearing from a voluminous, if ragged coat, bore a sufficiently close resemblance to me.
Thus I changed my identity and became M. Constantine. M. Constantine’s future was mapped out for him. It would of course be unwise for him to visit any of the known friends of Sidney Reilly, but in his pocket he had a letter addressed by Grammatikoff to Dagmara K.
Dagmara was Grammatikoff’s niece and, as such, of course, perfectly well known to me, though I had not seen her since before the outbreak of the war. She was now a dancer at the arts theatre and shared a flat in the Cheremeteff Pereulok with two other young actresses, the Mlles S. Now among the colleagues of these young ladies at the arts theatre was Mlle Friede, sister of no less a personage than Colonel Friede, who at that time was chief of the Bolshevik staff in Moscow. It became obvious at once of what use Dagmara could be to me and why I wanted an introduction to the charming Mlle Friede.
It was no surprise to me to learn that Mlle Friede and indeed her brother, the Bolshevik Chief of Staff, were not Bolsheviks. Most of Moscow was anti-communist. The town swarmed with White Russians. Many of them were in the employment of the Bolshevik authorities. By the granting of extraordinary privileges, particularly in the all important matter of rations, the Bolsheviks were endeavouring to increase their membership. People slipped into the Communist Party very easily. I saw the advisability of becoming a member myself.
My great purpose at present was of course to secure copies of those confidential military documents which passed through the hands of Colonel Friede. And as it happened the Colonel’s sister was not only a close friend of the Mlles S. but frequently visited them at their flat in the Cheremeteff Pereulok. These young ladies were entirely on my side, and it was arranged that I should meet Mlle Friede there. The meeting was a great success. When I was sure of Mlle Friede, I unfolded my proposition to her, namely that her brother should secure me copies of all documents which passed through his hands. Mlle Friede greeted the suggestion with joy, and assured me that her brother was only too anxious to be able to strike a blow against Bolshevism.
I had one or two surreptitious meetings with Friede, and when we were each assured of the other’s bona fides, he became my most willing collaborator. All communiqués from the Archangel front, from the Korniloff front, from the Koltchak front passed through his hands. All army orders, all military plans, all confidential documents relating to the army fell within his province, and many a copy of a highly confidential document he handled was read in England before the original was in the hands of the officer to whom it was addressed.
The house in Cheremeteff Pereulok was a large place, containing no fewer than 200 flats, and some of these were of the largest size. The flat for example, occupied by the Mlles S. which was on the third floor, was altogether too spacious for the young ladies who occupied it, and rooms of it were let to two sub-tenants, an ex-government official and a professor of music. These interesting young ladies had a regular visitor, whom they knew as Sidney Georgevitch, officially described as Relinsky of the Tcheka-Criminel.
What more natural than that the young artistes should be visited by a close friend of theirs, Mlle Friede, also of the Arts Theatre? The young ladies were apparently very much attached and the visits were of daily occurrence. Mlle Friede would bring her portfolio with her, and no doubt the young ladies met for the purpose of practising triolets together under the guidance of the music master.
Yes, but portfolios may be made to carry many more things than a pianoforte score. Mlle Friede lived with her brother in a flat not very far away. Every evening he would bring home copies of the Bolshevik dispatches and orders. The following morning she brought them round to the Cheremeteff Pereulok, where they were duly handed over to me.
In fact the flat in Cheremeteff Pereulok was my headquarters in Moscow and Mlles S., Friede and Dagmara K. were among my most loyal and devoted collaborators.
And thus it was that I was absolutely au courant with everything that was happening on all the Bolshevik fronts, and was enabled to get a correct orientation of the political and military position of the regime. Some of these communiqués were in the highest degree humorous and characteristic, as when the young Red General Sabline telegraphed: ‘Our canaille has ratted again, and we have been obliged to yield Red Hill.’
My own official reports to my superiors in London always took one form. Beneath their national apathy the great mass of the Russian people longed to be delivered from their oppressors. Give Russia a popular government and once more she would show a united front to the Germans. In any case Bolshevism was a far worse enemy than Germany, a hideous cancer striking at the very root of civilisation.
It was pretty obvious that, if they could only be made to co-operate, the anti-Bolsheviks could seize the reins of power with ease. Numerically they were far superior to their enemies. But they were leaderless. The Russians are useless without a leader. Without a leader they will stand and let themselves be slaughtered like so many sheep. I was positive that the terror could be wiped out in an hour, and that I myself could do it. And why not? A Corsican lieutenant of artillery trod out the embers of the French Revolution. Surely a British espionage agent, with so many factors on his side, could make himself master of Moscow?
The armed forces on which the Bolsheviks relied were Letts. The Red soldiers were deserting by hundreds of thousands. But the Letts could not desert. Latvia was in the hands of the Germans. The Letts were the only soldiers in Moscow. Whoever controlled the Letts controlled the capital. The Letts were not Bolsheviks; they were Bolshevik servants because they had no other resort. They were foreign hirelings. Foreign hirelings serve for money. They are at the disposal of the highest bidder. If I could buy the Letts my task would be easy.
Meantime it was necessary for me to travel to Petrograd fairly often, both to carry the dispatches which Colonel Friede brought and to confer with my friends in that city. Accordingly I requested Colonel Friede to secure me a pass. The Colonel advised me to obtain an official post under the Soviet, as he had done, and gave me, in addition to the pass, a letter of introduction to Orlovsky, President of the Tcheka-Criminel in Petrograd, but like Friede an anti-communist.
There are two branches of the Tcheka – the political secret police, of which Dzerjinski was the head, the most diabolical organisation in the history of the world, and the criminal branch answering to the civic police in a civilised country. It was of this latter that Orlovsky, formerly a judge, was President, and to his office I went on my arrival in Petrograd.
It was entering the lion’s den with a vengeance, but there was no help for it. If I was to have a regular pass to Orlovsky I must go. And accordingly when I returned to Moscow I was Comrade Relinsky, collaborator of the Tcheka.
Needless to say I was not slow to make use of my new office. It gave me opportunities, which were of the greatest value to me and which I quickly turned to account in securing very valuable information.
Orlovsky was a man of sardonic humour. I remember Grammatikoff’s account of his first meeting with Monsieur le President. One day to his extreme horror he received a summons from the Tcheka-Criminel. In fear and trembling poor Grammatikoff presented himself at the offices of the Tcheka, which were situated in the old Ministry of the Interior on the Fontanka quay, and was immediately conducted into the sumptuous apartment of the old Ministry, which had been assigned to the President of the Tcheka-Criminel. The President was sitting at his desk, and a stenographer was in the room with him.
When Grammatikoff entered the President introduced himself with a strong Polish accent as ‘Veneslav Orlovsky’.
Then he dismissed the stenographer and turning to Grammatikoff said in pure Russian:
‘Well, Monsieur Grammatikoff, I perceive that you do not recognise me.’
Grammatikoff realised that the gentleman before him was someone he knew, but who it was he could not say. The President resembled someone – but who?
‘You remember Orloff,’ resumed the President, ‘juge d’instruction at Vaisovie?’
Grammatikoff was a barrister and had practised in that court. And now he recognised in the gentleman before him the famous juge d’instruction in espionage cases. How had he become President of the Tcheka? That was the sort of question one did not ask.
‘I know,’ said Orloff, ‘that you must go to Moscow, but all travelling between Petrograd and Moscow is forbidden to the ordinary citizen. Here is a return ticket. You will travel as a collaborator of mine. And now – au revoir. Come and see me again as soon as you return from Moscow.’
Grammatikoff and myself thus very simply solved the extremely difficult question of travelling between Moscow and Petrograd. We travelled as collaborator of the Tcheka-Criminel.
On my return to Moscow I proceeded at once with the organisation of my conspiracy, and the preparation of the White Russians to wipe out the terror. I had to be cautious though.
The Tcheka was everywhere and the chances that I would enlist some of its provocateurs into my scheme were large. It was essential that my Russian organisation should not know too much, and that no part of it should be in a position to betray another.
The scheme was accordingly arranged on the ‘Five’ system, and each participant knew another four persons only. I myself, who was at the summit of the pyramid knew them all, not personally, but by name and address only, and very useful was I to find the knowledge afterwards, as I shall have to show. Thus, if anything were betrayed, everybody would not be discovered, and the discovery would be localised. The mind shudders to contemplate how ghastly the revenge would be if there were a complete betrayal.
No less than 60,000 officers, who lived in Moscow, were in the conspiracy and were ready to mobilise immediately the signal was given. Grammatikoff had been right in saying that the White Russians were only waiting for a leader. A well-known Tsarist officer, General Judenitch, was immediately to take command of this army. From the outside our nearest assistance would be from General Savinkoff who was hammering away at the outskirts of Russia with one of the counter-revolutionary armies. As soon as the insurrection had proved successful the way for Savinkoff into Russia would be clear and what remained of the Bolsheviks would be between an upper and a nether millstone.
All arrangements were made for a provisional government. My great friend and ally Grammatikoff was to become Minister of the Interior, having under his direction all affairs of police and finance. Tchubersky, an old friend and business associate of mine, who had been head of one of the greatest mercantile houses in Russia, was to become Minister of Communications. Judenitch, Tchubersky and Grammatikoff would constitute a provisional government to suppress the anarchy which would almost inevitably follow from such a revolution.
All this of course entailed a great deal of organisation. Looking back I wonder that in so short a time I was able to accomplish so much. Only two things remained to be done. The most formidable obstacle in our path was constituted by the Lettish garrison, who, as I have explained, were mercenaries in the pay of the Bolsheviks. I must buy their support. Secondly, I must time the rising when both Lenin and Trotsky should be in Moscow. For Lenin and Trotsky were Bolshevism. Once they were removed the whole foul institution would crumble to dust, but while they lived there could be no peace in Russia. It was accordingly necessary to our success for us to arrest Lenin and Trotsky at the first blow.
The money was very soon forthcoming for the purchase of the Letts. There was no lack of anti-communists in Moscow who were prepared to sacrifice their all if necessary to overthrow the horror which was reigning in Russia. In a surprisingly short space of time there were hundreds of thousands of roubles in the bureau drawer in Mlle S.’s flat in the Cheremeteff Pereulok.
Finally I got into touch with Colonel Berzin, one of the three Lettish commandants. Berzin was a soldier and a gentleman, a sworn foe of Germany and of Communism. If afterwards he revealed to the Bolsheviks certain details of our conspiracy, it was under the stress of tortures too terrible to be borne. I am satisfied that the Bolshevik story that he was from the start one of their provocation agents is a vile scandal.
Berzin came to me, as it were, with a recommendation. He was already co-operating with the Allied secret service, with de Vertemont the French agent, and with de Vertemont’s American colleague, Kalamatiano. At the time I had not met these two gentlemen, judging it best to keep myself to myself, but I was informed of their activities by Captain Hill, who was attached to the British mission and whom in the course of my duties I met frequently in Moscow. Afterwards Hill and myself were to be in several tight corners together and to get out safely. That was when the mission was under surveillance, when Bruce Lockhart, its head, was a prisoner, and when Hill was a wanderer in a Moscow grown rabid.
When I had sounded Berzin and entirely satisfied myself with regard to him, I unfolded some of the details of my conspiracy and asked him whether the collaboration of his Lettish colleagues could be secured. Our meeting took place at the Tramble Café in the Tverskoy Boulevard, and I stressed the money side of the question, promising large sums to the commandants and proportionate rewards to the lower ranks.
Berzin assured me that the task I had set him was easy, that the Letts were full of disgusted loathing for their masters, whom they served only as a pis aller. In consideration of my princely proposals he could positively guarantee the future loyalty of his men to me. Thereupon I handed him over some earnest money instructing him to divide it with his fellow commandants. And from that time Berzin dipped regularly into our exchequer.
I had merely to await my opportunity.
Meantime, starvation increased in Moscow. The patient queues waiting in the streets showed faces daily thinner and more emaciated. The comrades did not stand in queues. Not vainly had Lenin differentiated between ‘We’ and ‘You’. Daily the streets grew more dirty and litter strewn. Horses starved and fell exhausted, whipped to the last ounce of energy that was in them. There was nobody to remove the carcases. There they lay putrescent. Civilisation was losing the battle in Moscow, losing disastrously.
The Tcheka raids went on. People would go out in the morning and never return. Or you would visit the flat of the friend with whom you had talked and eaten yesterday, and find it empty, ransacked, desolate. Who were languishing in the terrible Butyrsky? Nobody knew; nobody dared ask questions.
The position of the representatives in Moscow was daily becoming more precarious. When my conspiracy was approaching fruition the German ambassador, von Mirbach, was shot down, assassinated, it was said at the time, by a White Russian who regarded him as the author of the horrors now being enacted in Moscow.
I shall never forget the comments on the crime which appeared in the Allied newspapers. The tone of them, while professing a proper abhorrence of the crime, was laudatory, congratulatory. Now, at last, a misled Russia was returning to a better frame of mind, had discovered who was her real enemy. Germany, Germany was the enemy. At all costs Germany must be brought to her knees.
Gracious heavens, will people in England never understand? The Germans are human beings; we can afford to be even beaten by them. Here in Moscow there is growing to maturity the arch-enemy of the human race. Here monsters of crime and perversion, to the fact of whose very existence the delicacy of society decreed for centuries that its very eyes should be shut and its very ears closed, are regnant. Here the foulest, most monstrous and most obscene passions, which have been suppressed and bridled by the common decency of people at large and by the strong hand of a most beneficent authority since civilisation first began, gibber and swagger in the seats of government. Here minds, of the like of which decent people were once not allowed to know, rule and control. Here men, who have been under sentence for nameless crimes, administer with a horrible parody of justice a satiric law. Here criminals of every mentionable and unmentionable kind are preparing an unholy war of revenge against civilisation, which has only lasted by suppressing them. The mental perverts of the world, in the extremity of their rage against the forces which have kept them in chains so long, have openly declared war on everything which the world has been taught to consider pure and right and noble.
If civilisation does not move first and crush the monster, while yet there is time, the monster will finally overwhelm civilisation.
As a matter of fact the Bolsheviks wished to drive the foreign envoys out of Russia. They had been saying for some time that the headquarters of the counter-revolution was at the foreign missions. A disastrous fire had occurred at one of the railway stations, in which the Bolsheviks informed us that a quantity of provisions was destroyed. In point of fact the conflagration was started by the Bolsheviks themselves, who had to find some excuse why there should be no food in a starving Moscow. They said that this fire was the work of the French mission.
The Allies themselves were anxious enough to leave Moscow. There was no point in remaining there. The city had sunk into a state of putrescence and stagnation beyond recall. It was fit to excite the disgust of any decent man. The missions were exposed to the insults of mentally and physically unhygienic commissars. The consulates were raided more than once and the Allied representatives treated with the grossest indignity and contumely. Infamy was piled upon infamy until at last the missions, after registering an emphatic protest, prepared to shake the dust of Moscow off their feet.
It was arranged that Captain Hill should remain in Moscow to assist me in intelligence work. Though he was my superior in rank, Hill unselfishly placed himself under my command and never could man wish for more gallant and devoted a collaborator. Moreover the American agent Kalamatiano and the French agent de Vertemont were to remain in hiding in the city for purposes of espionage, and it was proposed to me that as chief of the British secret intelligence service in Moscow I should meet de Vertemont and arrange for our future co-operation.
I had an uneasy feeling (such as one frequently gets in dangerous situations, when one’s nerves are constantly on the ‘qui vive’) that I should keep myself to myself and not go to the meeting which had already been arranged for me. But in the end I allowed myself to be persuaded.
The meeting took place for safety at the American consulate, the only one which had not yet been raided by the Bolsheviks. M. Grenard, the French consul, introduced me without naming me to de Vertemont, who of course knew who I was, and then, to my surprise to René Marchand (again without naming me) whom he described as a confidential agent of the French government. And here it was that the uneasy feeling, which had been haunting me all along, became acute. Marchand asked me my name, and I mumbled the first that came to my mind. I do not recall it now, but in his letter, as printed in the Isvestia, R. gave it as Rice.
I was by no means favourably impressed with M. Marchand, Moscow correspondent of the Paris Figaro though he was, and discreetly drew de Vertemont into another room and arranged with him some details about liaison. To do so I had to disclose to him some details of our conspiracy. The room in which we were was long and badly lighted. In the midst of an animated discussion I suddenly became aware that Marchand had crept in to the room, and no doubt had already overheard a large part of our conversation.
However there was no help for it now. I could only hope that my intuition had been wrong.
The organisation of the conspiracy was now complete. It was arranged that upon the signal being given, their Lettish bodyguards were to arrest Lenin and Trotsky, and to parade them publicly through the streets, so that everybody should be aware that the tyrants of Russia were prisoners. At the same time the provisional army was to mobilise under General Judenitch, and the provisional government be instituted. As soon as affairs in the city were sufficiently quiet – a matter of a very few days – an army was to march off to co-operate with General Savinkoff against the Red forces which still were in the field against him. Another force would be dispatched to Petrograd where a simultaneous rising was to take place and Uritzsky, the head of the Tcheka, to be arrested. The scheme sounds fanciful enough, but our organisation was now immensely strong, the Letts were on our side, and the people would be with us as soon as the first blow was struck.
We had now merely to await the return of Trotsky, and, as it happened, there was not long to wait. On the 20 August Mlle Friede informed me that in eight days’ time there was to be a meeting of the central committees of the Soviet in the Grand Theatre. Lenin was to address them and Trotsky was to give a report of the position on the Koltchak front.
I saw Berzin that same evening and learned that he already had the news. One of the Lettish regiments would in the course of its duty be on guard at the exits and entrances of the Grand Theatre. The meeting might have been arranged for my benefit. I told Berzin that whatever commandant was detached for duty was to choose the men whom he was absolutely sure were faithful and devoted to our cause. At a given signal the soldiers were to close the doors and cover all the people in the theatre with their rifles, while a selected detachment was to secure the persons of Lenin and Trotsky. The special detachment was to consist of my inner circle of conspirators, with myself at their head. We were to be previously introduced into the theatre by the commandant and to take up our place in hiding behind the curtains. In case there was any hitch in the proceedings, in case the Soviets showed fight or the Letts proved nervous when it came to the point, in case of a thousand and one unforeseen accidents which might intervene, the other conspirators and myself would carry grenades in our place of concealment behind the curtains.
When our plans were completed there came the news that the grand meeting had been postponed for a week. It was to be held on 6 September. I did not mind that. It gave me more time to make my final arrangements. I decided to take advantage of the delay and return to Petrograd, confer with Grammatikoff, and give my final orders.
Incidentally, it would be useful to know what was the attitude of the Letts in Petrograd, and to what extent the organisation had grown there. Berzin would be useful in this matter. He was in touch with the Lettish colony in Petrograd, and I wished to use him for the issue of Lettish proclamations.
I saw him again in the Griboiedov Pereulok and suggested that he should proceed to Petrograd. He was agreeable to set off at once. I gave him my address there and told him to ask for Mr Massino, the name which, together with the character of a very respectable Levantine merchant, I bore in Petrograd.
On the night of 28 August, Comrade Relinsky, travelling on a pass signed and sealed by Veneslav Orlovsky, President of the Tcheka-Criminel, boarded the train to Petrograd.