Spies and Commissars

The anti-Bolshevik army commanders had mixed fortunes after leaving Soviet-held territory. Pëtr Wrangel ended up in Serbia. His sudden death in 1928 gave rise to suspicion that his butler’s brother had poisoned him for some unexplained reason. Nikolai Yudenich retired to the French Riviera and shunned émigré affairs through to his peaceful end in 1933. Anton Denikin lived on fairly quietly until 1947 in France and the US. Symon Petliura also went to France where, in 1926, he was assassinated on a Paris street. This was also the year when Józef Piłsudski, the most effective of the commanders who fought the Reds, organized a coup d’état in Warsaw. Despite refusing to become President, he held the real power in Poland and dominated its foreign and military policy until his death in 1935.

The leaders of the Western Allies retained some influence after the Great War. Woodrow Wilson achieved his goal of establishing a League of Nations even though he failed to secure America’s entry. Physical debilitation prevented him from standing for a third Presidency and he died in 1924. Herbert Hoover, one of his main associates in developing policy to deal with Soviet Russia, became US President in 1929 only to lose power at the next election as the effects of the Great Depression were registered; but in Europe, country after country saluted his pioneering humanitarian efforts that had saved them from famine at the end of the Great War. Georges Poincaré became French premier a further four times after the Versailles treaty and sent the army into the Rhineland in 1923 to enforce Germany’s payment of reparations; he died in 1934. Georges Clemenceau retired soon after Versailles, widely celebrated as the ‘Tiger’ who had defeated the mighty Germans. He died in 1929. Although David Lloyd George outlived all of these leaders, his own coalition ministry of 1918 turned out to be his last and he lost power in 1922, never to regain it. Among his follies in the 1930s was his advocacy of accommodation with Hitler and the Third Reich. Lloyd George died in 1945, by which time his friend and rival Winston Churchill had supplanted him in national esteem. The anti-Soviet warmonger of 1918 became the ally of Stalin and the USSR in 1941. After the Second World War, Churchill resumed his hostility towards Soviet communism; and although he was defeated in the 1945 elections, he returned to the office of Prime Minister in 1951. At his funeral in 1965, he was mourned as the wartime saviour of his country.

The Western ambassadors of 1917–18 behaved with the discretion associated with their profession. Joseph Noulens returned to French national politics, becoming a senator in 1920 and going to his grave in 1944. Sir George Buchanan remained fitfully active in public debates about Russia; but his health was never good and he passed away in 1924. David Francis followed him in 1927. As things turned out, William C. Bullitt was the diplomat who went on to capture most attention in later years. His criticisms of the Paris Peace Conference had commended him to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the best person to open the US embassy in Moscow in 1933. Although the new ambassador had shed his early illusions about communist Russia, Soviet leaders welcomed him as someone who might get them a sympathetic hearing in Washington.

In 1924 Bullitt had married none other than John Reed’s widow Louise Bryant. But he divorced her in 1930 after finding she had been unfaithful. Had Bryant died of typhoid with her first husband, she might have joined him in his resting place beneath the Kremlin Wall. Instead she was consigned to the footnotes of history along with the other cheerleaders of the early years of Russian communism. Albert Rhys Williams consistently avoided criticism of the USSR even though he was well aware of the oppressive conditions there. In the Second World War he gave speeches across America drumming up support for Stalin. In Britain, Morgan Philips Price was elected as a Labour MP in 1929 and entered Ramsay MacDonald’s national government in 1931. This rightward movement in Philips Price’s politics did not stop him writing fondly of the times he had spent close to Lenin; he died in 1973.³ Bessie Beatty switched careers from news reporting to writing film scripts for MGM Studios; she also served as the American Secretary of the International PEN Club, a writers’ defence organization, and worked as a radio show presenter in New York until her death in 1947.

Although John Reed had died in 1920 his book lived on and was published in the world’s main languages. In 1922 a Russian famine relief edition came out in America, complete with a preface by Lenin.⁴ Reed was an admired figure in Comintern and the book was published in Russian translation in Moscow with a frontispiece photo of his monument outside the Kremlin.⁵ American communists founded John Reed Clubs in his honour. Reed’s chronicle made no mention of Stalin, however, and indeed he had expressed a lively appreciation of communist leaders such as Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. By the end of 1940 every single one of them was dead, killed as an enemy of the people. The book was withdrawn from Soviet libraries and further foreign editions were blocked by Comintern, which held some of the translation copyrights. After Stalin’s death in 1953 his successor Nikita Khrushchëv relicensed publication even though Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were still refused posthumous rehabilitation in the USSR. Khrushchëv’s scribes handled this situation by annotating the text with ‘explanatory’ footnotes.⁶ The world communist movement fell into lock-step with this compromise and Reed’s book went into fresh editions around the world—Fidel Castro said how much it had meant to him as a young man.⁷

Most of the Western witnesses of the October Revolution had already departed Russia by the early 1920s. But there were a few exceptions. Jacques Sadoul, having been sentenced to death in France in absentia, could not safely set foot on French soil. But he cut a dash in Moscow, as an American reporter noticed: ‘He struck me as being thoroughly happy, absolutely at ease in his strange surroundings. He was dressed, when I saw him, in a knickerbocker suit of English tweeds, with woollen golf stockings, and smart brown shoes that betokened a rather fastidious care of appearances.’⁸ After various assignments for Comintern, Sadoul in 1924 returned to France and surrendered to arrest and trial. Fifteen sessions of the Council of War were needed before, to the surprise of many at the time, he was acquitted and had his military rank restored to him. He subsequently became the Paris correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya and spoke up for Stalin’s foreign policy before and during the pact between Hitler and Stalin.⁹ When the USSR entered the war against the Third Reich, Sadoul with relief began working against the German occupation of France. He died in 1956, the year that Khrushchëv denounced Stalin in Moscow.

Another Frenchman, René Marchand, stayed on for a while in Soviet Russia after acting as an informer for the Cheka in 1918. He was by no means as content as Sadoul. Despite living comfortably in the Hotel Metropol with his wife and children, he appeared to be under constant nervous strain, which gave rise to speculation that he regretted throwing his lot in with the Bolsheviks.¹⁰ Eventually Marchand left for Turkey where he renounced his ties with Soviet Russia and died in obscurity after years of pamphleteering in support of the Turkish government.¹¹

Arthur Ransome and Yevgenia Shelepina married in 1924 and they later moved to the Lake District, as far as was possible from the spotlights of English public life. It is unlikely that she ever again worked for the Soviet authorities. For a long time, though, Ransome could not shrug off the suspicions that were directed at him. Surveillance of his activities continued until 1937, when the Passport Office was finally told that ‘this man’s name need no longer be retained on the black list’.¹² Although he continued to travel abroad, he had lost interest in Russian affairs and devoted his energies to writing novels for children. Even during the Second World War he refrained from commenting on the USSR. The Swallows and Amazons series brought pleasure to millions of readers who had no idea that the venerable story-teller had shuttled between Lenin and Lloyd George and served as agent S76. The marriage endured but was not entirely harmonious. Trotsky’s ex-secretary grew intolerant of her husband’s eccentricities and tried to make him into a more orderly person than he was ever capable of becoming. He died at the height of his fame in 1967; she survived him until 1975, three years after she had paid a trip to meet her long-lost sisters in Moscow.¹³

Other leading British agents of the early Soviet period maintained their links with the intelligence agencies. Sir Paul Dukes served on various missions and Sidney Reilly badgered him to stand for parliament and speak out against communist rule.¹⁴ Unusually for a secret agent, he acquired an aura of celebrity. Enjoying the high life, he entered a short but disastrous marriage to a wealthy American socialite. Though he continued to write about contemporary Russia,¹⁵ his heart lay in spiritual quest and he steadily felt drawn towards a different way of life. Before the Great War he had read voraciously about Eastern religion and this eventually led him to take up yoga. In his later years, after marrying for a second time, he explored the villages of the Himalayas and studied their religious traditions. He wrote copiously and, returning to his musical interests, composed melodies to accompany his favourite yogic exercises and corresponded with the Dalai Lama. In 1967 Dukes suffered a broken leg when a guest accidentally drove her car into him in snowy conditions outside his house. Although he bore this injury with bravery, there was also irreversible damage to his brain and he died some days later.¹⁶

Like Dukes, George Hill wrote accounts of his intelligence career. He helped some of the ‘girls’ who worked for him to escape Soviet Russia and briefly took one of them, Evelyn, as his second wife.¹⁷ But his books involved a breach of the rules of public service, and he was made aware that Mansfield Cumming’s successor Sir Stewart Menzies was displeased with him.¹⁸ Nonetheless he was sent back into the USSR in the Second World War as Britain’s liaison officer with the NKVD. He later claimed to have co-written the Soviet training manual on sabotage for partisans.¹⁹ This did not discourage the Soviet political police from planting one of his old couriers in the same hotel with mischievous intent; but Hill was too clever for them and wrote a formal complaint to his Soviet counterparts which he copied to London.²⁰ The NKVD under Lavrenti Beria dropped its trickery and soon Hill was meeting Beria himself to discuss how to improve Anglo-Soviet co-operation. Apparently Beria showed keen interest in what Hill could tell him about undetectable poisons and automatic-weapon silencers.²¹

The Grand Alliance of the USSR, Britain and the US crumbled soon after the war, and Hill set himself up in business in West Germany.²² One of his money-making plans was to write the biography of Sidney Reilly. In the end it was Robert Bruce Lockhart’s son Robin who did the job using Hill’s detailed notes, and the book became a best-seller. Its closing chapters told a wretched tale. Although Reilly had not divorced his first wife Margaret, who was still alive, he entered into a bigamous marriage with Nadine Zalessky in 1915.²³ After abandoning Nadine in 1920, he arranged a wedding (again bigamous) to the blonde Chilean actress Mrs Pepita Haddon-Chambers in 1923. When Reilly disappeared on a trip to Russia in 1925, Pepita wrote up his life story on the basis of a colourful draft he had left behind him.²⁴ By the time the book appeared, Reilly was dead. The Cheka had lured him back to Russia only to arrest, interrogate and execute him in secret. The books by his widow and Robin Bruce Lockhart brought his name to public attention.²⁵ A Thames Television series glamorized him as ‘the Ace of Spies’.²⁶ Although he was often talked of as having been a model for Ian Fleming’s agent 007, truly any one out of that trio of Reilly, Dukes and Hill could have supplied inspiration for James Bond.

Robert Bruce Lockhart was certainly the model for the hero of the 1934 Hollywood movie British Agent, which starred Leslie Howard as ‘Stephen Locke’ and Kay Francis as ‘Elena Moura’.²⁷ In the 1920s he had worked at the Prague embassy where he became close to President Tomáš Masaryk. But despite adoring the night clubs, champagne and beautiful women in Czechoslovakia, he longed to go back to the high life in London and resume an affair with his latest mistress. After switching careers and moving into journalism, he achieved success through his friendship with the Daily Express owner Lord Beaverbrook. Lockhart was as profligate as Reilly. To supplement his income, he wrote an autobiography, taking him through to the end of his Russian period. Memoirs of a British Agent, on which the film was loosely based, earned vast royalties for him but predictably irritated Soviet spokesmen. Although the Moscow chapters centred on his purely diplomatic functions, the title of the book lent weight to the official Soviet claim that he had been involved in activities inappropriate for a diplomat. Lockhart lamented his notoriety in the USSR ,²⁸ though it was nobody’s fault but his own: as a master of the written word he had surely calculated that the resonances of the word ‘agent’ would increase his sales.

Lockhart had tried the patience of everyone in Whitehall by selling the film rights of his memoirs to Warner Brothers. Before the movie was released, his friends in Hollywood were alarmed by the depiction of him as the leader of an armed conspiracy against Lenin while Moura appeared as a fanatical Leninist who betrayed him. They sent Lockhart a telegram advising him that the script was ‘libellous and burlesque’.²⁹ In 1918, of course, Lockhart really had been engaged in subverting Soviet rule whereas Moura at that time had been a fanatic only in the cause of love. Lockhart prudently let the matter rest and did not sue. When war broke out with Germany, he was appointed Director of Political Warfare and knighted in 1943.³⁰ From 1945 he found himself without a regular income and wrote frantically about everything from European international affairs to fishing and malt whisky to keep himself in the grand style. He died in 1970 at the age of eighty-two.

After Lockhart left her in Moscow, Moura worked as Maxim Gorki’s personal assistant.³¹ When in 1921 Gorki left for Italy she returned to her family in Estonia and, after the shortest of courtships, married Baron Nikolai Budberg. The marriage ended in divorce in 1926.³² As Moura Budberg she lived for a while again with Gorki and then with H. G. Wells in London.³³ But she and Lockhart had never lost their mutual attraction. She was displeased that his memoirs gave prominence to their affair, but she acknowledged that this had the benefit of making her name known in the West; and Lockhart interceded with officials for a successful result when she applied for a British residence permit. Always attracted by a life of glamour, she found work on the production side in the UK film industry. She had never been conventionally good-looking; it was her zest for life that made her so appealing, and this quality remained with her into her retirement when she continued to turn men’s heads. Yet no one was absolutely sure where her political loyalties lay and it was often mooted that she might be a Soviet agent. Lockhart defended her gallantly against such aspersions.³⁴ But he was wrong. An investigation of the Soviet archives revealed that she indeed became an NKVD informer and almost certainly reported on both Gorki and Wells.³⁵

The aviator Merian Cooper—‘Coop’—had an even more extraordinary career in cinema than Moura. After Poland he went into the American movie business and in 1933 co-wrote and co-directed one of the most famous films of all time, King Kong. Cooper gave himself a role in the last scene as he piloted the plane that finished off the monster Kong at the end of the story. In the Second World War, despite being too old for conscription, he volunteered for the US air force; he rose to Chief of Staff in the China Air Task Force and witnessed the final surrender of the Japanese on USS Missouri.³⁶ In 1951 he received an Academy Award nomination as the producer of John Ford’s The Quiet Man. He died in 1973.

Others had a less fortunate experience after their time in Russia. Xenophon Kalamatiano languished in Soviet confinement until 1921 when Herbert Hoover obtained the release of all American detainees as a condition of the dispatch of food aid. Until then the US authorities had done little on their leading intelligence officer’s behalf. Some said that the Cheka released him from prison long before he was repatriated because he had agreed to become a double agent. The Department of State itself seems to have wondered about his allegiance. It gave him a less than warm welcome in Washington, refusing to give him a job commensurate with his experience. A mysterious ailment killed Kalamatiano in 1923.³⁷ Boris Savinkov, who perished two years later, had an even grislier end. His volatile temperament had often led him into errors of judgement and none of these was greater than when, in 1925, he felt so demoralized about his ruined political career that he went back to Moscow and gave himself up to the Soviet authorities. He told nobody but Dukes about his decision—and Dukes never explained why he did not try to stop him.³⁸ The Cheka immediately took him into custody. It exploited him for its own propaganda purposes, getting him to write to Reilly about the stability of the Soviet regime.³⁹ As soon as Savinkov had exhausted his usefulness, he was given a show-trial and executed .⁴⁰

All the people mentioned in this book are now dead and few of them are remembered outside the pages of monographs. Among the obvious exceptions are Lenin, Trotsky, Churchill and Wilson. Lenin and Trotsky remain a benchmark for communist doctrines and practices around the world. Churchill is remembered for his leadership in the war against Nazi Germany. Wilson’s creation of the League of Nations is seen as the forerunner of today ’s institutions of global governance. Yet the other men and women who analysed and reported and fought over the October Revolution also made their contribution to the history of their times. Each could see that something big and unprecedented had happened in Russia in 1917. As through a glass darkly, they glimpsed the October Revolution’s potential for good or evil in their world. They were excited, appalled or enraptured. Regardless of their attitude to communism, they appreciated that huge, important questions had arisen from the Soviet revolutionary experiment, questions that have not lost their importance today. Although the USSR has been consigned to the waste-paper basket of history, many of the disputes about the year 1917 are still with us.

The disputes range from the peaks of politics and philosophy to the lowly fates of individuals. An unexpected example of the Revolution’s lasting capacity to impinge on our current affairs was given in September 2005, when the General Procuracy of the Russian Federation reopened the posthumous case of Robert Bruce Lockhart. Ever since his trial in absentia in 1918, Lockhart had been a demonic figure in Soviet history textbooks—and the popular Soviet movie Hostile Whirlwinds, which was released in 1953, reinforced this image. At the turn of the millennium, the General Procuracy in Moscow was still busy reviewing historic cases of possible miscarriages of justice over the seven decades of Soviet communist dictatorship. Its verdict on Lockhart was flinty but fair: the British agent was found to have engaged in active subversion. He had therefore been guilty as charged at the time and did not qualify for posthumous rehabilitation .⁴¹