Spies and Commissars

What happened in Russia had been predicted for years but few revolutionary emigrants had expected the final moments to be so orderly. Ivan Maiski, a left-wing Menshevik resident in London, raced around calling on fellow emigrants and ‘congratulating’ startled English passers-by. The cry went up among the comrades: ‘To Russia!’² Another of the émigrés was Maxim Litvinov, who phoned his wife Ivy at a nursing home in Golders Green after the birth of their son Misha. Litvinov belonged to the Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxists, led by Lenin, which regarded the Mensheviks as disgraceful moderates; and he was no armchair revolutionary, having helped to launder the money stolen by Bolsheviks in the sensational Tiflis bank robbery in 1907. Ivy shared Maxim’s delight: ‘Darling it means we’re not refugees any more.’³ Litvinov was so elated that he tried to shave with his toothpaste and got into the bath without having turned on the water. He had waited for revolution all his adult life. Now it had happened, and his hands trembled with excitement as he read the newspapers.⁴ ‘The colony’ of Russian Marxists assembled to confer about the situation: ‘[They] began to feel the compulsion to meet every day in each other’s rooms, talking, exclaiming, surmising, looking from face to face, and their wives, unwilling to miss a word, popped the dishes into the cold oven, too impatient even to take them out to the scullery.’⁵ The small world of Russian political emigrants bubbled with exhilaration.

Litvinov felt he had to do something, almost anything, for the revolutionary cause in Russia. His mind was bursting with frustration. While Petrograd was in political ferment, he was stuck hundreds of miles away in London. As a Bolshevik, he regarded the war as an ‘imperialist’ conflict between two coalitions of greedy capitalists. Most Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries thought the same. But no socialist organization in Russia, not even the Bolsheviks, had yet fixed its policy on how to end the war—it would take months before some degree of clarity emerged on this matter.

In a burst of zeal, Litvinov met up with British socialists who opposed the Allied war effort. The Labour anti-war MP Ramsay MacDonald received them in the House of Commons. MacDonald naturally did not share the British government’s hope that the fall of the Romanovs would increase Russian combativeness on the eastern front. In fact he was predicting the opposite.⁶ But although he was courteous enough, he disappointed Litvinov by providing no notion about what ‘he was going to do about the Revolution’. ⁷ Litvinov called next day at the Russian embassy in Chesham House and was received by the chargé d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov. He asked why the staff had not yet taken down the portraits of the Imperial family.⁸ He enjoyed rubbing up the old regime’s officials the wrong way. Nabokov stood his ground and behaved with dignity. He had never disguised his sympathy with the Russian liberals and was hoping to receive the trust of Lvov and his cabinet. Instead the Provisional Government gave the London embassy to former Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Sazonov.⁹ But as Sazonov failed to arrive, Nabokov continued to head the embassy.

On 31 March the Labour Party held a celebration of the revolutionary events at the Albert Hall. Ten thousand people attended and Ramsay MacDonald was the main speaker. Others on the platform included Israel Zangwill, who spoke on behalf of the Russian Jewish refugees in London’s East End. The audience adopted Russian custom and bared their heads before observing a silence in honour of‘the countless sacrifices which the Russian people have made to win their freedom’.¹⁰ It was an occasion that nobody present would forget. The Romanovs were gone and freedom had arrived in Russia. There was talk of a brotherhood of the Russians and the British no longer poisoned by the existence of tsarist despotism.

Most of the revolutionary emigrants in central and western Europe were impatient to return to Russia. The only routes available to them were across the North Sea, either directly to Archangel and onward by rail to any number of Russian cities or to Scandinavia and then by a longer railway journey looping over northern Sweden and Finland south to Petrograd.¹¹ Britain’s Royal Navy had penned Germany’s large fleet in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven for the duration of the war. The result was that transport to Sweden or Norway from the rest of Europe became a British prerogative, and even the French government had to seek authority to send ships eastwards. The big Russian revolutionary colonies in Paris, Geneva and Zurich therefore had to cross the English Channel if they aimed to go home. London was turned for the first time into the largest centre for Russian political emigrants.¹² Excitement grew about the chance of a trip to Scandinavia, and the passenger ferries from the French ports to Dover were kept busy with Slavic passengers. The editorial board of Nashe slovo, a Russian Marxist anti-war newspaper based in Paris, was stripped bare by the exodus; the same happened to the émigré revolutionary press in Switzerland. The place to shape opinion was Petrograd. Nowhere else mattered, and the emotional tug on the minds of émigrés was seldom resistible.

They knew the physical risks. Although the Royal Navy kept the German battleships trapped and inactive, the U-boats were a constant menace. Sneaking out from their ports, they had a licence to sink all Allied military and civilian shipping. In 1916 a submarine laid a mine that sank the ship carrying Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, on a trip to Russia. There were grievous losses of ships and supplies throughout the year.

Yet the hastily invented convoy system protected a lot of commercial traffic across the Atlantic. The Americans were giving political and financial assistance to the Allies short of going to war. The German high command successfully pressed for a change of policy to allow its forces to attack US shipping. The rationale was simple. Germany’s economy was being suffocated by the British naval blockade. Urban consumers had endured a ‘turnip winter’ when coffee, sugar and even potatoes ran out. Raw materials for military production were no longer plentiful. Meanwhile Britain and France were obtaining what they needed from their American friends. The Germans gave notice of unrestricted submarine warfare from 1 February 1917 and US merchant vessels began to be sunk in March. British intelligence sources discovered that Germany had promised to restore Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico if the Mexican government would agree to fight America. Washington fell into uproar. Until that point it had been impossible for President Woodrow Wilson to gain the support of his Congress to enter the fighting. These isolationist obstacles crumbled when news of the U-boat campaign was printed. On 6 April the US announced that it would join the Allied as an Associated Power in the struggle against Imperial Germany. Wilson intended it to be a ‘war to end war’.

In New York the fall of the Romanovs had been greeted with wild enthusiasm. The American press, being free from the British and French constraints of wartime censorship, had reported quickly and extensively on the revolution.¹³ News of the abdication appeared in the newspapers two days earlier than in London and Paris. Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire were ecstatic.¹⁴ The tyrant had been overthrown; equality of religion and nationality was being proclaimed. Then came the complication of American entry into the war. The Jewish Forward newspaper approved of President Wilson’s decision, whereas the anti-war left was furious with him. Lev Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin were prominent critics of US ‘militarism’. Trotsky had been deported from France for his agitation against the war; he was, at that time, a far-left Marxist who was neither a Bolshevik nor a Menshevik but demanded the installation of a ‘workers’ government’. Bukharin was a young Bolshevik who was not shy of challenging Lenin’s writings on the Marxist doctrines. Trotsky and Bukharin called on socialists in the US to oppose America’s military involvement. Noisy public meetings took place in the cities of the east coast where anti-war and pro-war activists confronted each other about whether the old government in Washington and the new one in Petrograd merited support.

Nearly all the Russian political refugees in America, regardless of this dispute, were as keen as their comrades in Europe to get back home without delay. In the United Kingdom, the ultimate permission to travel across the North Sea rested with the cabinet. The Prime Minister David Lloyd George dallied for some weeks before allowing the anarchist Pëtr Kropotkin and the Marxists Georgi Plekhanov and Grigori Alexinski to make the trip. Kropotkin, Plekhanov and Alexinski were picked for having advocated the cause of the Allies.¹⁵ Anti-war militants denounced this as favouritism, and the Mensheviks Ivan Maiski and Georgi Chicherin formed a repatriation committee with themselves as chairman and secretary. They visited the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Home Office to argue the case for a passage to Russia. After a month of frustration they called on Nabokov at Chesham House, where they were pleased to discover that he was under instructions from Petrograd to assist with all requests by emigrants to leave Britain. Nabokov duly issued the visas but, because of the risk of German U-boat attack, only to the men. Loud protests ensued from the female revolutionaries living in Whitechapel. (Nabokov later shuddered at the memory: ‘God knows they can make a noise.’) The chargé’s job was not made any easier by the political emigrants’ habit of using false passports. Nabokov complained that Litvinov alone had four or five aliases. So even when the embassy tried to be helpful it was not an easy process to issue visas.¹⁶

The first large group of applicants obtained tickets to sail from Aberdeen to Bergen on HMS Jupiter.¹⁷ Having taken the train from King’s Cross Station in high spirits, they then had to sit around in Aberdeen for four days. The ship’s captain announced that this was normal procedure. He was waiting for a storm to brew up and curtail the German submarine patrols. He was also a little too optimistic. Halfway across the North Sea the Jupiter had to lurch to port to evade a German submarine.¹⁸ Some later convoys were even less fortunate and one of the ships went down with all on board—it was the same vessel that Litvinov had hoped to take. Only the recent birth of his son had dissuaded him from buying a ticket.¹⁹

The anti-war activists did not thank the British for helping them. One of them, Georgi Chicherin, went around saying that Lloyd George was discriminating against them in the issuance of travel documents.²⁰ This was untrue, at least for those setting out from the United Kingdom. Nabokov as chargé had indeed co-operated with Chicherin, although nobody would have known this from Chicherin’s journalism—and his tirades against the Allies could only aggravate the difficulties of British diplomacy in Petrograd. What is more, Chicherin was unusual in being in no hurry to depart for Russia. His presence in London became an annoyance, and the British cabinet was to lose patience with him in August on learning how he had written articles in Pravda that virulently condemned the Allied war effort—he was also suspected of favouring the German side. Without further ado he was taken to Brixton prison under a Defence of the Realm order.²¹ Pëtr Petrov was already in custody for agitating among British workers against the war.²² Chicherin and Petrov were recalcitrant prisoners. They interpreted their treatment as yet further proof that the Allied powers would stop at nothing to fight their ‘imperialist’ war. They declined to make a special plea to the Lloyd George cabinet for their release.

The shortest route to Russia from France or Switzerland, of course, would have been by rail across Europe. But this was impossible at a time when two military fronts with their millions of troops and artillery were stretched out from north to south down the middle of the continent. Revolutionaries based in Swiss cities had the theoretical option of travelling across Germany to Scandinavia and entering Russia via Finland. The snag was that Russian citizens on German territory were enemy aliens in wartime. Most Russians had fled Germany and Austria at the outbreak of hostilities rather than face possible arrest by police or a beating up on the streets. But the German government had always seen the advantage of subsidizing Russian and Ukrainian revolutionary groups that aimed to bring down the Romanov monarchy; and when Nicholas II abdicated, the German Foreign Office expressed interest in schemes to infiltrate anti-war revolutionaries back into Russia. Diplomats in Switzerland began negotiations for the transit of Russian revolutionaries by rail across Germany to the Baltic coast. Lenin and his Bolsheviks were courted through intermediaries. Since Lenin not only wanted an end to Russian involvement in the war but actively advocated Russia’s defeat, the German high command could not wish for a better helpmate.

Together with the Menshevik leader Yuli Martov, Lenin explored the opportunities, but Martov worried about the absence of sanction by the Provisional Government. He hated the liberals and thought of them as warmongers and imperialists. But he was loath to risk going back without an official imprimatur. Lenin was made of tougher mettle. He had taken too long to return from Switzerland in the 1905 revolutionary crisis and paid the price of diminished political influence. He was not going to repeat that mistake in 1917.

But he had to be circumspect. If the Provisional Government could in any way accuse him of collaborating with Germany he would be in jeopardy on arrival. He might even be shot for treason. He therefore struck a deal with the German ambassador Gisbert von Romberg that he and his supporters would travel over German territory without contact with Germans. Not even the driver or guard of the locomotive was to approach them. This would call for a ‘sealed’ train. German ministers readily agreed to Lenin’s terms.²³ For his part Lenin sought to entice other anti-war emigrants like Karl Radek into putting their names down for the trip. Radek, a bright and witty Polish Jew with a record of criticizing Lenin in past years, belonged simultaneously to the German Social-Democratic Party and a far-left Polish Marxist organization. If he and Martov joined the train, the initiative would look less like an exclusively Bolshevik scheme. Radek consented but Martov continued to refuse. Although Martov was on the far left of Menshevism and deplored the Russian war effort, he continued to worry about being tainted by association with Imperial Germany. Nothing Lenin said would make him budge. Nevertheless thirty-two assorted political emigrants, mainly Bolsheviks, turned up in the cold on 9 April at the railway station in Zurich. Lenin was accompanied by his wife Nadezhda and his principal adjutant Grigori Zinoviev. His ex-lover Inessa Armand was also in the group—and Radek, renowned for his scabrous wit, was cracking jokes from the moment the train departed.²⁴

Nearly everyone felt pleasantly entertained except Lenin, who took exception to the noise coming from the next-door compartment where Radek, Inessa, Olga Ravich and Varvara Safarova spent the entire time larking about. Olga Ravich had a shrieking voice when she laughed, and Lenin gruffly hauled her out into the corridor until her companions rescued her; but he then told them again to keep the noise down. Throughout the trip he was a killjoy: he was determined to get on with his writing as the train chugged its way through Stuttgart, Frankfurt-on-Main and Berlin on its route to the ferry port at Sassnitz. He reprimanded anyone who smoked. When he saw a queue building up for the toilets, he introduced a ticketed waiting system—this calmed his mood until he discovered that Radek was using his time in the closet to light up his pipe. Another scolding followed.

Once they had arrived in Denmark, Lenin and his fellow travellers made their way to Sweden where a reception committee awaited them in Stockholm. He himself adopted yet another assumed name. For a while this foxed the sympathizers who wanted to escort him on his way. An overture also arrived from Alexander Parvus-Helphand. Parvus was a Marxist from Odessa and a millionaire merchant who conducted political errands for the German government; and he wished to make an arrangement whereby the Germans could subsidize Bolshevik activity in Russia. Although Lenin wanted the money, he could not risk being reported as having met with Parvus. Instead he let subordinates negotiate on his behalf. Not everything went as he wanted. He lacked the strength to resist Radek’s admonishments about his sartorial appearance. Radek explained that he simply did not look the part of a revolutionary leader while walking round in hobnailed mountain boots. As Radek got his own back for being told off on the sealed train, Lenin reluctantly agreed to buy new shoes and trousers. But he would go no further than that. He told his tormentor that he was not going back to Russia in order to establish himself in the clothing business. He might have added that someone with Radek’s eccentricities of dress had little right to tell him what to wear.²⁵

All this time Lenin was clarifying his thoughts about overthrowing the Provisional Government and introducing a socialist dictatorship. En route to Russia he wrote them up as his ‘April Theses’. After the Swedish socialists had made their fuss of him, it was on to the border with Finland at Haparanda. This was a neat little riverside town where Swedish gendarmes kept order as the baggage was unloaded. Over the bridge was the village of Tornio that already bore signs of the recent revolution. Russian soldiers were slovenly and unhelpful. The gendarmes had disappeared and the rail timetable had lost any semblance of reality.²⁶ For the travelling party from Switzerland it was an emotional moment as they began to experience the sights and smells of a proper revolution. On 13 April they boarded the train at Tornio, taking copies of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda to their compartments with them. At Beloostrov they crossed the Russo-Finnish border, where they were greeted by Bolshevik Central Committee member Lev Kamenev. Shortly before midnight on 16 April they pulled into Petrograd’s Finland Station where a huge crowd was waiting to welcome the returning revolutionary hero. Lenin was less than gracious to the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries present; he snubbed their ideas about unity among socialists and brusquely called for ‘worldwide socialist revolution’.²⁷

Martov paid dearly for his scruples. He sat it out in Switzerland until he received formal permission from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to do what Lenin had done, not arriving in Petrograd until 22 May.²⁸ By then his Mensheviks had fallen decisively under the sway of comrades like Irakli Tsereteli and Nikolai Chkheidze who had persuaded the Petrograd Soviet to support the Provisional Government. Pavel Milyukov, the new Russian Foreign Affairs Minister, was the piggy in the middle of the negotiations about travel permits. He had not sanctioned Lenin’s trip and consented to Martov returning solely because the Petrograd Soviet had stipulated that every single revolutionary emigrant should have the right to a visa. The Provisional Government could not lightly contradict the will of the soviets.

Martov was slow enough but Trotsky was even slower. It was little consolation for him that Lenin, his old opponent on matters of revolutionary strategy, was edging close to his ideas. Lenin’s ‘April Theses’ were proof of this, but years of dispute between the two had to be surmounted before they could actively co-operate. And anyway Trotsky was stuck in New York. As soon as the Russian consulate had issued a visa for him, he booked a passage for himself and his family on the SS Kristianiafjord. The Trotskys left New York on 27 March. The ocean crossing was as perilous as any taken over the North Sea, and indeed that summer a German U-boat sank the Kristianiafjord on an Atlantic crossing. Trotsky gave no thought to the dangers. Any risk was worth taking when revolutionary Petrograd was the destination. In fact things went well until the steamship pulled in at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Canada was a dominion of the British Empire and the authorities were vetting the passenger lists of transatlantic ferries between Canada and Europe. The British control officers based in Halifax had been alerted to Trotsky’s presence on board and were unhappy about facilitating the journey of a well-known anti-war militant to Scandinavia and Russia. He was arrested and, kicking and shouting, bundled off the vessel to a detention camp. He conducted propaganda among German prisoners-of-war while daily demanding the right to rejoin his family.

Word of what had befallen Trotsky quickly reached Russia, where both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet clamoured for his release as an honourable fighter against the hated monarchy. At first Milyukov had favoured this step. But then he pressed Sir George Buchanan, the United Kingdom’s ambassador in Petrograd, to get the British to keep Trotsky in detention. This they duly did. But when the political left in Petrograd started a press campaign for Trotsky to be freed, Buchanan sensed a danger to the physical security of Britain’s many businessmen in Russia. He leant on Milyukov to stress that the British were not responsible for the situation in Halifax. On 21 April the Provisional Government made clear its lack of objection to Trotsky’s release, and he was reunited with his family and they were allowed to take the next scheduled boat—the Helig Olaf—across the Atlantic.²⁹ They reached Christiania (Oslo) without mishap and made for Haparanda before the last stage across Finland to Petrograd. Like others before him, he was greeted warmly at the Finland Station a month after Lenin’s arrival. His close comrade Moisei Uritski and the Bolshevik Central Committee member G. F. Fëdorov had gone out to accompany him and help acclimatize him to Russian revolutionary politics.

He never forgave the British for his experience in Halifax. His Marxist doctrines and analysis should have told him that the leading capitalist powers were hardly any different from each other and that the French would have done the same in similar circumstances; indeed, from his own doctrinal viewpoint, it was little short of incredible that the American authorities had allowed him out of New York City harbour in the first instance. But Trotsky moaned that the British authorities had had the impertinence to strip-search him; he noted that even the Imperial Russian government had never subjected him to this degrading treatment. It was as if the compulsion to take off his clothes for inspection by a medical doctor was the ultimate barbarity. For a man who was about to introduce a harsh dictatorship this was remarkably over-sensitive.

With Trotsky’s arrival in Petrograd, the Provisional Government was faced by not one but two exceptional troublemakers. He and Lenin set about exploiting the political situation. Even before returning, both had denounced the cabinet as being militarist and imperialist; and they had dismissed those Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders in the Petrograd Soviet who supported Georgi Lvov and fellow ministers and passed up the opportunity to take power in the name of socialist revolution. Russia after the fall of the Romanovs was like no other great power in the world. Restrictions on freedom had vanished. Lenin, the lifelong enemy of the Imperial government and its oppressiveness, was impressed by the reforms undertaken by the Provisional Government. Famously he declared before his return that Russia was the freest country in the world at that time. He and Trotsky could write fluently and get their pieces quickly published. Lenin had a ready-made faction of followers which he could turn into a mass party. He was as yet a nervous speaker, but Trotsky—along with Kerenski—was a talented orator who could stir vast audiences whenever he appeared. And though Trotsky did not immediately join the Bolsheviks, he and Lenin knew they had to bury their past disputes. They wanted the same thing: supreme power in revolutionary Russia.