Spies and Commissars

On 21 March 1918 Germany started its great military offensive on the western front after weeks of troop transfers from the east. The French and British were forced back to within forty miles of Paris; it looked as if Ludendorff and Hindenburg might pull off a decisive victory and finish the war.¹ Lenin boasted of the ‘breathing space’ achieved by his policy at Brest-Litovsk, but he knew he could not trust the German high command. Soviet leaders understood that if Paris fell to the Germans, it would not be long before they invaded Russia. And were the Germans to tear up the treaty and march on Petrograd, the newly created Red Army could not stop them. Sovnarkom would have to evacuate to the Urals and appeal to the Western Allies for aid. The Bolsheviks could not therefore afford to break ties with Allied representatives in Russia. This meant that Lenin and Trotsky were by no means as hostile to each other as most people thought at the time. Ioffe got other party leaders to support his suggestion that Trotsky be made People’s Commissar for Military Affairs,² and Lenin followed this up with a personal plea to Trotsky, who made a brief show of demurral before accepting the appointment—and Chicherin took his place at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, at first on a provisional basis.³

On 5 March, two days after the ink had dried on the treaty, Raymond Robins asked Trotsky about the consequences for Russia at home and abroad. Despite having handed over his post to Chicherin, Trotsky was happy to give him answers. He himself hoped for American assistance for the Red Army. But Robins asked why the communist leaders had signed the treaty unless they aimed to cease fighting. Trotsky explained that no treaty could involve a permanent commitment, and he did not discount the possibility of moving into active military co-operation with the Allies. Robins believed him but was reluctant to accept that Lenin shared this way of thinking. Trotsky escorted him to the Sovnarkom meeting chamber so that he could ask Lenin for himself, with Alexander Gumberg tagging along as interpreter. Lenin confirmed Trotsky’s words; he said he had an open mind about entering into a ‘military agreement with one of the imperialist coalitions against the other’ since he had no fundamental preference for the Central Powers or the Allies. The cardinal criterion for him was what benefited the Revolution in Russia.⁴ Lenin had questions of his own for the American authorities. What would the Western Allies do if the Bolsheviks ripped up the treaty? Would the US give military aid? Would Washington help Russia if the Japanese invaded Siberia? Would the United Kingdom send help to Murmansk and Archangel if Russia got into difficulties with Germany?⁵

Robins asked Ambassador Francis to accept that Lenin and Trotsky were genuinely open to restarting hostilities against Germany. He discussed the matter with Lockhart, who enthusiastically wired London:

Empower me to inform Lenin that the question of Japanese intervention has been shelved; that we will persuade the Chinese to remove the embargo on foodstuffs; that we are prepared to support the Bolsheviks in so far as they will oppose Germany, and that we will invite [Lenin’s] suggestions as to the best way in which this help can be given. In return for this there is every chance that war will be declared between the Bolsheviks and Germany.⁶

Oliver Wardrop, the UK consul-general in Petrograd, was of similar mind and advised London that the Bolsheviks embodied the only hope that Russia might return to fighting Germany.⁷ Ambassador Francis too displayed flexibility by cabling the American Railway Mission across the Russo-Chinese frontier in Harbin to get a hundred experts ready for sending into Russia with a view to restoring the rail network—and he kept Washington informed of his action. Even the Times correspondent Harold Williams, a fierce critic of Bolshevism, rushed to alert Lloyd George to the opportunity for a diplomatic initiative on Russia and the Bolsheviks.⁸

The Bolsheviks maintained a healthy distrust of Germany and decided to shift the Russian capital into the interior, to Moscow. Lenin and most of the other People’s Commissars left Petrograd on 10 March. On arrival, they found that the great clock on the Spasski Gate overlooking Red Square still played ‘God Save the Tsar’ on the hour.⁹ And if the Germans did invade, the monarchy’s restoration might not be wholly improbable.

Power to ratify or reject the treaty lay with the Fourth Congress of Soviets, which opened in Moscow on 15 March. It was no longer feasible to wait for messages from Washington or London. Lenin grimly told Robins: ‘I shall now speak for the peace. It will be ratified.’¹⁰ He had arranged for the foreign missions to attend and hear his speech. In it he mentioned nothing of his recent approaches to the Western Allies and, seeking to keep his party’s spirits up, he asserted: ‘We know that [the German revolutionary] Liebknecht will be victorious one way or another; this is inevitable in the development of the workers’ movement.’¹¹ But on 29 April he had to admit: ‘Yes, the peace we have arrived at is unstable to the highest degree; the breathing space obtained by us can be broken off any day both from the west and from the east.’¹² He still could not afford to let the Germans conclude that he intended to challenge the terms of the treaty, but, provoked by criticisms in Russia, he came before the Central Committee to urge that the priority of Soviet diplomacy ought to be ‘to manoeuvre, retreat and wait’.¹³ This was as far as he could go without alarming Berlin. Many Russians thought that he was more interested in power for himself and his party than in spreading revolution westwards. But Lenin meant what he said: he remained committed to revolutionary expansion whenever the opportunity appeared.

The People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs lost much of its earlier influence. It was obvious that Chicherin would never dominate policy. Lenin and Trotsky wanted him to operate as an expert executant of their wishes, and generally he was willing to comply. Chicherin in any case had his hands full coping with ‘subordinates’ who showed him no deference. The People’s Commissariat seethed with its own disputes. Radek was an unrepentant advocate of ‘revolutionary war’ whereas Karakhan favoured compromise with the Allies. Radek put it about that Karakhan—‘a donkey of classical beauty’—was not up to the job. Karakhan thought Radek a hothead who was too sharp-tongued by half. The rivalry suited Lenin, who could play them off against each other—or at least this was how Lockhart assessed the situation.¹⁴

Trotsky at any rate was again seeing eye to eye with Lenin; and when the new People’s Commissar for Military Affairs finally left for Moscow on 16 March, he took Lockhart on the same train.¹⁵ Sadoul dismissed the Scot as ‘un bon bourgeois’ and regretted that the Allies had sent out no genuine socialist among their diplomats.¹⁶ But Lockhart at least counted for more with the Bolsheviks than Robins did. Trotsky disliked Robins for his lack of enthusiasm for the October Revolution and his past association with ‘imperialists’ like President Theodore Roosevelt.¹⁷ Lenin felt the same, and when Albert Rhys Williams put in a good word for Robins, Lenin exclaimed: ‘Yes, but Robins represents the liberal bourgeoisie of America. They do not decide the policy of America. Finance-capital does. And finance-capital wants control of America. And it will send American soldiers.’¹⁸

Lenin and Trotsky were also sceptical about Lockhart but thought he might come in useful while the Bolsheviks were looking for chances to play off the Allies and Germany against each other. Trotsky was hoping to get assistance as he built up the Red Army. Lockhart was a willing helpmate, assuring London that the Bolsheviks had been ‘wonderfully patient’.¹⁹ The Allies could perhaps be persuaded to lend a hand if they judged that the Russians might one day soon break with the Germans. But his words increasingly fell on deaf ears. Foreign Secretary Balfour, while encouraging him to be frank in his reports, complained that he had supplied no evidence of genuine anti-German purposes among the Bolshevik leaders.²⁰ General Alfred Knox, the British military liaison officer in Siberia, was blunt about those Allied representatives who continued to press the case for accommodation with the Kremlin. In a report to London he wrote that Lockhart’s bland commentaries on Soviet politics were ‘criminally misleading’.²¹

Anti-Bolshevik Russians were angry about liaison between the Allies and the Reds. E. D. Trubetskoi and fellow monarchists warned the French consul-general Fernand Grenard in Moscow that Allied policy was wrong in every way. They stressed that Lenin had not the slightest intention of fighting Germany. If France and Britain continued to indulge Sovnarkom, the result might be to push Russian patriots into seeking help from the Germans. Trubetskoi’s words were ignored and the Allies went on probing the possibilities of co-operation with the Soviet leadership.²²

Lenin’s manoeuvres annoyed the German high command. Rudolf Bauer, head of Germany’s military intelligence in Russia, threatened a German occupation of Petrograd unless Sovnarkom showed full compliance.²³ But generally there was satisfaction in Germany at the closure of the eastern front. On 7 March the Germans signed a treaty with the White Finnish government and helped General Mannerheim to crush the remnants of the Finnish Reds and eliminate the prospect of socialist revolution in Helsinki. In April they tore up their treaty with the Central Rada in Kiev and installed Pavlo Skoropadskyi as a client ruler. Ukraine became a colony in all but name. The German military campaign stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and was accomplished with ease, enabling the high command to divert men and equipment to the western front. Not only the Allies but also the Bolsheviks hoped that Germany’s onslaught in northern France would prove ineffective. The fate of the October Revolution rested on the resilience of the French and British armies in their cold, wet trenches. If the Germans overwhelmed the Allies, they would rip up the Brest-Litovsk treaty and turn their power against Sovnarkom.

The Western Allies were exasperated by a treaty that allowed the Germans to concentrate their forces against them in northern France. But Soviet leaders were pleased at least that London, Paris and Washington left their diplomats in Russia. President Wilson declined to do anything further to assist Sovnarkom. He replied politely but blandly to overtures from Lenin and Trotsky.²⁴ He was simply being diplomatic. Things did not need to be made worse by an offensive telegram from the White House. Wilson disliked the British and French proposal for the Japanese to intervene in Russia from Siberia. He refused to contemplate a similar expedition by the Americans—and he insisted that in any case the outcome of the Great War was about to be decided on the western front.²⁵

The staff of the European embassies returned from Finland to Russia and joined the Americans and Japanese in Vologda. They all absolutely refused to transfer to Moscow even though they maintained consuls or other representatives there. Bruce Lockhart watched all this from afar: ‘It was as if three foreign Ambassadors were trying to advise their governments on an English cabinet crisis from a village in the Hebrides.’²⁶ He thought no Allied ambassador was up to the task. Francis in his eyes was ‘a charming old gentleman of nearly eighty’ and he recorded that Trotsky dubbed Noulens ‘the Hermit of Vologda’. Noulens supposedly shaped his attitude according to ‘the prevailing policy of his own party in the French Chamber’, whereas Della Torretta spoke Russian but allowed himself to be bullied by Noulens. Rumours proliferated in Vologda’s fetid diplomatic atmosphere; and Lockhart had to chuckle when Noulens, who had heard that the Germans had installed one of Nicholas II’s ministers in power in Petrograd, nervously asked whether the story was true.²⁷ Moves were afoot behind the scenes to send expeditionary forces to protect Allied interests. The British were gathering troops for a landing in the Russian north at Murmansk and the Japanese were planning the same for eastern Siberia. Sovnarkom would receive no prior notice. The idea was to do the deed before anyone noticed, but the Bolsheviks got wind of Japan’s intentions and sought to pre-empt them by making pleas to the other Allies.

In April, the United Kingdom landed a force of 2,500 men in Murmansk, mainly British but also including some French and Serbs.²⁸ Their stated purpose was to protect Allied military supplies from falling into German hands. Trotsky retorted: ‘This is what the wolf said to the hare whose leg it had just snapped.’²⁹ But there was nothing he could do to get rid of the British, and anyway he wanted their help in enhancing Soviet security. The operation in northern Russia had been kept strictly secret out of concern for British popular opinion and also in order to avoid letting Berlin know what was afoot. The troops led by Brigadier General Finlayson had been trained in seclusion in the Tower of London. The force was kept in the dark about its destination when it boarded the train at King’s Cross Station in London; and the officers were informed only when their ship, City of Marseilles , was already at sea. Things went awry early on when Spanish influenza afflicted the crew and the troops. Indian Muslim stokers succumbed first. As it was the month of Ramadan, they had had to fast daily until dusk. Soldiers and then even officers had to shovel coal before the ship docked in Murmansk.³⁰

Lenin and Trotsky were shocked by the British action, but they soon surmounted this. Increasingly the Allied landings appeared a helpful counterweight to Germany’s rapacity. The Bolsheviks had assumed that they would keep control of Crimea; but this did not stop the Germans from invading and imposing their control over the northern coast of the Black Sea. Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinodar, Voronezh and Kursk too fell under German occupation. ³¹ The treaty in March had drawn a line from the Baltic Sea only as far south as Brest-Litovsk. Trotsky, while concentrating on his ploy of ‘neither war nor peace’, had overlooked the need for agreement on Russia’s new frontiers. This was an elementary blunder, and the Russian and Ukrainian governments were still negotiating over the line to be drawn between Russia and Ukraine until well into the autumn.³² No one in the Central Committee, least of all Lenin, had foreseen the consequences as Russian-inhabited cities continued to fall to the Germans. Nevertheless even the German high command held back from a total invasion. It assisted the Cossack leader General Krasnov in building up an army that one day might be deployable against the Reds. Yet already on 2 April 1918 Stalin was questioning the point of the treaty and mooted the idea of forming an anti-German military coalition with the Ukrainian Central Rada when the Germans seized Kharkov.³³ Stalin’s change of stance was a sign of the panic in Sovnarkom. Rather than a breathing space, Brest-Litovsk appeared to have produced an opportunity for suffocation.

The Central Committee met in emergency session on 10 May. Six members were in Moscow and available, and it was the most tumultuous gathering since the discussions of January and February. Sokolnikov, the very man whose hand had signed the treaty, argued that Germany’s recent military actions had breached the terms of the Soviet–German agreements. What lay behind this, according to Sokolnikov, was a confluence of interests between the Russian bourgeoisie and German imperialism. He urged the pursuit of ‘a military agreement with the Anglo-French coalition with the objective of military co-operation on certain conditions’.³⁴ Lenin rebutted this proposal and persuaded the Central Committee to stick by its peace policy. Sokolnikov did not give up. On 24 May he wrote in Pravda: ‘Should Germany break the Brest peace treaty, the Soviet government will have to ask itself whether it should not try and obtain military help from one imperialist power against another. The communists are in no way opposed to such methods as would cause the imperialists to break each other’s heads.’³⁵ This was no more than Trotsky had been thinking since November 1917; it had also been in Lenin’s mind at the time when the treaty was signed. But no one had previously made such a suggestion on the pages of the central party newspaper.

Trotsky appealed for five hundred French officers to assist with the Red Army.³⁶ France’s diplomats and military attachés, with the exception of Sadoul, were sceptical. Georges Petit said: ‘All this sterile and hypocritical blustering ought not to be taken seriously.’ Henri-Albert Niessel of the French military mission went further. After hearing Trotsky blame the Allies for the Brest-Litovsk treaty, Niessel lost his temper and addressed him ‘in a way that no general would dare to speak to a subordinate officer’.³⁷ Niessel’s comrade Jean Lavergne sent officers into Ukraine to cause trouble for the ‘Austro-Germans’. Despite telling Lenin he would assist in training the Red Army, Lavergne doubted that Sovnarkom would meet the French condition that the Reds should demonstrably prepare to fight Germany.³⁸ Trotsky had greater success with the United Kingdom. For advice on a Soviet air force he enlisted the British intelligence officer George Hill and appointed him inspector of aviation, and two or three times a week he laid aside half an hour for Hill to instruct him in aeronautics. Hill relished the queerness of being asked to teach the arts of war to a man who was famous for having opposed militarism throughout Europe. His task was to enable the communists to build up an air force that could take on Germany’s fighter and reconnaissance planes in the event of war.³⁹ Ambassador Francis tried to appear helpful, cabling Robins on 3 May 1918: ‘You are aware of my action in bringing about the aid of the military missions towards organizing an army.’⁴⁰

This support pleased Trotsky, who asked Lockhart on 5 May to request the help of the British government in building the Red Army and for the dispatch of the Royal Navy to ‘save the Black Sea fleet’. In exchange he promised to allow the large contingent of Czech ex-POWs to proceed to Murmansk and Archangel for shipment across the North Sea to the western front against the Central Powers .⁴¹ Serb volunteers had already done this with Soviet consent. Negotiations about the Czechs, based mainly in Penza, had gone on since shortly after the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The Bolsheviks sniffed the danger that the British in the north might treacherously deploy them against the Red Army; they also worried about how the Germans might react to such a deployment of the Czechs.⁴² Trotsky therefore tried to persuade Czech units to join the Red forces. But the Western Allies had to be appeased if he wanted anything from them, so he sanctioned an arrangement for the Czechs to make their way out of Russia via Vladivostok for onward transportation to Europe.⁴³ Trotsky ignored the taboo against assisting one of the two military coalitions in ‘the imperialist war’. He assured Lockhart that the British force could keep its stores undisturbed in northern Russia.⁴⁴ The British pushed for more. Rumours grew that the Germans were about to march on Petrograd and there was a danger that the entire Baltic Sea would fall under their control. The Admiralty in Whitehall instructed Francis Cromie, the naval attaché in Petrograd, to explore ways of scuttling the ships as a precaution. On 11 May Cromie set off for Moscow to see whether Trotsky would make trouble; he also spoke to Lockhart and the Red Army General Staff.⁴⁵

The United Kingdom continued to strengthen its presence at Murmansk in the Russian north, raising its force steadily from the initial strength of 450 officers and men.⁴⁶ The French took responsibility for the Allies in the south, sending a flotilla to Odessa on the Black Sea and depositing a force there. The Murmansk landings provoked protests but no action from Sovnarkom. Soviet leaders lacked the military strength to remove the British expedition; they also quietly welcomed the arrival of a counterbalance to the Germans. France’s force in Odessa received critical comment but it was far from being at the top of Pravda’s agenda since the Bolsheviks had lost their toehold across Ukraine.

The military position was tricky enough, but Sovnarkom also faced an ever worsening economic situation. Until the Brest-Litovsk treaty it had been possible for old contracts to be fulfilled and new ones drawn up with foreign businesses. Sovnarkom had valuable goods for sale or rent. Lenin had consistently said that foreign capital was essential for industrial reconstruction; he wanted to offer ‘concessions’ in the Russian economy—and Sovnarkom resolved to draw up a plan on non-capitalist principles. ⁴⁷ (Why capitalists should want to invest without any chance of making a profit was not given consideration.) The idea of inviting businesses abroad to invest in Russia had been debated in Soviet governing circles since the beginning of the year.⁴⁸ It was not widely popular among Bolshevik leaders but Lenin would not let go of it, believing that capitalist powers were inherently greedy. He hoped to inveigle the Americans into doing business in Russia and deflect the military threat from Japan. Lenin suggested that President Wilson might put pressure on Tokyo if Sovnarkom used Siberian concessions as an enticement to American big business.⁴⁹ The Allies, even if they were willing to prop up Sovnarkom, saw the Russian trade as a growing risk for governments as well as businesses. Platinum was held in large stocks in Russia, and the British government had been negotiating their purchase; but in May 1918 a prosecution was brought in London against a British firm that had sought to buy up Russian platinum through the businessman William Camber Higgs of Petrograd. An Allied economic blockade of the territory under Soviet rule commenced.⁵⁰

Lenin turned instead to Germany and made an appeal to its industrialists and financiers. The Germans did not make this easy for him. Their ambassador, Count von Mirbach, was exigent and imperious. He was also a stickler for diplomatic propriety. He insisted on presenting his credentials in the time-honoured fashion of diplomacy. This he did to Sverdlov as Chairman of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets. His one concession to the Bolsheviks was to wear only a day suit and not a top hat and tails.⁵¹

Mirbach treated Chicherin at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs as an underling. Whenever he wanted to speak to him, he barged into his rooms without ceremony and flung his hat, overcoat and cane on the table. He shot his mouth off in Radek’s office for everybody to hear.⁵² He intended that the Bolsheviks should feel that Moscow had become part of Germany’s domains. It had taken until 26 April for Mirbach to set up his official residence at 5 Denezhny Pereulok (Money Lane). The German consulate was on the other side of the street at Number 18. The position could not have been more awkward since the French military mission worked and lived on the same street.⁵³ The chauffeurs of the two nations competed to get their limousines ahead of each other. On one occasion they screeched to a halt just three inches apart.⁵⁴ The efficiency and zest of the Germans impressed onlookers in comparison with the pomaded diplomats of several other embassies.⁵⁵ Setting the tone, Mirbach paid visits to leading monarchists, including a sister-in-law of Nicholas II.⁵⁶ He insisted that Sovnarkom should restore money and companies seized from German owners in the war or after the October Revolution.⁵⁷ Sovnarkom complied, committing itself to punish anyone who tried to obstruct the policy. Russia’s subordination appeared complete.⁵⁸

The Soviet leadership did not pretend to like the situation, as Pravda made clear: ‘The German ambassador has arrived in the revolutionary capital not as a representative of the toiling classes of a friendly people but as the plenipotentiary of a military gang which with boundless insolence kills, rapes and pillages every country.’⁵⁹ But rhetoric was one thing, practical resistance entirely another.

Trying to make the best of a bad job, Sovnarkom appointed missions to central Europe on 4 April 1918. Lev Kamenev was the choice for Austria, Adolf Ioffe for Germany and Yan Berzin and Ivan Zalkind for Berne.⁶⁰ On his way back from the United Kingdom Kamenev had been apprehended on one of the Åland Islands by the White Finns and the announcement of his Viennese appointment seems to have been a ploy to get the Central Powers to exert their influence to release him. (In fact he was not freed until 17 June 1918 by means of a deal to swap him for half-a-dozen White Finnish officers.)⁶¹ It anyway was Ioffe who had the key posting. Berlin was the capital of the power which had forced the ‘obscene peace’ on Russia; but, like Trotsky, Ioffe was willing to suppress his feelings about Brest-Litovsk. He could perhaps salve his conscience by doing what he could to promote the cause of revolutionary internationalism in Berlin. Leonid Krasin and Vladimir Menzhinski went with him. Krasin had been a manager for Siemens-Schuckert in Germany and Russia before the Great War; he had also been involved in the Bolshevik robbery unit after the failure of the 1905–6 revolution. He was hardly a veteran of big business but he was the best qualified among the Bolsheviks. Menzhinski was a trusted Chekist who was assigned to undercover work.

No one could tell what would come out of this hazardous international situation. For nearly two months after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk had been signed, anything seemed possible—or at least this was the assumption underlying the activity of the politicians and the diplomats. The treaty had solved everything and nothing. Any slight shift in the fortunes of the Allies or the Germans could have immense consequences. The war was not over and any trembling of ‘Soviet power’ could result in the collapse of Bolshevism. The government in Moscow was far from secure and the economy was in free fall.

Even the German leadership was perplexed. The flotsam of many nations was swept around in the Russian tumult. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners had fallen into the hands of the Russians since 1914, and Lenin and Trotsky regarded them as excellent material for revolutionary indoctrination. Many POWs needed no new stimulus to turn against their old governments. The belligerent mood was especially remarkable among Czech and Hungarian captives who wished to return home and overthrow the Habsburg authorities.⁶² Many had newly developed communist sympathies—this was true of Czechs, Hungarians, Bulgarians as well as Austrians and Germans. The Bolsheviks organized an All-Russia Congress of POW Internationalists in Moscow on 9 April 1918. ⁶³ By freeing the military prisoners of Imperial Russia they intended to foster insurrections in Europe. It was the Central Powers which had reason to fear what was afoot. Within days of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, according to Sadoul, German and Austrian volunteers were being sent into Ukraine from Moscow to take up the struggle against the military occupation.⁶⁴ Prisoner-of-war associations were being formed all over the country—and predictably the Central Powers showed little eagerness to welcome them back across their frontiers.

Robert Vaucher left an account of the Germans freed from detention camps by Sovnarkom:

In the streets of Petrograd the German ex-POWs walk around freely, dressed in new attire several days previously, belted in their blue, green or white pre-war uniforms, fully ornamented with frogging, with braids and with insignia. They parade the length of Nevski Prospect in their flamboyant lion-tamer uniforms with the air of victors and look down on their Austrian allies who are still dressed in their old uniforms which are patched, faded and threadbare.⁶⁵

Not everyone was eager to go back to Germany, for fear of being mobilized to the trenches of the western front. Nor was the German high command enthusiastic about using them as soldiers until all traces of Bolshevik influence had been removed. The Austrian commanders were still more worried about the contaminating effects of communism.⁶⁶ Lenin’s peace needed careful handling. The outcome of the Great War was being decided in northern France, but the dismantled eastern front retained its capacity to affect the situation in the western trenches.