Spies and Commissars

While the Allies were gathering intelligence and even plotting the downfall of the new Bolshevik regime, organized opposition—as yet clandestine—to the Bolsheviks was growing. In the early summer of 1918, an informal coalition took shape bringing together anti-Bolshevik politicians in Moscow and Petrograd from the Kadets to right-wing socialists; no effort was made to appeal to monarchists. Leading liberals such as Pëtr Struve joined the enterprise and the National Centre, as it became known, kept up links with the so-called Volunteer Army in Rostov-on-Don as well as with Allied officials across Russia.¹ The Volunteer Army was the first of the White forces to be formed and was initially led by Generals Kornilov and Alexeev. The Whites chose their colour to distinguish themselves from the Reds and to suggest that their cause was a pure and just one. The Allies quietly welcomed them as determined enemies of Bolshevism. They also preferred the National Centre to the Right Centre, which included figures like Pavel Milyukov who made overtures to the Germans for help to bring down the Bolsheviks.² The Allied embassies feared that the Volunteer Army might make the same choice. There was also a Left Centre. Based in Ufa in the Urals, it consisted of socialists and successfully set up a local administration.³ Allied diplomats reported on these processes and kept a lookout for signs that the people of Russia were getting ready to overthrow Bolshevism and re-enter the embrace of the Allies.

In fact the deadliest threat to the Soviet regime as yet came not from Russians but from Czechs. It crystallized when the Czech former POWs journeying in armed batches from Penza to the Pacific coast turned violently against the Bolsheviks.⁴ The trouble flared up in late May when the Chelyabinsk Soviet tried to disarm the Czechs before allowing them to travel any further. Trotsky had issued an appeal for the Czech volunteers to join the Red Army; he had followed this up with an order that they could proceed to Vladivostok only if they handed over their weapons. Instead the Czechs seized control of Novonikolaevsk and then travelled back westwards as far as Penza to rescue their comrades.⁵ Opinion was divided in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs about Trotsky’s management of the process. Radek tried to convince Robert Bruce Lockhart that Soviet leaders in Moscow had simply acted out of anxiety about letting the Germans think them indulgent to Allied interests.⁶ Karakhan was less charitable, admitting that Trotsky could have handled things with greater understanding.⁷ Whatever their views, the outcome was a disaster for Sovnarkom as 25,000 Czech troops assembled in the Volga region and put themselves at the disposal of the Komuch government in Samara. They no longer intended to fight on the western front but planned to stay and fight Bolsheviks. Komuch had always been militarily weak, but the Czechs could help to rectify this.

The Allies pretended to be mere spectators of this turnabout. This was less than convincing. The French had been subsidizing and liaising with the Czechs from March to May. The British too had been involved. In essence the Allied leaders wanted the Czech troops to cause trouble and undermine Soviet rule in Siberia—and the Germans, having negotiated Russia’s withdrawal from the war, were annoyed by this.⁸ The Bolsheviks reeled from blow after blow. Workers grumbled about conditions in factories and mines and demobbed soldiers returned to villages where anger at the state seizures of grain was acute. Peasants in many provinces were on the brink of revolt. Sovnarkom governed only the areas of Russia around Moscow and Petrograd plus the Urals. The Red Army was still a shambles. The Cheka could scarcely cope with the growing number of plots and protests. In the soviets there was unceasing criticism from the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries who hated the peace treaty and the turn in agrarian policy towards forcible seizures of grain. Food shortages in the cities worsened. Urban residents with any ties to the land fled to the countryside.

Ambassador Noulens in Vologda hoped that the Bolsheviks were on the brink of collapse. Wanting to make his own assessment, in early June 1918 he paid a return visit to Moscow where he held a meeting with what remained of the French colony. He knew he was under surveillance. At the time he felt his trip was worthwhile since he learned about the various subversive actions being contemplated. But Noulens’ interpreter and confidant was the French reporter René Marchand. It soon became clear that Marchand’s sympathy lay with the Bolsheviks—and indeed he later transmitted everything he knew to the Cheka.⁹

The rapid westward advance of the Czech troops forced the Kremlin to think again about the Romanovs. Until the winter of 1917–18 the former emperor and his immediate family and retainers had been quarantined in Tobolsk in western Siberia, where they had been dispatched by Kerenski—and the emergencies in Russian affairs meant that few people wondered what was happening to them. But, although they were out of sight, the Bolshevik leaders did not forget about them. On 11 February 1918 Sovnarkom considered a proposal to bring the former emperor to Petrograd to be put on trial;¹⁰ but no action followed until 9 March, when Lenin and the government decided instead to move them to Yekaterinburg in the province of Perm for fear that monarchists might try and liberate them in Tobolsk.¹¹ Yekaterinburg was the Soviet administrative centre of the Urals region and a stronghold of Bolshevism; it was also nearer than Tobolsk to Petrograd and Moscow and on the Trans-Siberian railway. Moisei Uritski, head of the Cheka in Petrograd, oversaw the transfer, and the precise place of confinement was left to the Yekaterinburg comrades.¹² They picked the large walled mansion of the once-wealthy merchant, Nikolai Ipatev. The transfer and the reasons for it were announced by Sovnarkom in early May.¹³

Nicholas II whiled away the time by reading novels by Turgenev as well as anti-Semitic tracts. He and his wife behaved as normally as possible while tending to the needs of their son Alexei and their daughters. The Bolsheviks kept up the pressure by changing their guards frequently and making it difficult for the Romanovs to form any friendships with them. Each fresh shift started by uttering obscenities and shunning overtures. At least the food was adequate, but the uncertainty was demoralizing. Sensing that they might be moved again in unpredictable circumstances, the former empress Alexandra and her daughters sewed jewels into their underwear for use as currency in an emergency.

By mid-July the Czechs were within days of reaching Yekaterinburg and the Bolshevik leadership in the Urals were panicking. The fear was that Nicholas Romanov might be freed and used as a rallying symbol of the anti-Soviet cause. The order came from Moscow to liquidate the entire family. Exactly who issued the instructions, and how and when, was deliberately kept unclear. No communist leader wanted to put his signature to a warrant that might later incriminate him. The deed was done early in the morning of 17 July when the Romanovs were ordered from their beds and marshalled in the cellar. Armed men, sodden with drink, stood them against the wall before gunning them down. The news was suppressed: the fear remained in Moscow about the likely reaction in Russia and abroad. Trotsky’s diary records that the Kremlin leaders in Moscow had held a discussion about the plan for liquidation and given their instructions to the Yekaterinburg Bolsheviks. Lenin and Sverdlov were actively involved. Trotsky, tied up with his military duties on the Volga front, heard the story from Sverdlov and was disappointed. Although he had no objection in principle to the killings, he would have preferred to put the ex-emperor on show-trial to publicize the iniquities of the Imperial government. Trotsky never liked missing any propaganda trick.¹⁴

Sovnarkom met on the day of the killings to hear Sverdlov’s confidential report.¹⁵ Nothing was said in public for several months. It was understood that foreign monarchies, including the Hohenzollerns, would be enraged by what had been done. The Kaiser and the emperor were cousins, and even though their armies had fought each other in 1914–17 the ties of consanguinity still meant much to Wilhelm II. His anger would have been still fiercer if ever he learned that the communists had butchered Nicholas’s wife and children along with him. Empress Alexandra had originally been Princess Alix of Hesse and, although it was impolitic for the Kaiser to enquire about the deposed Nicholas, he could very properly send an emissary to ask Ioffe about Alexandra as a native German and indeed a relative. One of her brothers made the same approach. Lenin hid the full truth from Adolf Ioffe in the German mission, telling Felix Dzerzhinski: ‘Don’t let Ioffe know anything. It will be easier for him to tell lies there in Berlin.’¹⁶ Ioffe therefore simply repeated the official story he had heard from Moscow. He prised the facts out of Dzerzhinski only later in the year when the head of the Cheka made a trip incognito to Berlin and Ioffe gained the opportunity to question him directly.¹⁷

Even in Russia, most party leaders and militants were kept in the dark. As late as March 1919 Bolsheviks at their Eighth Party Congress were asking why Nicholas II was not being brought back to Moscow for a public trial.¹⁸ But by then the Western Allies were able to make an informed guess about the fate of the Imperial family. The American army contingent in Siberia now followed the Czechs to Yekaterinburg and learned from anti-Bolshevik investigators about their preliminary enquiries. It was no longer reasonable to doubt that the Romanovs had been slaughtered. King George V in Britain expressed his acute concern for his cousin Nicky and the family in comments that must have been tinged with guilt since he had turned down Kerenski’s request to grant them asylum in 1917.

The Bolsheviks felt steadily less secure in power, and Czech military actions were not the only cause. Humiliated at Brest-Litovsk, they were forced to give away further territory under German pressure in June. The Germans, worried by the British landings in the Russian north, demanded that Lenin should cede the western segment of the Murmansk area to the Finns. This would provide the contingent of German troops already stationed in Finland with a base to counteract the spread of Allied armed strength in Russia.¹⁹ The Bolsheviks gave way: they had no choice short of going to war against Germany. But they were not totally acquiescent. Even some of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries said that no party had done more than the Bolsheviks to assist Ukrainians willing to take up arms against the German occupation of Ukraine.²⁰ Uprisings took place in small towns and villages. (The British officer George Hill helped with this, even though his claim to have led the entire campaign of sabotage was a somewhat exaggerated one.)²¹ But the Ukrainian forays by Bolsheviks were marginal to the Kremlin’s general line of appeasing the Germans. However arrogantly their diplomats behaved in Moscow, the communist leadership continued to draw a deep breath and overlook any offence.

This was an attitude that infuriated the Allies. Although Bruce Lockhart continued to parley with Trotsky, he no longer believed that Sovnarkom would ever fight Germany. It now made sense for the British to strengthen contacts with the enemies of Bolshevism and lend them their support. Approaches were made to Lockhart by the Volunteer Army and others.²² When a certain Fabrikantov asked him for help in enabling Kerenski to escape from Russia, he ignored protocol and issued him with travel documents under the alias of a Serbian soldier.²³ Lockhart also handed over £200,000 worth of Russian rubles to George Hill and Sidney Reilly for delivery to Patriarch Tikhon to help with the Orthodox Church’s resistance to the Soviet government.²⁴ William Camber Higgs, who owned a small British firm in Moscow, facilitated such subventions by cashing cheques drawn on the British Treasury. (George Hill did the same thing as Lockhart but specified the War Office.) ²⁵

Lockhart passed on funds to Boris Savinkov for an uprising in Yaroslavl, 155 miles north east of Moscow; Ambassador Noulens, from Vologda, provided finance for Savinkov through Consul-General Grenard and the military attaché Jean Lavergne.²⁶ Savinkov had assembled a Union for the Defence of the Fatherland and Freedom to organize a chain of resistance to Bolshevism on the eastern side of Petrograd and Moscow. As Lockhart reported to London, the immediate objective was to establish a military dictatorship. Savinkov had himself in mind as Minister of the Interior and some well-known general—almost certainly Mikhail Alexeev—as head of a national government; he alerted both the Czech Corps and the Volunteer Army to his plan and co-ordinated his activity with them.²⁷ He also informed Sergei Sazonov, who by then was serving as the chief anti-Bolshevik diplomat attached to the Western Allies in Paris. Lockhart explained to London that Savinkov hoped to stir up a peasant revolt culminating in the execution of Bolshevik leaders. When Lord Curzon, as a member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, received Lockhart’s report he declared Savinkov’s methods to be on the drastic side, but nonetheless wished him well. What Curzon avoided was any promise to augment the British forces of intervention even though Lockhart had spelled it out that Savinkov’s scheme depended on such assistance from the Allies.²⁸ Ambassador Noulens was less straightforward. Wanting to multiply the attacks on Sovnarkom, he advised Savinkov that the Allies were on the very point of undertaking a full invasion; and, although the French had no expeditionary force in the north, Noulens told him that he could count on decisive reinforcement from that direction.²⁹

Noulens achieved his purpose and the insurrection duly occurred on 6 July. As well as Yaroslavl, Savinkov occupied Vladimir, Rybinsk and Murom and proclaimed the overthrow of Soviet rule across Yaroslavl province.³⁰ He restored private trade, promising to regenerate the economy and feed the hungry. He announced that he was acting in concert with anti-Bolshevik governments in Siberia and by the Volga. Savinkov put himself forward as leader of the Northern Army of rebels against communism while affirming his subordination to the command of General Alexeev, who was striving to build up the Volunteer Army in southern Russia.³¹ But when the Reds moved against the rebels no French or British assistance was made available to relieve Savinkov when he faced defeat. The Allies had never intended to invade—and indeed President Wilson would have opposed any such enterprise. Savinkov had been tricked.³²

The timing was awful for the anti-Bolshevik cause in Moscow. The Fifth Congress of Soviets opened in the Bolshoi Theatre on 4 July, and the Bolsheviks gave every sign of determination to fight on and win. The foreign missions sat in the boxes and watched from above. On one side was Mirbach with his Austrian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Turkish colleagues; the head of German intelligence, Rudolph Bauer, was also present. On the other side were the Allied representatives with Lockhart prominent among them; the French and the Americans had places in the upper tier. (Sadoul turned up in a silk hat, frock coat and kid gloves.)³³ Lenin spoke for the Brest-Litovsk peace, Trotsky for the Red Army’s preparedness. All Bolsheviks contended that every official policy had merit. No sliver of disagreement appeared between one Bolshevik commissar and another. Maria Spiridonova who led the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, still operating openly under the regime, denounced Sovnarkom at length; her comrade Boris Kamkov declared them to be inhuman scoundrels and, as he looked up at Mirbach’s party, shouted: ‘Down with the assassins!’³⁴ The Bolsheviks at the Congress did not try to silence the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries because they knew that Sovnarkom was guaranteed an absolute majority of votes. If the Germans were worried, they did not show it.

Foreseeing the results of the voting, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee secretly sanctioned terrorist attacks in Russia. The idea was not to kill Lenin or Trotsky but to organize a ‘provocation’ that would wreck the Brest-Litovsk treaty and bring the Bolsheviks back to the path of ‘revolutionary war’. Left Socialist-Revolutionaries thought that they would achieve this simply by assassinating Ambassador von Mirbach. If they were successful, Berlin would break with Moscow immediately.

On 6 July Yakov Blyumkin, an eighteen-year-old Left Socialist-Revolutionary working for the Cheka, entered the German embassy on a false pretext and shot Mirbach. Sovnarkom instantly proscribed the party and arrested several of its leaders. Dzerzhinski, embarrassed by the lapse in state security, sped off to their headquarters only to be taken captive by them. He was liberated thanks to resolute action by the Latvian Riflemen—a force which had gone over en masse to the Bolsheviks from the old Imperial army and quickly formed the effective core of the Red Army. Without their Latvians, the Bolsheviks would have been helpless. Lenin and Radek took a limousine to the German embassy at Denezhny Pereulok to express formal condolences. They were grovelling because they feared that unless they expressed outrage, however insincere, Germany might overrun Russia.³⁵ In Berlin, Ioffe’s first thought was that German agents had killed Mirbach so as to sharpen the conflict between Russia and the Allies. He deduced this from the German Foreign Office’s request for Lenin to put the blame on Allied agents. The Germans called for the killers and their ‘ideological inspirers’ to be caught and punished.³⁶ They also demanded the right to dispatch their own troops into Russia.³⁷ But things calmed down and the leading Bolshevik Anatoli Lunacharski spread the news among the foreign community in Moscow that the emergency was nearly over. This needed doing since the Bolsheviks were worried that the British and French would start a preventive war to save Russia from German occupation.³⁸

Young Blyumkin was nowhere to be found. He had escaped to Ukraine, hoping to return when the Bolsheviks tore up the peace treaty. Frantic to oblige the Germans, the Soviet government ordered the execution of V. A . Alexandrovich, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary who had worked as Deputy Chairman of the Cheka. The German authorities let it be known that they were satisfied with the Bolshevik official reaction. Radek could be relied upon to make the best jokes about the emergency. He told acquaintances that a job could now be found for the generals of Nicholas II’s armed forces: they could be formed into detachments and trained to shed crocodile tears in Mirbach’s funeral cortège.³⁹

The Bolsheviks badly needed a counterweight to German power. Chicherin, who was appointed People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs on a permanent basis at the end of May,⁴⁰ cabled Ambassador Francis to say that Vologda was unsafe and that the diplomatic corps should move to Moscow. He added: ‘I am sending Radek to Vologda to execute the invitation.’ The word ‘execute’ did not exactly reassure Francis after the Mirbach murder. He replied that he felt secure in the north ‘because we do not fear the Russian people’. Radek, taking Ransome as his interpreter, turned up uninvited; he was sporting a jacket pulled tight with a belt from which hung a conspicuous revolver.⁴¹ To Francis this was an attempt to look like a ‘cowboy on the war path’. He told Noulens: ‘Ah, the miserable little Jew! If he comes back to see me with his revolver in his holster, I’ll get mine from out the drawer; I’ll put it on the table and tell him: “Now let’s talk! ”’⁴² Soviet leaders, not for the first or last time, were behaving incautiously. The French were picking up their wireless traffic passing through Petrograd and knew what Radek and Chicherin wrote to each other seated at their Hughes apparatuses—this was the most up-to-date method of telegraph communication, which allowed people to type and exchange messages instantaneously. Radek ought to have avoided mentioning Francis’s predilection for his embassy secretaries; Chicherin was unwise to refer to the false tone of deference he used with the American ambassador. Ambassador Noulens enjoyed passing both these titbits on to Francis.⁴³

After Francis had received cable intelligence that Chicherin had indeed ordered the local soviet to take them hostage, the Western diplomatic corps could see that Vologda was no longer a safe haven. This would have been the last straw for the ambassador even if he had not known that the British force in Murmansk was planning to overthrow the Archangel Soviet. The Bolsheviks had their own intelligence about this and had been executing known enemies in the region. Northern Russia became a theatre of war. Francis already had a secret agreement with the Vologda station master to keep a locomotive and carriages ready for his embassy to leave for Archangel at an hour’s notice. On 29 July he decided that the time had come to flee but, wanting to avoid the appearance of colluding in British military aggression, he changed the destination to Kandalaksha, a few miles south of Murmansk.⁴⁵ Shortly before boarding he practised a little deceit by wiring Chicherin: ‘We have determined to take your advice.’ Chicherin heard what was really being planned and tried to prevent it: ‘Archangel means leaving Russia.’ He could hardly complain. His own deceit would have delivered Francis into Soviet custody. Chicherin had acted too late and soon all the Americans were sound asleep on a moving train.⁴⁶

Whatever brittle trust had existed between the Kremlin and the White House now vanished. Raymond Robins had already left for America on 14 May, still convinced that the Western Allies should not attempt a military intervention in Russia unless given Sovnarkom’s explicit sanction—by then his friend Lockhart had come round to recommending an Allied campaign regardless of the Kremlin’s wishes.⁴⁷ But room for diplomacy through informal mediation had already disappeared. A bleak future of armed conflict loomed on the horizon. The Bolsheviks had dealt with the threat from Germany by signing the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Western Allies had yet to clarify their military intentions—and the communist leaders pondered their own options with heightened concern. They had hoped to crush their Russian enemies before meeting the challenges from abroad. Now they could no longer be confident that the Allied powers would allow them this freedom.