Spies and Commissars

Even they, though, did not want to employ former Okhrana officials. Like other communists, they detested what the political police had done to revolutionaries under the Romanovs, and they felt they could not trust any of them. The Soviet Constitution stripped former policemen of civil rights. Since the Chekists refused to employ such people, they had to teach themselves from scratch how to organize intelligence and counter-intelligence—on this as on other practical matters, Marx and Engels had left no handbook of instruction behind. The sole asset that the Bolshevik party possessed was its long experience of struggle against the security police. Clandestine political work had required the Bolsheviks to take precautions against infiltration and provocation. Cool vigilance had been essential. In fact when the Okhrana’s files were opened after the February Revolution, it was shown that police agents had penetrated the revolutionary parties more systematically than anyone had imagined. The Bolsheviks had prided themselves on their conspiratorial prowess. So Lenin was astounded to learn that one of his protégés in the Central Committee, Roman Malinovski, was a paid employee of the Okhrana. When Malinovski imprudently came to Petrograd and threw himself on Sovnarkom’s mercy, Lenin had no compunction about having him executed.²

The Chekists learned some lessons better than others and were notably slow in acquiring technical expertise in code-breaking and encryption. This was something of an oddity. Before 1917 all of them—in the underground, Siberian exile or emigration—had used forms of secret writing for internal party correspondence. Often this involved little more than working with an agreed piece of printed text or list of specific words, and the chemicals they deployed for invisible script might sometimes be no more complex than the contents of a milk bottle. This experience taught them the importance of codes, but their political suspiciousness deprived them of a chance to increase their practical cleverness. Imperial Russia had brought on a brilliant group of cryptographers. None was more remarkable than Ernst Fetterlein, who fled across the Finnish frontier in June 1918. Fetterlein had decrypted the British diplomatic codes in the Great War, giving an invaluable tool to Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the War Ministry in their dealings with London.³ The communist authorities were able to invent only rather primitive codes—and the art of decryption for a while was out of their reach.

They were aware that the security of their wireless communications left much to be desired. It took them years to recover from the loss of many of Russia’s most expert telegraphists, who walked out on them after the October Revolution.⁴ Bolsheviks could see that they were technically inferior to the Allies, the Germans and the Whites. One way round the problem was to send deceptive messages en clair. This is the only sensible way to interpret a particular conversation on the Hughes telegraph apparatus between Karl Radek in Moscow and Khristo Rakovski in Kiev. With theatrical extravagance, Radek claimed he could see no cloud in the Soviet sky. Lenin was recovering well from illness. The Red Army was conquering all the counter-revolutionary forces ranged against it and would definitely prevent the Czechs from linking up with the Allies. British and French prisoners were being held as hostages and would be summarily shot if trouble started up from Vologda. Radek boasted to Rakovski that things were entirely fine with the Germans.⁵ Such nonsense can only have been meant to reassure German snoopers that the Bolsheviks were sticking firmly to the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Just possibly Radek was hoping to scare the Allies away from interfering in Soviet affairs—or perhaps he had both purposes in mind at the same time.

Chekist leaders were determined to rectify their lack of effectiveness. One thing they found easy was in recruiting officials. Plenty of Bolsheviks and their supporters had grievances against the middle and upper classes in the light of their personal experience under Romanov rule and were eager to join the security services and liquidate the plots against Sovnarkom.

Felix Dzerzhinski at first glance was not the most obvious man for Lenin to have wanted as head of the Cheka in December 1917. He had no recent acquaintance with underground activity. Born near Minsk, he was a Pole from a noble family and went to a grammar school before being expelled for ‘revolutionary activity’. He was a poet and liked to sing. But political rebellion was his passion; and once he had discovered Marxism, he helped to found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. He detested nationalism, being wary of fellow Poles who wanted their own independent state. He was allergic to internal party polemics—and, like his comrade Rosa Luxemburg, he had despised the shenanigans let loose by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the world of Marxism before the Great War. He was exiled to Siberia in 1897 and again in 1900, but both times he escaped. Shortly after he had married Zofia Muszkat, she was arrested and he was left alone with their baby son. Yet he kept up his revolutionary activities. He had a rough time in prison after his last arrest in 1912, suffering beatings and being held for long periods in manacles—his wrists bore permanent scars. When released at the fall of the monarchy, he was more austere and restrained than before—and he was plagued by bronchitis.

The fact that Dzerzhinski did not want the Cheka post was a recommendation in itself, and Lenin never doubted that he had made the right choice. Dzerzhinski applied a clinical judgement to any situation and had no qualms about ordering mass executions. Józef Piłsudski, who led the Poles to national independence in 1919, remembered him generously from their schooldays: ‘Dzerzhinsky distinguished himself as a student with delicacy and modesty. He was rather tall, thin and demure, making the impression of an ascetic with the face of an icon . . . Tormented or not, this is an issue history will clarify; in any case this person did not know how to lie.’⁶ The British sculptor Clare Sheridan, who did a bust of Dzerzhinski in 1920, was struck by his demeanour:

His eyes certainly looked as if they were bathed in tears of eternal sorrow, but his mouth smiled an indulgent kindness. His face is narrow, high-cheek-boned and sunk in. Of all his features it is his nose which seems to have the most character. It is very refined, and the delicate bloodless nostrils suggest the sensitiveness of overbreeding. ⁷

Dzerzhinski told her: ‘One learns patience and calm in prison.’⁸ Sheridan was unusual in coaxing such intimacies out of him since he did not welcome conversations of a personal nature. Dzerzhinski was nobody’s acolyte but he agreed with Lenin about what needed to be done in Russia. Ascetic and dedicated to the case, he would run the Cheka just as Lenin wanted—and he would not be held back by the kind of moral scruples that would have bothered Luxemburg.

Dzerzhinski was not the only Chekist with a reputation for dispensing violence with a degree of distaste. Yakov Peters, his Deputy Chairman, impressed Louise Bryant in the same way: ‘Peters told me at various times that the only people he believed in killing were traitors in his own ranks, people who were grafters and who tried to steal everything, people in a time like that who did not stick to the high moral principle of revolutionary discipline.’⁹ If terror occurred under Soviet rule, she said, it was carried out by reluctant perpetrators like Peters who were harder on delinquent Bolsheviks than on ‘enemies of the people’. Even George Hill, less friendly than Bryant to Sovnarkom, felt that Peters ‘really hated what he was doing, but felt that it was necessary’.¹⁰ But Peters had a darker personality than he revealed to sympathetic foreigners. When living in London he had been involved in the murder of policemen which led to the Sidney Street siege in 1910. Like Dzerzhinski, he would do anything for the Revolution. As time went on, Dzerzhinski and Peters became more enthusiastic about taking the bridle off the Cheka. Enemies of the Bolsheviks did not scruple to use conspiracy and insurrection—an attempt was made on Lenin’s life in December 1917. Chekists wanted to meet fire with fire. They stopped at nothing to uphold the Soviet order while continuing to speak softly with foreigners.

Martyn Latsis, a member of the Cheka Board, called in the Cheka house journal for the class enemies of the Soviet order to be exterminated. He was advocating classocide. It was not enough to suppress capitalism; just as important for Latsis was the requirement to liquidate all living capitalists. But although the legislative framework was permissive in the extreme, Dzerzhinski at first trod carefully and consulted the central party leadership regularly. The coalition between Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries was among the factors holding back the Cheka, but after July 1918 the Bolsheviks were running a one-party state. They faced enemies, foreign and Russian, who were becoming increasingly well organized and well financed. From then onwards the Chekists fired first and asked questions later, if they asked them at all.

The social groups they targeted were named in the Constitution adopted by the Congress of Soviets that July. In the clauses devoted to citizenship, several types of people were deprived of electoral and general civil rights. Aristocrats, priests and policemen were blacklisted, as were industrialists, bankers and landlords. The Constitution declared all the ‘former people’—chilling phrase—to be suspect. Latsis wanted to victimize all of them. What he said openly, the Chekists quietly practised. When emergencies arose, the custom became to arrest people belonging to these categories and hold them as hostages. Such prisoners were executed whenever the Whites carried out terror against Bolsheviks. The gaols in Moscow and Petrograd were grim, filthy places of confinement and the work of rooting out counter-revolutionary groups brutalized the Chekists in attitude and practice. Their leaders at every level prominently included Jews, Latvians and other non-Russians whose animus against monarchy, Okhrana and Church was highly developed. They did not blanch at orders to terrorize people who had enjoyed privileges before 1917.

One of the great worries of communist leaders was that their enemies might find a way to disrupt the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The anarchists were always out to cause trouble. Four of their number had seized the car of Raymond Robins in April 1918. Robins drew his Browning pistol on them only to be confronted by their own four Brownings. The anarchists stole the vehicle, forcing the chauffeur to do the driving for them. Robins, stranded on the pavement, contacted the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and demanded the return of his car as well as an apology. Chicherin met his indignation with the less than reassuring comment that ‘he had had the same thing happen to himself only a week before’. This infuriated Robins, who said that no other foreign minister in the world would talk so complacently. Robins went next to the Cheka, which is what he should have done in the first place. Dzerzhinski’s people promised that the American’s property would be back with him within a week, and this is exactly what happened.¹¹ On the night of 11–12 April 1918 the Cheka and the Red Army moved decisively against the anarchist strongholds in Moscow. Twenty-six premises were attacked. Sovnarkom used the Latvian Riflemen to carry out a thorough suppression of resistance. By the end of the action they had killed forty anarchists and taken five hundred prisoners.¹²

Dzerzhinski, humiliated by having been captured in the Left Socialist-Revolutionary rising, resigned as Chairman of the Cheka on 8 July and agreed to resume his post only on 22 August. Eight days later Lenin was wounded in an assassination attempt that came very close to success. Dzerzhinski’s morale again crumbled. In September he took himself off to Berlin. He travelled under the alias of a courier called Felix Damanski, leaving the Cheka in the care of Yakov Peters. Getting away from the scene of his embarrassment, he hoped to do something useful for the international communist cause. Adolf Ioffe refused to go easy on him and asked how the Chekists could mess things up so badly as to let Lenin be shot.¹³ Another purpose of Dzerzhinski’s trip was to retrieve the shreds of his private life. His wife Zofia had not seen him since before the Great War. After her release from Russian custody, she had moved to Switzerland with their son; from 1918 she was employed in Berne by the Soviet mission. Dzerzhinski slipped over the border to visit his family. He took them to the zoo in Berne and on a boat trip on Lake Lugano. Zofia was later to write a less than reliable account, claiming that her husband unexpectedly came face to face with the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart on the same pleasure steamer.¹⁴ In fact Lockhart at that time was in London recuperating from the Spanish influenza.¹⁵

The Soviet authorities were not yet making much effort to infiltrate agents into foreign political establishments. If they had looked for a candidate as their master spy in the West it would surely have been Theodore Rothstein, who wrote for the Manchester Guardian in wartime and worked in the War Office press office as a translator.¹⁶ Rothstein, an emigrant from the Russian Empire, was one of Lenin’s old acquaintances in London and had taken his side in the original split between Bolshevism and Menshevism. He was also a veteran supporter of causes on the political far left in his country of refuge; no Russian Marxist had a better command of English. When the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd he became a spirited advocate of their ideas. His journalism for the Call newspaper marked him out as a fanatical Bolshevik as he justified communist dictatorship and called for a Revolutionary World War.¹⁷ This was never going to make Rothstein popular in the War Office after Sovnarkom had announced that Russia would not continue in the war,¹⁸ and it was no surprise when his employment was terminated. According to Basil Thomson of Special Branch, Rothstein’s duties had anyway never given him access to anything of use to an enemy power.¹⁹ Rothstein expressed no regret about leaving the civil service. As a revolutionary he was reserving his energy for disseminating Soviet propaganda and money.

Although the Cheka had yet to set up a comprehensive operational network in Europe, there was another ‘abroad’ where Chekists were hard at work. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in October 1917 it was not long before rival governments were established in those territories of the former Russian Empire where resistance to Bolshevism was strong. Sovnarkom took it for granted that such places should come under Moscow’s authority. Chekists were trained to infiltrate with a view to subverting the current rulers and preparing a situation that would make the tasks of the Red Army easier to accomplish.

Activity in Europe was restricted to a few Cheka operatives, Vladimir Menzhinski in Berlin being one of them. Germany and Switzerland were easier places for communication than the Allied countries. Indeed, the breakdown of postal communication with the United Kingdom reduced Yakov Peters to asking friendly Allied intelligence officers to get a British diplomatic courier to carry letters to his wife in London.²⁰ Foreign intelligence operations were anyway not the monopoly of the Cheka. A confusion of agencies sprang up, involving the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and sundry communists returning from Moscow to their native countries. The Russian Communist Party as well as Sovnarkom was plagued by overlaps in functional tasks. Soviet rulers wanted results. They were practical zealots, and as long as it looked as if something positive might come out of their plans they did not bother about institutional propriety. Dzerzhinski was pictured as the spider at the centre of a vast web of international intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Cheka, Sovnarkom and the Central Committee operated alongside each other in energetic activity and no single institution had a monopoly in the tasks of intelligence.

In fact Dzerzhinski and his comrades did not get round to setting up an illegal operations department for work abroad until June 1919: the emergencies in Russia were the priority to be dealt with. (On a point of detail, it must be remembered that none of the Cheka’s operations in Soviet Russia were beyond the law for the simple reason that Sovnarkom had intentionally freed Chekists from legal restraints.)²¹ But intelligence about foreign governments was vital for the formation of policy. Germany and the Allies constituted a dire threat to Sovnarkom’s survival. Either of them might at any moment invade. Plots by Russians too had to be stamped out or prevented all over the territories under Soviet rule. White conspiracies sprouted up with Allied support. The communist leaders scrabbled around to improve their knowledge of what was going on in Washington, London and Paris. Litvinov and Rothstein ably discharged this task in the United Kingdom for the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In America, Nuorteva and Martens went around canvassing support for the Bolsheviks through the Finnish Information Bureau, and help continued to be made available by sympathizers like Felix Frankfurter.

Probably the best conduit of inside news, though, were informal diplomatic channels. Karakhan and Radek in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs talked at length to influential foreigners in Moscow. Both were charming in their individual ways. Despite offending many people with his brashness and extreme opinions, Radek seemed decidedly winsome to Arthur Ransome, who had his ear to the ground as he sought to track down Allied intentions. Ransome’s pro-Bolshevism was an open secret and agents of the Allies had learned to be cautious in what they said in front of him; indeed his letters and movements were kept under close review even though he was simultaneously working for British intelligence.²² Karakhan was anyhow always the more congenial acquaintance for Allied representatives since he did not disguise his wish for some kind of deal between Soviet Russia, as it was starting to be called,²³ and the Western Allies. Lockhart claimed that his favourite commissar was known to like turning up ‘begloved and armed with a box of coronas’.²⁴

The gentlemanly pleasantries disguised the savagery of international relations. While Karakhan and Lockhart puffed on their cigars, they exchanged opinions frankly about the situation. Karakhan rebuked the British for failing to assist the Bolsheviks; he claimed that the Red terror had acquired its wildness because the Allies had isolated and threatened Soviet Russia. Lockhart retorted that Sovnarkom had itself to blame after jeopardizing the Allies by closing down the eastern front. While Britain and France were fighting for national survival, Lenin had chosen to relieve the military pressure on Germany. If the Soviet intelligence effort abroad was frail in the year after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik leadership did not lack access to information about what the Allied powers thought of them. Radek and Karakhan were adept at picking up titbits useful for the formulation of foreign policy. They took what they discovered back to their comrades in the Kremlin. As yet it made little difference to Bolshevik actions. Sovnarkom’s room for manoeuvre between Germany and the Allies was minuscule; and Bolsheviks anyway saw the world around them through ideological spectacles: they assumed the worst in everything communicated to them by Allied diplomats about the intentions of foreign capitalist powers. This was a prudent tactic in the circumstances of the time.