Spies and Commissars

But the survival of the Soviet government meant that the ‘Russian question’ was anything but a historical one. German commanders and diplomats who had cheerfully welcomed their government’s use of the Bolsheviks to ease their tasks in the war now warned against the possibility that Bolshevism might move into the heart of Europe. Until November 1918 Allied politicians had looked on Russians mainly in terms of their potential to restore the eastern front. From being fitfully alarmed by pro-Soviet anti-war propaganda in their own countries, they began to appreciate that the Bolshevik revolutionary example might soon be followed abroad. Talk about the communist ‘contagion’ was growing. It was accentuated by the actions of the Bolsheviks themselves after the German surrender. The borderlands of the old empire underwent revolutions as Moscow supplied personnel to instigate seizures of power in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and proclaim Soviet republics. Fundamental economic and social reforms followed Russia’s model. Once Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius had fallen under their influence, the Bolsheviks tried to extend the revolutionary order from the capitals to other towns and villages. Stalin drafted decrees in December recognizing the new Soviet republics and providing them with financial assistance.² If this could happen so quickly, who was to say that Poland or Germany would not soon fall to the communists? And what was to stop communist influence from spreading still further westwards?

In fact the German capitulation occurred just a little too soon for the Bolsheviks, who had not yet secured their hold on Russia. On 18 November 1918 in Omsk, a city in south-western Siberia, Admiral Alexander Kolchak pushed aside the regional administration led by Socialist-Revolutionaries and declared himself Supreme Ruler. Komuch by then was no more and the Red Army had seized control of the Volga towns. Kolchak, assisted by the remaining volunteers of the Czech Corps, despised the Socialist-Revolutionaries as much as he hated the Bolsheviks. His forces dealt savagely with the Reds and their sympathizers as he undertook his advance through the Urals. His was the first of the White armies to make serious progress and in December he occupied Perm, scattering the Bolsheviks to the winds. In the south, where another White force—the Volunteer Army—was still gathering under General Anton Denikin after the deaths of Generals Kornilov and Alexeev, the hope was that the Allied victory in the west would liberate resources to help against the Bolsheviks. Denikin welcomed the existence of the clandestine National Centre with its liberal and socialist members so that he could win friends in London and Paris.³ The British quickly indicated approval and promised their help. The French made similar noises.⁴ Action followed on 18 December when the French landed troops in Odessa while Britain’s expedition remained in the Russian north. The situation was grim for Bolshevism and getting grimmer.

Although they temporarily gave up territory, the Bolsheviks tightened their grip on the areas under their rule. They had spent the year 1918 in internal disputes, nearly breaking apart as a party over the Brest-Litovsk treaty. There were also regular problems with indiscipline and lack of co-ordination between the various organizational levels. Bolshevik leaders in the provinces as well as in Moscow recognized that this situation had to change if Sovnarkom was going to win the Civil War against the Whites. Agreement was reached on the need for a properly functioning hierarchy. As personnel were drafted into the Red Army, fewer and fewer people were left to take the big decisions. The Party Central Committee established a system of internal sub-committees to facilitate rapid reactions to emergencies. The Political Bureau (or Politburo, as it was known) consisted of five members including Lenin and Trotsky; it quickly became the key agency of central party decision and command. The Bolsheviks were willing to militarize themselves if it helped against Kolchak and Denikin. They had always believed in centralism: now they set about practising it systematically. Gradually, the chaotic conditions in soviets, army, police and trade unions began to improve as the party imposed its institutional supremacy.

The Whites’ strategic aim was simply to advance on Moscow and overrun the Bolsheviks. The Allies were more enigmatic. Lloyd George and Wilson still claimed they simply wanted to see Russia achieve internal peace. Clemenceau, who as French premier exerted authority at President Poincaré’s expense, agreed. The difficulty remained that no Allied leaders recognized the legitimacy of Sovnarkom and the October Revolution—they commonly believed that the Russian people were oppressed by Bolshevik rule.

There were three basic options. The Western Allies—or one or two of them—could decide that Russia, by defecting from their side and relieving the military pressure on Germany, had forfeited the right to be left alone at the end of hostilities. The spectre of communism was haunting Europe. Lenin and his comrades had openly stated their wish to put global capitalism to the torch. They aimed to overturn the American, French and British governments. The Allied powers might reasonably conclude that the way to prevent the communist insurrections was to cauterize the ‘contagion’ by invading Russia. This would require a big army and a concentration of political will. A less demanding option would be to strengthen the Allied expeditions lodged on the periphery of‘Soviet power’, supplying the Whites with money and arms but holding back from their own direct attack on Moscow and Petrograd. But political opposition and social exhaustion at home might rule out even this possibility. The Great War was over and few people in Britain, France or America had the appetite for yet another far-flung conflict and indeed many were fiercely opposed to the idea. In that case the ultimate option would be to conclude that Russia was a lost cause and to abandon the Russian people to their fate.

But even a policy of non-intervention left problems unresolved. Should Soviet Russia receive official recognition? Should normal trade links be resumed? Several business lobbies in the UK and the US called for a diplomatic and commercial rapprochement. The trade unions meanwhile campaigned against military action, and European socialist parties had leaders and militants who saw a lot of good in the social and economic reforms in Russia.

In the United Kingdom, too, a Hands Off Russia movement grew up, supplied with a rousing booklet by Arthur Ransome. In The Truth about Russia he lamented:

I only know that, from the point of view of the Russian Revolution, England seems to be a vast nightmare of blind folly, by the sea, and beyond that by the trenches, and deprived, by some fairy godmother who was not invited to her christening, of the imagination to realise what is happening beyond. Shouting in daily telegrams across the wires from Russia I feel I am shouting at a drunken man asleep in the road in front of a steamroller . . . I think it possible that the revolution will fail. If so, then the failure will not mean that it loses its importance . . . No matter, if only in America, in England, in France, in Germany, men know what it was that failed, who betrayed it, who murdered it. Man does not live by his deeds so much as by the purposes of his deeds.⁵

This was certainly the line taken by Labour Party candidates at the hustings before the general election on 14 December 1918. Ramsay MacDonald thought that it had served the Allies right that Lenin had dragged Russia out of the war; he was also sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as fellow socialists, despite being regularly insulted by them in print.⁶ The New Statesman, breaking its wartime silence about how to handle Russia, joined the Daily Herald, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Express in putting pressure on Lloyd George and the government to halt the intervention. Even the Daily Telegraph, usually a supporter of the Coalition, objected to ministers refusing to ventilate their considerations on Bolshevism in parliament or the press. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Milner, was an exception; he openly contended that it would be ‘an abominable betrayal, contrary to every British instinct of honour and humanity’, if the country abandoned those Russians who had supported the Allied forces of intervention—and he confided to ex-chargé d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov that his personal preference was to reinforce the military intervention.⁷ But generally the Coalition MPs avoided the Russian question save only for affirming that a vote for them would help defend the United Kingdom against Bolshevism. Their electoral tactic paid off. When the results were declared on 28 December the Coalition had triumphed.⁸

Robert Bruce Lockhart’s line was more belligerent than Milner’s. Newly returned from Moscow, he was acclaimed as a near-martyr who had done his patriotic duty. In the House of Commons only the Liberal MP Joseph King sounded a discordant note about him. King had got hold of the Soviet version of events and pointed out that Lockhart was no innocent but had tried to suborn the Latvian Riflemen into arresting Lenin and Trotsky.⁹ This isolated clamour drew no response from Lockhart, who maintained his focus on seeking to influence governmental policy; with Germany defeated, he favoured an all-out invasion of Russia. On 7 November, the first anniversary of the October seizure of power in Petrograd, he forwarded a memorandum to the Foreign Office emphasizing the strength that accrued to the Soviet government from its repressive zeal as well as its popularity with workers and peasants. The Bolsheviks were easily the biggest party in Russia; the counter-revolutionary forces were hopelessly divided. Lockhart pointed out that the communist leadership was intent on expanding the revolution into central Europe. He mapped out the various options before recommending military force ‘to intervene immediately on a proper scale’. He proposed sending British troops to Siberia and Archangel. But his idea was that the main offensive should be organized from the south: he called for 50,000 men to be dispatched to the Black Sea to link up with the Volunteer Army.¹⁰

Lockhart predicted success for an invasion at a time when the Red Army was weak and the Allies were not yet exhausted. No time was to be lost.¹¹ Balfour ignored him, and Lockhart sensed a general frostiness in Whitehall:

After a week at home it is perfectly obvious that apart from the relief of having rescued me from the Bolsheviks the Foreign Office is not in the least interested in my account of things. They prefer the reactionaries who have never even seen Bolshevism. Tyrrell and Hardinge are frankly and avowedly hostile and I may even have difficulty in obtaining another job.¹²

W. G. T. Tyrrell served as head of the Political Intelligence Department at the Foreign Office; Charles Hardinge was Permanent Under-Secretary to Balfour. Behind them stood Lord Robert Cecil as Under-Secretary of State. They had disliked Lockhart since early 1918 when he was advising the government to give official recognition to the Bolsheviks. Now they rejected him as a whirligig. Lockhart learned that Tyrrell regarded him as ‘a hysterical schoolboy who had intrigued with the Prime Minister behind the Foreign Office’s back’. This was a reference to Lloyd George’s dispatch of Lockhart to Russia as an antidote to the cautious policy pursued at the time by Balfour. Lockhart reasonably concluded of Tyrrell: ‘Not much hope in this quarter.’¹³

Others, including the King, were more favourably disposed. Lockhart recorded his meeting with George V in his diary for 23 October 1918: ‘The King was very nice and showed a surprising grasp of the situation; he however did most of the talking and during the forty minutes I was with him I didn’t really get much in. He sees pretty well the need for reforms everywhere, and has a wholesome dread of Bolshevism.’¹⁴ Lockhart, originally a proponent of accommodation with Lenin and Trotsky, stayed firmly anti-Bolshevik for the rest of his life.

Winston Churchill refrained from advocating an all-out Allied invasion, but he was the one politician to speak out more strongly than Milner against the Soviet order. In his electoral address to his Dundee constituents on 28 November 1918 he declared: ‘Russia is being reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of Barbarism . . . Civilisation is being extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troupes of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.’¹⁵ Even for Churchill this was pungent language. When referring to the Germans, mortal enemies of the United Kingdom until a few days previously, he called them ‘barbarian’. But barbarians are human. Churchill’s speech was aimed at dehumanizing the Soviet leaders and their followers as a way of persuading people that the October Revolution had somehow to be overthrown. On another occasion he wildly referred to Bolshevism as a baby that should be ‘strangled in its cradle’. Churchill was fired up on the Russian question, but he usually liked to drop a phial of wit into his fulminations. About Russia he felt no such impulse.

Perhaps Churchill’s monarchist sentiments had an influence. He had stood out against those who called for the hanging of the Kaiser, and anyway he was with Lloyd George in trying to prevent harsh peace terms being imposed on Germany. It was Churchill’s habit to focus obsessively on chosen problems. His colleagues trembled when he was in one of his moods; and everyone remembered his pet military project in 1915–16 to land Allied troops at Gallipoli—people forgot that he thought that insufficient troops had been provided for the task. He was notorious for pushing forward with plans without having thought through how he would cope if things went wrong. When criticism was made, he grew obstinate and put himself beyond debate. Yet behind the frothing schemes and wild rhetoric there was his acuity of vision. His instincts told him that something deeply menacing—indeed evil—was in the making in the east. He knew no more than anyone else in the cabinet about the Soviet leadership and its intentions. But he had enough information to sense that they presented a fundamental threat. If the need arose, he was willing to stand alone and fight for his opinions.¹⁶

In France, the attention paid to revolutionary Russia was less intense for a while. The Great War was barely over and all thoughts were focused on the securing of Allied authority over central Europe. Germany had to be stabilized and peaceful economic recovery facilitated in several countries precariously poised on the brink of famine—and most French politicians sought to punish the Germans for the four years of carnage.

In America the State Department was fitful in its examination of Russian affairs. Ambassador Francis was no longer in northern Russia. By October 1918 his health had collapsed and he travelled to London for medical treatment. ¹⁷ Meanwhile Lansing was too busy with German questions to occupy himself with the situation further east in Europe. Inside the State Department, sympathizers with Soviet Russia were acquiring influence. Among them was the young William C. Bullitt, who headed the Far Eastern desk. Already in March 1918 he had held discussions with Santeri Nuorteva of the pro-Soviet Finnish Information Bureau in New York.¹⁸ Bullitt and Nuorteva met and wrote to each other, and Nuorteva was pleased to have found a friend in high places.¹⁹ Bullitt took the line that the October Revolution had a vast importance for world affairs and that American policy ought to be based on an informed acquaintance with Soviet intentions. Yet there was more to it than just that. Bullitt was one of the few Americans outside the labour movement and certain business lobbies who favoured some kind of accommodation with Sovnarkom. He detested the Anglo-French military intervention in Russia and Ukraine and hoped to lessen and reverse his own country’s involvement in such ventures.

Bullitt’s career had started in journalism. He had made a brilliant name for himself with interviews with politicians of the Central Powers that pointed to German complicity in Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia.²⁰ He came from a charmed background of well-to-do Philadelphia lawyers and had degrees from Yale University and the Harvard Law School. During the war he worked in Europe reporting for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and dabbled in writing novels. He married the aptly named socialite Aimee Ernesta Drinker and together they lived the high life until the call came for a posting at the State Department. ²¹

Bullitt used his imagination in delving for information about the Russian communist leadership. Whereas others shunned contact with John Reed as a traitor, Bullitt saw him as a man on the spot who could be of use in liaising with Lenin and Trotsky. The ‘awful diplomatic gulf’ had to be closed up. Bullitt had encouragement from the distinguished lawyer Felix Frankfurter in this effort. Frankfurter nominally belonged to the War Department but was really President Wilson’s special diplomatic aide and was keen to get a brief prepared on Russia. Using contacts such as Santeri Nuorteva, Frankfurter planned to send a cable directly to Trotsky. The State Department overruled him, sensing the need to restrain both Frankfurter and Bullitt in case they upset other US activities in Russia and co-operation with the Western Allies. The second-best step was an indirect one. Frankfurter received permission to approach the Red Finns with a view to using them as intermediaries with the Bolsheviks. Yrjö Sirola, their Foreign Minister until their defeat in mid-May 1918 in the Finnish Civil War, knew Lenin well and might be able to improve US–Soviet understanding on one of his trips to Petrograd. While normal diplomacy was failing, other methods had to be tried out.²²

Bolshevism was widely seen as a menace to political stability in North America, although many politicians worried that Wilson’s involvement in global affairs was distracting his administration from urgent domestic problems. Nonetheless, in early 1919 the Senate Committee on the Judiciary set up a sub-committee on Bolshevik propaganda under Senator Lee S. Overman. The stated purpose was to discover the extent of Russian subversion in America, but the proceedings were quickly fanned out to consider the situation in Russia itself. The sub-committee began meeting on 11 February 1919. The atmosphere was set by Attorney-General Alexander Mitchell Palmer who claimed that Russian Bolsheviks had used over a dozen ‘German brewers of America’ to buy up a great American newspaper with the intention of manipulating public opinion.²³ The names of Nuorteva, Reed, Bryant and Rhys Williams cropped up—and it was intimated that the Englishman Ransome had suspect connections with Imperial Germany.²⁴ Details were given of large quantities of Bolshevik material that had flooded into America since late 1917, and the smuggling methods were described.²⁵

The large number of Jews among the pro-Soviet agitators was also a theme of the sub-committee proceedings. Rev. George A. Simons, until recently the superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Petrograd, recounted that Trotsky and other Jewish revolutionary refugees had set out for Russia from New York in 1917. Now, said Simons, admirers of the Soviet model were growing in number in America:

In fact I am very impressed with this, that moving around here I find that certain Bolsheviki propagandists are nearly all Jews. I have been in the so-called People’s House, at 7 East Fifteenth Street, New York, which calls itself also the Rand School of Social Science, and I have visited that at least six times during the last eleven weeks or so, buying their literature, and some of the most seditious stuff I have ever found against our own Government, and 19 out of 20 people I have seen there have been Jews.²⁶

Although Simons denied being anti-Jewish, he stated that he had confidence in the authenticity of anti-Semitic forgeries such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that accused the Jews of a conspiracy to achieve global political dominion. He adjured the Senate to cease thinking of Bolshevism as a fad and treat it as a ‘monstrous thing’ with the capacity to undermine American society.²⁷

His testimony agitated America’s Jews. Lewis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee and Simon Wolf of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations sent in letters protesting against the slur that most Jews were Bolsheviks.²⁸ The journalist Herman Bernstein appeared before the subcommittee to point out that Reed, Bryant, Rhys Williams and Robins were Christians—or rather lapsed Christians. Thus the threat to American political stability consequently had nothing to do with religion.²⁹

The Soviet sympathizers themselves were then called to testify. Louise Bryant was first. She defended her husband’s work for the Bolsheviks in 1917–18 on the grounds that he was seeking to provoke revolution in Germany—and she claimed that this conformed to America’s wartime interests. But she had to admit to having acted as a Bolshevik international courier.³⁰ Her interrogation was lengthy and hostile and she complained of being treated worse than the earlier witnesses. John Reed received an equally severe questioning. Under pressure he acknowledged that he hoped for revolution in America. He added that he hoped for this to happen by peaceful due process and without the violence that had typically accompanied revolutions. ³¹ Next up was Albert Rhys Williams, who rebuked the critics of Bolshevism; he laid claim to an open mind about whether the Soviet order was ‘a successful form of government’, and he denied advocating it for the USA . He affected to believe that the communist leadership were considering the idea of convoking a Constituent Assembly again.³² Raymond Robins was less enthusiastic about Soviet rule but continued to advocate trade with Soviet Russia.³³

A few days later it was the Senate Committee on Public Information that called on Reed and Bryant to give an account of themselves. Reed admitted to having worked for the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in publishing Soviet newspapers in multi-language editions. The Senators had done their homework and compelled him to admit to having promised the State Department in 1917 that he would not get involved in Russian politics. But Reed argued that he had not given his word under oath—and he lied that he had received no money from the Soviet government and was not in communication with it.³⁴

When asked about atrocities under Bolshevik rule, he and Bryant cast doubt on the veracity of the reports. Bryant argued against America’s right to intervene in Russia; but when pushed by the Committee, she refused to approve or disapprove of ‘Bolshevist interference in American affairs’. She spoke up for the Cheka’s Yakov Peters, calling him ‘an aesthetic young man’ and disclaiming any knowledge of his murky activities in London before 1914.³⁵ When Albert Rhys Williams took the stand, he too was open about the fact that he had been in the employ of the ‘Trotzky–Lenine government’. He stated that, when leaving Russia in June 1918, he had an assignment to set up a propaganda bureau in New York but assured the Committee that this had not come to pass. By staying on in Russia five months after the Reeds had departed, moreover, he had seen more brutality than they had. But he rejected reports of the killing of innocents by the communists, whom he declared to have ‘a sublime faith in the people’. He professed his abhorrence of violence and his feeling that if the communist experiment were to take place in the US, the means could and should be entirely peaceful. ³⁶

Politicians and reporters were deepening a debate that had begun with the October Revolution. Bolshevik rule and the consequences for Western policy were a divisive topic, and it was far from being the case that the advocates of conciliation with Soviet Russia were confined to the labour movement. Business interests too were beginning to make themselves felt.³⁷ On the other side of the debate, of course, there were political, commercial and ecclesiastical lobbies that wanted Russia and its communist rulers kept in strict quarantine. Dispute was often angry and seldom less than spirited. In Britain and France the press led the way in inviting public exchange; this also happened in the US, where the committees of the Senate gave additional propulsion to the process. Steadily the Russian question was rising up the public agenda. At a time when national governments had to concentrate their efforts on economic recovery, Russia and its communism could still not obtain priority of attention. But it was increasingly obvious that the revolutionary tide might at any moment surge across Russian frontiers into Europe, and many people in those countries as well as in North America doubted that their leaders had yet found sound measures to deal with this prospect—and the disarray of the Western powers on the Russian question at the Paris Peace Conference in the first half of 1919 was to do little to dispel these concerns.