INTRODUCTION

The story of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 has been told a thousand times and usually the focus is on Russian events to the exclusion of the global situation. There is nothing wrong with examining ‘October’ and its consequences in such a fashion. But this book is an attempt to see things in a different light. The early years of Bolshevik rule were marked by dynamic interaction between Russia and the West. These were years of civil war in Russia, years when the West strove to understand the new communist regime while also seeking to undermine it; and all through that period the Bolsheviks tried to spread their revolution across Europe without ceasing to pursue trade agreements that might revive their collapsing economy. Looking at this interaction in detail reveals that revolutionary Russia—and its dealings with the world outside—was shaped not only by Lenin and Trotsky, but by an extraordinary miscellany of people: spies and commissars certainly, but also diplomats, reporters and unofficial intermediaries, as well as intellectuals, opportunistic businessmen and casual travellers. This is their story as much as it is the story of ‘October’.

The communist leaders believed that their revolution would expire if it stayed trapped in one country alone; they were gambling on their hope that countries elsewhere in Europe would soon follow the path they had marked out in Russia. The October Revolution happened in Petrograd—as the Russian capital St Petersburg had been renamed to do away with its Germanic resonance—while the Great War between the Allies and the Central Powers raged across Europe, and until November 1918 the world’s powers gave little thought to revolutionary Russia except when examining how its situation could be exploited to their advantage. The Germans had signed a separate peace with Lenin’s government at Brest-Litovsk in March that year in order to redeploy their army divisions in the east to serve on the western front against France, Britain and the US; the French and British meanwhile increased their efforts to bring Russia back into the fight against Germany even if this meant bringing down the communist government. When peace came to Europe after the German surrender, the ‘Russian question’ was transformed in content as Western politicians at last gave priority to preventing the contagion of communism from spreading beyond the Russian borders into the heart of Europe. Sporadic revolutionary outbreaks in Germany, Hungary and Italy occurred but, to the frustration of the Russian communist leadership, petered out in failure. The Western Allies meanwhile undertook direct military intervention in Russia as well as the subsidizing of the anti-communist Russian armed forces. But in late 1919, when these enterprises ran into difficulty, they withdrew their expeditionary forces. Communist Russia had survived its first international trial of strength.

At the same time the Russian communists were engaged in efforts to export their revolution. In 1918 they sent emissaries, including some of their most prominent leaders, to subvert Germany. In the following year they also founded the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow which aimed to create communist parties abroad and destroy global capitalism. In 1920 they sent the Red Army itself into Poland. And although Lenin and Trotsky were disappointed when ‘the European revolution’ did not take place as they had expected, they remained convinced that their original gamble would end in triumph.

I stumbled upon the idea for the book when looking at personal papers of the British intelligence agent Paul Dukes. His memoirs are an outstanding eyewitness account of conditions under early communist rule. Dukes on one of his spying missions enlisted with the Red Army and reported what he saw with the mind of an outsider. This led me to investigate other examples of reportage by foreigners, ranging from lively pro-Soviet cheerleaders like the newspaper correspondents John Reed and Arthur Ransome to the sombre attack on communism by Bertrand Russell in 1920. Then I found that the diplomats, too, had recorded many important things in their telegrams and autobiographies. This, I freely admit, was something of a surprise since I had shared the widespread idea that they were a rather slow-witted and incompetent bunch. From there it was only a short hop to investigating the entrepreneurs who lined up to restart the Russian trade in 1920–1. Such sources provide opportunity for a fresh insight into the history of communist Russia and supplement the abundant documentation that has become available in Moscow in recent years. Russian history cannot be written satisfactorily on the basis of Russian archives alone.

Other discoveries came to hand as this material was brought under scrutiny. I had taken it for granted that the Reds and the White Russians—and for that matter the Allies—knew rather little about each other. As Ethel Snowden first put it in 1920 on her visit to Petrograd and Moscow, an ‘iron curtain’ appeared to have been built along the frontiers of Russia. In fact the telegraphists, decoders and spies on every side did an effective job for their masters. Their activity filled large gaps in information by providing timely, accurate reports in the absence of conventional diplomacy after 1917. The Red Army was well informed about the White armies and vice versa. And although the White armies were separated from each other by huge distances, they could usually make contact through wireless messages. They were also helped by access to Soviet telegraph traffic which was intercepted by the British, French and Americans. The Reds lost a lot of Russia’s experts in communication and decryption who fled into obscurity or abroad soon after the October Revolution, but they increasingly made up for this failing. This was consequently a period when each side found out enough about the others to be able to formulate plans and policy on the basis of genuine knowledge—and the spies, telegraphists and decoders were as important in this process as the diplomats.

No realistic calculus of military power in Europe favoured the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. Their weak and ill-equipped Red Army would have stood no chance against the Germans if they had invaded Russia in 1918. Russia would have been equally vulnerable if the Western Allies had concerted an all-out invasion in the years that immediately followed. The communists were fortunate that external factors inhibited foreign great powers from marching into east-central Europe and overthrowing the revolutionary state. They were equally lucky that states abroad increasingly found it advantageous to end Russia’s economic isolation: trade treaties were signed first with Estonia and Scandinavia in 1920 and then with the United Kingdom in the following year.

When the communists led by Lenin and Trotsky took power in Petrograd, they could not be certain that their government would last more than a few days. But this did not dent their optimism. If the Russians could so easily cast down capitalism, it would surely not be long before others did the same. The communists declared that imperialism, nationalism and militarism were about to be liquidated everywhere. Bolsheviks outlined their project in global terms. The working classes of the world were about to achieve liberation from every kind of oppression. Industrial societies would start to pay, feed, clothe and educate properly those who had suffered down the generations. Governments would tumble. The market economy would be eliminated. An end would be put to war and people would administer their affairs without hindrance from kings, commanders, priests and policemen. Communism was on the point of spreading itself worldwide. Soon there would be no government, no army, no bureaucracy on the face of the earth.

But even while aiming at world revolution, the communist leaders saw the sense in hedging their bets. They knew that the great powers, if they wanted, could conquer Russia without much difficulty. The Kremlin went on talking to its foreign enemies for fear of an international crusade being organized against it. Its fear was not misplaced. In 1918 the communists knew full well that the Western Allies in the Great War—France, Britain and America—were supplying finance and advice to the anti-communist Russian forces. In the August of that year they discovered an outright conspiracy by the British—later known as the Lockhart Plot—to disrupt and possibly even to overturn Soviet rule in Moscow. Yet the Kremlin never broke off attempts to negotiate with the West. All the Allied diplomats had left the country before the end of the first full year after the October Revolution when the communist leadership put British, French and American officials on trial. (Robert Bruce Lockhart, architect of the conspiracy, was by then in London and safe from Lenin’s clutches.) Yet the Russian economy had been destroyed by war and revolution and the Bolshevik government needed foreign trade for its survival—and communist emissaries continued to make overtures for the resumption of commercial and diplomatic links with the advanced industrial countries, which culminated in the Anglo-Soviet trade treaty of March 1921.

The political rupture between Soviet Russia and the West in autumn 1918 made it difficult for both the communists and the Allies to gather information and explain their purposes. At first after the October Revolution, Western ambassadors had used unofficial intermediaries while refusing official recognition to Lenin’s government. In this way the Allies had continued to negotiate with the communists in Petrograd and Moscow, and the governments in London and Washington also liaised discreetly with the designated representatives of the Soviet authorities.

But just as Soviet Russia played its double game of diplomacy and revolution, so the Western Allies persisted with their schemes to bring down Lenin and Trotsky. A lot of this has been kept a secret for almost a century. Western diplomats were deeply involved in subversive activity but full disclosure would have embarrassed subsequent governments in the West, governments which wanted to appear as clean as the driven snow in the way they conducted their political and military rivalry with the USSR. They preferred to suggest that all the skulduggery took place on the Soviet side. Yet the British conspiracy in 1918, even though it was bungled, was a serious project to undermine communist rule—and it is hard to see why so much of the documentation should remain officially classified. In any event, Allied espionage and subversion did not end with the exodus of the diplomatic corps when the plot was exposed. Intelligence operations were quickly resumed both to finance the anti-Bolshevik White Russians and to gather information; and although these failed to dislodge the communist government, they certainly provided data of value to Western governments.

The British, French, Japanese and Americans had sent military expeditions after the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March 1918, but they never moved out from the periphery of the old empire and were anyway much too small to overthrow Lenin and Trotsky. The battles on the western front constrained what could be done until the end of the war in November that year. Subsequently, none of the Allies was willing to organize an invasion of Russia. Both economic and political considerations held them back. Even Winston Churchill, the arch-advocate of the White cause, had no idea how to do more in Russia than the Allied powers actually did. Yet Russia continued to attract attention. Attempts were made to restore the links of international trade outside the Soviet-occupied zones. The French had their plans for southern Ukraine. American entrepreneurs, especially those on the west coast, were eager to do business in Siberia. British intelligence agent Sidney Reilly characteristically planned to pull off big commercial deals in post-communist Russia, and others in Britain wanted to do the same. Food supplies to Russia were another instrument which the American government contemplated using against the communists. In 1919 initiatives were taken both to offer grain to Lenin on political conditions and to send it to feed the regions of Russia that came into White hands.

Lenin and Trotsky after the Russian Civil War successfully tempted several foreign countries into trading with Russia. But the conventional idea that this marked the end, for a while, to Soviet expansionist schemes is utterly wrong. Comintern, on orders from Moscow, tried in March 1921 to overthrow the German government. The communist action in Germany was undertaken despite the knowledge that this would bring British and French armies on to German soil to restore their continental dominance. Although the Party Politburo spoke the rhetoric of peace for Europe, its members had mentally prepared themselves for another European war.

Yet there was no German communist revolution in the inter-war period despite Comintern’s intensive efforts. The Soviet leadership underestimated the resilience of anti-communist groups and feelings across Germany—just as they had overlooked Polish nationalism when marching on Warsaw in 1920. No matter how good the information that was available to politicians, it was only as useful as they allowed it to be. Lenin and Trotsky had already fixed their view on the world and its future. They were convinced that Europe was on the threshold of communist revolution and that it needed only a slight nudge from them to make all this happen. The ‘masses’ in the communist imagination would break off their chains and rise in revolt. Bolshevik leaders filtered the contents of reports they received from the West. Their informants themselves, being communists, pre-filtered a lot of it before sending material on to Russia. Political ideology was involved, but Lenin and Trotsky anyhow had little time for basic reflection. And although they adjusted policy to changing circumstances, they still did this within the setting of their general preconceptions. They led a party which objected whenever they abandoned established doctrine. They themselves were ardent believers in the communist cause. They had given their lives to it and, despite being agile in their political manoeuvres, kept any practical compromises to a minimum.

The Allied leaders too had their own prior assumptions. Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George were in receipt of plentiful information from diplomats, reporters and agents—far more informants operated for them in Russia than the Soviet leaders could yet deploy in the West; but it was one thing for governments to obtain reports and an entirely different one to know what to do next. While being grateful for the fast flow of material, every Western leader had to contend with witnesses contradicting each other. Understandably, leaders who were already dealing with horrendous difficulties in their own countries and throughout central Europe worked as much by instinct and preconception as by steady analysis of the reports placed on their desks. Lloyd George in particular went his own way in his pursuit of Britain’s post-war economic recovery, stealing a march on France and America by authorizing the 1921 trade agreement with Soviet Russia. He had an exaggerated belief in the erosion of communism that would result in Russia. As a result he donated a breathing space to Lenin for his New Economic Policy, decisively enabling the Soviet state to restore its economy and stabilize its control over society.

This book takes up an international vantage point on Soviet Russia and the West. The foreigners who reported, denounced, eulogized, negotiated, spied on, subverted or attacked Russia in 1917–21 rest in their graves. The Russians—Reds and Whites—who fought over Russia’s future in their Civil War are long gone. Lenin’s mausoleum still stands on Red Square in Moscow, a monument to an October Revolution that shook the world’s politics to its foundations. His corpse remains there because Russian public opinion is not ready for its removal. What happened in Petrograd in late 1917 transfigured global politics in the inter-war period. Out of the maelstrom of revolutionary Russia came a powerful state—the USSR—which defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War and for decades after 1945 was locked in the contest of the Cold War against the US and its allies. The October Revolution gave rise to questions which remain important today, questions that find expression in the polarities of democracy and dictatorship, justice and terror, social fairness and class struggle, ideological absolutism and cultural pluralism, national sovereignty and armed international intervention. This is a cardinal reason why the history of Soviet Russia and the West continues to command attention.