Spies and Commissars Page 6

  Allied personnel scurried to every public occasion to get a sense of what was going on. Colonels William B. Thompson and Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross went to the Democratic Conference.27 Thompson lavishly subsidized pro-war newspapers in Petrograd, often dipping into his own pockets — he had made his wealth as a businessman before the war.28 And although the Red Cross was meant to be a charitable, non-combatant and apolitical agency, Robins secretly employed informers in the Petrograd garrison; what they told him was not confined to the supply of medicine and the dressing of wounds.29 Robins concluded that the war was dead ‘in the heart of the Russian soldier’.30

  Sir George Buchanan could see how badly things were going for the Provisional Government. His own health was frail but, despite withering to a skeletal thinness, he had not lost the forthrightness that once led him to tell Nicholas II that reforms were urgently necessary.31 On 9 October it fell to Buchanan to go with Noulens and Della Torretta and tell Kerenski that he was losing the confidence of Russia’s Western Allies. They disliked interfering in the affairs of a troubled, friendly power, but the Provisional Government had to understand their worries. The Russian Army was falling apart; it no longer constituted any serious threat to the Germans or even to the Austrians. The Allies were reluctant to divert precious resources to Russia at a time when their own forces in northern France were fighting hard. Buchanan delivered the message with firm solemnity. Kerenski, exhausted by all the woes of his rule, bridled at what he heard. He replied in Russian as Foreign Affairs Minister Tereshchenko interpreted for him. For once he was concise, demanding that the stream of aid should be restored. It was Kerenski’s last attempt to persuade the Allies that the eastern front was not a lost cause.32

  Colonel Thompson called a meeting of Allied military representatives in his rooms in the Hotel Europe on 3 November 1917. Present were Colonel Alfred Knox, General Henri Niessel and General William V. Judson as well as General Neslukhovski and David Soskice from Kerenski’s office. Thompson also invited his Red Cross colleague Raymond Robins. It was not a pleasant occasion. Knox and Niessel were scathing about the failings of the Provisional Government. Tempers were lost when Niessel called Russia’s soldiers ‘yellow cowardly dogs’ and the Russians soon walked out.33 Knox was usually as forthright as Niessel. He thought Robins should have supported Kornilov’s campaign for a military dictatorship. He highlighted the danger from Lenin and Trotsky: ‘I tell you what we do with such people. We shoot them.’34 Robins retorted: ‘You do if you catch them. But you will have to do some catching. But you are up against several million. General, I am not a military man. But you are not up against a military situation. You are up against a folks’ situation.’35 Suitably translated into Marxist jargon and shorn of its colloquialism, this could have been Lenin speaking. The angry exchange between Knox and Robins was about to be repeated in Western capitals as governments debated their policy on Russia. Should Russians be left to decide their own future or could the Allies pressurize them to continue the war on the eastern front?

  4. CHEERING FOR THE SOVIETS

  Most newspapers in the Allied countries supported the effort to keep Russia in the war. But there were always dissenters, especially among the reporters based in Petrograd. They had diverse reasons for opposing conventional opinion. But one thing united them: their appreciation that the Provisional Government stood no chance of sustaining the military effort. They thought Kerenski was, politically, a dead man walking. They shared a feeling of moral outrage at the sufferings of Russian soldiers who were compelled to confront the German armies without hope of operational effectiveness. And they turned sympathetically to the single big party — the Bolsheviks — that promised to take drastic action to pull Russia out of the war. The Western dissenters became cheerleaders for Bolshevism.

  Nobody was more ardent than Arthur Ransome. His early social contacts in London had been in the book trade and he had not shown socialist leanings before leaving for Russia as a freelance author in 1913. From working in publishers’ offices he had started to write books of his own. His Bohemia in London achieved a decent success but then his biography of Oscar Wilde got him entangled with the courts when Wilde’s former lover Lord Alfred Douglas sued him for libel. The court case was a draining experience for Ransome even though he emerged the victor. He had achieved only moderate success before the time of his marriage to Ivy Walker and the birth of their daughter Tabitha. He and Ivy got on badly from the start, and the journey to Russia offered him an escape from her evening rages. He industriously picked up the language and wrote a book that stayed permanently in print. This was Old Peter’s Russian Tales, a retelling of folk stories meant for children but read with equal pleasure by adults. With the onset of war Ransome’s facility in Russian and his zest for adventure permitted a change of tack, and he became a correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian. Steadily his interest in the socialist movement in both Britain and Russia grew. He showed an exceptional talent for listening carefully to his interviewees and relaying their thought in crystal-clear prose.1

  Ransome sought out the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders after the fall of the Romanovs. His sympathy with socialism loosened their tongues and they spoke to him in a way they did not dare in public. By late summer 1917 they knew that the Russian Army would not stay in the trenches much longer. When the Constituent Assembly eventually met, there would be huge pressure for the signing of a separate peace if some kind of negotiations with the Central Powers had not already begun.2 Ransome thought this over. He did not question the urgent need for the Allies to defeat Germany. He was a British patriot and his own brother had died in the fighting, but he could see no good in trying to compel Russia to keep its troops on the eastern front since they were already exhausted and defeated. His conclusion was anathema to official circles in London; and British intelligence kept its eyes on him as a dangerous freethinker and opened the letters he wrote to his wife Ivy in England.3 But just as he was starting to annoy the authorities, he announced his desire for a period of English leave. The daily tasks of following the fast-moving political drama in Petrograd had worn him out. When granted permission for a holiday, he took the dangerous ferry journey back across the North Sea and reached Aberdeen on 17 October.4

  Ransome told everyone in London willing to listen that Kerenski was doomed. Within days his prophecy had been realized in Petrograd. He kicked himself for having missed the greatest newspaper scoop of his lifetime, and pestered his editors to sanction another assignment in Russia. His enthusiasm was reciprocated: few journalists were better qualified to report on Russian affairs.

  Less extravagant in his dismissal of the Provisional Government was the British consul-general in Moscow. Robert Bruce Lockhart had proved himself a sharp-eyed observer of the Russian political stage and, like Ransome, had gone native in Moscow. His Russian contacts gave him a Russian Christian name and patronymic and knew him as Roman Romanovich Lokkart.5 Perhaps his full name in English, Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, was too much of a mouthful for them. Lockhart had arrived in Russia in 1912. No Scot was prouder in saying, as he often did: ‘There is no drop of English blood in my veins.’ He claimed descent from the noble families of Bruce, Hamilton, Wallace and Douglas — and he boasted of a genealogical connection with Boswell of Auchinleck. He was as restless as Ransome, having tried to make a career as a rubber planter in Malaya, where an amorous dalliance with a local princess got him into hot water. He loved writing poems and stories and could easily have become a journalist but instead applied for the Foreign Office and scraped through the entrance exam. He married Jean Turner and brought her out with him on his Russian posting. Ambassador Buchanan took him under his wing as a bright diplomatic prospect even though Lockhart’s politics were to the left of centre in Britain.6

  Unhinged by her husband’s philandering, Jean went back to Britain. He treated her departure as a licence to indulge himself. He spent many a night out on the tiles after carousing in th
e Gypsy encampment on the city outskirts at Strelnaya. He dabbled in the occult with his friend Aleister Crowley.7 But he was not entirely feckless. He read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the original. He steeped himself in Russian poetry and was a regular visitor to the theatre. He was young and fit; on first arriving in Moscow he had played a good game of football for a Russian team. He had plenty of self-confidence and determination. And throughout this time he made himself acquainted with all shades of public opinion in wartime Russia.

  By autumn 1917 neither Buchanan nor Lockhart would have bet on the Provisional Government’s survival or the Russian Army’s continuation in the war. But Lockhart was no longer in Moscow when the Bolsheviks seized power. His reason for absence was more dubious than Ransome’s. All his life Lockhart had an attraction for neurotic upper-class women who wanted to throw off convention. Russian high society had plenty of such examples, and it had not been long before the young Scot was conducting an illicit affair with a lady from one of Moscow’s prominent families. Ambassador Buchanan, on being informed, told Lockhart that the embassy could not afford such a scandal in the country of a wartime ally. The discreet solution was to send him back to London on medical grounds. Lockhart went to a Russian doctor who signed an affidavit that he was suffering from anaemic exhaustion.8 Buchanan, it must be said, was no expert in dissembling. Instead of sticking to the agreed story, he told his fellow ambassador Joseph Noulens mysteriously that Lockhart had left against his advice.9

  One Briton remained in Russia who was willing to welcome a left-of-centre alternative to Kerenski. This was the Manchester Guardian’s Morgan Philips Price. Throughout the war he had criticized the motives of all the belligerent powers even at the risk of his public standing. Philips Price was a wealthy man from the west country. Educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he had inherited an estate of 2,000 acres near Gloucester and came from a political family. His father was a Liberal MP and he himself was adopted as prospective candidate for the same party, but he was dropped for his strident opposition to the war. Philips Price then joined the Union of Democratic Control. He also wrote The Diplomatic History of the War at manic speed and got it published within weeks of the outbreak of hostilities. He lamented the tragedy of diplomatic failure: ‘But for the outbreak of war there was a reasonable hope that the liberal political elements in Austria and Russia would have gained the day.’10 Soon he came to the attention of C. P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian and he was sent out to Russia as its reporter. He was one of the earliest to warn about the sorry condition of Kerenski’s armed forces and to argue that other Russian political elements should be given consideration by the Allies.

  Philips Price quickly became friends with American journalists who thought along the same lines. Quite a number of them had gathered in Petrograd, including John Reed, Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty and Albert Rhys Williams. Unlike Philips Price and Ransome, they worked for newspapers with a predominantly local base and had yet to make an impact in the US public debate on the war. None of them wrote for a Washington or New York daily. But they made up for this in their energy and initiative. They were determined to challenge the Wilson administration’s liaison with the Provisional Government.

  John Reed and Louise Bryant, who married in 1916, were well known in US radical circles. Reed had never enjoyed good health, and had known poverty as a child. He lived on his nerves and by his wits. His father was a Progressive Party militant who together with Lincoln Steffens had smashed the Oregon Land Fraud Ring. As the family’s fortunes improved, Reed went to boarding school and on to Harvard. After college he became a journalist and covered the war in Europe before America’s entry.11 He was bitterly hostile to President Wilson’s decision to bring the US into the fighting, and together with his father’s friend Steffens he appeared as witness for the defence in a New York trial in July against the two anarchist anti-war protesters and Russian-Jewish immigrants Emma Goldman and her husband Alexander Berkman.12 Reed criticized a bill going through the US Congress making it a felony to speak or write in such a way as to foster disaffection in the American armed forces.13 The US State Department was understandably edgy about his decision to work in Russia since he could obviously cause trouble for it and for the Kerenski administration there. Before receiving their travel documents, Mr and Mrs Reed had to promise that they would conduct no propaganda in Russia.14

  This was not enough to calm the worries of the British Imperial authorities. In August, the ship carrying Reed and Bryant was detained in Halifax, Nova Scotia just as Trotsky’s had been. It took a week before permission was granted for the resumption of the sailing. A similar delay was experienced at Haparanda on the border with ‘Russian’ Finland. Reed and Bryant were furious at their treatment. Only later did Bryant comfort herself with the thought that one of her fellow passengers from New York took five months longer to arrive in Russia.15

  The couple reached their destination in September 1917 and had their first experience of Russian revolutionary politics. It was the time of the Kornilov mutiny.16 Whereas Reed had never set foot on Russian soil, it was Bryant’s second visit.17 She too was a fiery critic of the political status quo in the US. Her father was a Pennsylvanian miner who had moved out west for work. Although she made it to the University of Oregon and embarked on a career in journalism, financial circumstances compelled her to seek employment as a teacher of Hispanic children in Salinas, California. Her undergraduate thesis had been on the war against the Indian tribes in Oregon, and in California she took up the cause of the indigenous people. She was also a suffragette who mingled with anarchist militants. Her first marriage quickly fizzled out and, after meeting Reed in Oregon, she followed him to the east coast. By 1917 she was working simultaneously for Metropolitan Magazine and the Philadelphia Public Ledger.18 Bryant had less knowledge than her husband about the war and international relations, but she was no less critical of Woodrow Wilson and wanted to do her bit to change US policy back to one of non-involvement in the Great War. Like her husband, she wrote muscular prose and hit her deadlines.

  Others in the American group were Albert Rhys Williams and Bessie Beatty. Rhys Williams, who belonged to the Socialist Party, worked in Russia for the New York Evening Post. Born in Ohio, he was also a former Congregational minister who had obtained leave of absence from his duties so as to go off and report on the war in Europe.19 His Welsh parentage brought him under suspicion as a British spy in Belgium, and he was detained for a while by the German occupation forces. Out of this experience came the book In the Claws of the German Eagle, published in 1917. By then he was working in Petrograd and was instantly attracted to Russian far-left socialists who sought Kerenski’s downfall. Bessie Beatty took to him immediately: ‘He was a decidedly American type, tall, with a pleasant frank face and a delightfully inclusive smile.’20 Beatty herself was a daredevil and a radical. She went to Occidental College in Los Angeles but left without completing her degree; and taking up journalism, she covered the 1912 Nevada miners’ strike and wrote searing articles on prostitution. Events in Russia after the monarchy’s collapse excited her. Throwing up her job as editor ofMcCall’s Magazine, she left San Francisco in April on her trip to Petrograd by the Pacific route. She arrived in early June.21

  The last of the Western dissenters based in Russia was the French military attache´ Jacques Sadoul, who arrived in the Russian capital on 1 October 1917. He came on the recommendation of Munitions Minister Albert Thomas, and his assignment was to act as a political observer. Someone who saw him three years later described him as having ‘a “Chaplin” moustache, Norman head, alert yet reposeful eyes, and [being] dressed like a very respectable shop assistant’.22 But in 1917 he wore military uniform. He quickly concluded that most Russians were determined to avoid further involvement in the war and would sooner or later sign a separate peace with the Central Powers. He let Ambassador Noulens know of his radical socialist opinions and stuck out like a sore thumb among most other diplomats.23 Sadoul was
a man of some eccentricity. After studying to become a lawyer, he had written a doctoral thesis on tax legislation.24 He also worked for an American businessman who owned a Montana ranch and a Wyoming gold mine. In his free time he rode in the Rocky Mountains. Subsequently he returned to Paris as an Appeal Court advocate. He was brash and ambitious, and gained renown for obtaining lengthy interviews with President Theodore Roosevelt.25 The war shifted him away from the French establishment. He believed there was no end in sight to the military conflict on the western front. Sadoul was a soul looking for its resting place and he began to find it in Russia and in Bolshevism.

  What distinguished this group of temporary residents of Russia was their determination to seek sources of information independent of the Provisional Government and its supporters. They quickly made contact with the Bolsheviks. Trotsky gave an hour-long interview to John Reed on 17 October 1917 about the projected dictatorship of the proletariat. This consisted mainly of a description of the evils of the Russian bourgeoisie. According to Trotsky, the Provisional Government was powerless and the Kadets headed the ‘militant counterrevolution’ while the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were fools to think that they had any kind of ‘alliance’ with the middle classes. He called for a ‘Federated Republic of Europe’. He refrained from saying what the proletarian dictatorship would be like. One of his supporters, though, was a certain V. Volodarski, who suggested that the dictatorship would be ‘a loose government, sensitive to popular will, giving local forces full play’.26