Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The Cheka’s early priorities were overwhelmingly domestic. Dzerzhinsky described it as “an organ for the revolutionary settlement of accounts with counterrevolutionaries,” 4a label increasingly applied to all the Bolsheviks’ opponents and “class enemies.” Within days of its foundation, however, the Cheka had also taken its first tentative steps in foreign intelligence collection. The career of the first agent sent on a mission abroad, Aleksei Frolovich Filippov, was sadly at variance with the heroic image which KGB historians struggled to maintain in their descriptions of the Leninist era. Born in 1870 and trained as a lawyer, Filippov had made a career before the Revolution as a newspaper publisher. At the end of 1917 he was recruited by Dzerzhinsky to go on intelligence assignments to Finland under cover as a journalist and businessman. Before departing on his first mission in January 1918, Filippov gave a written undertaking “on a voluntary basis, without receiving payment, to pass on all the information which I hear in industrial, banking and particularly in conservative [nationalist] circles.” 5

On January 4 Lenin publicly recognized the independence of Finland, formerly part of the Tsarist Empire, then immediately set about trying to subvert it. A putsch at the end of the month by Finnish Communists, supported by the Russian military and naval garrison in Helsinki, seized control of the capital and much of southern Finland. The Communists were quickly challenged by a defense corps of Finnish nationalists led by the former Tsarist officer General Karl Mannerheim. 6Filippov’s main Cheka assignment was to report on Mannerheim, his dealings with the Germans, and the mood of the sailors who had supported the putsch. Early in April 1918, however, German forces intervened in Finland, and by the end of the month both the Communist putsch and Filippov’s brief career as the first Soviet foreign agent were at an end. 7

DURING THE CIVIL war, which began in May 1918 and continued for two and a half years, the Bolshevik regime had to fight for its survival against powerful but divided White Russian armies. Behind all the forces arraigned against them, the Bolshevik leaders saw a vast conspiracy orchestrated by Western capitalism. “What we are facing,” declared Lenin in July, “is a systematic, methodical and evidently long-planned military and financial counter-revolutionary campaign against the Soviet Republic, which all the representatives of Anglo-French imperialism have been preparing for months.” 8In reality, though the young Soviet regime had many enemies both at home and abroad, there was no carefully planned, well coordinated imperialist plot to bring it down. The illusion that such a plot existed, however, helped to shape the Cheka’s early operations against its imperialist foes.

In the course of the civil war, the Cheka claimed to have uncovered and defeated a series of major conspiracies by Western governments and their intelligence agencies to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. The first such conspiracy in the summer of 1918 was the “envoys’ plot,” also known as the “Lockhart plot” (after its instigator, Robert Bruce Lockhart, a junior British diplomat). According to a KGB history published in 1979, “One could say without exaggeration that the shattering blow dealt by the Chekists to the conspirators was equivalent to victory in a major military battle.” 9That is what the Cheka had claimed in 1918 and what most of Mitrokhin’s colleagues continued to believe over half a century later. In reality, however, the “envoys’ plot” was mounted not by a coalition of capitalist governments but by a group of politically naive Western diplomats and adventurous secret agents who were left largely to their own devices during the chaotic early months of the Bolshevik regime and became involved in farcically inept attempts to overthrow it. The best-known of the secret agents was Sidney Reilly of the British Secret Intelligence Service (then known as MI1c), whose exploits oscillated between high adventure and low farce, and whose increasing tendency to fantasy later led to his exclusion from SIS. Reilly announced his arrival in Moscow on May 7, 1918 in bizarre but characteristic fashion by marching up to the Kremlin gates, announcing that he was an emissary from the British prime minister, Lloyd George (who had probably never heard of him), and unsuccessfully demanding to see Lenin.

By far the most sophisticated part of the “envoys’ plot” was devised not by the envoys themselves or their secret agents but by the Cheka, possibly at Lenin’s suggestion, as a trap for Western conspirators. In August 1918 the Cheka officer Yan Buikis, posing as an anti-Bolshevik conspirator named Shmidkhen, succeeded in persuading Lockhart, Reilly and the French consul-general that Colonel Eduard Berzin, commander of a Latvian regiment in the Kremlin (in reality a Cheka agent provocateur ) , was ready to lead an anti-Bolshevik rising. To finance Berzin’s proposed coup, Reilly gave him 1,200,000 roubles which Berzin promptly passed on to the Cheka. 10Reilly’s schemes for the coup varied. At one point he imagined himself leading a detachment of Latvian troops on to the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre during the Congress of Soviets, seizing Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders, and shooting them on the spot. 11However, Reilly was also attracted by an alternative scheme not to execute Lenin and Trotsky, but instead to remove their trousers, parade them in their underpants through the streets of Moscow, and so “hold them up to ridicule before the world.” 12

Reilly’s fantasies however were overtaken by events. On August 30 the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky, was assassinated by a former member of the moderate Workers’ Popular Socialist Party, Leonid Kannegiser. 13In an unrelated attack on the same day, Lenin was shot and seriously wounded by the Socialist Revolutionary, Fanya (Dora) Kaplan. “I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor [to Socialism],” Kaplan told her Cheka interrogators. 14In the aftermath of both shootings, Dzerzhinsky decided to wind up the “envoys’ plot,” which the Cheka itself had been largely responsible for orchestrating. On September 2 it was announced that the Cheka had “liquidated… the conspiracy organized by Anglo-French diplomats… to organize the capture of the Council of People’s Commissars and the proclamation of military dictatorship in Moscow; this was to be done by bribing Soviet troops.” Predictably, the statement made no mention of the fact that the plan to bribe Soviet troops and stage a military coup had been devised by the Cheka itself and that the diplomats had been drawn into the conspiracy by agents provocateurs relying on Okhrana tradecraft. On September 5 Dzerzhinsky and Zinovyev, the Petrograd Party boss, issued a further statement declaring that the Anglo-French conspirators had been the “organizers” of the attempt on Lenin’s life and the “real murderers” of Uritsky. Dzerzhinsky did not, however, reveal Reilly’s plan to remove Lenin’s and Trotsky’s trousers. Though happy to publicize, or invent, Western involvement in assassination plots against Lenin, the Cheka dared not disclose a plot to hold him up to ridicule. 15

The attempt on Lenin’s life, the killing of Uritsky and the announcement of the “liquidation” of “the envoys’ plot” were quickly followed by the declaration of the Red Terror. With the Bolsheviks engaged in a bitter civil war against their White enemies, the Cheka set out to terrorize the regime’s opponents. Lenin himself, only three weeks before the attempt on his own life, had written to the Bolsheviks in Penza, and probably elsewhere, urging them to organize public executions to make the people “tremble” “for hundreds of kilometers around.” While still recovering from his wounds, he instructed, “It is necessary secretly—and urgently— to prepare the terror.” 16On October 15 Uritsky’s successor in Petrograd, Gleb Ivanovich Boky, proudly reported to Moscow that 800 alleged counterrevolutionaries had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned. Among those arrested, and probably executed, in Petrograd was the Cheka’s first foreign agent, Alexei Filippov. His liquidation was due, in all probability, not to the failure of his Finnish missions but to his “bourgeois” origins, which marked him down as an enemy of the people in the paranoid atmosphere of the Red Terror. 17Twenty years later Boky was himself to fall victim to the even greater paranoia of Stalin’s Terror. 18