Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The situation was deeply unpromising for the Provisional Government. Germany’s army marched into Riga on 3 September and the Russian Army was scattered into retreat. The railway network was disrupted as troops piled on to any train moving towards their home regions. The economy was disintegrating. In the cities a winter of unemployment and food shortages was the prospect for all but the wealthy in the cities. In the villages of Russia and Ukraine agitation for the transfer of all arable land to the peasantry grew. Whole regions ignored government decrees. A French propaganda film of model guns and planes was shown in Petrograd to encourage Russian patriotic enthusiasm. This was never going to be popular since Russia’s war was all but over. 8

By October the mood on Petrograd streets was flagging. Outwardly there was normality. The trams were running. The post and telegraph system was working. But people were talking about what the Germans might do next; they wondered whether zeppelins and aeroplanes might be used to drop bombs on the capital. The authorities took the necessary precautions. Air-raid sirens were given frequent tests. There were rehearsals for the measures to be taken in case of an attack, and firemen doubled the number of practice exercises. Street gas lamps were banned. Crime and disorder had been bad enough since March when the gendarmes fled. Now they were worse. 9These were weeks of sombre news as the war went in favour of the Central Powers. German forces seized the two islands at the extreme northern edge of the Gulf of Riga in mid-month. Russian armed forces were pushed eastwards. Although they held on to Estonian territory, they had to withdraw their strategic defence to the Gulf of Finland for the first time. 10Supplies in the capital’s shops dwindled. There was no tobacco on sale and anyone wanting chocolate had to queue for it with a ration book. 11

Kerenski seldom left the Winter Palace. His courage and commitment remained high but there were days when his morale dipped low. The Bolsheviks no longer troubled to debate with other socialists. They sped round Petrograd making final preparations for a decisive violent clash. Kerenski was visibly losing his earlier confidence. He was no longer waving to his crowds: he was drowning.

As the Russian Army fell apart on the eastern front, the Western Allies ceased to pay much attention to the opinions of Alexander Kerenski. They came reluctantly to this position. Sharing a dislike of the Romanov monarchy, they had hoped to co-operate well with democratic Russia. There was no rush among them to ditch the Provisional Government. But the news from Petrograd was constantly depressing, and leaders in Paris, London and Washington concluded that it was no longer sensible to fund and supply the Russian armed forces.

The French President Georges Poincaré was prominent among the small group of politicians who revised the agenda of the Allied powers. An intensely ambitious lawyer who had once acted for the writer Jules Verne, he had been elected President in 1913, and held the post through to 1920. Poincaré was a political conservative and had served regularly in cabinets before the Great War, constantly pushing for the firm pursuit of France’s national interest. The turnover in ministerial postings enabled him to increase his influence. There were four premiers — Aristide Briand, Alexandre Ribot, Paul Painlevé and Georges Clemenceau — in 1917 alone. Not until Clemenceau, a fierce Radical who had made a name for himself by speaking against anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus Affair, became premier in November that year was there a rival to Poincaré’s dominance and the President would find himself sidelined. The two men anyway agreed about national military and foreign policy. German armies occupied departments in northern France. No leading politician in France proposed the slightest appeasement of the Central Powers. The war had to be fought to a victorious end. Germany had to be made to pay for the devastation it had caused — and subjected to a peace settlement that would disable it from threatening the French again.

David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, was usually less strident in his rhetoric but agreed that the Germans had to be totally defeated. He had acceded to supreme office in December 1916 to lead a governing coalition of Conservatives and Liberals and so straddled the political right and centre-left. He was a Welshman whose accent had not entirely left him, and he was a Nonconformist. Becoming MP for Caernarfon Boroughs, he supported social reforms with a panache which brought him to attention inside and outside the House of Commons. His private life was a mess. He kept his secretary Frances Stevenson as a mistress; he shamelessly sold peerages for political favours. But he proved himself as a war leader, and helped to lessen the U-boat threat by imposing the convoy system on the Royal Navy. He spoke with equal impressiveness to aristocrats at house parties and to factory workers and shop girls at the hustings. A man of abundant self-belief, he was acknowledged alongside Winston Churchill as one of the great orators in the House of Commons.

As the war dragged on, Lloyd George concentrated on military questions to the exclusion of post-war planning. But President Woodrow Wilson had no intention of letting the topic disappear from the Allied agenda. He was determined to see that victory over the Central Powers would be followed by a peace which offered a better future to the peoples of the world. Wilson had occupied the White House since 1913. Patrician in appearance and austerely intellectual, he was the most academic of the leaders of the world’s great powers, having headed Princeton University before becoming Governor of New Jersey. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on congressional government. He detested militarism, and, like other American politicians, he also hated empires. He had won a second presidential term in 1916 by promising to keep his country out of the Great War. He was resolute in his principles but open to correcting them in the light of examined reality. He could not directly explore the currents of European politics since constitutionally he was prevented from travelling abroad on long trips. For that purpose he employed his confidant Edward House, who despite having no military experience was always known as Colonel House. No one talked directly with so many leading politicians of the Allies and the Central Powers, and President Wilson received the very best and latest information about war and politics in Europe.

The Allied leaders knew that the great cities in Germany and Austria were experiencing a growth in discontent. Allied intelligence agencies and embassies reported regularly on the situation in Germany. British and French diplomats in Sweden were well placed to gather information simply by speaking to ferry passengers arriving from Hamburg. The Swedish newspapers were anyway discussing the same material. 1The government in Berlin got wind of this and sometimes produced a false edition of some German newspaper containing misinformation. But although Stockholm experienced a swirling fog of claims and counter-claims, there was no denying that Germany faced growing difficulties. 2

German politics was entering a volatile period. The extreme left had been rounded up and imprisoned in mid-1916, including leading revolutionaries such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Their Spartakusbund, named after the gladiator who headed the slave revolt against Rome in 73–71 BC, continued clandestine activity. Liebknecht and Luxemburg smuggled articles out of prison which argued that the war was being fought for the exclusive purposes of the rich and powerful. More and more German socialists were attracted to their message. By 1917 the Social-Democratic Party of Germany was splitting apart as its radical members, led by Hugo Haase in the Reichstag, refused to obey the party line. By then it had become plain not only that the General Staff under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff dominated both Kaiser and government but that they were pushing for policies of naked territorial expansion. Haase and his comrades would no longer tolerate the mildness of their party’s critique of the government and the high command. As a result, they established the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany — and they brought the old party’s great theorist Karl Kautsky along with them and communicated with the imprisoned Spartacists.