Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Much though Bolshevik doctrine pretended to scientific status, it was in fact rooted in blind faith and the Russian revolutionary tradition. Lenin and Trotsky never seriously took account of the dire warnings about the likely result of their project. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries may have shared a lot of their social and economic assumptions but they also issued clear predictions that the horrors of civil war would be the inevitable result if the Bolshevik party somehow managed to hold on to power. They doubted that Europe was on the brink of revolution. They ridiculed Lenin’s promise to regenerate the Russian economy swiftly or at all. They were talking to the deaf. Bolsheviks had made their choice. If there was going to be civil war, it would be of short duration and easily won. There would surely be European socialist revolution and, when Germany acquired its revolutionary government, economic exchange between the Russians and the Germans would guarantee rapid recovery from wartime devastation. It was in this frame of mind that Bolshevik leaders had seized power in Petrograd. Foreigners saw only chaos and weakness in Russia. The Bolsheviks asked them to look through different spectacles and observe the fire being lit for a brilliant new world order.

Lenin’s Decree on Peace set out fresh basic principles for the kind of peace he wanted in the world. Both the Allies and the Central Powers tried to ignore him. The exception was Woodrow Wilson, who was fired by the urge to achieve a lasting peace and saw the defeat of the Central Powers as a prerequisite. Coming before a joint session of the US Congress on 8 January 1918, he declared that the Allies should impose a universal peace involving democracy, free trade, open treaties and national self-determination. He depended on advice and assistance from his confidant Colonel Edward House, who had returned from a tour of the European capitals, and a group of key advisers, known as ‘The Inquiry’; but the impetus came from Wilson himself. Wilson was aiming to prescribe the shape of the post-war world order. His Congress speech was delivered with panache and gained instant fame as the ‘Fourteen Points’. The American press endorsed the President’s words as offering the first great contribution to ending the carnage brought about by the rivalries of ancient European states. Wilson was enabling the US to stand tall among the nations. Many Americans had disliked his decision to enter the war against Germany, but many took pride in his vision of a global framework for peace and freedom.

Wilson’s advocacy of national self-determination disturbed the Western Allies. Lloyd George had his hands full with the consequences of the Easter 1916 rising in Dublin against Great Britain, not to mention growing demands for independence among Indians and other peoples in the British Empire. Clemenceau and Italy’s Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando felt disquiet, too. But they feared annoying a US President who was sending indispensable finance, munitions and troops across the Atlantic. They had always stressed that their war against Germany and Austria-Hungary was a just and moral one. They could hardly speak out against democracy or free trade, and it was difficult to deny the right of nations to determine their own futures. The Western press reported Wilson’s Fourteen Points in detail, and the American embassy gave away many thousands of free copies of a translation on the streets of Petrograd — altogether 5.5 million copies were printed for distribution in the territories of the former Russian Empire. 1This contrasted with the Allied treat- ment of Lenin’s Decree on Peace which appeared abroad in full only in far-left booklets after being translated in Petrograd. The Allied powers had no interest in facilitating its distribution.

The Bolsheviks had to improvise their publicity. Trotsky, with his instinct for propaganda, was frustrated at being unable to write for the foreign press or get his speeches carried by newsreels. In desperation he asked his People’s Commissariat to call in Claude Anet of the Petit Parisien newspaper and offer exclusive stories. 2Nothing came of this. Trotsky had to make do by relying on his existing group of cheerleaders to write whatever they liked for their editors.

The pattern of work became smoother after he took on the young Bolshevik Yevgenia Shelepina as his secretarial assistant. Born in 1894 and educated at grammar school, she was working in the Ministry of Trade and Industry and disapproved of those civil servants who went on strike against the October Revolution. She was seconded to the People’s Commissariat of Labour before being recruited for work with Trotsky in room 67 of the Smolny Institute:

I found [him] in that same room where I used to see him, at the end of the corridor on the third floor. It was differently furnished then. There was just one table in the corner by the two windows. In the little room partitioned off was some dreadful furniture, particularly a green divan with a terrible pillow on it. You see it had been the room of the resident mistress on that floor of the Institute when it was still an Institute for girls. Trotsky sat on one side of the table and I sat on the other. I did not hide from him that I was quite unfit for the work, but that I wanted to do anything I could. 3

Shelepina started by calling him ‘comrade Trotsky’ but this only made him laugh, so they addressed each other with conventional politeness as ‘Yevgenia Petrovna’ and ‘Lev Davidovich’. She smartened up Trotsky’s room and requisitioned a functioning typewriter to replace the antique machine on his desk. 4

He was still in the habit of writing all his letters in longhand, 5and she wanted to relieve him of this. Since she had not been trained in shorthand, he arranged to dictate on to a phonograph; but he could not get on with this contraption and they reverted to amateurish methods. Shelepina was thrilled at being involved in the work. 6

Trotsky wrote frequently to the Petrograd embassies stressing that Sovnarkom was the real power in Russia and deserved official recognition. This was vital if the Bolsheviks were to break down the obstacles to international communication. He had to admit that any diplomatic relations would be of an unusual kind since the Bolsheviks remained open enemies of every state in the world. He insisted that he aimed to have such relations not only with governments but also with ‘socialist-revolutionary parties that are thrusting themselves at overthrowing the existing governments’. 7At the same time he was determined to prevent Allied diplomats from interfering in Russian politics. When he thought that the British embassy was helping the anti-Soviet efforts of Boris Savinkov, he threatened to arrest Sir George Buchanan — if only in conversation with Sadoul. 8He refused to see a contradiction between demanding official recognition and encouraging worldwide subversion. 9Only the Spanish embassy would parley with Trotsky, and its charge´ d’affaires Garrido Cisneros welcomed the Soviet proposal for an armistice and peace negotiations. The rest of the diplomatic corps expressed outrage. But Spain was taking no part in the war and, although Cisneros had blotted his copybook in Allied eyes, nothing of practical consequence resulted. 10

Routine work at the People’s Commissariat — in the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs building — was done by Trotsky’s deputy Ivan Zalkind. Zalkind’s professional qualifications were no better than Trotsky’s, but his science doctorate from Algiers University meant that he had fluent French. 11He was even brusquer than the average Bolshevik. France’s diplomats thought that he had a particular dislike for them, 12but he was just as aggressive to every other nationality and seemed to make trouble just for the sake of it. Skinny, myopic, with long silvery hair, he was puny in appearance; British agent George Hill, with no attempt at impartiality, described him as ‘a most unpleasant hunchback with the viciousness of a rat’. 13Zalkind compensated by adopting a quasi-military uniform and contriving to look bold and combative. 14(The sporting of military apparel was a growing trend among Bolsheviks: Party Central Committee Secretary Yakov Sverdlov had a black leather jacket and trousers tailored for him and bought a pair of long black boots and a black leather cap.)