Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Every Allied embassy made use of unofficial agents. David Francis turned to Raymond Robins of the Red Cross as his intermediary with the Soviet leadership. Robins had friendly links with the Smolny Institute. He thought it was in the American interest to come to some kind of accommodation with Lenin and Trotsky — and he hoped to make an impact in Washington by influencing what went into Francis’s reports. 37Trotsky felt that he could exploit Robins and encouraged him to get himself appointed to the American Railway Mission to Russia. The restoration of the rail network to a normal working pattern was a priority for the Bolsheviks. If the Americans assisted in this, Trotsky promised to enable the transit of Allied military stocks currently held in Russian warehouses; he told Robins he would make him Assistant Superintendent of Russian Ways and Communications. 38Truly the People’s Commissar would do whatever it took to get the results he wanted. He let Red Cross trains run down to Iasi inside the Romanian sector of the eastern front. He also issued a prohibition on the growing export of Russia’s copper and other goods to Germany via Finland. 39

Sovnarkom was being devious. While seeking to keep the Allies sweet, it was anxious to avoid any trouble with the Germans. In the night of 28–29 December, something extraordinary happened, something which had barely seemed possible a few weeks earlier: the German and Austrian diplomatic contingent arrived in Petrograd.

There were two delegations — one stopped at the Hotel Bristol on the Moika and was headed by Rear-Admiral Count Kaiserling and Count von Mirbach… This committee was known as the Naval Delegation and their mission was to discuss means of stopping the naval war in accordance with the armistice treaty. The second delegation was headed by Count Berchtold, German Red Cross representative, and met to consider the exchange of war prisoners. They established themselves at the Grand and the Angleterre. British and French officers were stopping at both these places, which was obviously embarrassing. 40

The contingent was sixty strong; the Central Powers meant serious business in Petrograd. 41

This turnabout was the product of the recent military truce and the opening of peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk near the eastern front. The Soviet authorities knew about it in advance but everyone else in Petrograd was taken by surprise; and every attempt by the Bolsheviks to lessen the impact was ineffective. The Germans ignored their request that they should remain in their residences. They enjoyed causing embarrassment and openly walked the streets of the capital, renewing old contacts in high banking and industrial circles. 42

Mirbach’s previous posting was as Germany’s ambassador in Rome. After obtaining a degree at Heidelberg, he had proceeded to a study course in Oxford. Generations of his family had served the Hohenzollerns. 43Mirbach wore formal attire when presenting himself at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs:

‘Hello!’ [Zalkind] said, ‘what are you doing here?’ The count was abashed. ‘Why, I am just returning your call,’ he said stiffly. Zalkind was amused. ‘Excuse me, Count,’ he said, ‘we are revolutionists and we don’t recognise ceremony. You might have saved yourself the trouble if you had remembered that you are in New Russia.’ He thought a minute. ‘But you can come in,’ he added, ‘and have a glass of tea.’ Von Mirbach did not accept the invitation. He looked down at Zalkind’s rough clothes, his rumpled grey hair and his inspired face. Very awkwardly he got himself out of the alien atmosphere of the [People’s Commissariat]. 44

The German delegation obdurately affirmed the ways of traditional diplomacy; and when Karl Radek tried to complain about the treatment of far-left socialists in Germany, Mirbach cut him short: German politics was none of Radek’s business. 45

The Allied embassies refused to have anything to do with the German diplomats. Ambassador Francis became dean of the corps with Buchanan’s departure on 7 January 1918. 46Early that same month a group of anarchists arrived from Helsinki to speak with him. They protested about the imprisonment of their American comrades Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman and about the projected execution of a San Francisco bomb-thrower. The anarchists threatened to hold Francis personally responsible if any harm came to these comrades. Francis urged Washington to take no notice. 47(He suspected that John Reed had provided the information about Berkman and Goldman.) 48A few days later Zalkind, while passing on a similar threat on behalf of Petrograd anarchists, declined to offer protection for the embassy. Francis asked Robins to intercede with Lenin. Although Zalkind refused to apologize, the contretemps was ended by his replacement by Chicherin, who had just arrived from England. 49

Sovnarkom still needed to neutralize the threat of a German invasion while avoiding causing undue offence to the Western Allies. But the communist leaders also aimed to make revolution. They were not always prudent in how they went about this. Russia still had a large number of troops stationed on Romanian territory, and Lenin and Trotsky saw the opportunity to get its agitators to spread the Russian anti-war spirit to the Romanian troops. They hoped that this might lead to revolutionary stirrings. Romania’s Prime Minister Ionel Bratianu had no intention of letting the Bolsheviks dissolve his army from within. Pushed by Germany’s continuing military operations, he was determined to preserve what little power remained to his government in its rump independent territory around Iasi. Lenin and Trotsky saw things from an opposite viewpoint. They were angered by the encroachment of Bratianu’s Romanian Army into Russian-ruled but Romanian-inhabited Bessarabia to form a new Moldavian state. 50Sporadic violence broke out between Russian and Romanian units, and Romania’s beleaguered authorities responded by arresting five thousand Russians on service near Botosani.

The Soviet government was in no mood to tread carefully. Every untoward event near the borders could be the beginning of an invasion. Sovnarkom always suspected the worst — and it was often proved right in these years. Soviet retaliation in this instance was an act unprecedented in modern diplomacy. On 13 January Red troops were ordered into the Romanian embassy in Petrograd to arrest the ambassador Constantin Diamandy and his staff. 51

Diamandy’s detention outraged the Petrograd diplomatic corps. When a Russian mob had looted the German embassy at the start of the war, Nicholas II’s government had restored order and shielded the ambassador from harm. 52The Romanian imbroglio was of a different order. If an accredited diplomat could be thrown into prison, was any foreigner safe in Russia under the Bolsheviks? Were not Lenin and Trotsky the barbarians of global politics? Diplomats in Russia aimed to make them appreciate the importance of centuries-old international convention and law while Sovnarkom met to discuss what to do next. 53Francis made the arrangements by phone and the corps went en masse to see Lenin, who was accompanied by Zalkind. Lenin and Zalkind concentrated on the rights and wrongs of the incident in Botosani. 54Francis strenuously objected: ‘No discussion on the subject whatever.’ He pointed out that every diplomat’s person was inviolable. Noulens pitched in and prolonged the discussion, which went on for an hour and a half. Or at least this was how Francis recalled the event. Noulens remembered it differently and said that it was previously agreed that his own superior legal understanding as well as his native fluency in French made it sensible for him to give a lengthy exposition of the scandal that would fall upon the heads of the Bolsheviks if they refused to back down.