Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Conservative MPs began to ask questions in the House of Commons about his activities:

Major Hunt asked the Prime Minister whether, in view of the fact that M. Litvinoff is advocating a revolutionary movement in this country, he can now say whether he will be prosecuted or interned?

Lord R. Cecil [Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs]: My right hon. Friend asks me to answer this question. I have nothing to add to the reply given by the Home Secretary on the 14th instant to the hon. Member for Hertford, and to the reply given yesterday to the hon. Member.

Major Hunt: Is it the fact that M. Litvinoff has sent round a document, signed by himself, to the trade unions, advocating revolution, and stating that a social revolution is absolutely necessary if a lasting peace is to be secured, and is that sort of thing to be allowed in the case of an alien when it is not allowed in the case of any of our own people?

Lord R. Cecil: I am afraid I can only repeat the answer I have given. I really have nothing to add to what I have already said on the subject, that the matter is being considered. 20

This remained the government’s position over the next few months.

Maxim and Ivy Litvinov were enjoying themselves. At New Year 1918 it was their turn to throw the annual party for the colony. Fifteen sat down to celebrate. In characteristic Russian fashion the guests came with contributions to the feast. Ivy wrote:

They brought whisky (lamenting vodka) and zakuski from the Jewish shops in Soho — short, rotund salted cucumbers, smoked salmon, voblya [which is] a strange fish cured hard as a board which I had difficulty in cutting into strips and which I thought more suitable for a clown to slap another in the face with than for human consumption. 21

The cry went up: ‘There’s no caviar, there’s no caviar!’ It might be wartime in a foreign country but the colony expected to dine in the manner to which they were accustomed. Relying on Maxim’s advice and the labour of their red-faced charlady Mrs Bristow, Ivy produced a satisfactory borshch (beetroot soup) followed by roast beef and an immense apple pie. 22The Russians would normally have asked the servants to sit and eat with them but decided that Mrs Bristow would be unable to understand any word that was spoken. She was invited just for the toasts to the New Year and to the Revolution. More toasts followed, including one to Maxim as ‘the First People’s Ambassador of the First Socialist Republic’. 23

Soon, along with Ivy, Maxim was attending luncheon and dinner parties in Westminster and Mayfair. On one occasion they were received at Downing Street; unfortunately there is no record as to whether it was at Number 10 or Number 11, but the guest list included Ramsay MacDonald and Bertrand Russell. A fellow guest ventured the question: ‘Wasn’t it a bolt from the blue, Mrs Litvinoff, living quietly in West Hampstead with your husband and baby, suddenly to be plunged into the whirlpool of public events? We immediately imagined you handing your husband his cup of tea at breakfast and him looking up from The Times and through the newspaper.’ Ivy refused to be patronized. ‘It was’, she said firmly but implausibly, ‘what we expected.’ 24

Intellectuals of the political left courted the Litvinovs. As Ivy recalled, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Charles Roden Buxton as well as Russell made social overtures to Maxim:

It was a pity they felt obliged to invite me too. I was such a chatterbox and Maxim by nature so taciturn and glad to have others do the talking for him. Whatever the subject under discussion I generally managed to get round to psychoanalysis, and people who sincerely wished to discover what the structure of the Soviets was, found themselves diverted into acrimonious wrangles about Freud and even obliged to listen to the relation of my childhood complexes. 25

While Ivy had an altercation with Russell her husband ‘was glad to be able to enjoy his lunch in peace’. 26(His calm temperament proved an asset when he served under Stalin in the 1930s as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs.) Maxim was anyway more confident with pen in hand. His pamphlet The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Rise and Meaning derided the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, praising the Bolsheviks as the only party that had the support of the ‘masses’. He defended the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly on the grounds that only Sovnarkom could guarantee that the ‘bourgeois parties’ would not come back to power. 27

On 23 January the Manchester Guardian ran an article by an unnamed correspondent, possibly Theodore Rothstein, denying that communism stood for ‘class war’. This alleged mistake was said to result from a mistranslation of the German Klassenkampf , which was better rendered as ‘class struggle’ and was widely used by European socialists without connection with Bolshevism. 28This was an inaccurate presentation of Lenin’s ideas. Since 1914 he had called for the ‘imperialist war’ to be turned into a ‘European civil war’, and by war he meant war and not just struggle.

There was no Bolshevik of Litvinov’s stature in America because all the resident leaders of the Russian far left had departed for Petrograd. The most active advocate of Bolshevism in the US was not a Russian but a Finn, Santeri Nuorteva, who headed the Finnish Information Bureau in New York. The Bureau was an agency of the Provisional Revolutionary Government established by the Red Finns in January 1918 as civil war broke out between the Reds and the Whites in Finland. Bolsheviks kept close ties with the Bureau, which operated as an unofficial embassy for the Reds in Russia as well as Finland. The US Secretary of State Robert Lansing would have nothing to do with Nuorteva, who then reached out to sympathetic officials in the State Department such as William Bullitt, William Irwin and Felix Frankfurter (political discipline under Lansing was much more lax than in Balfour’s Foreign Office). Nuorteva also approached likely journalists such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times . Although he was later to operate as a cheerleader for Joseph Stalin, at this time Duranty was still wary of associating himself with the Russian communist cause. The Finnish Information Bureau’s Harold Kellock derided him in a letter to Frankfurter: ‘Walter reminds me a bit of a sort of orthodox Virgin Mary who is always fully conscious of being Queen of Heaven. Perhaps he’s a direct descendant “son of the Jewish Revolution”.’ 29

The weakness of the Soviet propaganda effort in the US induced John Reed and Louise Bryant to volunteer to return to America on Sovnarkom’s behalf. This would undoubtedly involve a certain risk. A Federal Grand Jury had indicted Reed in November 1917 for violating the Espionage Act with his article ‘Knit a Straitjacket for your Soldier Boy’ in the Masses . But Reed did not flinch and on 29 January 1918 the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs appointed him New York consul. 30The State Department retorted that Lenin’s government lacked even de facto recognition. 31Trotsky at this point saw that he was annoying Washington for no good purpose, and he withdrew Reed’s name from his list of appointees. The most important thing was to facilitate Reed’s arrival in the US. 32Reed and Bryant disembarked on 28 April. 33Although the indictment was quietly forgotten, in late May he was arrested in Philadelphia on a charge of inciting a riot. 34Yet again the authorities stepped back from providing him with the publicity of a trial. On release he delivered speeches against the war, sharing platforms with Nuorteva and Masses editor Max Eastman. 35Reed’s articles and pamphlets were disseminated widely in the American labour movement. He thought he had seen the world’s future in Russia, and he recommended it.