Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The community of foreign sympathizers in Petrograd continued to promote the Soviet cause. The most eccentric was Daily News and Manchester Guardian correspondent Arthur Ransome. Caught in the United Kingdom at the time of the October Revolution, he had returned to Russia on Christmas Day 1917. 36Ransome inspired great affection: every one of his acquaintances, even those who detested Bolshevism, was fond of him. Moura Benckendorff, Lockhart’s mistress, noticed ‘his Bolshevik appearance’ but still felt sorry for him. Thinking that he was not eating well, she ‘stuck a piece of veal in his mouth… and a few radishes in his pocket’. 37Ransome might have preferred something sugary: he loved his ‘sweets’. 38

The British intelligence officer George Hill was another who warmed to him: ‘He was a tall, lanky, bony individual with a shock of sandy hair, usually unkempt, and the eyes of a small, inquisitive and rather mischievous boy. He was a lovable personality when you came to know him.’ 39Hill and Ransome lived on the same hotel corridor. Only Hill had a bathroom, which he allowed Ransome to use each morning:

Our profoundest discussions and most heated arguments took place when Ransome was sitting in the bath and I wandering up and down my room dressing. Sometimes, when I had the better of an argument and his feelings were more than usually outraged, he would jump out of the water and beat himself dry like an angry gorilla. After that he would not come for his bath for two or three days, then we would meet and grin at each other, I would ask after the pet snake which lived in a large cigar box in his room, and the following day he would come in as usual and we would begin arguing again, the best of friends. 40

The species and provenance of the snake remain unknown.

Ransome, an unhappily married man, had fallen in love with a Bolshevik — and British intelligence wondered whether he had become one too. 41The object of his affections was none other than Trotsky’s secretary Yevgenia Shelepina. Hill asked her out to dinner but she refused, claiming she had to work at her desk till late. 42The true reason may well have been her growing fancy for Ransome, and the two were soon conducting an affair. A bit of politics was involved, too. Ransome was sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as well as convinced, from a patriotic viewpoint, that it was in the British interest to have good relations with them and not to bully or subvert Sovnarkom. And Shelepina was anyway a useful source of material for his dispatches home. Her close knowledge of Trotsky’s planning and activity was a priceless asset.

C. P. Scott, Ransome’s editor in Manchester, was not keen on the Soviet revolutionary experiment. While appreciating his reporter’s extraordinary access to the Bolshevik elite, Scott used the old device of muffling a correspondent’s enthusiasms by judicious editing and occasional spiking of reports. At least Ransome kept his job. Louise Bryant lost her contract of employment with the Philadelphia Public Ledger and was in no doubt about the reason. As soon as a reporter tried to tell the news honestly, she claimed, the editor at home disowned him or her. 43Morgan Philips Price complained that his telegrams were being suppressed or emasculated. 44But the cheerleaders kept up their work. Determined to write as they pleased, Bryant and Ransome published booklets on Russia after the October Revolution. Ransome’s Letter to America so pleased Karl Radek at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs that he helped to get it published in the US and supplied his own introduction. Ransome denied that the Allies had any right to compel Russia to do what they wanted. While allowing that the Revolution might fail, he applauded the Soviet order and its appropriateness for Russia; he dismissed the anti-Bolshevik majority in the Constituent Assembly as an ‘indifferent mass’ of people incapable of achieving the decisiveness and popularity of the Bolsheviks. 45

Jacques Sadoul and Raymond Robins went on pressing the case for gentle handling of Sovnarkom by their governments. At the beginning of 1918 their chorus was swelled by Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had caught the eye of Lloyd George as someone with an open mind about the Bolsheviks. The Prime Minister decided to send him back to Russia as ‘Agent’ or ‘Head of the British Mission’. 46Before departing, Lockhart spoke to Viscount Milner (Secretary of State for War), Sir Edward Carson (First Lord of the Admiralty), Earl Curzon (Lord President of the Council and soon to become Foreign Secretary), Lord Hardinge (Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) and Sir George Clerk (private secretary to the Acting Foreign Secretary). Lockhart emerged well briefed on the general problems of the British war effort. He also learned that Lloyd George had a low opinion of A. J. Balfour and the Foreign Office, which gave Lockhart an opening for writing reports without inhibition. 47Lockhart’s linguistic competence and political contacts as well as his self-confidence were undeniable. Lloyd George got no sense of Lockhart’s recklessness. Perhaps his own personality and unconventional lifestyle — he took his mistress Frances Stevenson along with him nearly everywhere — blinded him to the risks of sending the Scot back into a post of political responsibility without a senior diplomat like Buchanan to keep an eye on him. Lockhart was like quicksilver, a man who loved the thrills of adventure.

He left for Russia on 14 January 1918 with a letter of recommendation from none other than Maxim Litvinov. 48Only one person in Whitehall poured cold water on his mission. General Sir Nevil Macready, who on learning that Lockhart’s assignment was to help to restore the Russians to the eastern front, said: ‘Don’t the boys in the Foreign Office read history? Don’t you know that when an army of seven million runs away in disorder, it needs a generation before it can fight again?’ 49But Lloyd George believed that Raymond Robins was carrying out useful work for the Americans and wanted Lockhart to do the same for the British. He told him simply: ‘Go to it.’ 50With Lockhart went his personally chosen team of Captain William Hicks, Edward Phelan and Edward Birse. Hicks had recently worked in Russia as an expert on poison gas; Phelan was scooped from the Ministry of Labour, presumably on the premise that he knew how to talk to far-left socialists. Birse was a Moscow businessman. 51They took the normal wartime route across the North Sea and made for Finland, only to discover that the direct rail line down to Petrograd was broken. Instead they made for Helsinki, where they encountered fighting in the streets between the Red and White Finns. The travellers set off quickly to Russia, reaching the capital on 30 January. 52Lockhart wrote in his diary: ‘Streets in a dreadful state, snow had not been swept away for weeks. Everyone looks depressed and unhappy.’

Among his first steps was to arrange a meeting with Trotsky. He lunched beforehand with Raymond Robins, who told him: ‘Trotsky [is a] poor kind [of] son of a bitch but the greatest Jew since Christ.’ Trotsky tried to convince Lockhart that the Bolsheviks would engage in partisan warfare if the Germans mounted an invasion. Lockhart recorded in his diary: ‘Loud in his blame of the French and said the Allies had only helped Germany by their intrigues in Russia.’ 53Robins took a liking to Lockhart and offered him a deal:

Let us assume that I am here to capture Russia for Wall Street and American business men. Let us assume that you are a British wolf and I am an American wolf, and that when this war is over we are going to eat each other up for the Russian market; let us do so in perfectly frank, man fashion, but let us assume at the same time that we are fairly intelligent wolves, and that we know that if we do not hunt together in this hour the German wolf will eat us both up, and then let us go to work. 54