Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

From that day onwards they took breakfast together. 55

Lockhart slotted himself back into old routines, getting official accreditation as Roman Romanovich Lokkart from the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs even though Britain was withholding recognition from Sovnarkom. 56He was enjoying himself. He saw Trotsky regularly and put the case for Russian military co-operation with the Allies. Sadoul too maintained amicable ties with Trotsky. Ambassador Noulens was later to declare that Sadoul favoured communist Russia over France. Ambassador Francis, he thought, was coming to the same conclusion about Robins. And soon Lockhart’s oddities too were remarked upon. 57Colonel Alfred Knox put things with succinct brutality: ‘[Robins] is a fanatic with the temperament of a hero-worshipping schoolgirl, and while without the mental equipment or the experience to enable him to advise on policy, he is a dangerous companion for anyone as impressionable as Lockhart.’ 58General Henry Wilson on behalf of the Imperial General Staff urged the War Cabinet either to stop Lockhart commenting on military questions or, failing that, to recall him from Moscow. 59But Lockhart, Robins and Sadoul were excellent conduits for contact with the Soviet leadership and were still too useful to be dropped. 60The Western Allies needed to make the best of a bad situation. There was a war to be won and it was important to go on cajoling the Russians to stay in the war.

The Bolshevik leaders were optimists. Believing that only a little time was needed for their revolutionary example to be followed abroad, they had agreed to a truce on the eastern front on 15 December 1917. Sovnarkom demobilized the Russian Army — when the formal order went out by wireless on 7 December, the slim chance of having any forces available to repel the Germans disappeared; 1Russia was rendered indefensible as peasant soldiers, rifles over their shoulders, jumped on trains and went back to the villages. Lenin and Trotsky were counting on ‘European socialist revolution’ and felt that the October Revolution depended on their gamble. The Allied powers looked on anxiously. The consequences for their armies on the western front would be deeply damaging if a deal was struck between Germany and Russia. The Germans stood to gain from being able to transfer army divisions from the east as their manpower ran low in northern France. They had already sent experienced troops there while the Russian Army had been falling apart. There could also be economic benefit because Germany wanted access to goods and markets in Russia, Ukraine and the south Caucasus so as to circumvent the British naval blockade of German ports.

Russia and Germany continued to negotiate at the little German-held town of Brest-Litovsk close to the eastern front. The German high command was getting anxious. It badly needed its armies to crush the Western Allies before the Americans could be fully deployed there. 2Each side in Brest-Litovsk expected to achieve its purposes to the detriment of the other. The Germans wanted a separate peace with Russia, the Russians a German communist revolution. Berlin was confident that the talks would be of brief duration since the communists had empty trenches and no soldiers. German commanders and diplomats felt no need for preparations beyond allocating a set of two-storeyed dwellings to house the delegations in the snow-laden town. 3

The Germans and their allies — Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Turks — sat down with the Russians in the Officers’ Building on 22 December. Trotsky was needed in Petrograd and so it was his friend Adolf Ioffe who headed the Soviet delegation that departed by rail via Vilnius and Bialystok. Ioffe was from a rich Jewish family from Simferopol in Crimea. His father had a reputation as Minister of Finances Sergei Witte’s ‘favourite Jew’ in the 1890s, and Adolf’s choice of a revolutionary career aroused parental consternation. He had also married young, gaining family consent solely because the girl was Jewish — Ioffe senior had feared that his atheist son might marry outside the ancestral faith. Adolf received a regular financial allowance that enabled him to enrol as a student in the Berlin University medical faculty. Although he worked hard at his studies, the police objected to his activities on behalf of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and expelled him from Germany. He decamped to Vienna where he became a pupil of the psychologist Alfred Adler and made the acquaintance of Trotsky. In 1917 he wrote prolifically and served on the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Although he had no expertise in international affairs, his command of German and familiarity with central Europe were thought an asset for dealing with Germany and Austria-Hungary. 4

Travelling with Ioffe in the delegation were Lev Kamenev and a handful of lesser Bolsheviks including the rising official of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, Lev Karakhan. Radek joined them later. Some military officers attended as special advisers; their morale was so low that it was said that they went ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, believing that the Bolsheviks were bent on signing terms that were tantamount to treason. Admiral Altvater was apparently an exception: Trotsky sardonically reported that he ‘was touched by grace and has returned from Brest-Litovsk more Bolshevik than the Bolsheviks on this peace question’. 5

Ioffe had a preliminary conversation with the Austrian Foreign Minister Count Ottokar von Czernin and politely rejected his entire worldview. When Czernin commented sceptically on Soviet political expectations, Ioffe leant across and said: ‘I still hope we’ll succeed in calling forth a revolution in your country.’ 6Such was the atmosphere when Prince Leopold of Bavaria opened the formal talks on behalf of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. Ioffe spoke for the Russian side and insisted, in the face of Turkish objections, on full publicity for the proceedings in Russia and among the Central Powers. He exploited the occasion by giving an explanation of the purposes behind Lenin’s Decree on Peace. Over the next few days Ioffe and Kamenev completely ignored the big topic at the centre of everyone’s attention: the German demand for Russia to sign a comprehensive peace on the eastern front. The Bolsheviks had vowed to start a ‘revolutionary war’ rather than make a separate settlement with the Germans, so they needed to keep the Central Powers talking and talking. Ioffe expatiated on the complications likely to arise from Soviet economic nationalizations as yet to be announced. He also drew attention to the problems arising from a separate delegation from the Ukrainian Central Rada, which had declared Ukraine’s independence in January but had yet to be recognized by Sovnarkom. Ioffe explained all the niceties with elegance and courtesy. 7

The Germans tried to hurry things along but were under instructions to observe diplomatic proprieties. They soon saw that Ioffe, liaising regularly with Trotsky, was hoping to gain time for revolutionary upheavals to occur in Berlin and Vienna. Indicating that their patience was not inexhaustible, they threatened that unless the Soviet leaders submitted quickly to their terms they would face the might of their forces.

Trotsky decided that his presence in Brest-Litovsk had become essential and he joined the talks on 27 December 1917. Smartly attired as usual, he stepped off the train with a bright scarf tucked into a dark fur coat; his shoes were polished as if for an evening ball. He was a virtuoso performer. He spoke in his fluent German whenever he wanted to get his meaning across quickly to the military monoglots. He picked holes in the draft documents produced by the Germans. Why on earth could the translators not see the difference between words like ‘nation’, ‘people’ and ‘state’? 8Over the table from him sat men who had acted haughtily towards Ioffe. Trotsky presented them with a different personality. He appeared indifferent to their threats; and although he was invariably polite he left more than a suspicion that he was treating them condescendingly. They had assumed that he would be embarrassed by the inclusion of the Ukrainian delegates who turned up on the same day as him. Not a bit of it. He accepted their participation, mentioning only that he expected that the territorial allegiance of the Black Sea region would be decided by a plebiscite of its residents. 9Trotsky gave an actor’s display of calm confidence. It was hard to believe that he spoke for a state that was utterly incapable of repelling any German invasion.