Robert Service: Spies and Commissars

The British, French, Japanese and Americans had sent military expeditions after the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March 1918, but they never moved out from the periphery of the old empire and were anyway much too small to overthrow Lenin and Trotsky. The battles on the western front constrained what could be done until the end of the war in November that year. Subsequently, none of the Allies was willing to organize an invasion of Russia. Both economic and political considerations held them back. Even Winston Churchill, the arch-advocate of the White cause, had no idea how to do more in Russia than the Allied powers actually did. Yet Russia continued to attract attention. Attempts were made to restore the links of international trade outside the Soviet-occupied zones. The French had their plans for southern Ukraine. American entrepreneurs, especially those on the west coast, were eager to do business in Siberia. British intelligence agent Sidney Reilly characteristically planned to pull off big commercial deals in post-communist Russia, and others in Britain wanted to do the same. Food supplies to Russia were another instrument which the American government contemplated using against the communists. In 1919 initiatives were taken both to offer grain to Lenin on political conditions and to send it to feed the regions of Russia that came into White hands.

Lenin and Trotsky after the Russian Civil War successfully tempted several foreign countries into trading with Russia. But the conventional idea that this marked the end, for a while, to Soviet expansionist schemes is utterly wrong. Comintern, on orders from Moscow, tried in March 1921 to overthrow the German government. The communist action in Germany was undertaken despite the knowledge that this would bring British and French armies on to German soil to restore their continental dominance. Although the Party Politburo spoke the rhetoric of peace for Europe, its members had mentally prepared themselves for another European war.

Yet there was no German communist revolution in the inter-war period despite Comintern’s intensive efforts. The Soviet leadership underestimated the resilience of anti-communist groups and feelings across Germany — just as they had overlooked Polish nationalism when marching on Warsaw in 1920. No matter how good the information that was available to politicians, it was only as useful as they allowed it to be. Lenin and Trotsky had already fixed their view on the world and its future. They were convinced that Europe was on the threshold of communist revolution and that it needed only a slight nudge from them to make all this happen. The ‘masses’ in the communist imagination would break off their chains and rise in revolt. Bolshevik leaders filtered the contents of reports they received from the West. Their informants themselves, being communists, pre-filtered a lot of it before sending material on to Russia. Political ideology was involved, but Lenin and Trotsky anyhow had little time for basic reflection. And although they adjusted policy to changing circumstances, they still did this within the setting of their general preconceptions. They led a party which objected whenever they abandoned established doctrine. They themselves were ardent believers in the communist cause. They had given their lives to it and, despite being agile in their political manoeuvres, kept any practical compromises to a minimum.

The Allied leaders too had their own prior assumptions. Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George were in receipt of plentiful information from diplomats, reporters and agents — far more informants operated for them in Russia than the Soviet leaders could yet deploy in the West; but it was one thing for governments to obtain reports and an entirely different one to know what to do next. While being grateful for the fast flow of material, every Western leader had to contend with witnesses contradicting each other. Understandably, leaders who were already dealing with horrendous difficulties in their own countries and throughout central Europe worked as much by instinct and preconception as by steady analysis of the reports placed on their desks. Lloyd George in particular went his own way in his pursuit of Britain’s post-war economic recovery, stealing a march on France and America by authorizing the 1921 trade agreement with Soviet Russia. He had an exaggerated belief in the erosion of communism that would result in Russia. As a result he donated a breathing space to Lenin for his New Economic Policy, decisively enabling the Soviet state to restore its economy and stabilize its control over society.

This book takes up an international vantage point on Soviet Russia and the West. The foreigners who reported, denounced, eulogized, negotiated, spied on, subverted or attacked Russia in 1917–21 rest in their graves. The Russians — Reds and Whites — who fought over Russia’s future in their Civil War are long gone. Lenin’s mausoleum still stands on Red Square in Moscow, a monument to an October Revolution that shook the world’s politics to its foundations. His corpse remains there because Russian public opinion is not ready for its removal. What happened in Petrograd in late 1917 transfigured global politics in the inter-war period. Out of the maelstrom of revolutionary Russia came a powerful state — the USSR — which defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War and for decades after 1945 was locked in the contest of the Cold War against the US and its allies. The October Revolution gave rise to questions which remain important today, questions that find expression in the polarities of democracy and dictatorship, justice and terror, social fairness and class struggle, ideological absolutism and cultural pluralism, national sovereignty and armed international intervention. This is a cardinal reason why the history of Soviet Russia and the West continues to command attention.

In March 1917, while Europe was convulsed by the Great War, news of a revolution in Russia began to spread abroad. It started in Petrograd, the capital, with an outburst of industrial conflict. Strikes had taken place in the two previous winters and the army and political police had dealt with them efficiently. Workers determined to bring down the Imperial monarchy walked out of the factories and joined demonstrations. Emperor Nicholas II was at GHQ in Mogilëv, five hundred miles away, and saw no reason for concern. This time, however, the strikers did not simply go home, but massed on the streets and goaded the militants of clandestine revolutionary parties into joining them. When the army garrisons were mobilized to restore order, the troops went over to the side of the workers. The popular mood was fiercely radical. Workers and soldiers elected their own Petrograd Soviet (or Council) to press for their cause. Suddenly the Russian capital became ungovernable. Alert at last to the magnitude of the emergency, the emperor sought to abdicate in favour of his haemophiliac young son Alexei. When counselled against this, he suggested that his brother Mikhail should take the throne, but this compromise was angrily rejected by those demonstrating on the streets. They would be satisfied only by the removal of the Romanov dynasty, and they had Petrograd at their mercy.

The end for the Romanovs, when it came, was abrupt. It was also unexpectedly peaceful. On 15 March Nicholas II’s nerve suddenly cracked and he stood down, allowing a Provisional Government to take power. It was led by the liberal Georgi Lvov with Pavel Milyukov as Foreign Affairs Minister and Alexander Guchkov as Minister for Military Affairs. Most of the cabinet’s members were liberals, with Guchkov as the sole representative of moderate conservative opinion. There was but one minister on the political left. This was the Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerenski, a young lawyer who became Minister of Justice.