Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Foreseeing the results of the voting, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Central Committee secretly sanctioned terrorist attacks in Russia. The idea was not to kill Lenin or Trotsky but to organize a ‘provocation’ that would wreck the Brest-Litovsk treaty and bring the Bolsheviks back to the path of ‘revolutionary war’. Left Socialist-Revolutionaries thought that they would achieve this simply by assassinating Ambassador von Mirbach. If they were successful, Berlin would break with Moscow immediately.

On 6 July Yakov Blyumkin, an eighteen-year-old Left Socialist-Revolutionary working for the Cheka, entered the German embassy on a false pretext and shot Mirbach. Sovnarkom instantly proscribed the party and arrested several of its leaders. Dzerzhinski, embarrassed by the lapse in state security, sped off to their headquarters only to be taken captive by them. He was liberated thanks to resolute action by the Latvian Riflemen — a force which had gone over en masse to the Bolsheviks from the old Imperial army and quickly formed the effective core of the Red Army. Without their Latvians, the Bolsheviks would have been helpless. Lenin and Radek took a limousine to the German embassy at Denezhny Pereulok to express formal condolences. They were grovelling because they feared that unless they expressed outrage, however insincere, Germany might overrun Russia. 35In Berlin, Ioffe’s first thought was that German agents had killed Mirbach so as to sharpen the conflict between Russia and the Allies. He deduced this from the German Foreign Office’s request for Lenin to put the blame on Allied agents. The Germans called for the killers and their ‘ideological inspirers’ to be caught and punished. 36They also demanded the right to dispatch their own troops into Russia. 37But things calmed down and the leading Bolshevik Anatoli Lunacharski spread the news among the foreign community in Moscow that the emergency was nearly over. This needed doing since the Bolsheviks were worried that the British and French would start a preventive war to save Russia from German occupation. 38

Young Blyumkin was nowhere to be found. He had escaped to Ukraine, hoping to return when the Bolsheviks tore up the peace treaty. Frantic to oblige the Germans, the Soviet government ordered the execution of V. A. Alexandrovich, the Left Socialist-Revolutionary who had worked as Deputy Chairman of the Cheka. The German authorities let it be known that they were satisfied with the Bolshevik official reaction. Radek could be relied upon to make the best jokes about the emergency. He told acquaintances that a job could now be found for the generals of Nicholas II’s armed forces: they could be formed into detachments and trained to shed crocodile tears in Mirbach’s funeral cortège. 39

The Bolsheviks badly needed a counterweight to German power. Chicherin, who was appointed People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs on a permanent basis at the end of May, 40cabled Ambassador Francis to say that Vologda was unsafe and that the diplomatic corps should move to Moscow. He added: ‘I am sending Radek to Vologda to execute the invitation.’ The word ‘execute’ did not exactly reassure Francis after the Mirbach murder. He replied that he felt secure in the north ‘because we do not fear the Russian people’. Radek, taking Ransome as his interpreter, turned up uninvited; he was sporting a jacket pulled tight with a belt from which hung a conspicuous revolver. 41To Francis this was an attempt to look like a ‘cowboy on the war path’. He told Noulens: ‘Ah, the miserable little Jew! If he comes back to see me with his revolver in his holster, I’ll get mine from out the drawer; I’ll put it on the table and tell him: “Now let’s talk!”’ 42Soviet leaders, not for the first or last time, were behaving incautiously. The French were picking up their wireless traffic passing through Petrograd and knew what Radek and Chicherin wrote to each other seated at their Hughes apparatuses — this was the most up-to-date method of telegraph communication, which allowed people to type and exchange messages instantaneously. Radek ought to have avoided mentioning Francis’s predilection for his embassy secretaries; Chicherin was unwise to refer to the false tone of deference he used with the American ambassador. Ambassador Noulens enjoyed passing both these titbits on to Francis. 43

Noulens and Francis faced Radek down. The fact that he had tried to stir up the feelings of a 2,000-strong crowd of workers against the Allies did nothing to reassure them. They reasoned that they could too easily end up as Lenin’s hostages if they moved to Moscow. Radek and Ransome returned to Moscow with their tails between their legs. 44

After Francis had received cable intelligence that Chicherin had indeed ordered the local soviet to take them hostage, the Western diplomatic corps could see that Vologda was no longer a safe haven. This would have been the last straw for the ambassador even if he had not known that the British force in Murmansk was planning to overthrow the Archangel Soviet. The Bolsheviks had their own intelligence about this and had been executing known enemies in the region. Northern Russia became a theatre of war. Francis already had a secret agreement with the Vologda station master to keep a locomotive and carriages ready for his embassy to leave for Archangel at an hour’s notice. On 29 July he decided that the time had come to flee but, wanting to avoid the appearance of colluding in British military aggression, he changed the destination to Kandalaksha, a few miles south of Murmansk. 45Shortly before boarding he practised a little deceit by wiring Chicherin: ‘We have determined to take your advice.’ Chicherin heard what was really being planned and tried to prevent it: ‘Archangel means leaving Russia.’ He could hardly complain. His own deceit would have delivered Francis into Soviet custody. Chicherin had acted too late and soon all the Americans were sound asleep on a moving train. 46

Whatever brittle trust had existed between the Kremlin and the White House now vanished. Raymond Robins had already left for America on 14 May, still convinced that the Western Allies should not attempt a military intervention in Russia unless given Sovnarkom’s explicit sanction — by then his friend Lockhart had come round to recommending an Allied campaign regardless of the Kremlin’s wishes. 47But room for diplomacy through informal mediation had already disappeared. A bleak future of armed conflict loomed on the horizon. The Bolsheviks had dealt with the threat from Germany by signing the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Western Allies had yet to clarify their military intentions — and the communist leaders pondered their own options with heightened concern. They had hoped to crush their Russian enemies before meeting the challenges from abroad. Now they could no longer be confident that the Allied powers would allow them this freedom.

The foreign military campaigns against Soviet rule ran the Cheka ragged across Russia and the borderlands of the old empire. The Germans held Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic region and maintained a force in Finland at its government’s request. The British were in occupation of Murmansk and Archangel. The French presided in Odessa. The Turks were pushing into the south Caucasus. The Japanese and the Americans landed expeditionary forces in eastern Siberia. The ‘intervention’ was multi-angled and highly dangerous. Nor could Soviet security forces ignore the potential for trouble from armed foreigners like the Czech ex-POWs who had been in Russia. The disintegration of the Russian Empire gathered pace as Georgians, Armenians and Azeris rejected the authority of Sovnarkom. The Volga region in south-east Russia was governed by Komuch. Russian anti-Bolshevik armies — the Whites — were stiffening their efforts in south Russia and mid-Siberia. Each of these forces sought to make contact with supporters in the areas under Bolshevik control around Moscow and Petrograd. The Chekists had their hands full with the tasks of combating counter-revolutionary activity over this entire zone. There was little time or personnel to spare on espionage and subversion abroad.