Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The tasks of governing the Soviet-dominated zone were huge. The Bolsheviks accepted that they had to employ in the People’s Commissariats ‘specialists’ who had worked in the ministries before the October Revolution. Some did this with much reluctance and zealously persecuted anyone they thought to be acting disloyally. Although Joseph Stalin was notoriously suspicious of ‘bourgeois’ experts, he was not alone among Bolsheviks. It was their preference to promote the working class to administrative authority in the ‘proletarian state’. Lenin had said and written this throughout 1917. 1Yet he recognized that years would be needed for workers to acquire confidence and training. While this was happening, the old personnel had to be kept in post under the watchful eye of communist commissars. Lenin and Trotsky were adamant that the Soviet state would collapse without qualified professionals; but they had a problem in securing acceptance for their pragmatism.

Even they, though, did not want to employ former Okhrana officials. Like other communists, they detested what the political police had done to revolutionaries under the Romanovs, and they felt they could not trust any of them. The Soviet Constitution stripped former policemen of civil rights. Since the Chekists refused to employ such people, they had to teach themselves from scratch how to organize intelligence and counter-intelligence — on this as on other practical matters, Marx and Engels had left no handbook of instruction behind. The sole asset that the Bolshevik party possessed was its long experience of struggle against the security police. Clandestine political work had required the Bolsheviks to take precautions against infiltration and provocation. Cool vigilance had been essential. In fact when the Okhrana’s files were opened after the February Revolution, it was shown that police agents had penetrated the revolutionary parties more systematically than anyone had imagined. The Bolsheviks had prided themselves on their conspiratorial prowess. So Lenin was astounded to learn that one of his protégés in the Central Committee, Roman Malinovski, was a paid employee of the Okhrana. When Malinovski imprudently came to Petrograd and threw himself on Sovnarkom’s mercy, Lenin had no compunction about having him executed. 2

The Chekists learned some lessons better than others and were notably slow in acquiring technical expertise in code-breaking and encryption. This was something of an oddity. Before 1917 all of them — in the underground, Siberian exile or emigration — had used forms of secret writing for internal party correspondence. Often this involved little more than working with an agreed piece of printed text or list of specific words, and the chemicals they deployed for invisible script might sometimes be no more complex than the contents of a milk bottle. This experience taught them the importance of codes, but their political suspiciousness deprived them of a chance to increase their practical cleverness. Imperial Russia had brought on a brilliant group of cryptographers. None was more remarkable than Ernst Fetterlein, who fled across the Finnish frontier in June 1918. Fetterlein had decrypted the British diplomatic codes in the Great War, giving an invaluable tool to Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the War Ministry in their dealings with London. 3The communist authorities were able to invent only rather primitive codes — and the art of decryption for a while was out of their reach.

They were aware that the security of their wireless communications left much to be desired. It took them years to recover from the loss of many of Russia’s most expert telegraphists, who walked out on them after the October Revolution. 4Bolsheviks could see that they were technically inferior to the Allies, the Germans and the Whites. One way round the problem was to send deceptive messages en clair . This is the only sensible way to interpret a particular conversation on the Hughes telegraph apparatus between Karl Radek in Moscow and Khristo Rakovski in Kiev. With theatrical extravagance, Radek claimed he could see no cloud in the Soviet sky. Lenin was recovering well from illness. The Red Army was conquering all the counter-revolutionary forces ranged against it and would definitely prevent the Czechs from linking up with the Allies. British and French prisoners were being held as hostages and would be summarily shot if trouble started up from Vologda. Radek boasted to Rakovski that things were entirely fine with the Germans. 5Such nonsense can only have been meant to reassure German snoopers that the Bolsheviks were sticking firmly to the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Just possibly Radek was hoping to scare the Allies away from interfering in Soviet affairs — or perhaps he had both purposes in mind at the same time.

Chekist leaders were determined to rectify their lack of effectiveness. One thing they found easy was in recruiting officials. Plenty of Bolsheviks and their supporters had grievances against the middle and upper classes in the light of their personal experience under Romanov rule and were eager to join the security services and liquidate the plots against Sovnarkom.

Felix Dzerzhinski at first glance was not the most obvious man for Lenin to have wanted as head of the Cheka in December 1917. He had no recent acquaintance with underground activity. Born near Minsk, he was a Pole from a noble family and went to a grammar school before being expelled for ‘revolutionary activity’. He was a poet and liked to sing. But political rebellion was his passion; and once he had discovered Marxism, he helped to found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. He detested nationalism, being wary of fellow Poles who wanted their own independent state. He was allergic to internal party polemics — and, like his comrade Rosa Luxemburg, he had despised the shenanigans let loose by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the world of Marxism before the Great War. He was exiled to Siberia in 1897 and again in 1900, but both times he escaped. Shortly after he had married Zofia Muszkat, she was arrested and he was left alone with their baby son. Yet he kept up his revolutionary activities. He had a rough time in prison after his last arrest in 1912, suffering beatings and being held for long periods in manacles — his wrists bore permanent scars. When released at the fall of the monarchy, he was more austere and restrained than before — and he was plagued by bronchitis.

The fact that Dzerzhinski did not want the Cheka post was a recommendation in itself, and Lenin never doubted that he had made the right choice. Dzerzhinski applied a clinical judgement to any situation and had no qualms about ordering mass executions. Józef Pi sudski, who led the Poles to national independence in 1919, remembered him generously from their schooldays: ‘Dzerzhinsky distinguished himself as a student with delicacy and modesty. He was rather tall, thin and demure, making the impression of an ascetic with the face of an icon… Tormented or not, this is an issue history will clarify; in any case this person did not know how to lie.’ 6The British sculptor Clare Sheridan, who did a bust of Dzerzhinski in 1920, was struck by his demeanour:

His eyes certainly looked as if they were bathed in tears of eternal sorrow, but his mouth smiled an indulgent kindness. His face is narrow, high-cheek-boned and sunk in. Of all his features it is his nose which seems to have the most character. It is very refined, and the delicate bloodless nostrils suggest the sensitiveness of over-breeding. 7

Dzerzhinski told her: ‘One learns patience and calm in prison.’ 8Sheridan was unusual in coaxing such intimacies out of him since he did not welcome conversations of a personal nature. Dzerzhinski was nobody’s acolyte but he agreed with Lenin about what needed to be done in Russia. Ascetic and dedicated to the case, he would run the Cheka just as Lenin wanted — and he would not be held back by the kind of moral scruples that would have bothered Luxemburg.