Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Dzerzhinski was not the only Chekist with a reputation for dispensing violence with a degree of distaste. Yakov Peters, his Deputy Chairman, impressed Louise Bryant in the same way: ‘Peters told me at various times that the only people he believed in killing were traitors in his own ranks, people who were grafters and who tried to steal everything, people in a time like that who did not stick to the high moral principle of revolutionary discipline.’ 9If terror occurred under Soviet rule, she said, it was carried out by reluctant perpetrators like Peters who were harder on delinquent Bolsheviks than on ‘enemies of the people’. Even George Hill, less friendly than Bryant to Sovnarkom, felt that Peters ‘really hated what he was doing, but felt that it was necessary’. 10But Peters had a darker personality than he revealed to sympathetic foreigners. When living in London he had been involved in the murder of policemen which led to the Sidney Street siege in 1910. Like Dzerzhinski, he would do anything for the Revolution. As time went on, Dzerzhinski and Peters became more enthusiastic about taking the bridle off the Cheka. Enemies of the Bolsheviks did not scruple to use conspiracy and insurrection — an attempt was made on Lenin’s life in December 1917. Chekists wanted to meet fire with fire. They stopped at nothing to uphold the Soviet order while continuing to speak softly with foreigners.

Martyn Latsis, a member of the Cheka Board, called in the Cheka house journal for the class enemies of the Soviet order to be exterminated. He was advocating classocide. It was not enough to suppress capitalism; just as important for Latsis was the requirement to liquidate all living capitalists. But although the legislative framework was permissive in the extreme, Dzerzhinski at first trod carefully and consulted the central party leadership regularly. The coalition between Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries was among the factors holding back the Cheka, but after July 1918 the Bolsheviks were running a one-party state. They faced enemies, foreign and Russian, who were becoming increasingly well organized and well financed. From then onwards the Chekists fired first and asked questions later, if they asked them at all.

The social groups they targeted were named in the Constitution adopted by the Congress of Soviets that July. In the clauses devoted to citizenship, several types of people were deprived of electoral and general civil rights. Aristocrats, priests and policemen were blacklisted, as were industrialists, bankers and landlords. The Constitution declared all the ‘former people’ — chilling phrase — to be suspect. Latsis wanted to victimize all of them. What he said openly, the Chekists quietly practised. When emergencies arose, the custom became to arrest people belonging to these categories and hold them as hostages. Such prisoners were executed whenever the Whites carried out terror against Bolsheviks. The gaols in Moscow and Petrograd were grim, filthy places of confinement and the work of rooting out counter-revolutionary groups brutalized the Chekists in attitude and practice. Their leaders at every level prominently included Jews, Latvians and other non-Russians whose animus against monarchy, Okhrana and Church was highly developed. They did not blanch at orders to terrorize people who had enjoyed privileges before 1917.

One of the great worries of communist leaders was that their enemies might find a way to disrupt the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The anarchists were always out to cause trouble. Four of their number had seized the car of Raymond Robins in April 1918. Robins drew his Browning pistol on them only to be confronted by their own four Brownings. The anarchists stole the vehicle, forcing the chauffeur to do the driving for them. Robins, stranded on the pavement, contacted the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and demanded the return of his car as well as an apology. Chicherin met his indignation with the less than reassuring comment that ‘he had had the same thing happen to himself only a week before’. This infuriated Robins, who said that no other foreign minister in the world would talk so complacently. Robins went next to the Cheka, which is what he should have done in the first place. Dzerzhinski’s people promised that the American’s property would be back with him within a week, and this is exactly what happened. 11On the night of 11–12 April 1918 the Cheka and the Red Army moved decisively against the anarchist strongholds in Moscow. Twenty-six premises were attacked. Sovnarkom used the Latvian Riflemen to carry out a thorough suppression of resistance. By the end of the action they had killed forty anarchists and taken five hundred prisoners. 12

Dzerzhinski, humiliated by having been captured in the Left Socialist-Revolutionary rising, resigned as Chairman of the Cheka on 8 July and agreed to resume his post only on 22 August. Eight days later Lenin was wounded in an assassination attempt that came very close to success. Dzerzhinski’s morale again crumbled. In September he took himself off to Berlin. He travelled under the alias of a courier called Felix Damanski, leaving the Cheka in the care of Yakov Peters. Getting away from the scene of his embarrassment, he hoped to do something useful for the international communist cause. Adolf Ioffe refused to go easy on him and asked how the Chekists could mess things up so badly as to let Lenin be shot. 13Another purpose of Dzerzhinski’s trip was to retrieve the shreds of his private life. His wife Zofia had not seen him since before the Great War. After her release from Russian custody, she had moved to Switzerland with their son; from 1918 she was employed in Berne by the Soviet mission. Dzerzhinski slipped over the border to visit his family. He took them to the zoo in Berne and on a boat trip on Lake Lugano. Zofia was later to write a less than reliable account, claiming that her husband unexpectedly came face to face with the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart on the same pleasure steamer. 14In fact Lockhart at that time was in London recuperating from the Spanish influenza. 15

The Soviet authorities were not yet making much effort to infiltrate agents into foreign political establishments. If they had looked for a candidate as their master spy in the West it would surely have been Theodore Rothstein, who wrote for the Manchester Guardian in wartime and worked in the War Office press office as a translator. 16Rothstein, an emigrant from the Russian Empire, was one of Lenin’s old acquaintances in London and had taken his side in the original split between Bolshevism and Menshevism. He was also a veteran supporter of causes on the political far left in his country of refuge; no Russian Marxist had a better command of English. When the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd he became a spirited advocate of their ideas. His journalism for the Call newspaper marked him out as a fanatical Bolshevik as he justified communist dictatorship and called for a Revolutionary World War. 17This was never going to make Rothstein popular in the War Office after Sovnarkom had announced that Russia would not continue in the war, 18and it was no surprise when his employment was terminated. According to Basil Thomson of Special Branch, Rothstein’s duties had anyway never given him access to anything of use to an enemy power. 19Rothstein expressed no regret about leaving the civil service. As a revolutionary he was reserving his energy for disseminating Soviet propaganda and money.

Although the Cheka had yet to set up a comprehensive operational network in Europe, there was another ‘abroad’ where Chekists were hard at work. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in October 1917 it was not long before rival governments were established in those territories of the former Russian Empire where resistance to Bolshevism was strong. Sovnarkom took it for granted that such places should come under Moscow’s authority. Chekists were trained to infiltrate with a view to subverting the current rulers and preparing a situation that would make the tasks of the Red Army easier to accomplish.