Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Activity in Europe was restricted to a few Cheka operatives, Vladimir Menzhinski in Berlin being one of them. Germany and Switzerland were easier places for communication than the Allied countries. Indeed, the breakdown of postal communication with the United Kingdom reduced Yakov Peters to asking friendly Allied intelligence officers to get a British diplomatic courier to carry letters to his wife in London. 20Foreign intelligence operations were anyway not the monopoly of the Cheka. A confusion of agencies sprang up, involving the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and sundry communists returning from Moscow to their native countries. The Russian Communist Party as well as Sovnarkom was plagued by overlaps in functional tasks. Soviet rulers wanted results. They were practical zealots, and as long as it looked as if something positive might come out of their plans they did not bother about institutional propriety. Dzerzhinski was pictured as the spider at the centre of a vast web of international intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Cheka, Sovnarkom and the Central Committee operated alongside each other in energetic activity and no single institution had a monopoly in the tasks of intelligence.

In fact Dzerzhinski and his comrades did not get round to setting up an illegal operations department for work abroad until June 1919: the emergencies in Russia were the priority to be dealt with. (On a point of detail, it must be remembered that none of the Cheka’s operations in Soviet Russia were beyond the law for the simple reason that Sovnarkom had intentionally freed Chekists from legal restraints.) 21But intelligence about foreign governments was vital for the formation of policy. Germany and the Allies constituted a dire threat to Sovnarkom’s survival. Either of them might at any moment invade. Plots by Russians too had to be stamped out or prevented all over the territories under Soviet rule. White conspiracies sprouted up with Allied support. The communist leaders scrabbled around to improve their knowledge of what was going on in Washington, London and Paris. Litvinov and Rothstein ably discharged this task in the United Kingdom for the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In America, Nuorteva and Martens went around canvassing support for the Bolsheviks through the Finnish Information Bureau, and help continued to be made available by sympathizers like Felix Frankfurter.

Probably the best conduit of inside news, though, were informal diplomatic channels. Karakhan and Radek in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs talked at length to influential foreigners in Moscow. Both were charming in their individual ways. Despite offending many people with his brashness and extreme opinions, Radek seemed decidedly winsome to Arthur Ransome, who had his ear to the ground as he sought to track down Allied intentions. Ransome’s pro-Bolshevism was an open secret and agents of the Allies had learned to be cautious in what they said in front of him; indeed his letters and movements were kept under close review even though he was simultaneously working for British intelligence. 22Karakhan was anyhow always the more congenial acquaintance for Allied representatives since he did not disguise his wish for some kind of deal between Soviet Russia, as it was starting to be called, 23and the Western Allies. Lockhart claimed that his favourite commissar was known to like turning up ‘begloved and armed with a box of coronas’. 24

The gentlemanly pleasantries disguised the savagery of international relations. While Karakhan and Lockhart puffed on their cigars, they exchanged opinions frankly about the situation. Karakhan rebuked the British for failing to assist the Bolsheviks; he claimed that the Red terror had acquired its wildness because the Allies had isolated and threatened Soviet Russia. Lockhart retorted that Sovnarkom had itself to blame after jeopardizing the Allies by closing down the eastern front. While Britain and France were fighting for national survival, Lenin had chosen to relieve the military pressure on Germany. If the Soviet intelligence effort abroad was frail in the year after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik leadership did not lack access to information about what the Allied powers thought of them. Radek and Karakhan were adept at picking up titbits useful for the formulation of foreign policy. They took what they discovered back to their comrades in the Kremlin. As yet it made little difference to Bolshevik actions. Sovnarkom’s room for manoeuvre between Germany and the Allies was minuscule; and Bolsheviks anyway saw the world around them through ideological spectacles: they assumed the worst in everything communicated to them by Allied diplomats about the intentions of foreign capitalist powers. This was a prudent tactic in the circumstances of the time.

Archangel had acquired strategic importance early in the war when the German submarine fleet turned the Baltic Sea into the most dangerous waters for shipping in the northern hemisphere. The old timber quays on the east bank of the River Dvina became the main destination for cargoes to Russia from Britain; and in summer 1918, when German forces encroached on northern Russia from Finland, the War Department in London gave approval for the British expeditionary force to leave its station in Murmansk and seize Archangel. General Frederick Poole, who commanded the operation, saw it as the first step towards the overthrow of Sovnarkom.

The city was Russia’s oldest port for international commerce. Since the sixteenth century, when England’s Queen Elizabeth I ordered the creation of the Muscovy Company, it had supplied timber and furs to the rest of Europe. Its fortunes dipped in the early eighteenth century when Peter the Great privileged St Petersburg, his new capital, on the Gulf of Finland, and by the outbreak of the Great War Archangel’s population had dwindled to 38,000. Its estuary was navigable for only half the year from May to the end of September. In the winter, temperatures could drop to minus 13° centigrade and wealthy local families put triple glazing in their windows. In the ‘white nights’ of the summer, when there were long hours of daylight, the mosquitoes were a torment for everyone. But Archangel remained a bustling entrepôt and its administration increased the number of quays to the physical limit in the interests of intensifying activity. Ships with draughts as deep as sixty feet could find a berth there. A road ran the length of the city — a whole five miles — parallel to the Dvina. Traders built their mansions and sawmills between the road and river, near enough to the quays to watch over their interests. The pavements were of timber and the industry was timber. Although other goods like tar, pitch, fish and flax were also traded, Archangel was well described as a ‘wooden metropolis’. 1

General Poole’s plan was to use the entire province of Archangel as his base for an invasion. The plan was to send a force south up the Dvina to Kotlas which was the terminal of the rail line to Vyatka and the Trans-Siberian railway. His objective was to form an attacking semi-circle pointed at Petrograd and Moscow from the north and east. 2After combining with the Czech Corps in the Urals and the Volunteer Army in southern Russia, he expected to tip the military balance against Sovnarkom. 3The plan had French blessing; and although the Americans wanted no direct part in it, they discreetly indicated that they would not object to anything the British did. 4Optimism was peaking. The Admiralty in London shared Poole’s assumption that he could easily recruit and train an army of Russian volunteers to fight the unpopular and vulnerable regime in Moscow. 5

On 26 July 1918 the Allied contingent sailed from Murmansk for Archangel. Poole issued an ultimatum and, more by bluff than anything else, the city fell to him on 2 August as the Red garrison and its political commissar Mikhail Kedrov made a hasty departure. 6Nikolai Chaikovski, the septuagenarian revolutionary who had lived in London until the February Revolution, had agreed to head the Supreme Government of North Russia. (The word ‘supreme’ appeared obligatory for anti-Bolshevik enterprises.) Poole had taken little account of Russian geography and society and Chaikovski was already less than wholly confident. Peasants failed to greet the new administration with enthusiasm and the civil service was weak. The Allies attempted a little economic reform. It was agreed that the anti- Soviet authorities should have access to the funds in Western banks left behind by the Provisional Government and currently claimed by the Bolsheviks. John Maynard Keynes, then working as a Treasury consultant in London, submitted a memorandum explaining how to establish a stable currency in areas outside Soviet control; he recommended a fixed exchange rate between sterling or gold and Archangel rubles. 7