Robert Service: Spies and Commissars

The Petrograd Soviet, led by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, gave its blessing to this arrangement. The Mensheviks were a Marxist faction dedicated to the ultimate objective of socialist revolution; but they believed that the country had not yet reached the level of modernization necessary to socialism, and they shuddered at the thought of burdening themselves with responsibility for governance in wartime. The Socialist-Revolutionaries looked for support more to the peasants than to the workers. But they too were influenced by Marxism and they shared the judgement of the Mensheviks. Together these two socialist organizations could easily have taken power in the Russian capital. Instead they gave approval to Lvov’s cabinet on condition that he agreed to renounce Nicholas II’s expansionist aims and fight only a defensive war. They also demanded the realization of a full range of civic reforms. Lvov agreed. He understood that, without the Petrograd Soviet’s consent, the Provisional Government would be still-born. So began an uneasy system of rule known as dual power.

The press in Paris and London initially held back from reporting what was going on. The war against the Central Powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria — was poised on a knife edge, and France and the United Kingdom wanted nothing done that might damage Russia’s fighting capacity. The Russians had joined the French and the British in the Triple Entente that had taken Serbia’s side in its dispute with Austria-Hungary in mid-1914. The Entente powers, usually known as the Allies, were joined by Japan, Italy and others. Two great military fronts, the western and the eastern, stretched across Europe. The early successes fell to Germany as its armies pressed into northern France and Russian-ruled Poland. But quickly the Great War became a conflict fought from trenches as the fronts were stabilized and neither the Central Powers nor the Allies appeared able to devise methods to break the stalemate until December 1916 when the flexible offensive of General Alexei Brusilov resulted in a Russian advance. The French and the British, worn down on the western front, acclaimed Russia’s military achievement at the time; and when telegrams arrived reporting the political disturbances in Petrograd, the governments in Paris and London avoided any semblance of interference. Not until 19 March 1917, when the Provisional Government was already in office, did the press report that Nicholas II had abdicated. 1

What happened in Russia had been predicted for years but few revolutionary emigrants had expected the final moments to be so orderly. Ivan Maiski, a left-wing Menshevik resident in London, raced around calling on fellow emigrants and ‘congratulating’ startled English passers-by. The cry went up among the comrades: ‘To Russia!’ 2Another of the émigrés was Maxim Litvinov, who phoned his wife Ivy at a nursing home in Golders Green after the birth of their son Misha. Litvinov belonged to the Bolshevik faction of Russian Marxists, led by Lenin, which regarded the Mensheviks as disgraceful moderates; and he was no armchair revolutionary, having helped to launder the money stolen by Bolsheviks in the sensational Tiflis bank robbery in 1907. Ivy shared Maxim’s delight: ‘Darling it means we’re not refugees any more.’ 3Litvinov was so elated that he tried to shave with his toothpaste and got into the bath without having turned on the water. He had waited for revolution all his adult life. Now it had happened, and his hands trembled with excitement as he read the newspapers. 4‘The colony’ of Russian Marxists assembled to confer about the situation: ‘[They] began to feel the compulsion to meet every day in each other’s rooms, talking, exclaiming, surmising, looking from face to face, and their wives, unwilling to miss a word, popped the dishes into the cold oven, too impatient even to take them out to the scullery.’ 5The small world of Russian political emigrants bubbled with exhilaration.

Litvinov felt he had to do something, almost anything, for the revolutionary cause in Russia. His mind was bursting with frustration. While Petrograd was in political ferment, he was stuck hundreds of miles away in London. As a Bolshevik, he regarded the war as an ‘imperialist’ conflict between two coalitions of greedy capitalists. Most Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries thought the same. But no socialist organization in Russia, not even the Bolsheviks, had yet fixed its policy on how to end the war — it would take months before some degree of clarity emerged on this matter.

In a burst of zeal, Litvinov met up with British socialists who opposed the Allied war effort. The Labour anti-war MP Ramsay MacDonald received them in the House of Commons. MacDonald naturally did not share the British government’s hope that the fall of the Romanovs would increase Russian combativeness on the eastern front. In fact he was predicting the opposite. 6But although he was courteous enough, he disappointed Litvinov by providing no notion about what ‘he was going to do about the Revolution’. 7Litvinov called next day at the Russian embassy in Chesham House and was received by the chargé d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov. He asked why the staff had not yet taken down the portraits of the Imperial family. 8He enjoyed rubbing up the old regime’s officials the wrong way. Nabokov stood his ground and behaved with dignity. He had never disguised his sympathy with the Russian liberals and was hoping to receive the trust of Lvov and his cabinet. Instead the Provisional Government gave the London embassy to former Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Sazonov. 9But as Sazonov failed to arrive, Nabokov continued to head the embassy.

On 31 March the Labour Party held a celebration of the revolutionary events at the Albert Hall. Ten thousand people attended and Ramsay MacDonald was the main speaker. Others on the platform included Israel Zangwill, who spoke on behalf of the Russian Jewish refugees in London’s East End. The audience adopted Russian custom and bared their heads before observing a silence in honour of ‘the countless sacrifices which the Russian people have made to win their freedom’. 10It was an occasion that nobody present would forget. The Romanovs were gone and freedom had arrived in Russia. There was talk of a brotherhood of the Russians and the British no longer poisoned by the existence of tsarist despotism.

Most of the revolutionary emigrants in central and western Europe were impatient to return to Russia. The only routes available to them were across the North Sea, either directly to Archangel and onward by rail to any number of Russian cities or to Scandinavia and then by a longer railway journey looping over northern Sweden and Finland south to Petrograd. 11Britain’s Royal Navy had penned Germany’s large fleet in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven for the duration of the war. The result was that transport to Sweden or Norway from the rest of Europe became a British prerogative, and even the French government had to seek authority to send ships eastwards. The big Russian revolutionary colonies in Paris, Geneva and Zurich therefore had to cross the English Channel if they aimed to go home. London was turned for the first time into the largest centre for Russian political emigrants. 12Excitement grew about the chance of a trip to Scandinavia, and the passenger ferries from the French ports to Dover were kept busy with Slavic passengers. The editorial board of Nashe slovo , a Russian Marxist anti-war newspaper based in Paris, was stripped bare by the exodus; the same happened to the émigré revolutionary press in Switzerland. The place to shape opinion was Petrograd. Nowhere else mattered, and the emotional tug on the minds of émigrés was seldom resistible.

They knew the physical risks. Although the Royal Navy kept the German battleships trapped and inactive, the U-boats were a constant menace. Sneaking out from their ports, they had a licence to sink all Allied military and civilian shipping. In 1916 a submarine laid a mine that sank the ship carrying Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, on a trip to Russia. There were grievous losses of ships and supplies throughout the year.