Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The British press hardly mentioned northern Russia beyond noting that ‘a considerable force’ had been landed there. 8When a Labour MP complained about the lack of public disclosure, the government simply refused to comment. 9Months later, Douglas Young, Britain’s consul in Archangel, was to go to the London press and denounce the subterfuge and the violence he had witnessed. While disliking Bolshevism, he contended that the way to deal with Soviet Russia was through diplomacy. Young denied that a few thousand troops seven hundred miles from Moscow could bring down Sovnarkom. 10But at the time a curtain of mystery was drawn over the Archangel operation. The US embassy, having fled Vologda, made its base there as soon as Poole pronounced it safe for Allied personnel. 11A degree of diplomatic fussiness was involved. The Americans still wanted the Soviet government to know that they had not taken part in the occupation of the city. They were merely going there after Poole had seized it. In this way the door was kept open for the US to negotiate with Sovnarkom if a suitable opportunity arose. These nuances had little influence on how the Bolsheviks reacted to Poole’s military action. In their view, the Western Allies had committed a flagrant violation of Soviet Russia’s sovereignty — and they feared that Poole would continue his advance.

Without being reinforced by fresh units, however, Poole could not expand his operations beyond Archangel province. The British government, before sanctioning the seizure of Archangel, had received advice from naval intelligence in Petrograd that at least two army divisions were necessary if the Bolsheviks were to be overthrown. Anything less than that would ‘lead to the impression that operations were not being undertaken seriously’. By contrast, a truly substantial contingent would have an instant strategic impact since the Germans would no longer be able to transfer troops from east to west but would have to move them in the opposite direction, and this would be of benefit to the Allies on the western front. 12

But it took the maximum of Allied human and material resources to repel the great German offensive that had begun in March. Poole had to sit tight and pray for victory in northern France. It had appeared that his hopes might be fulfilled on 18 July when the Germans, exhausted by months of attacking, had to fall back at Villers-Cotterêts. The French Army had shown that Germany was not invincible. Celebrations were in order and church bells rang throughout France that Sunday. But the German forces regrouped and the Allied commanders did not believe that two whole divisions could be spared at that crucial moment. Poole disappointedly dropped the idea of attempting a breakthrough to Vyatka. Instead he settled his men in Archangel until such time as the military situation should change either in Russia or in France. He had angered Sovnarkom without endangering its survival, and his force got used to enduring the insect bites in the long summer days.

For weeks, however, the German Foreign Office had been agitating for the communists to take back northern Russia and get rid of the British. Ioffe reported from Berlin that the Germans had offered to undertake a joint military operation. 13Germany’s high command continued to worry that the Allies might succeed in restoring the eastern front — and a war on two fronts was the last thing that Ludendorff and Hindenburg could cope with. Sovnarkom resisted the German invitation until Archangel capitulated to Allied power. On 1 August Chicherin asked Karl Helfferich, who had headed the embassy since Mirbach’s death, about collaborating in an attack on the British in Archangel and Murmansk. Concern about the potential threat from Poole intensified. On 13 August Chicherin put a request to the Germans to carry out an aerial bombardment of Archangel. Moisei Uritski, head of the Cheka in Petrograd, talked to German diplomats about the need to crush the British military platform in the north. Uritski’s stipulation was that German troops should not go via Petrograd. He claimed to be nervous about Russian working-class opinion. More likely he did not entirely trust the Germans despite wanting help from them. If German troops were allowed into Petrograd there was no guarantee that they would leave Soviet rule intact. 14

Germany’s intentions were a source of constant worry to the Soviet leaders, and they were right to be concerned. Ruling circles in Berlin had never discounted the notion of invading Russia and throwing out the Bolsheviks. The war party was constantly tempted by this option. As late as June 1918 Ludendorff was saying: ‘We can expect nothing from this Soviet government.’ Enquiries were put in hand about practicalities. 15

Ioffe and the Soviet mission in Berlin failed to penetrate such discussions. The German government had allocated to it the Russian embassy building on Unter den Linden. International etiquette required Ioffe to present his credentials in person to the Kaiser; but this was more than Ioffe, a severe opponent of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, would contemplate — and probably the Kaiser was not displeased. Although Ioffe always dressed smartly, in other ways he was far from the diplomatic stereotype. His office was chaotic. He had no idea how to keep financial accounts; he had no clue about the exchange rate and lacked the desire to find out. 16Like other communist veterans, he regarded money with distaste. Nevertheless he continued to employ the German servants inherited from the old embassy. 17Ioffe looked on servants through a Marxist prism of analysis. For him, they were ‘proletarians’ who were winnable to the revolutionary cause. The working atmosphere in the mission was nothing if not relaxed. The tone was set by Ioffe’s young Russian chauffeur who usually arrived in the mornings in his sports kit. This was not a problem until the day when Ioffe had to go to the German Foreign Office and told him to dress more demurely. The chauffeur’s reaction was to don a pair of silk pyjamas. 18

Ioffe’s private life was equally chaotic. After the October Revolution, his wife and daughter Nadya lived in Baku until he brought them to Berlin. It was not a happy conjoining. What disconcerted Mrs Ioffe was the presence of the young woman operating as her husband’s personal assistant. This was Maria Girshberg, who had joined the communist party in Petrograd in 1917. Everyone in the Soviet mission knew what was going on. Maria — or Musya as she was known — spent whole days with Ioffe and not always on revolutionary business. The Ioffes fell to arguing into the small hours and little Nadya could hear them through her bedroom wall. Her mother had red eyes every morning. Comrades in the Berlin mission thought he had fallen for a little schemer. 19After the Ioffes took a short holiday in Sweden, the parents began sleeping apart. Musya had become the mistress in every sense. 20

But Ioffe’s true passion was revolution. As the man on the spot in Berlin, he thought he knew better than Chicherin. The People’s Commissar liked to work through the night and felt free to contact Ioffe at four in the morning about trivial matters. He also used the telegraph facilities without adopting any security precautions despite the risk of the Germans taking advantage. 21But the main question dividing them was about how to handle Germany. Ioffe thought Chicherin too timid, arguing that the Germans were fully exercised with occupying Poland and Ukraine and were unlikely to go for an open break with Russia. Although Ioffe was no longer hostile to doing deals with ‘German imperialism’, he was crude in the way he treated Germany’s banks and businesses and had no intention of honouring contracts. Nikolai Krestinski, People’s Commissar of Finances, objected that such trickery would find him out. 22But others in the mission such as Lev Krasin and Vladimir Menzhinski took Ioffe’s side when writing to Lenin. 23Krasin was the Bolsheviks’ expert on foreign trade; 24Menzhinski was a Cheka officer marked out for a higher posting. Both denied that the German government would ever assist with Russia’s economic recovery. 25Lenin was so exasperated with Ioffe that for a while he rejected his request to make a trip to Moscow. 26He accused him of trying to run the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs from Berlin and called for ‘ambassador Ioffe’ to cease querying Moscow’s decisions. 27