Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Hoping to guarantee that Ioffe’s party came to no harm at Borisov, Sovnarkom detained Germany’s consul-general Herbert Hauschild in Moscow. 19Agreement was reached to swap diplomats on the Lockhart–Litvinov model. Two trains approached each other at Borisov station, and Ioffe was exchanged for Hauschild before proceeding in a second-class carriage to Orsha eighty miles east in Soviet-ruled Russia. His journey ended in Moscow on 24 November. 20

The Kremlin leadership declared Friedrich Ebert and the new government in Berlin to be hand in glove with the Western Allies. Lenin suspected that German ministers aimed to secure better peace terms by offering to deploy German forces against Soviet Russia. Sovnarkom, in yet another breach of international law, allowed German and Austrian ex-POWs to occupy the embassy buildings of their countries. De Potere, already demoralized, felt grateful that the intruders left him his own office and bathroom. He did not mind if they brought girlfriends back at night, only drawing the line at their use of his suite as a thoroughfare, and even Radek warmed to him. 21German diplomats were of a different mind, wanting nothing to do with leading Bolsheviks. The exception was the military attaché Schubert who asked for copies of The Communist Manifesto and read Lenin’s State and Revolution from start to finish. At the same time, in Berlin the entire political system was being overhauled. These were strange times — and they were about to get stranger. Soviet leaders watched for any sign that the German situation might start moving their way. They had lost their direct source of information with Ioffe’s expulsion and depended on patchy wireless traffic and on German newspapers brought by rail.

Liebknecht did not let them down as he pressed his arguments in the Spartakusbund in favour of an uprising. At first, Luxemburg and Jogiches took a lot of convincing. Berlin in the winter of 1918–19 was not like Petrograd in October 1917. Ebert and Scheidemann, unlike Kerenski, were not friendless on the political left. What is more, they could call upon the assistance of army regiments as well as of the unofficial armed squads known as the Freikorps. There was still no equivalent of the Russian soviets in Berlin.

Luxemburg had long objected to Lenin’s authoritarian methods inside the labour movement, and she had never liked his penchant for bringing the peasantry into revolutionary politics. From her wartime prison cell she had quickly formed a severe opinion of the October Revolution. She was against the Brest-Litovsk treaty, thinking it damaged the prospects of revolution in Germany. She also objected to what she saw as Lenin’s compromises on the land question and the national question. On dictatorship and terror she was horrified by the reports she received about the Bolsheviks in power. Liebknecht was less sensitive: ‘One can’t make revolution in white gloves. Whoever sincerely wants it must also want the means which guarantee it; there’s no time to lose. Perhaps it will be necessary to pass through rivers of blood and mud to get to the destination. Anyway the German revolution won’t require so many sacrifices.’ 22He believed that the Red terror in Russia would be of short duration, 23and he wore down Luxemburg’s doubts with his enthusiasm. She anyway considered Germany ready for its socialist transformation and had long advocated ‘mass action’ on the streets.

The Spartakusbund helped to form workers’ councils in Berlin and announced the holding of a congress. The Bolsheviks received an open invitation and chose some of their leaders to attend, including Ioffe, Rakovski, Bukharin and Radek. 24All of them had opposed Lenin throughout the Brest-Litovsk controversy and were itching to foment revolution in Germany. Although all Bolsheviks agreed that Berlin would be the cockpit of ‘European socialist revolution’, Lenin worried that his ex-opponents would behave irresponsibly on their German trip. He had already written a warning note to Ioffe: ‘Bukharin is loyal but has lunged into “left-wing idiocy” to a devilish extent… Prenez garde! ’ 25Radek was another object of concern. Lenin had a firm word with him before departure and pointed out that if the Allied armies were to decide to march eastwards, the French commander Franchet d’Espèrey would have a clear route across Hungary and Romania into Ukraine and on to Russia. When Radek replied that French war-weariness would deter any such enterprise, Lenin interjected: ‘They’ll deploy coloured forces. How are you going to conduct agitation among them?’ Radek replied by saying that he would use picture cards, though he added that he thought the Russian winter would prove intolerable for soldiers from Africa. 26

Yet Lenin was still determined to assist in the making of a revolution in Germany — and Radek, who had belonged to the German Social-Democratic Party before 1914, was the Soviet leader with the closest acquaintance with the Berlin political scene before the Great War. Lenin told him to behave with caution and avoid forcing the pace. 27Sverdlov handed over 200,000 German marks to cover the delegation’s expenses. He gave little thought to their bodily requirements: they received only kasha (Russian porridge) and honey for the long trip through eastern Europe. Radek was cherished among the party leaders for his sense of humour; but when he said the Hebrews had got better conditions in their flight from the Pharaoh, Sverdlov just told him to stop complaining. 28

The first stop for the delegation was an overnight one at Dvinsk where they fraternized with German soldiers from the local soviet and Radek fell asleep with his head resting on Khristo Rakovski’s chest. When the German high command learned of their attempt to suborn its troops, it stopped them from continuing to travel further westwards by train. 29By then the western borderlands of the old Russian Empire were in uproar, and the Bolsheviks were intent on establishing a Soviet republic in Ukraine. Pavlo Skoropadskyi, Germany’s client ruler, was already under threat from nationalists led by Symon Petliura and was overthrown in December. The Soviet leadership in Moscow wanted to resume its revolutionary impetus and, as soon as possible, establish a Red administration in Kiev. Rakovski was chosen to head this attempt, and he abandoned his ambition to make for Berlin. 30Radek, however, was determined to resume the German trip. Getting on a Hughes apparatus in Minsk, he secured permission from Sverdlov and Lenin to proceed in disguise to Berlin. A friend, German communist Felix Wolf, helped with the arrangements, and Radek continued alone on his westward journey by horse-drawn sleigh. 31After crossing Poland he reached Königsberg and jumped on a direct train to Berlin. 32

Arriving at the Schlesinger Bahnhof, he bought a copy of the Spartacist newspaper Die Rote Fahne and took a taxi to his hotel before meeting up with the leaders of the German political far left — not only Liebknecht and Luxemburg but also August Thalheimer and Paul Levi. He made contact, too, with his old mentor Leo Jogiches, with whom he had a warm discussion. Jogiches temptingly asked whether he wanted to remain an observer for the Soviet leadership or become an integral member of the Spartakusbund, 33but Radek stuck to his assignment as a Kremlin emissary. Obviously a lot of work had to be done before the Spartacists could lead an insurrection. There had been only fifty of them at the Kaiser’s abdication and they were also in a small minority at the Congress of Workers’ Councils and had many internal disagreements on policy. Furthermore, Luxemburg continued to attack the Bolsheviks for conducting a terror against their enemies. She asked Radek to relay her comments to Moscow and expressed shame that her former comrade Dzerzhinski had agreed to head the Cheka. 34