Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Yet the hastily invented convoy system protected a lot of commercial traffic across the Atlantic. The Americans were giving political and financial assistance to the Allies short of going to war. The German high command successfully pressed for a change of policy to allow its forces to attack US shipping. The rationale was simple. Germany’s economy was being suffocated by the British naval blockade. Urban consumers had endured a ‘turnip winter’ when coffee, sugar and even potatoes ran out. Raw materials for military production were no longer plentiful. Meanwhile Britain and France were obtaining what they needed from their American friends. The Germans gave notice of unrestricted submarine warfare from 1 February 1917 and US merchant vessels began to be sunk in March. British intelligence sources discovered that Germany had promised to restore Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico if the Mexican government would agree to fight America. Washington fell into uproar. Until that point it had been impossible for President Woodrow Wilson to gain the support of his Congress to enter the fighting. These isolationist obstacles crumbled when news of the U-boat campaign was printed. On 6 April the US announced that it would join the Allied as an Associated Power in the struggle against Imperial Germany. Wilson intended it to be a ‘war to end war’.

In New York the fall of the Romanovs had been greeted with wild enthusiasm. The American press, being free from the British and French constraints of wartime censorship, had reported quickly and extensively on the revolution. 13News of the abdication appeared in the newspapers two days earlier than in London and Paris. Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire were ecstatic. 14The tyrant had been overthrown; equality of religion and nationality was being proclaimed. Then came the complication of American entry into the war. The Jewish Forward newspaper approved of President Wilson’s decision, whereas the anti-war left was furious with him. Lev Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin were prominent critics of US ‘militarism’. Trotsky had been deported from France for his agitation against the war; he was, at that time, a far-left Marxist who was neither a Bolshevik nor a Menshevik but demanded the installation of a ‘workers’ government’. Bukharin was a young Bolshevik who was not shy of challenging Lenin’s writings on the Marxist doctrines. Trotsky and Bukharin called on socialists in the US to oppose America’s military involvement. Noisy public meetings took place in the cities of the east coast where anti-war and pro-war activists confronted each other about whether the old government in Washington and the new one in Petrograd merited support.

Nearly all the Russian political refugees in America, regardless of this dispute, were as keen as their comrades in Europe to get back home without delay. In the United Kingdom, the ultimate permission to travel across the North Sea rested with the cabinet. The Prime Minister David Lloyd George dallied for some weeks before allowing the anarchist Pëtr Kropotkin and the Marxists Georgi Plekhanov and Grigori Alexinski to make the trip. Kropotkin, Plekhanov and Alexinski were picked for having advocated the cause of the Allies. 15Anti-war militants denounced this as favouritism, and the Mensheviks Ivan Maiski and Georgi Chicherin formed a repatriation committee with themselves as chairman and secretary. They visited the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Home Office to argue the case for a passage to Russia. After a month of frustration they called on Nabokov at Chesham House, where they were pleased to discover that he was under instructions from Petrograd to assist with all requests by emigrants to leave Britain. Nabokov duly issued the visas but, because of the risk of German U-boat attack, only to the men. Loud protests ensued from the female revolutionaries living in White-chapel. (Nabokov later shuddered at the memory: ‘God knows they can make a noise.’) The chargé’s job was not made any easier by the political emigrants’ habit of using false passports. Nabokov complained that Litvinov alone had four or five aliases. So even when the embassy tried to be helpful it was not an easy process to issue visas. 16

The first large group of applicants obtained tickets to sail from Aberdeen to Bergen on HMS Jupiter . 17Having taken the train from King’s Cross Station in high spirits, they then had to sit around in Aberdeen for four days. The ship’s captain announced that this was normal procedure. He was waiting for a storm to brew up and curtail the German submarine patrols. He was also a little too optimistic. Halfway across the North Sea the Jupiter had to lurch to port to evade a German submarine. 18Some later convoys were even less fortunate and one of the ships went down with all on board — it was the same vessel that Litvinov had hoped to take. Only the recent birth of his son had dissuaded him from buying a ticket. 19

The anti-war activists did not thank the British for helping them. One of them, Georgi Chicherin, went around saying that Lloyd George was discriminating against them in the issuance of travel documents. 20This was untrue, at least for those setting out from the United Kingdom. Nabokov as chargé had indeed co-operated with Chicherin, although nobody would have known this from Chicherin’s journalism — and his tirades against the Allies could only aggravate the difficulties of British diplomacy in Petrograd. What is more, Chicherin was unusual in being in no hurry to depart for Russia. His presence in London became an annoyance, and the British cabinet was to lose patience with him in August on learning how he had written articles in Pravda that virulently condemned the Allied war effort — he was also suspected of favouring the German side. Without further ado he was taken to Brixton prison under a Defence of the Realm order. 21Pëtr Petrov was already in custody for agitating among British workers against the war. 22Chicherin and Petrov were recalcitrant prisoners. They interpreted their treatment as yet further proof that the Allied powers would stop at nothing to fight their ‘imperialist’ war. They declined to make a special plea to the Lloyd George cabinet for their release.

Nearly all other male political emigrants in the British, French and Swiss revolutionary colonies got back to Russia if they wanted to make the journey. Many of the travellers, moreover, had it in mind to throw out the Provisional Government; and some were determined to stop Russia from continuing in the war.

The shortest route to Russia from France or Switzerland, of course, would have been by rail across Europe. But this was impossible at a time when two military fronts with their millions of troops and artillery were stretched out from north to south down the middle of the continent. Revolutionaries based in Swiss cities had the theoretical option of travelling across Germany to Scandinavia and entering Russia via Finland. The snag was that Russian citizens on German territory were enemy aliens in wartime. Most Russians had fled Germany and Austria at the outbreak of hostilities rather than face possible arrest by police or a beating up on the streets. But the German government had always seen the advantage of subsidizing Russian and Ukrainian revolutionary groups that aimed to bring down the Romanov monarchy; and when Nicholas II abdicated, the German Foreign Office expressed interest in schemes to infiltrate anti-war revolutionaries back into Russia. Diplomats in Switzerland began negotiations for the transit of Russian revolutionaries by rail across Germany to the Baltic coast. Lenin and his Bolsheviks were courted through intermediaries. Since Lenin not only wanted an end to Russian involvement in the war but actively advocated Russia’s defeat, the German high command could not wish for a better helpmate.