Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

W. G. T. Tyrrell served as head of the Political Intelligence Department at the Foreign Office; Charles Hardinge was Permanent Under- Secretary to Balfour. Behind them stood Lord Robert Cecil as Under-Secretary of State. They had disliked Lockhart since early 1918 when he was advising the government to give official recognition to the Bolsheviks. Now they rejected him as a whirligig. Lockhart learned that Tyrrell regarded him as ‘a hysterical schoolboy who had intrigued with the Prime Minister behind the Foreign Office’s back’. This was a reference to Lloyd George’s dispatch of Lockhart to Russia as an antidote to the cautious policy pursued at the time by Balfour. Lockhart reasonably concluded of Tyrrell: ‘Not much hope in this quarter.’ 13

Others, including the King, were more favourably disposed. Lockhart recorded his meeting with George V in his diary for 23 October 1918: ‘The King was very nice and showed a surprising grasp of the situation; he however did most of the talking and during the forty minutes I was with him I didn’t really get much in. He sees pretty well the need for reforms everywhere, and has a wholesome dread of Bolshevism.’ 14Lockhart, originally a proponent of accommodation with Lenin and Trotsky, stayed firmly anti-Bolshevik for the rest of his life.

Winston Churchill refrained from advocating an all-out Allied invasion, but he was the one politician to speak out more strongly than Milner against the Soviet order. In his electoral address to his Dundee constituents on 28 November 1918 he declared: ‘Russia is being reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of Barbarism… Civilisation is being extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troupes of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.’ 15Even for Churchill this was pungent language. When referring to the Germans, mortal enemies of the United Kingdom until a few days previously, he called them ‘barbarian’. But barbarians are human. Churchill’s speech was aimed at dehumanizing the Soviet leaders and their followers as a way of persuading people that the October Revolution had somehow to be overthrown. On another occasion he wildly referred to Bolshevism as a baby that should be ‘strangled in its cradle’. Churchill was fired up on the Russian question, but he usually liked to drop a phial of wit into his fulminations. About Russia he felt no such impulse.

Perhaps Churchill’s monarchist sentiments had an influence. He had stood out against those who called for the hanging of the Kaiser, and anyway he was with Lloyd George in trying to prevent harsh peace terms being imposed on Germany. It was Churchill’s habit to focus obsessively on chosen problems. His colleagues trembled when he was in one of his moods; and everyone remembered his pet military project in 1915–16 to land Allied troops at Gallipoli — people forgot that he thought that insufficient troops had been provided for the task. He was notorious for pushing forward with plans without having thought through how he would cope if things went wrong. When criticism was made, he grew obstinate and put himself beyond debate. Yet behind the frothing schemes and wild rhetoric there was his acuity of vision. His instincts told him that something deeply menacing — indeed evil — was in the making in the east. He knew no more than anyone else in the cabinet about the Soviet leadership and its intentions. But he had enough information to sense that they presented a fundamental threat. If the need arose, he was willing to stand alone and fight for his opinions. 16

In France, the attention paid to revolutionary Russia was less intense for a while. The Great War was barely over and all thoughts were focused on the securing of Allied authority over central Europe. Germany had to be stabilized and peaceful economic recovery facilitated in several countries precariously poised on the brink of famine — and most French politicians sought to punish the Germans for the four years of carnage.

In America the State Department was fitful in its examination of Russian affairs. Ambassador Francis was no longer in northern Russia. By October 1918 his health had collapsed and he travelled to London for medical treatment. 17Meanwhile Lansing was too busy with German questions to occupy himself with the situation further east in Europe. Inside the State Department, sympathizers with Soviet Russia were acquiring influence. Among them was the young William C. Bullitt, who headed the Far Eastern desk. Already in March 1918 he had held discussions with Santeri Nuorteva of the pro-Soviet Finnish Information Bureau in New York. 18Bullitt and Nuorteva met and wrote to each other, and Nuorteva was pleased to have found a friend in high places. 19Bullitt took the line that the October Revolution had a vast importance for world affairs and that American policy ought to be based on an informed acquaintance with Soviet intentions. Yet there was more to it than just that. Bullitt was one of the few Americans outside the labour movement and certain business lobbies who favoured some kind of accommodation with Sovnarkom. He detested the Anglo-French military intervention in Russia and Ukraine and hoped to lessen and reverse his own country’s involvement in such ventures.

Bullitt’s career had started in journalism. He had made a brilliant name for himself with interviews with politicians of the Central Powers that pointed to German complicity in Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia. 20He came from a charmed background of well-to-do Philadelphia lawyers and had degrees from Yale University and the Harvard Law School. During the war he worked in Europe reporting for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and dabbled in writing novels. He married the aptly named socialite Aimee Ernesta Drinker and together they lived the high life until the call came for a posting at the State Department. 21

Bullitt used his imagination in delving for information about the Russian communist leadership. Whereas others shunned contact with John Reed as a traitor, Bullitt saw him as a man on the spot who could be of use in liaising with Lenin and Trotsky. The ‘awful diplomatic gulf’ had to be closed up. Bullitt had encouragement from the distinguished lawyer Felix Frankfurter in this effort. Frankfurter nominally belonged to the War Department but was really President Wilson’s special diplomatic aide and was keen to get a brief prepared on Russia. Using contacts such as Santeri Nuorteva, Frankfurter planned to send a cable directly to Trotsky. The State Department overruled him, sensing the need to restrain both Frankfurter and Bullitt in case they upset other US activities in Russia and cooperation with the Western Allies. The second-best step was an indirect one. Frankfurter received permission to approach the Red Finns with a view to using them as intermediaries with the Bolsheviks. Yrjö Sirola, their Foreign Minister until their defeat in mid-May 1918 in the Finnish Civil War, knew Lenin well and might be able to improve US–Soviet understanding on one of his trips to Petrograd. While normal diplomacy was failing, other methods had to be tried out. 22

Bolshevism was widely seen as a menace to political stability in North America, although many politicians worried that Wilson’s involvement in global affairs was distracting his administration from urgent domestic problems. Nonetheless, in early 1919 the Senate Committee on the Judiciary set up a sub-committee on Bolshevik propaganda under Senator Lee S. Overman. The stated purpose was to discover the extent of Russian subversion in America, but the proceedings were quickly fanned out to consider the situation in Russia itself. The sub-committee began meeting on 11 February 1919. The atmosphere was set by Attorney-General Alexander Mitchell Palmer who claimed that Russian Bolsheviks had used over a dozen ‘German brewers of America’ to buy up a great American newspaper with the intention of manipulating public opinion. 23The names of Nuorteva, Reed, Bryant and Rhys Williams cropped up — and it was intimated that the Englishman Ransome had suspect connections with Imperial Germany. 24Details were given of large quantities of Bolshevik material that had flooded into America since late 1917, and the smuggling methods were described. 25