Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The Allies were not acting out of altruism. While hoping for a White victory, they looked forward to the restoration of a private-enterprise economy in Russia that would benefit their nations — and they aimed to get first bite of the Russian economic cherry. With this in mind, the British set up a Department of Overseas Trade in the Foreign Office, and made John Picton Bagge their commercial secretary in Odessa. 17

The Allied powers set about facilitating international commerce in the areas under White control. The trading conditions were not of the easiest kind. The economy of the former Russian Empire had been terribly disrupted in 1917–18. Although business deals continued to be conducted outside the Soviet-occupied territory, corruption and fraud were widespread. Entrepreneurs in Russia and Ukraine lacked financial credit and Western banks were understandably wary of underwriting projects to trade with them. 18But many businessmen from Russia who were currently based abroad were willing to take chances by re-entering Russian and Ukrainian markets. Vladimir Bashkirov in Paris was one of them. Seeing that he would make no progress in France, he liaised with Bakhmetev’s embassy in Washington with a view to restarting the Pacific trade with Vladivostok. The Siberian Creameries Co-operative Union welcomed such initiative and planned to send its products across the ocean to the US ports of Seattle and San Francisco. 19Western Siberia had exported huge quantities of yoghurt and butter to Germany before 1914; and the Union now looked east for new markets in America, at least until Kolchak started his headlong retreat in summer 1919. The difficulties were immense. It was hard to find shipping companies willing to sail for Vladivostok even though the arms and equipment for the Whites had been assembled in Seattle for transit. 20Civilian categories of goods were still more difficult to move to and from Siberia. But there were glimmerings of a future very different from the one which Lenin and Trotsky intended for Russia.

Yudenich did not rely entirely on Paris for his funds. Before starting the North-Western Army’s offensive, he created a financial consultative committee to help until money reached him from the ambassadors. Emil Nobel was a leading committee member who, together with other oil company owners, put up a loan to tide Yudenich over the campaign. It was a scheme of mutual advantage. If the companies were ever to reclaim their assets in Baku, they needed the White armies to be properly financed to do the fighting. 21

Appreciation of the difficulties facing the Whites earned them a degree of sympathy — and a blind eye was turned to the evidence that White commanders aimed to conquer all the territories once ruled by the Romanovs. This is what the slogan of ‘Russia One and Indivisible’ meant to them. The Whites played along with Allied demands to the extent of expressing semi-compliance with their commitment to make concessions to the peoples of the borderlands of the former Russian Empire. But they failed to follow this up with action. When General Gustaf Mannerheim, the Finnish army leader, came to Paris to propose an alliance against Sovnarkom and the Red Army, he was sent packing. The Whites flatly refused to recognize Finland’s independence. Sazonov’s reaction was characteristic: ‘We shall get along without them, because Denikin will be in Moscow in two weeks.’ 22Denikin himself was furious with the Allies for recognizing the Finnish government and said that war would come of it. 23The White armies preferred to fight alone rather than compromise their objective of reconstituting Russia complete with all its territorial appendages. Allied governments reinforced this recalcitrance of the Whites by refusing to give official recognition to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and in the Estonian case they put pressure on Tallinn to provide Yudenich with freedom for his military preparations on Estonian soil.

At the British War Office, Churchill energetically removed impediments to the Whites’ procurement of supplies. Eighteen aeroplanes were shipped to the North-West Army. 24Tanks were also made available. Yudenich, though, faced a different kind of shortage as a commander. Operating from newly independent Estonia rather than Russia itself, he had a problem in recruiting Russian troops. Conscription being impossible, he asked the Allies to enable volunteers to leave the POW camps in Germany; he badly needed experienced officers, and again Churchill was helpful. 25E. L. Spears, who had headed intelligence operations for a while in northern Russia, put him in touch with Boris Savinkov when he came over from Paris for discussions. 26Churchill and Savinkov took to each other. Savinkov also had a meeting with Lloyd George but immediately sensed the Prime Minister’s ambivalence about increasing the assistance to the Whites. Churchill was obviously the best hope of the Whites, although Savinkov complained that he had an alarming tendency to regard the Russians as British subjects. When pointing to a map of Russia with Denikin’s regiments marked with flags, Churchill declared: ‘Here, this is my army.’ 27This was not a good way to win the respect of a Russian patriot, but Savinkov restrained himself. Churchill’s delusions of grandeur did not matter so long as he continued to support the White cause.

The labour movements in Europe remained an obstacle to such efforts since dockers were militantly opposed to British and French assistance to the anti-Bolshevik armies. Germany was another potential source of supplies for the Whites; its military equipment was cheap after the Great War and there was plenty of it on sale. But German workers persistently held up such exports to Russia and Ukraine. 28As it happened, this mattered less to Denikin than to other White armies because he could buy material channelled clandestinely through Salonika and Alexandria where no trade union was likely to hold things up. 29

One crucial piece of assistance came free of charge: Western intelligence reports. After the Allies withdrew their diplomatic corps from Russia they usually relocated their espionage networks to wherever the White military headquarters were operating at the time, whether in southern Russia, mid-Siberia or Estonia. The British with their immense empire had established the world’s most comprehensive cable system and could tap into almost any message whenever they wanted. 30Allied and White networks shared a lot of the information they were gathering. Denikin could rely on being told what the French and British military missions learned from their capitals and from their own secret agencies in Russia and Ukraine. 31Yudenich too obtained material from ministries in Paris and London. 32He received information of high quality about the political and social situation in Russia and Ukraine, 33and he usually got the data he needed on the latest deployments and appointments in the Red Army. 34And although the commanders of the Whites — Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Miller — had their disputes, they did not let them escalate to the point of disrupting each other’s military operations. Each White army used its team of radio telegraphists to keep the others informed of their plans, and Sazonov in Paris was also included in the exchange of telegrams. 35

The Whites conducted a deep surveillance of planning and conditions in the Red Army. Denikin’s agency was called Azbuka (or ABC). Its operatives received a wide licence from him for its spying activity — they even kept an informant inside the National Centre despite the fact that it was firmly allied to his Volunteer Army. Azbuka’s penetration of Ukraine had been deep ever since 1918; 36and as the Volunteer Army grew in strength, the agency increased its geographical range and reported in detail on what Russia’s workers thought about the Bolsheviks and on how the peasants were reacting to Soviet rule. 37In 1918, the technical specialists working for Azbuka had often even succeeded in intercepting conversations between Bolshevik leaders on the Hughes telegraph apparatus; 38they had also been well informed about exchanges between the Germans and the Soviet authorities. 39In 1919 they regularly picked up Moscow’s confidential news broadcasts to local Bolshevik administrations across Russia and caught Soviet messages going to and from European radio stations. 40