Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The Soviet missions were also active in translating and publishing communist writings. When Yan Berzin arrived in Berne as Soviet plenipotentiary in May 1918 he rushed Bolshevik texts into print in German and French. A group of local translators was employed, and a small publisher was found outside the city so as to avoid governmental interference. Lenin’s The State and Revolution received priority alongside his The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky , and Trotsky’s From the October Revolution to the Brest Peace Treaty quickly appeared. Books by Radek, Philips Price and Sadoul went to press. Profit was not the aim. Moscow was willing to shower whatever finance was required to spread the doctrines of communism. 24

It was not always necessary to do this through communist agents. When George Lansbury went to Moscow in February 1920 and mentioned that his Daily Herald was in financial trouble he was offered money to save the newspaper from falling into the hands of socialists who opposed the Soviet regime. He addressed the Moscow Soviet and commended communists on their achievements in economic reconstruction. 25As part of the deal he agreed to help publish translated booklets by the Russian communist leadership. The Bolsheviks were people of the printed word. There were marvellous orators among them but their basic premise was that thorough indoctrination required books to be made available for study — and somehow a flow of revolution would proceed from them. Chicherin told Litvinov to give the funds to the Swedish communist Fredrik Ström for handing over to Lansbury. The scheme worked as the newspaper moved leftwards and advocated direct political action in Britain. 26The Daily Herald’ s dependence on Soviet money became public knowledge after Fetterlein decrypted the telegrams. Lansbury — an early Soviet dupe — denied trying to hide anything shameful, alleging that he was only counteracting a discreet boycott by British paper suppliers. 27A Christian socialist, he wrote that everything was fine in Russia because there was no religious persecution. Even the Bolsheviks laughed when they heard about it. 28

Another urgent task for the Cheka and the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs was to make sense of public opinion in the West. Before 1917 Lenin and Trotsky had assumed that politics merely reflected big economic interests. They had generally thought that the outstanding foreign enemies of the October Revolution — Churchill, Curzon or Clemenceau — were mere puppets of industrial and financial lobbies in London and Paris. As soon as they came to power they recognized the need to take personalities seriously in international politics. They courted the good opinion of Woodrow Wilson in 1918–19. Despite considering him a capitalist scoundrel, they did not dismiss the possibility that he might be induced to depart from the line preferred by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Lenin in particular followed the ages-old tradition of clever rulers in seeking to divide and influence the enemies of his government.

A lot of what the Kremlin needed to know could be plucked from the air either by its agents or by the telegraphists they bribed. The gigantic Nauen radio station, twenty-four miles to the west of Berlin, had two masts 850 feet high. It was the biggest installation in the world and could transmit signals as far as New York. Soviet leaders regarded it as their ‘window on Europe’. There were only undulating hills and no mountains between the Russian and German capitals and Soviet telegraphists had no problem in getting hold of news of political and military importance for the Bolsheviks. 29The People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs used a more traditional method by scrutinizing the Western press for information. 30Its diplomats examined the newspapers for important news and sent the material back to Moscow. 31The practical usefulness of their reports was diminished by the fact that they applied the same ideological filter as Lenin and Trotsky. Although Yan Berzin commented on the disastrous impact on Western opinion of Trotsky’s handling of the Czech Corps and warned Soviet leaders to take account of the international perspective before acting so precipitately, he undercut his own sound advice by assuring Moscow that he had the evidence that ‘proletarian revolution is uninterruptedly growing in all countries’. 32

The fact that he wrote in this fashion from the stable Swiss capital shows that information was only as good as the Bolsheviks were willing to let it be. They allowed nothing to interfere with their belief that the West was teetering on the revolutionary brink. They had to keep comforting each other with lines from their credo. Otherwise the world would take on an altogether bleaker appearance in their eyes.

Arthur Ransome reinforced their preconceptions. The Kremlin knew that he was no mere journalist since a Cheka report in March 1921 stated that ‘Lloyd George’s group’ had sent Ransome on his latest mission to Moscow. 33(Soviet leaders were wrong on one detail: they were under the mistaken impression that this was the first time that Ransome came to them with the sanction of the British government.) Whether Ransome mentioned to the Kremlin that he was the emissary of a specific group is not known, but it was anyhow an open secret that several British ministers were displeased about the moves by Lloyd George for a rapprochement with Soviet Russia. The communist leaders had always given a warm welcome to Ransome because his books burnished their image. They also saw him as someone who could explain the British political scene to them. Ransome duly complied and gave an account of the factions in ruling circles, one led by Lloyd George and the other by Curzon and Churchill. He added the names of Paul Dukes and Harold Williams as protagonists on the anti-Soviet side along with Leslie Urquhart, George Hill and Sir George Buchanan. 34This was not a bad summary of the leadership and opinion-formers on the Russian question in the United Kingdom, providing information beyond what could be gleaned from The Times and the Manchester Guardian .

Ransome went outside the boundaries of his brief as a British agent when disclosing to the Cheka what he knew about those people in Soviet Russia who were obstructing the progress towards a trade treaty with the United Kingdom. He mentioned Simon Liberman, a Menshevik expert and ex-businessman working in the timber industry, in this connection. He also gave encouragement to the Bolsheviks in their global rivalry with Britain by suggesting that Muslims in Asia were responding better to Soviet than to British ‘diplomatic influence’. 35Getting into his stride, he commented that France might be willing to resort to military measures in the Baltic Sea if this would help to bring down the Soviet government. 36Evidently the gangly, eccentric Englishman had his own bias about Western politics and readily deployed it. And he could not stop himself pandering to the ideological prejudices of the Soviet leaders he met. In his references to Liberman, he was even putting an innocent Russian economic official in jeopardy of arrest by spreading unfounded rumours about him. The best that may be said is that Ransome was perhaps only acting like many newspaper reporters in seeking to butter up a politician so as to get information out of him or her. At any rate it was not his finest hour.

Liberman had already been out of favour with Dzerzhinski, who questioned his loyalty at the start of his employment in the Soviet administration in November 1918. But they patched up their disagreements at the end of 1920 and Dzerzhinski supported him. 37Ransome came near to messing everything up for Liberman. Truly he could be a dangerous acquaintance for Russians who were not Bolsheviks. British intelligence in any case constantly monitored his political allegiance even while using his services. The Manchester Guardian’ s editor C. P. Scott was asked for a guarantee that he would not print anything from Ransome that was detrimental to British national interests. Only then was Ransome allowed to go on his Russian mission. 38The Secret Service Bureau never felt it could drop its guard with him, especially after learning that he had told Russians that a particular British official was ‘an agent of the British government’. 39In Britain he continued to talk up the Soviet cause at the drop of a hat. 40Such was Ransome’s intimacy with the Kremlin leadership that Litvinov took the trouble to wire him about how to avoid the latest travel difficulties. 41But the Secret Service Bureau persisted with Ransome, finding him useful because of ‘his friendship with the Bolchevik [ sic ] leaders’ and his capacity to supply ‘a lot of most valuable stuff’. 42A fellow British intelligence operative put the problem about agent S76 succinctly: ‘He will report what he sees, but he does not see quite straight.’ 43