Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

It was not just politicians in Britain and abroad who had doubts about Krasin; many businessmen too were not happy to welcome him. Krasin learned this directly when he was harangued in his hotel by an entrepreneur who been arrested by the Cheka and forced to hand over his English pounds for rubles, a currency without exchange value abroad. 35A court case was also brought against Krasin for trying to sell Russian timber to a British firm. The plaintiff claimed that his own stocks of timber had been seized without compensation in 1918 and the communist authorities were making illicit profit from them. Although the case moved sluggishly through the judicial system, no one was in any doubt about the possible consequences. If judgement went against the Soviet government, a torrent of such cases might be let loose as disgruntled owners and investors sought financial redress. 36Krasin’s travails continued when the British industrialist Leslie Urquhart began to pester him. Urquhart had advocated the maintenance of business links with Russia after October 1917; but in mid-1918, on a trip to Moscow, he was threatened with imprisonment as a spy. If he had not been fluent in Russian, he might not have been able to extricate himself and repair to safety in northern Russia, from where he departed for the United Kingdom. He was less fortunate with his property because the communists had expropriated his large Russian mining and smelting company — and Urquhart did not intend to let Krasin forget this. 37

Lloyd George’s life would have been easier if the influential business lobby in favour of resuming trade had been willing to come into the open. But no company chairman wanted to push the case too hard in public. Sovnarkom’s record in ripping up property rights, persecuting religion and conducting a Red terror was notorious. The men of business were using the Prime Minister as their battering ram without putting their shoulders to the charge. As for the British labour movement, its sympathies with all or some of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s policies made it less than helpful in persuading the doubters. If an Anglo-Soviet commercial treaty was going to be realized the impetus had to come from the government. Lloyd George was willing to give this a try — and Soviet leaders were hoping that he would succeed.

From November 1919 a group of leading British anti-Bolsheviks met together in the Savoy Hotel and the Café Royal for ‘Bolo Liquidation Lunches’. Bolo was the slang term for Bolshevik used by British and American officials at that time. Those seated around the table included Stephen Alley, Paul Dukes (who signed the menu in Cyrillic script), George Hill, Rex Leeper, John Picton Bagge and Sidney Reilly. All were old Russia hands and were connected with the Foreign Office or the Secret Service Bureau. As ardent foes of communism, they organized the lunches to discuss how to toughen British policy and bring down Lenin and the Soviet order. 1

Paul Dukes, when his cover was blown in Russia, began to write articles for the London Times . He recounted the terrible food shortages and blamed them on Soviet economic policies rather than war or the weather. 2He ridiculed the idea that the workers and peasants were on the side of the Bolshevik party and said that the public displays of joy on May Day were an artificial confection. He pointed out that Bolsheviks treated their critics, including factory labourers, as counter-revolutionaries. He hailed the spread of peasant rebellions against communist rule and wished the Greens well in their struggle with the Reds. 3(The Greens were peasant partisans who fought the Reds and Whites with equal ferocity.) The final article in his series depicted the intimidation, fraud and lying propaganda involved in a local soviet election he had witnessed. 4He called on the Western political left to shed its illusions: ‘Bitterly as they revile the bourgeoisie , the Bolshevist leaders reserve their fiercest hatred and their last resources of invective and derision for all other Socialists — Russian, English, German, and American alike. They are never spoken of otherwise than as “social-traitors”.’ 5Dukes bragged that he had visited Russia not as an accredited journalist but as a private traveller who had conversed with every section of the Russian people — he of course omitted to mention his employment by the Secret Service Bureau. 6

According to Dukes, the ‘National Centre Party’ enjoyed support across the whole political spectrum, apart from monarchists and communists. The National Centre, however, was not a party but a combination of public figures of diverse political opinions. Dukes was deliberately misleading his readers to win their sympathies. He also made the unfounded claim that ‘the large majority of socialists have joined [the party]’ and were in productive contact with General Denikin. 7Although Dukes did admit that the so-called National Centre Party aimed to install a temporary dictatorship, he declared that democracy was its ultimate aim. The peasants would be left in possession of the land. The Soviet separation of Church and state would endure and the universal educational provision introduced by the Bolsheviks would be maintained. The National Centre Party would hold elections to a National Assembly and had no desire to restore the survivors of the Romanov dynasty to power. By focusing on the National Centre Party and exaggerating its status as a rallying point for anti-Soviet opinion in Russia, Dukes downplayed the extremism of the officers in Denikin’s forces. If anything united the Whites, in fact, it was Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism. They despised all liberals and socialists; they believed that democratic institutions had been tried and found wanting between February and October 1917. The political future they wanted would have little space for politicians, and Russia’s fate would have been grim and chaotic under their rule.

Dukes reminded his readers that the leadership in the Kremlin had set up a Communist International with the purpose of subverting governments in Europe and North America. 8His pronouncements did not go unnoticed by the Bolsheviks. When he joined the Christian Counter-Bolshevist Crusade and began to speak at its meetings, supporters of Soviet Russia attended his appearances to heckle. 9Dukes responded that since he had served in the Red Army he was speaking from personal knowledge; but in February 1920 his speech at a public meeting in Westminster Hall led to an affray that the police had to quell. 10When the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestiya accused him of subversive machinations he at last admitted to having been in charge of British intelligence operations in Russia, but he still held that he had only been gathering information. 11Dukes received a knighthood for his services in December 1920 — George V had in fact wanted to award the Victoria Cross but was overruled by the army chiefs of staff who insisted that the medal could be received only by members of the armed services. 12

Conservative and liberal figures such as Professor Bernard Pares at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies joined Dukes in signing a letter to The Times denouncing Soviet outrages. 13Dukes also wrote to the Manchester Guardian protesting against its indulgent editorial line on Soviet Russia — he was angered by the mild critique of communist rule offered by its reporter W. T. Goode, announcing his own credentials as follows: ‘I was at Moscow at the same time as Professor Goode, and I left Russia later than he. I was not, however, a guest of the Bolshevik Government, but, knowing the language thoroughly, lived as a Russian amongst the Russians. My object was to study the effects of Bolshevism on the people.’ 14Although this was another of his misleading descriptions of what he had done in Russia, he efficiently made his point that it was inadequate to find the October Revolution and its leaders merely ‘interesting’ instead of offering a basic analysis of the revolutionary order. According to Dukes, Goode had praised the new educational system while failing to mention that schools had been compelled to stop teaching morality; he had also overlooked the antipathy of Russians to their Bolshevik rulers and their policies and ideology.