Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

America had few writers on the anti-Soviet side of the debate with the direct experience of Soviet Russia that Dukes could muster. Dukes tried to do something about this by going on an American lecture tour in February 1921. 15While there he supported the attacks on Bolshevik rule made by Princess Cantacuzène, who before 1917 had belonged to the highest social circles. She printed her reminiscences of the October Revolution in the Saturday Evening Post , republishing them in a book. She condemned the daily illegalities in Petrograd, picking out Trotsky for harsh criticism. 16Her fellow Princess Catherine Radziwill, a best-selling author, concentrated on the secret deals between the Bolsheviks and the German government, but her research methods were less than exemplary since she felt entirely free to invent conversations and incidents involving Lenin and Trotsky. 17

The Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov produced a steadier work, which appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, about Bolshevism’s foreign pretensions. Looking at Soviet efforts to spread revolution abroad, he noted the Russian linkage to the communist episodes in Budapest and Munich and sounded an alarm about Comintern. Milyukov stressed that ‘Mr Lenin’ and ‘Mr Trotsky’ were open about their global ambition; and he argued that the Bolsheviks had planned to use President Wilson’s proposal for a Prinkipo peace conference as a way of securing a diplomatic presence in Washington, London and Paris. He mentioned the huge grain fund and military resources gathered by Sovnarkom for future use in the revolutionary cause in central Europe. 18He wanted to depict himself as the constant Russian patriot and therefore omitted any reference to his own less than illustrious record in 1918 when he had sought Germany’s military assistance in overturning the Bolsheviks. He declared that the Hands Off Russia campaign was damaging the interests of his country and the world. 19He regretted the way the European and American socialist parties, despite deep disagreements with Bolshevism, were urging their governments to grant recognition to Sovnarkom. 20He warned, too, against listening to prominent American and British sympathizers with Bolshevism. 21

Milyukov’s book was all but ignored on both sides of the Atlantic. In frustration he wrote to the London Times , repudiating criticism of the White armies and their commanders. He insisted that Alexander Kerenski was wrong to advise against support for Kolchak and Denikin and intimated that if only Kerenski had taken a stronger line in 1917, Russia might have been spared its later torment. 22This was not the fairest of comments. If it was true that Kerenski had had a genuine chance in summer 1917, Milyukov had been given his own in the spring of that year. Russian political refugees all too frequently subsided into internal polemics. Disputes were bitter as conservative and liberal writers re-examined the events between the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolsheviks with the same intense disputatiousness that had made the émigré socialist colonies notorious before the Great War.

Such a reputation had also begun to attach itself to those in the West who were outspoken in their support for the Whites. On 17 July 1919 Winston Churchill had given a talk at the British-Russian Club in London and paid tribute to the achievements of the Russian Imperial army on the eastern front, saying that its valour had saved Paris from the Germans in 1914–15. The Secretary of State for War was on sparkling form: ‘Some people are inclined to speak as if I were responsible, as if I was at the bottom of all this trouble in Russia.’ When the laughter had subsided Churchill explained that he believed in the ‘inherent weakness of Bolshevism’. The Red Army, he declared, was weaker than many supposed. He fulminated against Lenin and Trotsky but did not confine himself to the Russian question. Turning to Hungary, he described the communist leader Béla Kun as ‘another fungus, sprung up in the night’. European civilization was under threat. He summarized his standpoint as follows: ‘Russia, my lords and gentlemen, is the decisive factor in the history of the world at the present time.’ 23Using extravagant vocabulary as usual, Churchill had a clear understanding of communism’s threat to the freedoms fully or partially available in the West; and, ignoring the reproaches of Lloyd George, he gave encouragement to active anti-Bolsheviks in London. 24

Friends of the Bolsheviks meanwhile queued up to extol what was happening in Russia. Arthur Ransome’s Russia in 1919 was a rapidly written memoir that described the communist leaders in the blandest personal terms, Ransome blithely acknowledging that he was not going to cover the Red terror. 25And although Morgan Philips Price mentioned the terror in his own account, he claimed that it had lasted only six weeks. He chose instead to stress the sustained awfulness of the White terror while praising the Soviet system of government. 26Ivy Litvinov, when left behind in London by Maxim, published a booklet in the same spirit. Drawing on Maxim’s notes, she asked what worth there could ever be in the Constituent Assembly. She accused the Whites of worse violence than anything done by the Reds, stating: ‘As a matter of fact, the Soviet regime has been much less sanguinary than any known in history.’ 27

But of all the books about the new regime, whether favourable or otherwise, the one with the greatest impact was John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World , which appeared in March 1919. 28His chapters concentrated on the brief period before and after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and were based on his own notes and memories as well as on his file of Le Bulletin de la Presse issued daily by the French Information Bureau. 29He offered what he called ‘intensified history’, but he was also providing disguised propaganda. Reed claimed that until the October Revolution Russia had been an ‘almost incredibly conservative’ country: he entirely overlooked the surge of revolutionary action that had taken place in factories, garrisons and villages long before the Bolsheviks took over. The ‘masses’ appeared in his pages only when listening to speeches by Lenin and the other communist leaders. Reed wrote about the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries only to indicate how little they understood the scale of the external and internal emergency in Russia. Lenin and Trotsky were his heroes, and Kerenski was depicted as an incompetent fool: no attempt was made to explain the rationale for the Provisional Government’s policies. Reed wrote: ‘It is still fashionable… to speak of the Bolshevik insurrection as an “adventure”. Adventure it was, and one of the most marvellous mankind has ever embarked upon, sweeping into history at the head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple desires.’ 30Bolshevism and popular opinion according to Reed were one and the same thing.

He threw himself into the tasks of public speaking and writing for the socialist press; he also prepared a tendentious memorandum for the State Department denying that any parties other than the Bolsheviks had the slightest following. He wrote that the entire social structure in Russia had been transformed because the bourgeoisie had been dispossessed and turned into proletarians. He claimed that the former middle classes could freely ‘organize in the Soviets, but only to defend their [new] proletarian interests’. The truth was different. The Soviet Constitution expressly deprived those classes of civic rights. Reed stated that the USA was the foreign partner of choice for Sovnarkom because the British and the French had been unremittingly hostile. He added that it was in the Russian interest for Germany to be defeated in the Great War. The reality was that Lenin and Trotsky hoped for anti-capitalist risings across Europe and North America. Reed dropped his tactful tone just once, when saying of the Russians: ‘As for President Wilson, they don’t believe a word he says.’ 31Reed wanted the US to recognize Soviet Russia and stop persecuting Bolsheviks in America — and he urged American politicians to get the Japanese to withdraw from eastern Siberia. 32