Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Together with Max Eastman, he also produced a booklet that included translated pieces by Lenin and Chicherin. Lenin’s contribution was his ‘Letter to American Workingmen’. The booklet was distributed in a somewhat abridged edition ‘in deference to an extremely literal interpretation of the Espionage Act’. Eastman wrote an imaginary conversation between Lenin and President Wilson. This was wholly to Wilson’s disadvantage, with Lenin putting awkward questions to Wilson and exposing him as wealthy, ignorant, insincere and dangerous. 33Eastman was a communist sympathizer although he did not belong to an organized communist group. He was not alone in taking this position. The outstanding example in France was the novelist Henri Barbusse, who contended that the Bolsheviks had ‘attenuated their implacable rigidity’ and were adapting to ‘the life of an innumerable, young people’. 34Barbusse implied that France had a superior civilization to Russia: he urged everyone not to expect too much of the Russians. But he insisted that, after a poor start, communism in Russia was changing for the better.

Reed and the other pro-Bolshevik commentators were not the only proponents of conciliation with the Russian communist leaders. A leading American critic of Soviet rule was John Spargo, whose comments were all the more persuasive inasmuch as he was a socialist friend of Georgi Plekhanov. 35 Russia as an American Problem , appearing in mid-November 1919, held that Bolshevism was an ‘inverted tsarist regime’ and an enemy of democracy. 36But Spargo argued that the Germans remained bent on the economic domination of Russia and that Japanese objectives were not dissimilar. 37He urged America to get involved before it was too late. US businessmen could help Russia back on its feet by trading in its natural resources. Exports of gold and timber would enable Russians to pay for the capital equipment vital for economic recovery. America should send some of its own experts and make financial credits available. 38He admitted that there were uncompromising extremists among the Soviet leadership, but suggested that Lenin and a few others were demonstrating a readiness for internal reform. Spargo had vociferously supported the White armies until their defeat in the Civil War; but when the Reds achieved military victory he judged that the resumption of international commerce was the surest way to erode Bolshevism’s grip on the country. 39

In fact the person who gave the most effective succour to Moscow was the economist John Maynard Keynes. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace , published late in 1919, Keynes said that Clemenceau had been eaten up with a desire for vengeance on Germany. He thought Wilson was an innocent abroad whose intelligence was overstated, while Lloyd George seemed to lose his political compass when confronted by a Clemenceau on the rampage. Keynes took all Western leaders to task for their treatment of Germany, 40arguing that the Versailles treaty was a Carthaginian peace which had ruined the chances of recuperation and guaranteed chronic political instability. Territory had been grabbed from the Germans, reparations imposed. 41

Keynes sombrely predicted that a devastated Russia and an exhausted Germany would draw close; he argued that it could not be excluded that ‘Spartacism’ would win out in Berlin. 42But even if the political far left fell short of victory, he wrote, there could still be an alliance between German capitalism and Russian communism — and the British, Americans and French would be the losers unless they changed their policy. Keynes hailed the work of Herbert Hoover and the American Relief Administration — Hoover had condemned the treaty as too harsh while it was being negotiated, and Keynes called him ‘the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation’. 43Cheap grain shipments from the US Midwest were currently saving eastern and central Europe from famine. This vital relief, though, would not continue for ever and it behoved the Allies to enable the restoration of Russian cereal exports. Keynes claimed that without them there could be no European economic recovery or political stabilization. He insisted that since the Allies could not yet supply Russia with the agricultural implements needed to regenerate its farming, Germany would be doing everyone a service by trading with Moscow. The world had an interlinked economy and Keynes wanted policy to be adjusted in the light of this. 44

He wrote his book in a spasm of fervour in autumn 1919 and it came out amid controversy at the end of the year. Few other works by him around that period had quite the same punch. The book was an instant best-seller in many languages, but disparagers quickly appeared in abundance. A London Times editorial applauded the Cambridge academic for his cleverness and erudition but denied that the Germans had been treated too severely. Supposedly Keynes was urging a policy that would ‘place Germany in effective control of Russia as a recompense for having let loose a war in which one of her principal objects was the economic enslavement of Russia’. 45The reviewer in the New York Times was blunter still, calling the book a ‘revolting melodrama’. Keynes had allegedly practised ‘the highly perfect art of slurring those who helped to win this war’. 46The French authorities and press were similarly negative. 47Only on the left did Keynes experience a warm reception. The Manchester Guardian praised him for his ‘conspicuous courage’. 48From donnish obscurity Keynes rose to international fame, leaving no one indifferent regardless of whether they liked or disliked his analysis of the Versailles treaty.

Soviet communist leaders acclaimed the book. Ioffe said it exactly coincided with his own opinions. 49Even Lenin, who only reluctantly cited authors hostile to Marxism in his writings, welcomed The Economic Consequences of the Peace ; but if he was flattered by Keynes’s reference to his ‘subtle mind’, he did not say so. 50Bolsheviks were delighted to witness one of the world’s most brilliant economists agreeing that a punitive peace had been inflicted on Germany and a disastrous blockade on Russia. While they waited for revolutions to roll out across Europe, they could at least enjoy watching others spreading their propaganda for them.

From late 1919 Sovnarkom denied accreditation to journalists of unfriendly foreign newspapers. 1Dispatches had to be submitted in advance to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Marguerite E. Harrison of the Associated Press noted that the official Soviet reviewer of Western press coverage mysteriously lost or delayed sanctioning the articles he disliked. He confessed: ‘Mrs Harrison, your article is perfectly correct in every particular, but I prefer Mr Blank’s article. It is more favourable to us. If they both came out in the American press at the same time it might produce a bad impression. I will send his first and hold yours for twenty-four hours.’ 2Meanwhile a Central Bureau for the Service of Foreigners was created in the Russian capital with the idea of arranging evenings of cultural uplift for favoured reporters, and Party Central Committee member Anatoli Lunacharski helped out by compèring a concert by the State Stradivarius Quartet playing Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Debussy. 3

Such efforts had only patchy success with the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who arrived in Russia early in 1920 after being deported from America. In line with the idea of winning friends who could influence international opinion, the Soviet authorities made a fuss of them and gave them rooms in a good Moscow hotel. Goldman had modified her doctrines of anarchism to the point where she no longer advocated non-violence as an absolute principle. But she was never likely to become a Bolshevik and indeed she remarked on the poverty, bureaucracy and fanatical intolerance that prevailed under Soviet rule. Communist functionaries filled their days with meetings with trade union activists and factory workers who would reliably spout the official Bolshevik line; but, as word of her presence got around Moscow, Russian anarchists made contact and told her of the persecution they had suffered since the October Revolution. By December 1921 she and Berkman had had enough and left Russia for good. They decamped to the Latvian capital Riga, where they could write freely about the oppression they had witnessed. Joseph Pulitzer published their work in his New York World magazine and Goldman later integrated their articles into her book My Disillusionment in Russia. 4