Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

If Comintern was to be effective as the means of bringing millions to the revolutionary cause, however, it had to counteract any assumption that peaceful methods of struggle were sufficient for success. When Lenin learned of objections to violent methods among the British Labour delegation to Russia in 1920, he issued an open letter to the workers of the United Kingdom defending the use of terror and the suppression of press freedom under Soviet rule. Such mechanisms, he argued, constituted ‘the defence of the working class against [its] exploiters’. He contended that freedom of the press was merely ‘the freedom of the wealthy to conspire against those who laboured’. 23He also felt it important to note that ‘England’ and its allies had carried out a ‘White terror’ in Finland, Hungary, India and Ireland. Somewhat condescendingly, he said he had explained this so frequently over the years that he found it ‘not very joyful’ to have to repeat himself. 24This was less than graceful; it was also a wild exaggeration because the British had instigated no killing of communists in Finland or Hungary. But Lenin was a practical revolutionary. It would do no harm if a piece of rhetoric swelled the ranks of support for Comintern.

When a particular national situation was not yet ripe for insurrection it was still possible for communists to render assistance to the Soviet cause. In 1920 Comintern issued a May Day appeal suggesting that peace was impossible under capitalism and calling for the obstruction of troops and supplies going to the anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. Henriette Roland-Holst, the Secretary of Comintern’s Amsterdam Bureau, recommended the resumption of trade with Russia. She admitted that this would involve private business but argued that Russia needed Western manufactures and that the West needed Russian grain. She suggested that European workers would benefit from the stimulus given to post-war economic recovery. 25

Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev hammered out their message that the Bolsheviks were heroically carrying out the practical objectives of socialism. What Comintern said about capitalist exploitation and imperial oppression was anyway in line with traditional doctrines of socialist, social-democratic and labour parties the world over. There was immense war-weariness after 1918, and most militants thought the biggest danger to peace lay in the temptation for the victor powers to undertake a crusade against the Bolsheviks. Whenever objections were raised against Lenin’s policies on terror and dictatorship it was always tempting for radical socialists to argue that the regime in Moscow had been forced to act harshly by the vicious ring of counter-revolutionary armies, Russian and foreign, that was meant to throttle it in 1918–19. The hope was that Bolshevik doctrines and practices would steadily become more moderate if Russia was left alone by foreign armies and permitted to trade with the rest of the world.

Not every Comintern militant was content with the way things were being propelled by Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev. Among the critics was John Reed. When talking to friends, he made no secret of his growing distaste for Bolshevik manipulation of the international labour movement. He mixed readily with communist leaders in Russia and witnessed the condescending attitude they had to foreign communists. This attitude was not confined to Lenin and other Politburo members. Yan Berzin, the Soviet plenipotentiary in Switzerland, told Zinoviev that ‘[Zeth] Höglund and all the other Scandinavian ditherers are people without energy or initiative, but nevertheless it’s necessary to operate precisely through them for the moment.’ 26

Reed had come late in his young life to the political far left and brought along with him an idealism about acceptable methods. He looked askance at the discrediting of Sovnarkom’s critics. He objected that so many officials were being promoted to high office in Comintern simply because they obeyed Zinoviev. He saw no signs of Bolshevik authoritarianism fading from Russian politics. The Bolshevik leaders knew of Reed’s second thoughts about them and were already wondering what to do about him when, on his way back from Baku, he contracted typhus. He and Zinoviev had never got on either personally or politically. Yet when Reed died in October 1920 he received a magnificent funeral and his remains were interred below the walls of the Kremlin. Although his wife Louise Bryant had been shocked by the poor quality of care he received from Russian doctors and nurses, she bore no grudge. The interment, however, rankled. She told fellow reporter Marguerite Harrison: ‘John was a real American. I know he would have wanted to be buried on American soil.’ 27In death he was turned into an unquestioning communist hero who remained of use in propaganda for a Comintern which he had come to despise.

Comintern had yet to grow to its mature size and strength, but its dominant features were already clearly delineated. The Russian Communist Party had called it into existence and was exercising parental control. Moscow had the funds, determination and cunning to maintain its dominance. Bolsheviks had made the October Revolution, whereas all the attempts to set up communist regimes elsewhere as yet had failed. The Kremlin planned to maintain its grip in directing communist strategy and operations.

The Western Allies might have withdrawn their expeditions from Russia and Ukraine but Russian communist leaders had to maintain their vigilance about potential threats from abroad. Foreign powers had intervened in Soviet Russia since 1918 and every Bolshevik thought that they could return on an anti-communist ‘crusade’. If the Allied powers did not do this by themselves, they might employ the forces of Russia’s bordering states — Finland, Poland or Romania were surely open to being used in this fashion. Travelling around the Baltic in the winter of 1918–19, Adolf Ioffe warned Trotsky that the Poles might soon invade. 1

From spring 1919 there had been serious clashes between Red forces and the Polish army across the western borderlands of the former Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks had established a joint Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Republic in February with its two capitals in Vilnius and Minsk. By its creation, communist leaders disclaimed any association with Russian ‘chauvinism’ and strove to prove their tolerance of all nations. The Poles saw things differently. Although ostensibly the new republic was independent, it was led by Bolsheviks who remained subject to the discipline of the centralized communist party in Moscow. The ‘Litbel’ republic, moreover, was a clear and present threat to Poland’s security. Józef Pilsudski, the Polish commander-in-chief, ordered military action in April. Vilnius fell immediately, followed by Minsk in August. Since Trotsky’s Red Army was then engaged in finishing off the White armies of Kolchak and Denikin, the Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Republic was incapable of defending itself. Polish forces in the same months were also involved in heavy fighting with Soviet Ukraine. Thus the entire area of the old western borderlands was under contestation. 2

The Western Allies appreciated the dangers. The Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski approached them in September 1919 with an offer to attack Soviet Russia in return for subsidizing his armed forces. Clemenceau had the Allied Supreme Council with him in rejecting any such idea and the British instead proposed the establishment of an eastern Polish frontier short of Grodno, soon to be known as the Curzon Line (even though Lord Curzon, who had recently become Foreign Secretary, played no part in drafting it). 3

Pilsudski, however, thought the Allies naive in believing that the Bolsheviks would abide by any such settlement, and he continued to work on his strategy of exploiting Moscow’s moment of weakness by expanding the territory under Warsaw’s control. Aiming to set up a federation with the Ukrainians he agreed a pact with anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura. The coming together of Poland and Ukraine would improve their chances against a resurgent Russia or Germany. Pilsudski rejected any alliance with the Russian Whites because the White commanders believed in ‘Russia one and indivisible’ and refused to commit themselves to Polish independence. General Yudenich, entirely failing to understand Poland’s national sensitivities, expressed annoyance when the Poles refused to cross the River Berezina to render assistance. 4But while Pilsudski had hopes of Kiev, Lenin’s mind was fixed on Berlin. Germany’s current government was always going to suffer criticism for having acceded to the treaty of Versailles. Berlin was pulled in all directions by political tension. The far right acted first. On 17 March 1920 a coalition of Freikorps and other paramilitary groups led by Wolfgang Kapp attempted a putsch. Lenin cabled Stalin to speed up the defeat of the Whites in Crimea because he wanted to have the Red Army available to intervene in a German civil war since revolution in Germany was always the communist objective. 5