Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The political temperature in the United Kingdom rose still higher when an influential group in the Independent Labour Party called for Churchill’s impeachment as Secretary of State for War. 47Churchill issued a quick rebuttal:

It is not the British who are making war, but the Russian Bolshevists. They are at this moment invading Poland and trampling down its freedom. They are doing their best to light the flames of war in Persia, Afghanistan, and, if possible, in India. Their avowed intention is to procure by violence a revolution in every country… My sole object has been, and will be, to keep such hateful foreign oppression far from our native land. 48

While denying he had any wish for a Western crusade against Soviet Russia, he urged that the talks on any commercial treaty be suspended immediately. 49

Not even Lloyd George was willing to see Poland defeated, and he had already stated that the British would go to war again if the Red Army occupied Warsaw. 50As a result he was relieved when reports indicated that Pilsudski’s headlong retreat had stopped in the Polish capital. Pilsudski declared that Warsaw would be defended to the last man, and he had grounds for confidence. The Reds were exhausted by their hot pursuit of the Polish army; their supply lines were frail and over-stretched and their equipment inadequate. Their commander in the northern sector, Mikhail Tukhachevski, found it hard to co-ordinate his advance as Warsaw came within range. Exposing the naivety and wrong-headedness of Lenin’s rationale for the war, Poles of all classes saw the Reds as Russian invaders rather than internationalist liberators. They waited for the enemy on the eastern side of the River Vistula where Pilsudski had time to organize them. He also had the advantage that Stalin, the leading commissar in the southern sector of the Red advance, ignored orders to divert his armies from outside Lwów and reinforce the strategic thrust at the Polish capital. It would probably have made little difference if Stalin had shown greater compliance since Tukhachevski’s forces were rapidly torn apart by the resurgent Polish army. By 19 August the Reds were conducting a general retreat from the Vistula. Central Europe was saved from Sovietization. 51

The scale of the defeat outdid anything suffered by the Reds in the Civil War after Kolchak’s initial success at the end of 1918. There was nothing they could do but fall back and sue for a truce. The Politburo convened on 1 September. Trotsky, the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, gave a gloomy account of the campaign and recommended agreeing to a ‘compromise peace’ — a quaint formulation for acceptance of defeat. Peace talks would be requested with the Poles in Riga. 52At the next Politburo meeting, five days later, Chicherin pressed for peace to be signed fast with Latvia and Lithuania. 53It was plain to the leadership that Moscow had to content itself with the territory won in the Civil War or else risk losing everything. Kamenev left for Russia on 11 September. 54He had had a last meeting with Lloyd George a day earlier and, together with Krasin, had become acquainted with the latest British terms for a trade treaty. On peace, there was no longer anything he could do. Pilsudski and Paderewski were now the men who set the agenda. 55

When the Party Conference met later in the month, Lenin was frank about the ‘gigantic, unprecedented defeat’. He acknowledged that it was the product of a Polish ‘patriotic upsurge’ rather than action or assistance by the Western Allies. Soviet Russia had to accept that the Poles were unlikely to agree to the frontier proposed earlier by Lord Curzon. Galicia had to be delivered to Poland and the boundaries shifted to the east of the Curzon Line. 56Lenin added: ‘This undoubtedly means that a mistake was committed: you see, we had victory in our hands and we let it slip from our fingers.’ 57He asked forgiveness, admitting that the Politburo should have halted the Red advance in eastern Galicia and been content with gaining a base for a future offensive — ‘a little push’ into Hungary across the Carpathians. 58Now that peace negotiations were under way the priority had to be the regeneration of the Soviet economy. He expressed doubt that the Bolsheviks could succeed without foreign industrial investment. Communism, he declared, could not be built solely by ‘Russian forces’. 59

The Polish war punctuated a year of talks on a trade treaty between Soviet Russia and the United Kingdom. The British government played its hand with some caution. Its ministers were determined to prevent foreigners from stirring up revolution and on 16 July 1920 deported Santeri Nuorteva of the Russian Soviet Bureau, as the front organization was known by then — who had landed in Liverpool from New York. Nuorteva was carrying a ‘diplomatic passport’ stamped by his comrade Ludwig Martens. Back in New York, the Russian Soviet Bureau blustered that Canadian contracts to the value of six million dollars would be cancelled. 1Martens attended a gathering of 8,000 supporters in Madison Square Garden where he wanted to call on the US government to permit the transport of medical supplies to Russia. He received fifteen minutes of applause before he could start speaking. The Internationale was sung. Martens haltingly read out his speech in English before giving a vivid delivery in Russian: ‘There is much talk of Bolshevist propaganda against America. There is no such thing. But there is propaganda against Soviet Russia.’ 2This was of no help to Nuorteva in England, where Lloyd George had to be seen to be standing up to communism to placate the Conservative MPs in the governing coalition. Rejecting pleas on Nuorteva’s behalf, he said that his papers were not in order and that normal procedures had been followed. 3

Yet rather than sending Nuorteva back to America, Lloyd George allowed him to travel on to the Estonian capital, from where he would be able to reach Russia. 4Nor did Lloyd George object to Kamenev and Krasin coming to London. 5Things had changed since Kamenev’s fruitless visit in 1918. Lloyd George was giving communists a chance to show that they deserved admittance inside the perimeter of formal international relations. Lenin understood this. Worrying that Kamenev and Krasin might get over-excited, he warned them against summoning far-left socialists to get arms for the British working class. 6

The dominant theme in the talks with Kamenev and Krasin at 10 Downing Street on 4 and 8 August was the Soviet military advance on Warsaw. 7But after demanding peace and security for Poland, Lloyd George and Bonar Law also took the opportunity to set out their conditions for future trade with Soviet Russia. They insisted that Soviet leaders should cease their political subversion and ideological propaganda in the United Kingdom and its empire. Kamenev affected to understand and agree. But the evidence from telegrams between Moscow and London told a different story, evidence that was eagerly published in The Times . 8Ernst Fetterlein at the Government Code and Cypher School had decrypted the intercepts between Lenin and Kamenev, which were then leaked to the press. Lloyd George disliked what he learned from Fetterlein about the Kremlin’s basic intentions and told Kamenev that there was no prospect of resuming Anglo-Russian trade unless Lenin changed his posture. 9 The Times also alleged that Kamenev had a hand in Moscow’s delivery of the secret subsidy to the Daily Herald and was in regular contact with the Council of Action, which the Labour Party and the trade unions had established on 5 August as part of a campaign to prevent Britain from intervening in the Soviet–Polish war. Other newspapers soon took the same line that Kamenev had come as a diplomat and behaved as a subversive. All this angered Lloyd George and he rebuked Krasin and Kamenev for breaking their word that they would not interfere in British politics. He told Kamenev that if he did not quickly leave the United Kingdom, he would be deported. 10