Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Vanderlip meanwhile performed like a snake-oil salesman: ‘I have joined the frontiers of Russia and America, making a broad band of republicanism around the world from Atlantic to Atlantic.’ He called on the US Congress to regularize trade relations without delay. 25Mining, timber-felling and fur-pelt production had made fortunes for entrepreneurs in Siberia before the Great War. The region’s general potential was famously under-exploited. Vanderlip continued his approaches to west-coast investors asking them to join his scheme and making it seem like a licence to print money; and soon he inveigled the Standard Oil Co. to purchase a quarter of his shares. 26The impetus towards a commercial treaty with Soviet Russia was gathering strength. On 4 January the Manchester Guardian reported that the US authorities were on the point of lifting their restrictions; its source was said to be ‘a Moscow wireless message’. 27The Soviet leadership was probably trying to bounce countries into restoring commercial links. 28Just as the Kremlin intended, the Republican Party in the US pricked up its ears. Senator Joseph I. France of Maryland led his colleagues in advocating official recognition of Soviet Russia. When the order was given to deport Ludwig Martens in early 1921, Senator France publicly protested and called for an end to the economic blockade. 29In his eyes simply no American interest was being served by ostracizing the Russian communist regime.

On 26 January his campaign bore fruit in the Senate when Henry Cabot Lodge convened the Committee on Foreign Relations to hold hearings on Russia. 30Senator France, as a prosperous man of affairs, spoke his mind; but the witnesses were chosen mainly from the American labour movement. This was deliberate. Lodge and France wanted to appear as if they had the interests of working men and women at the forefront of their minds — and they allowed plenty of time for them to argue that trade with Russia would boost industrial production and employment. The trade unionists spoke with admiration for Vanderlip’s Kamchatka initiative. They pointed out that a treaty would open the way for the US import of Russian raw materials and export of American manufactured goods. Senators asked briefly about the dictatorship established by the Bolsheviks, then dropped the matter. They were somewhat more persistent in questioning the labour movement’s representatives about their attitude to democracy in America. The unionists were ready for this and presented themselves first and foremost as US patriots. Yet this failed to convince several members of the Senate Committee. Under further interrogation, some witnesses declined to repudiate the potential benefits of introducing Bolshevism to the American political scene, and Alexander L. Trachtenberg from the Socialist Party admitted to favouring the ‘nationalisation of property’. 31

This was not what Senators Lodge and France wanted to hear; they knew they would be thwarted in their objective of changing US foreign policy if the idea got around that labour movement leaders were crypto-communists. (They really should have done more research on Trachtenberg, who wanted his Socialist Party to become an affiliate of Comintern.) 32Lodge and his colleagues were happier when witnesses quoted H. G. Wells and his arguments for a trade treaty. They also liked it when John Spargo was cited as warning that America was falling behind Britain in looking after its economic interests; 33and under Republican leadership the Committee took the unusual step of including the entire report of the British Labour delegation to Russia in its published proceedings. The thinking behind this was obvious. The Labour delegation argued for the resumption of commercial links, and this was exactly what Lodge and Cabot sought for America. 34Fortunes could be made in Russia. America should not miss out on the lucrative opportunities.

The divergences among the Allied powers — or rather their governments — were getting wider. The French were resolute in their stand against dealing with Soviet Russia while Lenin refused to recognize obligations for the foreign loans incurred by Russian governments before October 1917. The Americans, through the Senate hearings, were only just beginning to consider whether to change policy. Even in the United Kingdom the situation was fluid. The British were still talking to Krasin, and no one outside the negotiations could yet tell whether they would produce a signed agreement. But the Western Alliance was practically at an end. Indeed Allied leaders took only one big decision jointly about Russia. This was reached on 24 January 1921 when the Allies granted their de jure recognition of Estonia and Latvia as independent states. 35The signal was being given that the Russian Whites were a lost cause. Until then the Allies had avoided contradicting the ambition of Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Wrangel to reconstitute ‘Russia One and Indivisible’. They now accepted that at least two new Baltic states deserved official acceptance. As the remnants of Wrangel’s forces clambered on boats for Constantinople in November 1920, they left behind the battlefields of defeat and looked to the future without solace. Their paymasters and advisers abandoned them.

The Bolshevik leadership and the Whites were in agreement on one thing: the desirability of gathering back the territories of the Russian Empire. The recent military defeat in Poland ruled out speedy action to the west of Russia, and the Kremlin set about assuring Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that it had only peaceful intentions towards them. The south Caucasus was a different matter. Azerbaijan fell to the Red Army in April 1920, Armenia in December that year; like Ukraine, they were quickly turned into Soviet republics. For a while, the Georgians remained under Menshevik rule, but on 26 January 1921 the Party Central Committee decided to correct this anomaly with a plan to provoke a diplomatic breach with Georgia with a view to organizing an invasion. 36

The same day, the Central Committee examined the latest reports from London. Lloyd George was proving amenable even though the legal status of Russian gold had still presented difficulties as recently as December. 37But although Krasin had done well with the Prime Minister, the judicial system was another matter. Mr Justice Roche in the same month found in favour of the Briton who had lost his timber in Sovnarkom’s nationalizing campaigns of two years earlier and was seeking to impound a Soviet cargo of veneer about to be unloaded in the United Kingdom. Roche’s judgment endangered any contract entered into by Krasin, and the New York Times warned that this could also have adverse consequences for any American businessmen tempted to trade with communist Russia. 38The oil of the south Caucasus was another contentious matter. Two British companies, the Baku Consolidated Oilfields and the gloriously named Spies Petroleum Co., had suffered the nationalization of their assets when the Red Army marched into Azerbaijan — some of their staff were thrown into prison. The companies raised a hue and cry when Krasin offered to make these assets available to other British enterprises. 39The disgruntled Leslie Urquhart also continued to make trouble for Soviet negotiators by denouncing the London talks in The Times . 40

Even so, the Prime Minister was willing to keep the talks going. With a little more compromise on the Soviet side it might soon be possible to conclude a trade treaty. A small working party was created in Moscow to examine questions about Russia’s foreign debts in case Krasin needed to give some sort of commitment to recognizing them. 41Better to sign a half-good treaty than to lose the chance of any treaty at all. But when Lloyd George kept up the pressure on Krasin for the Bolsheviks to refrain from conducting their propaganda and subversion in the British Empire, Krasin affected outrage. If the government in Russia were to accept such a clause, he asked, what was to be done about Secretary for War Winston Churchill’s contributions to the Western press? 42Churchill doubtless caused annoyance to the Kremlin. But his commentary was never published in Moscow, and Krasin understood full well that Lloyd George simply wanted a reciprocal understanding that the British and the Russian authorities would not interfere in each other’s politics. Krasin could easily — if insincerely — give this guarantee. Almost without anyone expecting it, the muddled negotiations began to look as if they might end in a treaty.