Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The aviator Merian Cooper — ‘Coop’ — had an even more extraordinary career in cinema than Moura. After Poland he went into the American movie business and in 1933 co-wrote and co-directed one of the most famous films of all time, King Kong . Cooper gave himself a role in the last scene as he piloted the plane that finished off the monster Kong at the end of the story. In the Second World War, despite being too old for conscription, he volunteered for the US air force; he rose to Chief of Staff in the China Air Task Force and witnessed the final surrender of the Japanese on USS Missouri . 36In 1951 he received an Academy Award nomination as the producer of John Ford’s The Quiet Man . He died in 1973.

Others had a less fortunate experience after their time in Russia. Xenophon Kalamatiano languished in Soviet confinement until 1921 when Herbert Hoover obtained the release of all American detainees as a condition of the dispatch of food aid. Until then the US authorities had done little on their leading intelligence officer’s behalf. Some said that the Cheka released him from prison long before he was repatriated because he had agreed to become a double agent. The Department of State itself seems to have wondered about his allegiance. It gave him a less than warm welcome in Washington, refusing to give him a job commensurate with his experience. A mysterious ailment killed Kalamatiano in 1923. 37Boris Savinkov, who perished two years later, had an even grislier end. His volatile temperament had often led him into errors of judgement and none of these was greater than when, in 1925, he felt so demoralized about his ruined political career that he went back to Moscow and gave himself up to the Soviet authorities. He told nobody but Dukes about his decision — and Dukes never explained why he did not try to stop him. 38The Cheka immediately took him into custody. It exploited him for its own propaganda purposes, getting him to write to Reilly about the stability of the Soviet regime. 39As soon as Savinkov had exhausted his usefulness, he was given a show-trial and executed. 40

All the people mentioned in this book are now dead and few of them are remembered outside the pages of monographs. Among the obvious exceptions are Lenin, Trotsky, Churchill and Wilson. Lenin and Trotsky remain a benchmark for communist doctrines and practices around the world. Churchill is remembered for his leadership in the war against Nazi Germany. Wilson’s creation of the League of Nations is seen as the forerunner of today’s institutions of global governance. Yet the other men and women who analysed and reported and fought over the October Revolution also made their contribution to the history of their times. Each could see that something big and unprecedented had happened in Russia in 1917. As through a glass darkly, they glimpsed the October Revolution’s potential for good or evil in their world. They were excited, appalled or enraptured. Regardless of their attitude to communism, they appreciated that huge, important questions had arisen from the Soviet revolutionary experiment, questions that have not lost their importance today. Although the USSR has been consigned to the waste-paper basket of history, many of the disputes about the year 1917 are still with us.

The disputes range from the peaks of politics and philosophy to the lowly fates of individuals. An unexpected example of the Revolution’s lasting capacity to impinge on our current affairs was given in September 2005, when the General Procuracy of the Russian Federation reopened the posthumous case of Robert Bruce Lockhart. Ever since his trial in absentia in 1918, Lockhart had been a demonic figure in Soviet history textbooks — and the popular Soviet movie Hostile Whirlwinds , which was released in 1953, reinforced this image. At the turn of the millennium, the General Procuracy in Moscow was still busy reviewing historic cases of possible miscarriages of justice over the seven decades of Soviet communist dictatorship. Its verdict on Lockhart was flinty but fair: the British agent was found to have engaged in active subversion. He had therefore been guilty as charged at the time and did not qualify for posthumous rehabilitation. 41

1. The Times , 19 March 1917; Manchester Guardian , 19 March 1917.

2. I. Maisky, Journey into the Past , p. 241.

3. I. Litvinov, ‘Letters to Viola’, autobiographical fragment, p. 32: St Antony’s RESC Archive; I. Litvinov, autobiographical fragment on 1917–1918: Ivy Litvinov Papers (HIA), box 11, folder 7.

4. M. Litvinov, ‘From the Diary of a Russian Political Emigre, March 17th, London’ (typescript, apparently dictated to Ivy Litvinov): ibid ., box 10, folder 5, p. 1.

5. I. Litvinov, ‘Letters to Viola’, autobiographical fragment, p. 33: St Antony’s RESC Archive.

6. D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald , p. 208.

7. I. Litvinov, ‘Letters to Viola’, autobiographical fragment, p. 33: St Antony’s RESC Archive.

8. Ibid .

9. C. Nabokoff, The Ordeal of a Diplomat , pp. 83–4.

10. I. Maisky, Journey into the Past , p. 245.

11. On the Archangel route see H. Shukman, War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917 , pp. 88–9.

12. C. Nabokoff, The Ordeal of a Diplomat , pp. 94–5.

13. New York Times , 16 March 1917.

14. Ibid ., 17 March 1917.

15. I. Maisky, Journey into the Past , p. 255.

16. C. Nabokoff, The Ordeal of a Diplomat , pp. 95–7.

17. I. Maisky, Journey into the Past , pp. 257–8.

18. Ibid ., p. 261.

19. I. Litvinov, ‘Letters to Viola’, autobiographical fragment, p. 36: St Antony’s RESC Archive.

20. HO 144/2158/322428. My thanks to Harry Shukman for sharing the documents in this and the next endnote.

21. HO 144/2158/322428/6 and 9; see also H. Shukman, War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain, 1917 , p. 59.

22. J. McHugh and B. J. Ripley, ‘Russian Political Internees in First World War Britain: The Cases of George Chicherin and Peter Petroff’, Historical Journal , no. 3 (1985), pp. 733–4.

23. A. E. Senn, The Russian Revolution in Switzerland, 1914–1917 , pp. 224 and 228.

24. Ibid ., p. 228.

25. See here.

26. G. A. Hill, Go Spy the Land , pp. 81–2.

27. N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revolyutsii , vol. 2, book 3, p. 6.

28. I. Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat , p. 150.

29. Sir G. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories , pp. 120–1.

1. L. Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia , p. 44; J. Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (1960), pp. 13, 219 and 331; G. A. Hill, Go Spy the Land , p. 84.

2. J. Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (1960), p. 14.

3. See R. Service, The Russian Revolution, 1900–1927 , p. 63.

4. See R. Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change , pp. 53–4 and 57.

5. See K. Rose, King George V , pp. 211–15.

6. Interview of A. F. Kerenski, N. A. Sokolov investigation (Paris, 14–20 August 1920), pp. 105–9: GARF item (unspecified as to catalogue reference), Volkogonov Papers, reel 15.

7. Protokoly Tsentral’nogo Komiteta , p. 87.

8. L. de Robien, The Diary of a Diplomat in Russia , pp. 127–8.

9. Ibid ., p. 121.

10. Ibid. , p. 122.

11. Ibid.