by Giles Milton
Events now gathered apace. That very evening, 8 November, Lenin made his first public address at the Smolny Institute, a cavernous building with classical façade on the eastern fringes of Petrograd. It had previously been an elite finishing school for daughters of the nobility, but the powdered young ladies and their governesses had been evicted by a detachment of Red Guards. Now, it was the headquarters of the new revolutionary government.
Lenin read out a proclamation calling for the transfer of all privately owned land into the hands of the Peasants Soviets – local councils – that had sprung up across Russia. He then demanded an immediate end to Russia’s participation in the First World War and made a dramatic call for revolution in the Western democracies. It was a portent of things to come.
When Lenin had finished speaking, Trotsky took to the rostrum and harangued the crowd. ‘There are only two alternatives,’ he shouted. ‘Either the Russian revolution will create a revolutionary movement in Europe, or the European powers will destroy the Russian revolution.’
Both men were already viewing the Western democracies as a far more dangerous enemy than the German Kaiser.
George Hill was still in Petrograd when the revolutionary upheaval occurred. He was not yet working for Mansfield Cumming: he was still employed as a military advisor to the Russian armed forces.
But he was increasingly drawn to unofficial intelligence work, gathering information on anything that seemed of relevance. When he learned that the Smolny Institute had become the temporary home of the new government, he immediately headed there and talked his way inside in order to see Lenin in person.
He found the Bolshevik leader ‘a strong and simple man of less than middle height with a Slavonic cast of countenance, piercing eyes and a powerful forehead.’
In a characteristically bold move, Hill stepped forward to shake Lenin’s hand. ‘His manner was not friendly, nor could it be said to be hostile; it was completely detached.’
He found something chilling about Lenin, something that he was unable to pinpoint at the time. It was as if he was determined to push ahead with his revolutionary ideals, whatever the cost in human blood.
Hill held out the vain hope that the Bolsheviks would keep Russia in the war. He also hoped that the new leaders would allow him and his colleagues to remain in Petrograd as military advisors to the Russian armed forces. But his visit to the Smolny Institute made him realise that this was most unlikely: the new regime looked certain to cut all its ties with the Entente governments. The Bolsheviks, he wrote, were ‘ruthless, ignorant, pig-headed, seeking to conduct affairs on a strict adherence to a few second-hand phrases.’
The Bolshevik revolution rapidly consolidated itself, or so it seemed to outward observers. Revolutionary councils had sprung up across the length and breadth of Russia over the previous months. Now, representatives from these councils converged on Petrograd and met at the Smolny Institute as the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The congress ratified the revolutionary transfer of power into Bolshevik hands, with Lenin at their head. Although there were many political battles to come, there was to be no turning back.
Trotsky, the new People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, was keen to meet the ambassadors of the most important foreign powers, including Britain’s Sir George Buchanan. He asked that they call on him at the Smolny Institute.
The ambassadors, schooled in convention, were indignant at being summoned in such a fashion. They disdainfully reminded Trotsky that there was a strict protocol to such visits. The customary procedure was for new ministers to inform the ambassadors by letter of their assumption of office.
It was a formality that infuriated Trotsky. ‘He said that such a procedure was all very well under the old regime, but hardly suited present circumstances.’ If they were not prepared to play by the new rules, then he was not interested in meeting them.
Ambassador Buchanan sent a series of stark messages to London warning that Lenin presented a new and formidable threat to the world. His fiery speeches about crushing the democracies of the West were delivered with a conviction that appalled Buchanan.
He particularly feared for the future of the Raj, especially when Lenin announced that he was tearing up the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. This annulment was more than symbolic: it left the scant defences of India’s northern frontier vulnerable and exposed.
Buchanan’s warning was one of his last acts as ambassador: he left the country soon afterwards, along with many of his staff. He was not sorry to bid farewell to Russia. He had suffered what was tantamount to a nervous breakdown over the previous two weeks and felt like a relic in the new Russia.
His closest acquaintances, the grand dukes and duchesses, had taken stock of their dramatic change in fortunes and were now fleeing the capital. When Buchanan bid farewell to his friend Grand Duke Michael, he must have suspected that he would never see him again.
Mansfield Cumming’s operations had steadily expanded during the course of the war. He had more than a thousand agents in the field, most of them gathering intelligence on the Western Front.
Now, with the apparent success of Lenin’s revolution, Cumming needed to turn his attentions to Russia. Whitehall Court was to focus increasingly on events in Petrograd and Moscow.
Cumming had recruited many new employees at his London headquarters in the months that preceded the Bolshevik revolution. There were now more than sixty secretaries, typists and technical staff working at Whitehall Court; they spent their time collating reports arriving from agents around the globe.
The work was hard, with long hours and few holidays, but it was enlivened by the antics of Cumming’s unofficial deputy, an affable young jester named Colonel Freddie Browning.
Cumming had personally summoned the sharp-witted Colonel Browning to an interview. The two men bonded immediately and Cumming offered him a key position at Whitehall Court.
Browning proved extremely capable, helping Cumming to restructure his fast-growing organisation. He also introduced an element of merry mayhem to the office. ‘Gay, witty, with an acute sense of humour,’ recalled one member of staff, ‘la joie de vivre was in his blood.’
Browning knew that people worked best when they were enjoying themselves. He kept the office ladies amused with a stream of anecdotes while his after-work soirées were relished by all, especially Cumming. ‘He brought happy evenings to the old man by having gay parties with all the stage beauties that he had at call.’
So wrote Frank Stagg, another key member of the team. Stagg added that the colonel would bring together ‘those who knew what was what in any particular line.’ Whether he meant sex, spying or something entirely different is unclear.
Cumming was a man of his era: although married, he spent an inordinate amount of time cavorting with his ‘top mates’, the office staff, and there were long spells where he can have seen little of Mrs C. He certainly had an eye for pretty secretaries: when one of them was sent to Egypt, Cumming offered her a monthly dress allowance that was considerably more generous than her salary.
There was an occasion when he stood accused of having too much ‘partiality with the typists’, but that did not stop him employing a lady ‘chauffeuse’ to drive his Mercedes. He liked his ladies in uniform and went so far as to personally arrange for her to be properly attired in a smart driver’s suit.
Colonel Browning was no less attentive to the needs of the secretaries. Ever the gallant, he was ‘distressed at the way the female element on the staff had [only] buns for lunch’. He installed a first-class canteen in Whitehall Court, employing an army chef to produce decent meals procured through the Savoy’s suppliers.
The jovial atmosphere at Whitehall Court was occasionally disturbed by the unwanted intrusion of senior civil servants. Officials at the War Office, motivated by professional rivalry, frequently suggested that Cumming’s organisation should be subsumed into their own espionage operations.
Cumming reacted angrily when these changes were first mooted.
The War Office dealt exclusively with military intelligence, whereas his agents covered a range of espionage operations, including political, economic and technical targets.
‘Ever since the war started, my Bureau has been subjected to attacks which have disorganised and almost destroyed it,’ he wrote in one tetchy memorandum. He claimed that short-sighted actions by the War Office had already compromised his work in a number of countries, including Russia.
Cumming managed to fend off the War Office for almost two years, but in 1917 he found himself facing a more formidable foe. George Macdonogh had recently been appointed as Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office: his new position made him one of the biggest guns in Whitehall.
A taciturn Scot with a chilling gaze, General Macdonogh would tell people that his sole interest in life was his work. Few doubted this assertion. He was a socially awkward individual driven by ambition, and went by his nickname, Blitz. He soon had Cumming in his sights.
Macdonogh launched his first strike in February 1917, at the time of the first Russian revolution. He declared himself overall master of all wartime intelligence operations and accused Cumming of ‘empire building’. More alarmingly, he demanded that Cumming accept the status of ‘being under my orders in all military intelligence matters’.
Cumming’s initial response was magnificently aloof: he simply ignored the general. He was fortunate that General Macdonogh was distracted by more urgent matters and unable to press home his attack. But it was a stark warning of the troubles to come.
Macdonogh’s second offensive came in October 1917, when Russia was entering a more unpredictable period of revolutionary activity. The timing could scarcely have been worse for Cumming. At the very moment when he needed to devote all his energies to Russia, his efforts were seriously undermined by an enemy on home turf.
Macdonogh sent a curt message to Cumming informing him that ‘he was going to take over the whole S[ecret] S[ervice].’ Cumming’s organisation was to be demoted to a subordinate role.
This time, the general meant business. He set out a plan of how intelligence gathering should be structured (with himself at the helm) and then summoned a meeting of his military staff in order to start implementing the changes. Cumming was allowed to attend the meeting as an observer but was not permitted to take part in the discussions.
Cumming acted swiftly to prevent his organisation being swallowed. He instigated a major structural reorganisation in order to accommodate Macdonogh’s most pressing demands. He then solicited heavy-gun support from Charles Hardinge, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.
Hardinge gave his wholehearted backing to Cumming. He reminded Macdonogh that Cumming answered first and foremost to the Foreign Office. He also expressed his dismay at any scheme ‘which diminished the authority of the man at the top’. Cumming was to be ‘master in his own house.’
General Macdonogh was not the first to try to usurp Cumming’s position and nor would he be the last. Yet Cumming was quietly confident that he could see off other pretenders to his throne. As one of his agents later recalled, ‘C always used to boast that as he had three masters, [the Foreign Office, Admiralty and War Office] he had not got one at all, as he could always set the other two against any objector.’
Once Cumming had dealt with Macdonogh he could turn his attentions back to Russia. The departure of Sir George Buchanan had left the British Embassy with a skeletal staff which had to adjust to life in a country that had gone from friend to foe in a matter of days.
The few remaining diplomats assumed that they would also be recalled to England and that the embassy would be formally closed. They were therefore surprised to learn of the appointment of a new member of staff, one whose role, from the very outset, was as controversial as it was ambiguous.
Robert Bruce Lockhart had been sent to Russia with the ostensible task of keeping open a channel of communication with Lenin’s revolutionary government. British ministers did not wish to cut all their ties with Russia, even though Lenin’s hostility could not have been clearer. Lockhart was charged with meeting the new leaders and establishing unofficial relations with them.
But Lockhart was also to play a far more secretive role, helping to co-ordinate the future activities of Cumming’s agents inside Russia. This work was to prove highly dangerous in the months ahead.
On the face of it, Lockhart was well suited to the job for which he had been appointed. He spoke good Russian and had previously served as Consul General in Moscow. Thirty years of age and in the prime of life, he was affable, colourful and endlessly entertaining.
He described himself as ‘broad-shouldered and broken-nosed, with a squat stumpy figure and a ridiculous gait.’ Yet he proved a magnate for the high-society women of Petrograd, for whom wit and gallantry were more of a draw than looks.
Lockhart had many failings and he wrote about them with disarming honesty. His lack of discretion would have been a handicap in any employment, but it was doubly alarming in a diplomat. Not for nothing would he later find employment as a gossip writer for London’s Evening Standard.
His insatiable appetite for women was another drawback. He had first got into trouble when living in Malaya a decade earlier. He had fallen hopelessly in love with a young Malay princess called Amai, thereby provoking the wrath of the local sultan.
Lockhart was repeatedly warned that ‘the crow does not mate with the bird of Paradise,’ but this did nothing to dampen his ardour. He installed Amai in his colonial bungalow and embarked upon a torrid affair. ‘The rest of the story,’ he wrote, ‘is all tragedy or all comedy.’ Death threats, poisoned food and life-threatening malaria brought their affair to an abrupt end: at great risk to his life, Lockhart was smuggled out of Malaya and forced to abandon his lover to an uncertain fate.
His next public indiscretion, a scandalous extramarital affair, had led to him being sacked from his previous post in the Moscow consulate. ‘I had made myself talked about,’ he admitted. ‘The Ambassador sorrowfully but firmly decided . . . that I must go home to England for a rest.’
Lockhart’s return to Russia in early 1918 did not bring about a change to his lifestyle: he continued to frequent the decadent cabaret acts staged in the underground bars of the Okhotny Ryad. There were also nights when he would clamber into his horse-drawn troika and drive to the grounds of the Strelna Palace. Here, with stinging cheeks and icicles in his hair, he would carouse with the gypsy singers like the celebrated Maria Nikolaievna.
‘The cynic will say that her task in life was to collect foolish and preferably rich young men, to sing to them, and to make them drink oceans of champagne until their wealth or their father’s wealth was transferred from their pockets to her own,’ he wrote.
Lockhart was never one of the cynics. He would guzzle his way through Maria’s champagne until the drink and the music left him in a state of blissful intoxication.
Lockhart’s posting to Russia was to bring gaiety to many and misery to one. Oliver Wardrop was a humourless career diplomat who had served diligently as British Consul for some years and had remained in the country in the aftermath of Ambassador Buchanan’s departure. He was dismayed to learn of Lockhart’s appointment and telegraphed London to enquire as to his rank in the diplomatic hierarchy.
The reply was evasive. ‘Mr Lockhart will on arrival in Moscow continue to act as unofficial British agent to the Bolshevik government.’
None the wiser, Wardrop pressed on with his work, but found himself continually distracted by Lockhart, who behaved with complete disregard to the conventions of diplomacy.
‘Position of Lockhart is unique,’ complained Wardrop in a sniffy letter to London. ‘He is variously described in official and inspired press as “Ambassador”, “Envoy”, “Official Representative”, “Consul General” and so on.’
What really irked Wardrop was the fact that Lockhart worked in secrecy. ‘He has a staff of some six persons, exact nature of whose duties I am unaware but neverthele
ss with my ready consent uses my staff for ciphering and deciphering.’
Wardrop was fearful of being sidelined and sent another telegram to the Foreign Office, asking for clarification as to whether or not he was still the ‘senior British official in what used to be called Russia.’
The reply merely thanked him for his ‘loyal attitude’. The unpalatable truth was that Lockhart had been given carte blanche to act in whatever way he saw fit.
Robert Bruce Lockhart and his little team at the embassy were not the only British nationals based in Russia at this time. Among the small number of Englishmen who had made their homes in Petrograd was one who had more experience of Russia than most.
Arthur Ransome had, by this time, been working as a Daily News correspondent for several years and was well acquainted with both senior Russian politicians and the British expatriate community.
‘A tall, lanky, bony individual,’ was how George Hill described Ransome, ‘with a shock of sandy hair, usually unkempt, and the eyes of a small inquisitive and rather mischievous boy. He really was a lovable personality when you came to know him.’
But Ransome had become increasingly irritable in the months before the Bolshevik revolution, partly because of his inadequate diet. The lack of fruit and vegetables had begun to affect his health and his recurring haemorrhoids had become so inflamed that he found it impossible to work.
‘I can’t cross a room without nearly collapsing,’ he had written in a letter to his mother, ‘and the day before yesterday I fainted in the street.’
He was eventually forced into the operating theatre, where he went under the knife with only a cocaine paste to dull the agony of having the haemorrhoids cut out and the bleeding veins cauterised. ‘VIOLENT AND ABOMINABLE PAIN,’ he wrote on the day after the operation. For the next sixty hours, the pain remained so excruciating that he could not sleep.