The political culture of everlasting distrust
The most effective British Ambassador to Stalinist Russia was Sir Archie Clark Kerr, who was created Lord Inverchapel as a reward for his success. ‘Nearly all of those who now govern Russia and mould opinion have led hunted lives since their early manhood when they were chased from pillar to post by the Tsarist police,’ he wrote in a dispatch of December 1945 assessing diplomacy in the new nuclear age. ‘Then came the immense and dangerous gamble of the Revolution, followed by the perils and ups and downs of intervention and civil war.’ Later still came the deadly purges, when ‘no one of them knew today whether he would be alive tomorrow’. Through all these years Soviet apparatchiks ‘trembled for the safety of their country and of their system as they trembled for their own’. Their personal experiences and their national system liquidated trust and personal security.45
Stalin achieved supremacy by implementing a maxim in his book Concerning Questions of Leninism: ‘Power has not merely to be seized: it has to be held, to be consolidated, to be made invincible.’ To Lev Kamenev, whom he was to have killed, he said: ‘The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and go to sleep.’ Dissidents who had fled abroad were assassinated. In 1938, for example, Evgeni Konovalets, the Ukrainian nationalist leader, was killed in Rotterdam by an exploding chocolate cake. Stalin compared his purges and liquidations to Ivan the Terrible’s massacres: ‘Who’s going to remember all this riffraff in twenty years’ time? Who remembers the names of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one … He should have killed them all, to create a strong state.’46
Stalin rewarded his associates with privileges so long as they served his will. ‘Every Leninist knows, if he is a real Leninist,’ he told the party congress of 1934, ‘that equality in the sphere of requirements and personal life is a piece of reactionary petit-bourgeois stupidity, worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics, but not of a socialist society organized on Marxist lines.’ But Stalin was pitiless in ordering the deaths of his adjutants when they no longer served his turn. The first member of his entourage to be killed on his orders was Nestor Apollonovich Lakoba, who was poisoned during a dinner at which his attendance was coerced by Stalin’s deadly subordinate Lavrentiy Beria in 1936. Beria then maddened Lakoba’s beautiful widow by confining her in a cell with a snake and by forcing her to watch the beating of her fourteen-year-old son. She finally died after a night of torture, and the child was subsequently put to death.47
The enemies of the people were not limited to saboteurs and spies, Stalin said at the time that he launched his purges. There were also doubters – the naysayers to the dictatorship of the proletariat – and they too had to be liquidated. The first of the notorious Moscow show-trials opened in August 1936. Chief among the sixteen defendants were Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had agreed with Stalin to plead guilty and make docile, bogus confessions in return for a guarantee that there would be no executions and that their families would be spared. They were faced by the Procurator General, Andrei Vyshinsky, the scion of a wealthy Polish family in Odessa, who had years before shared food-hampers from his parents with his prison cell-mate Stalin. Vyshinsky was ‘ravenously bloodthirsty’, in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s phrase, producing outrushes of synthetic fury at need, and using his vicious wit to revile the defendants as ‘mad dogs of capitalism’. The promises of clemency were ignored, and when all sixteen defendants were sentenced to death, there was a shout in court of ‘Long live the cause of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin!’ Stalin never attended executions, which he treated as ‘noble party service’ and which were officially designated the Highest Measure of Punishment. Vyshinsky seldom saw the kill, for he too was squeamish. At the Lubianka prison, Zinoviev cried: ‘Please, comrade, for God’s sake, call Joseph Vissarionovich [Stalin]! Joseph Vissarionovich promised to save our lives!’ He, Kamenev and the others were shot through the back of the head. The bullets, with their noses crushed, were dug from the skulls, cleaned of blood and brains, and handed (probably still warm) to Genrikh Grigorievich Yagoda, the ex-pharmacist who had created the slave-labour camps of the Gulag and was rewarded with appointment as Commissar General of State Security.48
Yagoda, who was a collector of orchids and erotic curiosities, labelled the bullets ‘Zinoviev’ and ‘Kamenev’, and treasured them alongside his collection of women’s stockings. At a subsequent dinner in the NKVD’s honour, Stalin’s court jester Karl Pauker made a comic re-enactment of Zinoviev’s desperate final pleading, with added anti-semitic touches of exaggerated cringing, weeping and raising of hands heavenwards with the prayer, ‘Hear oh Israel the Lord is our God.’ Stalin’s entourage guffawed at this mockery of the dead: the despot laughed so heartily that he was nearly sick. A year later Pauker himself was shot: ‘guilty of knowing too much and living too well: Stalin no longer trusted the old-fashioned Chekists with foreign connections’. When Yagoda in turn was exterminated in 1938, the ‘Zinoviev’ and ‘Kamenev’ bullets passed ‘like holy relics in a depraved distortion of the apostolic succession’ to his successor Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov. Two years later Yezhov was convicted of spying for Polish landowners, English noblemen and Japanese samurai. When taken to a special execution yard, with sloping floor and hosing facilities, Yezhov’s legs buckled and he was dragged weeping to meet the bullet. Similarly the executioner who shot Beria after Stalin’s death stuffed rags in his mouth to stifle the bawling.49
Denis Pritt attended the first Moscow show-trials of 1936. A former Tory voter and a King’s Counsel with a prosperous practice in capitalist Chancery cases, he had turned Red, and became the barrister chosen by the CPGB to defend party members accused of espionage. For fifteen years he was MP for North Hammersmith: after his expulsion from the Labour party in 1940 he continued for a decade to represent the constituency as a communist fellow-traveller; he was rewarded with the Stalin Peace Prize. ‘The Soviet Union is a civilised country, with … very fine lawyers and jurists,’ Pritt reported of a criminal state which deprived its subjects of every vestige of truth. The Moscow trials were a ‘great step’ towards placing Soviet justice at the forefront of ‘the legal systems of the modern world’. Vyshinsky, he said, resembled ‘a very intelligent and rather mild-mannered English businessman’, who ‘seldom raised his voice … never ranted … or thumped the table’, and was merely being forthright when he called the defendants ‘bandits and mad-dogs and suggested that they ought to be exterminated’. Any doubts about the guilt of Zinoviev and Kamenev were dispelled for Pritt by ‘their confessions [made] with an almost abject and exuberant completeness’. None of the defendants had ‘the haggard face, the twitching hand, the dazed expression, the bandaged head’ familiar from prisoners’ docks in capitalist jurisdictions. Bourgeois critics who vilified socialist justice exceeded the bounds of plausibility: ‘if they thus dismiss the whole case for the prosecution as a “frame-up”, it follows inescapably that Stalin and a substantial number of other high officials, including presumably the judges and the prosecutors, were themselves guilty of a foul conspiracy to procure the judicial murder of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and a fair number of other persons’.50
Stalin’s obsession with ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’ working within the Soviet Union is certainly a projection of Moscow’s activities abroad: plans and personnel for sabotage of British factories, transport and fuel depots in the event of the long-expected Anglo-Russian war were probably extensive. More than ever, after the purges, Stalin used gallows humour to intimidate his entourage. At a Kremlin banquet to welcome Charles de Gaulle in 1942, he proposed a toast: ‘I drink to my Commissar of Railways. He knows that if his railways failed to function, he would answer with his neck. This is wartime, gentlemen, so I use harsh words.’ Or again: ‘I raise my glass to my Commissar of Tanks. He knows that failure of his tanks to issue from the factories would cause him to hang.’ The commissars in question had to rise from their seats and proceed along the banqueting table clinking glasses. ‘
People call me a monster, but as you see, I make a joke of it,’ he chuckled to de Gaulle. Later he nudged the Free French leader and pointed at Molotov confabulating with Georges Bidault: ‘Machine-gun the diplomats, machine-gun them. Leave it to us soldiers to settle things.’51
Soviet Russia killed its own in their millions, tortured the children of disgraced leaders, urged other children to denounce their parents for political delinquency, used threats of the noose or the bullet as a work-incentive for its officials, and built slaughter-houses for the extermination of loyal servants. ‘There are no … private individuals in this country,’ Stalin told a newly appointed Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Maurice Peterson, in 1946. The best-organized and most productive Stalinist industry was the falsification of history. Blatant lies were symbols of status: the bigger the lies that went unchallenged, the higher one’s standing. Communist Russia liquidated trust throughout its territories. Every family constantly scrutinized their acquaintances, trying to spot the informers and provocateurs, or those who by association might bring down on them the lethal interest of the secret police. By the culmination of the purges in 1937, people were too scared to meet each other socially. Independent personal judgements on matters of doctrinal orthodoxy became impermissible. As Hugh Trevor-Roper noted in 1959, ‘the Russian historians who come to international conferences are like men from the moon: they speak a different language, talk of the “correct” and “incorrect” interpretations, make statements and refuse discussions’. When after thirty years of internal exile, Nadezhda Mandelstam returned to Moscow in 1965, she found that fear remained ubiquitous. ‘Nobody trusted anyone else, and every acquaintance was a suspected police informer. It somehow seemed as if the whole country was suffering from persecution mania.’52
In Stalin’s toxic suspicions we reach the kernel of this book: the destruction of trust. Purges, so Nikolai Bukharin told Stalin in 1937, guaranteed the primacy of the leadership by arousing in the upper echelons of the party ‘an everlasting distrust’ of each other. Stalin went further, and said in Nikita Khrushchev’s presence in 1951, ‘I’m finished, I trust no one, not even myself.’ Soviet Russia’s ultimate triumph was to destroy reciprocal trust within the political society of its chief adversary.53
CHAPTER 2
The Intelligence Division
Every power system must defend itself against spies, traitors, rebels, saboteurs and mutineers. Cunning ambitions – both internal and external – threaten every sovereignty. Individual vanities endanger national security. Accordingly, hidden away inside the great machinery of states, there have always been the smaller apparatuses of espionage, counter-espionage and counter-subversion. Yet spies, double agents, couriers and informers are little use abroad or in the homeland, nor can the collection by licit means of foreign and domestic information be made intelligible, without offices to process material and turn it into intelligence. In England, as in Russia, the organized collection of reports and intercepts on exiles, foreign enemies and domestic rebels reached maturity in the sixteenth century.
Pre-Victorian espionage
One of the ablest men in Elizabethan England, Sir Francis Walsingham, was the country’s earliest spymaster. When in 1571 the Florentine banker Roberto di Ridolfi led an international conspiracy to kill England’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth and to crown the Catholic Queen of Scotland, Mary, in her stead, Walsingham’s organization foiled the plot, with the help of informants, torture, intercepted messages and deciphered codes. He had fifty-three agents at foreign courts, and was adept at persuading Catholics to betray one another. His apparatus detected further plots to depose Elizabeth. After the foiling of the most notable of these conspiracies, led by Anthony Babington in 1586, the Queen told her parliament, ‘Good Neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in Trust I have found Treason.’1
Sectarian animosity between Catholics and Protestants, and dynastic rivalries between adherents of the Tudors, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, involved foreign conspirators, aggrieved exiles, domestic malcontents and headstrong adventurers. European power-centres were monitored from London. The Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, used countless paid spies during the 1650s and was said to have ‘carried the secrets of all the Princes of Europe at his girdle’. The Venetian Ambassador in London, reporting on the Protectorate, declared that ‘no Government on earth discloses its own acts less and knows those of others more precisely than that of England’.2
During the 1720s the South Sea Company financial scandal set other precedents in the spiriting away from prosecutors of malefactors with disturbing secret knowledge. The company’s cashier, Robert Knight, after attempting to blackmail government ministers into protecting him, and reluctant to undergo close interrogation, took ship for Calais with his son and namesake. The two Robert Knights then hastened to the Austrian Netherlands, where a junior English diplomat acted on his own initiative, pursued the elder Knight with a troop of hussars and had him incarcerated, under heavy security, in the citadel of Antwerp. Although the House of Commons sought Knight’s extradition, their purpose was not punishment but political gamesmanship: the opposition wished him to divulge material incriminating office-holders. The monarch and the government were correspondingly anxious to prevent his repatriation and to silence the disruptive stories that he might tell. There followed an intricate ‘screen’: the Georgian word for a cover-up. After negotiations between London and Vienna, Knight was transferred to Luxembourg, and then taken at night to the Ardennes and set free. The authorities meanwhile arranged for a hole to be dug in the wall of the Knights’ cell, and for a rope-ladder to be lowered from it, in order to bolster the pretence that they had escaped. The determination of London office-holders that the secrets of Knight’s financial chicanery should not be publicly aired was akin to the aversion of twentieth-century authorities to sharing security failures.3
Eighteenth-century uprisings by Scottish Jacobites against the government in London were defeated by secret intelligence, disinformation and betrayals as well as by force of arms. Both sides employed messenger-spies, such as the Jacobite innkeeper who in 1745 tried to cut his throat after being captured with papers from Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, hidden in his glove. The London government gained an important advantage when the Jacobite cipher code was seized by a mob in Cumberland from the Duke of Perth’s travelling servant. After two years of imprisonment in the Tower of London, the clan chief Alastair Ruadh MacDonell of Glengarry was turned, and under the alias of Pickle acted as a secret informant on Jacobite activities after 1747. ‘Tall, athletic, with a frank and pleasing face, Pickle could never be taken for a traitor,’ wrote his biographer. ‘The man was brave, for he moved freely in France, England, and Scotland, well knowing that the sgian [small dagger] was sharpened for his throat if he were detected.’ He was not a paid informer, but a conceited man who enjoyed the secret importance of double-dealing. His second alias was Random, which suggests his liking for risk. Collectors of antiquities and works of art, who roamed Europe in pursuit of their avocation, as well as the dealers from whom they bought their rarities, had good cover for underhand activities as political agents. There were ample opportunities for gossip, covert surveillance, gambits and counter-espionage by connoisseurs who encountered Jacobites in exile. Much useless tittle-tattle from Rome or Florence about the Old and Young Pretenders was sold to London at high prices, which were paid tardily or not at all.4
The Home Office employed informers and agents provocateurs during the French revolutionary wars and their turbulent sequel. Lord Sidmouth, Home Secretary during 1812–22, became convinced by his sources, so he told the House of Lords in 1817, that ‘scarcely a cottage had escaped the perseverance of the agents of mischief’. Radicals, warned Sidmouth, ‘had parliamentary reform in their mouths, but rebellion and revolution in their hearts’. The Cato Street conspirator Arthur Thistlewood was incriminated by a bevy of police spies, including John Castle, a maker of paper dolls for children, who was also a bigamist and pimp,
and George Edwards, a maker of plaster figurines, whose bestselling line was a bust of the headmaster of Eton which pupils bought to use in the manner of a coconut shy. The defence of the realm from internal foes has always needed its Pickles, Randoms and Castles.5
Mid-nineteenth-century London became a haven for political exiles (predominantly German, but some Italian). Most were quiescent refugees who sat smoking, talking, eating and drinking in Soho dives, but one account of 1859 presents a minority group of active conspirators gathering in a small Whitechapel Gasthaus known as the Tyrants’ Entrails: ‘the incandescent ones, the roaring, raging, rampaging, red-hot refugees; the amateurs in vitriol, soda-bottles full of gunpowder, and broken bottles for horses’ hoofs’. The surveillance of these irreconcilables was the preserve of foreign police spies. A Prussian spy reported in 1853 on one exile who had been born in the Rhineland, had been radicalized in Berlin and was living in two rooms in Dean Street, Soho: ‘everything is broken down, tattered and torn, with a half inch of dust over everything … manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as children’s toys, and rags and tatters of his wife’s sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash – in a word, everything top-turvy’. As to the paterfamilias, ‘Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he rarely does, and he likes to get drunk. Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has great work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the world.’ It was in this squalid chaos that Karl Marx did the preliminary thinking that led to Das Kapital.6
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