by Mark Mazower
CHAPTER FOUR
Border Crossing, 1919
Refugees are rarely in a position to choose their traveling companions, and when Max fled Petrograd, it was in the company of a group of smugglers and black marketeers. There was also a wealthy banker and his wife, and a leading Menshevik opponent of the regime, Eva Broido. She was the only one of them he knew. She had a bad cough—a mark of her years in Siberia—and had brought her twelve-year-old daughter to make the crossing with her.
Heavy fighting had been under way for months between the Bolsheviks and the Polish army, so they were heading for a war zone: Max and his companions hoped to cross the front during the winter lull. From Petrograd a train took them south through the forests to the small railway town of Nevel. There they changed into a cattle car pulled by a smaller locomotive, which stopped now and then for troops to clamber on, men arriving for the coming spring offensive. When the train eventually halted, as it seemed in the middle of nowhere, the black marketeers and the soldiers got out and trudged off and the others were told to wait. They could hear distant gunfire but there were no dwellings to be seen. Snow stretched across the fields to the horizon. I wonder what went through their minds as the train reversed away and it grew dark. Eventually a guide did appear, with a sledge and a horse to load up their belongings, and they trudged through the drifts until they reached their destination, the old town of Polotsk.
The front had come to rest along the frozen Dvina River that bisected the town, and most of the inhabitants on the Russian side had fled. For several weeks, Max and the rest of the little group made themselves as comfortable as they could in the cellar of a burned-out house. They lit a fire and a local man brought them food while they waited for word that they could cross. The Broido girl spent the days reading popular French novels that she found in the house. Many years later, she could not forget the strange contrast between the abandoned streets outside and the book-lined rooms of the empty house in which they were holed up. The adventures of Rocambole that she devoured, classic nineteenth-century yarns, featured a fearless hero always beset by disaster, yet somehow finding a way to embark upon the next set of daring deeds. Her mother told her about her own experiences of reading in prison, of being so gripped by a Dumas novel that she was reluctant to leave it when the day came for her to be released. Her daughter felt the same way when the guns across the river finally fell silent and she was obliged to leave her beloved Rocambole behind unfinished.
Once the crossing was arranged, they were told to leave any letters, printed documents, and photographs, and to carry only small sums of money. Max was traveling light; he had left most of his belongings in Petrograd. At dawn, clutching their bundles, they trudged through the snow down to the first checkpoint by the bank. Max waited in line, but when his turn came the Red Army guards were bored and scarcely looked at his papers. Across the ice, and through the Polish lines, he and the others found lodgings for the night with an elderly Jewish man who led them off up the other bank.
It is hard to estimate now what risks they faced. Certainly large sums of money had changed hands to smooth their passage and Max appears to have been briefly arrested at some point, paying out another 15,000 rubles to be released—a sum that dwarfed the 300 rubles he had spent on his train ticket out of Petrograd. Then there was the pretty Lithuanian nurse who had joined their party in Polotsk and crossed with them, hoping to meet up with her mother on the other side. They were shocked when the Polish officer who was arranging their transport out of the town insisted she stay behind. Her companions protested—it was obvious what he wanted—but the next day, when they left, she was nowhere to be seen. The passage across the border had been dangerous for them all, but women on their own were always the most vulnerable. Max’s companionship had probably given Eva Broido and her daughter some protection. But none of them had been able to help the nurse. Broido’s daughter, not far off her in age, never forgot the scene.
In Vilna, Max said good-bye to the Broidos and made his way to his brother Zachar’s apartment. The streets were patrolled by Polish soldiers and paramilitaries. The city he had grown up in, the city of his Bundist past, his former home, had suffered badly. As German rule disintegrated, there was one short-lived administration after another—seven or eight of them in two years. The Red Army had tried to set up a Soviet republic. Then the Poles pushed the Russian forces out, and in April 1919, as the Poles took over, they targeted the town’s Jews and killed dozens of them in the belief they had supported the Reds. One of them had been a close comrade of Max’s before the war, a brilliant Yiddish writer and publisher named Vayter who had been with him in Łódź. Max did not linger. Once he had obtained the papers he needed and contacted his employer in London, he traveled on to Warsaw and then took the train across Europe to Paris. By the end of April 1920, after a six-year absence, he was back in his lodgings in North London.
CHAPTER FIVE
Brits and Bolsheviks
“At the request of Mr. Cassatt, I am writing you the following lines regarding the present situation in Russia.” Thus, in impeccable English, begins the analysis that Max wrote at his employers’ request shortly after his return. Even today it is unnerving to see with what lucidity he understood the complex political dynamics of a country in the throes of civil war. He anticipated that the regime would stay in power despite the ongoing war with the Poles, and he outlined to his employers the mechanisms through which the government was taking over private concerns. The key thing, he advised them, was to work through the Russian trade delegation that was en route to London: “There is no other way to do business with Soviet-Russia.”
Max had fled Russia at the end of 1919 because he feared a return visit from the Cheka. The charge of espionage was bandied around by the Soviet authorities, then and later, and generally of course it was unfounded, the product of paranoia not evidence. Nevertheless, the British secret intelligence service, then in its infancy, was active in Russia and was certainly using businessmen to help gather intelligence on the Bolsheviks. The question of whether Max might have been spying for the British is not a stupid one.
Those years were, in a way, the start of the Cold War and there were larger-than-life characters on both sides: Dad had always been fascinated by them. We used to talk about Sidney Reilly, certainly the most colorful of MI6’s early agents in Soviet Russia, and one of the bookshelves in Dad’s office at the top of our house was dominated by the fast-paced accounts of figures like Paul Dukes, another MI6 man, whose fluent Russian had been learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. I wondered if the thought about Max being a spy had crossed Dad’s mind. But because MI6 keeps its archives firmly shut, checking in its files was not straightforward. The best I could do was to explain what I was after to a fellow historian, a colleague who was used to roaming the no-man’s-land between academia and the intelligence world, and as she had some sort of security clearance or access, she was kind enough to check. Nothing there, was the answer. So that had to be that.
Yet once one’s mind starts running down such channels, it takes on a momentum of its own and I was reluctant to end the sleuthing, not least because espionage seemed to provide such a dramatically satisfying explanation for Max’s determined silence. So I turned to the countervailing possibility: Had Max perhaps become a spy for the communists? It seemed unlikely, given the long animosity between them and the Bund. On the other hand, Bundists did move into the Bolshevik camp after 1917, some more willingly than others, and one can retrospectively invent all kinds of reasons why it might have happened to him.
I have already mentioned that through his work in the Bund Max might have easily come to know Feliks Dzerzhinsky and others whom the revolutions of 1917 brought to power in Russia. But there was the London phase of his life too. A few Bolsheviks had also been living there before the First World War and some of them might have known Max from then, especially as they frequented the same neighborhoods around Hampstead Heath. Perhaps the most important of these was
Lenin’s former arms procurer and smuggler in chief, Maxim Litvinov. After 1917, Litvinov quickly rose to the highest echelons of power, and by the time he was forced from office by Stalin on the eve of the Second World War, he was Europe’s longest-serving foreign minister. He intrigued me because his background was so similar to Max’s and there were many points when their paths might have intersected.
They had been born only two years apart in nearby towns in the Pale and both had gravitated to the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and then been imprisoned. They had escaped—Max from Siberia, Litvinov from the main prison in Kiev—within a few months of each other and both had ended up living in North London before the First World War. Litvinov married an Englishwoman, Ivy Low, and settled down with her and their baby in Golders Green, becoming the informal leader of the small group of Lenin’s followers in the capital.
Finding out who exactly had known whom among the Russian exiles in London in those days is not at all easy. Revolutionaries were not good at writing down gossip and tended to subordinate the personal to the political. An evocative memoir of those prewar years by one member of the Russian community, Ivan Maisky, made one thing clear: Ideological differences had not stopped Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and others in the Russian socialist movement from mixing. Maisky himself, who would later become the Soviet ambassador to London, was a Menshevik before 1914, yet he had seen plenty of Litvinov and other followers of Lenin. He is a wonderful guide to some of the extraordinary personalities he encountered—the aging anarchist Prince Kropotkin; a picnic on Parliament Hill with the revolutionary feminist Alexandra Kollontai. But there is nothing in his book about Max.
Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, is more accommodating than MI6, so I did manage to see some of their files on Bolsheviks in London. Litvinov’s has recently been declassified and fascinating it is, with hilarious accounts of polite interrogations with Colonel Kell at Scotland Yard one minute and dinner parties with Bloomsbury worthies like Bertrand Russell the next. But there is no mention of Max. Nor does he appear in the equally voluminous mass of papers the snoops collected on a fellow comrade of Litvinov’s, Fyodor Rothstein, a “red-hot socialist” (according to the file) who had been born in the Pale just two years before Max. Rothstein had lived in Highgate, across from Waterlow Park, and most of the Russian socialists visiting London seemed to have passed through his house at one time or another. By the war he was firmly in Lenin’s camp and later became the Soviet ambassador to Persia. But he had moved in Bund circles in the East End earlier, and he had a brother named Samuel, and there was a Samuel Rothstein who was an early business partner of Max’s in these years. Still, this was very little to go on.
There was only one other person besides Maisky who I knew had written about the social circles of London’s Bolsheviks, and that was Litvinov’s wife, Ivy; somewhere there was an unfinished autobiography that talked about their early years together. Her papers are scattered across several continents, but a number of boxes are held at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and I made an appointment to visit the archive. It was a place I knew well. Years earlier I had done my doctorate there and my supervisor, a wise, deeply humane anthropologist called John Campbell, had died only weeks before Dad. His grave under the trees at Great Tew in the Cotswolds was a spot I visited regularly. I felt abiding affection for his memory and this extended to the college too. I wondered what I might find there. I had always been dimly aware of its purportedly close connections to British intelligence during the Cold War—devotees of John le Carré will remember the odd obscure reference to St. Antony’s in his books—but it had never occurred to me that I would be looking in that direction for the sake of my own family’s history.
An old Victorian convent had formed the original college building, and part of it has now been converted into a comfortable reading room for students of the vanished Soviet empire. On the table the college archivist had placed a single enormous cardboard box: inside was a mass of amateurishly typed drafts and counter-drafts in no particular order. Ivy Low had moved on the margins of London literary life before she met Litvinov, and she had evidently been a prolific writer. I had to wade through reams of irrelevant material before I came closer to what I was looking for. It was just a couple of pages, an incomplete draft in which she tried to reconstruct what had happened when news of the revolution in Russia had first reached her and Litvinov in North London in the spring of 1917. She had just given birth to their first child. It had been a momentous time:
The nurse who brought me the baby to feed in the morning said there was nothing special in the paper. “Just another Zeppelin raid over the West End.” As Golder’s Green was in the west end (or at least the northwest end) this was of course nothing special. Maxim called me to the telephone. “Haven’t you heard? The revolution has broken out in Russia.” I was quick to see where it affected us. “Darling, we’re not refugees any more!” I spent the rest of the morning talking to Aunt Edith and Catherine over the telephone.[…]
Maxim came round to the nursing home later that same day more excited than I had ever seen him, continually mopping at his forehead, though it was March. He and Mitrov had been to the House to call out Ramsay MacDonald … and ask him what he was going to do about the Revolution? It seemed Ramsay MacDonald was not quite sure at the moment, he hadn’t had time to think it over yet. Next they called at Chesham House (the old Russian embassy) and asked them why they hadn’t taken down the portraits of the Royal Family in the hall. They weren’t sure at the Embassy, either, though Maxim noted the glances of interest and he thought sympathy from certain youthful members of the embassy staff.
The London Russians immediately applied to the British Govt for a convoy to Stockholm, on their way to Moscow. But the Govt hedged, first sending over two old stagers, Plekhanov and Chaikovsky (Kropotkin) (Were they SRs?) who had been lying very low in London throughout the war so that hardly anybody realised they were there. (Perhaps this isn’t true?) The Govt knew they could depend on these old stagers to support continuation of the war at all costs. Whereas the SD group contained subversive foundation members of the Bolshevik faction (?) like Litvinoff (who else? Mitrov was a Menshevik. Rothstein? Maisky? It would be nice to have a few names here.)1
As the question marks and strike-throughs suggest, when Ivy started writing this, in the years after her husband’s death, she was elderly and there was a lot she was not sure about or could not remember. Even so, one name leapt out at me because I had come across it already in some of our family letters—Mitrov, the man who had gone with Litvinov to the House of Commons in March 1917. He was a former Duma deputy, a Menshevik, who had ended up in Hampstead and was making a living as an expert on the Baku petroleum industry in Azerbaijan. He also happened to be a friend or acquaintance of Max. Into the 1930s, after Mitrov had returned to live in the USSR, Max and Frouma followed his news and tried to help out when his son came to England to study. To date he remains the only link I have been able to trace between Max and Litvinov, the man whom I have come to see as leading a kind of parallel life to Max, who had (unlike Max) opted early on for Bolshevism and for the return to Russia and who was, as the Soviet foreign minister, to become one of the most prominent and influential figures in the Soviet Union. Still, it is precious little to go on, not least because Mitrov was not even a Bolshevik, and so one has to say that the evidence for Max associating with the Bolsheviks in London before the First World War is limited, and as for spying for them, nonexistent. He really does seem to have spent most of the time after 1909 selling typewriters in Russia. There is a fading photo of him standing outside a Kirghiz yurt in 1914; there is a set of hand-tinted postcards of Japanese geishas, which he always kept and which he may have bought during a holiday there during his travels. If this was all cover for the work of a secret agent, it was extremely effective and he hid his tracks well.2
Max’s later connection to the Russian cooperative movement, on the other hand, is demonstrable. In 1919 his join
ing it had been merely precautionary. But in the early 1920s, before formal diplomatic relations were established between Britain and Soviet Russia, the cooperative movement became, as he had predicted to his bosses at Yost, the main mechanism for political interaction between the two countries, and it became especially important in Anglo-Russian relations with the establishment in London of Arcos, the Soviet cooperative trading arm. Arcos was always suspected by British intelligence of being a nest of spies, and the police mounted a ham-fisted raid on its premises in 1927, which ruptured relations between the two countries for a time, although little enough was found to warrant the intervention.
Max did have contacts in Arcos because several former Bundists were high-ranking officials there. There was even a young Grodno relative of his on the staff, Isaak Jezierski, who had been stranded in London by the Russo-Polish War. In the summer of 1920, the penniless Jezierski bumped into Max on Oxford Street: to the younger man’s surprise, the uncle he remembered as a hard-up revolutionary appeared to have become a wealthy man. Happy to repay the debts and kindness Jezierski’s father had shown him in the past, Max supported Isaak financially until he landed the Arcos job. Did Max benefit from his work in Arcos? Since Jezierski was a young accountant, and not a communist, the truth was probably much more banal. That Anglo-Soviet trade in the early 1920s ran through Arcos certainly did not mean that all the people or firms associated with it were engaged in intelligence work. The Arcos officials who had been in the Bund, and may well have known Max, were not necessarily spies, and any London-based businessman trading in Russia, as Max was, would naturally have gone through them.