Adventures of a British Master Spy

by Sidney Reilly

  The comrade with the bandoliers and the revolvers called a greeting to me for he knew me. I was Comrade Relinsky of the Tcheka-Criminel. I returned his greeting and passed on, picking my way carefully over the filthy street.

  The Cheremeteff Pereulok was in the shade. It was a relief to turn into it from the white glare of the main street. I stopped at No. 3. I turned round. Nobody else was in the street. I was unobserved.

  I slipped into the house and mounted the stairs. They were dirty and covered with litter and stunk abominably. The whole house was deathly silent. It might have been deserted – in the hands of the housebreakers probably. As a matter of fact it was a large block of flats, more than 200 altogether, and all of them were occupied by more than one family. I came to a halt before a door, listening and looking very carefully up and down the stairs before I knocked. The door opened about half an inch and the point of a nose might be seen peering round it.

  ‘Is that you, Dagmara?’ I asked.

  ‘M. Constantine.’ There came the sound of a chain being removed, the door opened, and I slipped in. The door closed quietly behind me.

  I was M. Constantine, Chief of the British secret intelligence service in Soviet Russia.

  • • •

  In the spring of 1918, on returning from a mission, I found my superiors awaiting me with some impatience. I was instructed to proceed to Russia without delay. The progress of affairs in that part of the world was filling the Allies with consternation. Following the breakdown of Kerenski’s abortive administration and the accession of the Bolsheviks to power, Russia had ceased hostilities against Germany. Germany, relieved of all apprehension in the East, was attacking on the West with reinforced troops and redoubled ardour.

  Of course the part played by Germany in the Russian breakdown was well known and my instructions were to counter, as far as possible, the work being done by the German agents, and to report on the general feeling in the Russian capital. My superiors clung to the opinion that Russia might still be brought to her right mind in the matter of her obligations to the Allies. Agents from France and the United States were already in Moscow and Petrograd working to that end.

  After my experiences as an espionage agent in Germany, my Russian task seemed safe and easy. I knew Petrograd as a man does know the city in which he has lived from childhood to middle age. I was returning home after an absence of only two years. I had many friends in the city. I knew where I could go when I arrived there. I knew upwards of a score of people on whose co-operation I could implicitly rely. In short the whole mission promised to be the very antithesis of my adventures in Germany, where I had to keep up a perpetual disguise, where any moment might be my last, where often I had no idea where to turn or what to do next.

  Accordingly it was Sidney Reilly who arrived quite openly in Petrograd to visit his birthplace and the cari luoghi of his youth.

  I had not been prepared for the full extent of the change which had come over my birthplace. Petrograd, which once could challenge comparison with any city in the world, bore a ruinous and tumbledown aspect. The streets were dirty, reeking, squalid. Houses here and there lay in ruins. No attempt was made to clean the streets, which were strewn with litter and garbage. There was no police except for the secret police which held the country in thrall, no municipal administration, no sanitary arrangements, no shops open, no busy passengers on the pavements, no hustle of traffic on the roads. The place had sunk into utter stagnation, and all normal life seemed to have ceased in the city.

  When I had last been in Petrograd in 1915, food had been scarce and bread queues a feature of the landscape. Now, in 1918, the bread queues were still there, but there was no food at all. The great mass of the people was starving.

  It was impossible to obtain any sort of conveyance. Carriages were not to be had for love nor money, if there were any of either at that time in Russia. I had already determined on my first port of refuge: the house of an old friend, Elena Michailovna, who lived in the Torgovaya Ulitza. It was a longish distance from the Fontanka, where I had been landed, but I walked there with as good a grace as I could muster. Everybody I passed avoided my glance and shuffled by with obvious suspicion and terror. Petrograd was in a state of panic. Slowly the atmosphere of horror, exuded from the very walls and pavements, seemed to grip at my heart, until I was in a mood to start at a shadow, and to my mingled embarrassment and amusement I was in a cold bath of perspiration when finally I reached my goal.

  Watching that I was not observed I slipped into the house. It might have been a necropolis I entered and my footfall awoke a thousand echoes. I stopped at the well-remembered door and rapped upon it, my knock reverberating strangely through the silent building. I had to knock three times before I heard answering footsteps creeping silently, stealthily, on the other side of the door.

  After another pause I knocked again and this time the door opened very silently, very slowly, very little upon its hinges.

  The silence was unnerving, but it was Elena Michailovna’s voice, which asked in tones of subdued alarm:

  ‘Who is there?’

  ‘It is I, Sidney Georgevitch,’ said I.

  A gasp of surprise answered me. A chain rattled, and the door was opened a little wider.

  ‘You,’ gasped Elena Michailovna incredulously. ‘You – back again in Petrograd,’ and she began to sob quietly with relief.

  And thus I came back to Petrograd.

  I had already worked out a plan of campaign.

  The first thing I did when I had billeted myself was to get into touch with some of the members of my old Petrograd set, whom I thought might be of service. I had to proceed with caution. Some might be fled, others dead, others under suspicion. It was not even impossible that some, despairing of the future, might have joined the Bolsheviks.

  However, as it happened, my lucky star was in the ascendant. The man on whose assistance I set more store than on that of all my other potential allies was immediately procurable. Grammatikoff was not only a scholar and a thinker, but a man of character. He had been long acquainted with me and his loyalty was above suspicion. It was a queer moment when I heard his voice over the wire. Two years had passed since last I spoke to him, and in those two years Russia had been turned upside down. It made our friendship seem immensely ancient somehow, as if we were survivors of a forgotten civilisation.

  In pursuance of my policy of appearing in my own person, I fixed an appointment with him at his office and went round to see him openly. Grammatikoff gave me a very graphic and terrible account of the position of affairs in Russia. The new masters were exercising a regime of bloodthirstiness and horror hardly equalled in history. The most ignorant and the most vile, everybody who conceived that they had a grievance against society were in the ascendancy. Russia, Grammatikoff said, was in the hands of the criminal classes and of lunatics released from the asylums. Nobody did any work. There was a growing want of all the necessaries of life. People were starving. The vast majority were prepared to rise in revolt, but there was nobody to lead them. The terror of the Tcheka was heavy on every man.

  All the higher officials of the Tcheka are members of the Communist Party, and the names of some of them are known. But who are its servants what man shall say? The man who has been your friend from infancy, the woman you love, nay, your parents or your children may be in the service of the Tcheka against you. It is a terrible, a gruesome, ghastly thing. Nobody trusts anybody any more; no man dares commit a secret even to his bosom friend. Some of its work is done by provocateurs, men who deliberately foment counter-revolutionary plots, and when they have engineered a conspiracy, which is just about to burst into open flame, betray it to their masters. The streets run with blood, and one more counter-revolutionary plot is discovered and avenged.

  In the foul cells of the Butyrsky at Moscow sit scores of the wretched victims of the Tcheka. The ‘investigators’ employ every diabolical device, every ghastly torture ever invented by the fiendish ingenuity of man to wri
ng from them a confession or a betrayal. They are held under examination without rest or food until the reason goes, and in their madness they reveal their complicity in plots, real or imaginary, against the Bolshevik power.

  Such is the Tcheka, which ministers to the preachers of the foulest and most horrible gospel known in the history of the world. Such are the means by which, unless it is checked and that soon, Bolshevism will master every country in the world. And it can only be checked by an organisation as subterranean, as secret, as mysterious, as ferocious and inhuman as itself.

  In Petrograd, however, I was but a bird of passage. The capital of Russia and the headquarters of Bolshevism were located in Moscow, whither I was now ready to proceed. But here an unforeseen difficulty interposed. Travelling by railway between Petrograd and Moscow was only possible on a pass, and passes were forbidden to all but officials. ‘Divide et impera’ was the Bolshevik motto.

  In this difficulty I was able to avail myself of Grammatikoff’s assistance. Grammatikoff had charge of a fine library, and among the Bolsheviks then in Moscow was the bibliophile General Brouevitch. Brouevitch had approached Grammatikoff with an offer to buy some of his books. At my suggestion Grammatikoff offered, if Brouevitch would secure him a pass, to come to Moscow, bringing me with him. The Bolshevik general was charmed and Grammatikoff and myself set out for Moscow under official favour. And Moscow was a city of the damned.

  Something like this, I thought, hell must be – paved with desolation, filth, squalor, fiendish cruelty, abject terror, blood, lust, starvation. The Bolsheviks were masters of Russia.

  A city of the damned. Slowly it sank into stagnation; hoardings went up to cover dust and rubble and ruin, or did not go up and left dust and rubble and ruin naked. There had been looting at first, but now there was nothing left to loot. The rabble had been riotous, full of the lust of blood and destruction. Now the rabble was cowed and frightened, except for the few that were Bolsheviks. Everywhere was starvation, food queues that had forgotten to be clamorous, dearth, stagnation. And over all silent, secret, ferocious, menacing, hung the crimson shadow of the Tcheka. The new masters were ruling in Russia.

  A city of the damned. Bolshevism, the new bantling of slow time, had been baptised in the blood of the bourgeoisie. Among its leaders were those who had been before oppressed by society – whatever they were, criminals, assassins, murderers, gunmen, desperadoes. The more serious their crimes had been, the heavier the penalties hanging over their heads at the time when all prisoners in the state prisons were released, the greater was their grievance against society and the greater was their welcome to the ranks of Bolshevism. A man who could read and write was eyed askance; the illiterates were obviously of the oppressed, and now their time had come.

  The premium put on ignorance among the high Bolshevik officials was of the greatest value to the British secret service. Many of my agents operated with passports which were something more than dubious, and which were frequently scanned with an air of great knowingness by Commissars, who could neither read nor write.

  The hated bourgeoisie, many of whom had been among the prime movers in the revolution of the previous year, were put to work for the new masters. There they were cleaning the streets beneath the watchful eye of an armed workman. In each block of flats there had been constituted a committee of servant girls, yard-keepers, cleaners, porters, who beneath the new banner of liberty ceased to do any work, and carried off from the flats of their erstwhile masters and mistresses such furniture as they coveted for the better decoration of their own apartments. For furniture, of course, belonged not to yourself, but to the community. At any moment a party of comrades might arrive and make their choice out of your belongings.

  Here and there, pathetic attempts were made to carry on as if nothing in particular had happened, spasmodic attempts at retaining some of the decencies of civilisation, which flickered precariously for a time, and then – blackness.

  And everywhere there was a current of murmuring, of bitterness, of counter-revolution.

  The Bolsheviks laid this at the door of the Allied missions. There were still at this time representatives of civilised countries in the City of the Terror. A German embassy was resident there in charge of Count von Mirbach, and in opposition a British mission led by Mr Bruce Lockhart. There was an American consulate under Poole and a French under Grenard. Furthermore there were Allied agents in the city, an American Kalamatiano and a French de Vertemont. But though I had been informed of their presence I judged it best to keep clear of them, thinking that my mission could be best fulfilled if I worked on my own, and employed the assistance of Russian accomplices only.

  Brouevitch received Grammatikoff and myself very graciously. Grammatikoff introduced me by my own name, informing him that, though English by nationality, I had been born in Russia and lived there all my life, and was in fact to all intents and purposes Russian. I corroborated this story and added that I was very interested in Bolshevism, the triumph of which had brought me back to Russia.

  Brouevitch listened to this declaration which, after all, was quite true, with great complacency, and in response to my request gave us every facility for studying Bolshevism in its cradle.

  Nobody could be more officious on our behalf than Brouevitch. It was he who enabled us to attend a meeting of the Soviets in the Grand Theatre, where Lenin in his address made a revealing distinction between the leaders and the rank and file of the Communist Party.

  ‘The period of destruction is over,’ said Lenin. ‘The bourgeoisie is extinct, Korniloff is dead, the White Army has crumbled away, Koltchak has been finally repulsed. We must now begin the construction of the socialist state. If we have not the socialist discipline, if we do not construct the socialist state, the capitalists and imperialists of the entire world will fall upon us. We,’ said Lenin, with a sweep of his arm embracing all the occupants of the stage at the Grand Theatre at Moscow, ‘we will have to make our terms, you’ – with a gesture towards the crowded auditorium, where the deputies or the local soviets had their seats – ‘you will perish.’

  ‘You say that the bourgeoisie is extinct,’ cried Gay, the notorious anarchist, ‘you say that the reign of terror can stop and the period of reconstruction begin. Well, here is a story: a man was very ill and the doctor said to his wife, “Madam, we can do no more for your husband. All the evidence of science shows that he will be dead tomorrow.” By chance the lady met the doctor again two years after, and said to him, “Doctor, my husband is still alive!” “Yes, you think he is alive,” replied the doctor. “For you he is alive. For science he is dead.”’

  The reign of terror went on. The bourgeoisie continued to be shot down by the hundred. The Tcheka struck, struck, struck again and again. The streets ran with blood. Of the obscene and ghastly horrors of the Butyrsky, mercifully we can form no estimate.

  ‘All the Bolsheviks are sadists at heart,’ said to me the last doctor to practise in Moscow.

  It soon became obvious that Brouevitch intended to be obliging to the point of embarrassment. We were permitted to go nowhere unattended, and, so that we should not be unduly embarrassed, our watchers had instructions to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Wherever we went we were followed. It became obvious that, if I were to carry out the mission on which I was engaged, I must disappear.

  It was not difficult for us to find somebody to accompany Grammatikoff back to Petrograd in my place. Moscow was full of people who were anxious to leave it, and our only task was to light on someone who bore a passable resemblance to me. Both Grammatikoff and myself had friends in the city, and could call on assistance from many quarters. Indeed my visits to one or two old friends were known to Brouevitch and the substitution was made with greater ease than might have been anticipated.

  When the morning arrived I watched from safe concealment Grammatikoff and the pseudo-Sidney Reilly set off from the station. I knew that hidden eyes were watching them, that unseen spies were dogging their footsteps, a
nd I prayed that they might reach their destination without their secret being discovered. By the greatest good fortune the day was squally and my representative with his nose appearing from a voluminous, if ragged coat, bore a sufficiently close resemblance to me.

  Thus I changed my identity and became M. Constantine. M. Constantine’s future was mapped out for him. It would of course be unwise for him to visit any of the known friends of Sidney Reilly, but in his pocket he had a letter addressed by Grammatikoff to Dagmara K.

  Dagmara was Grammatikoff’s niece and, as such, of course, perfectly well known to me, though I had not seen her since before the outbreak of the war. She was now a dancer at the arts theatre and shared a flat in the Cheremeteff Pereulok with two other young actresses, the Mlles S. Now among the colleagues of these young ladies at the arts theatre was Mlle Friede, sister of no less a personage than Colonel Friede, who at that time was chief of the Bolshevik staff in Moscow. It became obvious at once of what use Dagmara could be to me and why I wanted an introduction to the charming Mlle Friede.

  It was no surprise to me to learn that Mlle Friede and indeed her brother, the Bolshevik Chief of Staff, were not Bolsheviks. Most of Moscow was anti-communist. The town swarmed with White Russians. Many of them were in the employment of the Bolshevik authorities. By the granting of extraordinary privileges, particularly in the all important matter of rations, the Bolsheviks were endeavouring to increase their membership. People slipped into the Communist Party very easily. I saw the advisability of becoming a member myself.