Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  Nearly all other male political emigrants in the British, French and Swiss revolutionary colonies got back to Russia if they wanted to make the journey. Many of the travellers, moreover, had it in mind to throw out the Provisional Government; and some were determined to stop Russia from continuing in the war.

  The shortest route to Russia from France or Switzerland, of course, would have been by rail across Europe. But this was impossible at a time when two military fronts with their millions of troops and artillery were stretched out from north to south down the middle of the continent. Revolutionaries based in Swiss cities had the theoretical option of travelling across Germany to Scandinavia and entering Russia via Finland. The snag was that Russian citizens on German territory were enemy aliens in wartime. Most Russians had fled Germany and Austria at the outbreak of hostilities rather than face possible arrest by police or a beating up on the streets. But the German government had always seen the advantage of subsidizing Russian and Ukrainian revolutionary groups that aimed to bring down the Romanov monarchy; and when Nicholas II abdicated, the German Foreign Office expressed interest in schemes to infiltrate anti-war revolutionaries back into Russia. Diplomats in Switzerland began negotiations for the transit of Russian revolutionaries by rail across Germany to the Baltic coast. Lenin and his Bolsheviks were courted through intermediaries. Since Lenin not only wanted an end to Russian involvement in the war but actively advocated Russia’s defeat, the German high command could not wish for a better helpmate.

  Together with the Menshevik leader Yuli Martov, Lenin explored the opportunities, but Martov worried about the absence of sanction by the Provisional Government. He hated the liberals and thought of them as warmongers and imperialists. But he was loath to risk going back without an official imprimatur. Lenin was made of tougher mettle. He had taken too long to return from Switzerland in the 1905 revolutionary crisis and paid the price of diminished political influence. He was not going to repeat that mistake in 1917.

  But he had to be circumspect. If the Provisional Government could in any way accuse him of collaborating with Germany he would be in jeopardy on arrival. He might even be shot for treason. He therefore struck a deal with the German ambassador Gisbert von Romberg that he and his supporters would travel over German territory without contact with Germans. Not even the driver or guard of the locomotive was to approach them. This would call for a ‘sealed’ train. German ministers readily agreed to Lenin’s terms.23 For his part Lenin sought to entice other anti-war emigrants like Karl Radek into putting their names down for the trip. Radek, a bright and witty Polish Jew with a record of criticizing Lenin in past years, belonged simultaneously to the German Social-Democratic Party and a far-left Polish Marxist organization. If he and Martov joined the train, the initiative would look less like an exclusively Bolshevik scheme. Radek consented but Martov continued to refuse. Although Martov was on the far left of Menshevism and deplored the Russian war effort, he continued to worry about being tainted by association with Imperial Germany. Nothing Lenin said would make him budge. Nevertheless thirty-two assorted political emigrants, mainly Bolsheviks, turned up in the cold on 9 April at the railway station in Zurich. Lenin was accompanied by his wife Nadezhda and his principal adjutant Grigori Zinoviev. His ex-lover Inessa Armand was also in the group — and Radek, renowned for his scabrous wit, was cracking jokes from the moment the train departed.24

  Nearly everyone felt pleasantly entertained except Lenin, who took exception to the noise coming from the next-door compartment where Radek, Inessa, Olga Ravich and Varvara Safarova spent the entire time larking about. Olga Ravich had a shrieking voice when she laughed, and Lenin gruffly hauled her out into the corridor until her companions rescued her; but he then told them again to keep the noise down. Throughout the trip he was a killjoy: he was determined to get on with his writing as the train chugged its way through Stuttgart, Frankfurt-on-Main and Berlin on its route to the ferry port at Sassnitz. He reprimanded anyone who smoked. When he saw a queue building up for the toilets, he introduced a ticketed waiting system — this calmed his mood until he discovered that Radek was using his time in the closet to light up his pipe. Another scolding followed.

  Once they had arrived in Denmark, Lenin and his fellow travellers made their way to Sweden where a reception committee awaited them in Stockholm. He himself adopted yet another assumed name. For a while this foxed the sympathizers who wanted to escort him on his way. An overture also arrived from Alexander Parvus-Helphand. Parvus was a Marxist from Odessa and a millionaire merchant who conducted political errands for the German government; and he wished to make an arrangement whereby the Germans could subsidize Bolshevik activity in Russia. Although Lenin wanted the money, he could not risk being reported as having met with Parvus. Instead he let subordinates negotiate on his behalf. Not everything went as he wanted. He lacked the strength to resist Radek’s admonishments about his sartorial appearance. Radek explained that he simply did not look the part of a revolutionary leader while walking round in hobnailed mountain boots. As Radek got his own back for being told off on the sealed train, Lenin reluctantly agreed to buy new shoes and trousers. But he would go no further than that. He told his tormentor that he was not going back to Russia in order to establish himself in the clothing business. He might have added that someone with Radek’s eccentricities of dress had little right to tell him what to wear.25

  All this time Lenin was clarifying his thoughts about overthrowing the Provisional Government and introducing a socialist dictatorship. En route to Russia he wrote them up as his ‘April Theses’. After the Swedish socialists had made their fuss of him, it was on to the border with Finland at Haparanda. This was a neat little riverside town where Swedish gendarmes kept order as the baggage was unloaded. Over the bridge was the village of Tornio that already bore signs of the recent revolution. Russian soldiers were slovenly and unhelpful. The gendarmes had disappeared and the rail timetable had lost any semblance of reality.26 For the travelling party from Switzerland it was an emotional moment as they began to experience the sights and smells of a proper revolution. On 13 April they boarded the train at Tornio, taking copies of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda to their compartments with them. At Beloostrov they crossed the Russo-Finnish border, where they were greeted by Bolshevik Central Committee member Lev Kamenev. Shortly before midnight on 16 April they pulled into Petrograd’s Finland Station where a huge crowd was waiting to welcome the returning revolutionary hero. Lenin was less than gracious to the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries present; he snubbed their ideas about unity among socialists and brusquely called for ‘worldwide socialist revolution’.27

  Martov paid dearly for his scruples. He sat it out in Switzerland until he received formal permission from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to do what Lenin had done, not arriving in Petrograd until 22 May.28 By then his Mensheviks had fallen decisively under the sway of comrades like Irakli Tsereteli and Nikolai Chkheidze who had persuaded the Petrograd Soviet to support the Provisional Government. Pavel Milyukov, the new Russian Foreign Affairs Minister, was the piggy in the middle of the negotiations about travel permits. He had not sanctioned Lenin’s trip and consented to Martov returning solely because the Petrograd Soviet had stipulated that every single revolutionary emigrant should have the right to a visa. The Provisional Government could not lightly contradict the will of the soviets.

  Martov was slow enough but Trotsky was even slower. It was little consolation for him that Lenin, his old opponent on matters of revolutionary strategy, was edging close to his ideas. Lenin’s ‘April Theses’ were proof of this, but years of dispute between the two had to be surmounted before they could actively co-operate. And anyway Trotsky was stuck in New York. As soon as the Russian consulate had issued a visa for him, he booked a passage for himself and his family on the SS Kristianiafjord. The Trotskys left New York on 27 March. The ocean crossing was as perilous as any taken over the North Sea, and indeed that summer a German U-boat sank the Kristi
aniafjord on an Atlantic crossing. Trotsky gave no thought to the dangers. Any risk was worth taking when revolutionary Petrograd was the destination. In fact things went well until the steamship pulled in at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Canada was a dominion of the British Empire and the authorities were vetting the passenger lists of transatlantic ferries between Canada and Europe. The British control officers based in Halifax had been alerted to Trotsky’s presence on board and were unhappy about facilitating the journey of a well-known anti-war militant to Scandinavia and Russia. He was arrested and, kicking and shouting, bundled off the vessel to a detention camp. He conducted propaganda among German prisoners-of-war while daily demanding the right to rejoin his family.

  Word of what had befallen Trotsky quickly reached Russia, where both the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet clamoured for his release as an honourable fighter against the hated monarchy. At first Milyukov had favoured this step. But then he pressed Sir George Buchanan, the United Kingdom’s ambassador in Petrograd, to get the British to keep Trotsky in detention. This they duly did. But when the political left in Petrograd started a press campaign for Trotsky to be freed, Buchanan sensed a danger to the physical security of Britain’s many businessmen in Russia. He leant on Milyukov to stress that the British were not responsible for the situation in Halifax. On 21 April the Provisional Government made clear its lack of objection to Trotsky’s release, and he was reunited with his family and they were allowed to take the next scheduled boat — the Helig Olaf — across the Atlantic.29 They reached Christiania (Oslo) without mishap and made for Haparanda before the last stage across Finland to Petrograd. Like others before him, he was greeted warmly at the Finland Station a month after Lenin’s arrival. His close comrade Moisei Uritski and the Bolshevik Central Committee member G. F. Fëdorov had gone out to accompany him and help acclimatize him to Russian revolutionary politics.

  He never forgave the British for his experience in Halifax. His Marxist doctrines and analysis should have told him that the leading capitalist powers were hardly any different from each other and that the French would have done the same in similar circumstances; indeed, from his own doctrinal viewpoint, it was little short of incredible that the American authorities had allowed him out of New York City harbour in the first instance. But Trotsky moaned that the British authorities had had the impertinence to strip-search him; he noted that even the Imperial Russian government had never subjected him to this degrading treatment. It was as if the compulsion to take off his clothes for inspection by a medical doctor was the ultimate barbarity. For a man who was about to introduce a harsh dictatorship this was remarkably over-sensitive.

  With Trotsky’s arrival in Petrograd, the Provisional Government was faced by not one but two exceptional troublemakers. He and Lenin set about exploiting the political situation. Even before returning, both had denounced the cabinet as being militarist and imperialist; and they had dismissed those Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders in the Petrograd Soviet who supported Georgi Lvov and fellow ministers and passed up the opportunity to take power in the name of socialist revolution. Russia after the fall of the Romanovs was like no other great power in the world. Restrictions on freedom had vanished. Lenin, the lifelong enemy of the Imperial government and its oppressiveness, was impressed by the reforms undertaken by the Provisional Government. Famously he declared before his return that Russia was the freest country in the world at that time. He and Trotsky could write fluently and get their pieces quickly published. Lenin had a ready-made faction of followers which he could turn into a mass party. He was as yet a nervous speaker, but Trotsky — along with Kerenski — was a talented orator who could stir vast audiences whenever he appeared. And though Trotsky did not immediately join the Bolsheviks, he and Lenin knew they had to bury their past disputes. They wanted the same thing: supreme power in revolutionary Russia.

  2. RUSSIA ON ITS KNEES

  The returning emigrants came upon a disorientating mixture of the old and the new in Petrograd. The statue of Catherine the Great had a red flag flying from her sceptre. At noon every day without fail the bells of the Peter-Paul Fortress rang out the Glinka melody of ‘God Save the Tsar’. Much also remained unchanged in Moscow and it was still possible to catch sight of the younger grand dukes near the Spasski Gates on Red Square going out for the evening. The brilliant ballerina Tamara Karsavina gave performances in both cities. The world-famous bass Fëdor Shalyapin sang in Verdi’s Don Carlos at Petrograd’s Bolshoi Opera; he had never been a supporter of the old regime and was enjoying his acclaim as a champion of the people. Despite the wartime evacuation of the Hermitage art collection from Petrograd to Moscow, there were weekly exhibitions of paintings as well as public lectures on painting and literature in the capital. Plays were put on which had long been banned. At the Alexandrinski Theatre there was a revival of Alexei Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan the Terrible. The censorship office ceased to function. The Salvation Army, which had been prohibited on Imperial soil by Nicholas II’s government, plastered announcements of its gospel meetings on the walls. A vegetarian restaurant was doing a lot of business by enticing customers with a huge poster of the writer and Christian anarchist Lev Tolstoy and a sign that stated: ‘I Eat Nobody’.1

  The conventions of society were being turned inside out. Domestic servants became less likely to obey when their masters or mistresses made demands on them. Many waiters refused to accept gratuities because the practice offended their dignity: ‘Just because a man has to make his living waiting on table is no reason to insult him by offering him a tip!’ Social deference was disappearing. Tram conductors addressed passengers as ‘comrades’ regardless of social status — an innovation that middle-class passengers often found unnerving.2

  The most remarkable phenomenon was the influence wielded by organized labour. Workers elected their own soviets in the factory yards. Many cities acquired their own Red Guards to fill the gap left by the gendarmes who had fled. The entire labour movement wanted both order and better conditions for working people as they expanded their network of trade unions and set up factory-workshop committees. And when one body failed to satisfy their demands they either replaced its leadership or turned to some other body to act on their behalf.3 Although the industrial labour force led the way, the enthusiasm for participation spread to every corner of society — with the exception of the aristocracy and the landed gentry whose members lay low after the monarchy’s downfall. Peasants in most Russian regions already had their own bodies, the village communes, to run their affairs. The communes had traditionally engaged in rural selfpolicing and they now extended their authority over all aspects of life in the agricultural areas. Popular administration was a slogan of the day. Even the Trans-Siberian railway was affected. Foreign passengers trying to make their exodus from Russia found themselves being asked to choose a council for their carriage. The motive was more practical than political as the train had to pick up food and drink on the journey and there had to be effective bargaining at each big station. Citizenship in 1917 required everyone to become something of a politician.

  Workers wanted higher wages, improved living conditions and secure employment. Increasingly they feared being conscripted if the Provisional Government were to resume active operations on the eastern front. Garrison soldiers felt menaced by the same prospect. At any time they might be ordered to the trenches, and everyone knew how poorly the Russian Army was beginning to perform against the Germans. Peasant households were also restless. They resented having to pay land rents and looked enviously upon the woods and pastures of absentee gentry landlords. It seemed only a matter of time before the villages became ungovernable.

  The administrative disintegration picked up pace and the forces of order broke down almost entirely. The gendarmerie in the Russian Empire had never operated with the consent of society. As soon as the monarchy fell, gendarmes pulled off their uniforms and hid themselves from the enraged populace. The old political police — the Okhrana —
was disbanded. The commanders of army and navy garrisons could no longer enforce military discipline. The Petrograd Soviet on 14 March issued Order No. 1 stipulating its right to overturn commands issued by military officers. This left the Provisional Government with few instruments to impose its will. Ministers were dependent on favours dispensed by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in the great network of soviets elected by workforces and garrisons in the cities. Prince Lvov could hardly drink a cup of tea without checking whether he had permission. The cabinet kept itself busy and funnelled its policies down through the ministries. The old bureaucrats remained in place; many of them were eager to serve their new masters and implement instructions. But orders formulated in the capital were frequently slow to be obeyed in the provinces. The Provisional Government encountered difficulties from the very start of its rule.