Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  Kerenski seldom left the Winter Palace. His courage and commitment remained high but there were days when his morale dipped low. The Bolsheviks no longer troubled to debate with other socialists. They sped round Petrograd making final preparations for a decisive violent clash. Kerenski was visibly losing his earlier confidence. He was no longer waving to his crowds: he was drowning.

  3. THE ALLIED AGENDA

  As the Russian Army fell apart on the eastern front, the Western Allies ceased to pay much attention to the opinions of Alexander Kerenski. They came reluctantly to this position. Sharing a dislike of the Romanov monarchy, they had hoped to co-operate well with democratic Russia. There was no rush among them to ditch the Provisional Government. But the news from Petrograd was constantly depressing, and leaders in Paris, London and Washington concluded that it was no longer sensible to fund and supply the Russian armed forces.

  The French President Georges Poincaré was prominent among the small group of politicians who revised the agenda of the Allied powers. An intensely ambitious lawyer who had once acted for the writer Jules Verne, he had been elected President in 1913, and held the post through to 1920. Poincaré was a political conservative and had served regularly in cabinets before the Great War, constantly pushing for the firm pursuit of France’s national interest. The turnover in ministerial postings enabled him to increase his influence. There were four premiers — Aristide Briand, Alexandre Ribot, Paul Painlevé and Georges Clemenceau — in 1917 alone. Not until Clemenceau, a fierce Radical who had made a name for himself by speaking against anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus Affair, became premier in November that year was there a rival to Poincaré’s dominance and the President would find himself sidelined. The two men anyway agreed about national military and foreign policy. German armies occupied departments in northern France. No leading politician in France proposed the slightest appeasement of the Central Powers. The war had to be fought to a victorious end. Germany had to be made to pay for the devastation it had caused — and subjected to a peace settlement that would disable it from threatening the French again.

  David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, was usually less strident in his rhetoric but agreed that the Germans had to be totally defeated. He had acceded to supreme office in December 1916 to lead a governing coalition of Conservatives and Liberals and so straddled the political right and centre-left. He was a Welshman whose accent had not entirely left him, and he was a Nonconformist. Becoming MP for Caernarfon Boroughs, he supported social reforms with a panache which brought him to attention inside and outside the House of Commons. His private life was a mess. He kept his secretary Frances Stevenson as a mistress; he shamelessly sold peerages for political favours. But he proved himself as a war leader, and helped to lessen the U-boat threat by imposing the convoy system on the Royal Navy. He spoke with equal impressiveness to aristocrats at house parties and to factory workers and shop girls at the hustings. A man of abundant self-belief, he was acknowledged alongside Winston Churchill as one of the great orators in the House of Commons.

  As the war dragged on, Lloyd George concentrated on military questions to the exclusion of post-war planning. But President Woodrow Wilson had no intention of letting the topic disappear from the Allied agenda. He was determined to see that victory over the Central Powers would be followed by a peace which offered a better future to the peoples of the world. Wilson had occupied the White House since 1913. Patrician in appearance and austerely intellectual, he was the most academic of the leaders of the world’s great powers, having headed Princeton University before becoming Governor of New Jersey. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on congressional government. He detested militarism, and, like other American politicians, he also hated empires. He had won a second presidential term in 1916 by promising to keep his country out of the Great War. He was resolute in his principles but open to correcting them in the light of examined reality. He could not directly explore the currents of European politics since constitutionally he was prevented from travelling abroad on long trips. For that purpose he employed his confidant Edward House, who despite having no military experience was always known as Colonel House. No one talked directly with so many leading politicians of the Allies and the Central Powers, and President Wilson received the very best and latest information about war and politics in Europe.

  The Allied leaders knew that the great cities in Germany and Austria were experiencing a growth in discontent. Allied intelligence agencies and embassies reported regularly on the situation in Germany. British and French diplomats in Sweden were well placed to gather information simply by speaking to ferry passengers arriving from Hamburg. The Swedish newspapers were anyway discussing the same material.1 The government in Berlin got wind of this and sometimes produced a false edition of some German newspaper containing misinformation. But although Stockholm experienced a swirling fog of claims and counter-claims, there was no denying that Germany faced growing difficulties.2

  German politics was entering a volatile period. The extreme left had been rounded up and imprisoned in mid-1916, including leading revolutionaries such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Their Spartakusbund, named after the gladiator who headed the slave revolt against Rome in 73–71 BC, continued clandestine activity. Liebknecht and Luxemburg smuggled articles out of prison which argued that the war was being fought for the exclusive purposes of the rich and powerful. More and more German socialists were attracted to their message. By 1917 the Social-Democratic Party of Germany was splitting apart as its radical members, led by Hugo Haase in the Reichstag, refused to obey the party line. By then it had become plain not only that the General Staff under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff dominated both Kaiser and government but that they were pushing for policies of naked territorial expansion. Haase and his comrades would no longer tolerate the mildness of their party’s critique of the government and the high command. As a result, they established the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany — and they brought the old party’s great theorist Karl Kautsky along with them and communicated with the imprisoned Spartacists.

  Ludendorff and Hindenburg resolved to take an all-or-nothing gamble on the western front — indeed this was why unrestricted submarine warfare had been introduced. Every last resource was to be dedicated to an offensive strategy. They insisted that the Kaiser should replace the vacillating Theobald Bethmann Hollweg, Chancellor since 1909, with their protégé Georg Michaelis. If they were to beat the Allies on the western front it was essential to win battles decisively before the American armies reached France and acquired the necessary training. The industrial capacity of Germany had reached its limit. The adherence of the US to the Allied cause was bound to aggravate the problems in the economy. Time was not on the German side; and the fact that Austria-Hungary was known to be searching for a way of obtaining an honourable withdrawal from the war was an additional complication. Yet Ludendorff and Hindenburg also knew that morale was slipping in the French Army and that Marshal Pétain was having to deal with mutinies by the most severe means. The Germans would never have a better chance to swarm over the Anglo-French defences and finish the war in the west.

  The Western Allied leaders were sensitive to this possibility. While reinforcing their troops and equipment in northern France, they continued to look to the Russians to make their contribution in the east. Financial credits were still forthcoming. Military supplies came across the Pacific and the North Sea. Russian armed forces in the winter of 1916–17 had registered success with an offensive planned by General Alexei Brusilov. London, Paris and Washington had no illusions about where Germany had to be defeated. The western front would be their priority. But for this to happen it was essential for Russia to remain a threat in the east. The millions of peasants in uniform had to stay at the eastern front and tie down hundreds of German divisions.

  Throughout the war the Western Allies had frequently sent official visitors to Russia to gather information and consolidate support for the war effort.
A group of French and British socialist parliamentarians arrived at the Finland Station on 14 April 1917. They included Marcel Cachin, Ernest Lafont and Marius Moutet — two professors of philosophy and a lawyer. The British sent cabinet-maker James O’Grady and plumber Will Thorne.3 Although they received a warm welcome from the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, their impact on popular opinion was negligible. The French resolved to improve on this in midsummer by sending no less a personage than their Minister of Munitions Albert Thomas. He too was a socialist and the idea was that he would find it easy to talk to leaders of the Russian labour movement. But Thomas overdid his performance as a man of the people. At a banquet in his honour he ate his meat off the end of his knife; Russians detected a degree of condescension.4 The British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst arrived around the same time. She lost no time in criticizing opponents of the Allied military endeavour. She denounced the anti-war MP Ramsay MacDonald on the grounds that he was simply copying what Lloyd George had done in the Boer War in order to gain cheap popularity.5 MacDonald would have liked to visit Russia but the patriotic Seamen’s Union made it impossible for him to set off.6 The Provisional Government anyway did not want people like him in the country. As for Pankhurst, she got on well with Kerenski and his wife but attracted little wider attention. The political situation was no longer influenced by the thoughts of strangers.

  President Wilson’s special representative Elihu Root arrived in the same weeks and stayed in the Winter Palace.7 The Americans had offered a loan of a hundred million dollars to the Provisional Government on condition that it was used to buy products and supplies from American companies.8 That had been in May. The other requirement was for Russia to prove its military capacity to benefit from such assistance. Root, a former secretary of state, had a direct manner. His mission was ‘to devise, in accordance with the Russian government, effective means to aid Russia in her efforts to defeat the universal enemy’.9 He warned ministers that American aid would depend on the Russians continuing to keep up the fight on the eastern front.10 On returning to the US, he praised Kerenski to the skies and denounced American protesters against the war: ‘There are men here who should be shot at sunrise.’ He claimed that German agents were at work everywhere; he attacked Trotsky and other political emigrants who had returned to Russia and now vilified the country that had given them asylum.11 His advice to Wilson was to release funds to the Provisional Government. He insisted that the Russians, with American help, could still make an important contribution to victory over Germany.12

  The information reaching London and Paris was of good quality throughout the war; and the American diplomats quickly matched this effort. In March 1917, just before the United States entered the war, the American consul-general in Petrograd, North Winship, had found himself surrounded at the entrance to his office in the Singer Building by a crowd suspicious that he was pro-German. Singer seemed a Teutonic name; and as for the American bald-headed eagle, perhaps it was really a German symbol. Winship courageously held his nerve and set about supplying Washington with a detailed, daily summary of Petrograd politics. He followed the proceedings in the Petrograd Soviet. He explained the doctrines and policies of the ‘Maximalists’ under Lenin. He reported on every big newspaper’s reaction to President Wilson’s declaration of war. He described the poor showing of Russia’s armed forces and the decline in popular support for the war.13 His expertise was invaluable to David R. Francis, who had been appointed to the US embassy at the age of sixty-five in March 1916.

  The dean of the Petrograd diplomatic corps was the United Kingdom’s Sir George Buchanan. Tall and always dressed to perfection, Buchanan had not troubled to learn Russian despite having been ambassador since 1910. When about to be honoured with the freedom of the city of Moscow he had to spend an hour learning the word for ‘thank you’ (spasibo). But as the mayor hung a gold chain round his neck, Buchanan instead said pivo, which is the Russian for ‘beer’.14 Moscow’s dignitaries showed their magnanimity by pretending they had not heard the plea for alcoholic refreshment, and Buchanan survived his faux pas in serene ignorance. For the rest of his time in Russia he remained unapologetically monoglot except for when he spoke French (in which he was fluent but with a British lack of enthusiasm). Buchanan kept to the steady manners of the British ruling class abroad. He was thought the quintessential Englishman, although in fact he was Scottish. He was respected but not liked. Joseph Noulens, the French ambassador, described him as ‘dry, cold and disdainful’. High society in the Russian capital retained a lot of its old liveliness, but an evening at the Buchanans’ was unlikely to be a jolly occasion.15

  Buchanan was never going to make a close friend of the American ambassador. When visiting the US residence with Noulens, Buchanan seldom forbore to comment on what he saw as the vulgarity of the Americans. He scorned the large photograph of himself that Francis had hung outside his reception room: ‘Don’t you find this in bad taste?’ If asked to dine, he would turn to Noulens and say something like: ‘Ah, we’re going to have a bad supper… cooked by a Negro.’16

  Ambassador Francis sensed this contempt but continued to think well of Buchanan.17 Evidently he had a generous side to his nature; he had kindly Southern manners and rarely lost his temper. Nor did he disguise his own feeling that he was not the right man for the Russian posting. His qualifications were slim indeed. Like Buchanan, he spoke no Russian; but, unusually for a diplomat in those days, Francis’s French was primitive. This was hardly his fault. Although he had served in the cabinet of President Grover Cleveland as Secretary of the Interior in 1896–7, he had made his name not in international affairs but as a St Louis banker.18 While his staff busied themselves with liaising with the Russians, he maintained a high level of fitness. He was a big man who played a lot of golf. He was also an enthusiastic dancer at Petrograd balls. He practised a set of physical exercises each morning and arranged that no day passed without his devoting several hours to his pastimes. Among them were a partiality for comely young secretaries and a fondness for whisky, which he claimed he was drinking only to please his doctors.19

  The other leading Allied diplomats were Joseph Noulens and the Marchese della Torretta. Ambassador Noulens, who arrived in Petrograd in July 1917, was younger than Francis but temperamentally rigid despite his criticism of Buchanan for the same quality. As France’s ex-Minister of War, he hated the revolutionary turbulence in Russia under the Provisional Government.20 Della Torretta, the Italian chargé d’affaires, was still more settled in his ways. It was said that his preference would be to go to sleep and wake up with the Romanovs still in power. Russia’s traumas after the February Revolution left him dumb with incomprehension.

  The British and French embassies had built up military missions and intelligence agencies to look after their national interests in wartime. The Americans, coming late into the war, were slow to do the same. But once they were in it, they were determined to win it. By early autumn they were assembling an Information Service which covertly gathered data for Washington’s attention. But there remained a reluctance, felt keenly by Woodrow Wilson, to meddle in Russian internal affairs; and he overruled Senator Root’s advice to grant $5 million for the purposes of propaganda in Russia.21 Wilson was at any rate less disengaged than he appeared to be. Sir William Wiseman, head of the New York station of Britain’s Secret Service Bureau, put the case for an Anglo-American joint intelligence effort to support Russia and its military commitment. He had already made a positive impression on Colonel House.22 Since the US as yet had no serious network of agents it was easy for Wiseman to persuade House and the Secretary of State Robert Lansing to let the British take the lead — and the President on 15 June 1917 sanctioned funds to the value of $75,000. The Foreign Office in London was to supply the same amount.23 The Western Allies were increasingly concerned about Russia’s capacity to go on fighting. They used their missions and agencies to discover whether alternative arrangements might be possible without the Provisional Gov
ernment.

  For their chief covert agent in Petrograd the British picked the distinguished writer W. Somerset Maugham.24 This broke a rudimentary rule of intelligence. Maugham’s renown meant he could never be inconspicuous in the Russian capital. One of his plays was currently in performance there. What is more, Maugham was ignorant about Russian politics and was acquainted with no Russian public figures. He knew no Russian; he had not even mastered the Cyrillic alphabet. In other ways, though, he was a sensible choice. Maugham had wartime experience as an operative working for Mansfield Cumming of the Secret Service Bureau. He had demonstrated steely qualities on missions to France and Switzerland; he summed up individuals and situations and could keep a cool head. He was quietly pleased that the authorities thought him the best man for Russia, and he took the chance to regularize his employment. Until then he had given his services as a patriot, receiving only expenses but no pay. Now he insisted on being remunerated as a professional. He adopted no cover but lived openly in the Russian capital, contacting his former mistress Sasha Kropotkina to gain an entrée into high society. Through her he met Alexander Kerenski and took him out for meals at the fashionable Bear restaurant.

  Maugham thought he was picking up gems of information but in truth he discovered nothing closed to Sir George Buchanan. His main contribution was in cheering up Kerenski. But he preferred the company of Boris Savinkov, who was no longer on speaking terms with Kerenski after the Kornilov affair. Savinkov, a former deputy leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Combat Organization that had assassinated Imperial officials before the war, was a fervent militant to the core of his being and now made proposals to crush anti-war agitation at the front and to shelve Kerenski’s plans for the Constituent Assembly election. Victory in the war should be the supreme goal. Maugham liked Savinkov’s idea of forming a strong centre party of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries standing clear of the Kadets and the Bolsheviks. Savinkov proposed recruiting a Czech Corps to reinforce the Allied effort.25 Maugham rushed to get to know the Czechs. Most of them were ex-POWs captured by the Russians earlier in the war. They offered their services to the Allies in the hope of forming an independent state for Czechs and Slovaks after defeating the Central Powers. Maugham came up with an offer of money and supplies. He was not the first to do so. The British and French military missions were touring the Czech and Slovak camps trying to recruit volunteers to fight either in northern France or in the Balkans, establishing their own national contingents under the joint command of the Allies.26