Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  Communism would soon change everything, and communists assumed that Europe was where they stood their best chance of political advance. The continent was the cockpit of world war. Surely the deaths and material privations since 1914 had perfected the conditions for the Marxist case to attract popular support. ‘European revolution’ tripped easily off Bolshevik tongues.

  Russian communist ideas about Europe in the party were not those of conventional geography. The school textbooks said it stretched from Portugal to the Urals. This was not what Bolsheviks had in mind when they talked of ‘going’ to Europe despite the fact that Russia had its own large European zone. Bolshevik leader I. I. Kutuzov was to write an account of his westward journey by train from Moscow in the early 1920s. The first stage took him to Latvia. He commented that people started calling him mister rather than comrade when he crossed the frontier. He noticed how clean Riga appeared after his experience of Russian cities. Latvia was impressive enough, but when at last he reached German territory at Eidkunen, Kutuzov’s eye was caught by the almost complete absence of dirt and litter. Even the countryside of Germany was remarkable to his eyes — and all this was before he got to Berlin, a city that surpassed his every expectation in its modernity. To Kutuzov it seemed self-evident: ‘This was the beginning of Europe.’8 And Europe in the Bolshevik imagination was one half of ‘the West’ whose other half lay across the Atlantic in North America.

  Bolsheviks took it for granted that socialist revolution in Germany was the key to their survival and success in Russia. Former emigrants like Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin admired the cultural and organizational achievements of the German labour movement. Marx and Engels, the originators of Marxism, had been German. The left wing of the German Social-Democratic Party had broken away to form the Spartakusbund and, as Lenin saw it, proved that the labour movement in Germany retained the potential to effect a seizure of power and a revolutionary transformation. German workers were the flower of the European socialist movement. They were the most educated, skilled labour force in the entire continent. Their discipline at work was legendary. Their commitment to self-improvement at home and at leisure was remarkable. Most of them voted for the socialdemocrats, and the party had 633,000 members in 1909. Bolsheviks were angry when the German Social-Democratic Party’s caucus in the Reichstag voted financial credits for the war effort in mid-1914; but Lenin and his friends put the blame for this ‘betrayal’ on the party leadership. They refused to believe that Germany’s workers would tolerate this situation for ever. The Spartacists, when they obtained their opportunity, would surely prove able to pull them back to the line of revolution — and the great potential of the German proletariat would be fulfilled.

  What is more, Bolsheviks were impressed by the steps taken in Germany towards centralized state regulation. Capitalists had never been more closely integrated into planning mechanisms. Trotsky in particular was intrigued by the government’s measures for bringing official order and purpose to the economy. He proposed to use this approach in order to further his revolutionary aims: ‘For the introduction of control over production and distribution the proletariat has had extremely valuable models in the West, above all in the form of Germany’s so-called “war socialism”.’ In Russia this would require the carrying out of ‘an agrarian revolution’. If state economic coordination was going to be introduced it would have to be done in a steady fashion.9

  Yuri Larin, a left-wing Marxist who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, was equally inspired by what he read about the German situation. He noted how the state had taken food supplies into its hands and compelled agricultural producers to form unions so as to make them easier to control. Each German region and district was strictly supervised. Transport of goods beyond local borders was forbidden except with official permission. Prices were set for basic products. The entire economy was operated according to a central plan. According to Larin, Germany’s government found itself unable to avoid conceding to demands by urban and rural workers.10 Even so, the war had disrupted and lowered output. Most German people were worse off than before the fighting had started, and the effect of this was registered on socialist leaders who began to demand the forcible expropriation of agricultural land for the benefit of consumption in the cities. It was Larin’s belief that the drift of thinking towards the needs of urban residents would soon be seen in Russia too.11 As he pointed out, Germany’s workers had called for a universal compulsory system of food rationing at the outset of war. Fairness had fallen by the wayside as the propertied classes secured greater supplies than the average. The way forward in Russia as in Germany was to introduce a regime corresponding to the requirements of the people as a whole.12

  Larin argued that the best outcome for the workers and everybody else would be the ‘urbanization’ of agriculture. Farms should be set up on the outskirts of cities. The principle should be adopted that ‘agricultural enterprises must be subordinated to direct supervision and administration by the consumers of grain’. The industrial proletariat ought to have a dominant influence.13 Larin pointed out that no warring country was without its economic problems. He predicted high cereal prices for a long period after the war. He could not see how Europe could cope with its problems unless power was being exercised by the workers to ensure a swift expansion of farm output.14 Nikolai Bukharin spelled out how this could be done. Rather than allow peasants to grab and divide up the landed estates he recommended the establishment of large collective farms.15 The peasantry should not be left to decide how to plough, sow and reap — and the same prescription should be applied in every European country. The entire property order in Russia was going to be toppled and Bolsheviks wanted to ensure that the precedent would be followed elsewhere. The purpose was to persuade everybody that material possessions were always withheld from the poor in the most unfair fashion. A Bolshevik called Kii argued that the mystique of private ownership had to be exposed as the deceit that it was. Revolutions were not as difficult to undertake as ‘bourgeois’ social science contended.16

  The fundamental ideas of the Bolsheviks were never less than grandiose. They loved cities, industry, the proletariat and central state planning. They believed in the imposition of expertise. They praised order and control. Their priority was to provide what they thought were the basic requirements of civilization: work, health care, social insurance, food, shelter and education. They thought they knew better than the people they intended to serve. In the end — and they thought that the end would come soon — the people would understand and accept their wisdom.

  They rejected all counter-ideals as reactionary, pernicious nonsense. They disliked agriculture, handicrafts, the ‘chaos’ of markets, religion, private income and individual freedom. They detested banks — when Ivy Litvinov went into the Hampstead branch of Lloyds to cash a cheque she was treated by Maxim’s comrades as if she had done something immoral. She was not well off. She could not understand why revolutionary militants should be so grim towards her when they themselves aspired to a bourgeois lifestyle.17 But Bolsheviks liked to think they saw through the hypocrisies of middle-class prejudices. They thought marriage to be one of these. When Lenin wed Nadezhda Krupskaya it was only so that the police would allow them to stay together in Siberian exile. Trotsky and Alexandra Sokolovskaya went through a marriage ceremony for the same reason. Bolsheviks dropped and acquired partners with more than average frequency at that time. Their loyalty was to the Revolution. Family took second place to the Revolution in the lives of the militants. The cause was everything.

  It was all very well to study the history of Russia and to appreciate the difficulties ahead; but ‘science’ could take the movement for liberation only so far (although it was true that some Bolsheviks had written extensively on the Russian past). The party had to show daring and take risks. An exemplary opportunity was being offered to the political far left in Petrograd. Where Russians went, others would soon follow. There was no time for intellectual doubt.

  One big distinct
ion of the Bolshevik leadership lay in their readiness to use massive force to achieve their ends. Ivan Maiski offered a shrewd estimate of Lenin. His leader reminded him of a sentence in the Book of Revelation: ‘So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.’18 Lenin had always been notorious for his fondness for dictatorship and terror. Trotsky had been rather enigmatic. While proposing extreme schemes such as a ‘workers’ government’, he had kept comradely relations with the Mensheviks and criticized the Bolsheviks. In 1917 he revealed that he accepted that a government of workers would indeed need to use severe methods. For once he called on Marx as an authority. It was Marx who had lauded the Jacobin terror with its frequent use of the guillotine in the French Revolution and called it ‘the plebeian method’ of crushing resistance. Trotsky admired the Jacobins for their ‘iron repression’.19 Not all Bolshevik leaders were yet of the same ferocity. Kamenev and Bukharin often questioned the need for severe repressive measures and occasionally did something to moderate them. But they in no way forswore such methods in principle. As time went on, the entire leadership came over to the idea that there could be no revolutionary consolidation without harsh dictatorship and widespread state terror.

  Communists cared little for detailed prognostication. They dealt in visions and slogans, in promises and threats and commitments. They talked about ‘class struggle’, ‘class war’ and even ‘civil war’. They paid no attention to details of governance. Adolf Ioffe, one of Trotsky’s close associates, was unusual in writing a booklet about local administration.20 Action took precedence over forethought. Lenin used to quote Goethe to the effect that theory is grey whereas the tree of life is green. (Not that this stopped him being doctrinaire and bookish when explaining his own theoretical vision.) He and others stated endlessly that they were encouraging a ‘revolution from below’. They saw themselves as liberators of the working class. Soon there would be proletarian self-administration. But how this would be combined with the party’s objective of a highly centralized state was never elaborated — there was no serious attempt to ask the question. The Bolsheviks cheerfully smashed institutions to smithereens at the same time as insisting on internal organizational discipline as a permanent requirement. They had no concern about the disruption they were bound to cause. Their refrain was that revolutions were messy. They detested what they called politicking. They were repelled by compromise; they preferred open decisions to a public life of fudges and corruption.

  They felt that they were the true Reds of revolutionary Russia. Conservatives and liberals called every Menshevik and Socialist- Revolutionary a Red. But the Bolsheviks were undeniably more radical than their rivals, and so they monopolized political ownership of the colour. But although they displayed an expansive confidence, their doctrines were far from being comprehensive: there were not just marginal gaps in these doctrines but huge, hazardous holes. Like utopians of earlier centuries, they scoffed when this was pointed out to them. They called on their followers to show belief and confidence. They took pride in their willingness to experiment. They regarded themselves as open-minded scientists and humanitarians. When others predicted disaster they shrugged and claimed that advanced capitalism had already brought the world to catastrophe. Something entirely different was due to be tested. It was the dawn of a new epoch.

  Bolsheviks liked to think that they were unique in the Russia of 1917. This was not wholly true. In every modern profession there were many practitioners who partook of all or some of the Bolshevik ideals and had the same negative prejudices. Among the other revolutionary parties too there were leaders and militants whose mental world shared territory with Bolshevism. Indeed the communists borrowed much of their thinking from others. The professions had many members who wanted to take control of their sector of public life and set policy in the direction of rapid change. Left-of-centre economists favoured increasing governmental regulation of industry and finance.21 Teachers, scientists, artists and commanders were eager for a chance to transform their occupations by the introduction of new techniques; and they were aware that they needed a strong central government to achieve modernization. There was a welcome for any government that looked as if it would subsidize their activity. What is more, several features of thought in rival parties corresponded to what was intended by the Bolsheviks. The need for the state to play a big part in the running of the economy was widely felt by all socialists and even by liberals. Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries continued to regard most Bolsheviks as comrades. The communist determination to turn Russia upside down was shared far beyond the confines of the party.

  Much though Bolshevik doctrine pretended to scientific status, it was in fact rooted in blind faith and the Russian revolutionary tradition. Lenin and Trotsky never seriously took account of the dire warnings about the likely result of their project. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries may have shared a lot of their social and economic assumptions but they also issued clear predictions that the horrors of civil war would be the inevitable result if the Bolshevik party somehow managed to hold on to power. They doubted that Europe was on the brink of revolution. They ridiculed Lenin’s promise to regenerate the Russian economy swiftly or at all. They were talking to the deaf. Bolsheviks had made their choice. If there was going to be civil war, it would be of short duration and easily won. There would surely be European socialist revolution and, when Germany acquired its revolutionary government, economic exchange between the Russians and the Germans would guarantee rapid recovery from wartime devastation. It was in this frame of mind that Bolshevik leaders had seized power in Petrograd. Foreigners saw only chaos and weakness in Russia. The Bolsheviks asked them to look through different spectacles and observe the fire being lit for a brilliant new world order.

  7. DIPLOMATIC IMPASSE

  Lenin’s Decree on Peace set out fresh basic principles for the kind of peace he wanted in the world. Both the Allies and the Central Powers tried to ignore him. The exception was Woodrow Wilson, who was fired by the urge to achieve a lasting peace and saw the defeat of the Central Powers as a prerequisite. Coming before a joint session of the US Congress on 8 January 1918, he declared that the Allies should impose a universal peace involving democracy, free trade, open treaties and national self-determination. He depended on advice and assistance from his confidant Colonel Edward House, who had returned from a tour of the European capitals, and a group of key advisers, known as ‘The Inquiry’; but the impetus came from Wilson himself. Wilson was aiming to prescribe the shape of the post-war world order. His Congress speech was delivered with panache and gained instant fame as the ‘Fourteen Points’. The American press endorsed the President’s words as offering the first great contribution to ending the carnage brought about by the rivalries of ancient European states. Wilson was enabling the US to stand tall among the nations. Many Americans had disliked his decision to enter the war against Germany, but many took pride in his vision of a global framework for peace and freedom.

  Wilson’s advocacy of national self-determination disturbed the Western Allies. Lloyd George had his hands full with the consequences of the Easter 1916 rising in Dublin against Great Britain, not to mention growing demands for independence among Indians and other peoples in the British Empire. Clemenceau and Italy’s Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando felt disquiet, too. But they feared annoying a US President who was sending indispensable finance, munitions and troops across the Atlantic. They had always stressed that their war against Germany and Austria-Hungary was a just and moral one. They could hardly speak out against democracy or free trade, and it was difficult to deny the right of nations to determine their own futures. The Western press reported Wilson’s Fourteen Points in detail, and the American embassy gave away many thousands of free copies of a translation on the streets of Petrograd — altogether 5.5 million copies were printed for distribution in the territories of the former Russian Empire.1 This contrasted with the Allied treat- ment of Lenin’s Decree on Pe
ace which appeared abroad in full only in far-left booklets after being translated in Petrograd. The Allied powers had no interest in facilitating its distribution.

  The Bolsheviks had to improvise their publicity. Trotsky, with his instinct for propaganda, was frustrated at being unable to write for the foreign press or get his speeches carried by newsreels. In desperation he asked his People’s Commissariat to call in Claude Anet of the Petit Parisien newspaper and offer exclusive stories.2 Nothing came of this. Trotsky had to make do by relying on his existing group of cheerleaders to write whatever they liked for their editors.

  The pattern of work became smoother after he took on the young Bolshevik Yevgenia Shelepina as his secretarial assistant. Born in 1894 and educated at grammar school, she was working in the Ministry of Trade and Industry and disapproved of those civil servants who went on strike against the October Revolution. She was seconded to the People’s Commissariat of Labour before being recruited for work with Trotsky in room 67 of the Smolny Institute:

  I found [him] in that same room where I used to see him, at the end of the corridor on the third floor. It was differently furnished then. There was just one table in the corner by the two windows. In the little room partitioned off was some dreadful furniture, particularly a green divan with a terrible pillow on it. You see it had been the room of the resident mistress on that floor of the Institute when it was still an Institute for girls. Trotsky sat on one side of the table and I sat on the other. I did not hide from him that I was quite unfit for the work, but that I wanted to do anything I could.3