Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  Jacques Sadoul and Raymond Robins went on pressing the case for gentle handling of Sovnarkom by their governments. At the beginning of 1918 their chorus was swelled by Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had caught the eye of Lloyd George as someone with an open mind about the Bolsheviks. The Prime Minister decided to send him back to Russia as ‘Agent’ or ‘Head of the British Mission’.46 Before departing, Lockhart spoke to Viscount Milner (Secretary of State for War), Sir Edward Carson (First Lord of the Admiralty), Earl Curzon (Lord President of the Council and soon to become Foreign Secretary), Lord Hardinge (Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) and Sir George Clerk (private secretary to the Acting Foreign Secretary). Lockhart emerged well briefed on the general problems of the British war effort. He also learned that Lloyd George had a low opinion of A. J. Balfour and the Foreign Office, which gave Lockhart an opening for writing reports without inhibition.47 Lockhart’s linguistic competence and political contacts as well as his self-confidence were undeniable. Lloyd George got no sense of Lockhart’s recklessness. Perhaps his own personality and unconventional lifestyle — he took his mistress Frances Stevenson along with him nearly everywhere — blinded him to the risks of sending the Scot back into a post of political responsibility without a senior diplomat like Buchanan to keep an eye on him. Lockhart was like quicksilver, a man who loved the thrills of adventure.

  He left for Russia on 14 January 1918 with a letter of recommendation from none other than Maxim Litvinov.48 Only one person in Whitehall poured cold water on his mission. General Sir Nevil Macready, who on learning that Lockhart’s assignment was to help to restore the Russians to the eastern front, said: ‘Don’t the boys in the Foreign Office read history? Don’t you know that when an army of seven million runs away in disorder, it needs a generation before it can fight again?’49 But Lloyd George believed that Raymond Robins was carrying out useful work for the Americans and wanted Lockhart to do the same for the British. He told him simply: ‘Go to it.’50 With Lockhart went his personally chosen team of Captain William Hicks, Edward Phelan and Edward Birse. Hicks had recently worked in Russia as an expert on poison gas; Phelan was scooped from the Ministry of Labour, presumably on the premise that he knew how to talk to far-left socialists. Birse was a Moscow businessman.51 They took the normal wartime route across the North Sea and made for Finland, only to discover that the direct rail line down to Petrograd was broken. Instead they made for Helsinki, where they encountered fighting in the streets between the Red and White Finns. The travellers set off quickly to Russia, reaching the capital on 30 January.52 Lockhart wrote in his diary: ‘Streets in a dreadful state, snow had not been swept away for weeks. Everyone looks depressed and unhappy.’

  Among his first steps was to arrange a meeting with Trotsky. He lunched beforehand with Raymond Robins, who told him: ‘Trotsky [is a] poor kind [of] son of a bitch but the greatest Jew since Christ.’ Trotsky tried to convince Lockhart that the Bolsheviks would engage in partisan warfare if the Germans mounted an invasion. Lockhart recorded in his diary: ‘Loud in his blame of the French and said the Allies had only helped Germany by their intrigues in Russia.’53 Robins took a liking to Lockhart and offered him a deal:

  Let us assume that I am here to capture Russia for Wall Street and American business men. Let us assume that you are a British wolf and I am an American wolf, and that when this war is over we are going to eat each other up for the Russian market; let us do so in perfectly frank, man fashion, but let us assume at the same time that we are fairly intelligent wolves, and that we know that if we do not hunt together in this hour the German wolf will eat us both up, and then let us go to work.54

  From that day onwards they took breakfast together.55

  Lockhart slotted himself back into old routines, getting official accreditation as Roman Romanovich Lokkart from the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs even though Britain was withholding recognition from Sovnarkom.56 He was enjoying himself. He saw Trotsky regularly and put the case for Russian military co-operation with the Allies. Sadoul too maintained amicable ties with Trotsky. Ambassador Noulens was later to declare that Sadoul favoured communist Russia over France. Ambassador Francis, he thought, was coming to the same conclusion about Robins. And soon Lockhart’s oddities too were remarked upon.57 Colonel Alfred Knox put things with succinct brutality: ‘[Robins] is a fanatic with the temperament of a hero-worshipping schoolgirl, and while without the mental equipment or the experience to enable him to advise on policy, he is a dangerous companion for anyone as impressionable as Lockhart.’58 General Henry Wilson on behalf of the Imperial General Staff urged the War Cabinet either to stop Lockhart commenting on military questions or, failing that, to recall him from Moscow.59 But Lockhart, Robins and Sadoul were excellent conduits for contact with the Soviet leadership and were still too useful to be dropped.60 The Western Allies needed to make the best of a bad situation. There was a war to be won and it was important to go on cajoling the Russians to stay in the war.

  PART TWO

  Survival

  9. TALKS AT BREST-LITOVSK

  The Bolshevik leaders were optimists. Believing that only a little time was needed for their revolutionary example to be followed abroad, they had agreed to a truce on the eastern front on 15 December 1917. Sovnarkom demobilized the Russian Army — when the formal order went out by wireless on 7 December, the slim chance of having any forces available to repel the Germans disappeared;1 Russia was rendered indefensible as peasant soldiers, rifles over their shoulders, jumped on trains and went back to the villages. Lenin and Trotsky were counting on ‘European socialist revolution’ and felt that the October Revolution depended on their gamble. The Allied powers looked on anxiously. The consequences for their armies on the western front would be deeply damaging if a deal was struck between Germany and Russia. The Germans stood to gain from being able to transfer army divisions from the east as their manpower ran low in northern France. They had already sent experienced troops there while the Russian Army had been falling apart. There could also be economic benefit because Germany wanted access to goods and markets in Russia, Ukraine and the south Caucasus so as to circumvent the British naval blockade of German ports.

  Russia and Germany continued to negotiate at the little German-held town of Brest-Litovsk close to the eastern front. The German high command was getting anxious. It badly needed its armies to crush the Western Allies before the Americans could be fully deployed there.2 Each side in Brest-Litovsk expected to achieve its purposes to the detriment of the other. The Germans wanted a separate peace with Russia, the Russians a German communist revolution. Berlin was confident that the talks would be of brief duration since the communists had empty trenches and no soldiers. German commanders and diplomats felt no need for preparations beyond allocating a set of two-storeyed dwellings to house the delegations in the snow-laden town.3

  The Germans and their allies — Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians and Turks — sat down with the Russians in the Officers’ Building on 22 December. Trotsky was needed in Petrograd and so it was his friend Adolf Ioffe who headed the Soviet delegation that departed by rail via Vilnius and Bialystok. Ioffe was from a rich Jewish family from Simferopol in Crimea. His father had a reputation as Minister of Finances Sergei Witte’s ‘favourite Jew’ in the 1890s, and Adolf’s choice of a revolutionary career aroused parental consternation. He had also married young, gaining family consent solely because the girl was Jewish — Ioffe senior had feared that his atheist son might marry outside the ancestral faith. Adolf received a regular financial allowance that enabled him to enrol as a student in the Berlin University medical faculty. Although he worked hard at his studies, the police objected to his activities on behalf of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and expelled him from Germany. He decamped to Vienna where he became a pupil of the psychologist Alfred Adler and made the acquaintance of Trotsky. In 1917 he wrote prolifically and served on the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Although he had no expertise in international affa
irs, his command of German and familiarity with central Europe were thought an asset for dealing with Germany and Austria-Hungary.4

  Travelling with Ioffe in the delegation were Lev Kamenev and a handful of lesser Bolsheviks including the rising official of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, Lev Karakhan. Radek joined them later. Some military officers attended as special advisers; their morale was so low that it was said that they went ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, believing that the Bolsheviks were bent on signing terms that were tantamount to treason. Admiral Altvater was apparently an exception: Trotsky sardonically reported that he ‘was touched by grace and has returned from Brest-Litovsk more Bolshevik than the Bolsheviks on this peace question’.5

  Ioffe had a preliminary conversation with the Austrian Foreign Minister Count Ottokar von Czernin and politely rejected his entire worldview. When Czernin commented sceptically on Soviet political expectations, Ioffe leant across and said: ‘I still hope we’ll succeed in calling forth a revolution in your country.’6 Such was the atmosphere when Prince Leopold of Bavaria opened the formal talks on behalf of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. Ioffe spoke for the Russian side and insisted, in the face of Turkish objections, on full publicity for the proceedings in Russia and among the Central Powers. He exploited the occasion by giving an explanation of the purposes behind Lenin’s Decree on Peace. Over the next few days Ioffe and Kamenev completely ignored the big topic at the centre of everyone’s attention: the German demand for Russia to sign a comprehensive peace on the eastern front. The Bolsheviks had vowed to start a ‘revolutionary war’ rather than make a separate settlement with the Germans, so they needed to keep the Central Powers talking and talking. Ioffe expatiated on the complications likely to arise from Soviet economic nationalizations as yet to be announced. He also drew attention to the problems arising from a separate delegation from the Ukrainian Central Rada, which had declared Ukraine’s independence in January but had yet to be recognized by Sovnarkom. Ioffe explained all the niceties with elegance and courtesy.7

  The Germans tried to hurry things along but were under instructions to observe diplomatic proprieties. They soon saw that Ioffe, liaising regularly with Trotsky, was hoping to gain time for revolutionary upheavals to occur in Berlin and Vienna. Indicating that their patience was not inexhaustible, they threatened that unless the Soviet leaders submitted quickly to their terms they would face the might of their forces.

  Trotsky decided that his presence in Brest-Litovsk had become essential and he joined the talks on 27 December 1917. Smartly attired as usual, he stepped off the train with a bright scarf tucked into a dark fur coat; his shoes were polished as if for an evening ball. He was a virtuoso performer. He spoke in his fluent German whenever he wanted to get his meaning across quickly to the military monoglots. He picked holes in the draft documents produced by the Germans. Why on earth could the translators not see the difference between words like ‘nation’, ‘people’ and ‘state’?8 Over the table from him sat men who had acted haughtily towards Ioffe. Trotsky presented them with a different personality. He appeared indifferent to their threats; and although he was invariably polite he left more than a suspicion that he was treating them condescendingly. They had assumed that he would be embarrassed by the inclusion of the Ukrainian delegates who turned up on the same day as him. Not a bit of it. He accepted their participation, mentioning only that he expected that the territorial allegiance of the Black Sea region would be decided by a plebiscite of its residents.9 Trotsky gave an actor’s display of calm confidence. It was hard to believe that he spoke for a state that was utterly incapable of repelling any German invasion.

  His stay in Brest-Litovsk coincided with Lenin’s decision to leave Petrograd for a few days’ holiday in Finland, which provoked the sardonic comment from Jacques Sadoul: ‘And so here we are without a dictator.’10 As soon as Georgi Chicherin arrived from England he deputized for Trotsky at the People’s Commissariat, so that Soviet foreign affairs were entrusted to steadier hands than Zalkind could supply.

  Yevgenia Shelepina became Trotsky’s ‘courier extraordinary’. She had grown bored when Trotsky left, and asked Lenin and Stalin for a job that would bring some excitement. Shelepina was depressed by what she saw in Brest-Litovsk:

  The town was a dead town. All the houses were broken in some way or other, some with their roofs blown off, others with their walls blown in. Nothing had been done to mend the houses, but the streets had been tidied up, so that there was an oppressive orderliness even in the disorder of the broken town. There were only two or three little shops open, selling necessary things, tobacco and thread, and such things, and then there was a bookstore, over which, of course, Radek spent more time than over all the rest. When he was buying cigarettes, I told him to buy some for me. He told me the permission given him by the Commandant did not allow him to buy any more.11

  The signs of distress near the front line surprised her. Time and again she caught sight of ill-kempt Russian POWs being marched around by their captors. Shelepina felt like pulling a gun on the Germans — having run out of cigarettes, she was agitated by the absence of nicotine in her bloodstream. Radek, by contrast, was never without a well-stocked tobacco pouch and called out to the same POWs: he never missed a chance to spread the message of revolutionary socialism.12

  Trotsky brought order to the Soviet delegation and raised its morale. He put an end to the growing practice of taking meals with the negotiators of the Central Powers. He saw that if he wanted to maintain a firm bargaining stance, it would not help if his team became too friendly with the Germans. He told his comrades to take greater care with their appearance. The Germans had to feel that Bolsheviks were more than just a rabble from the street.

  He had seen enough of conditions near Brest-Litovsk to know how difficult it would be to restore the Russian armed forces. Lenin agreed. Although he went nowhere near the eastern front, he drew the same conclusion from a survey among the armed forces.13 The only hope lay in dragging out the talks and using them as an instrument of propaganda abroad. Trotsky’s slogan for the Bolshevik Committee was ‘neither war nor peace’. The German high command refused to accept this affront to military and diplomatic convention. Annoyed by the Soviet tactics, the Central Powers on 6 February signed a separate peace with the Ukrainian Rada. Whether Trotsky liked it or not, Ukraine could no longer be brought under Soviet rule. The Germans then issued an ultimatum: either the communist leaders accepted the terms on offer or they would face an immediate invasion of Russia. This was intended to bring Trotsky to heel, but he had a surprise of his own for them. When the talks resumed on 10 February, instead of responding to the ultimatum, he declared the state of war between Russia and the Central Powers to be ‘terminated’. The eastern front was no more. The Russians were withdrawing from the armed conflict regardless of the threats being made by the Germans.14

  Trotsky’s statement was more than Richard von Kühlmann, Germany’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, could bear. A government facing invasion had sent a plenipotentiary to Brest-Litovsk who refused to indicate his response to the threat of military attack. This was still an age when empires and nations declared war on others before waging it. The Blitzkrieg was invented by Hitler: no diplomat in 1918 felt comfortable about initiating armed conflict in Europe without having completed the formalities of mutual communication. The rest of the world was a different matter, and European powers had marched into Africa and Asia in their pell-mell scramble for colonial conquests in the late nineteenth century. It therefore took some minutes for Kühlmann to collect his thoughts and point out that wars could not end without agreements on borders, trade and a host of other practical matters. Trotsky’s rhetoric would not be allowed to remove the current question on the agenda for Sovnarkom. Was it going to be war or peace? But Trotsky was unbending and curtly announced that his delegation had exhausted the powers invested in it. Then he and his comrades picked up their papers and left the room.15


  Since Trotsky’s démarche had not been prearranged with the Party Central Committee or Sovnarkom, he had to return to Petrograd fast so as to argue his case. He knew that he could expect grave criticism from Lenin in the Central Committee. Lenin was no less impatient than Kühlmann about the need to make a clear choice between war and peace. Having disbanded the old Russian Army in December, Sovnarkom set about forming a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army two months later; but the first small, ill-trained units were undeniably in no condition to withstand attack by German military divisions. In Lenin’s view Trotsky was putting the October Revolution in peril. By 14 February the Soviet leadership was noting that the German missions in Petrograd were getting ready to leave the city. This was interpreted as a sign that invasion was imminent. Lenin snarled that a peace treaty had to be signed before all was lost.

  The Bolshevik Central Committee met on 17 February and conducted a congested sequence of votes. Lenin made steady but excruciatingly slow progress. Everyone conceded in principle that, under certain conditions, a peace could be signed with Germany. The conditions were not specified; but even Bukharin was recorded as acknowledging that the signing of a separate treaty with the Central Powers should not be entirely dismissed in principle as an acceptable manoeuvre. Nobody any longer held out unconditionally for a policy of revolutionary war. Indeed three out of eleven voters at the Central Committee — Bukharin, Ioffe and Georgi Lomov — abstained from registering their opinion on the matter on the grounds that Lenin had put the question in an incorrect fashion.16 But if they objected to his blunt wording, it is hard to see how else he could have phrased things. The Germans had made clear that the Bolshevik party had to agree to a separate peace treaty or else endure a military offensive. What would Bukharin and his sympathizers do if the Germans were to attack? They answered with their silence, and it became obvious that they at last saw that the idea of revolutionary war throughout Europe was unrealizable.