Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  Ioffe and the Soviet mission in Berlin failed to penetrate such discussions. The German government had allocated to it the Russian embassy building on Unter den Linden. International etiquette required Ioffe to present his credentials in person to the Kaiser; but this was more than Ioffe, a severe opponent of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, would contemplate — and probably the Kaiser was not displeased. Although Ioffe always dressed smartly, in other ways he was far from the diplomatic stereotype. His office was chaotic. He had no idea how to keep financial accounts; he had no clue about the exchange rate and lacked the desire to find out.16 Like other communist veterans, he regarded money with distaste. Nevertheless he continued to employ the German servants inherited from the old embassy.17 Ioffe looked on servants through a Marxist prism of analysis. For him, they were ‘proletarians’ who were winnable to the revolutionary cause. The working atmosphere in the mission was nothing if not relaxed. The tone was set by Ioffe’s young Russian chauffeur who usually arrived in the mornings in his sports kit. This was not a problem until the day when Ioffe had to go to the German Foreign Office and told him to dress more demurely. The chauffeur’s reaction was to don a pair of silk pyjamas.18

  Ioffe’s private life was equally chaotic. After the October Revolution, his wife and daughter Nadya lived in Baku until he brought them to Berlin. It was not a happy conjoining. What disconcerted Mrs Ioffe was the presence of the young woman operating as her husband’s personal assistant. This was Maria Girshberg, who had joined the communist party in Petrograd in 1917. Everyone in the Soviet mission knew what was going on. Maria — or Musya as she was known — spent whole days with Ioffe and not always on revolutionary business. The Ioffes fell to arguing into the small hours and little Nadya could hear them through her bedroom wall. Her mother had red eyes every morning. Comrades in the Berlin mission thought he had fallen for a little schemer.19 After the Ioffes took a short holiday in Sweden, the parents began sleeping apart. Musya had become the mistress in every sense.20

  But Ioffe’s true passion was revolution. As the man on the spot in Berlin, he thought he knew better than Chicherin. The People’s Commissar liked to work through the night and felt free to contact Ioffe at four in the morning about trivial matters. He also used the telegraph facilities without adopting any security precautions despite the risk of the Germans taking advantage.21 But the main question dividing them was about how to handle Germany. Ioffe thought Chicherin too timid, arguing that the Germans were fully exercised with occupying Poland and Ukraine and were unlikely to go for an open break with Russia. Although Ioffe was no longer hostile to doing deals with ‘German imperialism’, he was crude in the way he treated Germany’s banks and businesses and had no intention of honouring contracts. Nikolai Krestinski, People’s Commissar of Finances, objected that such trickery would find him out.22 But others in the mission such as Lev Krasin and Vladimir Menzhinski took Ioffe’s side when writing to Lenin.23 Krasin was the Bolsheviks’ expert on foreign trade;24 Menzhinski was a Cheka officer marked out for a higher posting. Both denied that the German government would ever assist with Russia’s economic recovery.25 Lenin was so exasperated with Ioffe that for a while he rejected his request to make a trip to Moscow.26 He accused him of trying to run the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs from Berlin and called for ‘ambassador Ioffe’ to cease querying Moscow’s decisions.27

  Ioffe told Lenin that ‘you are… very much mistaken if you suppose that Germany is sending its forces to the east with such pleasure’.28 He got nowhere. Lenin had made up his mind and rebuked Ioffe for getting distracted and not writing enough German-language propaganda. Ioffe ignored him and ran the mission according to his own lights.29

  In any case there was agreement about much else. Overt activity was only a part of the mission’s duties and Ioffe’s clandestine tasks included the reception of leaders, agents and couriers arriving from Moscow. Among his secret guests at various times were Nikolai Bukharin, Khristo Rakovski and Felix Dzerzhinski. Ioffe welcomed the help of these fellow Bolshevik leftists — all of them had originally objected to the Brest-Litovsk treaty.30 Germany remained in the communist imagination the engine house of European revolutionary transformation. Lenin anyway shared the feeling that the separate peace and the weakness of the Soviet regime should not deter the Bolsheviks from promoting mass insurrection in Berlin. Ioffe helped to co-ordinate agents who dispensed communist literature and financial subsidies to likely supporters. He assisted the Moscow emissaries with their arrangements for onward travel to the rest of Europe.31 The Berlin mission also became the base for propaganda directed at Allied countries. Receiving Moscow’s proclamations on war and revolution, Ioffe sent them on to Britain, Switzerland and Scandinavia; and he obtained permission from the German government to print revolutionary material for dispatch across the lines of the western front to French, British and American troops.32

  Many German public figures and organizations felt that it would not be prudent to treat Russia roughly. The liberal politician Gustav Stresemann told Ioffe that if only the Soviet leadership would agree to a proper alliance of some kind with Germany, he would look favourably on the idea of returning all but Poland and the former Baltic provinces to Sovnarkom. Ioffe and Stresemann also discussed how the two countries might help each other economically. But Stresemann was not in power. He could only promise to relay such ideas to Ludendorff and the high command.33

  Ludendorff was not disposed to be gentle with the Russians. On 8 August his forces crumpled before a British surge at Amiens.34 Steadily the war was being lost in northern France. There was panic in the German high command as the tactical ingenuity and superior resources of the Allies took their toll. Ludendorff called for a last great effort. With this in mind he resolved to force the Soviet government to yield up further territory and resources. A supplementary treaty was initialled on 10 August on terms that were even more onerous than those of the Brest-Litovsk peace. Sovnarkom was to renounce all claims to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, enabling a further tranche of German troops to be shipped to the western front. The Germans would receive access to the vessels of the Black Sea fleet. They could buy a quarter of Baku’s oil output. The Soviet leaders agreed to pay an indemnity of six milliard marks from their gold reserves. They also undertook to try and expel the British from Archangel and Murmansk and to look kindly on any German military operation to that end. Lenin got almost nothing in exchange except a promise that the Germans would cease offering help to Sovnarkom’s enemies in Russia. Signature of the treaty took place on 27 August.35

  This was the apogee of Lenin’s policy of appeasement. Already in June, as a sop to the Germans, he had ceded the western sliver of the Murmansk district to the Finns. This would help German troops in Finland to counteract the spread of Allied power.36 The same readiness to help the Germans was evident in the south Caucasus. At German GHQ in Spa on 2 July it was reported that Ioffe had given ‘a firm guarantee of oil from Baku’.37 Germany expressed its readiness to stop its Turkish allies from invading the area. The Bolsheviks alone could not defend Baku. In return for Germany’s diplomatic help they would sell fuel to Berlin.38 On 29 July Lenin made clear to the Bolshevik leader Stepan Shaumyan in Baku that he was not to accept any military help from the British, who had offered to send troops. Disregard of this order would be treated as ‘insurrection and treason’.39 Lenin and his comrades put a brave face on all this. Pravda usually carried little news about the western front — the British naval attache´ Captain Francis Cromie thought this was ‘by Hun order, of course’.40 But on 17 August the party newspaper suggested that the German setbacks at Villars-Cottereˆts and Amiens made it unlikely that the Germans would now ever be able to invade Russia.41 Even so, Lenin continued to predict trouble for the Allies. On 28 August he declared that the popularity of patriotic defence was in jeopardy in France and that the British working class was about to break with ideas about civil peace.42

  His own preoccupation was with the Volga region of Russia.
The adherence of the Czech Corps gave heart and strength to the Komuch armed forces in Samara. They pushed north and seized Kazan. This left them only 630 miles from Moscow by rail and river routes. Every available Red unit was rushed down to meet the challenge. Trotsky arrived in August to supervise the army high command and stiffen the morale of the troops. No one was in any doubt that, if the Red Army was forced out of the region, Komuch would pose an acute strategic menace to Moscow. Sovnarkom faced an existential challenge.

  The Red Army regrouped at Sviyazhsk up the River Volga from Kazan. It suffered initially from chaotic organization. There were also mass desertions as troops and their commanders decided to have nothing to do with the war between Sovnarkom and Komuch. Military supplies to the Red Army were fragmentary. But the Reds held their line on the Volga and their morale and discipline began to grow. Pravda reported on this as if only Russian factors were in play. But as usual there was an international dimension. The Red Army’s dispositions became possible only because of German consent. The Brest-Litovsk treaty had left the forces of Russia and Germany facing each other in the ‘screens’ arranged along the new Russo-Ukrainian frontier. Few doubted that the Germans could easily sweep aside the Red defences if they so desired. Sovnarkom could not risk leaving the borders unmanned unless it was confident that Germany would not take advantage. Ioffe explored the question with the German Foreign Office on 7 August, and he was gratified when the Secretary of State Paul von Hintze gave an official assurance that Germany would not exploit Soviet Russia’s military difficulties.43 If anything, the Germans were delighted by the Red Army’s efforts. Indeed Chicherin was to claim, a few weeks later, that Germany was insisting that the Reds should liquidate the entire menace of the Czechs in the Volga region. German and Soviet strategic interests were conjoined.44

  Lenin and Trotsky needed no pressure to prosecute war against Komuch. Far from fearing civil war in Russia, they actively sought it. They knew that their revolution would not be secure until they won a definitive trial of strength against the anti-communists. The last thing they wanted was some kind of compromise with their enemies. Trotsky sent the following confidential message to Lenin on 17 August 1918:

  I consider it unacceptable to let steamers sail [the Volga] under a Red Cross flag. The receipt of grain will be interpreted by charlatans and fools as showing the possibility that agreement can be made and that civil war is unnecessary. The military motives are unknown to me. Air pilots and artillerymen have been ordered to bomb and set fire to the bourgeois districts of Kazan and then Simbirsk and Samara. In these conditions a Red Cross caravan is inappropriate.45

  He wanted nothing to intervene between the two combatant sides. Too bad if people in the Volga region were starving. Lenin and Trotsky both believed that the Soviet cause required an unflinching commitment to military practicalities. The Komuch government and its supporters had to be destroyed. Any other priority would be a mere sentimentality. The Bolsheviks were setting Russia on fire and, with German consent, planning to burn out any resistance before it could be consolidated.

  14. SUBVERTING RUSSIA

  Western espionage and subversion in Russia were conducted by some vivid individuals in 1918 and none was more colourful than Sidney Reilly, who arrived in the spring on a mission for British intelligence. Reilly throughout his life told contradictory stories about himself. It is likely — but not absolutely certain — that he came from Ukraine and was at least part Jewish. He was shortish, sallow complexioned and balding. Though his real surname was probably Rosenblum, he ran his commercial affairs under an alias borrowed from his estranged wife Margaret Reilly Callaghan.1 He was attractive to women, and he sought them out with fervour.2 His other passions were fashionable clothes, swanky hotels, good cigars and collecting Napoleonic memorabilia.3 Reilly was a deeply manipulative man and in business was a greedy wheeler-dealer. Commercial partners came and went. They seldom stayed with him for long; many complained of sharp practices and indeed he treated everyone as fair game. No acquaintance ever suggested he had an excess of moral rectitude. Sidney Reilly was a compulsive conman.4

  Mansfield Cumming at the Secret Service Bureau trusted his instincts and took risks, and he was often proved right when choosing recruits whom others regarded as unqualified or unsuitable. He ignored the thick sheaf of warnings sent to him about Reilly.5 The Bureau needed Russian-speakers with audacity and initiative, and Reilly fitted that bill. Cumming sent him to Russia via Archangel as agent ST1. Reilly started as he meant to go on, disembarking in Murmansk against orders and without explanation. The British expeditionary force there threw him into the lock-up of the merchant vessel that had brought him out from England. Admiral Kemp asked an intelligence officer, Stephen Alley, to interrogate him. Alley reported: ‘His passport was very doubtful, and his name was spelled Reilli.’ The peculiar spelling was possibly a deliberate one; it may well have been based on the calculation that a strange English version of the name would attract less suspicion since although Reilly claimed to be from Ireland and spoke with perfect grammar his accent was unmistakably from eastern Europe.6 When challenged about his identity, he pulled out ‘a microscopic message in code, which he had secreted under a cork of a bottle of aspirin tablets’. Alley recognized the message and instructed that Reilly be permitted to proceed south as he wished.7

  On reaching Moscow in April 1918, Reilly avoided contact with British officials and threw protocol aside. Instead he made straight for the Kremlin where he claimed that he was researching a book on the achievements of the Soviet order. This got him an interview with Lenin’s chief of staff Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. The meeting was an amicable one and Reilly was given use of an official limousine as well as an invitation to attend the May Day celebrations at the Polytechnical Museum where Trotsky was to deliver a speech on the Red Army. The hall was already packed when Reilly and a friend arrived. With their privileged seats on the platform, only a piano separated them from Trotsky. Reilly whispered: ‘This is just the moment to kill Trotsky and liquidate Bolshevism!’8 But a sense of self-preservation intruded and Reilly stayed his hand. Although he had come to Russia with a rather gentle opinion of Bolshevism, a few days in Moscow changed his mind and he began to talk about the Soviet regime with venom.9 It was only then that Lockhart heard that an unidentified Briton had visited the Kremlin to seek an interview with Lenin. He was furious at being bypassed and hauled Reilly in for a stiff lecture on lines of authority.

  After clearing the air in this fashion, Lockhart felt he could take Reilly into his confidence about his current plans to bring down the Bolsheviks. Lockhart had gained greater liberty for himself after the British embassy decamped to Vologda — this was, as he liked to put it, his ‘great luck’.10 When he had moved to Moscow with Trotsky, he had specifically demanded authority from London to remain ‘independent’; he insisted in particular that Oliver Wardrop, who served as consul-general, should render him every assistance without being set in authority over him.11 He wanted to be free to pursue his tasks in diplomacy and intelligence without interference.

  He also wanted freedom in his private life. Despite having previously been sent home to avoid scandal over an affair with a married woman, he lost no time in finding another lover in Moscow. He first met Maria Benckendorff (née Zakrevskaya) on 2 February 1918 over a game of bridge in Petrograd. On that occasion they only shook hands, but he was smitten by her glamour and vivacity.12 Moura, as she liked to be known, still moved in the old high society that existed before the October Revolution. She was bored by her husband Ioann, who had retreated with their children to his large Estonian estate some weeks earlier.13 Lockhart was looking for excitement and would confess: ‘I fell desperately in love with her.’14 Soon they were having an affair.15 She fell pregnant by him and clearly expected that both she and Lockhart would soon divorce their respective spouses. But it is far from certain that Lockhart would have ended his marriage to Jean, and when Moura miscarried the baby in September, her happiness quickly started
to sour.16 Subsequently she came under suspicion of informing for Soviet intelligence — something she was certainly doing by the 1930s.17 But there is no evidence that she already worked for the Chekists in mid-1918. At any rate Lockhart had taken a risk in having an affair with her and giving her the run of his apartment. If he was not spied upon, it was not because he took sensible precautions.

  Lockhart and others in the British intelligence network in Moscow had an uninhibited lifestyle. But Sidney Reilly outdid them all. Among his many lovers was a young Russian actress, Yelizaveta Otten, who rented a well-appointed apartment in Sheremetev Lane a few hundred yards north of the Kremlin.18 Yelizaveta’s flatmate Dagmara Karozus was, according to George Hill, another of Reilly’s conquests.19 Dagmara was a German citizen who in 1915 had been investigated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a possible spy. She had sensibly responded by applying for Russian citizenship.20 Then there was Olga Starzhevskaya, who fell head over heels in love with Reilly and foolishly believed they were about to be married. She knew him as a Russian called Konstantin Markovich Massino.21 Starzhevskaya was a typist in the central administration of the All-Russia Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets — no doubt her potential access to important material was her main attraction for him.22 Reilly handed over the money for her to rent and decorate an apartment for them both on Malaya Bronnaya Street.23

  Reilly was expert at running his amours in parallel and even employed several of the women as his operatives. Probably Maria Fride was the most useful of them. As a single woman in her early thirties, she had worked as a teacher and nurse.24 Her prime asset was access to her brother Alexander, a lieutenant colonel employed in the communications office of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs.25