Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  Yet she went along with the other Spartacist leaders in their planning of an uprising in Berlin. A gathering was held with other far-left organizations from 30 December 1918 and the Communist Party of Germany was founded. Everyone present agreed with the Bolsheviks that a new era of human history was at hand. They had held this belief since before the Great War and their disgust at the immense loss of life since 1914 had convinced them that only revolution would prevent another such world war from occurring. Imperialism could not be curbed: it had to be eliminated. Capitalism was at the root of the world’s troubles and it too had to be swept away. No country was more advanced than Germany in industrial and educational skills. Marxism taught that the ‘proletariat’ in the factories and the mines would inevitably lead society into a bright future where oppression and exploitation would be no more. What the Russian workers had done in Petrograd was about to be accomplished — and accomplished with greater success — in the German capital; indeed the Bolsheviks agreed with the Spartacists that Germany’s working class was the readiest in the world for socialism. Conditions in the country were ripe for exploitation and the Spartakusbund intended to catch the new German government by surprise. Workers’ councils would seize power before army or police could stop them, and the entire ‘proletariat’ would rally to the cause of revolution.

  The leading Spartacists wanted Soviet comradeship, not tutelage, and felt that the sooner the insurrection was under way in Berlin, the easier it would be to avoid that outcome. Radek teased them that Lenin and Trotsky were revolutionaries of greater stature than anybody in the German Communist Party. As he no doubt intended, this only strengthened their resolve. They deputed a single comrade, Hugo Eberlein, to go Moscow for the international conference being organized by the Bolsheviks. Eberlein received strict instructions to prevent Lenin and his associates from taking control. Meanwhile Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogiches set about planning how to seize the post and telegraph office, the garrisons, government buildings and big printing presses in Berlin.

  The day chosen for a general strike and uprising was 5 January 1919. The proclamations had been written. The message went out early to militants in the metalworking factories to come out on to the streets. Liebknecht and his comrades got ready to talk to the crowds. Luxemburg already had a heavy heart, feeling that a serious revolution required more than high hopes. For their part, Ebert and Scheidemann reacted with vigour and called on the army garrisons, along with the Freikorps, to suppress the revolt. Many ex-soldiers of the western front saw the political far left as traitors to the national cause. The fact that several of them were Jewish intensified the hostility. In the eyes of many who had fought in the trenches, Germany had lost the war because people like Liebknecht and Luxemburg had undermined morale in the rear. Fighting was sporadic on the streets, but the rage to settle accounts was intense and it was quickly obvious that the combined action of army and Freikorps would overwhelm all resistance. The insurrection sputtered out almost before it began.

  The Freikorps wreaked a terrible vengeance. Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogiches were hunted down and bludgeoned to death. The killers dumped Luxemburg’s body outside the railings of the Zoological Gardens. The symbolism was intentional. The enemies of the Spartacists looked on them as being less than human. Dogs were being given a dog’s death. The Spartacist leaders met their ends with courage and dignity. Of their leaders, only Thalheimer and Levi survived — and it was Levi who delivered the funeral oration for Luxemburg on 2 February.35 Radek went into hiding. On the party’s orders he had spent the year 1917 in Stockholm rather than Petrograd. For all his big talk he had no more experience of organizing a seizure of power than anyone else in Berlin. The German authorities, moreover, were aware of his illicit presence in the country. A search was begun for him, and he was captured on 12 February 1919 and thrown into Moabit prison.

  While Ebert and Scheidemann resumed their attempts to bring about political stability and economic recovery, the newly formed German Communist Party sought to rebuild its organizations. It had lost the inspiring leaders who had founded it, but its revolutionary vision remained intact. Others filled the gap left by Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogiches. Their spirits stayed high. German communists continued to despise the new socialist government, a government that accepted responsibility for Germany’s humiliation at the hands of the Allies. The communists foresaw abundant chances to undertake revolution. Like the Bolsheviks in Russia, they believed that Berlin was the city where the future of Europe would be settled. The German working class would surely soon see that Scheidemann and his ministers were collaborating with big business. The communist party offered an alternative vision of internal and foreign policy. Thalheimer and Levi preached the coming doom of capitalism — and they intended by political action to bring forward the date when this would occur.

  PART THREE

  Probings

  17. REVOLVING THE RUSSIAN QUESTION

  After their triumph on the western front, the Allies could no longer claim that they were intervening in Russia so as to bring its armed forces back into the fight against Germany. In the United Kingdom, Robert Cecil as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs circulated a memorandum to the King and the War Cabinet spelling out the constraints on British policy. Cecil suggested that a crusade against Bolshevism was impracticable. Allied measures, he argued, should be limited to offering assistance to ‘our Russian friends’ and the Czech Corps.1

  But the survival of the Soviet government meant that the ‘Russian question’ was anything but a historical one. German commanders and diplomats who had cheerfully welcomed their government’s use of the Bolsheviks to ease their tasks in the war now warned against the possibility that Bolshevism might move into the heart of Europe. Until November 1918 Allied politicians had looked on Russians mainly in terms of their potential to restore the eastern front. From being fitfully alarmed by pro-Soviet anti-war propaganda in their own countries, they began to appreciate that the Bolshevik revolutionary example might soon be followed abroad. Talk about the communist ‘contagion’ was growing. It was accentuated by the actions of the Bolsheviks themselves after the German surrender. The borderlands of the old empire underwent revolutions as Moscow supplied personnel to instigate seizures of power in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and proclaim Soviet republics. Fundamental economic and social reforms followed Russia’s model. Once Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius had fallen under their influence, the Bolsheviks tried to extend the revolutionary order from the capitals to other towns and villages. Stalin drafted decrees in December recognizing the new Soviet republics and providing them with financial assistance.2 If this could happen so quickly, who was to say that Poland or Germany would not soon fall to the communists? And what was to stop communist influence from spreading still further westwards?

  In fact the German capitulation occurred just a little too soon for the Bolsheviks, who had not yet secured their hold on Russia. On 18 November 1918 in Ufa, a city in the Urals, Admiral Alexander Kolchak pushed aside the regional administration led by Socialist- Revolutionaries and declared himself Supreme Ruler. Komuch by then was no more and the Red Army had seized control of the Volga towns. Kolchak, assisted by the remaining volunteers of the Czech Corps, despised the Socialist-Revolutionaries as much as he hated the Bolsheviks. His forces dealt savagely with the Reds and their sympathizers as he undertook his advance through the Urals. His was the first of the White armies to make serious progress and in December he occupied Perm, scattering the Bolsheviks to the winds. In the south, where another White force — the Volunteer Army — was still gathering under General Anton Denikin after the deaths of Generals Kornilov and Alexeev, the hope was that the Allied victory in the west would liberate resources to help against the Bolsheviks. Denikin welcomed the existence of the clandestine National Centre with its liberal and socialist members so that he could win friends in London and Paris.3 The British quickly indicated approval and promised their help. The French made similar noises.4 Act
ion followed on 18 December when the French landed troops in Odessa while Britain’s expedition remained in the Russian north. The situation was grim for Bolshevism and getting grimmer.

  Although they temporarily gave up territory, the Bolsheviks tightened their grip on the areas under their rule. They had spent the year 1918 in internal disputes, nearly breaking apart as a party over the Brest-Litovsk treaty. There were also regular problems with indiscipline and lack of co-ordination between the various organizational levels. Bolshevik leaders in the provinces as well as in Moscow recognized that this situation had to change if Sovnarkom was going to win the Civil War against the Whites. Agreement was reached on the need for a properly functioning hierarchy. As personnel were drafted into the Red Army, fewer and fewer people were left to take the big decisions. The Party Central Committee established a system of internal sub-committees to facilitate rapid reactions to emergencies. The Political Bureau (or Politburo, as it was known) consisted of five members including Lenin and Trotsky; it quickly became the key agency of central party decision and command. The Bolsheviks were willing to militarize themselves if it helped against Kolchak and Denikin. They had always believed in centralism: now they set about practising it systematically. Gradually, the chaotic conditions in soviets, army, police and trade unions began to improve as the party imposed its institutional supremacy.

  The Whites’ strategic aim was simply to advance on Moscow and overrun the Bolsheviks. The Allies were more enigmatic. Lloyd George and Wilson still claimed they simply wanted to see Russia achieve internal peace. Clemenceau, who as French premier exerted authority at President Poincaré’s expense, agreed. The difficulty remained that no Allied leaders recognized the legitimacy of Sovnarkom and the October Revolution — they commonly believed that the Russian people were oppressed by Bolshevik rule.

  There were three basic options. The Western Allies — or one or two of them — could decide that Russia, by defecting from their side and relieving the military pressure on Germany, had forfeited the right to be left alone at the end of hostilities. The spectre of communism was haunting Europe. Lenin and his comrades had openly stated their wish to put global capitalism to the torch. They aimed to overturn the American, French and British governments. The Allied powers might reasonably conclude that the way to prevent the communist insurrections was to cauterize the ‘contagion’ by invading Russia. This would require a big army and a concentration of political will. A less demanding option would be to strengthen the Allied expeditions lodged on the periphery of ‘Soviet power’, supplying the Whites with money and arms but holding back from their own direct attack on Moscow and Petrograd. But political opposition and social exhaustion at home might rule out even this possibility. The Great War was over and few people in Britain, France or America had the appetite for yet another far-flung conflict and indeed many were fiercely opposed to the idea. In that case the ultimate option would be to conclude that Russia was a lost cause and to abandon the Russian people to their fate.

  But even a policy of non-intervention left problems unresolved. Should Soviet Russia receive official recognition? Should normal trade links be resumed? Several business lobbies in the UK and the US called for a diplomatic and commercial rapprochement. The trade unions meanwhile campaigned against military action, and European socialist parties had leaders and militants who saw a lot of good in the social and economic reforms in Russia.

  In the United Kingdom, too, a Hands Off Russia movement grew up, supplied with a rousing booklet by Arthur Ransome. In The Truth about Russia he lamented:

  I only know that, from the point of view of the Russian Revolution, England seems to be a vast nightmare of blind folly, by the sea, and beyond that by the trenches, and deprived, by some fairy godmother who was not invited to her christening, of the imagination to realise what is happening beyond. Shouting in daily telegrams across the wires from Russia I feel I am shouting at a drunken man asleep in the road in front of a steamroller… I think it possible that the revolution will fail. If so, then the failure will not mean that it loses its importance… No matter, if only in America, in England, in France, in Germany, men know what it was that failed, who betrayed it, who murdered it. Man does not live by his deeds so much as by the purposes of his deeds.5

  A crusade against Soviet Russia was anathema to troops who longed for demobilization and shipment home. Powerful resistance grew to making war on communism.

  This was certainly the line taken by Labour Party candidates at the hustings before the general election on 14 December 1918. Ramsay MacDonald thought that it had served the Allies right that Lenin had dragged Russia out of the war; he was also sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as fellow socialists, despite being regularly insulted by them in print.6 The New Statesman, breaking its wartime silence about how to handle Russia, joined the Daily Herald, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Express in putting pressure on Lloyd George and the government to halt the intervention. Even the Daily Telegraph, usually a supporter of the Coalition, objected to ministers refusing to ventilate their considerations on Bolshevism in parliament or the press. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Milner, was an exception; he openly contended that it would be ‘an abominable betrayal, contrary to every British instinct of honour and humanity’, if the country abandoned those Russians who had supported the Allied forces of intervention — and he confided to ex-chargé d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov that his personal preference was to reinforce the military intervention.7 But generally the Coalition MPs avoided the Russian question save only for affirming that a vote for them would help defend the United Kingdom against Bolshevism. Their electoral tactic paid off. When the results were declared on 28 December the Coalition had triumphed.8

  Robert Bruce Lockhart’s line was more belligerent than Milner’s. Newly returned from Moscow, he was acclaimed as a near-martyr who had done his patriotic duty. In the House of Commons only the Liberal MP Joseph King sounded a discordant note about him. King had got hold of the Soviet version of events and pointed out that Lockhart was no innocent but had tried to suborn the Latvian Riflemen into arresting Lenin and Trotsky.9 This isolated clamour drew no response from Lockhart, who maintained his focus on seeking to influence governmental policy; with Germany defeated, he favoured an all-out invasion of Russia. On 7 November, the first anniversary of the October seizure of power in Petrograd, he forwarded a memorandum to the Foreign Office emphasizing the strength that accrued to the Soviet government from its repressive zeal as well as its popularity with workers and peasants. The Bolsheviks were easily the biggest party in Russia; the counter-revolutionary forces were hopelessly divided. Lockhart pointed out that the communist leadership was intent on expanding the revolution into central Europe. He mapped out the various options before recommending military force ‘to intervene immediately on a proper scale’. He proposed sending British troops to Siberia and Archangel. But his idea was that the main offensive should be organized from the south: he called for 50,000 men to be dispatched to the Black Sea to link up with the Volunteer Army.10

  Lockhart predicted success for an invasion at a time when the Red Army was weak and the Allies were not yet exhausted. No time was to be lost.11 Balfour ignored him, and Lockhart sensed a general frostiness in Whitehall:

  After a week at home it is perfectly obvious that apart from the relief of having rescued me from the Bolsheviks the Foreign Office is not in the least interested in my account of things. They prefer the reactionaries who have never even seen Bolshevism. Tyrrell and Hardinge are frankly and avowedly hostile and I may even have difficulty in obtaining another job.12

  W. G. T. Tyrrell served as head of the Political Intelligence Department at the Foreign Office; Charles Hardinge was Permanent Under- Secretary to Balfour. Behind them stood Lord Robert Cecil as Under-Secretary of State. They had disliked Lockhart since early 1918 when he was advising the government to give official recognition to the Bolsheviks. Now they rejected him as a whirligig. Lockhart learned that Tyrrell regarded
him as ‘a hysterical schoolboy who had intrigued with the Prime Minister behind the Foreign Office’s back’. This was a reference to Lloyd George’s dispatch of Lockhart to Russia as an antidote to the cautious policy pursued at the time by Balfour. Lockhart reasonably concluded of Tyrrell: ‘Not much hope in this quarter.’13

  Others, including the King, were more favourably disposed. Lockhart recorded his meeting with George V in his diary for 23 October 1918: ‘The King was very nice and showed a surprising grasp of the situation; he however did most of the talking and during the forty minutes I was with him I didn’t really get much in. He sees pretty well the need for reforms everywhere, and has a wholesome dread of Bolshevism.’14 Lockhart, originally a proponent of accommodation with Lenin and Trotsky, stayed firmly anti-Bolshevik for the rest of his life.

  Winston Churchill refrained from advocating an all-out Allied invasion, but he was the one politician to speak out more strongly than Milner against the Soviet order. In his electoral address to his Dundee constituents on 28 November 1918 he declared: ‘Russia is being reduced by the Bolsheviks to an animal form of Barbarism… Civilisation is being extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troupes of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.’15 Even for Churchill this was pungent language. When referring to the Germans, mortal enemies of the United Kingdom until a few days previously, he called them ‘barbarian’. But barbarians are human. Churchill’s speech was aimed at dehumanizing the Soviet leaders and their followers as a way of persuading people that the October Revolution had somehow to be overthrown. On another occasion he wildly referred to Bolshevism as a baby that should be ‘strangled in its cradle’. Churchill was fired up on the Russian question, but he usually liked to drop a phial of wit into his fulminations. About Russia he felt no such impulse.