Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  When Ransome quipped that any British political disturbances were merely the sign of an abortive revolution, Lenin swatted him aside:

  Yes, that is possible. It is, perhaps, an educative period, in which English workmen will come to realize their political needs, and turn from liberalism to socialism. Socialism is certainly weak in England. Your socialist movement, your socialist parties… when I was in England I zealously attended everything I could, and for a country with so large an industrial population they were pitiable, pitiable… a handful at a street corner… a school class… pitiable… But you must remember one great difference between Russia of 1905 and England of today. Our first Soviet in Russia was made during the revolution. Your shop-stewards committees have been in existence long before. They are without programme, without direction, but the opposition they will meet will force a programme on them.5

  Lenin stood by his ideas of historical inevitability. Where Russians had gone, the British would surely follow whether Ransome agreed or not.

  The Allied governments knew only too well that this was Lenin’s objective and could see that he and his comrades had attracted foreign sympathizers in Moscow who might return home and stir up revolution. The French were the first to take preventive action when Jacques Sadoul indicated a desire to assume a role in public life in Paris and only a bout of typhus held him back in the winter of 1918–19. He planned to tell his compatriots what he knew — or thought he knew — about the Soviet order. He also aimed to divulge information about France’s actions in Russia. Attacks on him appeared in the French press. Sadoul suspected that ministers had instigated them so as to keep him in Moscow and pre-empt a political scandal.6 When the French Socialist Party adopted him as a candidate in the national elections in honour of his struggle against Allied armed military intervention in Russia, the government in Paris forestalled him by setting up a court-martial for treason. He was tried in absentia and, in November 1919, sentenced to death for treason.7

  The next attempt at communist revolution occurred not in Paris or London but in Munich. Soldiers had returned from the western front angry and exhausted. Unemployment was growing and food shortages increased. Resentment at the Allies’ demands was on the rise. Strikes and demonstrations spread and the Russian idea of workers electing their own councils was copied. Kurt Eisner, Bavaria’s Prime Minister, tried to dampen the fire. His moderating influence was not widely appreciated. Indeed, he was hated at both extremes of the political spectrum, and on 21 February 1919 a fiery young aristocrat gunned him down. The assassination encouraged Max Levien, a leader of the Munich Workers’ Council, to think that there would never be a better or more necessary time to seize power. Born and raised in Russia, Levien had come to Germany to take a degree in zoology and unlike other political emigrants he stayed in central Europe after the fall of the Romanovs. His political partner was Eugen Leviné, who hailed from St Petersburg and had studied in Heidelberg after being exiled to Siberia. Their German associates were heavily represented in the liberal professions. They were fervent admirers of the October Revolution, and Levien and Leviné put themselves forward as the Lenin and Trotsky of the political far left in southern Germany.

  On 7 April 1919 they proclaimed the Bavarian Council Republic. Factories and large commercial enterprises were expropriated. Church, aristocracy and bourgeoisie were threatened. Patrols were instituted around the city’s central districts. Telegrams of victory were sent to Moscow. Lenin replied congratulating the insurrectionaries; yet again he thought he had the proof that communism would spread quickly and easily to the rest of Europe.

  The fact that Levien and Leviné were of Jewish parentage and were Russian passport-holders did not go unremarked in Munich. In the eyes of Eugenio Pacelli, the papal nuncio who in 1939 would become Pope Pius XII, Levien was ‘a young man, about thirty or thirty-five, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.’8 The nuncio described the female communists as filthy sluts and he associated Levien and Leviné with dirt, slipperiness and even bestiality. Pacelli’s prejudices were shared by many Christians in those years, and the Council Republic was widely regarded as a foreign disease. But the leaders of the Council Republic, by mixing exclusively with people who shared their political extremism, failed to detect the revulsion that millions of Germans felt for their creed. Nor did they appreciate how the disruption of social and economic stability that had enabled their seizure of power was only a temporary phenomenon. Retaliation was inevitable. But Levien and his comrades underestimated their enemies’ capacity to do them damage — and at a time when Kolchak was threatening Moscow, there was no chance of armed support from the Red Army.

  The Bavarian Council Republic lasted only as long as it took for the national government in Berlin to organize an attack. Levien and Levine´ were breathtakingly naive. Believing that common criminals were simply victims of the old Imperial order, they released all convicts from prison. (Neither Lenin nor Trotsky was ever tempted into such silliness.) The subsequent wave of robberies and murders in Munich made it a terrible place to live. The economic emergency intensified as businesses closed down. Levien and Leviné had no idea how to restore employment, and their period in power was characterized by a collapse of industry and commerce.

  In May 1919 the Freikorps assembled in Bamberg 150 miles to the north and moved on Munich alongside regular army units. Known communists were shot in the streets. The official tally was six hundred deaths, but the reality could well have been twice that. The fighting was over within a few hours as workers’ militias quickly laid down their arms. Levien escaped to Vienna until he took refuge in Soviet Russia in June 1921. Leviné, a less worldly person, saw it as his duty to remain with his comrades in Munich. Arrested with the writer Ernst Toller, he was tried for sedition. He was resigned to his fate: ‘We communists are all dead men on leave.’9 He was executed after being found guilty of complicity in the shooting of hostages. The lamps of communism had failed to illumine central Europe. Although Soviet leaders were disappointed, they observed that German politics remained volatile and that the national government could not deal with its enemies on the political far left without bringing in the army and paramilitary forces. The economy was in tatters. Even if the Munich experiment had proved unsuccessful, this did not mean that workers in Germany and elsewhere in central Europe would not eventually find the ingredients to produce a revolutionary order.

  Hungarian communists gave grounds for optimism from 21 March 1919, when they swept to power in Budapest with a communist dominated coalition. The revolution was quickly spread to the entire country — or at least to those parts of Hungary left to the Hungarians by the Allies. Lenin and Trotsky greeted it with the same warmth as they had shown to the Bavarian Council Republic. Béla Kun, the Hungarian revolutionary leader, was a zealot for the Soviet order. He had spent time in Russia after being captured with the armies of Austria-Hungary on the eastern front. As an ex-POW he formed a Hungarian communist group in Moscow in March 1918, returning to Budapest as soon as the Great War was over. Kun had worked as a journalist and wrote lively pamphlets against the Western Allies and the prospect of a humiliating peace. He now found he had a talent for oratory, too. The unstable government that was striving to moderate the Allied terms threw him into prison. But when the social-democrats entered the cabinet they liberated Kun as a comrade on the political left. He walked straight from the cells into a ministerial post. He had been badly beaten while incarcerated and his face showed the wounds that he had received and fully intended to avenge.10

  Like his friend and fellow communist Tibor Szamuely, Kun was a fanatic. Solidarity with Soviet Russia was proclaimed and reports of Bolshevik achievements were carried in the Budapest newspapers. The Red flag was hoisted on public buildings. Trade unions received a generous quota of free tickets to the theatres. The banks, mines and big textile factories were nationalized. Kun established a security police that soon
gained notoriety for its terror against ‘class enemies’. Szamuely assembled the ‘Lenin Boys’ whom he sent into the villages to seize the harvest and impose a system of collective farms. (The same thing was happening in the Ukrainian countryside; but whereas in Ukraine it was against the instructions of Moscow, in Hungary it was on Kun’s orders.) Churches were desecrated and priests and landlords were arrested or murdered. When peasants objected to the violence, the Lenin Boys turned on them too. The communization of Hungarian society was undertaken at a faster pace even than in Russia after the October Revolution. Blood flowed copiously.

  Such popularity as Kun retained lay in his unequivocal rejection of the Allies’ schemes for Hungary. The Western Allies planned to reward Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia with territory that until then had been part of Hungary. Hungary would become a third of its previous size. As a result even Hungarians who were wary of Kun’s communist internationalist doctrines lent him their support. The communist leadership were willing to act rather than merely grumble.

  Recruiting left-of-centre commanders from the Imperial armed forces, Kun mobilized the troops to fight for every patch of ‘Hungarian’ soil. He vowed to repel the growing incursions by Romanian and Czechoslovak troops. He paraded foreign POWs through the streets of Budapest. Hungary’s interests, he implied, were safe in his hands. Although he disliked the Hungarian national flag, he yielded when Ferenc Julier, Chief of the General Staff, told him that without it there might be trouble in getting an army into the field against the Romanians.11 Kun was cunning in his interviews for the foreign press, pretending to be much more moderate than he really was and claiming that it would be years before any truly communist policies would be applied. For a while he was successful and the communist regime threw back the Romanian and Czech invaders in April 1919.12 Its Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia, taking several towns before meeting effective resistance. It closed the Danube to shipping, and Austrian attempts to break the river blockade were disrupted ‘by the Hungarian Bolshevists who would fire on boats’.13 The Orient Express continued to run across Hungary from Romania, but Red Guards with their fixed bayonets and grenade belts made crossing the border an unpleasant experience.14

  The Allies reacted with an economic blockade designed to bring Kun and Szamuely to their knees.15 Food supplies were depleted. The only solution according to Kun was to expropriate more grain, vegetables and meat from the villages. Clashes with the peasantry intensified as civil war broke out.

  Kun and Szamuely had always seen their ultimate salvation in international revolution. They begged Lenin and Trotsky to send a contingent of the Red Army from newly conquered Ukraine.16 Little did the communist leaders in Moscow and Budapest know that American forces were intercepting Hungarian wireless traffic.17 So nothing that Kun wrote in his telegrams was truly confidential.18 It was no secret, of course, that the Soviet leaders, if the opportunity arose, were intent on helping to spread communist revolution west-wards. The Bolshevik party’s entire foreign policy had been built on this foundation. Just occasionally there were surprises for the Allied powers, such as when the Austrian security agency claimed to have discovered a secret plan of Kun’s for a communist seizure of power in Vienna. This may have been a case of counter-intelligence officers trying to prove their usefulness to Austria’s new social-democratic government.19 It would seem that the Americans later used their intercepted information to prevent Kun from heading to Switzerland as an envoy of Lenin and Trotsky.20 Old ‘Austria-Hungary’ was boiling up with political conflicts that could spill over the new national borders. It appeared that anything might happen, and it frequently did.

  Lenin and Trotsky did not dismiss Kun’s requests out of hand, and their Red Army high command began to examine how it might lend assistance to Hungary. It quickly became obvious that a campaign across the Ukrainian frontier would put the Red Army in danger from Kolchak and Denikin. If Russians marched westwards, they might find there was no Soviet homeland to return to. With regret they turned down Kun’s request.21

  By late summer, the Hungarian Red Army faced rebellion throughout Hungary and threats on the northern borders. Desertions grew in number. The last slim hope of the Kun government vanished on 4 August when Romanian forces, after weeks of fighting in the north of the country, stormed into Budapest. Although they were delighted that a power in the region had overthrown communism, the Western Allies did not approve of what happened next. The Romanian military force was a law unto itself and the Bucharest authorities exercised no restraint over it. Red Hungarian terror was replaced with a White Romanian one, and Hungarian groups emerged seeking revenge on the communists who had tormented them for months. Chaos ensued when the Romanians reduced the police service to six hundred policemen. Attacks on Jews in the streets and in their houses became frequent. The economy fell apart entirely and food became scarce in the capital even for those who had possessions to barter.22 The Romanians stripped the occupied territories of their flour, sugar, medicine and even its railway locomotives.23 Famine spread across the country.24

  US officials were aware that communism remained a threat in central Europe — and not only in Hungary. Herbert Hoover, director of the American Relief Administration, wrote to Woodrow Wilson on 28 March 1919:

  Politically the Bolsheviki most certainly represent a minority in every country where they are in control. The Bolsheviki… [have] resorted to terror, bloodshed and murder to a degree long since abandoned even among reactionary tyrannies… [They have] embraced a large degree of emotionalism and… thereby given an impulse to [their] propaganda comparable only to the impulse of large spiritual movements.25

  Hoover’s remedy was to counteract Marxism’s appeal by shipping American food relief to central Europe. Europe had depended on grain exports from Russia before the Great War. Hoover argued that American farmers would benefit from filling the gap.26 America had an over-abundance of agricultural produce. Credits should be advanced so that European countries could buy stocks.27

  Hoover argued that no better way existed to demonstrate capitalist superiority over communism than to bring the bread of life from the world’s healthiest market economy and help industry and agriculture to recover. He saw that wherever food was short there was a danger of cities toppling into communist hands. American philanthropy, however, came with strings. Hoover stipulated that the recipient governments should maintain order and keep the political far left out of power. Revolutionary disturbances in Vienna were enough for him to suspend aid to Austria temporarily; and he held back supplies from Hungary underr Kun.28 Meanwhile his American Relief Administration transported cereals, medicines, sugar, tinned meat and fish to Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. His efforts in central Europe after the Great War were extraordinary in the face of much obstruction from the French and British, who continued to blockade Germany at the risk of outright mass starvation in 1919. When he learned that American grain cargoes were held up at European ports, Hoover angrily intervened by stressing that he had President Wilson’s full support. Undoubtedly the strain took a toll on him — J. M. Keynes described him admiringly as ‘a weary Titan’ and ‘an exhausted prize-fighter’.29 But Hoover got his way and the French and British stopped being obstructive — and the blockade of Germany was lifted.

  Food aid for Germany might help the Allies to avert communist revolutionary advances but it was by no means sufficient in itself. Even incarcerated in Berlin’s Moabit prison, Karl Radek refused to believe that capitalism had a long-term future. From August 1919 he was allowed visitors; he held what he called a salon in his cell as politicians and reporters queued to meet the exotic Bolshevik.30 Another rather unexpected visitor was one of Germany’s leading industrialists, Walter Rathenau, who agreed that any return to the old capitalist order in Europe was impossible. Rathenau spoiled this for Radek by adding that his published oeuvre refuted Marx’s theories as well as Lenin’s prediction of a German proletarian revolution. Radek was also visited by the journalist Maximilien Harden, who cam
e and asked Radek to write a piece for his weekly Die Zukunft. General von Reibnitz, an aristocratic member of the officer corps, arrived with his proposal for a Soviet–German rapprochement and even a German revolution on the Soviet model; and the British reporter Morgan Philips Price, the friend he had made in Petrograd, paid a visit to update him on events in the United Kingdom.31

  At the same time, Radek was keeping up a secret correspondence with the German communist movement. Ruth Fischer, an Austrian Marxist, was a fount of information for him on her visits to the prison. Not all her news was cheering. Germany’s communist leaders were heading for a split at their party congress in Heidelberg. Austrian communists were discussing how to organize a seizure of power in Vienna, but they had not got far in their preparations.32 Radek wrote a critical pamphlet on the German Communist Party and replied to Karl Kautsky’s attack on Bolshevik rule in Russia. Both works were published by a friendly press in Berlin.33 Despite having heard of the difficulties for the revolutionary cause in central Europe, he remained confident that the continent was on the brink of revolutionary transformation.

  The activities of the Italian political far left also helped to keep his spirits up. Unlike Hungary and Germany, Italy was one of the victorious powers. Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando had attended the Paris Peace Conference just long enough to secure the cession of the Trentino to Italy before returning to Rome. The big cities of the north, Milan and Turin, were shaken by strikes in the large industrial factories. Appeals for quiet negotiation in the national interest fell on deaf ears. Workers elected factory councils that in summer 1919 began to seize control of whole enterprises. The Italian Socialist Party was divided over how to deal with the crisis, and a split was in the making as the radicals expressed solidarity with the October Revolution in Russia. Comintern sent Nikolai Lyubarski as an agent to hasten this outcome with finance and advice.34 The young Sardinian militant Antonio Gramsci saw the factory councils as the embryo of a revolutionary administration that could assume power throughout the country. As editor of L’Ordine Nuovo (‘The New Order’) in Turin, he urged Italian workers to overturn capitalism and move towards self-rule. Orlando’s government positioned troops into the factories before Gramsci and his comrades could realize their objective — and the embers of revolt were put out in the course of the following year.