Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  At the time nobody could yet be sure that communism had been finally cauterized in Europe. Attempt after attempt had been made at launching a revolution that would join hands with the Soviet political experiment. Each time — in Berlin, in Munich, in Budapest and in Turin and Milan — it had been thwarted. But the conditions that provided communist organizations with an opportunity to challenge their governments had still to be eliminated. In many European countries the discontent with living and working conditions remained deep and wide, and far-left militants turned increasingly to Comintern for their guidance and inspiration. What had happened in Petrograd in 1917 might still take place elsewhere. This was one thing about which there was agreement between the Bolsheviks and the leaders of the Western Allies.

  20. THE ALLIES AND THE WHITES

  As the Paris Peace Conference moved to its close, the need for the Allies to define their Russian policy became urgent. They at last did this on 27 May 1919, when Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando and the leader of the Japanese delegation Saionji Kinmochi conferred in Woodrow Wilson’s residence to draft a message to Kolchak — wherever east of the Urals he was to be found. None of the Allied leaders thought any good could come from negotiating with Sovnarkom. But they also wanted to assure themselves that the Whites were a tolerable alternative worthy of support.

  They told Kolchak that it had ‘always been a cardinal axiom of the Allied and Associated Powers to avoid interference in the internal affairs of Russia’. They stressed that Allied intervention had always been limited to assisting those Russians who ‘wanted to continue the struggle against German autocracy and to free their country from German rule’ and to rescue the legion of Czech troops. Now that the war was over they remained willing to do what they could for Russia and help it towards ‘liberty, self-government and peace’. The terms on which they would offer this help were clearly set out. If Kolchak wanted assistance from the Western Allies, he had to promise to call elections to a Constituent Assembly or reconvene the old one. He had to guarantee universal civic freedoms and reaffirm his recognition of Russia’s foreign debts. He had to accept the independence of Poland and Finland. Other borderlands of the former Russian Empire — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Caucasus and central Asia — were to be promised autonomy. Any disputes over territory would have to be referred for adjudication to the League of Nations.1

  Kolchak replied through the French diplomats attached to his headquarters. He assented to Constituent Assembly elections and added that he would step down from power after military victory if this would help. He declared that he was willing to recognize Russian state debts. While accepting that Poland should be free, however, he limited himself to a vague readiness to discuss other international questions at a later date. Although this lay short of wholehearted compliance it satisfied the Western Allies, who wrote back sympathetically on 12 June.2 They wanted democracy in Russia, but their greater wish was to bring down Bolshevism; to do so they were more than willing to work with White Russian commanders who had little genuine democratic inclination.

  By then, however, the White cause was in terrible straits. Kolchak’s advance was halted at Ufa and the Red counter-offensive broke up his forces in June. Just weeks earlier he had appointed Yevgeni Miller to lead White forces in northern Russia; but Miller, based in Archangel with few troops, could do little more than wait on events. Kolchak’s situation worsened through the summer, and he retreated stage by stage along the Trans-Siberian railway, taking a vast gold reserve with him. He was pushed steadily eastwards, with no realistic hope of recovery, while his troops were attacked en route by the region’s peasants. Meanwhile Denikin had decided that he at last had adequate forces to make his thrust northwards from southern Ukraine. He divided his Volunteer Army into two groups — while one fought its way along the River Volga, the other attacked through central Ukraine. Like Kolchak, Denikin had the simple basic objective of reaching and occupying Moscow with all possible speed. The Red Army, relieved of the threat from the Urals, redeployed its main strength against him and in October 1919, fighting alongside Ukrainian peasant irregulars, decisively defeated Denikin outside Orël, in the border area between Russia and Ukraine, and steadily withdrew to the Ukrainian south.

  All this time the Whites pleaded with the Allies to strengthen their military presence in north Russia, southern Ukraine and mid-Siberia. But French commanders in Ukraine fretted about the worsening situation for their troops. General Philippe Henri d’Anselme had never had confidence in France’s expedition and in April decided that evacuation was the only option. His troops were demoralized: few wanted to fight the Red Army and military discipline was breaking down.3 He sent a telegram to Clemenceau saying that it no longer made sense to talk of France’s ‘army of the East’. The longer the troops stayed by the Black Sea, the graver the discontent among them. D’Anselme proposed instead that the French should train and equip the Romanian army, lending it an officer cadre. The Allies should also send food to Romania so that the Romanian people would be sufficiently well fed to provide useful soldiers.4 Clemenceau, who was equally anti-Soviet and anti-German, was not pleased, but he was unable to act against the advice from generals on the spot. French military withdrawal was only a matter of time.

  Lloyd George was also contemplating the withdrawal of the British expedition from northern Russia. Never having been an enthusiastic interventionist, he had concluded that the time had come to evacuate Archangel and Murmansk. The British labour movement was united against sending troops there and the Hands Off Russia campaign gathered strength on the political left.5 The troops themselves yearned to be demobbed; any orders for eastward deployment would almost certainly lead to mutinies. And many businessmen wanted to re-enter Russian markets.

  Churchill, however, stood out from the national consensus and continued to favour increased support for the Whites and to oppose any resumption of trade with the areas of Russia under Soviet rule. When he made a fuss in the cabinet, Lloyd George wrote a gentle reprimand:

  I wonder whether it is any use my making one last effort to induce you to throw off this obsession which, if you forgive me for saying so, is upsetting your balance. I again ask you to let Russia be, at any rate for a few days, and to concentrate on the quite unjustifiable expenditure in France, at home and in the East, incurred by both the War Office and the Air Department.6

  The Prime Minister’s mind was on British economic recovery since he saw that the country’s finances could not withstand another war. But he left the expedition where it was for some months. Apart from anything else, the outcome of the Civil War in Russia was in the balance and Lloyd George had no wish to undermine the chances of the Whites. Most Liberal and nearly all Conservative MPs supported the presence of the United Kingdom’s troops in Russia as did the two great newspaper proprietors, Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere.

  A sprinkling of parliamentarians challenged this orthodoxy. Labour MPs, many of them having been elected for the first time and not yet experienced in the ways of the House, were quiet on the Russian question; but a small group of independent voices — Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, Commander J. M. Kenworthy and Cecil Malone (who chose not to use his rank after leaving the forces) — criticized the government’s policy; they were favourably reported in the Manchester Guardian, the new Labour Daily Herald and Lord Beaver- brook’s Daily Express.7 Churchill ignored the press criticisms of him until the Daily Express printed a letter from Lieutenant Colonel Sherwood Kelly on 6 September 1919 alleging that the Secretary for War had misled the country about British army operations in Russia.8 Kelly, a holder of the Victoria Cross, had returned from service in Archangel disgusted by what he saw as governmental duplicity. The expedition had been told that its purpose was limited to protecting British military stores. Kelly accused Churchill and fellow ministers of deceitfully organizing a covert offensive to overthrow Sovnarkom. Obliged to defend both himself and the cabinet against charges of deceit, Churchill denied pursuing
a policy of invasion.9

  The Americans, like Lloyd George, wanted to help the Whites without actually sending their troops to fight alongside them. This had to be undertaken with discretion. The American labour movement was agitating for official recognition of Soviet Russia and a growing business lobby wanted the US to penetrate the Russian market while foreign affairs were moving towards isolationism. Senator Hiram Johnson from California asked why American boys were being shot in Russia. President Wilson and Secretary Lansing let the British and French take any blame for action against Soviet Russia while licensing their own confidential assistance to anti-Bolshevik forces. In Siberia the Cossack ‘strongman’ Semënov, whose army was notorious for its arbitrary violence, nonetheless received US finance and supplies. And when Semënov was defeated by the Reds, the Americans turned to Admiral Kolchak, whose officers were only a little less brutal. After Kolchak went the way of Semënov, Wilson rose from his sick bed to approve help for the White general Nikolai Yudenich, who in autumn 1919 led his North-Western Army in an offensive against Petrograd.10 The Whites had to agree to pay for the supplies they needed. They could not very well object. They understood that if they wanted to have their country back, they had to meet the going price.

  Yet Kolchak was exceptional among the White commanders in possessing a large supply of gold bullion; and even he could hardly carry out physical transactions from the middle of Siberia. The Whites found a way round the problem by drawing on funds registered abroad in the Provisional Government’s name. They had the blessing of the unofficial Russian Foreign Delegation which formed itself in Paris to press for support against the Bolsheviks and included ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Sazonov and ex-Ambassador Vasili Maklakov. Boris Savinkov, who had left Russia after the suppression of his July revolt, joined them at the end of 1918; he was followed from Archangel a year later by Nikolai Chaikovski.11 The former diplomats in the Allied countries — Sergei Sazonov, Boris Bakhmetev and Vasili Maklakov — made the Provisional Government’s accounts available to the White armies, holding their noses as they did so. Sazonov and his friends had no illusions about the reactionary inclinations of the White officer corps, and they complained frequently about the political ineptitude of its commanders. But the Whites embodied Russia’s sole chance of eliminating Bolshevism and the diplomats could not risk letting them lose the Civil War because nobody would disburse the money to pay for arms.

  The Allied governments favoured this financial solution knowing that Russian accounts held in western Europe and the US were in healthy balance. Predictably there was some reluctance about this in France, but Clemenceau restricted himself to a strong public reminder that French loans to previous Russian governments should be honoured; he also refrained from any raid on the funds controlled by former Ambassador Maklakov after he received them from the Germans at the end of the Great War.12 The situation was still easier for former Ambassador Bakhmetev in America, where in December 1918 he had $8,000 million at his disposal.13 He also exercised authority over the military supplies bought by Nicholas II’s administration which were still awaiting dispatch from the US.14 Bakhmetev began to make fresh purchases, informing General Yudenich that three thousand rifles had been bought from the US War Ministry for his use.15 Yudenich had realized that if he ever succeeded in occupying Petrograd, its citizens were likely to be suffering from starvation; he therefore pressed for food as well as guns and consented to Herbert Hoover commissioning six ships to sail to Tallinn with food supplies. Hoover made Yudenich sign a financial guarantee; and he suggested that, if Yudenich could not hand over the funds, he should apply to Sazonov for funding from the Russian governmental accounts held in Paris.16

  The Allies were not acting out of altruism. While hoping for a White victory, they looked forward to the restoration of a private-enterprise economy in Russia that would benefit their nations — and they aimed to get first bite of the Russian economic cherry. With this in mind, the British set up a Department of Overseas Trade in the Foreign Office, and made John Picton Bagge their commercial secretary in Odessa.17

  The Allied powers set about facilitating international commerce in the areas under White control. The trading conditions were not of the easiest kind. The economy of the former Russian Empire had been terribly disrupted in 1917–18. Although business deals continued to be conducted outside the Soviet-occupied territory, corruption and fraud were widespread. Entrepreneurs in Russia and Ukraine lacked financial credit and Western banks were understandably wary of underwriting projects to trade with them.18 But many businessmen from Russia who were currently based abroad were willing to take chances by re-entering Russian and Ukrainian markets. Vladimir Bashkirov in Paris was one of them. Seeing that he would make no progress in France, he liaised with Bakhmetev’s embassy in Washington with a view to restarting the Pacific trade with Vladivostok. The Siberian Creameries Co-operative Union welcomed such initiative and planned to send its products across the ocean to the US ports of Seattle and San Francisco.19 Western Siberia had exported huge quantities of yoghurt and butter to Germany before 1914; and the Union now looked east for new markets in America, at least until Kolchak started his headlong retreat in summer 1919. The difficulties were immense. It was hard to find shipping companies willing to sail for Vladivostok even though the arms and equipment for the Whites had been assembled in Seattle for transit.20 Civilian categories of goods were still more difficult to move to and from Siberia. But there were glimmerings of a future very different from the one which Lenin and Trotsky intended for Russia.

  Yudenich did not rely entirely on Paris for his funds. Before starting the North-Western Army’s offensive, he created a financial consultative committee to help until money reached him from the ambassadors. Emil Nobel was a leading committee member who, together with other oil company owners, put up a loan to tide Yudenich over the campaign. It was a scheme of mutual advantage. If the companies were ever to reclaim their assets in Baku, they needed the White armies to be properly financed to do the fighting.21

  Appreciation of the difficulties facing the Whites earned them a degree of sympathy — and a blind eye was turned to the evidence that White commanders aimed to conquer all the territories once ruled by the Romanovs. This is what the slogan of ‘Russia One and Indivisible’ meant to them. The Whites played along with Allied demands to the extent of expressing semi-compliance with their commitment to make concessions to the peoples of the borderlands of the former Russian Empire. But they failed to follow this up with action. When General Gustaf Mannerheim, the Finnish army leader, came to Paris to propose an alliance against Sovnarkom and the Red Army, he was sent packing. The Whites flatly refused to recognize Finland’s independence. Sazonov’s reaction was characteristic: ‘We shall get along without them, because Denikin will be in Moscow in two weeks.’22 Denikin himself was furious with the Allies for recognizing the Finnish government and said that war would come of it.23 The White armies preferred to fight alone rather than compromise their objective of reconstituting Russia complete with all its territorial appendages. Allied governments reinforced this recalcitrance of the Whites by refusing to give official recognition to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and in the Estonian case they put pressure on Tallinn to provide Yudenich with freedom for his military preparations on Estonian soil.

  At the British War Office, Churchill energetically removed impediments to the Whites’ procurement of supplies. Eighteen aeroplanes were shipped to the North-West Army.24 Tanks were also made available. Yudenich, though, faced a different kind of shortage as a commander. Operating from newly independent Estonia rather than Russia itself, he had a problem in recruiting Russian troops. Conscription being impossible, he asked the Allies to enable volunteers to leave the POW camps in Germany; he badly needed experienced officers, and again Churchill was helpful.25 E. L. Spears, who had headed intelligence operations for a while in northern Russia, put him in touch with Boris Savinkov when he came over from Paris for discussions.26 Churchill and Savink
ov took to each other. Savinkov also had a meeting with Lloyd George but immediately sensed the Prime Minister’s ambivalence about increasing the assistance to the Whites. Churchill was obviously the best hope of the Whites, although Savinkov complained that he had an alarming tendency to regard the Russians as British subjects. When pointing to a map of Russia with Denikin’s regiments marked with flags, Churchill declared: ‘Here, this is my army.’27 This was not a good way to win the respect of a Russian patriot, but Savinkov restrained himself. Churchill’s delusions of grandeur did not matter so long as he continued to support the White cause.

  The labour movements in Europe remained an obstacle to such efforts since dockers were militantly opposed to British and French assistance to the anti-Bolshevik armies. Germany was another potential source of supplies for the Whites; its military equipment was cheap after the Great War and there was plenty of it on sale. But German workers persistently held up such exports to Russia and Ukraine.28 As it happened, this mattered less to Denikin than to other White armies because he could buy material channelled clandestinely through Salonika and Alexandria where no trade union was likely to hold things up.29

  One crucial piece of assistance came free of charge: Western intelligence reports. After the Allies withdrew their diplomatic corps from Russia they usually relocated their espionage networks to wherever the White military headquarters were operating at the time, whether in southern Russia, mid-Siberia or Estonia. The British with their immense empire had established the world’s most comprehensive cable system and could tap into almost any message whenever they wanted.30 Allied and White networks shared a lot of the information they were gathering. Denikin could rely on being told what the French and British military missions learned from their capitals and from their own secret agencies in Russia and Ukraine.31 Yudenich too obtained material from ministries in Paris and London.32 He received information of high quality about the political and social situation in Russia and Ukraine,33 and he usually got the data he needed on the latest deployments and appointments in the Red Army.34 And although the commanders of the Whites — Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Miller — had their disputes, they did not let them escalate to the point of disrupting each other’s military operations. Each White army used its team of radio telegraphists to keep the others informed of their plans, and Sazonov in Paris was also included in the exchange of telegrams.35