Conservative and liberal figures such as Professor Bernard Pares at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies joined Dukes in signing a letter to The Times denouncing Soviet outrages.13 Dukes also wrote to the Manchester Guardian protesting against its indulgent editorial line on Soviet Russia — he was angered by the mild critique of communist rule offered by its reporter W. T. Goode, announcing his own credentials as follows: ‘I was at Moscow at the same time as Professor Goode, and I left Russia later than he. I was not, however, a guest of the Bolshevik Government, but, knowing the language thoroughly, lived as a Russian amongst the Russians. My object was to study the effects of Bolshevism on the people.’14 Although this was another of his misleading descriptions of what he had done in Russia, he efficiently made his point that it was inadequate to find the October Revolution and its leaders merely ‘interesting’ instead of offering a basic analysis of the revolutionary order. According to Dukes, Goode had praised the new educational system while failing to mention that schools had been compelled to stop teaching morality; he had also overlooked the antipathy of Russians to their Bolshevik rulers and their policies and ideology.
America had few writers on the anti-Soviet side of the debate with the direct experience of Soviet Russia that Dukes could muster. Dukes tried to do something about this by going on an American lecture tour in February 1921.15 While there he supported the attacks on Bolshevik rule made by Princess Cantacuzène, who before 1917 had belonged to the highest social circles. She printed her reminiscences of the October Revolution in the Saturday Evening Post, republishing them in a book. She condemned the daily illegalities in Petrograd, picking out Trotsky for harsh criticism.16 Her fellow Princess Catherine Radziwill, a best-selling author, concentrated on the secret deals between the Bolsheviks and the German government, but her research methods were less than exemplary since she felt entirely free to invent conversations and incidents involving Lenin and Trotsky.17
The Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov produced a steadier work, which appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, about Bolshevism’s foreign pretensions. Looking at Soviet efforts to spread revolution abroad, he noted the Russian linkage to the communist episodes in Budapest and Munich and sounded an alarm about Comintern. Milyukov stressed that ‘Mr Lenin’ and ‘Mr Trotsky’ were open about their global ambition; and he argued that the Bolsheviks had planned to use President Wilson’s proposal for a Prinkipo peace conference as a way of securing a diplomatic presence in Washington, London and Paris. He mentioned the huge grain fund and military resources gathered by Sovnarkom for future use in the revolutionary cause in central Europe.18 He wanted to depict himself as the constant Russian patriot and therefore omitted any reference to his own less than illustrious record in 1918 when he had sought Germany’s military assistance in overturning the Bolsheviks. He declared that the Hands Off Russia campaign was damaging the interests of his country and the world.19 He regretted the way the European and American socialist parties, despite deep disagreements with Bolshevism, were urging their governments to grant recognition to Sovnarkom.20 He warned, too, against listening to prominent American and British sympathizers with Bolshevism.21
Milyukov’s book was all but ignored on both sides of the Atlantic. In frustration he wrote to the London Times, repudiating criticism of the White armies and their commanders. He insisted that Alexander Kerenski was wrong to advise against support for Kolchak and Denikin and intimated that if only Kerenski had taken a stronger line in 1917, Russia might have been spared its later torment.22 This was not the fairest of comments. If it was true that Kerenski had had a genuine chance in summer 1917, Milyukov had been given his own in the spring of that year. Russian political refugees all too frequently subsided into internal polemics. Disputes were bitter as conservative and liberal writers re-examined the events between the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolsheviks with the same intense disputatiousness that had made the émigré socialist colonies notorious before the Great War.
Such a reputation had also begun to attach itself to those in the West who were outspoken in their support for the Whites. On 17 July 1919 Winston Churchill had given a talk at the British-Russian Club in London and paid tribute to the achievements of the Russian Imperial army on the eastern front, saying that its valour had saved Paris from the Germans in 1914–15. The Secretary of State for War was on sparkling form: ‘Some people are inclined to speak as if I were responsible, as if I was at the bottom of all this trouble in Russia.’ When the laughter had subsided Churchill explained that he believed in the ‘inherent weakness of Bolshevism’. The Red Army, he declared, was weaker than many supposed. He fulminated against Lenin and Trotsky but did not confine himself to the Russian question. Turning to Hungary, he described the communist leader Béla Kun as ‘another fungus, sprung up in the night’. European civilization was under threat. He summarized his standpoint as follows: ‘Russia, my lords and gentlemen, is the decisive factor in the history of the world at the present time.’23 Using extravagant vocabulary as usual, Churchill had a clear understanding of communism’s threat to the freedoms fully or partially available in the West; and, ignoring the reproaches of Lloyd George, he gave encouragement to active anti-Bolsheviks in London.24
Friends of the Bolsheviks meanwhile queued up to extol what was happening in Russia. Arthur Ransome’s Russia in 1919 was a rapidly written memoir that described the communist leaders in the blandest personal terms, Ransome blithely acknowledging that he was not going to cover the Red terror.25 And although Morgan Philips Price mentioned the terror in his own account, he claimed that it had lasted only six weeks. He chose instead to stress the sustained awfulness of the White terror while praising the Soviet system of government.26 Ivy Litvinov, when left behind in London by Maxim, published a booklet in the same spirit. Drawing on Maxim’s notes, she asked what worth there could ever be in the Constituent Assembly. She accused the Whites of worse violence than anything done by the Reds, stating: ‘As a matter of fact, the Soviet regime has been much less sanguinary than any known in history.’27
But of all the books about the new regime, whether favourable or otherwise, the one with the greatest impact was John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, which appeared in March 1919.28 His chapters concentrated on the brief period before and after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and were based on his own notes and memories as well as on his file of Le Bulletin de la Presse issued daily by the French Information Bureau.29 He offered what he called ‘intensified history’, but he was also providing disguised propaganda. Reed claimed that until the October Revolution Russia had been an ‘almost incredibly conservative’ country: he entirely overlooked the surge of revolutionary action that had taken place in factories, garrisons and villages long before the Bolsheviks took over. The ‘masses’ appeared in his pages only when listening to speeches by Lenin and the other communist leaders. Reed wrote about the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries only to indicate how little they understood the scale of the external and internal emergency in Russia. Lenin and Trotsky were his heroes, and Kerenski was depicted as an incompetent fool: no attempt was made to explain the rationale for the Provisional Government’s policies. Reed wrote: ‘It is still fashionable… to speak of the Bolshevik insurrection as an “adventure”. Adventure it was, and one of the most marvellous mankind has ever embarked upon, sweeping into history at the head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple desires.’30 Bolshevism and popular opinion according to Reed were one and the same thing.
He threw himself into the tasks of public speaking and writing for the socialist press; he also prepared a tendentious memorandum for the State Department denying that any parties other than the Bolsheviks had the slightest following. He wrote that the entire social structure in Russia had been transformed because the bourgeoisie had been dispossessed and turned into proletarians. He claimed that the former middle classes could freely ‘organize in the Soviets, but only to defend th
eir [new] proletarian interests’. The truth was different. The Soviet Constitution expressly deprived those classes of civic rights. Reed stated that the USA was the foreign partner of choice for Sovnarkom because the British and the French had been unremittingly hostile. He added that it was in the Russian interest for Germany to be defeated in the Great War. The reality was that Lenin and Trotsky hoped for anti-capitalist risings across Europe and North America. Reed dropped his tactful tone just once, when saying of the Russians: ‘As for President Wilson, they don’t believe a word he says.’31 Reed wanted the US to recognize Soviet Russia and stop persecuting Bolsheviks in America — and he urged American politicians to get the Japanese to withdraw from eastern Siberia.32
Together with Max Eastman, he also produced a booklet that included translated pieces by Lenin and Chicherin. Lenin’s contribution was his ‘Letter to American Workingmen’. The booklet was distributed in a somewhat abridged edition ‘in deference to an extremely literal interpretation of the Espionage Act’. Eastman wrote an imaginary conversation between Lenin and President Wilson. This was wholly to Wilson’s disadvantage, with Lenin putting awkward questions to Wilson and exposing him as wealthy, ignorant, insincere and dangerous.33 Eastman was a communist sympathizer although he did not belong to an organized communist group. He was not alone in taking this position. The outstanding example in France was the novelist Henri Barbusse, who contended that the Bolsheviks had ‘attenuated their implacable rigidity’ and were adapting to ‘the life of an innumerable, young people’.34 Barbusse implied that France had a superior civilization to Russia: he urged everyone not to expect too much of the Russians. But he insisted that, after a poor start, communism in Russia was changing for the better.
Reed and the other pro-Bolshevik commentators were not the only proponents of conciliation with the Russian communist leaders. A leading American critic of Soviet rule was John Spargo, whose comments were all the more persuasive inasmuch as he was a socialist friend of Georgi Plekhanov.35Russia as an American Problem, appearing in mid-November 1919, held that Bolshevism was an ‘inverted tsarist regime’ and an enemy of democracy.36 But Spargo argued that the Germans remained bent on the economic domination of Russia and that Japanese objectives were not dissimilar.37 He urged America to get involved before it was too late. US businessmen could help Russia back on its feet by trading in its natural resources. Exports of gold and timber would enable Russians to pay for the capital equipment vital for economic recovery. America should send some of its own experts and make financial credits available.38 He admitted that there were uncompromising extremists among the Soviet leadership, but suggested that Lenin and a few others were demonstrating a readiness for internal reform. Spargo had vociferously supported the White armies until their defeat in the Civil War; but when the Reds achieved military victory he judged that the resumption of international commerce was the surest way to erode Bolshevism’s grip on the country.39
In fact the person who gave the most effective succour to Moscow was the economist John Maynard Keynes. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published late in 1919, Keynes said that Clemenceau had been eaten up with a desire for vengeance on Germany. He thought Wilson was an innocent abroad whose intelligence was overstated, while Lloyd George seemed to lose his political compass when confronted by a Clemenceau on the rampage. Keynes took all Western leaders to task for their treatment of Germany,40 arguing that the Versailles treaty was a Carthaginian peace which had ruined the chances of recuperation and guaranteed chronic political instability. Territory had been grabbed from the Germans, reparations imposed.41
Keynes sombrely predicted that a devastated Russia and an exhausted Germany would draw close; he argued that it could not be excluded that ‘Spartacism’ would win out in Berlin.42 But even if the political far left fell short of victory, he wrote, there could still be an alliance between German capitalism and Russian communism — and the British, Americans and French would be the losers unless they changed their policy. Keynes hailed the work of Herbert Hoover and the American Relief Administration — Hoover had condemned the treaty as too harsh while it was being negotiated, and Keynes called him ‘the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation’.43 Cheap grain shipments from the US Midwest were currently saving eastern and central Europe from famine. This vital relief, though, would not continue for ever and it behoved the Allies to enable the restoration of Russian cereal exports. Keynes claimed that without them there could be no European economic recovery or political stabilization. He insisted that since the Allies could not yet supply Russia with the agricultural implements needed to regenerate its farming, Germany would be doing everyone a service by trading with Moscow. The world had an interlinked economy and Keynes wanted policy to be adjusted in the light of this.44
He wrote his book in a spasm of fervour in autumn 1919 and it came out amid controversy at the end of the year. Few other works by him around that period had quite the same punch. The book was an instant best-seller in many languages, but disparagers quickly appeared in abundance. A London Times editorial applauded the Cambridge academic for his cleverness and erudition but denied that the Germans had been treated too severely. Supposedly Keynes was urging a policy that would ‘place Germany in effective control of Russia as a recompense for having let loose a war in which one of her principal objects was the economic enslavement of Russia’.45 The reviewer in the New York Times was blunter still, calling the book a ‘revolting melodrama’. Keynes had allegedly practised ‘the highly perfect art of slurring those who helped to win this war’.46 The French authorities and press were similarly negative.47 Only on the left did Keynes experience a warm reception. The Manchester Guardian praised him for his ‘conspicuous courage’.48 From donnish obscurity Keynes rose to international fame, leaving no one indifferent regardless of whether they liked or disliked his analysis of the Versailles treaty.
Soviet communist leaders acclaimed the book. Ioffe said it exactly coincided with his own opinions.49 Even Lenin, who only reluctantly cited authors hostile to Marxism in his writings, welcomed The Economic Consequences of the Peace; but if he was flattered by Keynes’s reference to his ‘subtle mind’, he did not say so.50 Bolsheviks were delighted to witness one of the world’s most brilliant economists agreeing that a punitive peace had been inflicted on Germany and a disastrous blockade on Russia. While they waited for revolutions to roll out across Europe, they could at least enjoy watching others spreading their propaganda for them.
26. LEFT ENTRANCE
From late 1919 Sovnarkom denied accreditation to journalists of unfriendly foreign newspapers.1 Dispatches had to be submitted in advance to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Marguerite E. Harrison of the Associated Press noted that the official Soviet reviewer of Western press coverage mysteriously lost or delayed sanctioning the articles he disliked. He confessed: ‘Mrs Harrison, your article is perfectly correct in every particular, but I prefer Mr Blank’s article. It is more favourable to us. If they both came out in the American press at the same time it might produce a bad impression. I will send his first and hold yours for twenty-four hours.’2 Meanwhile a Central Bureau for the Service of Foreigners was created in the Russian capital with the idea of arranging evenings of cultural uplift for favoured reporters, and Party Central Committee member Anatoli Lunacharski helped out by compèring a concert by the State Stradivarius Quartet playing Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Debussy.3
Such efforts had only patchy success with the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who arrived in Russia early in 1920 after being deported from America. In line with the idea of winning friends who could influence international opinion, the Soviet authorities made a fuss of them and gave them rooms in a good Moscow hotel. Goldman had modified her doctrines of anarchism to the point where she no longer advocated non-violence as an absolute principle. But she was never likely to become a Bolshevik and indeed she remarked on the poverty, bureaucracy and fanatical intolerance
that prevailed under Soviet rule. Communist functionaries filled their days with meetings with trade union activists and factory workers who would reliably spout the official Bolshevik line; but, as word of her presence got around Moscow, Russian anarchists made contact and told her of the persecution they had suffered since the October Revolution. By December 1921 she and Berkman had had enough and left Russia for good. They decamped to the Latvian capital Riga, where they could write freely about the oppression they had witnessed. Joseph Pulitzer published their work in his New York World magazine and Goldman later integrated their articles into her book My Disillusionment in Russia.4
Soviet leaders hoped for better luck with their efforts to influence the British political left. On 10 December 1919 the Trades Union Congress demanded ‘the right to an independent and impartial enquiry into the industrial, economic and political conditions of Russia’, aiming to send a joint delegation of the TUC, the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party to see things for themselves.5 The Supreme Allied Council decided that no harm would be done, and on 27 April 1920 the delegation left for Scandinavia en route for Petrograd.6 Lenin remained unconvinced that this was a good idea and called for a press campaign to denounce the projected ‘guests’ of Soviet Russia as ‘social-traitors’. Chicherin pleaded for the trip to happen without any molestation, and Lenin for once gave way.7
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