Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  Soviet rule, as every Russian knew and foreign visitors soon discovered, was chaotic at its lower levels. Official policy was one thing and the reality was frequently very different. Corruption was pervasive. Even transport was never better than uncertain; and when William J. Kelley of the American Relief Administration tried to make his way from Riga to Moscow at the end of 1921, he had to bribe the train driver to give him logs to keep himself warm at the lengthy unscheduled stops on the journey.49 What is more, Bolsheviks often baulked at the party’s official encouragement of the purchase of concessions by foreigners. William H. Johnston, president of the International Association of Machinists, was held up in Latvia and could not even get a visa for his trip to Moscow.50 None of these difficulties caused surprise in the American administration, which had warned its country’s entrepreneurs about the dangers of doing business in Russia. They had only themselves to blame if they found that Soviet conditions offered a less than congenial experience. Official US opposition to a trade treaty remained in place; Herbert Hoover was implacable — and he ensured that no American concession, including Vanderlip’s well-known Kamchatka venture, could be operated on a grand scale in Siberia unless and until the Washington authorities gave their blessing.51

  There was still a lot for the Soviet leadership to do if economic recovery was to continue, and the growing rivalry between Lenin and Trotsky had the potential to open up yet another damaging controversy. They disagreed about the pace and orientation of industrial growth. Trotsky wanted to prioritize investment in heavy industry and introduce mechanisms for central state economic planning. Lenin feared that this would disrupt the reconciliation with the peasantry; his own preference was to grant freedom for private workshops to produce for the rural requirements.52 For the moment, at least, Lenin had the greater support in the Politburo and Central Committee — and the political situation settled down. The October Revolution survived the first full year of peace.

  32. THE UNEXTINGUISHED FIRE

  The Bolsheviks had kept their hardness and had kept their faith. Even the pseudonyms they chose for themselves signified unyielding intent. Stalin was a name taken from the Russian word for steel, Molotov was a derivation of hammer. Their generation had been born and brought up in years when armed force was used the world over to expand empires and transform economies. Bolsheviks absorbed this toughness of spirit into their own doctrines and practices. They saw how industrialists, financiers and landowners had become masters of the earth. They learned from the ruthlessness and optimism they witnessed. Like the capitalists they detested, they took chances. The October Revolution had always been a gamble. But it had been successful for them, even though the price was paid by millions of Russians in death, tears and famine. Communists proved themselves flexible. Although they hated compromise, they became adept at scraping off the minimum of skin from their ideology. Bolshevism was founded on the idea that humankind is infinitely plastic, infinitely malleable. The rulers of Soviet Russia aimed to reconstruct the entire edifice of life for the benefit of the working class — and if workers did not yet understand where their best interests lay, the communist party would simply carry out the Revolution on their behalf.

  Bolshevik leaders and militants, even if they had not read Lenin’s The State and Revolution or Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, believed that the October Revolution required the party, the Cheka and the Red Army to exercise a severe dictatorship. The Bolsheviks were known for their dictatorial inclinations long before the experiences of 1917; and although they had looked forward to enabling ‘the people’ to liberate themselves from capitalism, they had always believed in the need for a framework of authoritarian control to bring this about. By the end of the Civil War, the use of mass terror, arbitrary dispensation of justice and political discrimination against groups in society deemed to be inimical had become the norm. The upper and middle classes — the burzhui — were treated as ‘former people’ and stripped of the rights of citizenship along with priests and ex-policemen, and it was a rare ex-businessman who dared to go around town dressed in his pre-revolutionary finery.1 Although peasants and artisans gained some freedom to sell their goods and services, the communists’ ultimate objective had not changed. The entire economy would one day be owned, planned and regulated by powerful agencies of the state. Bolsheviks were engineers of the soul. They intended to manufacture a new collectivist mentality throughout society and were willing to wade through seas of blood to achieve their purposes.

  The Bolsheviks still aimed to provide everyone with an abundance of material and cultural well-being. Schooling and health care were already free of charge. Wherever possible, housing was made available to the poor. Trade unions could take up the grievances of individual labourers. Party militants set about promoting working-class youngsters to posts of authority. The dream was to make the ‘proletarian state’ ever more proletarian.

  The American journalist Anna Louise Strong, arriving in Russia at the outset of the New Economic Policy, bore witness to the preserved ideals. She reported that even entrepreneurs could be found imbued with enthusiasm for Bolshevism. In her account of a trip to the famine-afflicted Volga region she wrote in note form:

  The little East-side Jew whom I met in Samara, the heart of the famine, and who went with me as interpreter to organize village kitchens. Speaking English with a vile accent and physically most unattractive. Then I learned that he was manager of two little factories which had just reopened, making doors and windows for the repairing of Samara. He was a machinist; he was so proud of the two or three machines he had put together, down in a country where even plain nails were not to be had.2

  Despite being a communist party member, he was proud of having obtained official permission to put his workers on to piecework. This way they earned the equivalent of fifteen dollars per month. He himself received only rations and lodgings; beyond that point, he worked for free. His wife had to work too, and his offspring had to be fed in a state children’s home. But he did not complain. He was ‘eager and energetic and happy to be building Russia’.3

  Strong may well have been, and indeed almost certainly was, one of those many foreigners who fell for a self-serving story. But the situation in Russia was anyway complicated. Its people were emerging from a period of military and political turmoil and trying to come to terms with the often convoluted ways of understanding and practising communism that were being set before them.

  Ivy Litvinov directed a questioning gaze at the ambivalent lifestyles of most veteran Bolsheviks. Her scepticism began when she joined Maxim from London in Copenhagen in 1920: ‘You see, we lived in grand hotels and he wore fur coats and smoked enormous cigars and things like that. I’d never seen him so plutocratic, and we had cars all the time.’4 But she also recalled an earlier incident which was in his favour. When he took the train for Moscow from Petrograd the railway officials gave him an empty carriage to himself. Discovering that other passengers had been ejected to accommodate him, he insisted on their reinstatement.5 Litvinov was far from being the only Soviet leader to undergo a ragged process of embourgeoisement. Krasin was a case in point. Attending a private dinner given in his honour by leading bankers at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon, he let himself go and said: ‘Communism as we have tried it has proved a failure and it must be modified.’ Some of the waiters were radical socialists and, overhearing these startling comments, halted work in the kitchen for a while.6 But the International News Service judged that ‘Krasin was just kidding the bankers along for the benefit of [Soviet] business.’ Even so, there was an increasing and unmistakable tendency for communist leaders to enjoy the pleasures of the old upper classes. Litvinov and Krasin were sincere communists; but although they were not sybaritic, they were starting to accept privilege as their right.

  The American reporter Frank Mason saw Karl Radek as resistant to the sartorial drift of the Soviet elite and noted that he dressed ‘like a movie picture Bolshevic [sic]’. Mason commented: ‘You could pick him out witho
ut hesitation even were he seated in a room filled with stage anarchists.’ Radek had a fuzzy brown fringe of a beard, his hair was untroubled by a comb, and curls framed a face that was ‘delicate, almost womanly’. He wore a soiled fur-lined jacket and long, black-leather breeches.7

  Ivy Litvinov resented the communist milieu she found in Moscow. She disliked being introduced to everybody as Maxim’s marital adjunct and deposited with the wives of Soviet leaders who only wanted to talk about children or clothing.8 In the early 1920s the Litvinovs were living in the Kharitonenko House.9 Ivy’s great new friend was Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent Bolshevik whom she loved for her kindness and vivacity.10 This was not all that helpful for her husband’s career since Kollontai had emerged as a harsh critic of the Politburo and an advocate of the Workers’ Opposition. But the two women also came together for other reasons. Ivy was a devotee of D. H. Lawrence and, believing in free love, discovered a fellow spirit in Alexandra who scandalized most Russian communists with her uninhibited sexual liaisons. Ivy and Alexandra got on splendidly. They confided in each other about their disillusionment with communist leaders; and Ivy, despite admiring Lenin in many ways, came to believe he was ‘a wrong-headed saint’.11

  Her distaste for the Kharitonenko House surprised Maxim, who had written enticingly to her in London: ‘If you ever come here, your eyes will bulge.’12 Ivy thought the antique furniture hideous, although she herself shopped in expensive stores and hired governesses for her children;13 but she was shocked by the disparity between the conditions of the Moscow poor and the comfortable life of the elite: ‘I saw a woman in Red Square, sort of, just fall down. People just went like that round her, nobody stopped. Oh, of course… I thought everyone was a peasant because all the women wore shawls, you see, I was quite sure everybody was peasants, which was sort of not so untrue.’14 Although Ivy was no communist, she had expected more of communists:

  I thought I was going to the land of Socialism. You see I thought these thoughts so often, I remember exactly. And one thing I thought: how lovely — you see things have always had me in their power. I can’t cope with them. And it’s so lovely to throw them away every now and then. Get rid of them. And I somehow thought for some unknown reason: now I’m going to a land where ‘things’ — I suppose I meant property — won’t mean so much… I very soon discovered that there never had been a place where they mattered so much.

  The collapse of manufacturing output made people cling to whatever they possessed and few families could afford what they saw in shop windows.15

  The Bolsheviks had spent the year 1917 denouncing the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks for their denial of the immediate achievability of Russian socialism. Now Bolsheviks presided over the return of markets, and it was their New Economic Policy which had led to the emergence of both fur-coated urban spivs in the cities and well-off peasants — often known as ‘kulaks’ — in the villages. Although open political opposition was no longer possible, the anti-Bolshevik militants spread their message in other ways. Satirical song was one of these. A Socialist-Revolutionary ditty went as follows:

  I am in a low dive eating

  Kasha from a bowl,

  Trotsky and Lenin are boasting:

  ‘We’ve swallowed Russia whole!’

  In a low dive drinking tea,

  Nothing more to fear,

  My man is a Bolshevik

  And I’m a profiteer!16

  Denied the freedom to stand against the Bolsheviks in elections, Sovnarkom’s enemies faced constant adversity if they continued the political struggle. Eventually, in 1922, the patience of the Soviet authorities would be exhausted when the surviving Socialist-Revolutionaries were put on show-trial in 1922; and Lenin wanted to do the same to the Mensheviks.17

  Yet the communist elite never lost their basic unease about the New Economic Policy. They feared that the reintroduction of capitalism, albeit with severe restrictions, might be the start of counterrevolution by stealth. Ivy Litvinov recalled how badly her husband Maxim had reacted to Lenin’s policy: ‘[He] was terribly depressed. Afterwards I supposed he knew it had to be, but how depressed he was; he felt everything had been sold, you know… he was so terribly, terribly depressed.’18 Bolshevik wives thought and wrote as Bolsheviks and it did not usually occur to them to depict personal moods in their accounts: the bigger revolutionary cause was everything. But Ivy Litvinov was not typical. She was British, possessed little interest in politics and had the eyes and ears of a novelist; and the depression her husband experienced was almost certainly widely shared.

  Some Russians nonetheless dreamed that the scope for profit-making might eventually benefit Russia. For them, the New Economic Policy was a first and very desirable breach in the wall of doctrinaire communism. They hoped that the remaining restrictions on the operation of a private market economy would eventually be removed. They were carried away in their speculation. Perhaps the Bolshevik party was undergoing a permanent internal change, dropping its fanatical ideology for a more realistic appreciation of what could be accomplished. In Harbin, across the Siberian frontier in Manchuria, émigré Russian intellectuals became convinced that the Bolsheviks were turning into nationalists. And it is true that Bolshevism as it emerged from the Civil War was committed to gathering back the lands of the Russian Empire under central control. The Bolsheviks unquestionably wanted Russia to be a great military power once more. They also wanted to create an advanced industrial society and spread universal education. They were the most ambitious modernizers the country had known since Peter the Great. Some people regarded them, beneath their red banners, as national champions who were capable of succeeding where tsars, conservatives, liberals and socialists had failed.

  Undoubtedly there were leanings in this direction in the Bolshevik leadership, and the émigrés in Harbin were right that the Soviet state was far from being immune to pressures to move away from its violent, oppressive zealotry. Ex-Ambassador Vasili Maklakov in Paris agreed. He could not see how the Bolsheviks could survive without making allowance for the nationally minded elements in the Red Army that had enabled victory in the Civil War.19 In Russia too it was murmured that the October Revolution was gradually being ‘straightened out’ and ‘moderated’ and ‘civilized’. Across the professions there were people who welcomed communism’s modernizing zeal for Russia without being communists. Teachers felt free to experiment with fresh pedagogical ideas. Economists were attracted by opportunities to plan and regulate production and supply. Scientists welcomed the promise of abundant resources as and when they became available. It was common knowledge that Soviet Russia was a ruthless police state that boasted of its ruthlessness. Russian émigré and Western optimists took Lloyd George’s line, believing that it was better to shake hands and do business with Lenin and Trotsky than to face them across military fronts.

  The German government had reasons of its own to go further than Lloyd George when the European powers met in Genoa in April 1922 to settle Europe’s outstanding international questions. Chicherin attended instead of Lenin, who was thought likely to be assassinated. Trotsky stayed away for the same reason. The Soviet delegation got nowhere with the Western Allies because France refused to deal with Russia until such time as it recognized its obligations to those whose property and investments had been seized by Sovnarkom. The Russians and Germans drew the obvious conclusion: they were both pariah states. Having found plenty of points of mutual advantage, they travelled further down the Italian coast to Santa Margherita and Rapallo where the discussions were fast and fruitful; and a treaty was signed that gave full diplomatic recognition to Russia and opened avenues to the import and export business. Sovnarkom saw its chance to entice German companies to sign big commercial contracts. Secret arrangements were also made for the Germans to evade the military restrictions imposed by the treaty of Versailles by organizing and training their armed forces on Soviet soil, where the Red Army would benefit by seeing and copying up-to-date techniques.

 
The Bolsheviks had vanquished their enemies at home and begun to neutralize the threats from abroad, and Lenin’s firm leadership had been crucial to the survival of the Soviet order. The economy was recovering and society was beginning to recuperate from years of war and disruption. But in January 1924 Lenin died and in the ensuing power struggle it was Stalin who emerged victorious. In his own rough way he introduced radical changes, beginning with a programme of economic deprivatization. Forced-rate industrialization was instigated. State ownership, state regulation and state planning were spread to every corner of production and distribution. The old ‘specialists’ were replaced by newly trained and promoted Red operatives. The few outlets for cultural criticism were abolished. Compromise with the national aspirations of the many non-Russian peoples of the USSR was ended. Open-ended educational initiatives were replaced by rote learning. Factional dissent was banished from the party not just by decree but also in practice. Trials were organized of prominent figures thought likely to obstruct or undermine Stalin’s programme and the penal network of labour camps sucked in victims who never numbered fewer than a million. The Cheka, which was subsumed in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (or NKVD), acquired at least the same importance as the Bolshevik party.