Spies and Commissars

Petrograd Soviet. He explained the doctrines and policies of the ‘Maximalists’ under Lenin. He reported on every big newspaper’s reaction to President Wilson’s declaration of war. He described the poor showing of Russia’s armed forces and the decline in popular support for the war.¹³ His expertise was invaluable to David R. Francis, who had been appointed to the US embassy at the age of sixty-five in March 1916.

The dean of the Petrograd diplomatic corps was the United Kingdom’s Sir George Buchanan. Tall and always dressed to perfection, Buchanan had not troubled to learn Russian despite having been ambassador since 1910. When about to be honoured with the freedom of the city of Moscow he had to spend an hour learning the word for ‘thank you’ (spasibo). But as the mayor hung a gold chain round his neck, Buchanan instead said pivo, which is the Russian for ‘beer’.¹⁴ Moscow’s dignitaries showed their magnanimity by pretending they had not heard the plea for alcoholic refreshment, and Buchanan survived his faux pas in serene ignorance. For the rest of his time in Russia he remained unapologetically monoglot except for when he spoke French (in which he was fluent but with a British lack of enthusiasm). Buchanan kept to the steady manners of the British ruling class abroad. He was thought the quintessential Englishman, although in fact he was Scottish. He was respected but not liked. Joseph Noulens, the French ambassador, described him as ‘dry, cold and disdainful’. High society in the Russian capital retained a lot of its old liveliness, but an evening at the Buchanans’ was unlikely to be a jolly occasion.¹⁵

Buchanan was never going to make a close friend of the American ambassador. When visiting the US residence with Noulens, Buchanan seldom forbore to comment on what he saw as the vulgarity of the Americans. He scorned the large photograph of himself that Francis had hung outside his reception room: ‘Don’t you find this in bad taste?’ If asked to dine, he would turn to Noulens and say something like: ‘Ah, we’re going to have a bad supper… cooked by a Negro.’¹⁶

Ambassador Francis sensed this contempt but continued to think well of Buchanan.¹⁷ Evidently he had a generous side to his nature; he had kindly Southern manners and rarely lost his temper. Nor did he disguise his own feeling that he was not the right man for the Russian posting. His qualifications were slim indeed. Like Buchanan, he spoke no Russian; but, unusually for a diplomat in those days, Francis’s French was primitive. This was hardly his fault. Although he had served in the cabinet of President Grover Cleveland as Secretary of the Interior in 1896–7, he had made his name not in international affairs but as a St Louis banker.¹⁸ While his staff busied themselves with liaising with the Russians, he maintained a high level of fitness. He was a big man who played a lot of golf. He was also an enthusiastic dancer at Petrograd balls. He practised a set of physical exercises each morning and arranged that no day passed without his devoting several hours to his pastimes. Among them were a partiality for comely young secretaries and a fondness for whisky, which he claimed he was drinking only to please his doctors.¹⁹

The other leading Allied diplomats were Joseph Noulens and the Marchese della Torretta. Ambassador Noulens, who arrived in Petrograd in July 1917, was younger than Francis but temperamentally rigid despite his criticism of Buchanan for the same quality. As France’s ex-Minister of War, he hated the revolutionary turbulence in Russia under the Provisional Government.²⁰ Della Torretta, the Italian charge d’affaires, was still more settled in his ways. It was said that his preference would be to go to sleep and wake up with the Romanovs still in power. Russia’s traumas after the February Revolution left him dumb with incomprehension.

The British and French embassies had built up military missions and intelligence agencies to look after their national interests in wartime. The Americans, coming late into the war, were slow to do the same. But once they were in it, they were determined to win it. By early autumn they were assembling an Information Service which covertly gathered data for Washington’s attention. But there remained a reluctance, felt keenly by Woodrow Wilson, to meddle in Russian internal affairs; and he overruled Senator Root’s advice to grant $5 million for the purposes of propaganda in Russia.²¹ Wilson was at any rate less disengaged than he appeared to be. Sir William Wiseman, head of the New York station of Britain’s Secret Service Bureau, put the case for an Anglo-American joint intelligence effort to support Russia and its military commitment. He had already made a positive impression on Colonel House.²² Since the US as yet had no serious network of agents it was easy for Wiseman to persuade House and the Secretary of State Robert Lansing to let the British take the lead — and the President on 15 June 1917 sanctioned funds to the value of $75,000. The Foreign Office in London was to supply the same amount.²³ The Western Allies were increasingly concerned about Russia’s capacity to go on fighting. They used their missions and agencies to discover whether alternative arrangements might be possible without the Provisional Government.

For their chief covert agent in Petrograd the British picked the distinguished writer W. Somerset Maugham.²⁴ This broke a rudimentary rule of intelligence. Maugham’s renown meant he could never be inconspicuous in the Russian capital. One of his plays was currently in performance there. What is more, Maugham was ignorant about Russian politics and was acquainted with no Russian public figures. He knew no Russian; he had not even mastered the Cyrillic alphabet. In other ways, though, he was a sensible choice. Maugham had wartime experience as an operative working for Mansfield Cumming of the Secret Service Bureau. He had demonstrated steely qualities on missions to France and Switzerland; he summed up individuals and situations and could keep a cool head. He was quietly pleased that the authorities thought him the best man for Russia, and he took the chance to regularize his employment. Until then he had given his services as a patriot, receiving only expenses but no pay. Now he insisted on being remunerated as a professional. He adopted no cover but lived openly in the Russian capital, contacting his former mistress Sasha Kropotkina to gain an entree into high society. Through her he met Alexander Kerenski and took him out for meals at the fashionable Bear restaurant.

Maugham thought he was picking up gems of information but in truth he discovered nothing closed to Sir George Buchanan. His main contribution was in cheering up Kerenski. But he preferred the company of Boris Savinkov, who was no longer on speaking terms with Kerenski after the Kornilov affair. Savinkov, a former deputy leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Combat Organization that had assassinated Imperial officials before the war, was a fervent militant to the core of his being and now made proposals to crush anti-war agitation at the front and to shelve Kerenski’s plans for the Constituent Assembly election. Victory in the war should be the supreme goal. Maugham liked Savinkov’s idea of forming a strong centre party of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries standing clear of the Kadets and the Bolsheviks. Savinkov proposed recruiting a Czech Corps to reinforce the Allied effort.²⁵ Maugham rushed to get to know the Czechs. Most of them were ex-POWs captured by the Russians earlier in the war. They offered their services to the Allies in the hope of forming an independent state for Czechs and Slovaks after defeating the Central Powers. Maugham came up with an offer of money and supplies. He was not the first to do so. The British and French military missions were touring the Czech and Slovak camps trying to recruit volunteers to fight either in northern France or in the Balkans, establishing their own national contingents under the joint command of the Allies.²⁶

Allied personnel scurried to every public occasion to get a sense of what was going on. Colonels William B. Thompson and Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross went to the Democratic Conference.²⁷ Thompson lavishly subsidized pro-war newspapers in Petrograd, often dipping into his own pockets — he had made his wealth as a businessman before the war.²⁸ And although the Red Cross was meant to be a charitable, non-combatant and apolitical agency, Robins secretly employed informers in the Petrograd garrison; what they told him was not confined to the supply of medicine and the dressing of wounds.²⁹ Robins concluded that the war was dead ‘in the heart of the Russian soldier’.³⁰

Sir George Buchanan could see how badly things were going for the Provisional Government. His own health was frail but, despite withering to a skeletal thinness, he had not lost the forthrightness that once led him to tell Nicholas II that reforms were urgently necessary.³¹ On 9 October it fell to Buchanan to go with Noulens and Della Torretta and tell Kerenski that he was losing the confidence of Russia’s Western Allies. They disliked interfering in the affairs of a troubled, friendly power, but the Provisional Government had to understand their worries. The Russian Army was falling apart; it no longer constituted any serious threat to the Germans or even to the Austrians. The Allies were reluctant to divert precious resources to Russia at a time when their own forces in northern France were fighting hard. Buchanan delivered the message with firm solemnity. Kerenski, exhausted by all the woes of his rule, bridled at what he heard. He replied in Russian as Foreign Affairs Minister Tereshchenko interpreted for him. For once he was concise, demanding that the stream of aid should be restored. It was Kerenski’s last attempt to persuade the Allies that the eastern front was not a lost cause.³²

Colonel Thompson called a meeting of Allied military representatives in his rooms in the Hotel Europe on 3 November 1917. Present were Colonel Alfred Knox, General Henri Niessel and General William V. Judson as well as