Spies and Commissars

General Neslukhovski and David Soskice from Kerenski’s office. Thompson also invited his Red Cross colleague Raymond Robins. It was not a pleasant occasion. Knox and Niessel were scathing about the failings of the Provisional Government. Tempers were lost when Niessel called Russia’s soldiers ‘yellow cowardly dogs’ and the Russians soon walked out.³³ Knox was usually as forthright as Niessel. He thought Robins should have supported Kornilov’s campaign for a military dictatorship. He highlighted the danger from Lenin and Trotsky: ‘I tell you what we do with such people. We shoot them.’³⁴ Robins retorted: ‘You do if you catch them. But you will have to do some catching. But you are up against several million. General, I am not a military man. But you are not up against a military situation. You are up against a folks’ situation.’³⁵ Suitably translated into Marxist jargon and shorn of its colloquialism, this could have been Lenin speaking. The angry exchange between Knox and Robins was about to be repeated in Western capitals as governments debated their policy on Russia. Should Russians be left to decide their own future or could the Allies pressurize them to continue the war on the eastern front?

4. CHEERING FOR THE SOVIETS

Most newspapers in the Allied countries supported the effort to keep Russia in the war. But there were always dissenters, especially among the reporters based in Petrograd. They had diverse reasons for opposing conventional opinion. But one thing united them: their appreciation that the Provisional Government stood no chance of sustaining the military effort. They thought Kerenski was, politically, a dead man walking. They shared a feeling of moral outrage at the sufferings of Russian soldiers who were compelled to confront the German armies without hope of operational effectiveness. And they turned sympathetically to the single big party — the Bolsheviks — that promised to take drastic action to pull Russia out of the war. The Western dissenters became cheerleaders for Bolshevism.

Nobody was more ardent than Arthur Ransome. His early social contacts in London had been in the book trade and he had not shown socialist leanings before leaving for Russia as a freelance author in 1913. From working in publishers’ offices he had started to write books of his own. His Bohemia in London achieved a decent success but then his biography of Oscar Wilde got him entangled with the courts when Wilde’s former lover Lord Alfred Douglas sued him for libel. The court case was a draining experience for Ransome even though he emerged the victor. He had achieved only moderate success before the time of his marriage to Ivy Walker and the birth of their daughter Tabitha. He and Ivy got on badly from the start, and the journey to Russia offered him an escape from her evening rages. He industriously picked up the language and wrote a book that stayed permanently in print. This was Old Peter’s Russian Tales, a retelling of folk stories meant for children but read with equal pleasure by adults. With the onset of war Ransome’s facility in Russian and his zest for adventure permitted a change of tack, and he became a correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian. Steadily his interest in the socialist movement in both Britain and Russia grew. He showed an exceptional talent for listening carefully to his interviewees and relaying their thought in crystal-clear prose.¹

Ransome sought out the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders after the fall of the Romanovs. His sympathy with socialism loosened their tongues and they spoke to him in a way they did not dare in public. By late summer 1917 they knew that the Russian Army would not stay in the trenches much longer. When the Constituent Assembly eventually met, there would be huge pressure for the signing of a separate peace if some kind of negotiations with the Central Powers had not already begun.² Ransome thought this over. He did not question the urgent need for the Allies to defeat Germany. He was a British patriot and his own brother had died in the fighting, but he could see no good in trying to compel Russia to keep its troops on the eastern front since they were already exhausted and defeated. His conclusion was anathema to official circles in London; and British intelligence kept its eyes on him as a dangerous freethinker and opened the letters he wrote to his wife Ivy in England.³ But just as he was starting to annoy the authorities, he announced his desire for a period of English leave. The daily tasks of following the fast-moving political drama in Petrograd had worn him out. When granted permission for a holiday, he took the dangerous ferry journey back across the North Sea and reached Aberdeen on 17 October.⁴

Ransome told everyone in London willing to listen that Kerenski was doomed. Within days his prophecy had been realized in Petrograd. He kicked himself for having missed the greatest newspaper scoop of his lifetime, and pestered his editors to sanction another assignment in Russia. His enthusiasm was reciprocated: few journalists were better qualified to report on Russian affairs.

Less extravagant in his dismissal of the Provisional Government was the British consul-general in Moscow. Robert Bruce Lockhart had proved himself a sharp-eyed observer of the Russian political stage and, like Ransome, had gone native in Moscow. His Russian contacts gave him a Russian Christian name and patronymic and knew him as Roman Romanovich Lokkart.⁵ Perhaps his full name in English, Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, was too much of a mouthful for them. Lockhart had arrived in Russia in 1912. No Scot was prouder in saying, as he often did: ‘There is no drop of English blood in my veins.’ He claimed descent from the noble families of Bruce, Hamilton, Wallace and Douglas — and he boasted of a genealogical connection with Boswell of Auchinleck. He was as restless as Ransome, having tried to make a career as a rubber planter in Malaya, where an amorous dalliance with a local princess got him into hot water. He loved writing poems and stories and could easily have become a journalist but instead applied for the Foreign Office and scraped through the entrance exam. He married Jean Turner and brought her out with him on his Russian posting. Ambassador Buchanan took him under his wing as a bright diplomatic prospect even though Lockhart’s politics were to the left of centre in Britain.⁶

Unhinged by her husband’s philandering, Jean went back to Britain. He treated her departure as a licence to indulge himself. He spent many a night out on the tiles after carousing in the Gypsy encampment on the city outskirts at Strelnaya. He dabbled in the occult with his friend Aleister Crowley.⁷ But he was not entirely feckless. He read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the original. He steeped himself in Russian poetry and was a regular visitor to the theatre. He was young and fit; on first arriving in Moscow he had played a good game of football for a Russian team. He had plenty of self-confidence and determination. And throughout this time he made himself acquainted with all shades of public opinion in wartime Russia.

By autumn 1917 neither Buchanan nor Lockhart would have bet on the Provisional Government’s survival or the Russian Army’s continuation in the war. But Lockhart was no longer in Moscow when the Bolsheviks seized power. His reason for absence was more dubious than Ransome’s. All his life Lockhart had an attraction for neurotic upper-class women who wanted to throw off convention. Russian high society had plenty of such examples, and it had not been long before the young Scot was conducting an illicit affair with a lady from one of Moscow’s prominent families. Ambassador Buchanan, on being informed, told Lockhart that the embassy could not afford such a scandal in the country of a wartime ally. The discreet solution was to send him back to London on medical grounds. Lockhart went to a Russian doctor who signed an affidavit that he was suffering from anaemic exhaustion.⁸ Buchanan, it must be said, was no expert in dissembling. Instead of sticking to the agreed story, he told his fellow ambassador Joseph Noulens mysteriously that Lockhart had left against his advice.⁹

One Briton remained in Russia who was willing to welcome a left-of-centre alternative to Kerenski. This was the Manchester Guardian’s Morgan Philips Price. Throughout the war he had criticized the motives of all the belligerent powers even at the risk of his public standing. Philips Price was a wealthy man from the west country. Educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he had inherited an estate of 2,000 acres near Gloucester and came from a political family. His father was a Liberal MP and he himself was adopted as prospective candidate for the same party, but he was dropped for his strident opposition to the war. Philips Price then joined the Union of Democratic Control. He also wrote The Diplomatic History of the War at manic speed and got it published within weeks of the outbreak of hostilities. He lamented the tragedy of diplomatic failure: ‘But for the outbreak of war there was a reasonable hope that the liberal political elements in Austria and Russia would have gained the day.’¹⁰ Soon he came to the attention of C. P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian and he was sent out to Russia as its reporter. He was one of the earliest to warn about the sorry condition of Kerenski’s armed forces and to argue that other Russian political elements should be given consideration by the Allies.

Philips Price quickly became friends with American journalists who thought along the same lines. Quite a