At the same time the Russian communists were engaged in efforts to export their revolution. In 1918 they sent emissaries, including some of their most prominent leaders, to subvert Germany. In the following year they also founded the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow which aimed to create communist parties abroad and destroy global capitalism. In 1920 they sent the Red Army itself into Poland. And although Lenin and Trotsky were disappointed when ‘the European revolution’ did not take place as they had expected, they remained convinced that their original gamble would end in triumph.
I stumbled upon the idea for the book when looking at personal papers of the British intelligence agent Paul Dukes. His memoirs are an outstanding eyewitness account of conditions under early communist rule. Dukes on one of his spying missions enlisted with the Red Army and reported what he saw with the mind of an outsider. This led me to investigate other examples of reportage by foreigners, ranging from lively pro-Soviet cheerleaders like the newspaper correspondents John Reed and Arthur Ransome to the sombre attack on communism by Bertrand Russell in 1920. Then I found that the diplomats, too, had recorded many important things in their telegrams and autobiographies. This, I freely admit, was something of a surprise since I had shared the widespread idea that they were a rather slow-witted and incompetent bunch. From there it was only a short hop to investigating the entrepreneurs who lined up to restart the Russian trade in 1920–1. Such sources provide opportunity for a fresh insight into the history of communist Russia and supplement the abundant documentation that has become available in Moscow in recent years. Russian history cannot be written satisfactorily on the basis of Russian archives alone.
Other discoveries came to hand as this material was brought under scrutiny. I had taken it for granted that the Reds and the White Russians — and for that matter the Allies — knew rather little about each other. As Ethel Snowden first put it in 1920 on her visit to Petrograd and Moscow, an ‘iron curtain’ appeared to have been built along the frontiers of Russia. In fact the telegraphists, decoders and spies on every side did an effective job for their masters. Their activity filled large gaps in information by providing timely, accurate reports in the absence of conventional diplomacy after 1917. The Red Army was well informed about the White armies and vice versa. And although the White armies were separated from each other by huge distances, they could usually make contact through wireless messages. They were also helped by access to Soviet telegraph traffic which was intercepted by the British, French and Americans. The Reds lost a lot of Russia’s experts in communication and decryption who fled into obscurity or abroad soon after the October Revolution, but they increasingly made up for this failing. This was consequently a period when each side found out enough about the others to be able to formulate plans and policy on the basis of genuine knowledge — and the spies, telegraphists and decoders were as important in this process as the diplomats.
No realistic calculus of military power in Europe favoured the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. Their weak and ill-equipped Red Army would have stood no chance against the Germans if they had invaded Russia in 1918. Russia would have been equally vulnerable if the Western Allies had concerted an all-out invasion in the years that immediately followed. The communists were fortunate that external factors inhibited foreign great powers from marching into east-central Europe and overthrowing the revolutionary state. They were equally lucky that states abroad increasingly found it advantageous to end Russia’s economic isolation: trade treaties were signed first with Estonia and Scandinavia in 1920 and then with the United Kingdom in the following year.
When the communists led by Lenin and Trotsky took power in Petrograd, they could not be certain that their government would last more than a few days. But this did not dent their optimism. If the Russians could so easily cast down capitalism, it would surely not be long before others did the same. The communists declared that imperialism, nationalism and militarism were about to be liquidated everywhere. Bolsheviks outlined their project in global terms. The working classes of the world were about to achieve liberation from every kind of oppression. Industrial societies would start to pay, feed, clothe and educate properly those who had suffered down the generations. Governments would tumble. The market economy would be eliminated. An end would be put to war and people would administer their affairs without hindrance from kings, commanders, priests and policemen. Communism was on the point of spreading itself worldwide. Soon there would be no government, no army, no bureaucracy on the face of the earth.
But even while aiming at world revolution, the communist leaders saw the sense in hedging their bets. They knew that the great powers, if they wanted, could conquer Russia without much difficulty. The Kremlin went on talking to its foreign enemies for fear of an international crusade being organized against it. Its fear was not misplaced. In 1918 the communists knew full well that the Western Allies in the Great War — France, Britain and America — were supplying finance and advice to the anti-communist Russian forces. In the August of that year they discovered an outright conspiracy by the British — later known as the Lockhart Plot — to disrupt and possibly even to overturn Soviet rule in Moscow. Yet the Kremlin never broke off attempts to negotiate with the West. All the Allied diplomats had left the country before the end of the first full year after the October Revolution when the communist leadership put British, French and American officials on trial. (Robert Bruce Lockhart, architect of the conspiracy, was by then in London and safe from Lenin’s clutches.) Yet the Russian economy had been destroyed by war and revolution and the Bolshevik government needed foreign trade for its survival — and communist emissaries continued to make overtures for the resumption of commercial and diplomatic links with the advanced industrial countries, which culminated in the Anglo-Soviet trade treaty of March 1921.
The political rupture between Soviet Russia and the West in autumn 1918 made it difficult for both the communists and the Allies to gather information and explain their purposes. At first after the October Revolution, Western ambassadors had used unofficial intermediaries while refusing official recognition to Lenin’s government. In this way the Allies had continued to negotiate with the communists in Petrograd and Moscow, and the governments in London and Washington also liaised discreetly with the designated representatives of the Soviet authorities.
But just as Soviet Russia played its double game of diplomacy and revolution, so the Western Allies persisted with their schemes to bring down Lenin and Trotsky. A lot of this has been kept a secret for almost a century. Western diplomats were deeply involved in subversive activity but full disclosure would have embarrassed subsequent governments in the West, governments which wanted to appear as clean as the driven snow in the way they conducted their political and military rivalry with the USSR. They preferred to suggest that all the skulduggery took place on the Soviet side. Yet the British conspiracy in 1918, even though it was bungled, was a serious project to undermine communist rule — and it is hard to see why so much of the documentation should remain officially classified. In any event, Allied espionage and subversion did not end with the exodus of the diplomatic corps when the plot was exposed. Intelligence operations were quickly resumed both to finance the anti-Bolshevik White Russians and to gather information; and although these failed to dislodge the communist government, they certainly provided data of value to Western governments.
The British, French, Japanese and Americans had sent military expeditions after the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March 1918, but they never moved out from the periphery of the old empire and were anyway much too small to overthrow Lenin and Trotsky. The battles on the western front constrained what could be done until the end of the war in November that year. Subsequently, none of the Allies was willing to organize an invasion of Russia. Both economic and political considerations held them back. Even Winston Churchill, the arch-advocate of the White cause, had no idea how to do more in Russia than the Allied powers actually did. Yet Russia continued to attract attention. Attempts were made to restore the links of international trade outside the Soviet-occupied zones. The French had their plans for southern Ukraine. American entrepreneurs, especially those on the west coast, were eager to do business in Siberia. British intelligence agent Sidney Reilly characteristically planned to pull off big commercial deals in post-communist Russia, and others in Britain wanted to do the same. Food supplies to Russia were another instrument which the American government contemplated using against the communists. In 1919 initiatives were taken both to offer grain to Lenin on political conditions and to send it to feed the regions of Russia that came into White hands.
Lenin and Trotsky after the Russian Civil War successfully tempted several foreign countries into trading with Russia. But the conventional idea that this marked the end, for a while, to Soviet expansionist schemes is utterly wrong. Comintern, on orders from Moscow, tried in March 1921 to overthrow the German government. The communist action in Germany was undertaken despite the knowledge that this would bring British and French armies on to German soil to restore their continental dominance. Although the Party Politburo spoke the rhetoric of peace for Europe, its members had mentally prepared themselves for another European war.
Yet there was no German communist revolution in the inter-war period despite Comintern’s intensive efforts. The Soviet leadership underestimated the resilience of anti-communist groups and feelings across Germany — just as they had overlooked Polish nationalism when marching on Warsaw in 1920. No matter how good the information
