Spies and Commissars

name of Lenin. When the Bolsheviks seized power the next day in Petrograd, Litvinov’s reputation spread across London as the seer of Russian politics.⁶

In January 1918 Trotsky cabled Litvinov to announce his appointment as Sovnarkom’s very first ‘plenipotentiary’ in a foreign country. Just as they did not like the word ‘minister’, the communists forbore to call Litvinov an ambassador: revolutionary times called for fresh terminology. Litvinov was pleased to have a job that genuinely aided the party’s cause. Exactly what the job should involve, however, was unclear because Trotsky had to be cautious about what he wrote in open telegrams and anyway knew little about British high politics; and Litvinov was imaginative and willing to take initiatives: his time had come at last.

The British War Cabinet discussed Russia on 17 January 1918 and confirmed what Foreign Secretary Balfour had been telling the House of Commons. The Bolsheviks had repudiated their obligations under the treaties of alliance. They had aggravated the jeopardy to Britain and France on the western front by closing down the eastern one. They were stirring up revolutions in the West. The Italians pressed for the Western Allies to sever all relations with them; but Lloyd George and Balfour wished to maintain their para-diplomatic links through Litvinov in Britain and British intermediaries in Russia.⁷ Balfour expressed the hope that the Bolsheviks might yet cause trouble for the Germans.⁸ This was not an entirely fantastical consideration. Soviet official policy as yet ruled out signing a separate peace with the Germans, and if the Russo-German negotiations broke down the assumption was that Russia would go back to war with them. Rumours spread around the world. If the British were talking to Litvinov, perhaps the same kind of arrangement might be made in France where Trotsky was said to be planning to appoint another plenipotentiary.⁹ The British denied that they were granting de facto recognition to Sovnarkom, and Balfour stressed that he would never speak directly with Litvinov or allow him on to Foreign Office premises.¹⁰ Litvinov would be used only as a convenient conduit for urgent discussions.¹¹

This, however, was progress for Sovnarkom; the same was true of Chicherin’s release from prison and the permission given for him to return to Russia.¹² Litvinov made the most of the situation. He wrote to Konstantin Nabokov demanding that he vacate Chesham House and hand over the official ciphers. Nabokov replied that it was he and not Litvinov who enjoyed official recognition.¹³ Litvinov did better for himself when he inaugurated contact with the Foreign Office through an official called Rex Leeper, who conferred regularly with him on matters of politics and war. Meanwhile he scrambled together a working office. In fact he had no offices except the rented rooms he lived in, no designated couriers and no codebook.¹⁴ But he cheered himself up by producing headed notepaper in Sovnarkom’s name and asserting a claim of appointment to London’s diplomatic corps.¹⁵ He did the rounds of public meetings in February 1918, asking how it could be fair for the British government to prefer Nicholas II’s reactionary government to be in power rather than a democratically elected government.¹⁶ He was silent about the violent suppression of the Constituent Assembly. He relied on ignorance or undemanding sympathy among his British listeners, and he saw his task as being to turn sympathizers into enthusiasts.

Litvinov also spoke at the Labour Party annual conference and called on the British to ‘speed up your peace’.¹⁷ On Chicherin’s instructions, he wrote to the anti-war socialist John Maclean appointing him Soviet consul in Glasgow:

Dear Comrade Maclean,

I am writing to the Russian Consul in Glasgow (I am not sure that there exists such a person) informing him of your appointment and ordering him to hand over to you the Consulate. He may refuse to do so, in which case you will open a new Consulate and make it public through the press. Your position may be difficult somehow, but you will have my full support. It is most important to keep me informed (and through me the Russian Soviets) of the Labour Movement in N. B. [North Britain].¹⁸

He thought that the revolution he had missed in Russia was in the offing in the United Kingdom. As Special Branch reported, he actively fomented anti-war feelings among resident or visiting Russians — this included making contact with ship crews in British ports.¹⁹

Conservative MPs began to ask questions in the House of Commons about his activities:

Major Hunt asked the Prime Minister whether, in view of the fact that M. Litvinoff is advocating a revolutionary movement in this country, he can now say whether he will be prosecuted or interned?

Lord R. Cecil [Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs]: My right hon. Friend asks me to answer this question. I have nothing to add to the reply given by the Home Secretary on the 14th instant to the hon. Member for Hertford, and to the reply given yesterday to the hon. Member.

Major Hunt: Is it the fact that M. Litvinoff has sent round a document, signed by himself, to the trade unions, advocating revolution, and stating that a social revolution is absolutely necessary if a lasting peace is to be secured, and is that sort of thing to be allowed in the case of an alien when it is not allowed in the case of any of our own people?

Lord R. Cecil: I am afraid I can only repeat the answer I have given. I really have nothing to add to what I have already said on the subject, that the matter is being considered.²⁰

This remained the government’s position over the next few months.

Maxim and Ivy Litvinov were enjoying themselves. At New Year 1918 it was their turn to throw the annual party for the colony. Fifteen sat down to celebrate. In characteristic Russian fashion the guests came with contributions to the feast. Ivy wrote:

They brought whisky (lamenting vodka) and zakuski from the Jewish shops in Soho — short, rotund salted cucumbers, smoked salmon, voblya [which is] a strange fish cured hard as a board which I had difficulty in cutting into strips and which I thought more suitable for a clown to slap another in the face with than for human consumption.²¹

The cry went up: ‘There’s no caviar, there’s no caviar!’ It might be wartime in a foreign country but the colony expected to dine in the manner to which they were accustomed. Relying on Maxim’s advice and the labour of their red-faced charlady Mrs Bristow, Ivy produced a satisfactory borshch (beetroot soup) followed by roast beef and an immense apple pie.²² The Russians would normally have asked the servants to sit and eat with them but decided that Mrs Bristow would be unable to understand any word that was spoken. She was invited just for the toasts to the New Year and to the Revolution. More toasts followed, including one to Maxim as ‘the First People’s Ambassador of the First Socialist Republic’.²³

Soon, along with Ivy, Maxim was attending luncheon and dinner parties in Westminster and Mayfair. On one occasion they were received at Downing Street; unfortunately there is no record as to whether it was at Number 10 or Number 11, but the guest list included Ramsay MacDonald and Bertrand Russell. A fellow guest ventured the question: ‘Wasn’t it a bolt from the blue, Mrs Litvinoff, living quietly in West Hampstead with your husband and baby, suddenly to be plunged into the whirlpool of public events? We immediately imagined you handing your husband his cup of tea at breakfast and him looking up from The Times and through the newspaper.’ Ivy refused to be patronized. ‘It was’, she said firmly but implausibly, ‘what we expected.’²⁴

Intellectuals of the political left courted the Litvinovs. As Ivy recalled, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Charles Roden Buxton as well as Russell made social overtures to Maxim:

It was a pity they felt obliged to invite me too. I was such a chatterbox and Maxim by nature so taciturn and glad to have others do the talking for him. Whatever the subject under discussion I generally managed to get round to psychoanalysis, and people who sincerely wished to discover what the structure of the Soviets was, found themselves diverted into acrimonious wrangles about Freud and even obliged to listen to the relation of my childhood complexes.²⁵

While Ivy had an altercation with Russell her husband ‘was glad to be able to enjoy his lunch in peace’.²⁶ (His calm temperament proved an asset when he served under Stalin in the 1930s as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs.) Maxim was anyway more confident with pen in hand. His pamphlet The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Rise and Meaning derided the Mensheviks and Socialist- Revolutionaries, praising the Bolsheviks as the only party that had the support of the ‘masses’. He defended the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly on the grounds that only Sovnarkom could guarantee that the ‘bourgeois