Spies and Commissars

parties’ would not come back to power.²⁷

On 23 January the Manchester Guardian ran an article by an unnamed correspondent, possibly Theodore Rothstein, denying that communism stood for ‘class war’. This alleged mistake was said to result from a mistranslation of the German Klassenkampf, which was better rendered as ‘class struggle’ and was widely used by European socialists without connection with Bolshevism.²⁸ This was an inaccurate presentation of Lenin’s ideas. Since 1914 he had called for the ‘imperialist war’ to be turned into a ‘European civil war’, and by war he meant war and not just struggle.

There was no Bolshevik of Litvinov’s stature in America because all the resident leaders of the Russian far left had departed for Petrograd. The most active advocate of Bolshevism in the US was not a Russian but a Finn, Santeri Nuorteva, who headed the Finnish Information Bureau in New York. The Bureau was an agency of the Provisional Revolutionary Government established by the Red Finns in January 1918 as civil war broke out between the Reds and the Whites in Finland. Bolsheviks kept close ties with the Bureau, which operated as an unofficial embassy for the Reds in Russia as well as Finland. The US Secretary of State Robert Lansing would have nothing to do with Nuorteva, who then reached out to sympathetic officials in the State Department such as William Bullitt, William Irwin and Felix Frankfurter (political discipline under Lansing was much more lax than in Balfour’s Foreign Office). Nuorteva also approached likely journalists such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Although he was later to operate as a cheerleader for Joseph Stalin, at this time Duranty was still wary of associating himself with the Russian communist cause. The Finnish Information Bureau’s Harold Kellock derided him in a letter to Frankfurter: ‘Walter reminds me a bit of a sort of orthodox Virgin Mary who is always fully conscious of being Queen of Heaven. Perhaps he’s a direct descendant “son of the Jewish Revolution”.’²⁹

The weakness of the Soviet propaganda effort in the US induced John Reed and Louise Bryant to volunteer to return to America on Sovnarkom’s behalf. This would undoubtedly involve a certain risk. A Federal Grand Jury had indicted Reed in November 1917 for violating the Espionage Act with his article ‘Knit a Straitjacket for your Soldier Boy’ in the Masses. But Reed did not flinch and on 29 January 1918 the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs appointed him New York consul.³⁰ The State Department retorted that Lenin’s government lacked even de facto recognition.³¹ Trotsky at this point saw that he was annoying Washington for no good purpose, and he withdrew Reed’s name from his list of appointees. The most important thing was to facilitate Reed’s arrival in the US.³² Reed and Bryant disembarked on 28 April.³³ Although the indictment was quietly forgotten, in late May he was arrested in Philadelphia on a charge of inciting a riot.³⁴ Yet again the authorities stepped back from providing him with the publicity of a trial. On release he delivered speeches against the war, sharing platforms with Nuorteva and Masses editor Max Eastman.³⁵ Reed’s articles and pamphlets were disseminated widely in the American labour movement. He thought he had seen the world’s future in Russia, and he recommended it.

The community of foreign sympathizers in Petrograd continued to promote the Soviet cause. The most eccentric was Daily News and Manchester Guardian correspondent Arthur Ransome. Caught in the United Kingdom at the time of the October Revolution, he had returned to Russia on Christmas Day 1917.³⁶ Ransome inspired great affection: every one of his acquaintances, even those who detested Bolshevism, was fond of him. Moura Benckendorff, Lockhart’s mistress, noticed ‘his Bolshevik appearance’ but still felt sorry for him. Thinking that he was not eating well, she ‘stuck a piece of veal in his mouth… and a few radishes in his pocket’.³⁷ Ransome might have preferred something sugary: he loved his ‘sweets’.³⁸

The British intelligence officer George Hill was another who warmed to him: ‘He was a tall, lanky, bony individual with a shock of sandy hair, usually unkempt, and the eyes of a small, inquisitive and rather mischievous boy. He was a lovable personality when you came to know him.’³⁹ Hill and Ransome lived on the same hotel corridor. Only Hill had a bathroom, which he allowed Ransome to use each morning:

Our profoundest discussions and most heated arguments took place when Ransome was sitting in the bath and I wandering up and down my room dressing. Sometimes, when I had the better of an argument and his feelings were more than usually outraged, he would jump out of the water and beat himself dry like an angry gorilla. After that he would not come for his bath for two or three days, then we would meet and grin at each other, I would ask after the pet snake which lived in a large cigar box in his room, and the following day he would come in as usual and we would begin arguing again, the best of friends.⁴⁰

The species and provenance of the snake remain unknown.

Ransome, an unhappily married man, had fallen in love with a Bolshevik — and British intelligence wondered whether he had become one too.⁴¹ The object of his affections was none other than Trotsky’s secretary Yevgenia Shelepina. Hill asked her out to dinner but she refused, claiming she had to work at her desk till late.⁴² The true reason may well have been her growing fancy for Ransome, and the two were soon conducting an affair. A bit of politics was involved, too. Ransome was sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as well as convinced, from a patriotic viewpoint, that it was in the British interest to have good relations with them and not to bully or subvert Sovnarkom. And Shelepina was anyway a useful source of material for his dispatches home. Her close knowledge of Trotsky’s planning and activity was a priceless asset.

C. P. Scott, Ransome’s editor in Manchester, was not keen on the Soviet revolutionary experiment. While appreciating his reporter’s extraordinary access to the Bolshevik elite, Scott used the old device of muffling a correspondent’s enthusiasms by judicious editing and occasional spiking of reports. At least Ransome kept his job. Louise Bryant lost her contract of employment with the Philadelphia Public Ledger and was in no doubt about the reason. As soon as a reporter tried to tell the news honestly, she claimed, the editor at home disowned him or her.⁴³ Morgan Philips Price complained that his telegrams were being suppressed or emasculated.⁴⁴ But the cheerleaders kept up their work. Determined to write as they pleased, Bryant and Ransome published booklets on Russia after the October Revolution. Ransome’s Letter to America so pleased Karl Radek at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs that he helped to get it published in the US and supplied his own introduction. Ransome denied that the Allies had any right to compel Russia to do what they wanted. While allowing that the Revolution might fail, he applauded the Soviet order and its appropriateness for Russia; he dismissed the anti-Bolshevik majority in the Constituent Assembly as an ‘indifferent mass’ of people incapable of achieving the decisiveness and popularity of the Bolsheviks.⁴⁵

Jacques Sadoul and Raymond Robins went on pressing the case for gentle handling of Sovnarkom by their governments. At the beginning of 1918 their chorus was swelled by Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had caught the eye of Lloyd George as someone with an open mind about the Bolsheviks. The Prime Minister decided to send him back to Russia as ‘Agent’ or ‘Head of the British Mission’.⁴⁶ Before departing, Lockhart spoke to Viscount Milner (Secretary of State for War), Sir Edward Carson (First Lord of the Admiralty), Earl Curzon (Lord President of the Council and soon to become Foreign Secretary), Lord Hardinge (Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) and Sir George Clerk (private secretary to the Acting Foreign Secretary). Lockhart emerged well briefed on the general problems of the British war effort. He also learned that Lloyd George had a low opinion of A. J. Balfour and the Foreign Office, which gave Lockhart an opening for writing reports without inhibition.⁴⁷ Lockhart’s linguistic competence and political contacts as well as his self-confidence were undeniable. Lloyd George got no sense of Lockhart’s recklessness. Perhaps his own personality and unconventional lifestyle — he took his mistress Frances Stevenson along with him nearly everywhere — blinded him to the risks of sending the Scot back into a post of political responsibility without a senior diplomat like Buchanan to keep an eye on him. Lockhart was like quicksilver, a man who loved the thrills of adventure.

He left for Russia on 14 January 1918 with a letter of recommendation from none other than Maxim Litvinov.⁴⁸ Only one person in Whitehall poured cold water on his mission. General Sir Nevil Macready, who on learning that Lockhart’s assignment was to help to restore the Russians to the eastern front, said: ‘Don’t the boys in the Foreign Office read history? Don’t you know that when an army of seven million runs away in disorder, it needs a generation before it can fight again?’⁴⁹ But Lloyd George believed that Raymond Robins was carrying out useful work for the Americans and wanted Lockhart to do the same for the British. He told him simply: ‘Go to it.’⁵⁰ With Lockhart went his personally chosen team of Captain William Hicks, Edward Phelan and Edward Birse. Hicks had recently worked in Russia as an expert on poison gas;