Spies and Commissars

Bolsheviks were looking for chances to play off the Allies and Germany against each other. Trotsky was hoping to get assistance as he built up the Red Army. Lockhart was a willing helpmate, assuring London that the Bolsheviks had been ‘wonderfully patient’.¹⁹ The Allies could perhaps be persuaded to lend a hand if they judged that the Russians might one day soon break with the Germans. But his words increasingly fell on deaf ears. Foreign Secretary Balfour, while encouraging him to be frank in his reports, complained that he had supplied no evidence of genuine anti-German purposes among the Bolshevik leaders.²⁰ General Alfred Knox, the British military liaison officer in Siberia, was blunt about those Allied representatives who continued to press the case for accommodation with the Kremlin. In a report to London he wrote that Lockhart’s bland commentaries on Soviet politics were ‘criminally misleading’.²¹

Anti-Bolshevik Russians were angry about liaison between the Allies and the Reds. E. D. Trubetskoi and fellow monarchists warned the French consul-general Fernand Grenard in Moscow that Allied policy was wrong in every way. They stressed that Lenin had not the slightest intention of fighting Germany. If France and Britain continued to indulge Sovnarkom, the result might be to push Russian patriots into seeking help from the Germans. Trubetskoi’s words were ignored and the Allies went on probing the possibilities of cooperation with the Soviet leadership.²²

Lenin’s manoeuvres annoyed the German high command. Rudolf Bauer, head of Germany’s military intelligence in Russia, threatened a German occupation of Petrograd unless Sovnarkom showed full compliance.²³ But generally there was satisfaction in Germany at the closure of the eastern front. On 7 March the Germans signed a treaty with the White Finnish government and helped General Mannerheim to crush the remnants of the Finnish Reds and eliminate the prospect of socialist revolution in Helsinki. In April they tore up their treaty with the Central Rada in Kiev and installed Pavlo Skoropadskyi as a client ruler. Ukraine became a colony in all but name. The German military campaign stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and was accomplished with ease, enabling the high command to divert men and equipment to the western front. Not only the Allies but also the Bolsheviks hoped that Germany’s onslaught in northern France would prove ineffective. The fate of the October Revolution rested on the resilience of the French and British armies in their cold, wet trenches. If the Germans overwhelmed the Allies, they would rip up the Brest-Litovsk treaty and turn their power against Sovnarkom.

The Western Allies were exasperated by a treaty that allowed the Germans to concentrate their forces against them in northern France. But Soviet leaders were pleased at least that London, Paris and Washington left their diplomats in Russia. President Wilson declined to do anything further to assist Sovnarkom. He replied politely but blandly to overtures from Lenin and Trotsky.²⁴ He was simply being diplomatic. Things did not need to be made worse by an offensive telegram from the White House. Wilson disliked the British and French proposal for the Japanese to intervene in Russia from Siberia. He refused to contemplate a similar expedition by the Americans — and he insisted that in any case the outcome of the Great War was about to be decided on the western front.²⁵

The staff of the European embassies returned from Finland to Russia and joined the Americans and Japanese in Vologda. They all absolutely refused to transfer to Moscow even though they maintained consuls or other representatives there. Bruce Lockhart watched all this from afar: ‘It was as if three foreign Ambassadors were trying to advise their governments on an English cabinet crisis from a village in the Hebrides.’²⁶ He thought no Allied ambassador was up to the task. Francis in his eyes was ‘a charming old gentleman of nearly eighty’ and he recorded that Trotsky dubbed Noulens ‘the Hermit of Vologda’. Noulens supposedly shaped his attitude according to ‘the prevailing policy of his own party in the French Chamber’, whereas Della Torretta spoke Russian but allowed himself to be bullied by Noulens. Rumours proliferated in Vologda’s fetid diplomatic atmosphere; and Lockhart had to chuckle when Noulens, who had heard that the Germans had installed one of Nicholas II’s ministers in power in Petrograd, nervously asked whether the story was true.²⁷ Moves were afoot behind the scenes to send expeditionary forces to protect Allied interests. The British were gathering troops for a landing in the Russian north at Murmansk and the Japanese were planning the same for eastern Siberia. Sovnarkom would receive no prior notice. The idea was to do the deed before anyone noticed, but the Bolsheviks got wind of Japan’s intentions and sought to pre-empt them by making pleas to the other Allies.

In April, the United Kingdom landed a force of 2,500 men in Murmansk, mainly British but also including some French and Serbs.²⁸ Their stated purpose was to protect Allied military supplies from falling into German hands. Trotsky retorted: ‘This is what the wolf said to the hare whose leg it had just snapped.’²⁹ But there was nothing he could do to get rid of the British, and anyway he wanted their help in enhancing Soviet security. The operation in northern Russia had been kept strictly secret out of concern for British popular opinion and also in order to avoid letting Berlin know what was afoot. The troops led by Brigadier General Finlayson had been trained in seclusion in the Tower of London. The force was kept in the dark about its destination when it boarded the train at King’s Cross Station in London; and the officers were informed only when their ship, City of Marseilles, was already at sea. Things went awry early on when Spanish influenza afflicted the crew and the troops. Indian Muslim stokers succumbed first. As it was the month of Ramadan, they had had to fast daily until dusk. Soldiers and then even officers had to shovel coal before the ship docked in Murmansk.³⁰

Lenin and Trotsky were shocked by the British action, but they soon surmounted this. Increasingly the Allied landings appeared a helpful counterweight to Germany’s rapacity. The Bolsheviks had assumed that they would keep control of Crimea; but this did not stop the Germans from invading and imposing their control over the northern coast of the Black Sea. Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinodar, Voronezh and Kursk too fell under German occupation.³¹ The treaty in March had drawn a line from the Baltic Sea only as far south as Brest- Litovsk. Trotsky, while concentrating on his ploy of ‘neither war nor peace’, had overlooked the need for agreement on Russia’s new frontiers. This was an elementary blunder, and the Russian and Ukrainian governments were still negotiating over the line to be drawn between Russia and Ukraine until well into the autumn. ³² No one in the Central Committee, least of all Lenin, had foreseen the consequences as Russian-inhabited cities continued to fall to the Germans. Nevertheless even the German high command held back from a total invasion. It assisted the Cossack leader General Krasnov in building up an army that one day might be deployable against the Reds. Yet already on 2 April 1918 Stalin was questioning the point of the treaty and mooted the idea of forming an anti-German military coalition with the Ukrainian Central Rada when the Germans seized Kharkov.³³ Stalin’s change of stance was a sign of the panic in Sovnarkom. Rather than a breathing space, Brest-Litovsk appeared to have produced an opportunity for suffocation.

The Central Committee met in emergency session on 10 May. Six members were in Moscow and available, and it was the most tumultuous gathering since the discussions of January and February. Sokolnikov, the very man whose hand had signed the treaty, argued that Germany’s recent military actions had breached the terms of the Soviet–German agreements. What lay behind this, according to Sokolnikov, was a confluence of interests between the Russian bourgeoisie and German imperialism. He urged the pursuit of ‘a military agreement with the Anglo- French coalition with the objective of military co-operation on certain conditions’.³⁴ Lenin rebutted this proposal and persuaded the Central Committee to stick by its peace policy. Sokolnikov did not give up. On 24 May he wrote in Pravda: ‘Should Germany break the Brest peace treaty, the Soviet government will have to ask itself whether it should not try and obtain military help from one imperialist power against another. The communists are in no way opposed to such methods as would cause the imperialists to break each other’s heads.’³⁵ This was no more than Trotsky had been thinking since November 1917; it had also been in Lenin’s mind at the time when the treaty was signed. But no one had previously made such a suggestion on the pages of the central party newspaper.

Trotsky appealed for five hundred French officers to assist with the Red Army.³⁶ France’s diplomats and military attaches, with the exception of Sadoul, were sceptical. Georges Petit said: ‘All this sterile and hypocritical blustering ought not to be taken seriously.’ Henri-Albert Niessel of the French military mission went further. After hearing Trotsky blame the Allies for the Brest-Litovsk treaty, Niessel lost his temper and addressed him ‘in a way that no general would dare to speak to a subordinate officer’.³⁷ Niessel’s comrade Jean Lavergne sent officers into Ukraine to cause trouble for the ‘Austro-Germans’. Despite telling Lenin he would assist in training the Red Army, Lavergne doubted that Sovnarkom would meet the French condition that the Reds should demonstrably prepare to fight Germany.³⁸ Trotsky had greater success with the United Kingdom. For advice on a Soviet air force he enlisted the British intelligence officer George Hill and appointed him inspector of aviation, and two or three times a week he laid aside half an hour for Hill to instruct him in aeronautics. Hill relished