Spies and Commissars

Germans and the Whites. One way round the problem was to send deceptive messages en clair. This is the only sensible way to interpret a particular conversation on the Hughes telegraph apparatus between Karl Radek in Moscow and Khristo Rakovski in Kiev. With theatrical extravagance, Radek claimed he could see no cloud in the Soviet sky. Lenin was recovering well from illness. The Red Army was conquering all the counter-revolutionary forces ranged against it and would definitely prevent the Czechs from linking up with the Allies. British and French prisoners were being held as hostages and would be summarily shot if trouble started up from Vologda. Radek boasted to Rakovski that things were entirely fine with the Germans.⁵ Such nonsense can only have been meant to reassure German snoopers that the Bolsheviks were sticking firmly to the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Just possibly Radek was hoping to scare the Allies away from interfering in Soviet affairs — or perhaps he had both purposes in mind at the same time.

Chekist leaders were determined to rectify their lack of effectiveness. One thing they found easy was in recruiting officials. Plenty of Bolsheviks and their supporters had grievances against the middle and upper classes in the light of their personal experience under Romanov rule and were eager to join the security services and liquidate the plots against Sovnarkom.

Felix Dzerzhinski at first glance was not the most obvious man for Lenin to have wanted as head of the Cheka in December 1917. He had no recent acquaintance with underground activity. Born near Minsk, he was a Pole from a noble family and went to a grammar school before being expelled for ‘revolutionary activity’. He was a poet and liked to sing. But political rebellion was his passion; and once he had discovered Marxism, he helped to found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. He detested nationalism, being wary of fellow Poles who wanted their own independent state. He was allergic to internal party polemics — and, like his comrade Rosa Luxemburg, he had despised the shenanigans let loose by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the world of Marxism before the Great War. He was exiled to Siberia in 1897 and again in 1900, but both times he escaped. Shortly after he had married Zofia Muszkat, she was arrested and he was left alone with their baby son. Yet he kept up his revolutionary activities. He had a rough time in prison after his last arrest in 1912, suffering beatings and being held for long periods in manacles — his wrists bore permanent scars. When released at the fall of the monarchy, he was more austere and restrained than before — and he was plagued by bronchitis.

The fact that Dzerzhinski did not want the Cheka post was a recommendation in itself, and Lenin never doubted that he had made the right choice. Dzerzhinski applied a clinical judgement to any situation and had no qualms about ordering mass executions. Jozef Pisudski, who led the Poles to national independence in 1919, remembered him generously from their schooldays: ‘Dzerzhinsky distinguished himself as a student with delicacy and modesty. He was rather tall, thin and demure, making the impression of an ascetic with the face of an icon… Tormented or not, this is an issue history will clarify; in any case this person did not know how to lie.’⁶ The British sculptor Clare Sheridan, who did a bust of Dzerzhinski in 1920, was struck by his demeanour:

His eyes certainly looked as if they were bathed in tears of eternal sorrow, but his mouth smiled an indulgent kindness. His face is narrow, high-cheek-boned and sunk in. Of all his features it is his nose which seems to have the most character. It is very refined, and the delicate bloodless nostrils suggest the sensitiveness of over- breeding.⁷

Dzerzhinski told her: ‘One learns patience and calm in prison.’⁸ Sheridan was unusual in coaxing such intimacies out of him since he did not welcome conversations of a personal nature. Dzerzhinski was nobody’s acolyte but he agreed with Lenin about what needed to be done in Russia. Ascetic and dedicated to the case, he would run the Cheka just as Lenin wanted — and he would not be held back by the kind of moral scruples that would have bothered Luxemburg.

Dzerzhinski was not the only Chekist with a reputation for dispensing violence with a degree of distaste. Yakov Peters, his Deputy Chairman, impressed Louise Bryant in the same way: ‘Peters told me at various times that the only people he believed in killing were traitors in his own ranks, people who were grafters and who tried to steal everything, people in a time like that who did not stick to the high moral principle of revolutionary discipline.’⁹ If terror occurred under Soviet rule, she said, it was carried out by reluctant perpetrators like Peters who were harder on delinquent Bolsheviks than on ‘enemies of the people’. Even George Hill, less friendly than Bryant to Sovnarkom, felt that Peters ‘really hated what he was doing, but felt that it was necessary’.¹⁰ But Peters had a darker personality than he revealed to sympathetic foreigners. When living in London he had been involved in the murder of policemen which led to the Sidney Street siege in 1910. Like Dzerzhinski, he would do anything for the Revolution. As time went on, Dzerzhinski and Peters became more enthusiastic about taking the bridle off the Cheka. Enemies of the Bolsheviks did not scruple to use conspiracy and insurrection — an attempt was made on Lenin’s life in December 1917. Chekists wanted to meet fire with fire. They stopped at nothing to uphold the Soviet order while continuing to speak softly with foreigners.

Martyn Latsis, a member of the Cheka Board, called in the Cheka house journal for the class enemies of the Soviet order to be exterminated. He was advocating classocide. It was not enough to suppress capitalism; just as important for Latsis was the requirement to liquidate all living capitalists. But although the legislative framework was permissive in the extreme, Dzerzhinski at first trod carefully and consulted the central party leadership regularly. The coalition between Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries was among the factors holding back the Cheka, but after July 1918 the Bolsheviks were running a one-party state. They faced enemies, foreign and Russian, who were becoming increasingly well organized and well financed. From then onwards the Chekists fired first and asked questions later, if they asked them at all.

The social groups they targeted were named in the Constitution adopted by the Congress of Soviets that July. In the clauses devoted to citizenship, several types of people were deprived of electoral and general civil rights. Aristocrats, priests and policemen were blacklisted, as were industrialists, bankers and landlords. The Constitution declared all the ‘former people’ — chilling phrase — to be suspect. Latsis wanted to victimize all of them. What he said openly, the Chekists quietly practised. When emergencies arose, the custom became to arrest people belonging to these categories and hold them as hostages. Such prisoners were executed whenever the Whites carried out terror against Bolsheviks. The gaols in Moscow and Petrograd were grim, filthy places of confinement and the work of rooting out counter-revolutionary groups brutalized the Chekists in attitude and practice. Their leaders at every level prominently included Jews, Latvians and other non-Russians whose animus against monarchy, Okhrana and Church was highly developed. They did not blanch at orders to terrorize people who had enjoyed privileges before 1917.

One of the great worries of communist leaders was that their enemies might find a way to disrupt the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The anarchists were always out to cause trouble. Four of their number had seized the car of Raymond Robins in April 1918. Robins drew his Browning pistol on them only to be confronted by their own four Brownings. The anarchists stole the vehicle, forcing the chauffeur to do the driving for them. Robins, stranded on the pavement, contacted the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and demanded the return of his car as well as an apology. Chicherin met his indignation with the less than reassuring comment that ‘he had had the same thing happen to himself only a week before’. This infuriated Robins, who said that no other foreign minister in the world would talk so complacently. Robins went next to the Cheka, which is what he should have done in the first place. Dzerzhinski’s people promised that the American’s property would be back with him within a week, and this is exactly what happened.¹¹ On the night of 11–12 April 1918 the Cheka and the Red Army moved decisively against the anarchist strongholds in Moscow. Twenty-six premises were attacked. Sovnarkom used the Latvian Riflemen to carry out a thorough suppression of resistance. By the end of the action they had killed forty anarchists and taken five hundred prisoners.¹²

Dzerzhinski, humiliated by having been captured in the Left Socialist-Revolutionary rising, resigned as Chairman of the Cheka on 8 July and agreed to resume his post only on 22 August. Eight days later Lenin was wounded in an assassination attempt that came very close to success. Dzerzhinski’s morale again crumbled. In September he took himself off to Berlin. He travelled under the alias of a courier called Felix Damanski, leaving the Cheka in the care of Yakov Peters. Getting away from the scene of his embarrassment, he hoped to do something useful for the international communist cause. Adolf Ioffe refused to go easy on him and asked how the Chekists could mess things up so badly as to let Lenin be shot.¹³ Another purpose of Dzerzhinski’s trip was to retrieve the shreds of his private life. His wife Zofia had not seen him since before the Great War. After her release from Russian custody, she had moved to Switzerland with their son; from 1918 she was employed in Berne by the Soviet mission. Dzerzhinski slipped over the border to visit his family. He took them to the zoo in Berne and on a