Ioffe told Lenin that ‘you are… very much mistaken if you suppose that Germany is sending its forces to the east with such pleasure’.28 He got nowhere. Lenin had made up his mind and rebuked Ioffe for getting distracted and not writing enough German-language propaganda. Ioffe ignored him and ran the mission according to his own lights.29
In any case there was agreement about much else. Overt activity was only a part of the mission’s duties and Ioffe’s clandestine tasks included the reception of leaders, agents and couriers arriving from Moscow. Among his secret guests at various times were Nikolai Bukharin, Khristo Rakovski and Felix Dzerzhinski. Ioffe welcomed the help of these fellow Bolshevik leftists — all of them had originally objected to the Brest-Litovsk treaty.30 Germany remained in the communist imagination the engine house of European revolutionary transformation. Lenin anyway shared the feeling that the separate peace and the weakness of the Soviet regime should not deter the Bolsheviks from promoting mass insurrection in Berlin. Ioffe helped to co- ordinate agents who dispensed communist literature and financial subsidies to likely supporters. He assisted the Moscow emissaries with their arrangements for onward travel to the rest of Europe.31 The Berlin mission also became the base for propaganda directed at Allied countries. Receiving Moscow’s proclamations on war and revolution, Ioffe sent them on to Britain, Switzerland and Scandinavia; and he obtained permission from the German government to print revolutionary material for dispatch across the lines of the western front to French, British and American troops.32
Many German public figures and organizations felt that it would not be prudent to treat Russia roughly. The liberal politician Gustav Stresemann told Ioffe that if only the Soviet leadership would agree to a proper alliance of some kind with Germany, he would look favourably on the idea of returning all but Poland and the former Baltic provinces to Sovnarkom. Ioffe and Stresemann also discussed how the two countries might help each other economically. But Stresemann was not in power. He could only promise to relay such ideas to Ludendorff and the high command.33
Ludendorff was not disposed to be gentle with the Russians. On 8 August his forces crumpled before a British surge at Amiens.34 Steadily the war was being lost in northern France. There was panic in the German high command as the tactical ingenuity and superior resources of the Allies took their toll. Ludendorff called for a last great effort. With this in mind he resolved to force the Soviet government to yield up further territory and resources. A supplementary treaty was initialled on 10 August on terms that were even more onerous than those of the Brest-Litovsk peace. Sovnarkom was to renounce all claims to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, enabling a further tranche of German troops to be shipped to the western front. The Germans would receive access to the vessels of the Black Sea fleet. They could buy a quarter of Baku’s oil output. The Soviet leaders agreed to pay an indemnity of six milliard marks from their gold reserves. They also undertook to try and expel the British from Archangel and Murmansk and to look kindly on any German military operation to that end. Lenin got almost nothing in exchange except a promise that the Germans would cease offering help to Sovnarkom’s enemies in Russia. Signature of the treaty took place on 27 August.35
This was the apogee of Lenin’s policy of appeasement. Already in June, as a sop to the Germans, he had ceded the western sliver of the Murmansk district to the Finns. This would help German troops in Finland to counteract the spread of Allied power.36 The same readiness to help the Germans was evident in the south Caucasus. At German GHQ in Spa on 2 July it was reported that Ioffe had given ‘a firm guarantee of oil from Baku’.37 Germany expressed its readiness to stop its Turkish allies from invading the area. The Bolsheviks alone could not defend Baku. In return for Germany’s diplomatic help they would sell fuel to Berlin.38 On 29 July Lenin made clear to the Bolshevik leader Stepan Shaumyan in Baku that he was not to accept any military help from the British, who had offered to send troops. Disregard of this order would be treated as ‘insurrection and treason’.39 Lenin and his comrades put a brave face on all this. Pravda usually carried little news about the western front — the British naval attache? Captain Francis Cromie thought this was ‘by Hun order, of course’.40 But on 17 August the party newspaper suggested that the German setbacks at Villars-Cottere?ts and Amiens made it unlikely that the Germans would now ever be able to invade Russia.41 Even so, Lenin continued to predict trouble for the Allies. On 28 August he declared that the popularity of patriotic defence was in jeopardy in France and that the British working class was about to break with ideas about civil peace.42
His own preoccupation was with the Volga region of Russia. The adherence of the Czech Corps gave heart and strength to the Komuch armed forces in Samara. They pushed north and seized Kazan. This left them only 630 miles from Moscow by rail and river routes. Every available Red unit was rushed down to meet the challenge. Trotsky arrived in August to supervise the army high command and stiffen the morale of the troops. No one was in any doubt that, if the Red Army was forced out of the region, Komuch would pose an acute strategic menace to Moscow. Sovnarkom faced an existential challenge.
The Red Army regrouped at Sviyazhsk up the River Volga from Kazan. It suffered initially from chaotic organization. There were also mass desertions as troops and their commanders decided to have nothing to do with the war between Sovnarkom and Komuch. Military supplies to the Red Army were fragmentary. But the Reds held their line on the Volga and their morale and discipline began to grow. Pravda reported on this as if only Russian factors were in play. But as usual there was an international dimension. The Red Army’s dispositions became possible only because of German consent. The Brest-Litovsk treaty had left the forces of Russia and Germany facing each other in the ‘screens’ arranged along the new Russo-Ukrainian frontier. Few doubted that the Germans could easily sweep aside the Red defences if they so desired. Sovnarkom could not risk leaving the borders unmanned unless it was confident that Germany would not take advantage. Ioffe explored the question with the German Foreign Office on 7 August, and he was gratified when the Secretary of State Paul von Hintze gave an official assurance that Germany would not exploit Soviet Russia’s military difficulties.43 If anything, the Germans were delighted by the Red Army’s efforts. Indeed Chicherin was to claim, a few weeks later, that Germany was insisting that the Reds should liquidate the entire menace of the Czechs in the Volga region. German and Soviet strategic interests were conjoined.44
Lenin and Trotsky needed no pressure to prosecute war against Komuch. Far from fearing civil war in Russia, they actively sought it. They knew that their revolution would not be secure until they won a definitive trial of strength against the anti-communists. The last thing they wanted was some kind of compromise with their enemies. Trotsky sent the following confidential message to Lenin on 17 August 1918:
I consider it unacceptable to let steamers sail [the Volga] under a Red Cross flag. The receipt of grain will be interpreted by charlatans and fools as showing the possibility that agreement can be made and that civil war is unnecessary. The military motives are unknown to me. Air pilots and artillerymen have been ordered to bomb and set fire to the bourgeois districts of Kazan and then Simbirsk and Samara. In these conditions a Red Cross caravan is inappropriate.45
He wanted nothing to intervene between the two combatant sides. Too bad if people in the Volga region were starving. Lenin and Trotsky both believed that the Soviet cause required an unflinching commitment to military practicalities. The Komuch government and its supporters had to be destroyed. Any other priority would be a mere sentimentality. The Bolsheviks were setting Russia on fire and, with German consent, planning to burn out any resistance before it could be consolidated.
14. SUBVERTING RUSSIA
Western espionage and subversion in Russia were conducted by some vivid individuals in 1918 and none was more colourful than Sidney Reilly, who arrived in the spring on a mission for British intelligence. Reilly throughout his life told contradictory stories about himself. It is likely — but not absolutely certain — that he came from Ukraine and was at least part Jewish. He was shortish, sallow complexioned and balding. Though his real surname was probably Rosenblum, he ran his commercial affairs under an alias borrowed from his estranged wife Margaret Reilly Callaghan.1 He was attractive to women, and he sought them out with fervour.2 His other passions were fashionable clothes, swanky hotels, good cigars and collecting Napoleonic memorabilia.3 Reilly was a deeply manipulative man and in business was a greedy wheeler-dealer. Commercial partners came and went. They seldom stayed with him for long; many complained of sharp practices
