Spies and Commissars

take them out to the scullery.’⁵ The small world of Russian political emigrants bubbled with exhilaration.

Litvinov felt he had to do something, almost anything, for the revolutionary cause in Russia. His mind was bursting with frustration. While Petrograd was in political ferment, he was stuck hundreds of miles away in London. As a Bolshevik, he regarded the war as an ‘imperialist’ conflict between two coalitions of greedy capitalists. Most Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries thought the same. But no socialist organization in Russia, not even the Bolsheviks, had yet fixed its policy on how to end the war — it would take months before some degree of clarity emerged on this matter.

In a burst of zeal, Litvinov met up with British socialists who opposed the Allied war effort. The Labour anti-war MP Ramsay MacDonald received them in the House of Commons. MacDonald naturally did not share the British government’s hope that the fall of the Romanovs would increase Russian combativeness on the eastern front. In fact he was predicting the opposite.⁶ But although he was courteous enough, he disappointed Litvinov by providing no notion about what ‘he was going to do about the Revolution’.⁷ Litvinov called next day at the Russian embassy in Chesham House and was received by the charge d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov. He asked why the staff had not yet taken down the portraits of the Imperial family.⁸ He enjoyed rubbing up the old regime’s officials the wrong way. Nabokov stood his ground and behaved with dignity. He had never disguised his sympathy with the Russian liberals and was hoping to receive the trust of Lvov and his cabinet. Instead the Provisional Government gave the London embassy to former Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Sazonov.⁹ But as Sazonov failed to arrive, Nabokov continued to head the embassy.

On 31 March the Labour Party held a celebration of the revolutionary events at the Albert Hall. Ten thousand people attended and Ramsay MacDonald was the main speaker. Others on the platform included Israel Zangwill, who spoke on behalf of the Russian Jewish refugees in London’s East End. The audience adopted Russian custom and bared their heads before observing a silence in honour of ‘the countless sacrifices which the Russian people have made to win their freedom’.¹⁰ It was an occasion that nobody present would forget. The Romanovs were gone and freedom had arrived in Russia. There was talk of a brotherhood of the Russians and the British no longer poisoned by the existence of tsarist despotism.

Most of the revolutionary emigrants in central and western Europe were impatient to return to Russia. The only routes available to them were across the North Sea, either directly to Archangel and onward by rail to any number of Russian cities or to Scandinavia and then by a longer railway journey looping over northern Sweden and Finland south to Petrograd.¹¹ Britain’s Royal Navy had penned Germany’s large fleet in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven for the duration of the war. The result was that transport to Sweden or Norway from the rest of Europe became a British prerogative, and even the French government had to seek authority to send ships eastwards. The big Russian revolutionary colonies in Paris, Geneva and Zurich therefore had to cross the English Channel if they aimed to go home. London was turned for the first time into the largest centre for Russian political emigrants.¹² Excitement grew about the chance of a trip to Scandinavia, and the passenger ferries from the French ports to Dover were kept busy with Slavic passengers. The editorial board of Nashe slovo, a Russian Marxist anti-war newspaper based in Paris, was stripped bare by the exodus; the same happened to the emigre revolutionary press in Switzerland. The place to shape opinion was Petrograd. Nowhere else mattered, and the emotional tug on the minds of emigres was seldom resistible.

They knew the physical risks. Although the Royal Navy kept the German battleships trapped and inactive, the U-boats were a constant menace. Sneaking out from their ports, they had a licence to sink all Allied military and civilian shipping. In 1916 a submarine laid a mine that sank the ship carrying Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, on a trip to Russia. There were grievous losses of ships and supplies throughout the year.

Yet the hastily invented convoy system protected a lot of commercial traffic across the Atlantic. The Americans were giving political and financial assistance to the Allies short of going to war. The German high command successfully pressed for a change of policy to allow its forces to attack US shipping. The rationale was simple. Germany’s economy was being suffocated by the British naval blockade. Urban consumers had endured a ‘turnip winter’ when coffee, sugar and even potatoes ran out. Raw materials for military production were no longer plentiful. Meanwhile Britain and France were obtaining what they needed from their American friends. The Germans gave notice of unrestricted submarine warfare from 1 February 1917 and US merchant vessels began to be sunk in March. British intelligence sources discovered that Germany had promised to restore Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico if the Mexican government would agree to fight America. Washington fell into uproar. Until that point it had been impossible for President Woodrow Wilson to gain the support of his Congress to enter the fighting. These isolationist obstacles crumbled when news of the U-boat campaign was printed. On 6 April the US announced that it would join the Allied as an Associated Power in the struggle against Imperial Germany. Wilson intended it to be a ‘war to end war’.

In New York the fall of the Romanovs had been greeted with wild enthusiasm. The American press, being free from the British and French constraints of wartime censorship, had reported quickly and extensively on the revolution.¹³ News of the abdication appeared in the newspapers two days earlier than in London and Paris. Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire were ecstatic.¹⁴ The tyrant had been overthrown; equality of religion and nationality was being proclaimed. Then came the complication of American entry into the war. The Jewish Forward newspaper approved of President Wilson’s decision, whereas the anti-war left was furious with him. Lev Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin were prominent critics of US ‘militarism’. Trotsky had been deported from France for his agitation against the war; he was, at that time, a far-left Marxist who was neither a Bolshevik nor a Menshevik but demanded the installation of a ‘workers’ government’. Bukharin was a young Bolshevik who was not shy of challenging Lenin’s writings on the Marxist doctrines. Trotsky and Bukharin called on socialists in the US to oppose America’s military involvement. Noisy public meetings took place in the cities of the east coast where anti-war and pro-war activists confronted each other about whether the old government in Washington and the new one in Petrograd merited support.

Nearly all the Russian political refugees in America, regardless of this dispute, were as keen as their comrades in Europe to get back home without delay. In the United Kingdom, the ultimate permission to travel across the North Sea rested with the cabinet. The Prime Minister David Lloyd George dallied for some weeks before allowing the anarchist Petr Kropotkin and the Marxists Georgi Plekhanov and Grigori Alexinski to make the trip. Kropotkin, Plekhanov and Alexinski were picked for having advocated the cause of the Allies.¹⁵ Anti-war militants denounced this as favouritism, and the Mensheviks Ivan Maiski and Georgi Chicherin formed a repatriation committee with themselves as chairman and secretary. They visited the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Home Office to argue the case for a passage to Russia. After a month of frustration they called on Nabokov at Chesham House, where they were pleased to discover that he was under instructions from Petrograd to assist with all requests by emigrants to leave Britain. Nabokov duly issued the visas but, because of the risk of German U-boat attack, only to the men. Loud protests ensued from the female revolutionaries living in White-chapel. (Nabokov later shuddered at the memory: ‘God knows they can make a noise.’) The charge’s job was not made any easier by the political emigrants’ habit of using false passports. Nabokov complained that Litvinov alone had four or five aliases. So even when the embassy tried to be helpful it was not an easy process to issue visas.¹⁶

The first large group of applicants obtained tickets to sail from Aberdeen to Bergen on HMS Jupiter.¹⁷ Having taken the train from King’s Cross Station in high spirits, they then had to sit around in Aberdeen for four days. The ship’s captain announced that this was normal procedure. He was waiting for a storm to brew up and curtail the German submarine patrols. He was also a little too optimistic. Halfway across the North Sea the Jupiter had to lurch to port to evade a German submarine.¹⁸ Some later convoys were even less fortunate and one of the ships went down with all on board — it was the same vessel that Litvinov had hoped to take. Only the recent birth of his son had dissuaded him from buying a ticket.¹⁹

The anti-war activists did not thank the British for helping them. One of them, Georgi Chicherin, went around saying that Lloyd George was discriminating against them in the issuance of travel documents.²⁰ This was untrue, at least for those setting out from the United Kingdom. Nabokov as charge had indeed co-operated with Chicherin, although nobody would have known this from Chicherin’s journalism — and his tirades against the Allies could only aggravate the difficulties of British diplomacy in Petrograd. What is more, Chicherin was unusual in being in no hurry to depart for Russia. His presence in London became an annoyance, and the British cabinet was to lose