Spies and Commissars

February.³⁵ Radek went into hiding. On the party’s orders he had spent the year 1917 in Stockholm rather than Petrograd. For all his big talk he had no more experience of organizing a seizure of power than anyone else in Berlin. The German authorities, moreover, were aware of his illicit presence in the country. A search was begun for him, and he was captured on 12 February 1919 and thrown into Moabit prison.

While Ebert and Scheidemann resumed their attempts to bring about political stability and economic recovery, the newly formed German Communist Party sought to rebuild its organizations. It had lost the inspiring leaders who had founded it, but its revolutionary vision remained intact. Others filled the gap left by Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogiches. Their spirits stayed high. German communists continued to despise the new socialist government, a government that accepted responsibility for Germany’s humiliation at the hands of the Allies. The communists foresaw abundant chances to undertake revolution. Like the Bolsheviks in Russia, they believed that Berlin was the city where the future of Europe would be settled. The German working class would surely soon see that Scheidemann and his ministers were collaborating with big business. The communist party offered an alternative vision of internal and foreign policy. Thalheimer and Levi preached the coming doom of capitalism — and they intended by political action to bring forward the date when this would occur.

PART THREE Probings

17. REVOLVING THE RUSSIAN QUESTION

After their triumph on the western front, the Allies could no longer claim that they were intervening in Russia so as to bring its armed forces back into the fight against Germany. In the United Kingdom, Robert Cecil as Under- Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs circulated a memorandum to the King and the War Cabinet spelling out the constraints on British policy. Cecil suggested that a crusade against Bolshevism was impracticable. Allied measures, he argued, should be limited to offering assistance to ‘our Russian friends’ and the Czech Corps.¹

But the survival of the Soviet government meant that the ‘Russian question’ was anything but a historical one. German commanders and diplomats who had cheerfully welcomed their government’s use of the Bolsheviks to ease their tasks in the war now warned against the possibility that Bolshevism might move into the heart of Europe. Until November 1918 Allied politicians had looked on Russians mainly in terms of their potential to restore the eastern front. From being fitfully alarmed by pro-Soviet anti-war propaganda in their own countries, they began to appreciate that the Bolshevik revolutionary example might soon be followed abroad. Talk about the communist ‘contagion’ was growing. It was accentuated by the actions of the Bolsheviks themselves after the German surrender. The borderlands of the old empire underwent revolutions as Moscow supplied personnel to instigate seizures of power in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and proclaim Soviet republics. Fundamental economic and social reforms followed Russia’s model. Once Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius had fallen under their influence, the Bolsheviks tried to extend the revolutionary order from the capitals to other towns and villages. Stalin drafted decrees in December recognizing the new Soviet republics and providing them with financial assistance.² If this could happen so quickly, who was to say that Poland or Germany would not soon fall to the communists? And what was to stop communist influence from spreading still further westwards?

In fact the German capitulation occurred just a little too soon for the Bolsheviks, who had not yet secured their hold on Russia. On 18 November 1918 in Ufa, a city in the Urals, Admiral Alexander Kolchak pushed aside the regional administration led by Socialist- Revolutionaries and declared himself Supreme Ruler. Komuch by then was no more and the Red Army had seized control of the Volga towns. Kolchak, assisted by the remaining volunteers of the Czech Corps, despised the Socialist-Revolutionaries as much as he hated the Bolsheviks. His forces dealt savagely with the Reds and their sympathizers as he undertook his advance through the Urals. His was the first of the White armies to make serious progress and in December he occupied Perm, scattering the Bolsheviks to the winds. In the south, where another White force — the Volunteer Army — was still gathering under General Anton Denikin after the deaths of Generals Kornilov and Alexeev, the hope was that the Allied victory in the west would liberate resources to help against the Bolsheviks. Denikin welcomed the existence of the clandestine National Centre with its liberal and socialist members so that he could win friends in London and Paris.³ The British quickly indicated approval and promised their help. The French made similar noises.⁴ Action followed on 18 December when the French landed troops in Odessa while Britain’s expedition remained in the Russian north. The situation was grim for Bolshevism and getting grimmer.

Although they temporarily gave up territory, the Bolsheviks tightened their grip on the areas under their rule. They had spent the year 1918 in internal disputes, nearly breaking apart as a party over the Brest-Litovsk treaty. There were also regular problems with indiscipline and lack of co-ordination between the various organizational levels. Bolshevik leaders in the provinces as well as in Moscow recognized that this situation had to change if Sovnarkom was going to win the Civil War against the Whites. Agreement was reached on the need for a properly functioning hierarchy. As personnel were drafted into the Red Army, fewer and fewer people were left to take the big decisions. The Party Central Committee established a system of internal sub-committees to facilitate rapid reactions to emergencies. The Political Bureau (or Politburo, as it was known) consisted of five members including Lenin and Trotsky; it quickly became the key agency of central party decision and command. The Bolsheviks were willing to militarize themselves if it helped against Kolchak and Denikin. They had always believed in centralism: now they set about practising it systematically. Gradually, the chaotic conditions in soviets, army, police and trade unions began to improve as the party imposed its institutional supremacy.

The Whites’ strategic aim was simply to advance on Moscow and overrun the Bolsheviks. The Allies were more enigmatic. Lloyd George and Wilson still claimed they simply wanted to see Russia achieve internal peace. Clemenceau, who as French premier exerted authority at President Poincare’s expense, agreed. The difficulty remained that no Allied leaders recognized the legitimacy of Sovnarkom and the October Revolution — they commonly believed that the Russian people were oppressed by Bolshevik rule.

There were three basic options. The Western Allies — or one or two of them — could decide that Russia, by defecting from their side and relieving the military pressure on Germany, had forfeited the right to be left alone at the end of hostilities. The spectre of communism was haunting Europe. Lenin and his comrades had openly stated their wish to put global capitalism to the torch. They aimed to overturn the American, French and British governments. The Allied powers might reasonably conclude that the way to prevent the communist insurrections was to cauterize the ‘contagion’ by invading Russia. This would require a big army and a concentration of political will. A less demanding option would be to strengthen the Allied expeditions lodged on the periphery of ‘Soviet power’, supplying the Whites with money and arms but holding back from their own direct attack on Moscow and Petrograd. But political opposition and social exhaustion at home might rule out even this possibility. The Great War was over and few people in Britain, France or America had the appetite for yet another far-flung conflict and indeed many were fiercely opposed to the idea. In that case the ultimate option would be to conclude that Russia was a lost cause and to abandon the Russian people to their fate.

But even a policy of non-intervention left problems unresolved. Should Soviet Russia receive official recognition? Should normal trade links be resumed? Several business lobbies in the UK and the US called for a diplomatic and commercial rapprochement. The trade unions meanwhile campaigned against military action, and European socialist parties had leaders and militants who saw a lot of good in the social and economic reforms in Russia.

In the United Kingdom, too, a Hands Off Russia movement grew up, supplied with a rousing booklet by Arthur Ransome. In The Truth about Russia he lamented:

I only know that, from the point of view of the Russian Revolution, England seems to be a vast nightmare of blind folly, by the sea, and beyond that by the trenches, and deprived, by some fairy godmother who was not invited to her christening, of the imagination to realise what is happening beyond. Shouting in daily telegrams across the