Spies and Commissars

Bureau in New York led by Ludwig Martens and Santeri Nuorteva since 1918 retained some usefulness for the Soviet government — and in the following year Martens and Nuorteva received instructions from Chicherin to run a Bureau of Information on Soviet Russia from the same offices.² In truth the Finnish and Soviet Russian Bureaux were a single operation. On 27 May 1919 Maxim Litvinov wrote to Martens: ‘The aim of rapprochement with America has run like a red thread through all our foreign policy this last year.’ The Soviet leadership by then were aiming their economic concessions policy at the US in preference to other countries. Martens and Nuorteva were turning into political salesmen. They even contended that if the Americans were to assume responsibility for Russian state debts, the Kremlin was willing to turn over vast territories to them.³ Obviously this was an initial bargaining ploy: if President Wilson showed the slightest interest, full negotiations could begin. At the same time the Information Bureau maintained its pressure on Boris Bakhmetev to vacate the Russian embassy building in Washington and hand over the funds under its control.⁴ Things seemed to be looking brighter for the communists when the espionage case against John Reed was abandoned.⁵ The charges had been linked to his anti-war activity in 1917 and although he remained an irritant for the US authorities he would have brought any court into ridicule if proceedings were instituted against him so long after the end of the war. The better option seemed to be to pull him in when he attempted anything directly subversive on behalf of the American communist movement.

On 12 June 1919 the Information Bureau suffered a police raid which yielded compromising material on Martens and Nuorteva. Cash had flowed into the Bureau from an unidentified source thought to be the Soviet government — and Martens had been able to replenish the Bureau’s account as expenditure continued, keeping the balance between $5,000 and $9,000. Nuorteva had regular contact with subversive organizations; he also accepted invitations to give public speeches. The Information Bureau sought contact with groups in favour of revolution throughout North America, including Mexico. Martens and Nuorteva simultaneously campaigned for the resumption of full diplomatic and commercial relations between Russia and the US.⁶

The police leaked their findings to the press and the New York Times led the attack on the Bureau by reporting that Martens had been registered in England as a ‘Hohenzollern subject’.⁷ This kind of comment was meant to identify him as a German alien. In fact Martens was a Russian of German descent, born and brought up in the Russian Empire. The same newspaper claimed that the Bureau had compiled a list of Americans to be arrested in Russia. There was also a report that the Bureau had received a letter promising $10,000 for spreading revolutionary propaganda across the Mexican border. As was admitted by the New York Times, the Bureau resisted the offer, suspecting that it came from an agent provocateur. But this did not persuade the newspaper to let up in its campaign and its editorials continued to lambast the Bureau.⁸ Yekaterina Breshkovskaya, a veteran Socialist-Revolutionary refugee widely known abroad as the ‘grandmother of the Russian Revolution’, received space to assert that Lenin and Trotsky were Germany’s stooges and that the German officer corps was running the Red Army.⁹ This was complete nonsense, but the editor was hoping to play on the prejudices of those Americans who might have a sneaking sympathy for Russian communists but had become hostile to the Germans since the war.

The Bureau hit back by beginning court proceedings for the return of its papers — an option that would have been denied them under Bolshevik rule.¹⁰ Martens and Nuorteva had lived for years in the US, making considerable careers for themselves as emigres. Martens had been vice-president of the Weinberg and Posner engineering company; Nuorteva had been a successful journalist and in 1907 had been elected to the Finnish Sejm. They knew the ways of the American establishment and had funds for suitable legal advice in pursuit of Soviet ends.

Martens and Nuorteva also made commercial approaches to big American firms and were in correspondence with Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan Jr and Frank A. Vanderlip. They promised ready finance, to the value of $200 million, if a deal could be quickly sealed.¹¹ By spring 1919 the Information Bureau had produced its shopping list of Russia’s requirements, presumably on instructions from Moscow, stating that Sovnarkom wanted to enter the US market and purchase railway equipment, agricultural and factory machinery, mining and electrical equipment, cars and lorries, printing presses, tools, typewriters, textile goods, chemicals, shoes, clothing, medicines, canned meats and fats. The only large industrial item missing from their list was military supplies — this must have been thought too likely to provoke a response that would damage the chances of procuring the other items at a time when American troops remained on active service in northern Russia and Siberia. Martens and Nuorteva simultaneously dangled Russian natural and agricultural products before the eyes of American manufacturers. The Soviet authorities, they claimed, had grain, flax, hemp, timber, minerals, furs, hides and bristles for immediate sale. This was an implausible idea in a year of growing food shortages in Russia, and wheat and rye exports in particular would have been hard to organize in the face of peasant revolts. At any rate the Bureau publicized Soviet official willingness to deposit $200 million in gold in European and American banks to cover the initial deals.¹²

Its determination was rewarded in September 1919 when a contract was drawn up with the Antaeus Export and Import Company which wanted to buy furs from Petrograd. Another deal was put together for Soviet Russia to import pork and corned beef via the National Storage Company.¹³ While the British and French governments continued to ban trade with the territory under Soviet rule, a small breach in the Allied economic barriers was achieved in America.

This phenomenon inevitably made the US authorities edgy about the spread of communist influence from Russia. With President Wilson ailing, Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer sprang into action — had the President been in better health he might have asked him to be more cautious. On 8 November 1919 the Department of Justice arranged for two hundred ‘Russian Bolsheviki’ to be taken into custody and an official announcement was made: ‘This is the first big step to rid the country of these foreign trouble makers.’¹⁴ All were alleged to belong to the Union of Russian Workers as irreconcilable subversives. Bomb-making materials were said to have been found as well as Red flags, revolvers, printing presses and banknotes ready for circulation. A further sequence of raids was organized in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo. The Union of Russian Workers, which had been founded by Bill Shatov (though in 1917 he left to join the Bolsheviks in Petrograd), was among the organizations targeted. The most prominent detainees were the anarchist leaders Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who were accused of having invalid immigration and naturalization papers — and it was emphasized that they were hostile to political elections and the market economy.¹⁵

Palmer revelled in the publicity stirred up by his raids; it was widely believed that he had fixed his sights on standing for the Presidency in the near future. His officials indicated that a further search was under way to lay hands on five hundred leading ‘Red sympathizers’ across the country.¹⁶ On 1 December 1919 Charles Ruthenberg, secretary of the Communist Party of America, was arrested in Chicago.¹⁷

Although a mass deportation of ‘Russian Reds’ was in the offing, Nuorteva and Martens were spared arrest — an omission which did not go without adverse comment.¹⁸ An editorial in the New York Times was headed ‘The Plot against America’:

The testimony of Ludwig Martens before the Lusk committee puts an end to his pretensions as an Ambassador from Soviet Russia. He is not even in the status of an unrecognized Ambassador. His errand here is not diplomatic in any sense. He is here as an enemy of the United States, as the agent of conspirators in Russia who are planning to bring about a bloody revolution in this country and destroy its Government by force.¹⁹

Nuorteva spoke up for his comrade with the odd claim that Martens had no objection to being deported. Just as bizarrely, Nuorteva added: ‘But if he goes he will take a million residents in this country of Russian origin with him. The Soviet Russia Republic [sic] has eighty-seven vessels ready to bring them back as soon as the way is open. All they want is to be landed in some safe place where the Soviet Government is in control. Petrograd would suit us.’²⁰ The press campaign intensified as William C. Bullitt was reported as having had contact with Nuorteva and Martens. The newspapers, at least those not under socialist ownership, aimed to demonstrate that an international conspiracy was at work; and the fact that Bullitt had worked for the State Department and the White House gave a piquant menace to the media assault.²¹

Martens claimed that the Soviet leaders generally limited themselves to ‘affirmative propaganda’; but when pressed, he admitted that the Bolsheviks had employed terror. The New York Times pointed out that Lenin and Trotsky believed in violent revolution everywhere. One of its editorials went further by levelling the charge that the October 1917 seizure of power was effected ‘largely by men from America who went to