Spies and Commissars

Milyukov’s book was all but ignored on both sides of the Atlantic. In frustration he wrote to the London Times, repudiating criticism of the White armies and their commanders. He insisted that Alexander Kerenski was wrong to advise against support for Kolchak and Denikin and intimated that if only Kerenski had taken a stronger line in 1917, Russia might have been spared its later torment.²² This was not the fairest of comments. If it was true that Kerenski had had a genuine chance in summer 1917, Milyukov had been given his own in the spring of that year. Russian political refugees all too frequently subsided into internal polemics. Disputes were bitter as conservative and liberal writers re-examined the events between the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolsheviks with the same intense disputatiousness that had made the emigre socialist colonies notorious before the Great War.

Such a reputation had also begun to attach itself to those in the West who were outspoken in their support for the Whites. On 17 July 1919 Winston Churchill had given a talk at the British-Russian Club in London and paid tribute to the achievements of the Russian Imperial army on the eastern front, saying that its valour had saved Paris from the Germans in 1914–15. The Secretary of State for War was on sparkling form: ‘Some people are inclined to speak as if I were responsible, as if I was at the bottom of all this trouble in Russia.’ When the laughter had subsided Churchill explained that he believed in the ‘inherent weakness of Bolshevism’. The Red Army, he declared, was weaker than many supposed. He fulminated against Lenin and Trotsky but did not confine himself to the Russian question. Turning to Hungary, he described the communist leader Bela Kun as ‘another fungus, sprung up in the night’. European civilization was under threat. He summarized his standpoint as follows: ‘Russia, my lords and gentlemen, is the decisive factor in the history of the world at the present time.’²³ Using extravagant vocabulary as usual, Churchill had a clear understanding of communism’s threat to the freedoms fully or partially available in the West; and, ignoring the reproaches of Lloyd George, he gave encouragement to active anti-Bolsheviks in London.²⁴

Friends of the Bolsheviks meanwhile queued up to extol what was happening in Russia. Arthur Ransome’s Russia in 1919 was a rapidly written memoir that described the communist leaders in the blandest personal terms, Ransome blithely acknowledging that he was not going to cover the Red terror.²⁵ And although Morgan Philips Price mentioned the terror in his own account, he claimed that it had lasted only six weeks. He chose instead to stress the sustained awfulness of the White terror while praising the Soviet system of government.²⁶ Ivy Litvinov, when left behind in London by Maxim, published a booklet in the same spirit. Drawing on Maxim’s notes, she asked what worth there could ever be in the Constituent Assembly. She accused the Whites of worse violence than anything done by the Reds, stating: ‘As a matter of fact, the Soviet regime has been much less sanguinary than any known in history.’²⁷

But of all the books about the new regime, whether favourable or otherwise, the one with the greatest impact was John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, which appeared in March 1919.²⁸ His chapters concentrated on the brief period before and after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and were based on his own notes and memories as well as on his file of Le Bulletin de la Presse issued daily by the French Information Bureau.²⁹ He offered what he called ‘intensified history’, but he was also providing disguised propaganda. Reed claimed that until the October Revolution Russia had been an ‘almost incredibly conservative’ country: he entirely overlooked the surge of revolutionary action that had taken place in factories, garrisons and villages long before the Bolsheviks took over. The ‘masses’ appeared in his pages only when listening to speeches by Lenin and the other communist leaders. Reed wrote about the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries only to indicate how little they understood the scale of the external and internal emergency in Russia. Lenin and Trotsky were his heroes, and Kerenski was depicted as an incompetent fool: no attempt was made to explain the rationale for the Provisional Government’s policies. Reed wrote: ‘It is still fashionable… to speak of the Bolshevik insurrection as an “adventure”. Adventure it was, and one of the most marvellous mankind has ever embarked upon, sweeping into history at the head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple desires.’³⁰ Bolshevism and popular opinion according to Reed were one and the same thing.

He threw himself into the tasks of public speaking and writing for the socialist press; he also prepared a tendentious memorandum for the State Department denying that any parties other than the Bolsheviks had the slightest following. He wrote that the entire social structure in Russia had been transformed because the bourgeoisie had been dispossessed and turned into proletarians. He claimed that the former middle classes could freely ‘organize in the Soviets, but only to defend their [new] proletarian interests’. The truth was different. The Soviet Constitution expressly deprived those classes of civic rights. Reed stated that the USA was the foreign partner of choice for Sovnarkom because the British and the French had been unremittingly hostile. He added that it was in the Russian interest for Germany to be defeated in the Great War. The reality was that Lenin and Trotsky hoped for anti-capitalist risings across Europe and North America. Reed dropped his tactful tone just once, when saying of the Russians: ‘As for President Wilson, they don’t believe a word he says.’³¹ Reed wanted the US to recognize Soviet Russia and stop persecuting Bolsheviks in America — and he urged American politicians to get the Japanese to withdraw from eastern Siberia.³²

Together with Max Eastman, he also produced a booklet that included translated pieces by Lenin and Chicherin. Lenin’s contribution was his ‘Letter to American Workingmen’. The booklet was distributed in a somewhat abridged edition ‘in deference to an extremely literal interpretation of the Espionage Act’. Eastman wrote an imaginary conversation between Lenin and President Wilson. This was wholly to Wilson’s disadvantage, with Lenin putting awkward questions to Wilson and exposing him as wealthy, ignorant, insincere and dangerous.³³ Eastman was a communist sympathizer although he did not belong to an organized communist group. He was not alone in taking this position. The outstanding example in France was the novelist Henri Barbusse, who contended that the Bolsheviks had ‘attenuated their implacable rigidity’ and were adapting to ‘the life of an innumerable, young people’.³⁴ Barbusse implied that France had a superior civilization to Russia: he urged everyone not to expect too much of the Russians. But he insisted that, after a poor start, communism in Russia was changing for the better.

Reed and the other pro-Bolshevik commentators were not the only proponents of conciliation with the Russian communist leaders. A leading American critic of Soviet rule was John Spargo, whose comments were all the more persuasive inasmuch as he was a socialist friend of Georgi Plekhanov.³⁵Russia as an American Problem, appearing in mid-November 1919, held that Bolshevism was an ‘inverted tsarist regime’ and an enemy of democracy.³⁶ But Spargo argued that the Germans remained bent on the economic domination of Russia and that Japanese objectives were not dissimilar.³⁷ He urged America to get involved before it was too late. US businessmen could help Russia back on its feet by trading in its natural resources. Exports of gold and timber would enable Russians to pay for the capital equipment vital for economic recovery. America should send some of its own experts and make financial credits available.³⁸ He admitted that there were uncompromising extremists among the Soviet leadership, but suggested that Lenin and a few others were demonstrating a readiness for internal reform. Spargo had vociferously supported the White armies until their defeat in the Civil War; but when the Reds achieved military victory he judged that the resumption of international commerce was the surest way to erode Bolshevism’s grip on the country.³⁹

In fact the person who gave the most effective succour to Moscow was the economist John Maynard Keynes. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published late in 1919, Keynes said that Clemenceau had been eaten up with a desire for vengeance on Germany. He thought Wilson was an innocent abroad whose intelligence was overstated, while Lloyd George seemed to lose his political compass when confronted by a Clemenceau on the rampage. Keynes took all Western leaders to task for their treatment of Germany,⁴⁰ arguing that the Versailles treaty was a Carthaginian peace which had ruined the chances of recuperation and guaranteed chronic political instability. Territory had been grabbed from the Germans, reparations imposed.⁴¹

Keynes sombrely predicted that a devastated Russia and an exhausted Germany would draw close; he argued that it could not be excluded that ‘Spartacism’ would win out in Berlin.⁴² But even if the political far left fell short of victory, he wrote, there could still be an alliance between German capitalism and Russian communism — and the British, Americans and French would be the losers unless they changed their policy. Keynes hailed the work of Herbert Hoover and the American Relief Administration — Hoover had condemned the treaty as too harsh while it was being negotiated, and Keynes called him ‘the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation’.⁴³ Cheap grain shipments from the US Midwest were