Spies and Commissars

currently saving eastern and central Europe from famine. This vital relief, though, would not continue for ever and it behoved the Allies to enable the restoration of Russian cereal exports. Keynes claimed that without them there could be no European economic recovery or political stabilization. He insisted that since the Allies could not yet supply Russia with the agricultural implements needed to regenerate its farming, Germany would be doing everyone a service by trading with Moscow. The world had an interlinked economy and Keynes wanted policy to be adjusted in the light of this.⁴⁴

He wrote his book in a spasm of fervour in autumn 1919 and it came out amid controversy at the end of the year. Few other works by him around that period had quite the same punch. The book was an instant best-seller in many languages, but disparagers quickly appeared in abundance. A London Times editorial applauded the Cambridge academic for his cleverness and erudition but denied that the Germans had been treated too severely. Supposedly Keynes was urging a policy that would ‘place Germany in effective control of Russia as a recompense for having let loose a war in which one of her principal objects was the economic enslavement of Russia’.⁴⁵ The reviewer in the New York Times was blunter still, calling the book a ‘revolting melodrama’. Keynes had allegedly practised ‘the highly perfect art of slurring those who helped to win this war’.⁴⁶ The French authorities and press were similarly negative.⁴⁷ Only on the left did Keynes experience a warm reception. The Manchester Guardian praised him for his ‘conspicuous courage’.⁴⁸ From donnish obscurity Keynes rose to international fame, leaving no one indifferent regardless of whether they liked or disliked his analysis of the Versailles treaty.

Soviet communist leaders acclaimed the book. Ioffe said it exactly coincided with his own opinions.⁴⁹ Even Lenin, who only reluctantly cited authors hostile to Marxism in his writings, welcomed The Economic Consequences of the Peace; but if he was flattered by Keynes’s reference to his ‘subtle mind’, he did not say so.⁵⁰ Bolsheviks were delighted to witness one of the world’s most brilliant economists agreeing that a punitive peace had been inflicted on Germany and a disastrous blockade on Russia. While they waited for revolutions to roll out across Europe, they could at least enjoy watching others spreading their propaganda for them.

26. LEFT ENTRANCE

From late 1919 Sovnarkom denied accreditation to journalists of unfriendly foreign newspapers.¹ Dispatches had to be submitted in advance to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Marguerite E. Harrison of the Associated Press noted that the official Soviet reviewer of Western press coverage mysteriously lost or delayed sanctioning the articles he disliked. He confessed: ‘Mrs Harrison, your article is perfectly correct in every particular, but I prefer Mr Blank’s article. It is more favourable to us. If they both came out in the American press at the same time it might produce a bad impression. I will send his first and hold yours for twenty-four hours.’² Meanwhile a Central Bureau for the Service of Foreigners was created in the Russian capital with the idea of arranging evenings of cultural uplift for favoured reporters, and Party Central Committee member Anatoli Lunacharski helped out by compering a concert by the State Stradivarius Quartet playing Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Debussy.³

Such efforts had only patchy success with the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who arrived in Russia early in 1920 after being deported from America. In line with the idea of winning friends who could influence international opinion, the Soviet authorities made a fuss of them and gave them rooms in a good Moscow hotel. Goldman had modified her doctrines of anarchism to the point where she no longer advocated non-violence as an absolute principle. But she was never likely to become a Bolshevik and indeed she remarked on the poverty, bureaucracy and fanatical intolerance that prevailed under Soviet rule. Communist functionaries filled their days with meetings with trade union activists and factory workers who would reliably spout the official Bolshevik line; but, as word of her presence got around Moscow, Russian anarchists made contact and told her of the persecution they had suffered since the October Revolution. By December 1921 she and Berkman had had enough and left Russia for good. They decamped to the Latvian capital Riga, where they could write freely about the oppression they had witnessed. Joseph Pulitzer published their work in his New York World magazine and Goldman later integrated their articles into her book My Disillusionment in Russia.⁴

Soviet leaders hoped for better luck with their efforts to influence the British political left. On 10 December 1919 the Trades Union Congress demanded ‘the right to an independent and impartial enquiry into the industrial, economic and political conditions of Russia’, aiming to send a joint delegation of the TUC, the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party to see things for themselves.⁵ The Supreme Allied Council decided that no harm would be done, and on 27 April 1920 the delegation left for Scandinavia en route for Petrograd.⁶ Lenin remained unconvinced that this was a good idea and called for a press campaign to denounce the projected ‘guests’ of Soviet Russia as ‘social-traitors’. Chicherin pleaded for the trip to happen without any molestation, and Lenin for once gave way.⁷

The British Labour delegation reached Petrograd on 11 May for their six-week trip.⁸ Off the train stepped Margaret Bondfield, H. Skinner and A. A. Purcell for the TUC; Ben Turner, Mrs Philip Snowden and Robert Williams for the Labour Party; and Clifford Allen and R. C. Wallhead for the Independent Labour Party. Dr Leslie Haden Guest and C. Roden Buxton travelled as secretaries and interpreters.⁹ Bertrand Russell joined them later after undergoing a special interview by British officials in London and overcoming Litvinov’s initial reluctance to issue him a visa in Stockholm.¹⁰ The delegates felt they were breaking through to a different world. As Ethel Snowden put it: ‘We were behind the “iron curtain” at last!’¹¹ It is widely assumed that this phrase was coined by Winston Churchill, in his speech at Fulton, Missouri in 1946, as the Cold War started between the USSR and the USA. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels had in fact used it a year earlier as the Red Army swept into Romania.¹² But though it was she who had coined it, Mrs Snowden’s meaning was quite different from Churchill’s. She believed that a curtain of ignorance separated the countries of the West from Soviet Russia. She denied that the Russian communists were a threat to Britain’s security — and she opposed any project to renew British armed intervention or giving material assistance to the enemies of Bolshevism.¹³

She and her companions were alert to the risk of being treated like a ‘royal family’ and manipulated for Bolshevik purposes.¹⁴Chicherin made a prediction at a banquet of welcome: ‘We instructed ourselves whilst the process of creating a new Russia was going on. When you return to England you also will have to learn while building, and then, in the near future, you will be able to greet us as we greet you tonight.’¹⁵ Mrs Snowden tartly noted: ‘As propagandists there is surely no race and no class to surpass the Russian Communists.’¹⁶ The repeated singing of the Internationale at the banquet got on her nerves.¹⁷ She also disliked the pomposity of official gatherings. Propaganda was unconvincing on the lips of ill-fed youngsters and she found it ‘unspeakably funny tripping from the unaccustomed lips of sober-speeched Britons, anxious not to be outdone in the delivery of explosive perorations’.¹⁸

John Clarke, travelling with fellow Scot Willie Gallacher in July 1920 to the Comintern Congress, recorded a conversation on the slow train journey south from Murmansk to Petrograd. It was a time when the Red Army and the Polish Army were fighting for supremacy in Ukraine and Poland:

Gallacher: ‘Poles, Poles, are they defeated?’

Red Army soldier: ‘Ne upony mio!’ (I don’t understand.)

Gallacher: ‘Poles — defeated?’

Soldier: ‘Ne upony mio!’

Gallacher: ‘Poles — beaten — defeated — beaten?’ (A little fisticuff display.)

Soldier (stoically): ‘Ne upony mio!’

Gallacher: ‘Poles beaten! y’ken, beaten — washed oot — up the pole?’

Soldier (with loud guffaw): ‘Ne upony mio!’

And so on, ad infinitum.¹⁹

Clarke was known for his humour, but he could see that his efforts were lost on an audience of four hundred