Spies and Commissars

departure.⁴⁹

The one person she had to keep this secret from was her cousin Winston Churchill. At a recent lunch with her, he had exclaimed that Bolshevism was a crocodile and that ‘either you must shoot it, or else make a detour round it so as not to rouse it’.⁵⁰ Sheridan quietly used her personal contacts in the Foreign Office to get visas for Norway and Sweden. Kamenev and the Soviet group — accompanied by Sheridan — made their way by train to the Newcastle ferry.⁵¹ In Norway, Maxim Litvinov held things up, suspecting that she was a spy.⁵² Not only was she a close relative of the West’s great Red-baiter but she also had no record of involvement in radical politics. But Kamenev would not be put off and when Ivy Litvinov made friends with her and chatted about common friends, Maxim relented.⁵³

In Moscow, Sheridan was given rooms in the sumptuous mansion built by the Kharitonenko family on Sophia Embankment on the opposite side of the River Moskva from the Kremlin.⁵⁴ (It became the British Embassy in 1931.) It had been sequestrated by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, and among the other foreigners staying there at the time were H. G. Wells, Washington B. Vanderlip and Theodore Rothstein.⁵⁵ Sheridan finished several fine busts — those of Lenin, Zinoviev and Dzerzhinski were outstanding; but it was Trotsky who most appealed to her. She was not the first British woman to succumb to his charisma; even Ethel Snowden had been won over: ‘Physically he was a remarkably fine-looking man; a Jew, dark and keen, with penetrating eyes, and a quiet manner suggestive of enormous reserves of strength. He was in an officer’s uniform which fitted him extremely well.’⁵⁶ At first, though, Trotsky was standoffish toward Sheridan until Litvinov secured his co-operation.⁵⁷ Sheridan had got accustomed to things being cancelled or delayed in Moscow and was consequently surprised when Trotsky’s official car arrived to pick her up at the appointed time. She later heard an apocryphal story that Trotsky had shot an unpunctual chauffeur with his own revolver. She was delayed by a punctilious sentry at the entrance to the building, which made her late through no fault of her own. This did not save her from being rebuked, albeit not executed, by the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs.

He soon became charm incarnate and obviously liked being sculpted. The fact that the artist was a glamorous, uninhibited woman was a further stimulus:

He looked up suddenly and stared back, a steady unabashed stare. After a few seconds I said I hoped he did not mind. His galanterie was almost French!

‘I do not mind. I have my revanche in looking at you et c’est moi qui gagne!’

He then pointed out that he was quite asymmetrical, and snapped his teeth to show that his underjaw was crooked. He had a cleft in his chin, nose and brow, as if his face had been moulded and the two halves had not been accurately joined. Full face he was Mephisto, his eyebrows slanted upwards, and the lower part of his face tapered into a pointed and defiant beard. His eyes were much talked of; they had a curious way of lighting up and flashing like an electric spark; he was alert, active, observant, moqueur, with a magnetism to which he must have owed his unique position.⁵⁸

And so it went on. ‘ “Vous me caressez avec des instruments d’acier!” he said as I measured him with the callipers.’⁵⁹ At the start of the next sitting, on a cold evening, he ‘kissed my frozen hands and placed two chairs for me by the fire, one for me and one for my feet’.⁶⁰ When she asked him to loosen his collar, he ‘unbuttoned his tunic and the shirt underneath, and laid bare his neck and chest.’⁶¹

Despite rarely offering a smile, he flirted with her more and more: ‘Even when your teeth are clenched and you are fighting with your work, vous etes encore femme.’⁶² She replied: ‘I had expected you to be most unamiable, and I am surprised to find you otherwise. I wonder how I will describe you to people in England who think you are a monster.’ He said: ‘Tell them… tell them that “lorsque Trotzki embrasse, il ne mord pas!” ’ But he added: ‘Much as I like you and admire you as a woman, I assure you that if I knew you were an enemy, or a danger to our revolutionary cause, I would not hesitate to shoot you down with my own hand.’ Sheridan ‘found this vaunted ruthlessness most attractive’.⁶³ When she showed him pictures of her work, he expressed admiration for her bust of Asquith: ‘You have given me an idea — if Asquith comes back into office soon (there is a rumour that he might bring in a coalition with labour and recognise Russia) I will hold you as a hostage until England makes peace with us.’ Sheridan responded that her cousin Winston was more likely to form any new government; she also told him: ‘But if you said you would shoot me, Winston would only say “shoot”… Winston is the only man in England who is made of the stuff that the Bolsheviks are made of. He has fight, force, and fanaticism.’⁶⁴

Clare Sheridan attracted a lot of attention on her return to Britain, when she published the first of several memoirs of her time in Russia, and during her subsequent book tour of the USA; but she was not taken very seriously, except by the Hands Off Russia people.⁶⁵ This was partly her own fault; she had always claimed to be apolitical. But what did irk her was the icy attitude of Cousin Winston, who refused to speak to her. She called him heartless and disloyal, saying that she had been on the same kind of adventure he would have once undertaken. Churchill assured her of his friendship but still reproved her for her dalliance with ‘these fiends in human form’.⁶⁶ This was conciliatory enough for her to ask him to put in a good word for her to become the UK ambassador to Moscow — she reminded him that he had once said he would vote for her if ever she stood for parliament.⁶⁷ Nothing, of course, came of this overture.

Whereas Sheridan’s gushing recollections had little impact, the report of the Labour delegation received attentive scrutiny in both Britain and America. But being the product of collective authorship, it was somewhat insipid; and being focused on economic and social policies, it touched on communist politics only indirectly:

Whether, under such conditions, Russia could be governed in a different way — whether, in particular, the ordinary processes of democracy could be expected to work — is a question on which we do not feel ourselves competent to pronounce. All we know is that no practical alternative, except a virtual return to autocracy, has been suggested to us; that a ‘strong’ Government is the only type of Government which Russia has yet known; that the opponents of the Soviet Government when they were in power in 1917, exercised repression against the Communists.⁶⁸

Apparently democracy and civic freedoms were all right for the British but not necessarily appropriate for Russians. And the report ended with the comment: ‘We cannot forget that the responsibility for these conditions resulting from foreign interference rests not upon the revolutionaries of Russia, but upon the Capitalist Governments of other countries, including our own.’⁶⁹

The individual accounts by visitors were much less bland. H. G. Wells wrote up his thoughts in Russia in the Shadows: ‘Ruin: that is the primary Russian fact at the present time.’⁷⁰ He did not attempt an analysis of Bolshevism, and he could not resist a satirical aside:

A gnawing desire drew up on me to see Karl Marx shaved. Some day, if I am spared, I will take up shears and a razor against Das Kapital; I will write The Shaving of Karl Marx.

But Marx is for the Marxists merely an image and a symbol, and it is with Marxists that we now are dealing.⁷¹

Yet Wells also insisted that the communist order had more support in Russia than any of its Russian opponents, either on Russia’s soil or abroad, were ever likely to gather.⁷²The Times gave his account a backhanded compliment:

The merit — and it is a real merit — of Mr H. G. Wells’s book on Bolshevist Russia is that it tells us nothing new, either about Russia or about himself. It adds the evidence of one more sympathiser with communist ideals to the testimony of so many other witnesses with similar leanings on the utter and dismal breakdown of the Bolshevist system.⁷³

Wells had gone out to Russia with a favourable opinion of communism; his disillusionment carried weight.

Bertrand Russell’s book The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism described a similar