Spies and Commissars

mysterious chronic ailment and Zinoviev was recovering from two heart attacks; neither was passed fit enough to go to the Conference. (In fact Zinoviev did attend fleetingly to defend his reputation over the March Action.) Kamenev was also out of action because of a cardiac condition. Bukharin had been convalescing until a few days before the opening of proceedings and Stalin was laid low by acute appendicitis. It was true that Tomski, Central Committee member and head of the Soviet trade unions, had been politically active; but Lenin was annoyed with him because he had given unapproved assurances to trade unions about their freedom from party control — and Lenin for a while campaigned for his removal from the Central Committee.¹¹ Lenin was often described as a dictator and in the spring 1921 he indeed came close to being the supreme leader of Soviet Russia; but this was only because so few fellow leaders were available and willing to work co-operatively.

After getting this off his chest, Lenin led the line in defence of the New Economic Policy. Had he not done so, it is open to question whether the official measures would have survived intact.¹² In the Civil War, Bolsheviks had grown accustomed to thinking that forcible requisitioning of agricultural produce accorded with the communist way of life. The restored markets and the deals with foreign capitalists were anathema to them. Although Lenin had got away with little criticism and short debates at the Congress in March, now at the Conference he had to withstand fierce, sustained assault. But his critics had little to offer as an alternative beyond calling for greater state regulation and planning. In Russia’s current circumstances this would be hugely difficult. It would also be risky. The Conference could not bring itself to overturn a leader who had brought them through the October Revolution and the Civil War. Lenin swiftly sensed the mood and cheered everyone up by declaring that private entrepreneurship was only going to be temporary. He assured them that he was still committed to bringing about communism in Russia.

International affairs were easier for him to handle. Ernst Thalmann, freshly arrived from Berlin, claimed that German workers were turning to the communists in impressive numbers despite the defeat of the March Action.¹³ Indeed Bela Kun wanted the Russian Communist Party to applaud the Action. He and Zinoviev infuriated Trotsky by going around hinting that Lenin and the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs were divided on this question. Lenin agreed to support Trotsky, issuing a rebuke to those responsible for the debacle in Germany. Radek was ordered to toe the line in his report on the Comintern. Obediently he explained that the main reason for the defeat was poor leadership. According to Radek, objections to the plan for insurrection by Paul Levi had rendered the German communists ineffective, but other German leaders were also astonishingly inept. Nonetheless Radek also argued that the Comintern had to prepare itself to exploit turbulent situations as they arose, suggesting that the current stabilization of European capitalism would be vulnerable to future shocks. He was following the recent analysis by Trotsky as well as that by the Hungarian communist Jeno Varga; he also cited J. M. Keynes in arguing that the Paris peace settlement was inherently unstable. Radek contended that the US was the only power with reason for confidence. Even victor powers like Britain, France and Italy had difficulties. Rivalries among capitalist states were ineradicable.¹⁴

This was close to vindicating an early attempt to organize another German insurrection, and Lenin intervened for the sake of clarity, commenting: ‘Of course, if revolution arrives in Europe we’ll change policy.’ But he insisted that no one could make a sensible guess about when this might occur.¹⁵ The Soviet press immediately set about relaying the message that Moscow’s international priority was for trade with the big capitalist countries — and articles on revolutionary war disappeared.

Senator Joseph I. France continued to offer hope to the Politburo. In May 1921, convinced that America’s interests lay in trading with Russia, he set forth for Moscow to see things for himself. He gave an interview to the New York Times before he left in which he sketched out his intentions: ‘It is not a matter of personal opinion, political or economic. Approval will be a matter of practical politics. We did not approve of the regime of the late Czar. We do not need to approve of the Soviet. There are many of my colleagues in the Senate of whom I do not have to approve.’¹⁶ Trotsky asked Litvinov to set up a meeting with him.¹⁷ Litvinov had in fact been disinclined to let him into the country, but Krasin had persuaded Lenin and Chicherin that it would be folly to admit Washington B. Vanderlip while closing the frontier to the Senator.¹⁸ Yet Soviet bureaucrats shared a lingering distaste for dealing with prominent ‘bourgeois’ politicians. On his journey from Riga, Senator France was allotted a crowded, second-class carriage and compelled to obtain his own sleeping bag.¹⁹ He was forbidden to bring his personal assistant or interpreter with him or even to raise questions about the detention of Americans in Russian prisons.²⁰

Even so, he obtained his interview with Lenin in Moscow and put a warmer case for US–Soviet relations than he had dared to express publicly in America. Afterwards, Lenin told Chicherin:

I have just finished a conference with Senator France… He told me how he came out for Soviet Russia at large public meetings together with Comrade Martens. He is what they call a ‘liberal’, for an alliance of the United States plus Russia plus Germany, in order to save the world from Japan, England, and so on, and so on.²¹

Senator France returned to the US an enthusiast for full diplomatic recognition: ‘I found that the Russian Government was handling the situation in a statesmanlike way.’²² His endorsement of Lenin and Trotsky was unconditional. He even swallowed the official Soviet account of the Kronstadt mutiny, pinning responsibility on Colonel Edward W. Ryan of the American Red Cross for having fomented trouble among the sailors.²³

One American entrepreneur who followed Vanderlip’s example and interested himself in business in Russia was Dr Armand Hammer of the Allied Drug and Chemical Corporation. In November 1921, Hammer signed a deal for an asbestos concession in the Urals. The terms involved him handing over 10 per cent of all output to the Soviet government.²⁴ The US press quickly published its suspicions. Also involved in the business was Hammer’s father Julius, who by then was serving a sentence in New York State’s Sing Sing prison for carrying out an abortion. Julius Hammer was also known to have belonged to the Russian Soviet Information Bureau run by Martens and Nuorteva. Then it came out that other directors of Hammer’s corporation had no knowledge of any deal with the Soviet government and that the business had no interest in producing asbestos.²⁵ Armand Hammer was a wily individual and his liaison with the Soviet leadership was to bring him riches in the years ahead. Nor did he confine himself to commerce, carrying out secret political errands for the Kremlin and virtually becoming its intelligence agent. His success in conducting private business in Russia under Bolshevik rule also convinced others that it was safe to sign contracts despite Herbert Hoover’s warnings.²⁶

Even Leslie Urquhart dropped his campaign against Sovnarkom. When he saw that he might never get his Russian property back under Soviet rule, he approached his old adversary Krasin in June 1921 to examine what kind of deal he too might be able to negotiate.²⁷ In July he spoke to the annual general meeting of his Russo-Asiatic Consolidated Co. and recommended a change of heart:

My discussions with Mr Krassin [sic] have been of a practical, helpful, and very friendly nature. (Cheers.) I mention this because in ordinary circumstances it would have been very difficult for the representatives of two such antagonistic systems as those of Capitalism and Communism as applied to economics to find a basis of understanding. Capitalism stands for the right of property and economic freedom, while Communism is the absolute negation of both these principles.²⁸

Lenin and Krasin hoped that such positive endorsements would have a gold-rush effect on the minds of Western entrepreneurs. The Urquhart question was discussed repeatedly in the Politburo for over a year. Soviet leaders understood that if they could agree an appropriate arrangement with the Scottish mining magnate they could use it as the model for other concessions.²⁹

Herbert Hoover did not give up on Russia either. In summer 1921 he responded warmly to an appeal from the Russian novelist Maxim Gorki for famine relief in Russia and Ukraine. The American Relief Administration was closing its offices in Europe. Gorki asked Hoover to divert its activities eastwards rather than back across the Atlantic. Hoover said that he still needed basic assurances from Sovnarkom. American prisoners in Russia had to be released. The relief administrators from America had to be able to travel freely, organize the local committees and have control of the food brought on to Soviet soil.³⁰

The fly in the ointment was an allegation that the American Relief Administration had acted dishonestly in its earlier work in Europe. Captain T. C. C. Gregory, one of Hoover’s officials in 1919, claimed in the New York magazine World’s Wealth that the Administration had tried to subvert Bela Kun’s government in Hungary. Sovnarkom’s sympathizers in the US informed Moscow of the controversy, and Gregory’s