Spies and Commissars

Karakhan had stayed aloof from the oppositionist activity failed to save him. Radek by contrast had openly supported Trotsky. Although he tried to save his career by doing a political somersault and attacking Trotsky, he was dragged out for a show-trial and shunted into the labour-camp system where he perished in 1939. Maxim Litvinov died a free man in 1951. He had served Stalin punctiliously while privately telling Ivy about his objections,¹ and lived for years in dread of arrest. Ivy Litvinov somehow found the strength to endure. In 1972 she gained permission to leave for England, where she devoted herself to her writing until her death five years later.²

The anti-Bolshevik army commanders had mixed fortunes after leaving Soviet-held territory. Petr Wrangel ended up in Serbia. His sudden death in 1928 gave rise to suspicion that his butler’s brother had poisoned him for some unexplained reason. Nikolai Yudenich retired to the French Riviera and shunned emigre affairs through to his peaceful end in 1933. Anton Denikin lived on fairly quietly until 1947 in France and the US. Symon Petliura also went to France where, in 1926, he was assassinated on a Paris street. This was also the year when Jozef Pilsudski, the most effective of the commanders who fought the Reds, organized a coup d’etat in Warsaw. Despite refusing to become President, he held the real power in Poland and dominated its foreign and military policy until his death in 1935.

The leaders of the Western Allies retained some influence after the Great War. Woodrow Wilson achieved his goal of establishing a League of Nations even though he failed to secure America’s entry. Physical debilitation prevented him from standing for a third Presidency and he died in 1924. Herbert Hoover, one of his main associates in developing policy to deal with Soviet Russia, became US President in 1929 only to lose power at the next election as the effects of the Great Depression were registered; but in Europe, country after country saluted his pioneering humanitarian efforts that had saved them from famine at the end of the Great War. Georges Poincare became French premier a further four times after the Versailles treaty and sent the army into the Rhineland in 1923 to enforce Germany’s payment of reparations; he died in 1934. Georges Clemenceau retired soon after Versailles, widely celebrated as the ‘Tiger’ who had defeated the mighty Germans. He died in 1929. Although David Lloyd George outlived all of these leaders, his own coalition ministry of 1918 turned out to be his last and he lost power in 1922, never to regain it. Among his follies in the 1930s was his advocacy of accommodation with Hitler and the Third Reich. Lloyd George died in 1945, by which time his friend and rival Winston Churchill had supplanted him in national esteem. The anti-Soviet warmonger of 1918 became the ally of Stalin and the USSR in 1941. After the Second World War, Churchill resumed his hostility towards Soviet communism; and although he was defeated in the 1945 elections, he returned to the office of Prime Minister in 1951. At his funeral in 1965, he was mourned as the wartime saviour of his country.

The Western ambassadors of 1917–18 behaved with the discretion associated with their profession. Joseph Noulens returned to French national politics, becoming a senator in 1920 and going to his grave in 1944. Sir George Buchanan remained fitfully active in public debates about Russia; but his health was never good and he passed away in 1924. David Francis followed him in 1927. As things turned out, William C. Bullitt was the diplomat who went on to capture most attention in later years. His criticisms of the Paris Peace Conference had commended him to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the best person to open the US embassy in Moscow in 1933. Although the new ambassador had shed his early illusions about communist Russia, Soviet leaders welcomed him as someone who might get them a sympathetic hearing in Washington.

In 1924 Bullitt had married none other than John Reed’s widow Louise Bryant. But he divorced her in 1930 after finding she had been unfaithful. Had Bryant died of typhoid with her first husband, she might have joined him in his resting place beneath the Kremlin Wall. Instead she was consigned to the footnotes of history along with the other cheerleaders of the early years of Russian communism. Albert Rhys Williams consistently avoided criticism of the USSR even though he was well aware of the oppressive conditions there. In the Second World War he gave speeches across America drumming up support for Stalin. In Britain, Morgan Philips Price was elected as a Labour MP in 1929 and entered Ramsay MacDonald’s national government in 1931. This rightward movement in Philips Price’s politics did not stop him writing fondly of the times he had spent close to Lenin; he died in 1973.³ Bessie Beatty switched careers from news reporting to writing film scripts for MGM Studios; she also served as the American Secretary of the International PEN Club, a writers’ defence organization, and worked as a radio show presenter in New York until her death in 1947.

Although John Reed had died in 1920 his book lived on and was published in the world’s main languages. In 1922 a Russian famine relief edition came out in America, complete with a preface by Lenin.⁴ Reed was an admired figure in Comintern and the book was published in Russian translation in Moscow with a frontispiece photo of his monument outside the Kremlin.⁵ American communists founded John Reed Clubs in his honour. Reed’s chronicle made no mention of Stalin, however, and indeed he had expressed a lively appreciation of communist leaders such as Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. By the end of 1940 every single one of them was dead, killed as an enemy of the people. The book was withdrawn from Soviet libraries and further foreign editions were blocked by Comintern, which held some of the translation copyrights. After Stalin’s death in 1953 his successor Nikita Khrushchev relicensed publication even though Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were still refused posthumous rehabilitation in the USSR. Khrushchev’s scribes handled this situation by annotating the text with ‘explanatory’ footnotes.⁶ The world communist movement fell into lock-step with this compromise and Reed’s book went into fresh editions around the world — Fidel Castro said how much it had meant to him as a young man.⁷

Most of the Western witnesses of the October Revolution had already departed Russia by the early 1920s. But there were a few exceptions. Jacques Sadoul, having been sentenced to death in France in absentia, could not safely set foot on French soil. But he cut a dash in Moscow, as an American reporter noticed: ‘He struck me as being thoroughly happy, absolutely at ease in his strange surroundings. He was dressed, when I saw him, in a knickerbocker suit of English tweeds, with woollen golf stockings, and smart brown shoes that betokened a rather fastidious care of appearances.’⁸ After various assignments for Comintern, Sadoul in 1924 returned to France and surrendered to arrest and trial. Fifteen sessions of the Council of War were needed before, to the surprise of many at the time, he was acquitted and had his military rank restored to him. He subsequently became the Paris correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya and spoke up for Stalin’s foreign policy before and during the pact between Hitler and Stalin.⁹ When the USSR entered the war against the Third Reich, Sadoul with relief began working against the German occupation of France. He died in 1956, the year that Khrushchev denounced Stalin in Moscow.

Another Frenchman, Rene Marchand, stayed on for a while in Soviet Russia after acting as an informer for the Cheka in 1918. He was by no means as content as Sadoul. Despite living comfortably in the Hotel Metropol with his wife and children, he appeared to be under constant nervous strain, which gave rise to speculation that he regretted throwing his lot in with the Bolsheviks.¹⁰ Eventually Marchand left for Turkey where he renounced his ties with Soviet Russia and died in obscurity after years of pamphleteering in support of the Turkish government.¹¹

Arthur Ransome and Yevgenia Shelepina married in 1924 and they later moved to the Lake District, as far as was possible from the spotlights of English public life. It is unlikely that she ever again worked for the Soviet authorities. For a long time, though, Ransome could not shrug off the suspicions that were directed at him. Surveillance of his activities continued until 1937, when the Passport Office was finally told that ‘this man’s name need no longer be retained on the black list’.¹² Although he continued to travel abroad, he had lost interest in Russian affairs and devoted his energies to writing novels for children. Even during the Second World War he refrained from commenting on the USSR. The Swallows and Amazons series brought pleasure to millions of readers who had no idea that the venerable story-teller had shuttled between Lenin and Lloyd George and served as agent S76. The marriage endured but was not entirely harmonious. Trotsky’s ex- secretary grew intolerant of her husband’s eccentricities and tried to make him into a more orderly person than he was ever capable of becoming. He died at the height of his fame in 1967; she survived him until 1975, three years after she had paid a trip to meet her long-lost sisters in Moscow.¹³

Other leading British agents of the early Soviet period maintained their links with the intelligence agencies. Sir Paul Dukes served on various missions and Sidney Reilly badgered him to stand for parliament and speak out against communist rule.¹⁴ Unusually for a secret agent, he acquired an aura of celebrity. Enjoying the high life, he entered a short but disastrous marriage to a wealthy American socialite. Though he continued to write about contemporary Russia,¹⁵ his heart lay in spiritual quest and he steadily felt drawn towards a