Russian Roulette

by Giles Milton

  ‘The boy was fatally injured,’ wrote Compton Mackenzie in his account of the incident, ‘and his father, hearing him moan something about the cold, tried to extricate himself from the wreck of the car in order to put a coat over him; but struggle as he might, he could not free his smashed leg.’

  If he was to have any hope of reaching his son, there was only one thing to do. He reached for his pocket knife and hacked away at his mangled limb ‘until he had cut it off, after which he had crawled over to the son and spread a coat over him.’ Nine hours later, Cumming was found lying unconscious next to his son’s dead body.

  His recovery was as remarkable as his survival. He was back at his desk within a month, brushing aside any outer shows of mourning for his son. Cumming had the ramrod emotional backbone that so typified the gentlemen of his social class and era. Just a few months after his accident, one of his operatives visited him at his offices on the top floor of Whitehall Court.

  Cumming, who had not yet received his artificial leg, was inching his substantial frame down six flights of stairs: ‘two sticks, and backside, edging its way down one step at a time.’ Little wonder that his friends described him as ‘obstinate as a mule.’

  The spy, Edward Knoblock, recalled that when Cumming did finally acquire a prosthetic limb made of wood, he used it to theatrical effect. He would terrify potential recruits by reaching for his sharp letter knife and raising it high in the air. He would then slam it through his trousers and into his wooden leg, ‘concluding, if the applicant winced, “Well, I am afraid you won’t do.” ’

  Mansfield Cumming kept in daily touch with Samuel Hoare during his long months in Russia. Hoare was a diligent head of bureau and could usefully have remained at his post until the end of the war. But he was disenchanted with life as a spy and left Petrograd shortly after Rasputin’s murder. He had been hoping for danger and excitement: all he got was bureaucracy and paperwork.

  The rest of Hoare’s team remained in the city, including Oswald Rayner. He was lucky to escape censure or worse for his role in the murder of Rasputin. Although the tsar had voiced his suspicions, Rayner was neither apprehended nor even questioned by the Russian police. He spent the day after the murder chatting with Yusupov in his private chambers, making a hasty exit when Grand Duke Nicholas arrived to interrogate the prince.

  At the time, Yusupov vehemently denied playing any role in the murder and used his formidable network of connections to ensure that he was never put on trial. The tsar banished him to his country estates in South-West Russia, a lenient punishment for someone widely believed to have orchestrated the murder of the tsarina’s favourite.

  Whatever Yusupov and his conspirators may have hoped, Rasputin’s death made little change to the defeatist atmosphere on the streets of Petrograd. Daily hardships were on the increase and people began openly protesting about the regime. On 10 March 1917, the Petrograd correspondent of the Daily News, Arthur Ransome, took a stroll around the city and sensed that events were starting to spin out of control.

  ‘A rather precarious excitement,’ he wrote, ‘like a Bank Holiday with thunder in the air.’

  The number of protestors on the streets had increased dramatically by the following morning. ‘Crowds of all ages and conditions made their way to the Nevsky,’ recalled Robert Wilton, correspondent for The Times. But the mood was still good-humoured and there was no inkling of the violence to come.

  Accounts vary as to where and when the first shots were fired. Wilton was close to Moscow station at 3 p.m. when he heard the crack of gunfire. By the time he reached the scene, the crowd had been dispersed and the snow ‘was plentifully sprinkled with blood.’

  Cumming’s team in Petrograd was by now seriously alarmed. There had been political demonstrations in the past and even open condemnation of the tsar. But the outbreak of large-scale violent protest was a worrying new development.

  Unrest rapidly spread to other parts of the city. Later that afternoon, police armed with machine-guns began firing on the crowd in Znamenskaya Square. Some fifty protestors were shot dead.

  In a telegram to the Daily News, Arthur Ransome reported that the bloodshed was of a different order to anything that had come before. The city, he noted, was ‘like a pot of porridge coming slowly to the boil, with bubbles, now here and now there, rising to burst on the surface.’ He felt that it was the beginning of a revolution.

  On the following day, a Monday, angry demonstrators broke into the notorious Krestovsky Prison and released all the political prisoners. They then ran amok in the streets, smashing shop windows and attacking gendarmes.

  ‘Their faces had taken on a fanatical look,’ wrote one English eyewitness. ‘They were out for business and they carried crowbars, hammers and lengths of weighted, tarred and knotted rope.’ Among the rioters were many soldiers who had abandoned their regiments in order to protest against the tsar.

  To many onlookers, there was a palpable sense that the old order was about to be engulfed in catastrophe. Russia was sliding towards an unknown future in which society was to be polarised. The aristocracy and intellectual elite for which pre-war St Petersburg had been so famous now stood jeopardised by the forces of revolution.

  An Englishman, William Gibson, was witness to a direct confrontation between these two incompatible worlds. While of no consequence in itself, it provided him with a graphic illustration of the troubles to come.

  He had been watching the street mob systematically ransack the mansions and palaces of the elite and he knew they would soon reach the marbled residence of his mother-in-law, the formidable Madame Schwartz-Ebehard. She was a pillar of the old order; ‘a massive woman of fifty-five, with tight lips and eyes which could turn to steel . . . a veritable tower of strength, both physically and morally.’

  Gibson made his way to her house and warned her to flee before it was sacked by the mob. But Madame Schwartz-Ebehard remonstrated in the strongest terms. She was determined to defend her mansion against the illiterate thugs outside. Gibson was shamed into remaining as well.

  When the mob finally smashed their way in, Madame Schwartz-Ebehard was ready for them. ‘Seizing the gong-stick from the brass Chinese gong which filled a corner, she had boomed out a peremptory tattoo.’

  The men were stopped in their tracks. ‘Madame had drawn herself to her full height and had stared the rabble up and down.’ She pointed at her highly polished marble floor and then glared at the thugs.

  ‘Your boots are filthy,’ she declaimed coldly. ‘You should clean them before you come in here. You are spoiling the floor. Besides, you were not invited.’

  She haughtily informed them they were moujiki-bordiaji – ‘scum of the gutters’ – and ordered them out. She had no intention of being intimidated by revolutionaries.

  The men lifted their rifles and pointed them at her, but Madame Schwartz-Eberhard swept them aside. ‘Calmly and deliberately she had smacked the face of one desperado after another.’ Then, after flinging the ringleader backwards, she kicked them out and locked the door.

  Madame Schartz-Eberhard was fortunate to escape with her life. In her glacial haughtiness, she personified the social grandeur of the old regime. In mansions such as hers, the old ways and manners had been kept alive. Now, those ways were in danger of being trampled underfoot.

  Within hours of her foolhardy stand, the revolution was fully under way. The Preobrazhensky and Volynsky Regiments mutinied and soldiers from the Pavlovsky Regiment began firing on the police.

  Colonel Alfred Knox, military attaché at the British Embassy, realised the situation was now desperate. A meeting with three senior Russian generals confirmed his conviction that the old regime was doomed. The only hope of quashing the revolution was for troops to be brought in from the countryside. But when these soldiers arrived, they greeted the crowds with warm affection and ‘in extreme brotherly love handed over their rifles.’

  As the battle for the streets intensified, a political battle was also under way. The Duma o
r legislative assembly had been officially dissolved by the tsar. Now, it reconvened itself and established a Temporary Committee with one member for each party. When journalist Harold Williams entered the parliamentary chamber, he found it awash with soldiers listening to fiery orators ‘who had suddenly appeared from obscurity.’

  Williams’ wife was meanwhile attending a rival gathering that seemed, to her eyes, to have sprung from nowhere. The Council of Workmen’s Deputies, better known as the Petrograd Soviet, was a body of revolutionary activists that was far more in tune with the mood on the streets.

  It began issuing its own decrees, including the controversial Order No. 1, which instructed army units to obey the Duma only if its orders did not contradict those of the Petrograd Soviet. A power struggle was already under way.

  Colonel Knox was by now seriously alarmed: the behaviour of the Petrograd Soviet was the clearest possible signal that the revolution had entered a new and more unpredictable phase. ‘Leaflets were distributed advocating the murder of officers,’ wrote Knox. ‘The outlook was very black on the evening of the 15th.’

  The guardians of the old order were shortly to receive the greatest shock of all. On the same day that Colonel Knox wrote his report, Tsar Nicholas II announced his abdication. ‘We have thought it well to renounce the Throne of the Russian Empire and lay down the supreme power,’ he told the nation.

  A new Provisional Government was formed on the following day, with Prince Lvov as prime minister and the charismatic Alexander Kerensky as Minister of Justice.

  ‘Only those who know how things were but a week ago can understand the enthusiasm of us who have seen the miracle take place before our eyes . . .’ wrote Arthur Ransome. ‘It is as if honesty had returned.’

  The Provisional Government moved swiftly to agree an eight-point programme with the Petrograd Soviet. Point One in this programme offered the ‘immediate amnesty for all political prisoners, including terrorists.’

  In distant London, Mansfield Cumming had long ago expressed his belief that ‘Russia will be the most important country for us in the future.’ He was about to be proved right. The amnesty for Russian political prisoners was to have consequences that were both dramatic and unforeseen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE PERFECT SPY

  Mansfield Cumming’s network of agents inside Russia expanded rapidly during the long years of war. As well as his team working at the Petrograd bureau, he also had men based at many of Russia’s key frontier posts.

  These agents were ostensibly working as military control officers, helping their Russian allies to man the country’s vast borders. But they were also secretly collecting information on who was travelling in and out of the country.

  One of these officers, Harry Gruner, was serving at the snowbound outpost of Torneå, a frontier village nestled on the border between Sweden and Finland. Few travellers would ever have come to Torneå were it not for the fact that it was also a railway junction with an onwards connection to Helsingfors (Helsinki) and Petrograd. Ever since the revolutionary upheaval of four weeks earlier, a stream of political exiles had been using this route to cross back into Russia.

  Shortly before nightfall on Saturday, 15 April 1917, Gruner heard the muffled hiss of horse-drawn sleighs approaching the little border cabin. It was an unusually chill evening and the air was spiked with frost. Spring had yet to arrive in this frozen slice of the country and the wooden cabin was covered in a shroud of snow.

  Gruner stepped into the darkness to greet the travellers and immediately saw that they were Russian. He also noticed that they were jumpy when asked to show their papers. There was good reason for their nervousness: among their number was the notorious revolutionary firebrand, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

  Lenin had been living in exile for almost a decade, preaching the gospel of class warfare and radical social upheaval. He had also been demanding Russia’s immediate withdrawal from the war. There were many inside the country who viewed him as a dangerous troublemaker.

  Lenin appeared ‘outwardly calm’ as Gruner interrogated him. According to one of those in his party, the fellow revolutionary, Grigori Zinoviev, he was ‘most of all interested in what was happening in far off Petersburg.’ Yet he was also concerned that this young border guard would try to prevent him from crossing the frontier.

  Gruner hoped to do just that: Lenin was a prize catch, one that would earn him plaudits in London. But he found himself in a dilemma. Russia’s new government had sanctioned the return of all political refugees, regardless of the threat they might pose. Lenin was clearly more dangerous than most, but Gruner had no obvious justification in preventing him and his party from crossing the frontier.

  Reluctant to let his quarry slip so easily back onto Russian soil, he sent a telegram to Petrograd informing the government of Lenin’s arrival at Torneå. He also asked ‘whether a mistake had not been made in permitting him to return.’ While he awaited the reply, he submitted all the travellers to a humiliating strip search.

  ‘We were undressed to the skin,’ recalled Zinoviev’s wife indignantly. ‘My son and I were forced to take off our stockings . . . All the documents and even the children’s books and toys my son had brought with them were taken.’

  Lenin, too, was searched and once again interrogated. Gruner asked him why he had left Russia and why he was going back. Lenin said nothing incriminating, much to Gruner’s disappointment. He knew he could not detain the group of Russians indefinitely. He made a meticulous search of Lenin’s luggage in the hope of finding seditious literature. There was none.

  One of the Russians noticed Lenin chuckling with delight as the search finally came to an end. ‘He broke into happy laughter and, embracing me, he said: “Our trials, Comrade Mikha, have ended.” ’ He was confident that the Provisional Government would oblige Gruner to allow them to cross the frontier.

  This was exactly what happened. Gruner received a telegram reminding him that ‘the new Russian Government rested on a democratic foundation. Lenin’s group should be allowed to enter.’

  Gruner had no option but to allow them to proceed. He stamped their papers and let them continue on their journey. It was a decision he would later regret. One of his colleagues recalled that he was teased mercilessly for having set Lenin free.

  ‘You’re a bright lad,’ they would say to him. ‘Locking the stable door when the horse was out, or, rather, in.’

  Another of them joshed that if Gruner had been Japanese, ‘he would have committed hara-kiri.’

  He might have wished he had done so. Within a few months he would be arrested on Lenin’s orders and held under sentence of execution.

  Four thousand miles away in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a tip-off from British intelligence had led to the arrest of Leon Trotsky, another of Russia’s most notorious revolutionary exiles.

  Trotsky had been living in New York since the beginning of 1917, delivering fiery lectures on his hopes of destroying Russia’s new Provisional Government. He even urged the workers of Manhattan to bring down their own political masters, overthrowing them by way of violent revolution. ‘It’s time you did away with such a government once and forever,’ he told them.

  Trotsky’s activities had not gone unnoticed by Mansfield Cumming, who was receiving regular reports from his principal spymaster in New York, William Wiseman.

  Wiseman, a maverick baronet, had been sent to New York in the previous year. He had established an espionage bureau based in the British Consulate at 44 Whitehall Street, Manhattan. Its principal task was to monitor Indian and Irish revolutionaries living in the city. But Wiseman also kept a close eye on Trotsky, sending agents to infiltrate his meetings and keep tabs on his revolutionary collaborators.

  In the last week of March, Wiseman received a tip-off that Trotsky was planning to return to Russia with a group of fellow activists. They were carrying a large sum of money, more than $10,000, which was to be used to finance a new wave of revolutionary activity, one far more violent t
han the unrest that had swept the tsar from power.

  The revolutionaries boarded the SS Kristianiaford in New York, unaware that Wiseman’s agents were tracking them. Trotsky assumed that the voyage would be trouble-free; he was to get an unpleasant surprise when the vessel made a brief refuelling stop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The port was manned by British naval officials, for Canada was still a dominion of the British Empire, and these officials had been ordered to arrest Trotsky and his men.

  ‘These are Russian socialists leaving for the purpose of starting revolution against the Russian government,’ read the telegram sent to Halifax.

  Trotsky lost all his dignity when informed that he was being detained. According to one observer, he ‘crouched and whined and cried in abject terror’ – perhaps because he feared that the British would kill him. But when he realised he was not going to be executed, ‘his bluff returned and he protested violently.’

  He was held under lock and key for the next four weeks and proved a most troublesome prisoner. He spent his waking hours preaching revolution to the German prisoners of war that had also been interned on Nova Scotia.

  ‘[Trotsky] is a man holding extremely strong views and of most powerful personality,’ wrote the British commandant, ‘his personality being such that after only a few days stay here he was by far the most popular man in the whole camp.’

  In distant Petrograd, the Provisional Government was growing increasingly alarmed by the number of dangerous political exiles returning to Russia. When it learned of Trotsky’s internment, it asked the British to hold him indefinitely.

  This proved a gift to revolutionary agitators in Petrograd, who were infuriated by Trotsky’s detention. They hinted that British nationals in Russia would be targeted unless he was immediately released.

  For a few short days in the spring of 1917, British intelligence achieved the singular coup of holding both Trotsky and Lenin, the principal architects of the future Bolshevik revolution.