Russian Roulette

by Giles Milton

  Maugham left for San Francisco carrying $21,000 of the money for Kerensky in cash. It was concealed in a belt hidden under his shirt. He was accompanied by Emanuel Voska, three American diplomats and three Czech emissaries. Once inside Russia, Maugham was to travel alone and incognito.

  ‘The Czechs and I should appear to be entire strangers to one another,’ he wrote, ‘and communicate, if necessary, only with precaution.’ If anyone asked his occupation, he was to say that he was a journalist being sent to Petrograd to cover the unfolding revolution.

  Maugham would later write several accounts of his mission to Russia, including an intimate portrait of a nameless secret agent working for the Americans. It is almost certainly the wily Emanuel Voska, who seemed to have many of the facets required by the perfect spy.

  ‘Ruthless, wise, prudent and absolutely indifferent to the means by which he reached his ends,’ wrote Maugham. ‘[There was] something terrifying about him . . . he was capable of killing a fellow creature without a trace of ill-feeling.’

  Maugham and his fellow travellers travelled by boat to Vladivostok before boarding the Trans-Siberian Express for Petrograd. By the time they were approaching the Russian capital, in August 1917, Kerensky’s position had been seriously weakened.

  In mid June, his Provisional Government had launched a massive offensive against the German Army. After initial success, the Russians suffered a catastrophic counter-attack that resulted in the slaughter of half a million men. In the wake of defeat came more political unrest. Ministers wrangled among themselves, leading to the eventual collapse of the government. In the political vacuum that followed, Lenin’s revolutionaries took their protest to the streets.

  ‘On the Nevsky Prospekt, about ten o’clock, the shooting began,’ wrote the journalist, Harold Williams. ‘Who began it is not clear, but men on motor-lorries with machine-guns began firing indiscriminately into the crowd.’

  The situation was precarious but Kerensky eventually managed to restore order. A heavily disguised Lenin slipped away to Finland while Trotsky was temporarily arrested, along with a number of other key activists. Few doubted that the political unrest would continue.

  ‘The feeling of Petrograd,’ wrote the journalist Arthur Ransome, ‘is rather like that of a person half awake and not quite sure whether he has been visited by a burglar or a bad dream.’

  This was the city in which Somerset Maugham arrived in August 1917. He checked into the Hotel Europe – ‘a stamping ground for Allied agents’ – and then went for a stroll along the Nevsky Prospekt. He was disappointed in Russia’s imperial capital, finding it ‘dingy and sordid and dilapidated’.

  On the morning after his arrival, he presented himself at the British Embassy for a meeting with the ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. He was hoping that Buchanan would provide him with assistance in making contact with Kerensky. He was quickly disabused of this notion.

  Buchanan was studiously late for the meeting and when he did at long last arrive, he treated Maugham with glacial disdain, speaking to him in the manner of an Edwardian headmaster admonishing a wayward pupil.

  Buchanan was always frosty with people who worked for Mansfield Cumming. He was outraged that British agents were allowed to operate on what he considered to be his patch. The fact that they conducted their affairs without any reference to him only served to further offend him.

  A few months earlier he had telegraphed London and demanded that all of Cumming’s agents in Russia be placed under his personal control. This was met with a swift (but private) snub from the War Office. An internal memo said that ‘Secret Service was not a matter with which amateurs could be trusted.’ It added that Cumming was financing the Russian bureau and should therefore have full control over its operations.

  Buchanan was indignant to learn that Agent Somerville was ‘on a confidential mission’ of which he was to remain wholly ignorant. Maugham did not help matters by his extreme nervousness. ‘I was conscious that I made a very poor impression on him,’ he wrote. ‘I was nervous and stammered badly.’

  Buchanan grew even more offended when he learned that he was expected to place the embassy’s cable-transmitters at Maugham’s disposal, even though he was not to be privy to the contents of the cables being sent to London. They were to be written in a secret code known only to Maugham.

  ‘He looked upon it as a grave affront,’ wrote Maugham. ‘I realised that I could not count on much help in that quarter.’

  Maugham had other contacts in Petrograd who proved rather more than willing to assist. Among them was Alexandra Lebedev, née Kropotkin, with whom he had once had a brief love affair. She was a friend of Kerensky and promised to provide Maugham with an introduction, as well as setting up meetings with other senior ministers in the government.

  Maugham was taken aback when he finally met the Russian leader. ‘What struck me most was his colour,’ he wrote. ‘One often reads of people being green in the face with fright and I had always thought it an invention of novelists. But that is exactly what he was.’

  The man upon whom the Western democracies were pinning their hopes appeared indecisive, nervous and sick. ‘He seemed fearfully on edge. Sitting down and talking incessantly, he took hold of a cigarette box and played with it restlessly, locking and unlocking it, opening and shutting it, turning it round and round.’

  Maugham had heard a great deal about the Russian leader’s strengths and qualities. Now, sitting face to face with him, he found himself talking to a shadow. ‘His personality had no magnetism. He gave no feeling of intellectual or of physical vigour.’

  Maugham’s task was not to judge Kerensky but to do business with him. To this end, he staged a series of meetings with him and his ministers at Mjedved restaurant, the finest in town. ‘I provided my guests with quantities of caviare at the expense of the two governments who had sent me to Petrograd, and they devoured it with relish.’

  They discussed how the British, Americans and French could best support the Russian Government, with Maugham’s friend Alexandra Lebedev acting as interpreter.

  Maugham also had several meetings with Boris Savinkov, the feisty Minister of War. Here, at last, was someone with whom he could do business. He described Savinkov as ‘the most remarkable man I met.’

  His fascination was due, in part, to the fact that Savinkov had been personally responsible for the assassination of a number of senior imperial officials in the years before the war. Maugham found it hard to picture such a genial individual killing people in cold blood. ‘He had,’ he wrote, ‘the prosperous look of a lawyer.’

  As the champagne flowed and the party grew increasingly merry, Maugham plucked up the courage to quiz Savinkov about the assassinations. ‘When I asked him if it wasn’t rather nervous work, he laughed and said: “Oh, it’s just business like another.” ’

  Savinkov was disarmingly frank when telling Maugham about the dangers posed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries. He warned that they were bent on annihilating all who did not share their radical views. ‘He said to me once in his casual way: “Either Lenin will stand me up in front of a wall and shoot me or I shall stand him in front of a wall and shoot him.” ’

  Maugham reported every detail of his conversations back to Wiseman in America. Wiseman, in turn, forwarded the information to Mansfield Cumming. As a precaution against the Germans intercepting these telegraphic messages, Maugham wrote in code, with special signifiers for each letter of the alphabet and previously agreed names for all the principal players.

  Kerensky was Lane, Lenin was Davis and Trotsky was Cole. Three governments also had codenames: the British were Eyre and Co., the Americans were Curtis and Co., and the Russians were Waring and Co.

  When Maugham later came to write his Ashenden spy novels – semi-fictional versions of his own experiences – he gave an account of the time and effort it took his hero to write his despatches. ‘[The code] was in two parts, one contained in a slim book and the other, given him on a sheet of paper and de
stroyed by him before he left allied territory, committed to memory.’

  Decoding was even worse. ‘Ashenden deciphered the groups of numbers one by one . . . his method was to abstract his mind from the sense till he had finished, since he had discovered that if you took notice of the words as they came along, you often jumped to a conclusion and sometimes were led into error.’

  Maugham’s cables made for sombre reading in London and Washington. He expressed his belief that the Russian government was doomed and that more serious unrest was inevitable.

  ‘Perhaps if I had been sent to Russia six months earlier I might have done something,’ he wrote. ‘The condition of things is much more serious than appears on the surface . . . the situation [is] entirely out of hand.’

  Maugham worked hard at fulfilling his brief, despite the atmosphere of gloom. His key task was to establish how best Britain and America might support Kerensky’s government. He thought that anti-German propaganda needed to be given a far higher profile. The Germans, he noted, were masters of political manipulation, ‘with a vast, well-organised Secret Service covering all chief Russian centres.’

  Maugham had the idea of setting up a propaganda bureau that could vigorously support Kerensky’s government. He said it would require an annual budget of $500,000, a vast sum of money that raised surprisingly few eyebrows in Whitehall. He was told that ministers were prepared to spend more if the organisation proved effective. But the proposed bureau was outrun by events and the money was never needed.

  Maugham’s intelligence reports were carefully scrutinised by William Wiseman in New York. ‘I am receiving very interesting cables from Maugham,’ he informed Mansfield Cumming in London. ‘He asks if he can work with British intelligence officers at Petrograd, thereby benefiting both and avoiding confusion. I see no objection . . . He is very discreet.’

  Maugham spent his evenings ‘coding my sombre impressions.’ Then, when the work was done, he would take himself off to the Hotel Europe and swill goblets of brandy with English and American journalists.

  ‘[We] caught the Russian mood – ‘Nitchevo!’ [It doesn’t matter],’ wrote one of those journalists. ‘[We] managed to enjoy ourselves and forget the revolution.’

  On one occasion, Maugham had lunch with Louise Bryant, the partner of John Reed who would later write his celebrated account of the revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World.

  ‘You won’t reveal you had lunch with a British secret agent, will you?’ joshed a well-lubricated Maugham at the end of the meal. Bryant erupted into a peal of laughter. ‘It couldn’t have been funnier if he’d said he was an ambassador of the Pope,’ she wrote.

  The situation in Petrograd was by now so troublesome that Maugham saw no future for Kerensky’s government. ‘The Germans were advancing; the Russian soldiers at the front were deserting in droves, the navy was restless and there were stories bruited that officers had been cruelly butchered by their men.’

  The stories were true. Bolshevik gangs were taking advantage of the unrest to murder and pillage.

  In the first week of October, a desperate Kerensky summoned Maugham to a private meeting. He had a message that he wished Maugham to relay to Britain’s prime minister as soon as possible. It was ‘so secret that he would not put it in writing.’

  Maugham agreed to deliver it to Lloyd George in person and left Petrograd that very day. But he was obliged to write the message down, for he was worried that his uncontrollable stammer would ruin his delivery of it once he was in the prime minister’s presence.

  Kerensky’s secret proposal was an audacious political manoeuvre that had two principal objectives: to keep Russia in the war and simultaneously undermine the Bolsheviks. He wanted Lloyd George to make an offer of immediate peace with Germany, but on such stringent terms that Germany would have no option but to refuse.

  A German refusal, argued Kerensky, would enable him to reinvigorate the Russian war machine. He could instil in the army a renewed sense of purpose. ‘I can go to my soldiers and say: “You see, they don’t want peace.” Then they will fight.’

  Kerensky’s idea was bold but wholly unrealistic. Maugham knew that the British government would never agree to his proposition. He also knew that he was dealing with a broken man. Kerensky’s last words to Maugham were a testimony to his failure as a political leader.

  ‘When the cold weather comes I don’t think I shall be able to keep the army in the trenches,’ he said lamely. ‘I don’t see how we can go on.’

  Maugham found it all very sad. ‘The final impression I had was of a man exhausted. He seemed broken by the burden of power.’

  Maugham left for London that very day, taking a train to Oslo and then a boat to England. He debriefed the prime minister about his mission and repeatedly tried to relay the message from Kerensky, proposing that Britain make an offer of peace to Germany. But each time he started speaking, Lloyd George cut him short.

  ‘I received the impression, I don’t exactly know for what reason, that he had an inkling of what I had to say to him and was determined not to let me say it.’

  In the end, Maugham grew so frustrated that he thrust his handwritten account of Kerensky’s proposition into the prime minister’s hands.

  ‘He read it and handed it back to me.

  ‘ “I can’t do it,” he said.

  ‘It was not my business to argue.

  ‘ “What shall I tell Kerensky?” I asked.

  ‘ “Just that I can’t do it.” ’

  Maugham left the prime minister’s office wondering how he would break the news to Kerensky. He was dreading returning to Russia, especially as his tuberculosis had returned with a vengeance. But scarcely had he began planning his trip than it was suddenly cancelled.

  ‘[There] came the news that the Bolsheviks had seized power and Kerensky had been overthrown.’

  The days of friendly co-operation were at an end. Russia had become the enemy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  KNOW THY ENEMY

  Mansfield Cumming’s Russian bureau was still housed in the Petrograd War Ministry at the time of the second revolution of 1917 that swept the Bolsheviks to power.

  The agents who had previously worked under Samuel Hoare continued to send intelligence back to Whitehall Court, although it was becoming increasingly difficult to form a clear picture of what was taking place in those turbulent times.

  News also reached London from regular diplomatic channels. Ambassador George Buchanan was still at his post, but his tenure in Russia was rapidly coming to an end. Conventional diplomacy was soon to become an irrelevance.

  On the evening of 7 November, Buchanan happened to glance out of the embassy window and was surprised by what he saw. ‘Armoured cars took up positions at all points commanding the Winter Palace,’ he noted in his diary.

  Buchanan knew that Kerensky’s ministers were inside the building and he feared for their safety. The 2,000-strong garrison had dwindled over the previous few days and the building’s defence was now entrusted to three squadrons of Cossacks, a handful of volunteers and a company from the Women’s Death Battalion. Their numbers were so small that only a few of the palace’s numerous entrances could be guarded at any one time.

  Ambassador Buchanan had a second unwelcome surprise at 9.45 p.m. when the cruiser, Aurora, fired her famous blank shot. It was a signal for the Bolshevik revolution to begin. Soon afterwards, Buchanan saw live shells fired on the Winter Palace from the Peter and Paul fortress. By midnight, a mob of Bolshevik revolutionaries had surrounded the building and was intent on sacking this tangible symbol of the old regime.

  When they finally broke into the building at around 1 a.m. they met with little resistance. The image of the Winter Palace being stormed by force was a piece of later propaganda.

  ‘Three rifle shots shattered the quiet,’ wrote the American journalist Bessie Beatty who was at the scene. ‘We stood speechless, awaiting a return volley; but the only sound was the crunching of broken glass spread l
ike a carpet over the cobblestones. The windows of the Winter Palace had been broken into bits.’

  As Beatty stood there waiting to see what would happen next, there was a loud cry. ‘It’s all over,’ shouted a Bolshevik sailor. ‘They have surrendered.’

  Kerensky’s ministers inside the palace had taken refuge in the famous Malachite Room. According to an account later written by the British military attaché, Sir Alfred Knox, they experienced a tense few hours as they awaited the arrival of the mob. One of the ministers kept spitting on the ground. Another walked up and down ‘like a caged tiger.’ A third sat on a sofa ‘nervously pulling up his trousers till they were finally above his knees.’ All knew that the endgame was near and that Russia was heading into an uncertain future.

  The ministers were still hiding in the Malachite Room when the revolutionaries burst in and arrested them. They were marched off through hostile crowds to the Peter and Paul fortress. All except Kerensky, who had fled the city. There were rumours that he would soon be returning at the head of an anti-Bolshevik army.

  By 3 a.m., the corridors of the Winter Palace were packed with an unruly crowd of revolutionary activists. The American journalist, John Reed, witnessed scenes of total disorder as the mob embarked on an orgy of looting.

  One man was ‘strutting around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder; another found a plume of ostrich feathers, which he stuck in his hat. The looting was just beginning when someone cried: “Comrades! Don’t take anything. This is the property of the People!” ’

  Reed himself appropriated a jewelled sword that he tucked inside his winter coat. His sympathies with the Bolshevik revolutionaries did not preclude him from filching public property.

  It was not until the following morning that Ambassador Buchanan was brought the most unwelcome news of his entire tenure in Russia. He received confirmation that Lenin’s revolutionary Bolsheviks had seized power. Kerensky’s Provisional Government had been swept away, along with the last vestiges of law and order.