by Giles Milton
Dukes tentatively made contact with known anti-Bolshevik agents living in Petrograd – men and women whose names were so secretive that he only ever referred to them by their professions: The Banker, The Policeman, The Journalist. He made it known that his first requirement was intelligence on the state of the Baltic fleet.
It was not long before he was brought a top-secret report that had been intercepted while it was being transmitted to Trotsky from the commander in chief of the Bolshevik Navy. It revealed that coal was in such short supply that the fleet could no longer put to sea.
Dukes also obtained the confidential minutes of a meeting of the Revolutionary Military Soviet, chaired by Trotsky himself. This provided many more revelations about the state of the fleet and included an amusing anecdote about Trotsky’s fury on learning that officers were being forced to clean the lavatories.
‘[He] thumped his fist on the table, smashing an ink-stand, and declared in an excited voice: “I dare not call this sort of thing by its right name, as there is a lady present.” ’
The most important piece of intelligence was a plan of the minefields that surrounded the fort of Kronstadt in the Gulf of Finland. This included an instruction to the mine-layers that was to prove critical to Dukes’s own survival in the months to come. ‘The mines,’ it said, ‘must be laid at a depth of 2½ to 3 feet from the surface.’
When Mansfield Cumming read these lines, he realised that any future naval operation in the Gulf of Finland would require a wholly new type of vessel – flat bottomed and of shallow draught – if they were to avoid being blown up by mines.
In a short space of time, Dukes managed to forge contacts inside various commissariats and thereby provide Cumming with a steady supply of intelligence documents. His work was much appreciated in London. He received a message of praise from Whitehall and learned from the Stockholm bureau that he would be given every possible support.
‘The whole of the Baltic area was told to be ready to render me assistance . . . my name was kept a strict secret and if ever I needed to use an English name, I was told to use Captain McNeill.’
Cumming himself ordered that Dukes be helped in every possible way. ‘Supply ST25 with everything he wants,’ he told his men in Stockholm, ‘and convey thanks.’
Dukes spent part of his time mingling with the local Petrograd dockworkers in order to gauge morale in the fleet. He invented a whole new biography of himself, telling the sailors that his hostility to the old regime had led him to be banished from Russia. He even spun a tale about being imprisoned in England, ‘[where] the brutality and starvation to which I had been subjected in the English jail had reduced me both physically and mentally and I was a confirmed invalid for a long time to come.’
He relished the deceit, limping along with a stick and wincing with every step. The sailors took pity on him and repeated his stories to their comrades, telling them that he had been a ‘victim of capitalist maltreatment’.
Dukes continued to use the persona of Joseph Ilitch Afirenko throughout the spring of 1919. But he also adopted a second disguise, that of Joseph Krylenko, having managed to forge papers in Krylenko’s name.
He would later assume a third identity, Alexander Vasilievitch Markovitch, a clerical assistant at the head postal-telegraph office. He even acquired a uniform and a set of blank post-office identity papers that he filled in with Markovitch’s personal details.
‘Tracing the signatures carefully, and inserting a recent date, I managed to produce a document indistinguishable as regards authenticity from the original.’
Dukes was proud of his various personas and had himself photographed in disguise. His pose as Afirenko saw him sporting a wispy moustache and beard, a missing front tooth and oval framed glasses. It gave him the air of an impoverished mathematician.
As Markovitch, he cut a quite different figure. With his neatly trimmed beard, smart fur hat and round glasses, he looked like a provincial but well-educated functionary.
Dukes would later become Alexander Bankau, who bore no resemblance to his other incarnations. For this role, he shaved his beard and discarded the fur hat. As Bankau, he would sport a razor-sharp moustache, a peaked cap and workers’ smock. He looked the perfect Bolshevik revolutionary.
He felt so confident in his various disguises that he decided to return to the apartment in which he had lived before the revolution. He had left some belongings there and wanted to know if they were still there.
He visited the flat in the guise of Alexander Markovitch, hoping that the friendly old housekeeper, Martha Timofeievna, would not recognise him. When she opened the door, he told her that he was a friend of Paul Dukes and had come to pick up some of his belongings. His disguise worked to perfection. Martha had no clue as to his real identity.
Dukes got a surprise when he looked through his remaining possessions. ‘I came upon my own photograph taken two or three years before,’ he wrote. ‘For the first time, I fully and clearly realised how complete was my present disguise, how absolutely different I now appeared in a beard, long hair and glasses.’
He passed the photo to Martha in order to gauge her reaction. ‘Was he not a nice man,’ she sighed. ‘I wonder where he is now and what he is doing?’
Dukes concealed his smile. ‘ “I wonder,” I repeated, diving again into the muck on the floor. To save my life, I could not have looked at Martha Timofeievna at that moment and kept a straight face.’
While Paul Dukes was living his undercover life in the northern city of Petrograd, Arthur Ransome was reporting to Mansfield Cumming on the situation in Moscow.
Ransome had no need for false identity papers for he had crossed the frontier quite openly, after being expelled from Stockholm on suspicion of being a Bolshevik. He and Evgenia travelled by train to Moscow, arriving on ‘a rare cold day’ and paying over the odds for a sledge-driver to take them to the Metropol. The hotel was full, but Ransome’s old friend Lev Karakhan, Commissar for Foreign Affairs, came to the rescue and secured him rooms in the Hotel National.
Ransome had told the Bolshevik leadership (truthfully, as it later transpired) that he was intending to write a history of the Bolshevik revolution. This opened many doors. Over the weeks that followed, Ransome was given free rein to attend meetings of the Executive Committee and interview all the most important political players.
In his ‘Report on the State of Russia’, written for Mansfield Cumming and the Foreign Office, he said he was given unlimited access to ministries and meetings. ‘I was entirely uncontrolled . . .’ he wrote. ‘The Bolsheviks, knowing I am writing a history of the revolution, gave me every possible assistance.’
Trotsky suspected him of being a spy, as did Grigori Zinoviev. Indeed Ransome would later confess that he had ‘run considerable risks of detection at the hands of the Bolsheviks.’ Yet he was always protected by Lenin, who trusted him as a supporter of the revolution.
The book that Ransome eventually published, Six Weeks in Russia, contained pithy descriptive portraits of the most important commissars. These were often satirical and always irreverent: only Lenin escaped censure. ‘This little, bald-headed wrinkled man who tilts his chair this way and that, laughing over one thing or another . . .’
The two men liked to banter about the revolutionary struggle. Lenin genuinely enjoyed Ransome’s company ‘and paid me the compliment of saying that “although English”, I had more or less succeeded in understanding what they were at.’
Ransome insisted that England was not ripe for revolution, but Lenin refused to listen. ‘We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs,’ he said. ‘Twenty, maybe thirty years ago, I had abortive typhoid and was going about with it, [and] had had it some days before it knocked me over . . . England may seem to you untouched, but the microbe is already there.’
Lenin was convinced that the entire world was tipping inexorably towards revolution and told Ransome of his conviction that one extra push would bring the old order crashing dow
n.
He had good reason for his optimism, for a glance around the globe revealed a world in upheaval. The Ottoman Empire was on the brink of collapse and the Hapsburg Empire lay in ruins. Berlin was in revolutionary turmoil and even the victorious Allied powers faced massive social unrest in the aftermath of war.
In the first week of March 1919, Ransome was privy to some sensational news. It might never have reached his ears had it not been for the unguarded comments of the senior Bolshevik functionary, Nikolai Bucharin.
Bucharin had heard that Ransome was thinking of leaving Russia. Never doubting that he was anything but a loyal Bolshevik, he offered a piece of advice.
‘Wait a few days longer,’ he said, ‘because something of international importance is going to happen which will almost certainly be of interest for your history.’
Ransome was intrigued. No one else had spoken of this event. Indeed officials had been studiously careful not to mention it in his presence. ‘Only once,’ he would later write, ‘I found them hiding something from me.’
This ‘something’ was indeed to prove of immense significance. That very week, a meeting in Moscow saw the founding of a new body, the Comintern, which was dedicated to fomenting global revolution.
This was no hypothetical goal. The new organisation had been created in order to struggle ‘by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic.’ The meeting was to bring together revolutionary activists from around the world, with more than two dozen countries represented.
Arthur Ransome eventually obtained permission to attend the opening session of the Comintern. On his way to the meeting, he bought the local newspapers and noted with interest that they made no mention of it whatsoever. ‘It was still a secret,’ he wrote.
He made his way to the Kremlin, where the gathering was being held, and watched as the delegates assembled in the Courts of Justice built by Catherine the Great. The décor had been elaborately prepared for the occasion: ‘the whole room, including the floor, was decorated in red.’ The walls were festooned with revolutionary banners in different languages and the principal Soviet delegates were already in their seats.
‘Everyone of importance was there,’ noted Ransome, including Lenin and Trotsky. The latter had come in full military garb: ‘leather coat, military breeches and gaiters, with a fur hat with the sign of the Red Army in front.’
The audience was waiting in great expectation; waiting for Lenin to issue his rallying cry for global revolution. Eventually the great man rose to his feet and prepared to launch into his speech. As he did so, the delegates leapt from their seats in frenzied excitement and began cheering and whistling in support of their leader.
‘Everybody [was] standing and drowning his attempts to speak, with roar after roar of applause,’ wrote Ransome. They were so loud and enthusiastic that it was a long time before Lenin could make himself heard.
Ransome was blown away by the experience, not least because of the secrecy that surrounded the meeting. ‘It was an extraordinary, overwhelming scene, tier after tier crowded with workmen, the parterre filled, the whole platform and the wings.’
When the crowd finally fell silent, Lenin launched into a wild invective, promising that the Comintern would export revolution around the globe. ‘Let the bourgeoisie of the world rage, let them drive away, imprison, and even kill the [Bolsheviks]. All this is of no avail.’ He said that Soviet Russia was the leader of an international struggle in which there could be only one winner.
No one was in any doubt that Lenin was in earnest when he spoke of unleashing terror around the world. His words were uttered with such chilling conviction that Ransome listened wide-eyed.
‘It was really an extraordinary affair . . .’ he wrote, ‘[and] I could not help realising that I was present at something that will go down in the histories of socialism.’
Ransome met with Lenin in private on the day that followed the conference and pressed him further on the founding of the Comintern and its drive for world revolution. He particularly wanted to know the implications for Britain.
‘We are at war,’ was Lenin’s blunt reply. ‘And just as during your war, you tried to make revolution in Germany . . . so we, while we are at war with you, adopt the measures that are open to us.’ These ‘measures’ included invasion, insurrection and militant propaganda.
Lenin chatted candidly with Ransome, unaware that his words were being sent directly to Mansfield Cumming. The report that Ransome eventually compiled was detailed, covering political and economic aspects of life in Russia. He also acquired a number of documents from the Commissariats of Labour, Trade and Education: ‘practically all the printed matter that was available,’ he wrote. This was all despatched to London.
Ransome warned that the Bolshevik government had been ‘very much strengthened’ over the preceding months. He also stressed that Lenin and Trotsky were committed to global revolution. Both men had long spoken of their intention of spreading revolutionary mayhem around the world. Now, with the establishment of the Comintern, they had a tool with which to achieve this.
Paul Dukes was still in Petrograd when the Comintern was established ‘amid circumstances of great secrecy’. Shortly after the Moscow meeting, he learned that several key delegates were due to visit Petrograd. Aware of the significance of what was taking place, he made it his business to meet them. Among them was Grigori Zinoviev, the first chairman of the Comintern.
Dukes had first met Zinoviev before the revolution and had viewed him as a firebrand. Now Dukes heard his acid tongue in action once again. His position in the upper hierarchy of Bolsheviks had done nothing to improve his oratory. He had become ‘a gutter demagogue of low type, with bloated features and a vicious tongue.’
Dukes’s goal was to investigate the aims of the Comintern and he soon laid his hands on a report, written by Lev Karakhan, the Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs. This set out Bolshevik policy towards the East and gave details of a special mission that was being established to promote revolution and civil unrest.
‘The main object of the Mission,’ according to the report, ‘is to form connexions with revolutionary societies, to establish a centre in Turkestan for revolutionary activities in the East, where literature may be published, agents recruited and where it will be easier to keep in touch with affairs and direct the work according to the demands of the moment.’
The report made for such disturbing reading that it would (at a much later date) be published in The Times. Dukes noted that the Bolshevik mission had been provided with ‘an enormous sum’ to foment trouble. ‘It was decided to do everything possible to excite anti-British feelings in India, working at the same time on the fanatical religious sentiment of the natives.’ The Comintern wanted to harness militant Islam to its own revolutionary goals.
Dukes always tried to send original documents to Mansfield Cumming. But this was not always possible and he often had to make notes in secret and at short notice.
Some reports were so sensitive that they had to be copied in invisible ink. ‘I made the ink by – oh, it doesn’t matter how,’ wrote Dukes in his memoir. He had presumably been briefed about using semen when reporting highly sensitive information.
Dukes hid all his reports in his apartment until such time as they were ready to be transmitted to Stockholm. ‘I wrote mostly at night, in minute handwriting on tracing paper, with a small caoutchouc [rubber] bag about four inches in length, weighted with lead, ready at my side.’
He was constantly listening out for the Cheka. ‘In case of alarm, all my papers could be slipped into this bag and within thirty seconds be transferred to the bottom of a tub of washing or the cistern of the water-closet.’
It was the perfect hiding place. Dukes said he had seen Cheka officials turn entire apartments upside down in their quest to find hidden documents, ‘but it never occurred to anybody to search through a pail of washing or t
hrust his hand into the water closet.’
It was one thing to prepare his reports for transmission to London, quite another to smuggle them out of the country. Dukes inherited John Merrett’s courier system but it proved far from perfect. One of the key couriers was executed in January 1919, and Dukes urgently needed to find a new one.
He eventually found the perfect candidate, a man whom he referred to as Peter Petrovitch. His real name was Pyotr Sokoloff, an imposing figure who was ‘tall and muscular, slightly round-shouldered, with thick fair hair and a good humoured but somewhat shy expression.’ He was well equipped for danger: ‘a crack revolver shot and a prize boxer.’
Sokoloff’s preferred method of transporting documents to Finland (and thence to Sweden) was on foot. ‘The first time he took my despatches, it was in winter and he went on skis,’ recalled Dukes. ‘He was to run out at night onto the frozen sea near Sestroretsk, opposite Kronstadt, and ski across the snow-covered ice to Finland.’
It was a hazardous trip, for the coastline was under constant observation by Red Guards. On one occasion, Dukes himself made the journey, only to end up being chased by Red Army soldiers. ‘Suddenly there was a flash and a crack, then another and another,’ he wrote. ‘They were firing with carbines, against which a pistol was useless . . . a bullet whipped close to my ear.’
Dukes flung himself out of his dog-sledge and slid across the ice, clutching his precious reports. His pursuers did not notice his escape: they continued to chase after the empty sledge while Dukes hid in the craters of rough sea ice. When the soldiers were no longer in sight, he trekked across the frozen bay until he reached the ice-bound harbour of Terijoki in Finland.
‘It must have been a weird, bedraggled creature that stumbled several hours later, up the steep bank of the Finnish shore,’ he wrote.
