The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  90. Lieutenant-Colonel A. P. Perkhurov.

  Savinkov managed to escape from Rybinsk. He later joined Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s armies and organized raids behind Bolshevik lines. After Kolchak’s defeat, he fled to Western Europe, where he kept busy organizing anti-Bolshevik movements and smuggling agents into the Soviet Union. In August 1924, under the illusion that he could play an important role in post-Leninist Soviet Russia, he allowed himself to be lured by the GPU (the successor to the Cheka) into illegally crossing the frontier. He was promptly arrested. At a public trial later that year, he confessed to all his crimes, stressing the alleged involvement of the Allies in his subversive activities and pleading for mercy. His death sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. He died the following year in jail under highly suspicious circumstances: officially, he was said to have committed suicide, but it is more likely that he was killed by the GPU—according to some accounts, by being pushed from a window.164

  Perkhurov also joined Kolchak’s forces, where he was raised to the rank of general and earned the sobriquet Perkhurov-Iaroslavskii. Captured by the Bolsheviks, he managed to disguise his identity and obtain a commission in the Red Army. His true identity was discovered in 1922. Tried by a Military Collegium of the Supreme Tribunal he was sentenced to death: in prison, he was made to write his confessions, which were subsequently published.165 Rather than kill him in its dungeons, the GPU sent him to Iaroslavl, where on the fourth anniversary of the uprising he was paraded through the streets, taunted by the crowds and pelted with rocks, following which he was executed.166

  Riezler, who took charge of the German Embassy, was regarded by some of his colleagues as confused and absentminded.167 He spent less time on routine diplomatic affairs and more on negotiations with Russian opposition groups, which Berlin had instructed him to terminate on July 1. He did so out of an unalterable conviction that the Bolsheviks would not last and Germany needed contacts with their potential successors. His first reaction to Mirbach’s murder was to urge severance of relations with Moscow;168 this advice was rejected, and he was instructed to continue helping the Bolsheviks. In September 1918 he would state, without elaborating, that the Germans had on three occasions used “political” means to help save the Bolsheviks.169

  While carrying out his government’s directives, Riezler bombarded the Foreign Office with cables that the Bolsheviks were a spent force. On July 19, he wired:

  The Bolsheviks are dead. Their corpse lives [sic!] because the gravediggers cannot agree on who should bury it. The struggle which we presently wage with the Entente on Russian soil is no longer over the favors of this corpse. It has already turned into a struggle over the succession, over the orientation of the Russia of the future.

  170

  While he agreed that the Bolsheviks were rendering Russia harmless for Germany, by the same token they were rendering it useless.171 He recommended that Germany take charge of the “counterrevolution” and assist bourgeois forces in Russia. He thought it would require minimum effort to be rid of the Bolsheviks.

  Acting on his own, Riezler laid out the groundwork for an anti-Bolshevik coup. The first step was to station a battalion of uniformed Germans in Moscow. Their ostensible mission would be to protect the embassy from future terrorist acts and to assist the Bolsheviks in the event of another rebellion; their true purpose would be to occupy strategic points in the capital if Bolshevik authority collapsed or Berlin decided the time had come to remove them from power.172

  Germany agreed to dispatch a battalion to Moscow but only if the Soviet Government gave its approval. It also authorized Riezler to initiate discreet talks with the Latvian Rifles to sound them out about their intentions. Riezler, who had established good contacts with the Latvians, asked if they were prepared to defect. He was told they were. Vatsetis, the Latvian commander, describes as follows his thinking in the summer of 1918:

  Strange as [it may sound], at the time it was believed that central Russia would turn into a theater of internecine warfare and that the Bolsheviks would hardly hold on to power, falling victim to the hunger and the general discontent in the country’s interior. One could not exclude the possibility of a move on Moscow by the Germans, Don Cossacks, and White Czechs. This latter version was at the time especially widespread. The Bolsheviks had under their authority no military power capable of combat. The units, over whose formation M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, the Military Director of the Supreme Military Council, labored so intelligently and cleverly, owing to the hunger in the western zone of European Russia, scattered in search of food, turning into robber bands dangerous to Soviet authority. Such armies—if one can apply to them this honorable title—fled at the very sight of the German helmet. On the western border instances occurred of German forces being called upon to pacify mutinous Red units.… In connection with all these speculations and rumors, I was extremely troubled by the question of what would happen to the Latvian regiments should there be further German intervention and should the Cossacks and White armies make an appearance in the center of Russia. Such a possibility was then seriously contemplated: it could have led to the complete annihilation of the Latvian Rifles …

  173

  From his talks, Riezler learned that the Latvians were anxious to return to their German-occupied homeland, and if guaranteed amnesty and repatriation, would at least stay neutral in the event the Germans intervened against the Bolsheviks.174

  Riezler also resumed conversations with the Right Center. Its new representative, Prince Grigorii Trubetskoi, Imperial Russia’s wartime Ambassador to Serbia, pleaded for prompt German assistance to rid Russia of Lenin. He posed several conditions for the cooperation of his group: the Germans should allow the Russians to assemble their own military force in the Ukraine, so that Moscow would be liberated by Russians, not Germans; a pledge to revise the Brest Treaty; no pressure on the government that would replace the Bolsheviks; and Russia’s neutrality in the World War.175 Trubetskoi claimed that his group had contact with 4,000 combat-ready officers, who only needed weapons. Time was of the essence: the Bolsheviks were engaged in a regular “manhunt” for officers, executing dozens every day.176

  By the time Mirbach’s successor, Karl Helfferich, arrived in Moscow (July 28), Riezler had a plan for a full-fledged coup d’état. Once the German battalion took over Moscow (the Latvian Rifles guarding the city having been previously neutralized with pledges of amnesty and repatriation), it would take little to bring about a collapse of the Bolshevik Government. This would be followed by the installation of a Russian Government completely dependent on Germany, on the model of Hetman Skoropadski’s regime in the Ukraine.177

  Riezler’s plans came to naught. Their key provision, the installation of a German battalion in Moscow, was vetoed by Lenin and dropped by Berlin. Yielding to Hindenburg’s pressure, Wilhelmstrasse sent a note to the Soviet Government, which Riezler handed to Chicherin in the evening of July 14. It assured the Soviet Government that in proposing to send a uniformed detachment to Moscow, Germany had no intention of infringing on Soviet sovereignty: its only purpose was to ensure the safety of its diplomatic personnel. Furthermore, the note went on, should there be another anti-Bolshevik uprising, this force could help the Soviet Government to quell it.178 Chicherin communicated the German note to Lenin, who was resting out of town. Lenin immediately saw through the German ploy. He returned to Moscow that night and consulted with Chicherin. This was an issue on which he was not prepared to yield: he would give the Germans almost anything they wanted as long as they did not threaten his power. The following day he addressed the Central Executive Committee on the German note.179 He hoped, he said, that Germany would not insist on its proposal because Russia would rather fight than allow foreign troops on her soil. He promised to provide all the personnel needed to ensure the security of the German Embassy. Then he held out the bait of extensive commercial relations as a means of inducing German business interests to exert pressure on his behalf: it materialized in the f
orm of the Supplementary Treaty concluded the following month. It is doubtful that Lenin could have stood up to the Germans had they been truly determined: he was now even weaker than in February, when he had capitulated to their every demand. But he was not put to the test, because the Foreign Office, apprised of his reaction, quickly dropped Riezler’s proposal. It instructed Riezler “to continue supporting the Bolsheviks and merely [maintain] ‘contact’ with the others.”180

  Nor did Riezler have better luck with his proposal to win the neutrality of the Latvians with promises of amnesty and repatriation. This plan was scuttled by, of all people, Ludendorff, who feared “contaminating” Latvia with Bolshevik propaganda. The new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Admiral Paul von Hintze, who succeeded Kühlmann and was even more committed to collaboration with Lenin, needed to hear no more: he instructed the Moscow Embassy to suspend talks with the Latvians.181

  To be prepared in the event of a Bolshevik collapse, the Foreign Office worked out its own contingency plans. If pro-Allied SRs seized power in Russia, the German army would strike from Finland, seize Murmansk and Archangel, and occupy Petrograd as well as Vologda. In other words, if the pessimists proved correct, rather than deliver the Bolsheviks a coup de grace and replace them with other Russians, Germany would march in and presumably restore them to power.182

  Helfferich arrived in Moscow determined to implement the pro-Bolshevik policy of his government. But he quickly discovered that the embassy staff opposed it almost to a man. The briefings which he received on the evening of his arrival and such limited personal observations as he was able to make caused him to change his mind. On the afternoon of July 31, on his only venture outside the heavily guarded embassy compound during his brief stay in Moscow, he paid a visit to Chicherin to protest the murder by Left SRs of Field Marshal Eichhorn in the Ukraine and the continuing Left SR threats to embassy personnel. At the same time he assured him that the German Government intended to continue its support. He later learned that a few hours after his conversation with Chicherin, a meeting took place in the Kremlin at which Lenin told his associates that their cause was “temporarily” lost and that it had become necessary to evacuate Moscow. While this meeting was in progress, Chicherin arrived to say that Helfferich had just assured him of German backing.*

  The mood in the Kremlin was already desperate enough when on August 1 it received news that a British naval force had opened fire on Archangel. This shelling marked the beginning of large-scale Allied intervention in Russia. Moscow, which had much less reliable intelligence on Allied intentions than on those of Germany, was certain the Allies intended to advance on Moscow. It now completely lost its head and flung itself into German arms.

  It will be recalled that in March 1918 the Allies had discussed with the Bolshevik Government the landing of troops on Russian soil in the north (Murmansk and Archangel) and the Far East (Vladivostok) to protect these ports from the Germans as well as to secure bases for the projected Allied force in Russia. In return, they were to help organize and train the Red Army. The Allies, however, were slow to act. They did land token detachments in the three port cities and they assigned a few officers to Trotsky’s Commissariat of War, but they had no large forces to spare at a time when the full brunt of the German offensive was upon them. The United States alone had the necessary manpower, but Woodrow Wilson opposed involvement in Russia, and as long as this was the case, nothing could be done.

  The prospect of reactivating the Eastern Front improved substantially at the beginning of June when Wilson, impressed by the Czechoslovak uprising, experienced a change of heart. Feeling that the United States had a moral obligation to help the Czechs and Slovaks repatriate, he yielded to British entreaties and agreed to provide troops for the Murmansk-Archangel expedition as well as for Vladivostok. American forces assigned to the operation were under strict orders not to interfere in internal Russian affairs.183

  When it learned of Washington’s decision (June 3), the Supreme Allied Council at Versailles ordered the dispatch of an Allied expeditionary force to Archangel under the command of the British general F. C. Poole. Poole’s instructions were to defend the port city, make contact with the Czech Legion and with its help take control of the railway south of Archangel, and organize a pro-Allied army. Nothing was said of fighting the Bolsheviks: Poole’s troops were told, “We do not meddle in internal affairs.”184

  These Allied decisions have been subsequently criticized on the grounds that no serious German threat existed to the northern Russian ports and that in any event German forces in Finland capable of such action were withdrawn in early August and sent to the Western Front. The implication of these criticisms is that the true reason for the expeditions to northern Russia was to overthrow the Bolshevik regime.185 The charge cannot be sustained. It is known from German archives that the German High Command was indeed considering operations against the ports, either with its own troops or jointly with Finnish and Bolshevik forces. Such an operation made very good sense because control of Murmansk and Archangel would have enabled Germany to deny the Allies access to Russia and thus frustrated plans to reactivate the Eastern Front. Berlin opened negotiations to this end in late May 1918 with Ioffe. These talks eventually broke down, partly because of the inability of the Bolsheviks and Finns to agree on the terms of collaboration and partly because the Germans insisted on occupying Petrograd as a base of operations, to which the Russians would not consent.186 But the Allies could not have foreseen this, any more than they could have known in June that two months later the Germans would withdraw troops from Finland. There is no evidence to indicate that in sending troops to Russia in 1918 the Allies intended to overthrow the Bolshevik Government. The British, who played a key role in the operation, expressed, both publicly and privately, complete lack of concern about the nature of the government administering Russia. Prime Minister David Lloyd George put the matter bluntly at the meeting of the War Cabinet on July 22, 1918, when he declared that it was none of Britain’s business what sort of a government the Russians set up: a republic, a Bolshevik state, or a monarchy.187 The indications are that President Wilson shared this view.

  The Allied expeditionary force, initially 8,500 troops, 4,800 of them Americans, landed at Archangel on August 1–2. On August 10, General Poole received instructions “to cooperate in restoring Russia with the object of resisting German influence and penetration” and to help the Russians “take the field side by side with their Allies” for the recovery of their country.188 He was further instructed to establish communications with the Czech Legion, so as to jointly secure railroads leading to the east and organize an armed force to fight the Germans.189 While the language of these instructions could be interpreted to mean broader, more ambitious objectives than those stated in the June 3 directive, they provide no basis for the claim that the “future of the North Russian expedition would be in fighting the Bolsheviks, not the Germans.”190 At the time, the Bolsheviks appeared as, and indeed in considerable measure were, partners of the Germans: they took money from them, and more than once told the Germans that only the state of Russian public opinion prevented them from signing with them a formal alliance. The British and French, through their agents in Moscow, were informed of the role which the German Embassy played in keeping the Bolsheviks afloat. To disassociate—let alone contrast—Allied actions in 1918 against the Bolsheviks from those against the Germans, therefore, is to misunderstand both the perceptions and the mood of the time. If Poole’s mission were to fight the Bolsheviks, he certainly would have been given unequivocal instructions to this effect and he would have established communication with opposition groups in Moscow. Of this, there is no evidence. The evidence which does exist indicates, on the contrary, that the task of the Allied expeditionary force in the north was to open a new front against the Germans in cooperation with the Czechoslovaks, the Japanese, and such Russians as were willing to join. It was a military operation intimately connected with the final stages of the World War. />
  Following the occupation of Archangel, a second Allied force, commanded by British Major General C. C. M. Maynard, landed in Murmansk, which had had a small British contingent since June. Maynard’s force in time grew to 15,000 men, of which 11,000 were Allied troops and the remainder Russians and others. According to Noulens, the Archangel-Murmansk expeditionary force (then 23,500 men strong) nearly sufficed to reactivate the Eastern Front, a task which in the opinion of the Western military mission required 30,000 men.191

  Unfortunately for the Allies, by the time they had finally deployed sufficient troops in the north, and this happened only in September, the Czech Legion ceased to exist as a viable offensive force.

  As we have seen, the Czechoslovaks originally resorted to arms to ensure unimpeded passage to Vladivostok. In June, however, their mission changed because the Allied command came to regard them as the vanguard of the projected Allied army on the reactivated Eastern Front.192 In a message to the Czechoslovak troops on June 7, General Čeček thus defined their mission: