The Bolsheviks listened to our protests in silence. They were scrupulously polite. Although they had a case, they made no attempt to argue it. Chicherin, looking more like a drowned rat than ever, stared at us with mournful eyes. Karachan seemed stupidly bewildered. There was a painful silence. Everyone was a little nervous and none more than myself, whose conscience was not quite clear. Then Chicherin coughed. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have taken note of what you said.” We shook hands awkwardly and then filed out of the room.
Our protest had made a profound impression. Months afterwards, when I was in prison, Karachan told me that both he and Chicherin had been completely surprised by the vehemence of my language. Their first suspicions of me had dated from that day. The suspicions were well-founded. Almost before I had realised it I had now indentified myself with a movement which, whatever its original object, was to be directed, not against Germany, but against the de facto government of Russia.
I must explain the motives which had driven me into this illogical situation. For four and a half months I had opposed Japanese intervention and, indeed, every kind of intervention which had not received the sanction of the Bolsheviks. I had little faith in the strength of the anti-Bolshevik Russian forces and none at all in the feasibility of reconstituting an Eastern front against Germany. Moreover, I had been in close touch with the Czech Council. The Czech Army, whose revolt had brought matters to a head, was composed of war-prisoners. They were Slavs, who, although technically Austrian subjects, had deserted in their thousands to the Russians at the beginning of the war. They bore no love to the Tsarist régime, which had always refused to recognise their separate nationality. They were democrats by instinct, and their sympathies were with the Russian Liberals and the Social-Revolutionaries. They were not likely to co-operate smoothly with the Tsarist officers, who supplied the main strength to the armies of the anti-Bolshevik Generals.
Why then had I given my adherence to a policy which seemed to hold out little promise of success and which was to expose me to widespread accusations of inconsistency? Although I desire to be strictly truthful, the answer is not easy. Fortunate indeed are the traditionalists, who accept the existing order of society in their cradle, and who solve every political problem by the simple formula of “these men are my friends and those my enemies.” I could not see the situation in this light. I had been sent back to Russia mainly in order that I might keep the British Government informed about the real state of affairs. That task I had tried to fulfil to the best of my ability. I had no special sympathy for the Bolsheviks, nor did the numerous accusations of pro-Bolshevism augment unduly the obstinacy with which I strove to maintain an objective and unbiased view of the situation. At the same time, I could not help realising instinctively that, behind its peace programme and its fanatical economic programme, there was an idealistic background to Bolshevism which lifted it far above the designation of a mob movement led by German agents. For months I had lived cheek by jowl with men who worked eighteen hours a day and who were obviously inspired by the same spirit of self-sacrifice and abnegation of worldly pleasure which animated the Puritans and the early Jesuits. If to realise that I was living in a movement, which was likely to assume even greater proportions in history than the French revolution, was to be pro-Bolshevik, then I am entitled to the label of pro-Bolshevism. I knew from my wife’s telegrams—later they were to be confirmed from other sources—that my views were unpalatable to the British Government. I ought to have resigned and come home. To-day, I should have been enjoying the reputation of a prophet who had predicted the various phases of the Russian revolution with remarkable accuracy.
I did not do so. It would be easy for me to say that my first duty was to my country, that, when my country had decided on another policy, I had no right to oppose it, and that to resign in the middle of the war would have been equivalent to deserting my post in the face of the enemy. I do not plead these excuses. They were not my motives. Three months later, when I was in prison, Karl Radek wrote a letter to Arthur Ransome, in which he described me as a “carrièriste,” who, when he had seen that his own policy had no chance of being accepted, sought feverishly to regain the favour of his employers. This, too, although nearer the mark, is an unfair accusation. The motives for my conduct were two. Subconsciously, although I did not put the question to myself at the time, I was unwilling to leave Russia because of Moura. The other motive—and it was the all-compelling one, of which I was fully conscious—was that I lacked the moral courage to resign and to take a stand which would have exposed me to the odium of the vast majority of my countrymen.
There was perhaps one other more creditable motive. In my conceit I imagined that, if the Allies were bent on a military intervention in Russia, my special knowledge of the Russian situation would be of some value in aiding them to avoid the major pitfalls. I knew the Bolsheviks more intimately than any Englishman knew them at that time. I had had my finger on the pulse of events in Russia since January. The clamjamfrey of military experts, who from outside were screaming for intervention and who regarded the Bolsheviks as a rabble to be swept away with a whiff of grape shot, was deprived by its geographical situation of that knowledge. Having gone over to intervention, I did my best to ensure that it would have at least some chance of success. To the last I opposed the theory that the “loyal” Russians were capable of overthrowing the Bolsheviks even if supported by Allied munitions and money and led by Allied officers. To the last I insisted on the need for large Allied forces, without which the whole scheme was bound to fail. I even devised a special formula: that the support which we would receive from the “loyal” Russians would be in direct proportion to the number of troops we sent ourselves. For all the good I did I might have saved my breath for my own porridge. My volte-face had discredited me with everybody. The interventionists looked on me as an obstinate young mule, who had at last come over to their way of thinking. I was an obstacle which had been successfully removed. My views could now be safely disregarded. The Bolsheviks shared Radek’s opinion of me. I had fallen between two stools. To this day I have suffered from my tumble. To the Bolsheviks I am the incarnation of counter-revolution. To the interventionists I am still the pro-Bolshevik, who wrecked their plans!
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE INTERVENTION ITSELF did not take place until August 4th. The two months from June to August were a purgatory, during which our position gradually deteriorated. And, as a result of the increased danger which now threatened them, the Bolsheviks tightened up their discipline.
On June 10th “Benji” Bruce arrived in Moscow. He had come to fetch his bride, the beautiful and charming Karsavina. He brought me a large bundle of mail and my first real news from England. There was a letter from George Clerk, then Head of the War Department in the Foreign Office. It was full of nice things. Indeed, he and Colonel Kisch, who was then at the War Office, are almost the only senior officials who have been generous enough to sympathise with my attitude and to admit that my estimate of the situation had not been far wrong. Bruce, however, left me with no illusious regarding my unpopularity in England during the period of my so-called pro-Bolshevism. He informed me that in March I had nearly been recalled. He stayed only twelve hours in Moscow, but, in spite of the news he brought me, his visit was like a breath of wind coming over the desert. After being shut off from the world for five months I was thrilled by his account of the situation in England and on the Western front. Karsavina and he had a nightmare of adventure before reaching Murmansk. They had to travel without a Bolshevik permit. My powers to help them had ceased.
June was a dreary month. Perhaps because my conscience was uneasy, I lived in an atmosphere of suspicion. Trotsky would have no more dealings with us, and, although I continued to see Chicherin, Karachan, and Radek almost daily, we avoided the real issue in our conversations. With the alteration in the political attitude of the Bolsheviks came a change in our material position. We found it increasingly difficult to obtain supplies of fresh
meat and vegetables. Without the tinned rations supplied to us by the American Red Cross mission we should have fared badly.
Through Hicks I increased my contact with the anti-Bolshevik forces. As far as we were concerned, they were represented in Moscow by an organisation called the “Centre” which was subdivided into two wings of Left and Right, and by the League of the Regeneration of Russia founded by Savinkoff. There were constant bickerings between the two organisations. The Centre was in close touch with the White Army in the South. The White generals regarded Savinkoff with suspicion. Indeed, about this period I received a letter from General Alexeieff in which he stated that he would sooner co-operate with Lenin and Trotsky than with Savinkoff or Kerensky. Both organisations were agreed on one point only. They wanted Allied aid and Allied money. I saw one or two of the leaders, notably Peter Struve, a brilliant intellectual, who at one time had been a Socialist and had helped Lenin to frame his first Communist manifesto, and Michael Feodoroff, a former Assistant Minister. Both were men of fine character. Both were unswervingly loyal to the Allies. I was, however, very guarded in my conversations with them. As far as I knew officially, the British Government had not yet decided on intervention. Until the decision was brought to my notice I gave no support to the Whites either in cash or in promises.
In this my attitude differed from that of the French, who, as I knew from their own admission, were supplying funds to Savinkoff. Their promises, too, were extravagant. The Whites were led to believe that Allied military support would be forthcoming in decisive strength. The figure generally mentioned was two Allied divisions for Archangel and several Japanese divisions for Siberia. Encouraged by these hopes, the anti-Bolshevik forces began to increase their activities. On June 21st Volodarsky, the Bolshevik Commissar for Press Affairs in St. Petersburg, was assassinated on his return from a meeting at the Obuchoff Works. The Bolshevik reply was swift. In his speech to the St. Petersburg Soviet Uritsky, the head of the local Cheka, made a violent attack on England in which he accused the English of organising the dead Commissar’s murder. The next day Schastny, the Commander-in-Chief of the Baltic Fleet, who had been a prisoner in the Kremlin, was condemned to death and shot. At the trial Trotsky distinguished himself by the violence of his language. The Terror was beginning.
I went to see Chicherin to protest against Uritsky’s accusation. He put me off with semi-apologetic explanations. It was deplorable, but what else could we expect if we insisted on infringing Russia’s neutrality. Russia wanted only to be left alone and to enjoy the fruits of her dearly-bought peace. He was amusing about Trotsky, who, with his back to the wall, was always wanting to fight somebody and was now advocating strong measures against the Allies. “It is strange,” said Chicherin, “how the military idea has gone to Trotsky’s head. In March Lenin had to use his influence to prevent Trotsky from declaring war on Germany. Now it is Lenin’s cool brain which is holding Trotsky back from declaring war on the Allies.”
Although the intervention appeared to be hanging fire, our stay in Moscow seemed near its end. None of us was very happy. Denis Garstin had already left us. He had been ordered to join General Poole at Archangel. He, too, had to leave clandestinely owing to the difficulty in securing a Bolshevik pass for him. He went with a sad heart. He would have liked to remain with us to the end. Poor boy! He was one of the first victims of the intervention. Still, we were not without optimism. Believing that the Allies would land in force, we were convinced that the Bolsheviks would be unable to offer a serious resistance. Even Ransome, whose opposition to intervention without Bolshevik consent had remained constant, told us that “the show was over” and began to make preparations to leave. Before we ourselves were to be allowed to depart we were to have our fill of excitement.
One extraordinary adventure during this period was the murder of Count Mirbach, the German Ambassador. This assassination, accompanied as it was by an internal revolt against the Government, was the most dramatic political murder of modern times. As I myself was an uncomfortable eye-witness of the attempted coup d’état, I give my own account of the affair in full detail.
To understand the situation, the reader must remember that after the Bolshevik revolution in November, 1917, the extreme wing of the Russian Social-Revolutionary Party joined hands with the Bolsheviks and co-operated with them in the formation of the new Government. They received a few posts in the various Commissariats, retained their places in the Soviets, and were strongly represented in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which, when the Congress of Soviets is not sitting, is the supreme legislative and executive power of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. For the first eight months of its existence the Soviet Government was, in fact, a coalition.
As a party the Left Social-Revolutionaries were quite as extreme as the Bolsheviks in their hatred of capitalism and Imperialism. They were therefore as violent as the Bolsheviks in their denunciation of the Allies. In internal politics, while they differed from the Bolsheviks on agrarian questions, they upheld the Soviet system and supported the Bolsheviks in the prosecution of the civil war. Two members of the party, Colonel Muravieff, an ex-police officer, and Lieutenant Sablin, the son of the proprietor of the Korsh Theatre in Moscow, were during the first period of the Bolshevik régime the most successful military commanders of the new Government.
Unlike the Bolsheviks, however, the Left Social-Revolutionaries were not prepared to go to any lengths in their desire for peace. They had been opposed to the Brest-Litovsk Peace and, although they retained their representatives in the Government, had never accepted it. They drew most of their support from the Ukraine, which had been occupied by the Germans, and the Germans were hard taskmasters who had installed a dummy reactionary Russian Government and restored the land to the Russian landowners.
The Left Social-Revolutionaries had not accepted this situation, and ever since the peace they had carried on a violent partisan war in the Ukraine against both the Russian landlords and the German troops of occupation. By both sides this miniature warfare was conducted with appalling cruelty. Goaded almost to despair by the sufferings of their compatriots in the Ukraine, the Left Social-Revolutionaries protested vigorously against the servile attitude of the Bolsheviks before the Germans and denounced the Bolshevik Commissars as Mirbach’s lackeys. As even the official Press had to admit, almost daily, some fresh German breach of the Brest Treaty, considerable point was given to the caustic comments on the cringing tone of Chicherin’s mild protests and the barely civil replies of the German Ambassador.
The real difference between the two Russian Government Parties was that the Left Social-Revolutionaries regarded Germany as the chief menace to the revolution. The Bolsheviks, or rather Lenin, for he alone saw clearly in this confused atmosphere, were determined to do nothing which might endanger the fragile fabric of their peace. They were now more afraid of Allied intervention than of further aggression by the Germans. The two parties were of course at heart both anti-German and anti-Entente. The situation, however, was not without its comic side. While the Bolsheviks were publicly denouncing the activities of the Left Social-Revolutionaries in the Ukraine, they were supplying them secretly with the funds for their partisan warfare against the Germans.
There was one other grievance which further divided the two Parties. Among the peasants the chief supporters of the Left Social-Revolutionaries were the Kulaks. Partly in order to strengthen their own position in the country and partly to obtain more grain, the Bolsheviks had organised so-called Poverty Committees, composed of poorer peasants, who were encouraged to attack the richer Kulaks and to seize their grain.
Here obviously were dissensions, which were bound to come to a head. Secretly, the Left Social-Revolutionaries began to prepare fantastic plans for the overthrow of the Bolshevik Government and for a renewal of the war with Germany. By July 4th, the opening day of the Fifth All-Russian Congress, the political situation was ripe for the inevitable explosion.
For this
Congress the Left Social-Revolutionaries had made special preparations. In spite of Bolshevik manipulation at the elections, they succeeded in returning about one-third of the eight hundred delegates present, and for the first time since November, 1917, the Bolsheviks were confronted, in their own carefully hedged-in Parliament, with a real official opposition.
The Congress took place in the Moscow Opera House. In the parterre, where once sat the “balletomanes” and the richly bejewelled ladies of the Moscow plutocracy, now are ranged the official delegates: on the right, facing the stage, the Bolshevik majority, composed mainly of soldiers in khaki; on the left the Left Social-Revolutionary opposition, whose brawny arms and loose shirts proclaim their village origin.
On the high stage, from which Chaliapin first gave his immortal rendering of Boris, now sit the members of the Central Executive Committee—a motley gathering of about one hundred and fifty intellectuals with a strong predominance of Jews.
At a long table across the front of the stage is the Presidium, with Sverdloff, the President, in the centre. A Jew so dark that he might almost be suspected of “colour,” his black beard and his fierce black eyes make him look like some modern incarnation of the Spanish inquisitors. On his left are Afanasieff, the Secretary of the Central Executive Committee, an insignificant young Jew with nervous twitching eyes, and Nakhamkis, the editor of the Izvestia, and better known to the public under his pseudonym of Stekloff. At this table, too, sits Zinovieff, the President of the St. Petersburg Commune. Clean shaven and with an enormous forehead, he looks as intelligent as he is reputed to be. On the right of Sverdloff sit the Left Social-Revolutionary leaders: Kamkoff, Karelin, both young Jews, clean shaven, well dressed, and clearly of the intellectual class; Cherepanoff; and at the extreme end Maria Spiridonova, the thirty-two-year-old leader of the Party. Very simply dressed, her dark hair brushed smoothly back over her head, and with pince-nez with which she toys continuously, she looks for all the world like Olga, the schoolmistress, in Chehoff’s “Three Sisters.” In 1906, while still a girl, she had made herself famous by her assassination of Lujinovsky, the notorious Councillor of the Government Administration of Tamboff. She had been selected by her Party to carry out this terroristic act, and in the middle of winter she waited for Lujinovsky on the platform of the station at Borisogliebsk and fired on him with a revolver as he stepped out of the train. Her shots were successful, but an attempt to end her own life failed, and she was dragged from the platform and later raped by the Cossack soldiery. She had been condemned to death, but, yielding to a strong plea for mercy on account of her age, the Tsar had changed her sentence to one of penal servitude for life. The earnest, almost fanatical, expression in her eyes shows that her sufferings have affected her mind. She is more hysterical than practical, but her evident popularity with her own followers shows that she is still one of the few sentimental figures of the revolution.
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