Memoirs of a British Agent

by R. H. Bruce Lockhart

  His joy-ride in Arcady had an amusing sequel. I received a word-for-word report of the Radek-Chicherin direct wire conversation from one of our secret agents. The document was so obviously genuine that the American Consul-General in Moscow sent a translation of it to his Ambassador. Without reading it, Francis put it in his pocket and took it to the Ambassadors’ daily conference. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have received an interesting document from Moscow. It is Radek’s account of his negotiations with ourselves. I shall read it to you.” Fumbling with his pince-nez, he began: “Ambassador Francis is a stuffed shirt-front.” It was only too true, but, coming from the Ambassador’s lips, it was a little startling. Richer jests followed, and the climax came with the closing sentence: “Lindley is the only man who has any sense. He practically admits that he considers Noulens’ behaviour childish in the extreme.” Sir Francis Lindley has faced many difficult situations with unfailing courage and equanimity. I doubt, however, if he has ever felt quite so awkward as at that moment.

  There was to be one more comedy before the final tragedy. On July 22nd an official British Economic Mission, composed of Sir William Clark, now British High Commissioner in Canada, Mr. Leslie Urquhart, Mr. Armistead, and Mr. Peters of the Commercial Diplomatic Service, arrived in Moscow. They had come to discuss the possibilities of trade relations with the Bolsheviks. Their arrival staggered me. As far as I knew—and I had no certain knowledge—our intervention was only a matter of days. The Czech army was now advancing towards the West. It had taken Simbirsk and was then besieging Kazan. The Czechs were our Allies. In so far as we were supporting them we were supporting war against the Bolsheviks. Savinkoff, too, was holding Yaroslavl, and Savinkoff was being financed by the French. Moreover, at that very moment British troops must have been on their way to Archangel. Yet here was a British Economic Mission in Moscow breathing peace and commercial treaties to the Bolsheviks. Was there ever a more Gilbertian situation? Could I be surprised when, later, the Bolsheviks accused me of Machiavellian duplicity and supplemented their denunciation of my crimes with well-documented references to Albion’s perfidy. Alas! here was no guile or treachery. It was merely another example of one department in Whitehall not knowing what the other was doing, I took Sir William Clark to see Chicherin and Bronsky, the Trade Commissioner. I cannot say that I enjoyed the interview. Nor did I learn much from the English visitors. Sir William Clark knew nothing of the Allies’ plans regarding Russia. Urquhart, who had mining interests in Siberia, was a convinced interventionist. I was glad when, after two days of abortive negotiations, they left for St. Petersburg. Had they stayed twelve hours longer, they might have been detained indefinitely.

  The next day, with startling suddenness came the news that the Allied Embassies had left Vologda and had fled to Archangel. Although they issued a futile statement to the effect that their departure was not to be regarded as a rupture, the Bolsheviks rightly interpreted it as the prelude to intervention. Their flight, carried out without a word of warning to the Allied Missions in Moscow, left me in an unenviable position. All too clearly I saw that the rôle of hostages, which had originally been destined for the Ambassadors, would now be reserved for us. Together with my French, American, and Italian colleagues I went to see Chicherin in order to feel our way. He was studiously polite and obviously anxious to avoid any act which would put the blame for any rupture of relations on the Bolsheviks. He pressed us to remain in Moscow and assured us that, whatever happened, we should be allowed to leave whenever we wanted to go. We gave a non-committal answer. We were still without any official intimation from our Governments. We took it for granted that the Allies had decided to land troops. We assumed that they would land in force at Archangel, Murmansk, and Vladivostok. We knew nothing for certain.

  It was, however, clear that our own position in Moscow was no longer tenable, and I returned to my rooms to take the preliminary steps for our departure. The next few days were the most miserable of my whole stay in Russia. Moura had left Moscow some ten days before in order to visit her home in Esthonia. Owing to the fighting on the Czech and Yaroslavl fronts travelling on the railways was now strictly controlled. I could not communicate with her. It seemed any odds on my having to leave Russia without seeing her again. For four days and nights I never slept. For hours on end I sat in my room playing patience and badgering the unfortunate Hicks with idiotic questions. There was nothing we could do, and in my despair my self-control left me and I abandoned myself to the gloomiest depression. Then on the afternoon of July 28th my telephone rang. I picked up the receiver. Moura herself was speaking. She had arrived in St. Petersburg after six days of terrible adventure, during which she had crossed the no-man’s land between Esthonia and Russia on foot. She was leaving that night for Moscow.

  The reaction was wonderful. Nothing now mattered. If only I could see Moura again, I felt that I could face any crisis, any unpleasantness the future might have in store for me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE SEQUENCE OF events was now to be swift. On the day after Moura’s return, General Eichhorn, the German Commander-in-Chief in Russia, was assassinated at Kieff. A young Moscow student called Donskoi, who was a member of the Social-Revolutionary Party, had carried out this act of terror. He had hired a cab and, passing the General, had hurled a bomb at him with fatal effect. I was sitting with Chicherin and Karachan when the news was conveyed to them by telephone. They made no concealment of their joy—especially Chicherin, who turned to me and said: “You see what happens when foreigners intervene against the wishes of the people.” Their glee shocked me. My reason should have told me that in Bolshevik eyes the General was an oppressor, whose murderer was to be regarded as a liberator in just the same manner as bourgeois children are taught to admire Jaël or Brutus. To the Bolsheviks German generals and English generals were in the same category as soon as they set foot on Russian soil. They were the agents of counter-revolution and, therefore, outside the law. Both Allies and Germans, however, made the mistake of regarding Russia solely in the light of their own conflict. At the German court-martial of Donskoi two days later the first two questions asked of the prisoner were: “Do you know Lockhart? Do you know the head of the English mission in Moscow?”

  On August 1st we received notice to leave our hotel. It had been requisitioned for the General Council of Russian Trades Unions. The Bolsheviks were showing their horns. No longer were we worthy of special consideration. Fortunately, I succeeded in obtaining occupation of my old flat in the Khliebny Pereulok, and we were able to avoid an awkward predicament.

  On August 4th Moscow went wild with excitement. The Allies had landed at Archangel. For several days the city was a prey to rumour. The Allies had landed in strong force. Some stories put the figure at 100,000. No estimate was lower than two divisions. The Japanese were to send seven divisions through Siberia to help the Czechs. Even the Bolsheviks lost their heads and, in despair, began to pack their archives. In the middle of this crisis I saw Karachan. He spoke of the Bolsheviks as lost. They would, however, never surrender. They would go underground and continue the struggle to the last.

  The confusion was indescribable. On the day after the landing I went to see Wardrop, our Consul-General, who had established his office in the Yusupoff Palace close to the Red Gates. While I was talking to him, the Consulate-General was surrounded by an armed band. It was composed of agents of the Cheka. They sealed up everything, and everyone in the building was put under arrest except Hicks and myself. The special pass I had received from Trotsky still held good. This raid had an amusing aspect. While the Cheka agents were cross-examining our Consular officials downstairs, our intelligence officers were busily engaged in burning their ciphers and other compromising documents upstairs. Clouds of smoke belched from the chimneys and penetrated even downstairs, but, although it was summer, the Cheka gentlemen noticed nothing untoward in this holocaust. As we were to learn later, the Cheka was terrifying but far from clever.

  At the same time a simi
lar raid was carried out on the French Mission and Consulate-General. Although the Italians and Americans were left alone, this outrage (it is true that in Bolshevik eyes our landing at Archangel was also an outrage against international law) could not be ignored, and the next day we all went to Chicherin to give formal notice of the rupture of relations and to demand our passports. Chicherin did not actually refuse. He seemed overwhelmed by the situation, and made his usual plea for time. The unfortunate Chicherin was, indeed, sorely harassed. Only that morning he had received a similar visit from Helfferich, who had succeeded Count Mirbach as German Ambassador. Helfferich, too, seemed to treat the Allied intervention as a serious menace to the Bolsheviks. He had no intention of sharing Count Mirbach’s fate or of being caught in Moscow when the Allied troops marched in. The same night he took the train for Berlin, leaving only a small staff to carry on in Moscow.

  Deserted now by both the Allies and the Germans, the Bolsheviks seemed to be in a hopeless position. The Czech army had captured Kazan, and, although the Bolsheviks had retaken Yaroslavl from Savinkoff’s Russians, they seemed incapable of offering any serious opposition to the large Allied force which was supposed to be advancing from Archangel. For forty-eight hours I deluded myself with the thought that the intervention might prove a brilliant success. I was not quite sure what we should be able to do when we reached Moscow. I could not believe that a bourgeois Russian Government could be maintained in Moscow without our aid. Still less did I believe that we could persuade any considerable number of Russians to renew the war with Germany. In the circumstances the intervention was bound to assume an anti-Bolshevik rather than anti-German character. It was, therefore, likely that our occupation of Moscow would last indefinitely. But, with the adequate forces, which I assumed we had at our disposal, I had no doubt of our being able to reach the Russian capital.

  Disillusionment was to follow swiftly. On August 10th the Bolshevik newspapers splashed their front page with headlines announcing a great Russian naval victory over the Allies at Archangel. I regarded this report as a joke or, at best, as a feeble attempt on the part of the Bolsheviks to stimulate the courage of their own followers. But that afternoon, when I saw Karachan, I had misgivings. His face was wreathed in smiles. The dejection of the previous days had gone, and his relief was too obvious to be put down to play-acting. “The situation is not serious,” he said. “The Allies have landed only a few hundred men.”

  I smiled sceptically. Later, I was to discover that his statement was only too true. The naval victory was a myth. The Bolsheviks had sunk an Allied barge in the Dvina. But the account of the strength of the Allied forces was literally correct. We had committed the unbelievable folly of landing at Archangel with fewer than twelve hundred men.

  It was a blunder comparable with the worst mistakes of the Crimean War. In the chaotic state of Russia it was obvious that, if intervention was to be a success, it must start well. It had begun as badly as it could, and no individual gallantry could ever repair that initial mistake. The plan of the pro-interventionist Russians was to hold the line of the Volga with the Czechs and to join up with the Allies in the North and with Generals Alexeieff and Denikin in the South. The latter had been advised to proceed via Tsaritzin to Samara, while it was hoped that the Allies would be able to advance almost unopposed to Vologda and Viatka. The weakness of our landing force in the North resulted in the loss of the Volga line and in the temporary collapse of the anti-Bolshevik movement in European Russia.

  All my worst fears were speedily justified.

  In the absence of a strong lead from the Allies the various counter-revolutionary groups began to quarrel and bicker among themselves. The accuracy of my dictum that the support we would receive from the Russians would be in direct proportion to the number of troops we sent ourselves was speedily proved. The broad masses of the Russian people remained completely apathetic.

  The consequences of this ill-conceived venture were to be disastrous both to our prestige and to the fortunes of those Russians who supported us. It raised hopes which could not be fulfilled. It intensified the civil war and sent thousands of Russians to their death. Indirectly, it was responsible for the Terror. Its direct effect was to provide the Bolsheviks with a cheap victory, to give them a new confidence, and to galvanise them into a strong and ruthless organism. To have intervened at all was a mistake. To have intervened with hopelessly inadequate forces was an example of spineless half-measures which, in the circumstances, amounted to a crime. Apologists for this policy maintain that it served a useful purpose in preventing Russia from falling into the hands of Germany and in detaching German troops from the Western Front. By June, 1918, there was no danger of Russia being overrun by Germany. The effect of the intervention on the German situation in the West was insignificant. The fact remains that, whatever may have been the intentions of the Allied Governments, our intervention was regarded by those Russians, who supported it, as an attempt to overthrow Bolshevism. It failed, and, with the failure, our prestige among every class of the Russian population suffered.

  Karachan’s optimism was a bitter disillusionment, but now that the intervention had begun I had to do my best to aid it. My efforts during August were concentrated (1) on securing our own departure, and (2) on furnishing financial assistance to the Russians who were supporting us.

  As far as our own departure was concerned, we had reached a deadlock. Chicherin had assumed an attitude which was typical of Bolshevik diplomatic finesse. Of course we could have our passports. We could leave as soon as we liked. But where did we intend to go? The Germans were in control in Finland. The Turks were in Constantinople. He did not suppose we should like to make the long “trek” to the Afghan or Persian frontiers. Yet these seemed the only exits.

  I cut short this long rigmarole. “What about Archangel?” I asked. He washed his hands apologetically. “The English counter-revolutionaries are at Archangel,” he said. “We cannot let you go there.” We seemed to be checkmated. It was only too likely that we should be held in Moscow as hostages. There was only one hope: that the Finnish-German bourgeois Government would guarantee us a safe conduct through Finland. We put ourselves in the hands of the diplomatic representatives of the neutral Powers, who at once began negotiations with the Finnish and German Governments.

  I took advantage of this period of waiting to supply financial aid to the pro-ally organisations, who were badly in need of funds. For weeks the French had furnished this aid single-handed, and my refusal to co-operate in this work had been a sore point with Alexeieff’s and Denikin’s political representatives. Now that we had reached an open rupture with the Bolsheviks, I contributed my share. Although the banks were closed and all dealings in foreign exchange illegal, money was easily available. There were numerous Russians with hidden stores of roubles. They were only too glad to hand them over in exchange for a promissory note on London. To avoid all suspicion, we collected the roubles through an English firm in Moscow. They dealt with the Russians, fixed the rate of exchange, and gave the promissory note. In each transaction we furnished the English firm with an official guarantee that it was good for the amount in London. The roubles were brought to the American Consulate-General and were handed over to Hicks, who conveyed them safely to their destined quarters.

  Apart from this excitement the days passed drearily. There was almost no other work that we could do. With the exception of a small pocket code for emergency messages we had destroyed all our ciphers and all our documents. We had a daily meeting of the Allied representatives at the American Consulate-General, which was now our safest refuge. For, strangely enough, although the United States had associated itself with this landing at Archangel, the Bolsheviks showed no animosity against the Americans. Their name was always excluded from the official protests against the alleged atrocities by the French and British troops in North Russia. They were never mentioned in the violently anti-French and anti-British articles in the Moscow Press.

  We made plans for ou
r departure—the negotiations with the Finnish and German Governments were proceeding slowly but not unsatisfactorily. At immense expense the French kept a train waiting with steam up so that we might leave without a moment’s delay. From the British in St. Petersburg we were completely cut off. Through the Dutch Legation I sent Cromie a message informing him that I could do nothing to help him and that he had better conduct his own negotiations for the departure of himself and the other British officials. I had several discussions with Reilly, who had decided to remain on in Moscow after our departure.

  It was an extraordinary situation. There had been no declaration of war, yet fighting was proceeding on a front stretching from the Dvina to the Caucasus. We were unable to leave Moscow, yet our liberty of action inside the city was almost unrestricted. On the other hand, we knew little of what was going on outside. All that seemed clear was that the Bolsheviks were holding their own.

  We struggled successfully against dejection. We dined with the French, and they with us, and played bridge. We renewed our unsuccessful encounters with the Americans at poker. Here I must pay my tribute to Poole, the American Consul-General, and to Wardwell, the head of the American Red Cross Mission. They would have had little difficulty in arranging their own departure. Yet they stood solidly by us to the end.