8. THE OTHER WEST
In embassies around the world, the diplomats appointed by the Provisional Government denounced the October Revolution. Ambassador Vasili Maklakov, freshly arrived in Paris from Petrograd, led the way and alerted his colleague Boris Bakhmetev in Washington to the danger that America might recognize the territories breaking away from Petrograd’s control. Maklakov was a prominent Kadet and Bakhmetev had been a Marxist as a young man before withdrawing from party politics. The common nightmare of the ambassadors was the dismemberment of ‘Russia’. Maklakov spoke out against the secession of Ukraine; he argued that the Baltic littoral would always be essential to Russian military security — he demanded the retention of naval bases in Helsinki and Tallinn.1
The Western Allies, angered by the Soviet regime’s withdrawal from the fighting on the eastern front, withdrew their financial credits to Russia while allowing the Provisional Government’s accredited diplomats to continue occupying their embassies and enjoying the immunities of their status.2 Yet they no longer represented a functioning administration and the British cabinet, needing somehow to communicate with Sovnarkom, decided to talk to Maxim Litvinov and Theodore Rothstein, who were among the few Bolsheviks who had stayed behind in Britain.3 A little Bolshevik colony survived in Switzerland, and Vatslav Vorovski informally handled Sovnarkom’s interests in Stockholm;4 but London was the only Western capital to host a leading Bolshevik such as Litvinov, and he now became Sovnarkom’s principal spokesman outside Russia.5 He had begun to attract notice just before the October Revolution and was lionized when he took Ivy out to the theatre in London. The liberal journalist Salvador de Madariaga, an acquaintance, spotted him from a few rows away and moved to sit near him. In the interval he shouted over: ‘Litvinoff, the very man I wanted to meet! What’s going on in Russia?’ Others joined in the conversation and Litvinov told them to look out for the name of Lenin. When the Bolsheviks seized power the next day in Petrograd, Litvinov’s reputation spread across London as the seer of Russian politics.6
In January 1918 Trotsky cabled Litvinov to announce his appointment as Sovnarkom’s very first ‘plenipotentiary’ in a foreign country. Just as they did not like the word ‘minister’, the communists forbore to call Litvinov an ambassador: revolutionary times called for fresh terminology. Litvinov was pleased to have a job that genuinely aided the party’s cause. Exactly what the job should involve, however, was unclear because Trotsky had to be cautious about what he wrote in open telegrams and anyway knew little about British high politics; and Litvinov was imaginative and willing to take initiatives: his time had come at last.
The British War Cabinet discussed Russia on 17 January 1918 and confirmed what Foreign Secretary Balfour had been telling the House of Commons. The Bolsheviks had repudiated their obligations under the treaties of alliance. They had aggravated the jeopardy to Britain and France on the western front by closing down the eastern one. They were stirring up revolutions in the West. The Italians pressed for the Western Allies to sever all relations with them; but Lloyd George and Balfour wished to maintain their para-diplomatic links through Litvinov in Britain and British intermediaries in Russia.7 Balfour expressed the hope that the Bolsheviks might yet cause trouble for the Germans.8 This was not an entirely fantastical consideration. Soviet official policy as yet ruled out signing a separate peace with the Germans, and if the Russo-German negotiations broke down the assumption was that Russia would go back to war with them. Rumours spread around the world. If the British were talking to Litvinov, perhaps the same kind of arrangement might be made in France where Trotsky was said to be planning to appoint another plenipotentiary.9 The British denied that they were granting de facto recognition to Sovnarkom, and Balfour stressed that he would never speak directly with Litvinov or allow him on to Foreign Office premises.10 Litvinov would be used only as a convenient conduit for urgent discussions.11
This, however, was progress for Sovnarkom; the same was true of Chicherin’s release from prison and the permission given for him to return to Russia.12 Litvinov made the most of the situation. He wrote to Konstantin Nabokov demanding that he vacate Chesham House and hand over the official ciphers. Nabokov replied that it was he and not Litvinov who enjoyed official recognition.13 Litvinov did better for himself when he inaugurated contact with the Foreign Office through an official called Rex Leeper, who conferred regularly with him on matters of politics and war. Meanwhile he scrambled together a working office. In fact he had no offices except the rented rooms he lived in, no designated couriers and no codebook.14 But he cheered himself up by producing headed notepaper in Sovnarkom’s name and asserting a claim of appointment to London’s diplomatic corps.15 He did the rounds of public meetings in February 1918, asking how it could be fair for the British government to prefer Nicholas II’s reactionary government to be in power rather than a democratically elected government.16 He was silent about the violent suppression of the Constituent Assembly. He relied on ignorance or undemanding sympathy among his British listeners, and he saw his task as being to turn sympathizers into enthusiasts.
Litvinov also spoke at the Labour Party annual conference and called on the British to ‘speed up your peace’.17 On Chicherin’s instructions, he wrote to the anti-war socialist John Maclean appointing him Soviet consul in Glasgow:
Dear Comrade Maclean,
I am writing to the Russian Consul in Glasgow (I am not sure that there exists such a person) informing him of your appointment and ordering him to hand over to you the Consulate. He may refuse to do so, in which case you will open a new Consulate and make it public through the press. Your position may be difficult somehow, but you will have my full support. It is most important to keep me informed (and through me the Russian Soviets) of the Labour Movement in N. B. [North Britain].18
He thought that the revolution he had missed in Russia was in the offing in the United Kingdom. As Special Branch reported, he actively fomented anti-war feelings among resident or visiting Russians — this included making contact with ship crews in British ports.19
Conservative MPs began to ask questions in the House of Commons about his activities:
Major Hunt asked the Prime Minister whether, in view of the fact that M. Litvinoff is advocating a revolutionary movement in this country, he can now say whether he will be prosecuted or interned?
Lord R. Cecil [Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs]: My right hon. Friend asks me to answer this question. I have nothing to add to the reply given by the Home Secretary on the 14th instant to the hon. Member for Hertford, and to the reply given yesterday to the hon. Member.
Major Hunt: Is it the fact that M. Litvinoff has sent round a document, signed by himself, to the trade unions, advocating revolution, and stating that a social revolution is absolutely necessary if a lasting peace is to be secured, and is that sort of thing to be allowed in the case of an alien when it is not allowed in the case of any of our own people?
Lord R. Cecil: I am afraid I can only repeat the answer I have given. I really have nothing to add to what I have already said on the subject, that the matter is being considered.20
This remained the government’s position over the next few months.
Maxim and Ivy Litvinov were enjoying themselves. At New Year 1918 it was their turn to throw the annual party for the colony. Fifteen sat down to celebrate. In characteristic Russian fashion the guests came with contributions to the feast. Ivy wrote:
They brought whisky (lamenting vodka) and zakuski from the Jewish shops in Soho — short, rotund salted cucumbers, smoked salmon, voblya [which is] a strange fish cured hard as a board which I had difficulty in cutting into strips and which I thought more suitable for a clown to slap another in the face with than for human consumption.21
The cry went up: ‘There’s no caviar, there’s no caviar!’ It might be wartime in a foreign country but the colony expected to dine in the manner to which they were accustomed. Relying on Maxim’s advice and the labour of their red-faced char
lady Mrs Bristow, Ivy produced a satisfactory borshch (beetroot soup) followed by roast beef and an immense apple pie.22 The Russians would normally have asked the servants to sit and eat with them but decided that Mrs Bristow would be unable to understand any word that was spoken. She was invited just for the toasts to the New Year and to the Revolution. More toasts followed, including one to Maxim as ‘the First People’s Ambassador of the First Socialist Republic’.23
Soon, along with Ivy, Maxim was attending luncheon and dinner parties in Westminster and Mayfair. On one occasion they were received at Downing Street; unfortunately there is no record as to whether it was at Number 10 or Number 11, but the guest list included Ramsay MacDonald and Bertrand Russell. A fellow guest ventured the question: ‘Wasn’t it a bolt from the blue, Mrs Litvinoff, living quietly in West Hampstead with your husband and baby, suddenly to be plunged into the whirlpool of public events? We immediately imagined you handing your husband his cup of tea at breakfast and him looking up from The Times and through the newspaper.’ Ivy refused to be patronized. ‘It was’, she said firmly but implausibly, ‘what we expected.’24
Intellectuals of the political left courted the Litvinovs. As Ivy recalled, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Charles Roden Buxton as well as Russell made social overtures to Maxim:
It was a pity they felt obliged to invite me too. I was such a chatterbox and Maxim by nature so taciturn and glad to have others do the talking for him. Whatever the subject under discussion I generally managed to get round to psychoanalysis, and people who sincerely wished to discover what the structure of the Soviets was, found themselves diverted into acrimonious wrangles about Freud and even obliged to listen to the relation of my childhood complexes.25
While Ivy had an altercation with Russell her husband ‘was glad to be able to enjoy his lunch in peace’.26 (His calm temperament proved an asset when he served under Stalin in the 1930s as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs.) Maxim was anyway more confident with pen in hand. His pamphlet The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Rise and Meaning derided the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, praising the Bolsheviks as the only party that had the support of the ‘masses’. He defended the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly on the grounds that only Sovnarkom could guarantee that the ‘bourgeois parties’ would not come back to power.27
On 23 January the Manchester Guardian ran an article by an unnamed correspondent, possibly Theodore Rothstein, denying that communism stood for ‘class war’. This alleged mistake was said to result from a mistranslation of the German Klassenkampf, which was better rendered as ‘class struggle’ and was widely used by European socialists without connection with Bolshevism.28 This was an inaccurate presentation of Lenin’s ideas. Since 1914 he had called for the ‘imperialist war’ to be turned into a ‘European civil war’, and by war he meant war and not just struggle.
There was no Bolshevik of Litvinov’s stature in America because all the resident leaders of the Russian far left had departed for Petrograd. The most active advocate of Bolshevism in the US was not a Russian but a Finn, Santeri Nuorteva, who headed the Finnish Information Bureau in New York. The Bureau was an agency of the Provisional Revolutionary Government established by the Red Finns in January 1918 as civil war broke out between the Reds and the Whites in Finland. Bolsheviks kept close ties with the Bureau, which operated as an unofficial embassy for the Reds in Russia as well as Finland. The US Secretary of State Robert Lansing would have nothing to do with Nuorteva, who then reached out to sympathetic officials in the State Department such as William Bullitt, William Irwin and Felix Frankfurter (political discipline under Lansing was much more lax than in Balfour’s Foreign Office). Nuorteva also approached likely journalists such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Although he was later to operate as a cheerleader for Joseph Stalin, at this time Duranty was still wary of associating himself with the Russian communist cause. The Finnish Information Bureau’s Harold Kellock derided him in a letter to Frankfurter: ‘Walter reminds me a bit of a sort of orthodox Virgin Mary who is always fully conscious of being Queen of Heaven. Perhaps he’s a direct descendant “son of the Jewish Revolution”.’29
The weakness of the Soviet propaganda effort in the US induced John Reed and Louise Bryant to volunteer to return to America on Sovnarkom’s behalf. This would undoubtedly involve a certain risk. A Federal Grand Jury had indicted Reed in November 1917 for violating the Espionage Act with his article ‘Knit a Straitjacket for your Soldier Boy’ in the Masses. But Reed did not flinch and on 29 January 1918 the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs appointed him New York consul.30 The State Department retorted that Lenin’s government lacked even de facto recognition.31 Trotsky at this point saw that he was annoying Washington for no good purpose, and he withdrew Reed’s name from his list of appointees. The most important thing was to facilitate Reed’s arrival in the US.32 Reed and Bryant disembarked on 28 April.33 Although the indictment was quietly forgotten, in late May he was arrested in Philadelphia on a charge of inciting a riot.34 Yet again the authorities stepped back from providing him with the publicity of a trial. On release he delivered speeches against the war, sharing platforms with Nuorteva and Masses editor Max Eastman.35 Reed’s articles and pamphlets were disseminated widely in the American labour movement. He thought he had seen the world’s future in Russia, and he recommended it.
The community of foreign sympathizers in Petrograd continued to promote the Soviet cause. The most eccentric was Daily News and Manchester Guardian correspondent Arthur Ransome. Caught in the United Kingdom at the time of the October Revolution, he had returned to Russia on Christmas Day 1917.36 Ransome inspired great affection: every one of his acquaintances, even those who detested Bolshevism, was fond of him. Moura Benckendorff, Lockhart’s mistress, noticed ‘his Bolshevik appearance’ but still felt sorry for him. Thinking that he was not eating well, she ‘stuck a piece of veal in his mouth… and a few radishes in his pocket’.37 Ransome might have preferred something sugary: he loved his ‘sweets’.38
The British intelligence officer George Hill was another who warmed to him: ‘He was a tall, lanky, bony individual with a shock of sandy hair, usually unkempt, and the eyes of a small, inquisitive and rather mischievous boy. He was a lovable personality when you came to know him.’39 Hill and Ransome lived on the same hotel corridor. Only Hill had a bathroom, which he allowed Ransome to use each morning:
Our profoundest discussions and most heated arguments took place when Ransome was sitting in the bath and I wandering up and down my room dressing. Sometimes, when I had the better of an argument and his feelings were more than usually outraged, he would jump out of the water and beat himself dry like an angry gorilla. After that he would not come for his bath for two or three days, then we would meet and grin at each other, I would ask after the pet snake which lived in a large cigar box in his room, and the following day he would come in as usual and we would begin arguing again, the best of friends.40
The species and provenance of the snake remain unknown.
Ransome, an unhappily married man, had fallen in love with a Bolshevik — and British intelligence wondered whether he had become one too.41 The object of his affections was none other than Trotsky’s secretary Yevgenia Shelepina. Hill asked her out to dinner but she refused, claiming she had to work at her desk till late.42 The true reason may well have been her growing fancy for Ransome, and the two were soon conducting an affair. A bit of politics was involved, too. Ransome was sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as well as convinced, from a patriotic viewpoint, that it was in the British interest to have good relations with them and not to bully or subvert Sovnarkom. And Shelepina was anyway a useful source of material for his dispatches home. Her close knowledge of Trotsky’s planning and activity was a priceless asset.
C. P. Scott, Ransome’s editor in Manchester, was not keen on the Soviet revolutionary experiment. While appreciating his reporter’s extraordinary access to the Bolshevik elite, Scott used the old device of muffling a corre
spondent’s enthusiasms by judicious editing and occasional spiking of reports. At least Ransome kept his job. Louise Bryant lost her contract of employment with the Philadelphia Public Ledger and was in no doubt about the reason. As soon as a reporter tried to tell the news honestly, she claimed, the editor at home disowned him or her.43 Morgan Philips Price complained that his telegrams were being suppressed or emasculated.44 But the cheerleaders kept up their work. Determined to write as they pleased, Bryant and Ransome published booklets on Russia after the October Revolution. Ransome’s Letter to America so pleased Karl Radek at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs that he helped to get it published in the US and supplied his own introduction. Ransome denied that the Allies had any right to compel Russia to do what they wanted. While allowing that the Revolution might fail, he applauded the Soviet order and its appropriateness for Russia; he dismissed the anti-Bolshevik majority in the Constituent Assembly as an ‘indifferent mass’ of people incapable of achieving the decisiveness and popularity of the Bolsheviks.45
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