Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  On 23 July the Politburo created a Provisional Revolutionary Committee for Poland. Diplomatic duplicity was to be deployed. Britain and France would be assured that the Soviet government was willing to enter peace talks, but this was just a diplomatic manoeuvre to deflect attention from the Red advance on Warsaw. Lithuania was to be told that it had nothing to fear from Russia.30 This too was insincere because the Bolsheviks wanted to Sovietize the entire Baltic region in due course. But they wanted to limit the number of enemies until the Red Army had dealt with the Poles.

  Trotsky told his troops that the objective was not to subjugate Poland but to give power to the ‘working Polish people’ in their own land. He denied that Russia had started or even wanted the war.31 The Politburo hoped to attract Polish workers and poor peasants by a series of exemplary measures. Banks and factories would be nationalized in the future area of occupation. A terror would be initiated against landlords, clergy and commanders. Lenin was at his most bloodthirsty when urging Dzerzhinski and the Cheka to send squads into the Polish countryside with a view to seizing and hanging class enemies — the same tactics he had called for in Russia in summer 1918. Communists who had been brought up in Poland were not convinced that the Politburo knew what it was doing; they raised a cry about the strength of Polish national sentiments in all social classes. Stalin added that the Volunteer Army under Pëtr Wrangel in Crimea continued to constitute a serious danger to Soviet rule. But Lenin overrode such pessimism. The opportunity had arisen to spread the revolution westwards and he was going to take it — and Trotsky was only too happy to oblige. The time for ‘revolutionary war’ had arrived.

  Poland was not the only prize in the minds of Soviet leaders. Lenin wrote to Stalin: ‘Zinoviev and Bukharin as well as myself think it would be appropriate to stimulate a revolution immediately in Italy. My personal opinion is that this requires the Sovietization of Hungary as well as perhaps Czechia [Czechoslovakia] and Romania.’32 On 10 August the Politburo approved Trotsky’s proposal for Comintern Congress delegates to go home and prepare for revolution. Confident of success, he asked for a hundred German communists to be assigned to the front line to conduct propaganda — he assumed that they would soon be talking to Germans in Germany.33

  Lenin appreciated that the French and British would not sit on their hands while Berlin ripped up the Versailles treaty. He devised a scheme for a coalition of the far left and the far right in Germany. Although the Freikorps and their sympathizers detested communism and had bloodily crushed the Spartacists, they agreed with Comintern that the Western Allies had reduced their country to slavery. Lenin urged German communist leaders to line up with them to reclaim freedom for their country.34 The alliance would be strictly provisional. He expected that, once Germany regained its full independence, there would be civil war while the communists and the right-wing paramilitaries fought it out for supremacy.35 He predicted that a proletarian dictatorship on the Soviet model would emerge from this. He said nothing in public, but Radek referred to the basic idea in Pravda. Lenin and Radek had no scruples about exploiting the services of anti-communists so long as the ultimate result might be a communist seizure of power. Strategic flexibility was essential. Lenin had to admit that any alliance with the political far right would be an ‘unnatural’ one, and communist leftists in Germany justifiably doubted that he would have accepted such a strategy for Russia in 1917. Having joined the communist movement in their country because they despised the compromises favoured by the other socialists, they shunned Lenin’s advice to negotiate with the butchers of Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

  Soviet leaders anyway accepted the likelihood of a second Great War when the Western Allies crossed the German border in full strength to suppress any government that refused to recognize the treaty of Versailles. But Lenin and his comrades felt they simply had to force a breach in Russia’s international quarantine. As the Red Army advanced into Poland there was already a great deal of political unrest in Germany and the government was worried about more than just the German communists. Ministers feared that the Independent Social-Democratic Party might collude in a coup d'état in Berlin, especially after Arthur Crispien — one of the leaders of the Independent Social-Democrats — threatened as much in the Reichstag.36

  Lenin had already discussed with Stalin how best to organize a system of Soviet-style states stretching from the Rhineland to the Pacific. Trotsky stayed out of the debate, having talked throughout the Great War about the achievability of a United States of Europe. But Lenin now wanted a single federation of communist republics linking Europe and Asia. In this way, Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine would join up with Soviet Germany and Soviet Poland. Stalin was sceptical, telling Lenin that the German people were unlikely to want membership of a communist federation founded and led by Russians. Lenin had omitted to take the national factor into consideration. Stalin’s counter-proposal was to establish not one but two federations, the first being based in Moscow and the other in Berlin. Such federations would of course be headed by parties united under the Communist International, and Stalin implicitly proposed that this was a sufficient safeguard against disunity and strife. He offered the idea in good faith only to receive a furious rebuke from Lenin, who accused him of succumbing to nationalism. Stalin was affronted; he wrote back exclaiming that Soviet leaders had to be intelligent about the challenges that they had to surmount if they were to communize central Europe.37

  The dispute soon blew over as Lenin focused his attention on the campaign for Warsaw. He and the Politburo turned down Sergo Ordjonikidze’s plan for ‘a military force to be sent into Persia’ in mid-August.38 Nor did they see any need to recall the Soviet delegation they had sent to London, which from the beginning of August was reinforced by the arrival of Politburo member Kamenev. The idea was that Krasin would continue to lead the talks on trade while Kamenev handled the diplomacy about war and peace in whatever way the changing situation demanded.39 Lenin and Trotsky were keeping their options open; and Trotsky, while directing the Red Army to break through to Germany, asked the Politburo to use diplomatic means to secure a rail route across Poland for the shipment of arms from German businesses — Central Committee member Alexei Rykov was then given the task of buying the weaponry. The Politburo agreed.40 The fight was on for supremacy in central Europe. As the Reds hurtled towards Warsaw, Soviet leaders felt no inhibition about simultaneously planning to crush the German capitalist elites and do big business with them.

  The British sought to prevent any such outcome by announcing a diplomatic initiative for peace between Russia and Poland. Kamenev and Krasin called at 10 Downing Street for talks with Lloyd George and the Conservative Party leader Andrew Bonar Law on 4 August;41 but the results were inconclusive, and the next day Kamenev set out Soviet objections in a letter to Lloyd George.42 A further meeting lasting five hours was held on 6 August. This time Churchill was in attendance for a while as Lloyd George and Bonar Law debated with Kamenev and Krasin, and an agreement was reached which was to be relayed to Moscow. Lloyd George hoped to have Lenin’s reply before he met the French Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand in Kent the following day.43 The British government wanted an immediate armistice. To the French, though, this seemed intolerable as it would lend respectability to a bandit regime, and Lloyd George felt compelled to back down; he also felt that the Poles had to some degree brought the Soviet invasion on themselves by their Ukrainian campaign.44 He tried to demonstrate his open-mindedness in foreign policy by receiving a Labour Party delegation and listening to their demands for non-interference in Russia. He replied that he could not forget that the Bolsheviks were undemocratic and adduced the latest statements of Bertrand Russell, who had opposed the Great War but then turned against the Soviet leadership. Trade union leader and Labour Party militant Ernie Bevin urged the Prime Minister to ignore French pressure and threatened trouble if military force or supplies were sent to Pilsudski.45 Lloyd George replied that he had broken with Soviet Russia because Lenin had abandone
d the Allies, although he insisted that if Lenin now wanted peace he could have it.46

  The political temperature in the United Kingdom rose still higher when an influential group in the Independent Labour Party called for Churchill’s impeachment as Secretary of State for War.47 Churchill issued a quick rebuttal:

  It is not the British who are making war, but the Russian Bolshevists. They are at this moment invading Poland and trampling down its freedom. They are doing their best to light the flames of war in Persia, Afghanistan, and, if possible, in India. Their avowed intention is to procure by violence a revolution in every country… My sole object has been, and will be, to keep such hateful foreign oppression far from our native land.48

  While denying he had any wish for a Western crusade against Soviet Russia, he urged that the talks on any commercial treaty be suspended immediately.49

  Not even Lloyd George was willing to see Poland defeated, and he had already stated that the British would go to war again if the Red Army occupied Warsaw.50 As a result he was relieved when reports indicated that Pilsudski’s headlong retreat had stopped in the Polish capital. Pilsudski declared that Warsaw would be defended to the last man, and he had grounds for confidence. The Reds were exhausted by their hot pursuit of the Polish army; their supply lines were frail and over-stretched and their equipment inadequate. Their commander in the northern sector, Mikhail Tukhachevski, found it hard to co-ordinate his advance as Warsaw came within range. Exposing the naivety and wrong-headedness of Lenin’s rationale for the war, Poles of all classes saw the Reds as Russian invaders rather than internationalist liberators. They waited for the enemy on the eastern side of the River Vistula where Pilsudski had time to organize them. He also had the advantage that Stalin, the leading commissar in the southern sector of the Red advance, ignored orders to divert his armies from outside Lwów and reinforce the strategic thrust at the Polish capital. It would probably have made little difference if Stalin had shown greater compliance since Tukhachevski’s forces were rapidly torn apart by the resurgent Polish army. By 19 August the Reds were conducting a general retreat from the Vistula. Central Europe was saved from Sovietization.51

  The scale of the defeat outdid anything suffered by the Reds in the Civil War after Kolchak’s initial success at the end of 1918. There was nothing they could do but fall back and sue for a truce. The Politburo convened on 1 September. Trotsky, the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, gave a gloomy account of the campaign and recommended agreeing to a ‘compromise peace’ — a quaint formulation for acceptance of defeat. Peace talks would be requested with the Poles in Riga.52 At the next Politburo meeting, five days later, Chicherin pressed for peace to be signed fast with Latvia and Lithuania.53 It was plain to the leadership that Moscow had to content itself with the territory won in the Civil War or else risk losing everything. Kamenev left for Russia on 11 September.54 He had had a last meeting with Lloyd George a day earlier and, together with Krasin, had become acquainted with the latest British terms for a trade treaty. On peace, there was no longer anything he could do. Pilsudski and Paderewski were now the men who set the agenda.55

  When the Party Conference met later in the month, Lenin was frank about the ‘gigantic, unprecedented defeat’. He acknowledged that it was the product of a Polish ‘patriotic upsurge’ rather than action or assistance by the Western Allies. Soviet Russia had to accept that the Poles were unlikely to agree to the frontier proposed earlier by Lord Curzon. Galicia had to be delivered to Poland and the boundaries shifted to the east of the Curzon Line.56 Lenin added: ‘This undoubtedly means that a mistake was committed: you see, we had victory in our hands and we let it slip from our fingers.’57 He asked forgiveness, admitting that the Politburo should have halted the Red advance in eastern Galicia and been content with gaining a base for a future offensive — ‘a little push’ into Hungary across the Carpathians.58 Now that peace negotiations were under way the priority had to be the regeneration of the Soviet economy. He expressed doubt that the Bolsheviks could succeed without foreign industrial investment. Communism, he declared, could not be built solely by ‘Russian forces’.59

  29. TRADE TALKS ABROAD

  The Polish war punctuated a year of talks on a trade treaty between Soviet Russia and the United Kingdom. The British government played its hand with some caution. Its ministers were determined to prevent foreigners from stirring up revolution and on 16 July 1920 deported Santeri Nuorteva of the Russian Soviet Bureau, as the front organization was known by then — who had landed in Liverpool from New York. Nuorteva was carrying a ‘diplomatic passport’ stamped by his comrade Ludwig Martens. Back in New York, the Russian Soviet Bureau blustered that Canadian contracts to the value of six million dollars would be cancelled.1 Martens attended a gathering of 8,000 supporters in Madison Square Garden where he wanted to call on the US government to permit the transport of medical supplies to Russia. He received fifteen minutes of applause before he could start speaking. The Internationale was sung. Martens haltingly read out his speech in English before giving a vivid delivery in Russian: ‘There is much talk of Bolshevist propaganda against America. There is no such thing. But there is propaganda against Soviet Russia.’2 This was of no help to Nuorteva in England, where Lloyd George had to be seen to be standing up to communism to placate the Conservative MPs in the governing coalition. Rejecting pleas on Nuorteva’s behalf, he said that his papers were not in order and that normal procedures had been followed.3

  Yet rather than sending Nuorteva back to America, Lloyd George allowed him to travel on to the Estonian capital, from where he would be able to reach Russia.4 Nor did Lloyd George object to Kamenev and Krasin coming to London.5 Things had changed since Kamenev’s fruitless visit in 1918. Lloyd George was giving communists a chance to show that they deserved admittance inside the perimeter of formal international relations. Lenin understood this. Worrying that Kamenev and Krasin might get over-excited, he warned them against summoning far-left socialists to get arms for the British working class.6

  The dominant theme in the talks with Kamenev and Krasin at 10 Downing Street on 4 and 8 August was the Soviet military advance on Warsaw.7 But after demanding peace and security for Poland, Lloyd George and Bonar Law also took the opportunity to set out their conditions for future trade with Soviet Russia. They insisted that Soviet leaders should cease their political subversion and ideological propaganda in the United Kingdom and its empire. Kamenev affected to understand and agree. But the evidence from telegrams between Moscow and London told a different story, evidence that was eagerly published in The Times.8 Ernst Fetterlein at the Government Code and Cypher School had decrypted the intercepts between Lenin and Kamenev, which were then leaked to the press. Lloyd George disliked what he learned from Fetterlein about the Kremlin’s basic intentions and told Kamenev that there was no prospect of resuming Anglo-Russian trade unless Lenin changed his posture.9The Times also alleged that Kamenev had a hand in Moscow’s delivery of the secret subsidy to the Daily Herald and was in regular contact with the Council of Action, which the Labour Party and the trade unions had established on 5 August as part of a campaign to prevent Britain from intervening in the Soviet–Polish war. Other newspapers soon took the same line that Kamenev had come as a diplomat and behaved as a subversive. All this angered Lloyd George and he rebuked Krasin and Kamenev for breaking their word that they would not interfere in British politics. He told Kamenev that if he did not quickly leave the United Kingdom, he would be deported.10

  Lloyd George grew more truculent when news reached London of the Red Army’s defeat east of Warsaw. Kamenev accepted that he was no longer persona grata in the United Kingdom. Before he departed he sent an open letter to the Prime Minister claiming that the government was exploiting ‘paltry and unproved’ charges supplied to it by secret police agents; he also deplored the French government’s decision to recognize Wrangel rather than Lenin as the leader of Russia. Kamenev worried that the Allies might rediscover their enthusiasm for military
intervention, but in fact Lloyd George was being crafty. Nobody in Whitehall really thought Kamenev was worse behaved than Krasin, yet Krasin was allowed to keep his New Bond Street office and continue the trade talks.11 The truth was that the Prime Minister still desired some kind of commercial treaty with Soviet Russia. By making a fog of the situation he alleviated the criticism in the press. Lacking the military or political means to eliminate Bolshevism, he was doing what he thought was the next best thing by undermining the Soviet order through a resumption of commercial contacts. Lloyd George saw himself as the mole-catcher who would grub out communism.

  Like the other Liberals in his governing coalition, he wanted to avoid giving any impression that ministers were out to provoke an armed clash with Soviet Russia. He also needed to show himself as a friend of the British working man, which would be difficult if he threatened a so-called proletarian government elsewhere in Europe. He was also straining to promote Britain’s economic recovery from the post-war recession. Industrialists who had done good business in Russia before 1914 were lobbying him for a resumption of trade with the Russians. National economic self-interest was put forward in justification, and Lloyd George acted with confidence that more people would eventually support him than were writing to The Times to denounce him.

  Krasin still goaded the British by mentioning the progress being made by the rest of his negotiating team elsewhere in Europe. Among the experts on banking and railways he had left behind in Stockholm was Professor Yuri Lomonosov, once a monarchist but now a supporter of the October Revolution. Lomonosov was involved in Sovnarkom’s offer to sell its gold reserves in exchange for locomotives, carriages and rail track, and industrial companies in Sweden competed for the contracts being dangled in front of them.12 Originally the Soviet intention had been to make such purchases in Germany, but this was scuppered when the Allied powers reaffirmed their ban on deals involving Russian gold of disputed ownership. The Germans, having lost the war, had to comply with what the Allies demanded. Sweden, which had been neutral in the Great War and was therefore unaffected by the Paris peace treaties, was the next best option for the Bolsheviks. An agreement was drafted and, with Krasin’s consent, a provisional deal for one thousand locomotives was signed on 22 October 1920. Gold was already in place in Tallinn to complete the agreement. Sovnarkom was delighted at this latest breach in the wall of Russia’s economic isolation. It was consequently odd that it should be Krasin who raised an objection. He belatedly expressed the fear that the Allies would compel Sweden to withhold any railway exports under the terms of the contract. He thought there was a risk of depleting Russian gold reserves for the benefit of Swedish business partners but not for Sovnarkom.13