Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  The British government refused to give way on certain of its demands. Soviet Russia had to cease all hostile activities, including propaganda, in the territories of the British Empire. Britons in Russian captivity had to be immediately released; in return the British would repatriate the Russians they had incarcerated. Chicherin, however, told Krasin to resist any pressure because Britain’s hold on its empire in the East was no longer as strong as it had been. Lenin was blunter still: ‘That swine Lloyd George has no scruples of shame in the way he deceives. Don’t believe a word he says and gull him three times as much.’9 But Chicherin and Lenin soon calmed down since they knew that they would lose the deal if they rejected the British conditions, and Lenin remained pessimistic about Russia’s capacity for independent economic recovery without foreign assistance. His sudden explosions were characteristic. When Soviet officials went abroad on missions he frequently accused them of appeasing foreigners and quietly forgot how he had succumbed to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk. At any rate Krasin could show that the British government was willing to overlook the entire question of loans made to Russia’s previous governments; and since Lloyd George was not driving the hardest of bargains, Sovnarkom empowered Krasin to strike the deal.

  Since the débâcle near Warsaw, the Red Army had stood aside as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania proclaimed their borders and confirmed their independence. Adolf Ioffe led the Soviet delegation in the peace negotiations with Poland in Riga. The Poles had given up their hope that any Russian force could bring down the Bolsheviks. Wrangel’s army felt the full strength of a Red Army which was no longer being asked to fight a campaign on Polish territory. Crammed into Crimea, the Volunteer Army was in a desperate plight by early November 1920 and Wrangel ordered a mass evacuation, along with hundreds of thousands of civilian fugitives, across the Black Sea. The Russian White cause had gone down to comprehensive defeat. The Polish leadership recognized its incapacity to drive the Reds out of Ukraine and settled for a lot less than Poland’s April 1920 war aims. It was no longer convenient for the Poles to host Russian forces, and Pilsudski told Bulak-Balakhovich and his troops to leave the country.10 The Polish border would stay as it had been established in war by October 1920, hundreds of miles east of the Curzon Line. The Central Committee ordered the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to press for a peace treaty with all speed.11

  The prospect of peace between Soviet Russia and Poland proved disastrous for Menshevik-ruled Georgia because it freed the Red Army to cross into Georgian territory from Armenia. The campaign began on 15 February 1921. Tiflis fell ten days later and a Georgian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. Almost the entire territory of the Russian Empire south of the Caucasus was drawn back under Moscow’s control — just a few slivers of land were ceded to Turkey, which the Kremlin was seeking to placate at a time when it could not contemplate any military initiative abroad.

  Hoping to reduce the intensity of all external threats, on 26 February Russia signed a friendship treaty with Persia. The newly appointed Soviet ambassador to Tehran was none other than Theodore Rothstein. Meanwhile Krasin had returned to Moscow to discuss the finalization of the trade agreement with the British. He gave an interview to Louise Bryant, denying that Soviet Russia was in any way a menace to other countries: ‘After all, the talk of the Third International is exaggerated and ridiculous. We haven’t enough people in Russia to meet our needs. We are not fools enough to send our best people abroad when they are needed here to develop Russia. The best means for the world to get rid of this bogy of Bolshevik propaganda is to begin vigorous trade.’12 In her report, Bryant stressed that a freshly signed treaty with Afghanistan put aside the ‘imperialist’ legacy of old Russia. She predicted an end to the ‘English’ domination of the region and reported that Soviet emissaries in Kabul received an unusual amount of diplomatic freedom.13 Not long afterwards, Chicherin announced that Turkey too was aspiring to better relations with Soviet Russia.14 Step by step, the communist leadership were improving their security. None of the world’s great powers had yet concluded a treaty with Soviet Russia, but the chances were steadily improving.

  But more trouble was brewing off the coast of Petrograd. On 28 February the Soviet naval garrison on the nearby island of Kronstadt assembled to demand an end to communist oppression. Mikhail Kalinin and other Bolshevik leaders held a meeting with them the next day. The list of grievances was a long one. The sailors objected to the Bolshevik political monopoly. They demanded free soviet elections and an end to police terror; they denounced the blocking detachments on city outskirts which stopped the ‘sack men’ from bringing food supplies from the countryside for illicit sale. Kalinin failed to calm the situation and soon there was open mutiny in Kronstadt. Trotsky, who had spent the winter months polemicizing about the trade unions, lamented the lack of a proper plan to retake Kronstadt and — on 5 March — co-signed a military order with Commander-in-Chief S. S. Kamenev. If the mutineers refused to heed their warnings, the full force of the Red Army would be deployed against them with air support.15 When Kronstadt held fast to its rebellion, measures were put in hand to suppress it two days later. The symbolism was clear to everyone. The Kronstadters had formed part of the backbone of Bolshevik political and military support in 1917. Now they were turning on Lenin and his party for betraying their hopes. Neither side saw room for compromise.

  The Tenth Party Congress opened on 8 March in the shadow of these events. The Politburo by then had clear ideas on the desirable direction of policy and asked Lenin to explain its proposals. The peasantry was to be allowed to sell some of its grain harvest for private profit. The trade unions were to be subjected to greater state control, but not to the degree demanded by Trotsky. Peace was to be ratified with Poland. Foreign concessions were to be encouraged and the draft trade agreement with the United Kingdom confirmed. Lenin stressed the need for the party to deal mercilessly with threats to its power. Peasant revolts and the Kronstadt mutiny alike had to be crushed. Internal party discipline had to be tightened while communists were conducting a retreat from wartime economic policy. Lenin demanded a ban on party factions and denounced the Workers’ Opposition, which called for workers and peasants to have decisive influence on economic decision-making, as a ‘deviation’ from Bolshevik principles. Every single one of these proposals was contentious. But the worse the news about Kronstadt became, the easier it was for Lenin and his group in the leadership to impose their will on the Congress. A consensus developed about the urgent need to fight for the common cause. Even the Workers’ Oppositionists overlooked their verbal mauling by Lenin and volunteered for service in the military operation against Kronstadt. A quarter of the 717 full delegates immediately left the Congress in Moscow and travelled north.16

  Although Trotsky spoke at the Congress at some length about the trade unions and a little about the proposed agrarian reform,17 he stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin over Kronstadt and handed the military command to Tukhachevski while warning the Politburo that the mutiny should be liquidated before the spring thaw. Once the ice melted, the rebel sailors would again be able to make contact with foreign countries and the trouble could severely worsen. Tambov province was far from the prying eyes of the Allies, but Kronstadt lay in the Gulf of Finland and was easily approachable from abroad by vessels. Trotsky charged the Central Committee with failing to understand the gravity of the situation.18

  The Party Congress ended on 16 March with victory for the ascendant group on nearly every big question of policy even though the debates were sometimes fiery. Communists from Azerbaijan repeated their objections to leasing the Baku oilfields to foreigners. But the tightness of the scheduling at the Congress disabled those wishing to express dissent, and the New Economic Policy was raced through to confirmation almost before anyone had time to read the draft decree. The discussion on Anglo-Soviet trade was left until last, and Kamenev barely had time to introduce it before the entire proceedings were brought to a close and everyone stood to sing the Internati
onale. Lenin had dominated the proceedings and his friends in the leadership gained an easy majority of seats in the election of the Central Committee. And despite banning internal party factions, Lenin behaved as if he headed one both by reducing the number of Trotsky’s followers and by clearing them out of the Secretariat. Trotsky in Lenin’s opinion needed to suffer for having inflicted an unnecessary dispute about the trade unions on the party. Only then could they again start to work in mutual trust. Lenin regarded this as a priority: the communist leaders faced far too many emergencies for them to fall out.

  It was on the very same day in London that the trade talks reached completion with the signing of an agreement by Leonid Krasin and the President of the Board of Trade Robert Horne. While Sovnarkom celebrated, its Russian enemies were justifiably downcast: Lloyd George had rescued the Bolsheviks just at the point when they might have lost everything.19 The Red Army stormed into Kronstadt on 17 March. The Tambov revolt was in full spate. Other provinces in Ukraine, the Volga region and western Siberia were up in arms against the Bolshevik commissars. If the Allies wanted to undermine the Soviet dictatorship, this was a disastrous moment to choose to come to terms with Sovnarkom and prop up its economy. Anti-Bolsheviks looked on in dismay and their misfortunes increased when the Poles signed the treaty of Riga on 18 March. The Politburo had weathered the storm. On 19 March its members examined the latest draft of its decree to abolish grain requisitioning and the next day confirmed the manifesto to be issued to the peasants in pursuit of its support.20 The Bolsheviks had survived a winter of acute emergency by the skin of their teeth — and the British cabinet played not the least part in the denouement.

  Lloyd George’s insouciance about Soviet revolutionary pretensions was exposed for what it was a few days later, on 24 March, when the German Communist Party called for a general strike with a view to instigating an insurrection in Berlin. Inspiration for this action came from certain communist leaders in Moscow. Chief among them were Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek. Apparently leaving Lenin and Trotsky in the dark, they dispatched Béla Kun to the German capital as Comintern’s plenipotentiary. Kun was still smarting from the collapse of his revolutionary government in Hungary and ardently desired to assist the Berlin comrades in overthrowing Germany’s social-democratic government. The thoughtful German communist leader Paul Levi tried to argue against this. He remembered all too clearly what had happened in January 1919 when the Spartacists, lacking popular support, had tried to seize power and had been crushed by government, army and Freikorps. Levi was anxious to avoid a repetition of that disaster.

  Kun, however, had come to Berlin invested with the prestige and authority of a Comintern official; he saw to it that Levi was treated as a troublemaker who was breaking party discipline. He relied on the fact that the German communists had joined the party because they thought Germany was ready for communization. They yearned to reproduce the kind of revolution the Bolsheviks had started in Russia in October 1917. Kun drew together Ernst Thalmänn and a group of young leaders with an impulsive desire to take to the streets. Strikes and demonstrations were organized. Proclamations were issued. Rifles were acquired for use when the time came. The German communist leadership rapidly grew in confidence and ordered its supporters to begin what became known as the March Action. It was soon obvious that Kun’s plans were based on fantasies. A majority of the working class had no wish to see the elected social-democratic government overturned. At least in Munich in March 1919 there had been a semblance of soviets. There was no equivalent whatsoever in Berlin. Even Kun’s failed Hungarian communist republic had attracted support from a large number of workers. In Berlin in early 1921 the social-democrats were more popular than the communists. The communist party was small and inexperienced and, when it came out on the streets, the Reichswehr and police forced it to withdraw in defeat on 31 March.

  In Moscow the Bolsheviks were horrified. If Lenin and Trotsky had been given any advance notice about the March Action they certainly did not admit to it. In fact, they were angry with the bunglers in Russia and Germany. Radek and Bukharin had never had a reputation for sagacity, and Zinoviev was forever trying to make up for his doubts in 1917 about the seizure of power in Petrograd. Although the Politburo refrained from reprimanding them, they in return were compelled to accept and endorse Comintern’s criticism of the German Communist Party. A scapegoat had to be found. With absolutely no justification — and as a way of bringing Germany’s communists to heel for the future — Lenin targeted Paul Levi. Levi was the very man who had endeavoured to stop the March Action before it could begin. But he had breached party discipline whereas the bunglers had behaved with perfect loyalty.

  The Soviets already had a reputation for oppression at home and subversion abroad. The March Action, following so soon after the Kronstadt mutiny, forced them to strengthen their propaganda efforts. Louise Bryant faithfully relayed Trotsky’s words to the International News Service. He pretended that the revolutionary sailors of 1917 had left Kronstadt long before, adding that the mutiny was largely the work of White naval officers who had taken refuge at Tallinn and then spread their influence to the remaining garrison.21 Trotsky insisted, too, that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were acting like ‘the banana peel on which the working class would slip into counter-revolution against the Soviets’.22 Bryant compliantly treated Kronstadt as a minor distraction. In her series of dispatches, she declared that American firms could make huge profits if they started trading with Russia. America’s industrial goods would be exchanged for Russian raw materials. It could be a relationship of perfect equilibrium.23 Bryant probably knew nothing about conditions in the ‘disciplinary colony’ at Ukhta north of the Arctic Circle where the ‘Kronstadt bandit sailors’ were sent on Politburo orders after the leaders of their mutiny were executed.24 She had also not been in Berlin recently and had no direct acquaintance with the pointless loss of workers’ lives on the streets there. She knew of the concerns of her late husband John Reed about Soviet Russia, and as a foreign journalist she had the opportunity to explore them; but she entirely failed to take it.

  As winter gave way to spring, the prospects for communist rule were as yet unclear. Economic compromise and political ruthlessness had prevailed over the massive popular resistance. The Bolsheviks had yielded the minimum necessary to maintain their power. They had won the Civil War but did not yet have a lasting plan for the peace. Their policies were not a coherent programme of action, and they had not ironed out the creases in external and internal policy. The Bolsheviks had never been more confused about their general strategy. Their new measures were extricating them from an immediate emergency. But the party had yet to demonstrate that such measures offered a way to realize communism in Russia, far less in the rest of the world.

  31. THE SECOND BREATHING SPACE

  The New Economic Policy is usually credited with the regeneration of Russia’s economy in 1921, but in fact the enabling legislation for agrarian reform was not passed until April that year. Months were then spent in convincing the peasantry that the authorities were in earnest about permitting private local trade in grain. Three years of forcible expropriation, compulsory labour and endless conscriptions in the Civil War had fostered rural distrust and hatred. It was months into 1922 before the Tambov rural revolt was suppressed. There was famine throughout the Volga region. The Soviet regime had to deploy the Red Army simply to get peasant households to complete the spring sowing.

  But the long-awaited Anglo-Soviet trade agreement did indeed foster genuine recovery. Petrograd once again became Russia’s chief port. Tallinn lacked enough warehouses for the sudden upsurge in traffic — and after Germany’s defeat of course there was no longer any need to rely on Archangel.1 In April 1921 Pravda reported that Soviet officials were already buying rice, jam, salt beef, vegetables and herring from the United Kingdom. With the British trade under way again, the Kremlin hoped that American and Canadian commercial links would soon be in place. Nonetheless, the e
conomic emergency was still acute. Russia had once had more than enough coal to supply the country’s needs. Now it had to be imported.2 The first priority, though, was to lubricate the wheels of exchange between factory and village. Trotsky called for an import strategy that gave precedence to goods that the peasantry needed. In this way he aimed to stimulate agricultural activity and make the New Economic Policy a success, and he was willing to forgo the purchase of big capital goods for a while and requested that the remainder of the gold reserve should be used for such purposes. Timber, oil and grain should be exported to make up for any shortfall — and Trotsky was not deflected from this strategy by the fact that the Volga peasantry was suffering from malnutrition.3

  Communist hopes of a trade treaty with the US were dispelled by the new administration under President Warren G. Harding, who had won the election in the previous year. On 25 March 1921 Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes reaffirmed the policy established under Woodrow Wilson that Soviet Russia lacked the necessary conditions for economic co-operation. Litvinov’s overtures were brusquely rebuffed.4 It was Herbert Hoover, recently appointed Secretary of Commerce, who best explained the official standpoint. He denied that Sovnarkom was a legitimate power and predicted that Russian economic recovery would not occur while the communists held capitalism in a vice. The New Economic Policy did nothing to change his mind. He reasoned that the Bolsheviks could not be trusted while they sought financial credits from America despite refusing to guarantee private property as a right under the law.5 He also doubted that the Soviet regime could export anything much except gold, platinum and jewellery.6 This did not stop him from welcoming news that American businesses were signing independent deals with the Soviet government. Shoes and farm equipment were being sold in vast quantities to Russia.7 But if firms conducted business with the communists, they had to do so at their own risk. Hoover was not going to stop American firms trading with Russia, but he was not going to help them either.