Odd People

by Basil Thomson

  On 1 May 1919 this new arrangement came into force. A most admirable and efficient little staff was organised at a very low cost to the country. The revolutionary press tried to spread the belief among its readers that enormous sums were being lavished, that I went about with bulging pockets corrupting honest working men; whereas, in fact, all the most useful and trustworthy information was furnished gratuitously and the corruption was all on the other side. Many of the communist leaders and organisers were receiving salaries from Russia and, as a communist said feelingly a few months ago, ‘These men are all out for money and they would sell their own grandmothers.’ I have a shocking confession to make: I numbered among my friends communists who, while quite honestly entertaining communist views, disapproved very strongly of the manner in which the movement was being exploited.

  There are a number of virtuous people who think it highly improper for a government to keep itself quietly informed of what is going on in its own and other countries. They forget that they themselves, in the lobby of the House of Commons, in their clubs and at their dinner-tables, are collecting and dispensing intelligence all the time. That is how public opinion is formed. The duties of an intelligence officer are very like those of a journalist, the difference being that in the case of the intelligence officer he tries to sift out the truth and to give it all to his superiors, whereas the journalist has first to consider what it is good for the public to know and what will contribute to the popularity of his newspaper. I have tried hard to put myself into the mental attitude of the good people who think intelligence ‘immoral’, and I cannot help feeling that their real objection is that it is inconvenient.

  However this may be, it was certainly the case in 1920 and 1921 that while our expenditure had decreased there was not much of subversive activity in any part of the world that was unknown to us and whether we liked it or not, we were forced into the position of becoming a sort of clearing-house for foreign countries. The great art of acquiring information is to have friends in every grade of society in as many countries as possible.

  During the first three months of 1919 unrest touched its high-water mark. I do not think that at any time in history since the Bristol Riots we have been so near revolution. The Workers’ Committees had acquired the chief power in London, Sheffield, Coventry, Wales and on the Clyde and the cry for shorter hours was seized upon eagerly by the revolutionaries. On 27 January there were extensive strikes on the Clyde of a revolutionary rather than an economic character. There was great restlessness also among the electrical engineers and a general strike at the power stations had been fixed for 5 February. This was stopped by a new regulation which made strikes at power stations and similar vital undertakings illegal. The authorities had made arrangements for taking over the service if the strike occurred and no doubt some rumours about the arrangements had leaked out among the electricians. I remember waiting at the telephone at 11 p.m. one night. If the strike had taken place the leaders would probably have been brought to trial. I counted on a certain number of men coming out without the strike becoming general and in this event we should not have taken any action. The messages began to come in. No one had answered the call to strike except in one power station, where twelve men walked out into the street. Consequently, no action was taken.

  Late in January the ‘Hands Off Russia’ movement had been started and at a meeting at the Albert Hall on 8 February every section of the revolutionary movement was represented on the platform. The speeches were probably the most startling that had ever been made in that somnolent and respectable edifice. The workers were urged to arm themselves and people who had not been following the movement were in a flutter. To one whose business it is to know individuals and to watch the formation of subversive bodies this inflammatory oratory does not quicken the pulse by a single beat. It is all as hollow as the declamation of a tragedian in a stage rehearsal. One knows so well that if the drum did beat these fiery orators would take good care not to be among the first casualties. A retrospect is very instructive, for one sees how a movement which creates public consternation for a few weeks boils up, cools and evaporates. It was so with the People’s Russian Information Bureau, to which no fewer than a hundred societies affiliated themselves; it was so with the Sailors’, Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Union and, later, with the Councils of Action and it will be so with the ‘Hands Off Russia’ movement, with the Union of Democratic Control and with many other more sinister movements that will shake the nerve of future generations. All, all will pass into the lumber room, where the dust is already accumulating over the Union of Democratic Control and its sisters, the Pacifist Societies.

  In April 1919 we learned that a conspiracy was on foot to induce serving soldiers who enlisted under the Derby Scheme and under conscription to ‘demobilise themselves’ on 11 May on the ground that they enlisted for the period of the war and six months after. They were to strip off their badges and march out of barracks, not only in Kempton Park, Winchester, Salisbury and Oswestry, but in Rouen, Havre, Boulogne and Calais. In a speech delivered on May Day a member of this league who, during 1917, was employed in the Adjutant-General’s department, War Office, urged a general strike to enforce demobilisation on 11 May and about the same time a leaflet headed ‘To British Sailors’ incited naval ratings to seize the ports and invite soldiers and policemen to join them.

  The Daily Herald of 7 and 8 May published paragraphs supporting the view that the men were entitled to leave the colours on 11 May. The unrest among serving soldiers, especially the technical services, such as mechanics, drivers and other trades, many of whom were members of trade unions and had or thought they had jobs waiting for them which might be snapped up by others, was such that very serious disturbances might have resulted from this insidious form of incitement. But the Army Council issued a statement explaining the conditions of enlistment, which appealed to the good sense of the men, and 11 May passed off without disturbance.

  CHAPTER 24

  OUR COMMUNISTS

  KERENSKY’S REVOLUTION DID not take the official world by surprise: it was, in fact, inevitable. The Revolution was hailed by uninstructed public opinion in England as a fulfilment of long-deferred hope and some statesmen who ought to have had more prescience joined in the acclamation. The worst of revolutions is that they never know where to stop and when in the middle of a war they befall one of the Allies upon whom the rest are counting, they are a disaster of the first magnitude. Kerensky was not fashioned by nature to ride the whirlwind: a mountain-top, whence he could indulge his gift of impassioned oratory, would have been a safer steed for him. His nerveless fingers never gripped the reins: he could not even bring himself to execute mutineers and deserters in the field. It was inevitable that a stronger hand should thrust him aside. Strange that we should ever have talked of Russia as the ‘Steam Roller!’ All that is left of it now is the red flag.

  Of all the stupidities committed by the Germans during the war I think that the locked train was the most inexcusable because, as Ludendorff has since admitted, it was fraught with grave danger primarily for Germany herself. There had congregated in Switzerland a little band of revolutionaries who had fled after the disturbances of 1905. There, year in and year out, they frequented cafés and smoked and talked as only Russians can talk until the whole world became unreal and danced before them through a haze of cigarette smoke. For them revolution meant no half measures. They had drunk in the fatuities of Karl Marx until there was no room left in their minds for sober reasoning and here in their own country was their opportunity. In Russia a torch was to be put to dry thatch and presently the Red conflagration should spread until it consumed the world. The workers with sickle and hammer should unite over the whole world to wipe out the bourgeoisie. That was the measure of their intelligence.

  All this the Germans knew. They would not have such inflammatory material loose in their own country, but as a means of paralysing the army of their ancient Muscovite enemy it should be used at once, for K
erensky was reported to be preparing a new offensive. It is not quite clear from whom the proposal first came; whether the Bolsheviks asked for a ‘safe-conduct’ across Germany, or whether some German diplomatic agent invited the request; but it is known that the exiles packed themselves into a train which was sealed at the German frontier and kept so until it crossed into Russia. Had Kerensky and his advisers been wise and strong they would have hitched a locomotive to the other end of the train and sent it back, but they were neither wise nor strong. It is said that when Ulianov, otherwise Lenin, was making inflammatory speeches Kerensky was implored to take action against him and that he said, ‘Let him talk: he will talk himself out.’

  I remember speaking about this time to a diplomatist with a knowledge of Russia and asking him whether he thought that the Czar, who was then a prisoner in his own palace under Kerensky, was in any personal danger. He shook his head and said that he doubted whether the Czar would come out of the welter alive.

  With the second Revolution in November 1917, the Bolsheviks came into power. They included Nihilists, Anarchists and extreme Social Revolutionaries, who were all soon to be enrolled in a single body as communists and followers of Karl Marx. Lenin has never swerved from his plan of making Russia merely the seed-bed for a general revolution in Europe on a class basis. He hoped for it in Germany, Austria and Italy; he was certain of it in the Ukraine and Poland, but he admitted that his chances of success in England and America were small because in England he held the working class to be too ignorant and in America there had been no preparation. For the moment the Bolsheviks showed a frenzied energy in striking terror into their political opponents. There were mass executions and the horrors attending some of them, especially at Kronstadt, were not exaggerated. Even Tchitcherin, usually the mildest of men, wrote on 11 September 1918 to the head of the American Red Cross:

  Our adversaries are not executed, as you affirm, for holding other political views than ours, but for taking part in the most terrible battles, in which no weapon is left untouched against us, no crime is left aside and no atrocities are considered too great when the power belongs to them … 300 have been selected already (for execution) as belonging to the vanguard of the counter-revolutionary movement. In the passionate struggle tearing our whole people do you not see the sufferings, untold during generations, of all the unknown millions who were dumb during centuries, whose concentrated despair and rage have at last burst into the passionate longing for a new life, for the sake of which they have the whole existing fabric to remove?

  In the great battles of mankind, hatred and fury are unavoidable as in every battle and in every struggle.

  If he had said simply that they were executing their opponents in order to save their own skins he would have been nearer the truth, for fear is always more fertile in violent outrage than the spirit of revenge.

  There was something providential in the sequence of events. The Bolshevik Revolution came at a time when the entire people in England except a few defeatists and pacifists had gritted its teeth and was determined to see the war through. If it had come eighteen months later, when demobilisation was in the air and people were looking for a new world, it might have gone hardly with us. As it was, the ordinary Englishman felt that he had been ‘let down’ by the Russian Bolsheviks and he resented the treachery.

  The second Russian Revolution turned the heads of the pacifists and defeatists in England. They had failed in every enterprise: the country had declined to endorse their scheme for obtaining peace by negotiation with the Germans and here at last was a great people ready to put the doctrines of Karl Marx into practice. They had a great deal to explain away: it was impossible altogether to deny the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, but they could attack their own government on the score of the Allied intervention, which they represented as an attempt on the part of the capitalists to strangle an infant socialist state at birth and to excuse the excesses of the torch-bearers of revolutionary socialism. This, they thought, would be a more popular cry than ‘Peace by Negotiation’.

  On 3 June 1917 they called a National Conference at Leeds, which was attended by over 1,900 people. It was said at the time to have cost £5,000 and to have been held at the expense of the Union of Democratic Control. Mr Ramsay MacDonald described this conference as the most active gathering he had ever attended; Mr Sexton as ‘the most bogus, the most dishonest and the most corrupt conference ever created by the mind of man’. It was resolved to divide Great Britain into Soviets to the ominous number of thirteen, with headquarters in Duke Street, Adelphi. These Soviets existed for a few weeks and then expired. At Tunbridge Wells some attempt was made among soldiers awaiting demobilisation to organise support for a local Soviet among the troops, but there was little response. The Provisional Council, nominated presumably with their own consent, were also to be thirteen – a number which seemed to exercise a fascination on the Conference. They included Messrs Robert Smillie, Philip Snowden, Ramsay MacDonald, Robert Williams, George Lansbury and Joseph Fineberg, the Russian-Jewish secretary to Litvinoff. It is believed that this council never met, though manifestoes were issued by Mr Albert Inkpin in its name.

  The Russian Revolution dug Karl Marx out of the grave in which he had been lying uneasily since 1883. Karl Marx was a Prussian Jew born in 1818. He was driven successively from Prussia and from France and he found an asylum in London. He was not a working man, nor had he any business experience and his theories about capital and Labour were purely academic. His philosophy was really an attempt to reconcile the doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man, expounded by Rousseau, to modern economic conditions. In his time Rousseau’s theories were a little fly-blown. Marx attempted to rehabilitate them by pointing out that the industrial revolution had lowered the status of the workmen while immensely increasing their economic value; that it had deprived them of all real interest in their expanding industry and had converted them into ‘wage-slaves’. He called upon them to take arms in the class war throughout the industrial world. His manifesto, used by the Russian Bolsheviks and the British extreme socialists, was, ‘Workers of all lands, unite! You have a world to win; you have nothing to lose but your chains,’ and in another passage, ‘We make war against all the prevailing ideals of the state, of country, of patriotism.’ As Burke once said of the Jacobins: ‘This sort of people are so taken up by their theories of the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.’

  Between 1848 and 1860 the idea of international solidarity of classes was popular, but after 1860 the lines of cleavage tended to become vertical rather than horizontal, for from that date Europe became increasingly nationalist. Moreover, Marx himself, owing to his long residence in England, had begun to waver in his opinion. The mid-Victorian trade unionist believed in constitutional action. Marx, who had formed a Communist League in London in 1847, had seen it collapse in 1852. It had been re-formed in 1862 as a result of the cosmopolitan feeling created by the Great Exhibition, but after a few meetings, generally held in Switzerland, it languished and died. The only power that seemed to be growing was that of the constitutional trade unionist and before his death Marx was himself inclining in that direction.

  Some months before the Bolsheviks came into power a curious document which has since received much attention in England was brought to the notice of the State Department in Washington. The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, first published in Russian in 1897 by a Russian named Nilus, purported to set forth the details of a secret Jewish conspiracy for the domination of the world. A committee of Americans were preparing a report upon the document and I was asked unofficially to give my opinion upon its authenticity. Besides the internal evidence there was very little to go upon, but I reported that the ‘protocols’ were almost certainly fabricated by some anti-Semitic organisation and I heard afterwards that the American Committee had reported in the same sense.

  It was quite natural that when the Bolsheviks came into power and it was seen that nearly all the people’s commissarie
s were Jews, so obvious a fulfilment of the Protocols should not pass unnoticed. It was useless to point out that, ‘protocols or no protocols’, it was inevitable in a country like Russia: people would have it that the first part of this sinister programme had been realised and that worse was still to come. No doubt, the famous Protocols did faithfully reflect the kind of talk that has been current among fanatically nationalist Jews among themselves for more than a century.

  How the Russians themselves regard their Jewish masters is shown by a popular story now current in Russia. At a Soviet meeting the list of elected delegates was read over. The secretary came to the name ‘Ivan Ivanowitch Petroff’.

  ‘But what’s his real name?’ asked a delegate.

  ‘Ivan Ivanowitch Petroff. He has no other name.’

  ‘Bah!’ said the Jewish delegate. ‘These Russians will push in everywhere.’

  In Bela Kun’s regime in Hungary, as well as in Russia, nearly all the commissaries and especially those who were guilty of atrocious acts of cruelty, were Jews.

  There is one and one only virtue in the Russian Bolshevik – that he knows what he wants and allows no weak scruples or respect for public opinion to prevent him from getting it. Fancy a government of this country that knew its own mind and had no scruples and cared nothing for public opinion! It is conceivable that it might really bring about ‘a country fit for heroes to live in’ instead of a country in which only heroes can live.

  At this time even the professional moulders of our opinions failed us. I remember saying to a great newspaper owner in 1917 that he might devote his papers to a denunciation of Bolshevism and he replied, ‘Who’s afraid of Bolshevism? I tell you there will be so much employment in England after the war and the people will be earning such high wages, that they will have no time to think of Bolshevism.’