Well, the truth, as usual, lies midway. We had the fever mildly and now our temperature is a little below normal and so the world will go on in impulse and reaction to the end, always making a little progress in the long run unless the great catastrophe that has overtaken civilisation in Russia should overtake the civilisation of the globe. There have been Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, Carthage and Rome and the fate that overtook those great empires may overtake empires again, on so slender a thread hangs all human stability.
The Soviet ideal never got beyond its paper stage in England. Perhaps the nearest approach to it was the Rank and File Movement, which Lenin afterwards declared to be the nucleus of an organisation which embodies his ideas; but by the time the Russians were ready to subsidise the Rank and File Movement, workmen had realised the advantage of electing moderate men and women to represent them and the Rank and File Movement was dead.
One revolutionary paper, The Call, printed an article, ‘Learn to speak Russian!’ and said that the working class must ‘assert its will in Russian accents … It would be anti-Parliament, as the great Chartist Conventions were. Then we shall soon see how easily Russian can be spoken even in these islands without the knowledge of grammar or vocabulary’; but The Call had few readers at that time and there was a general distrust of anyone who held up Russian institutions for imitation.
For some months we were concerned with the antics of Maxim Litvinoff, whom the Bolsheviks had appointed their representative in England. On 18 February 1918 he addressed a meeting in Westminster at which the late Mr Anderson MP presided; 2,000 tickets were issued. Litvinoff’s reception on this occasion seems to have turned his head. He had taken an office in Victoria Street, at which he received visits from Russians serving in the British Army, from the crews of Russian ships of war lying in British harbours and from a vast number of persons of Bolshevik sympathy. Indeed, the number and the quality of the visitors became so embarrassing to the other tenants that the landlord evicted him. He had already appointed Mr John M’Lean, of the British Socialist Party, to be Bolshevik Consul in Glasgow and he himself called at the Russian embassy and demanded that it should be handed over to him.
Litvinoff is said to be a native of Baisk, a town in the Baltic Provinces. Both his parents were Jewish and his father’s name was Mordecai Finkelstein, a shopkeeper who used to give private lessons in Russian and Hebrew. Having associated himself with the revolutionary movement he left Russia and after some vicissitudes he came to London and obtained work at a stationer’s shop under the name of David Finkelstein. Later he changed his name to Harrison and became secretary to a Russian group of political refugees. He married a lady of Jewish descent, a British subject, though of foreign extraction. When the Russian Government Committee was formed for the purchase of war supplies he obtained work in the Agricultural Department and he kept his post for some months after the second Revolution and left it only in July 1917. He took this post under the name of Maxim Maximovitch Litvinoff. While Kerensky was in power he showed no Bolshevik leanings, but these appeared very soon after the subsidy from the Russian provisional government was stopped. He then left the committee and joined the Russian Delegates Committee with Tchitcherin at Finsbury House.
Soon after his appointment as Bolshevik representative he began to associate with English pacifists. He wrote and circulated a manifesto which appeared in the Woolwich Pioneer and he was accused of urging the soldiers who visited his offices to engage in propaganda in their regiments. As soon as the deputation from the Russian patrol vessel Poryv returned from seeing him a mutiny broke out on that vessel and on her sister ship, the Razsvet, both lying in Liverpool, and voices were heard crying, ‘Shoot the officers!’ A British naval officer came on board and saved their lives. The crews were taken on shore to the police cells and some of them made statements affecting Litvinoff. Deportation orders were made against them and they were sent back to Russia.
Litvinoff’s cup was full. It was decided, none too soon, that he should leave the country and not return to it. For a man of so humble a position and so lofty an ambition it was a severe blow. No doubt he had lain awake at nights dreaming of himself in uniform and decorations among the Corps Diplomatique at St James’s and it was not surprising that his disappointment should vent itself in bitter antagonism to this country. We had not quite done with him. The Russians had taken many British prisoners of war and they nominated Litvinoff to represent them in the negotiations for their release.
The high cost of living had provoked an outcry against profiteering and was causing very serious unrest. The London docks were choked with frozen meat that nobody wanted, but flour and other food-stuffs were deficient. A number of ill-informed people believed that there were large stores of corn in the granaries of south Russia and that if the cost of living was to be reduced in England this corn ought to be got out even at the cost of entering into quasi-diplomatic relations with the oligarchy in power in Moscow. An officer of the Ministry of Food made himself a laughing-stock by writing a grave essay to that effect, but it was no laughing matter, for there ensued from it the phrase, ‘the bulging corn-bins,’ though it was well known at the time that if the corn-bins bulged it was because there was nothing in them to support the walls.
At the beginning of 1920 the Soviet government was holding a number of British officers and soldiers as prisoners of war, although we were not at war with Russia, nor at the time were there any military preparations against her.
The pressing need was to rescue these prisoners and Mr O’Grady MP was sent to Reval to confer with Litvinoff, as representative of the Soviet government. Now Litvinoff had never concealed his strong desire to return to England in any capacity which might result eventually in his recognition as Russian ambassador. These negotiations were dilatory and ambiguous, being designed to bring the maximum of pressure to bear on the British government through the unfortunate prisoners.
Out of this conference, which did at last result in the release of the prisoners, grew the Russian Trade Agreement with England. The trade that has resulted is negligible. We have sold the Russians very little, we have got from them practically nothing that we wanted, but a great deal that we did not want at all. In May 1920 Kameneff and Krassin arrived in London to arrange the Agreement. A Jewish journalist of ability and experience named Theodore Rothstein at once attached himself to their delegation. During the war he had been employed in the press section of one of the government departments, where his known communist sympathies were thought unlikely to be dangerous to the country. He had never lost his Russian nationality, though his son, who shared his father’s views, having been born in England, was a British subject. Mr Rothstein immediately threw all his energies into a campaign in favour of communism in this country. He was the intermediary for subsidies to revolutionary organisations and his secret activities were far-reaching. Fortunately, in August 1920, he was selected to accompany Monsieur Miliutin to Russia and from that country he was not allowed to return. A year later he became the Bolshevik representative in Teheran.
This was not Kameneff’s first visit to England. Not very long after the Armistice he arrived in this country with another communist on his way to Paris and Berne, where they were respectively to become the permanent Bolshevik representatives. They brought with them a cheque for a large sum of money and a mass of propaganda literature in leather trunks, rove with steel chains, which they said had been used by the imperial Russian couriers for conveying documents of a specially secret nature: they chuckled over the manifest impossibility of the British police examining the contents without leaving their mark behind them. It was tempting Providence! As it was clear that the French government would not admit them and that they could not stay in this country they were both sent back to Russia with all their luggage and the cheque was handed to them on embarkation. There was a good deal of difficulty in inducing them to go, for one of them declined to get out of bed and a gigantic Cossack in physical charge of the party could speak no langua
ge but his own. But a display of tactful firmness by the Special Branch inspectors got them to King’s Cross just in time to catch the boat-train.
Under these circumstances it was scarcely to be expected that Kameneff would be friendly to this country and he soon began to show his hand. There were several counts against him. He had deliberately falsified a dispatch on the question of the Polish War at a time when the Councils of Action were ready to swallow any false information if it came from a Russian source and he had been foremost in arranging a Russian subsidy for the revolutionary press in England. He was plainly informed that the British government was aware what he had done and that they did not regard him as a proper representative of the Russian government. He departed to Moscow on the understanding that he would not return.
He was succeeded by Krassin as the head of the present Russian Trade Delegation. Every member of it gave an undertaking in writing not to interfere in the internal affairs of this country, or to be interviewed by representatives of the press: Monsieur Krassin gave a verbal undertaking to the same effect. While he tried loyally to carry out this undertaking and to confine himself to the non-political business for which he was admitted to this country, it was not so with many members of his staff and, as propaganda is considered to be the first duty of every communist, it was scarcely to be expected that they would keep any such promise. They had private conferences with members of the Council of Action and they supplied the Daily Herald regularly with ‘news’ from Russia.
Bolshevism has been described as an infectious disease rather than a political creed – a disease which spreads like a cancer, eating away the tissue of society until the whole mass disintegrates and falls into corruption. It has other attributes of disease. Captain McCullough has given an excellent description of its first febrile stage, when a young Russian bluejacket named Mekarov, who was certified to be Bolshevik-proof, returned from a Bolshevik meeting mad drunk on Bolshevik oratory and bad alcohol and went roaring up and down the corridor with a revolver threatening to murder the British officers. It is not recorded whether the same symptoms were observed in Paris during the Terror, but a German who had been through the recent revolution in Germany told me that he had noticed the eyes lighted by dull fire from within. I noticed the same symptoms in a young policeman who was shouting, ‘Let’s have a revolution!’ during the police strike. The Russians, the most amiable and the most docile of people, took the malady in its severest form; but while there were outbursts unknown to western Europe all over the country, the propagandist was displaying almost superhuman industry in Petrograd and Moscow. Leaflets were poured out from the press by the ton and the Russian revolutionaries living in foreign countries were at once mobilised to preach the Red doctrine.
In July 1918 Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, who had long been working on revolutionary lines in opposition to the rest of her family, joined with Mr W. F. Watson, of the Rank and File Movement, to found the People’s Russian Information Bureau on funds provided by the Russians for the dissemination of Bolshevik literature and the preaching of revolution.
On 30 August the police strike filled the extremists with renewed hope. For the Londoner the bottom seemed to have fallen out of the world. That a body so trusted and so patriotic should refuse duty in the last stages of a war in which so many of their comrades were fighting, implied that there was none of our settled institutions in which one could trust any more. There was no real cause for anxiety: the strike was economic, not revolutionary. For many months an agitation fostered by an ex-inspector who had left the Metropolitan Police with a grievance had been carried on and a Police and Prison Officers’ Union had secretly been formed. It had gained few adherents until the rise in the cost of living without a corresponding rise in pay swelled the membership to several hundreds. The Commissioner, Sir Edward Henry, was fully alive to this just grievance and had put forward proposals which had been approved. If the approval had been made public perhaps there would have been no strike, but unfortunately part of the scheme was an endowment for the widows of policemen and the actuarial calculations that were involved were holding up the whole scheme. For some days before the strike there had been a vigorous campaign of recruiting for the union and word had secretly been passed round that all members were to be ready. The great mass of the older men knew nothing of these plans. When they came on duty on the morning of 30 August a strong picket ordered them back and as they encountered the picket singly most of them obeyed. A number, however, refused to be intimidated and some of these were made afterwards to pay for their loyalty. Sir Edward Henry was on leave; Scotland Yard was filled with excited demonstrators in plain clothes. There were marches to Tower Hill, where the extremist members of the London Trades Council addressed the men. Special Constables were hustled and abused, but as might have been expected of the London driver, the traffic managed itself with surprisingly few accidents.
As soon as their grievances were remedied the great body of the men returned to duty. Sir Edward Henry retired, receiving a baronetcy for his services, and Sir Nevil Macready, the Adjutant-General, was appointed in his place. The Police Union, with the support of many Labour leaders, was now pressing for recognition and as a union in a disciplined force would have been unworkable, representative boards forming a direct channel from the men to the Commissioner were instituted and accepted by the Force. All this was skilfully managed by Sir Nevil Macready.
The officials of the Police Union, encouraged by revolutionary Labour, now began to organise a second police strike for the ‘full and frank recognition’ of the Police Union. The authorities were aware of their plans and were also aware that the higher pay granted on the recommendation of Lord Desborough’s Committee had satisfied the great majority of the men. In August 1919 when the strike was called, barely 1,000 men responded in London. At Liverpool the number was much larger and many of the warders at Wormwood Scrubs Prison also came out. All were dismissed. Among them, no doubt, were many thoughtless men who had done good service in the war, but had lacked the backbone to stand out against the revolutionary agitator. Their places were filled by demobilised soldiers, among whom were a few demobilised officers. Many of the police strikers joined the extremists in a campaign for reinstatement, but on this point the government has remained firm.
At this time the great body of Englishmen had only one preoccupation – the last phases of the war. There were distractions abroad as well as at home. In Finland the Red Terror had broken out and the Finnish right, for self-defence as they said, called in German troops for their protection. Many of the outrages during the Red Terror were committed not by Finns but by the Russian Bolsheviks who had poured into the country. There followed a reaction, which Finnish socialists describe as a White Terror, though in fact it seems to have been greatly exaggerated.
While the whole world was watching Marshal Foch’s counter-strokes with bated breath it had no time to think of revolution and even now it is not generally known that revolutions on the Russian plan actually broke out on Armistice Day, 1918, in Switzerland and Holland. They failed because the Swiss and the Dutch are not Russians. Immediately, the stable populations of these countries determined to take no further risk. In Switzerland military lorries drove up to the door of the Soviet representatives and the whole gang, men and women, with their belongings were packed into the vehicles and conducted to the frontier under a military escort. In Holland the orderly people formed a Burgerwacht, a sort of volunteer special constabulary recruited from all classes down to the humblest workman and for the moment the revolutionary movement was stifled. In Hungary Bela Kun, acting under the orders of Lenin, produced a revolution on the Russian model and that unspeakable ruffian, Szamueli, who ‘committed suicide’ and so escaped the penalty for his crimes, ravaged the country for five months and brought it to ruin.
Our first troubles in England arose out of demobilisation. As long as hostilities continued no soldier minded going back to France, but men did not at all see the necessity of going back when th
ere was no more fighting to do. On 10 January 1919 there were military riots at Folkestone and shortly afterwards at Calais and there was a feeling throughout the army that the system of demobilisation in liberating first the key industry men, irrespective of their length of service, was an injustice.
During the first month of 1919 there were minor disturbances at several of the camps, chiefly among the technical services, in which a large proportion of the men belonged to trade unions.
In the months following the Armistice some of the societies of ex-servicemen began to give anxiety. The most dangerous at the moment seemed to be the Sailors’, Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Union, which had wholeheartedly accepted the Soviet idea and was in touch with the police strikers who had been dismissed, with the more revolutionary members of the London Trades Councils and with the Herald League. The ‘Comrades of the Great War’ never gave any cause for anxiety, nor, on the whole, did the National Federation of Ex-Servicemen, though some of its branches were swayed by a few of the more extreme members.
During February 1919 a young Russian Bolshevik violinist was touring the country and drawing large audiences of working men and women not so much to listen to his playing as to the revolutionary speeches with which he interspersed his performances. His was a typical case of the epidemic in its febrile stage, a stage from which the British appear to be immune. In the disturbed state of the public mind it was decided that Soermus would be better in his own country and his triumphant tour was interrupted in order that he might be put on board a boat which was about to sail for Norway. This happened to be fixed for the day before the ‘Hands off Russia’ meeting at the Albert Hall, at which every section of the revolutionary movement was represented on the platform. Soermus was to have been on the platform at this meeting. There was a large strike on the Clyde at the moment and many of the speakers really believed that it was the beginning of the General Strike which was to merge into revolution. At that moment we were probably nearer to very serious disturbances than we have been at any time since the Bristol Riots of 1831. A few days later the reaction began. On 12 February the Clyde strikers resumed work and a few weeks’ later the National Industrial Conference met.
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