Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (10 page)

Maugham had the idea of setting up a propaganda bureau that could vigorously support Kerensky’s government. He said it would require an annual budget of $500,000, a vast sum of money that raised surprisingly few eyebrows in Whitehall. He was told that ministers were prepared to spend more if the organisation proved effective. But the proposed bureau was outrun by events and the money was never needed.

Maugham’s intelligence reports were carefully scrutinised by William Wiseman in New York. ‘I am receiving very interesting cables from Maugham,’ he informed Mansfield Cumming in London. ‘He asks if he can work with British intelligence officers at Petrograd, thereby benefiting both and avoiding confusion. I see no objection . . . He is very discreet.’

Maugham spent his evenings ‘coding my sombre impressions.’ Then, when the work was done, he would take himself off to the Hotel Europe and swill goblets of brandy with English and American journalists.

‘[We] caught the Russian mood – ‘
Nitchevo!
’ [It doesn’t matter],’ wrote one of those journalists. ‘[We] managed to enjoy ourselves and forget the revolution.’

On one occasion, Maugham had lunch with Louise Bryant, the partner of John Reed who would later write his celebrated account of the revolution,
Ten Days that Shook the World
.

‘You won’t reveal you had lunch with a British secret agent, will you?’ joshed a well-lubricated Maugham at the end of the meal. Bryant erupted into a peal of laughter. ‘It couldn’t have been funnier if he’d said he was an ambassador of the Pope,’ she wrote.

The situation in Petrograd was by now so troublesome that Maugham saw no future for Kerensky’s government. ‘The Germans were advancing; the Russian soldiers at the front were deserting in droves, the navy was restless and there were stories bruited that officers had been cruelly butchered by their men.’

The stories were true. Bolshevik gangs were taking advantage of the unrest to murder and pillage.

In the first week of October, a desperate Kerensky summoned Maugham to a private meeting. He had a message that he wished Maugham to relay to Britain’s prime minister as soon as possible. It was ‘so secret that he would not put it in writing.’

Maugham agreed to deliver it to Lloyd George in person and left Petrograd that very day. But he was obliged to write the message down, for he was worried that his uncontrollable stammer would ruin his delivery of it once he was in the prime minister’s presence.

Kerensky’s secret proposal was an audacious political manoeuvre that had two principal objectives: to keep Russia in the war and simultaneously undermine the Bolsheviks. He wanted Lloyd George to make an offer of immediate peace with Germany, but on such stringent terms that Germany would have no option but to refuse.

A German refusal, argued Kerensky, would enable him to reinvigorate the Russian war machine. He could instil in the army a renewed sense of purpose. ‘I can go to my soldiers and say: “You see, they don’t want peace.” Then they will fight.’

Kerensky’s idea was bold but wholly unrealistic. Maugham knew that the British government would never agree to his proposition. He also knew that he was dealing with a broken man. Kerensky’s last words to Maugham were a testimony to his failure as a political leader.

‘When the cold weather comes I don’t think I shall be able to keep the army in the trenches,’ he said lamely. ‘I don’t see how we can go on.’

Maugham found it all very sad. ‘The final impression I had was of a man exhausted. He seemed broken by the burden of power.’

Maugham left for London that very day, taking a train to Oslo and then a boat to England. He debriefed the prime minister about his mission and repeatedly tried to relay the message from Kerensky, proposing that Britain make an offer of peace to Germany. But each time he started speaking, Lloyd George cut him short.

‘I received the impression, I don’t exactly know for what reason, that he had an inkling of what I had to say to him and was determined not to let me say it.’

In the end, Maugham grew so frustrated that he thrust his handwritten account of Kerensky’s proposition into the prime minister’s hands.

‘He read it and handed it back to me.

‘ “I can’t do it,” he said.

‘It was not my business to argue.

‘ “What shall I tell Kerensky?” I asked.

‘ “Just that I can’t do it.” ’

Maugham left the prime minister’s office wondering how he would break the news to Kerensky. He was dreading returning to Russia, especially as his tuberculosis had returned with a vengeance. But scarcely had he began planning his trip than it was suddenly cancelled.

‘[There] came the news that the Bolsheviks had seized power and Kerensky had been overthrown.’

The days of friendly co-operation were at an end. Russia had become the enemy.

CHAPTER FOUR

KNOW THY ENEMY

Mansfield Cumming’s Russian bureau was still housed in the Petrograd War Ministry at the time of the second revolution of 1917 that swept the Bolsheviks to power.

The agents who had previously worked under Samuel Hoare continued to send intelligence back to Whitehall Court, although it was becoming increasingly difficult to form a clear picture of what was taking place in those turbulent times.

News also reached London from regular diplomatic channels. Ambassador George Buchanan was still at his post, but his tenure in Russia was rapidly coming to an end. Conventional diplomacy was soon to become an irrelevance.

On the evening of 7 November, Buchanan happened to glance out of the embassy window and was surprised by what he saw. ‘Armoured cars took up positions at all points commanding the Winter Palace,’ he noted in his diary.

Buchanan knew that Kerensky’s ministers were inside the building and he feared for their safety. The 2,000-strong garrison had dwindled over the previous few days and the building’s defence was now entrusted to three squadrons of Cossacks, a handful of volunteers and a company from the Women’s Death Battalion. Their numbers were so small that only a few of the palace’s numerous entrances could be guarded at any one time.

Ambassador Buchanan had a second unwelcome surprise at 9.45 p.m. when the cruiser,
Aurora
, fired her famous blank shot. It was a signal for the Bolshevik revolution to begin. Soon afterwards, Buchanan saw live shells fired on the Winter Palace from the Peter and Paul fortress. By midnight, a mob of Bolshevik revolutionaries had surrounded the building and was intent on sacking this tangible symbol of the old regime.

When they finally broke into the building at around 1 a.m. they met with little resistance. The image of the Winter Palace being stormed by force was a piece of later propaganda.

‘Three rifle shots shattered the quiet,’ wrote the American journalist Bessie Beatty who was at the scene. ‘We stood speechless, awaiting a return volley; but the only sound was the crunching of broken glass spread like a carpet over the cobblestones. The windows of the Winter Palace had been broken into bits.’

As Beatty stood there waiting to see what would happen next, there was a loud cry. ‘It’s all over,’ shouted a Bolshevik sailor. ‘They have surrendered.’

Kerensky’s ministers inside the palace had taken refuge in the famous Malachite Room. According to an account later written by the British military attaché, Sir Alfred Knox, they experienced a tense few hours as they awaited the arrival of the mob. One of the ministers kept spitting on the ground. Another walked up and down ‘like a caged tiger.’ A third sat on a sofa ‘nervously pulling up his trousers till they were finally above his knees.’ All knew that the endgame was near and that Russia was heading into an uncertain future.

The ministers were still hiding in the Malachite Room when the revolutionaries burst in and arrested them. They were marched off through hostile crowds to the Peter and Paul fortress. All except Kerensky, who had fled the city. There were rumours that he would soon be returning at the head of an anti-Bolshevik army.

By 3 a.m., the corridors of the Winter Palace were packed with an unruly crowd of revolutionary activists. The American journalist, John Reed, witnessed scenes of total disorder as the mob embarked on an orgy of looting.

One man was ‘strutting around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder; another found a plume of ostrich feathers, which he stuck in his hat. The looting was just beginning when someone cried: “Comrades! Don’t take anything. This is the property of the People!” ’

Reed himself appropriated a jewelled sword that he tucked inside his winter coat. His sympathies with the Bolshevik revolutionaries did not preclude him from filching public property.

It was not until the following morning that Ambassador Buchanan was brought the most unwelcome news of his entire tenure in Russia. He received confirmation that Lenin’s revolutionary Bolsheviks had seized power. Kerensky’s Provisional Government had been swept away, along with the last vestiges of law and order.

Events now gathered apace. That very evening, 8 November, Lenin made his first public address at the Smolny Institute, a cavernous building with classical façade on the eastern fringes of Petrograd. It had previously been an elite finishing school for daughters of the nobility, but the powdered young ladies and their governesses had been evicted by a detachment of Red Guards. Now, it was the headquarters of the new revolutionary government.

Lenin read out a proclamation calling for the transfer of all privately owned land into the hands of the Peasants Soviets – local councils – that had sprung up across Russia. He then demanded an immediate end to Russia’s participation in the First World War and made a dramatic call for revolution in the Western democracies. It was a portent of things to come.

When Lenin had finished speaking, Trotsky took to the rostrum and harangued the crowd. ‘There are only two alternatives,’ he shouted. ‘Either the Russian revolution will create a revolutionary movement in Europe, or the European powers will destroy the Russian revolution.’

Both men were already viewing the Western democracies as a far more dangerous enemy than the German Kaiser.

George Hill was still in Petrograd when the revolutionary upheaval occurred. He was not yet working for Mansfield Cumming: he was still employed as a military advisor to the Russian armed forces.

But he was increasingly drawn to unofficial intelligence work, gathering information on anything that seemed of relevance. When he learned that the Smolny Institute had become the temporary home of the new government, he immediately headed there and talked his way inside in order to see Lenin in person.

He found the Bolshevik leader ‘a strong and simple man of less than middle height with a Slavonic cast of countenance, piercing eyes and a powerful forehead.’

In a characteristically bold move, Hill stepped forward to shake Lenin’s hand. ‘His manner was not friendly, nor could it be said to be hostile; it was completely detached.’

He found something chilling about Lenin, something that he was unable to pinpoint at the time. It was as if he was determined to push ahead with his revolutionary ideals, whatever the cost in human blood.

Hill held out the vain hope that the Bolsheviks would keep Russia in the war. He also hoped that the new leaders would allow him and his colleagues to remain in Petrograd as military advisors to the Russian armed forces. But his visit to the Smolny Institute made him realise that this was most unlikely: the new regime looked certain to cut all its ties with the Entente governments. The Bolsheviks, he wrote, were ‘ruthless, ignorant, pig-headed, seeking to conduct affairs on a strict adherence to a few second-hand phrases.’