Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (3 page)

In the highly dangerous battle of wits that was to follow, these British agents had one advantage over their Bolshevik adversaries: they had already been working inside Russia for more than three years. Long before Lenin brought his revolutionary ideas to Petrograd, they already knew how to break the rules.

The team was led by an English gentleman named Samuel Hoare, and it was to make the first of many daring strikes in the winter of 1916.

PART ONE

SHOOTING IN THE DARK

CHAPTER ONE

MURDER IN THE DARK

Samuel Hoare eased himself from his chair and wandered over to the window of his office in the Russian War Ministry.

In the parade ground below, hundreds of young conscripts were rehearsing an attack through a quagmire of straw and mud. Icy rain was pouring from a gunmetal sky, turning the ground to liquid. Yet the conscripts seemed oblivious to the autumn chill as they advanced on their bellies towards imaginary German trenches.

Hoare stared at them for a moment before returning to the huge pile of documents that had just been delivered to his desk. Secret reports of battle failures; secret accounts of deserting troops; secret tales of disaster and mutiny. It did not take a genius to realise that Russia was losing the war on the Eastern Front.

Samuel Hoare was head of the Russian bureau, a seventeen-strong team of British intelligence officers working in Petrograd, capital of the Russian Empire. He had arrived in the city in the spring of 1916, excited and not a little bemused by his unexpected summons to join Britain’s intelligence service.

It had all happened so quickly: a private meeting in Whitehall, some questions about his fluency in Russian and then an offer of employment, swiftly concluded with a handshake. ‘In the space of a few seconds,’ he later recalled, ‘I was accepted into the ranks of the Secret Service.’

He was an unlikely candidate for espionage. An English baronet of the old school, he had been the Conservative Member of Parliament for Chelsea since 1910. Well-spoken, well-mannered, well-heeled, he was solidly conventional. Harrow and Oxford, old chap. Double first.

But he had taught himself conversational Russian and this had earned him the notice of the Secret Intelligence Service. He was to be sent to Petrograd in order to forge links with Russian generals and monitor the fighting on the Eastern Front.

It was not a question of spying on the enemy: Russia was a key member of the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia) fighting against Germany in the First World War. However, Hoare’s role was certainly of vital importance. The conflict on the Eastern Front was tying down huge numbers of German troops that could otherwise be transferred to the Western Front. A sudden influx of battle-hardened soldiers to Northern France would spell disaster for the British Tommies struggling to hold their entrenched positions in Picardie and Champagne.

Hoare was hoping to be initiated into a world of glamour, duplicity and deception when he first arrived in Petrograd. He had been given a rudimentary training in eavesdropping and ciphering and was looking forward to using his new skills.

However, his work at the Russian War Ministry proved monotonous and exhausting, with twelve-hour days and no holidays. Far from infiltrating subversive meetings, he found himself helping to supply Russian ministries with much needed supplies. On one occasion, he was asked to procure thousands of beeswax candles for the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church.

His evenings were no less tedious – a succession of champagne soirées with highly decorated generals whose knowledge of battlefield strategy was lamentable. ‘Incompetent, idle, self-indulgent, irresponsible,’ was Hoare’s opinion of the Minister of War.

Teamwork meant everything to Hoare. He played according to the rules – taking pride in being firm but fair – and he expected his men to do the same. He was unaware that they didn’t all agree with his very British approach to espionage. Nor did he realise that there was a far more nefarious side to the activities of the bureau that he directed. Among those serving in his team was a young Oxford graduate named Oswald Rayner. Along with a handful of others, Rayner had established a clandestine inner circle that members referred to as the ‘far-reaching system’.

This ‘system’ aimed to act in absolute secrecy, spearheading underground missions that left no trace of their involvement. These dangerous operations, of which Hoare had no knowledge, were to become a hallmark of the Russian bureau.

Oswald Rayner’s ‘far-reaching system’ was to make the first of many spectacular strikes in the winter of 1916. It was to leave a fingerprint so faint that it would remain undetected for nine decades.

The bitter chill of December 1916 brought a heightened sense of gloom to the city of Petrograd.

‘For us,’ wrote Hoare, ‘it made the ordinary routine of life difficult and irritating, but for the hundreds of thousands of working women who, badly clothed and miserably housed, stood hour after hour in queues amidst the snow and sleet of a Petrograd winter, and often went home with nothing for their families, it was a grim tragedy that led inevitably to bloodshed and revolution.’

Hoare’s weekly intelligence reports revealed that poor leadership and inadequate weaponry had led to Russian war fatigue. ‘I am confident that Russia will never fight through another winter,’ he wrote that December.

The imperial splendour of the Marinsky Theatre offered the only possibility of escape. Oblivious to the steady disintegration of the Russian Army, it continued to stage exquisitely choreographed ballets. Tsar Nicholas himself no longer attended, yet the royal box still sparkled with candlelight throughout the performances. ‘[It] seemed to many of us to symbolise a capital that the Emperor seldom visited and a society that the Emperor never saw,’ wrote Hoare.

The tsar’s absence only fuelled the rumours that he was no longer in charge of the country. The British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, concurred with the many who said he was under the baleful influence of the tsarina. Others claimed that the affairs of state were being manipulated by the tsarina’s ‘holy’ advisor, Grigori Rasputin.

As the tsarina grew increasingly alarmed about the health of her haemophiliac son, so she became increasingly dependent on Rasputin. He seemed blessed with semi-magical powers that brought temporary relief to the young tsarevich, heir to the Russian imperial throne.

Rasputin had many enemies. Licentious and dissolute, he was widely (if erroneously) believed to belong to the extremist Khlyst sect. Its practitioners held that boundless debauchery was the best way of suppressing lust and they engaged in orgiastic rituals while invoking the name of the Holy Spirit.

Rasputin’s lifestyle was widely criticised in the press. The tsarina was also much maligned, albeit more obliquely. Born into the Hesse-Darmstadt dynasty, she was suspected of having pro-German sympathies. It was not long before she and Rasputin were being viewed as a monstrous duo that was secretly sabotaging the Russian war effort in the hope of a German victory.

As the food crisis worsened, people spoke euphemistically of ‘Dark Forces’ at work in the Petrograd palaces. ‘Each and every calamity or inconvenience was in the public mind due to the “Dark Forces”,’ wrote Hoare.

Rasputin was eventually named as the leader of these ‘Forces’ and his removal from the court was demanded by the Duma, the legislative assembly. A succession of parliamentary speakers denounced his dangerous hold over the imperial family.

Hoare summed up these speeches in a single sentence: ‘Let the Emperor only banish this man and the country would be freed from the sinister influence that was striking down its natural leaders and endangering the success of its armies in the field.’

He was convinced that Russia’s problems would be instantly solved if only Rasputin were to be removed from the capital. But no one, it seemed, had the power or authority to rid the country of the tsarina’s favourite.

An icy wind was whipping off the Gulf of Finland.

The River Neva was frozen to a pewter crust and fine wisps of snow were rasping its surface. The city of Petrograd was shivering in a deep winter chill.

Shortly before midnight on 29 December 1916, a lone car swung into the courtyard of the Yusupov Palace. The car’s yellow headlamps cast a brief glare on the palace’s colonnaded gateway. The vehicle then made a circular sweep of the snow-covered courtyard and came to a halt by the side entrance of the building.

Three people were seated inside the car, all of them from very different walks of life. At the wheel was Doctor Lazovert, an army doctor on leave from his duties at the battlefront. He was dressed in disguise, masquerading as the chauffeur of the Yusupov family.

Behind him sat Prince Feliks Yusupov, an elite member of the imperial
Corps des Pages
. He was heir to the richest dynasty in the Russian Empire and celebrated as one of the most decadent aristocrats in Petrograd. He was also one of the most handsome. His almond eyes and delicate cheeks might have looked effeminate were it not for the compensation of a strong aquiline nose.

The third person in the car was Grigori Rasputin, the Russian tsarina’s confidant. He usually wore the simple garb of an Orthodox monk but on this particular night he was dressed for a party.

‘He wore a silk blouse embroidered in cornflowers with a raspberry-coloured cord as a belt,’ recalled Yusupov in his account of the evening. ‘His velvet breeches and highly polished boots seemed brand new.’

Rasputin’s beard, usually a wiry tangle, had been neatly combed: Yusupov had never seen him look so immaculate. ‘As he came near to me,’ he wrote, ‘I smelt a strong odour of cheap soap.’