Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (32 page)

The opulent palaces that lined the Moika lay deserted, for the dynastic families had either fled or been shot in the Red Terror. The city’s liberal intelligentsia, along with its writers and journalists, had met with a similar fate. So had the wealthiest business magnates.

Felix Dzerzhinsky himself had encouraged his Cheka officers to devote all their energies to a ruthless class war. He called for ‘the extermination of the enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles.’ He said that up to ten million people would have to be annihilated – all those who had actively supported the old order.

Dukes had grown up in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg and had known the city at the height if its imperial splendour. Now he got to see first-hand the Soviet system that Lenin was determined to impose on the city, the vast country and ultimately the rest of the world.

‘The market places of Petrograd are crowded daily with thousands selling every imaginable sort of goods . . .’ he wrote, ‘people with a few herrings in filthy pieces of newspaper, a number of individuals displaying on their open palms lumps of sugar at 6 or 7 roubles per lump.’ It was tangible evidence of a growing economic catastrophe.

Dukes had decided to remain incognito during his entire time in Russia, for he had no wish to implicate any of his former friends. But he did make contact with John Merrett, who had been keeping Mansfield Cumming’s espionage operations alive ever since the departure of Reilly, Hill and Lockhart.

Merrett told him how the secret police had been on his trail for many weeks. Just a few days earlier he had managed to make ‘a larky getaway’ as they burst into his apartment. He escaped from their clutches by ‘slithering down a drainpipe outside his kitchen window.’

On that occasion he had managed to disappear into the night, but he knew they would soon be back on his trail. ‘The blighters are looking for me everywhere,’ he told Dukes. ‘I was held up one evening by one of their damned spies under a lamppost, so I screwed up my face into a grimace and asked him for a light. Then I knocked him down.’

Merrett provided Dukes with a graphic account of the dangers of life in Russia. He also told him of his intention to leave the country immediately, for he had been warned that the Cheka were closing in on him.

He gave Dukes a list of all his underground contacts and agents, including several employed by the Ministry of War. He also gave him the addresses of all the safe houses in the city.

Then, after a brief farewell, Merrett fled the city in disguise: ‘With his face smudged with dirt and decorated with three day’s growth of reddish beard, a driver’s cap that covered his ears and a big sack on his back, Murometz [Dukes’s codename for Merrett] looked – well, like nothing on earth.’

Dukes tentatively made contact with known anti-Bolshevik agents living in Petrograd – men and women whose names were so secretive that he only ever referred to them by their professions: The Banker, The Policeman, The Journalist. He made it known that his first requirement was intelligence on the state of the Baltic fleet.

It was not long before he was brought a top-secret report that had been intercepted while it was being transmitted to Trotsky from the commander in chief of the Bolshevik Navy. It revealed that coal was in such short supply that the fleet could no longer put to sea.

Dukes also obtained the confidential minutes of a meeting of the Revolutionary Military Soviet, chaired by Trotsky himself. This provided many more revelations about the state of the fleet and included an amusing anecdote about Trotsky’s fury on learning that officers were being forced to clean the lavatories.

‘[He] thumped his fist on the table, smashing an ink-stand, and declared in an excited voice: “I dare not call this sort of thing by its right name, as there is a lady present.” ’

The most important piece of intelligence was a plan of the minefields that surrounded the fort of Kronstadt in the Gulf of Finland. This included an instruction to the mine-layers that was to prove critical to Dukes’s own survival in the months to come. ‘The mines,’ it said, ‘must be laid at a depth of 2½ to 3 feet from the surface.’

When Mansfield Cumming read these lines, he realised that any future naval operation in the Gulf of Finland would require a wholly new type of vessel – flat bottomed and of shallow draught – if they were to avoid being blown up by mines.

In a short space of time, Dukes managed to forge contacts inside various commissariats and thereby provide Cumming with a steady supply of intelligence documents. His work was much appreciated in London. He received a message of praise from Whitehall and learned from the Stockholm bureau that he would be given every possible support.

‘The whole of the Baltic area was told to be ready to render me assistance . . . my name was kept a strict secret and if ever I needed to use an English name, I was told to use Captain McNeill.’

Cumming himself ordered that Dukes be helped in every possible way. ‘Supply ST25 with everything he wants,’ he told his men in Stockholm, ‘and convey thanks.’

Dukes spent part of his time mingling with the local Petrograd dockworkers in order to gauge morale in the fleet. He invented a whole new biography of himself, telling the sailors that his hostility to the old regime had led him to be banished from Russia. He even spun a tale about being imprisoned in England, ‘[where] the brutality and starvation to which I had been subjected in the English jail had reduced me both physically and mentally and I was a confirmed invalid for a long time to come.’

He relished the deceit, limping along with a stick and wincing with every step. The sailors took pity on him and repeated his stories to their comrades, telling them that he had been a ‘victim of capitalist maltreatment’.

Dukes continued to use the persona of Joseph Ilitch Afirenko throughout the spring of 1919. But he also adopted a second disguise, that of Joseph Krylenko, having managed to forge papers in Krylenko’s name.

He would later assume a third identity, Alexander Vasilievitch Markovitch, a clerical assistant at the head postal-telegraph office. He even acquired a uniform and a set of blank post-office identity papers that he filled in with Markovitch’s personal details.

‘Tracing the signatures carefully, and inserting a recent date, I managed to produce a document indistinguishable as regards authenticity from the original.’

Dukes was proud of his various personas and had himself photographed in disguise. His pose as Afirenko saw him sporting a wispy moustache and beard, a missing front tooth and oval framed glasses. It gave him the air of an impoverished mathematician.

As Markovitch, he cut a quite different figure. With his neatly trimmed beard, smart fur hat and round glasses, he looked like a provincial but well-educated functionary.

Dukes would later become Alexander Bankau, who bore no resemblance to his other incarnations. For this role, he shaved his beard and discarded the fur hat. As Bankau, he would sport a razor-sharp moustache, a peaked cap and workers’ smock. He looked the perfect Bolshevik revolutionary.

He felt so confident in his various disguises that he decided to return to the apartment in which he had lived before the revolution. He had left some belongings there and wanted to know if they were still there.

He visited the flat in the guise of Alexander Markovitch, hoping that the friendly old housekeeper, Martha Timofeievna, would not recognise him. When she opened the door, he told her that he was a friend of Paul Dukes and had come to pick up some of his belongings. His disguise worked to perfection. Martha had no clue as to his real identity.

Dukes got a surprise when he looked through his remaining possessions. ‘I came upon my own photograph taken two or three years before,’ he wrote. ‘For the first time, I fully and clearly realised how complete was my present disguise, how absolutely different I now appeared in a beard, long hair and glasses.’

He passed the photo to Martha in order to gauge her reaction. ‘Was he not a nice man,’ she sighed. ‘I wonder where he is now and what he is doing?’

Dukes concealed his smile. ‘ “I wonder,” I repeated, diving again into the muck on the floor. To save my life, I could not have looked at Martha Timofeievna at that moment and kept a straight face.’

While Paul Dukes was living his undercover life in the northern city of Petrograd, Arthur Ransome was reporting to Mansfield Cumming on the situation in Moscow.

Ransome had no need for false identity papers for he had crossed the frontier quite openly, after being expelled from Stockholm on suspicion of being a Bolshevik. He and Evgenia travelled by train to Moscow, arriving on ‘a rare cold day’ and paying over the odds for a sledge-driver to take them to the Metropol. The hotel was full, but Ransome’s old friend Lev Karakhan, Commissar for Foreign Affairs, came to the rescue and secured him rooms in the Hotel National.

Ransome had told the Bolshevik leadership (truthfully, as it later transpired) that he was intending to write a history of the Bolshevik revolution. This opened many doors. Over the weeks that followed, Ransome was given free rein to attend meetings of the Executive Committee and interview all the most important political players.

In his ‘Report on the State of Russia’, written for Mansfield Cumming and the Foreign Office, he said he was given unlimited access to ministries and meetings. ‘I was entirely uncontrolled . . .’ he wrote. ‘The Bolsheviks, knowing I am writing a history of the revolution, gave me every possible assistance.’

Trotsky suspected him of being a spy, as did Grigori Zinoviev. Indeed Ransome would later confess that he had ‘run considerable risks of detection at the hands of the Bolsheviks.’ Yet he was always protected by Lenin, who trusted him as a supporter of the revolution.

The book that Ransome eventually published,
Six Weeks in Russia
, contained pithy descriptive portraits of the most important commissars. These were often satirical and always irreverent: only Lenin escaped censure. ‘This little, bald-headed wrinkled man who tilts his chair this way and that, laughing over one thing or another . . .’

The two men liked to banter about the revolutionary struggle. Lenin genuinely enjoyed Ransome’s company ‘and paid me the compliment of saying that “although English”, I had more or less succeeded in understanding what they were at.’

Ransome insisted that England was not ripe for revolution, but Lenin refused to listen. ‘We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs,’ he said. ‘Twenty, maybe thirty years ago, I had abortive typhoid and was going about with it, [and] had had it some days before it knocked me over . . . England may seem to you untouched, but the microbe is already there.’

Lenin was convinced that the entire world was tipping inexorably towards revolution and told Ransome of his conviction that one extra push would bring the old order crashing down.

He had good reason for his optimism, for a glance around the globe revealed a world in upheaval. The Ottoman Empire was on the brink of collapse and the Hapsburg Empire lay in ruins. Berlin was in revolutionary turmoil and even the victorious Allied powers faced massive social unrest in the aftermath of war.

In the first week of March 1919, Ransome was privy to some sensational news. It might never have reached his ears had it not been for the unguarded comments of the senior Bolshevik functionary, Nikolai Bucharin.

Bucharin had heard that Ransome was thinking of leaving Russia. Never doubting that he was anything but a loyal Bolshevik, he offered a piece of advice.

‘Wait a few days longer,’ he said, ‘because something of international importance is going to happen which will almost certainly be of interest for your history.’

Ransome was intrigued. No one else had spoken of this event. Indeed officials had been studiously careful not to mention it in his presence. ‘Only once,’ he would later write, ‘I found them hiding something from me.’

This ‘something’ was indeed to prove of immense significance. That very week, a meeting in Moscow saw the founding of a new body, the Comintern, which was dedicated to fomenting global revolution.

This was no hypothetical goal. The new organisation had been created in order to struggle ‘by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic.’ The meeting was to bring together revolutionary activists from around the world, with more than two dozen countries represented.