Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (33 page)

Arthur Ransome eventually obtained permission to attend the opening session of the Comintern. On his way to the meeting, he bought the local newspapers and noted with interest that they made no mention of it whatsoever. ‘It was still a secret,’ he wrote.

He made his way to the Kremlin, where the gathering was being held, and watched as the delegates assembled in the Courts of Justice built by Catherine the Great. The décor had been elaborately prepared for the occasion: ‘the whole room, including the floor, was decorated in red.’ The walls were festooned with revolutionary banners in different languages and the principal Soviet delegates were already in their seats.

‘Everyone of importance was there,’ noted Ransome, including Lenin and Trotsky. The latter had come in full military garb: ‘leather coat, military breeches and gaiters, with a fur hat with the sign of the Red Army in front.’

The audience was waiting in great expectation; waiting for Lenin to issue his rallying cry for global revolution. Eventually the great man rose to his feet and prepared to launch into his speech. As he did so, the delegates leapt from their seats in frenzied excitement and began cheering and whistling in support of their leader.

‘Everybody [was] standing and drowning his attempts to speak, with roar after roar of applause,’ wrote Ransome. They were so loud and enthusiastic that it was a long time before Lenin could make himself heard.

Ransome was blown away by the experience, not least because of the secrecy that surrounded the meeting. ‘It was an extraordinary, overwhelming scene, tier after tier crowded with workmen, the parterre filled, the whole platform and the wings.’

When the crowd finally fell silent, Lenin launched into a wild invective, promising that the Comintern would export revolution around the globe. ‘Let the bourgeoisie of the world rage, let them drive away, imprison, and even kill the [Bolsheviks]. All this is of no avail.’ He said that Soviet Russia was the leader of an international struggle in which there could be only one winner.

No one was in any doubt that Lenin was in earnest when he spoke of unleashing terror around the world. His words were uttered with such chilling conviction that Ransome listened wide-eyed.

‘It was really an extraordinary affair . . .’ he wrote, ‘[and] I could not help realising that I was present at something that will go down in the histories of socialism.’

Ransome met with Lenin in private on the day that followed the conference and pressed him further on the founding of the Comintern and its drive for world revolution. He particularly wanted to know the implications for Britain.

‘We are at war,’ was Lenin’s blunt reply. ‘And just as during your war, you tried to make revolution in Germany . . . so we, while we are at war with you, adopt the measures that are open to us.’ These ‘measures’ included invasion, insurrection and militant propaganda.

Lenin chatted candidly with Ransome, unaware that his words were being sent directly to Mansfield Cumming. The report that Ransome eventually compiled was detailed, covering political and economic aspects of life in Russia. He also acquired a number of documents from the Commissariats of Labour, Trade and Education: ‘practically all the printed matter that was available,’ he wrote. This was all despatched to London.

Ransome warned that the Bolshevik government had been ‘very much strengthened’ over the preceding months. He also stressed that Lenin and Trotsky were committed to global revolution. Both men had long spoken of their intention of spreading revolutionary mayhem around the world. Now, with the establishment of the Comintern, they had a tool with which to achieve this.

Paul Dukes was still in Petrograd when the Comintern was established ‘amid circumstances of great secrecy’. Shortly after the Moscow meeting, he learned that several key delegates were due to visit Petrograd. Aware of the significance of what was taking place, he made it his business to meet them. Among them was Grigori Zinoviev, the first chairman of the Comintern.

Dukes had first met Zinoviev before the revolution and had viewed him as a firebrand. Now Dukes heard his acid tongue in action once again. His position in the upper hierarchy of Bolsheviks had done nothing to improve his oratory. He had become ‘a gutter demagogue of low type, with bloated features and a vicious tongue.’

Dukes’s goal was to investigate the aims of the Comintern and he soon laid his hands on a report, written by Lev Karakhan, the Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs. This set out Bolshevik policy towards the East and gave details of a special mission that was being established to promote revolution and civil unrest.

‘The main object of the Mission,’ according to the report, ‘is to form connexions with revolutionary societies, to establish a centre in Turkestan for revolutionary activities in the East, where literature may be published, agents recruited and where it will be easier to keep in touch with affairs and direct the work according to the demands of the moment.’

The report made for such disturbing reading that it would (at a much later date) be published in
The Times
. Dukes noted that the Bolshevik mission had been provided with ‘an enormous sum’ to foment trouble. ‘It was decided to do everything possible to excite anti-British feelings in India, working at the same time on the fanatical religious sentiment of the natives.’ The Comintern wanted to harness militant Islam to its own revolutionary goals.

Dukes always tried to send original documents to Mansfield Cumming. But this was not always possible and he often had to make notes in secret and at short notice.

Some reports were so sensitive that they had to be copied in invisible ink. ‘I made the ink by – oh, it doesn’t matter how,’ wrote Dukes in his memoir. He had presumably been briefed about using semen when reporting highly sensitive information.

Dukes hid all his reports in his apartment until such time as they were ready to be transmitted to Stockholm. ‘I wrote mostly at night, in minute handwriting on tracing paper, with a small caoutchouc [rubber] bag about four inches in length, weighted with lead, ready at my side.’

He was constantly listening out for the Cheka. ‘In case of alarm, all my papers could be slipped into this bag and within thirty seconds be transferred to the bottom of a tub of washing or the cistern of the water-closet.’

It was the perfect hiding place. Dukes said he had seen Cheka officials turn entire apartments upside down in their quest to find hidden documents, ‘but it never occurred to anybody to search through a pail of washing or thrust his hand into the water closet.’

It was one thing to prepare his reports for transmission to London, quite another to smuggle them out of the country. Dukes inherited John Merrett’s courier system but it proved far from perfect. One of the key couriers was executed in January 1919, and Dukes urgently needed to find a new one.

He eventually found the perfect candidate, a man whom he referred to as Peter Petrovitch. His real name was Pyotr Sokoloff, an imposing figure who was ‘tall and muscular, slightly round-shouldered, with thick fair hair and a good humoured but somewhat shy expression.’ He was well equipped for danger: ‘a crack revolver shot and a prize boxer.’

Sokoloff’s preferred method of transporting documents to Finland (and thence to Sweden) was on foot. ‘The first time he took my despatches, it was in winter and he went on skis,’ recalled Dukes. ‘He was to run out at night onto the frozen sea near Sestroretsk, opposite Kronstadt, and ski across the snow-covered ice to Finland.’

It was a hazardous trip, for the coastline was under constant observation by Red Guards. On one occasion, Dukes himself made the journey, only to end up being chased by Red Army soldiers. ‘Suddenly there was a flash and a crack, then another and another,’ he wrote. ‘They were firing with carbines, against which a pistol was useless . . . a bullet whipped close to my ear.’

Dukes flung himself out of his dog-sledge and slid across the ice, clutching his precious reports. His pursuers did not notice his escape: they continued to chase after the empty sledge while Dukes hid in the craters of rough sea ice. When the soldiers were no longer in sight, he trekked across the frozen bay until he reached the ice-bound harbour of Terijoki in Finland.

‘It must have been a weird, bedraggled creature that stumbled several hours later, up the steep bank of the Finnish shore,’ he wrote.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE LETHAL M DEVICE

Five weeks after the founding of the Comintern, Winston Churchill made a keynote speech at the Connaught Rooms in London.

He had only been recently appointed Secretary of State for War, yet he was outspoken in his approach to Bolshevik Russia. He viewed Lenin and his commissars as an enemy that needed to be fought and crushed before it was too late.

‘Of all the tyrannies in history,’ he said, ‘the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and most degrading.’

He surprised many in his audience by declaring that ‘it is sheer humbug to pretend that it [Bolshevism] is not far worse than German militarism.’

He contended that the revolutionary atrocities being committed by Lenin and his comrades were ‘incomparably more hideous, on a larger scale and more numerous than any for which the Kaiser is responsible.’ Now they were intending to export those atrocities right around the globe.

Churchill would have liked to send large numbers of British troops into Soviet Russia with immediate effect, but his ministerial colleagues demurred. They had little appetite for renewed warfare and they were acutely aware that public opinion would not support large-scale military intervention. Prime Minister David Lloyd George listened to Churchill’s Connaught speech with consternation: ‘He has Bolshevism on the brain,’ he later remarked, ‘[and] he is mad for operations in Russia.’

Churchill’s anti-Bolshevik speeches were to grow increasingly strident in the months to come as he sought to persuade colleagues of the absolute necessity of major intervention in Russia, including the deployment of ground troops.

‘Bolshevism is not a policy, it is a disease,’ he told the House of Commons shortly after his Connaught speech. In an address to his constituents he went even further, warning that ‘civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.’

Churchill warmed to his baboon theme and used it on a number of occasions. ‘I will not submit to be beaten by the baboons,’ he thundered to one audience; he also spoke of the need to fight ‘against the foul baboonery of Bolshevism.’

In another speech, equally colourful, he described the new regime in Russia as ‘a league of failures, the criminals, the morbid, the deranged and the distraught’, while those who supported them were ‘typhus-bearing vermin.’

Churchill’s choice of language offended many. Even
The Times
baulked at his turn of phrase. Churchill was unrepentant. ‘I did not expect to encounter the hostile criticism of
The Times
,’ he wrote in a haughty response to their lead article.

Churchill continued to argue the case for armed intervention: he said it was Britain’s moral duty to throw military support behind the White armies that were locked in a desperate struggle against the Bolsheviks. In Churchill’s eyes, they represented the last hope of destroying the dangerous regime in Russia. But he also knew that parliament could not consider any intervention until it had a hard-headed assessment of the strengths and qualities of the White armies.