Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (43 page)

They were incensed by the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by Great Britain and her allies and fearful that the caliphate, traditionally invested in the Turkish sultan, would be abolished. Now, they intended to travel overland to Turkey – a journey of more than 2,000 miles – where they would fight the British.

These were the men who Roy intended to draft into his army. They were fanatically anti-British and fired by religious fervour. They were also highly experienced in guerrilla warfare, especially in the treacherous passes of the Hindu Kush. Roy knew they could cause mayhem if they were professionally trained and then sent back into India to fight.

Roy’s strategy, coming after the collapse of the military alliance with Afghanistan, made a deep impression on everyone he met in Moscow. He was introduced to the inner circle of the Comintern and given every possible assistance in turning his vision into reality. The Comintern was to provide money, leadership and technical know-how. It would also help Roy to establish a Central Asiatic Bureau, which was to be directly responsible for planning the assault on India.

Roy was installed as the bureau’s most prominent member, ‘charged with the responsibility . . . of carrying through the revolution in Turkestan and Bokhara’ – where there were still pockets of resistance – ‘and then spreading it to the adjacent countries.’ India was the principal goal, but the Comintern also had Chinese Turkestan in its sights.

The support of the Comintern brought many benefits. Roy was able to call upon the services of key figures in the Soviet regime, including Grigori Sokolnikov, the commander in chief of Soviet forces in Central Asia. His presence on the board of the Central Asiatic Bureau ensured that Roy could lay his hands on whatever supplies and hardware he needed for his army.

Roy was aware that he needed to move fast if he was to have any hope of success. ‘The war in Europe was over,’ he wrote. ‘Before long, the British-Indian army would again be available for the defence of the North-West Frontier.’

He worked around the clock on planning the logistics for his invasion, acquiring a huge quantity of military hardware. This included a ‘large quantity of arms, field equipment, training personnel and plenty of money.’

By November 1920, everything was ready. The weaponry was secretly loaded onto trains, along with two companies of crack Red Army troops. Their Soviet commander was a veritable giant: ‘nearly seven foot tall,’ wrote Roy, ‘and proportionately broad.’

The initial destination of this travelling force was Tashkent; this was to become Roy’s principal base. But once the nucleus of his Army of Liberation had been recruited and trained, he would move swiftly to stage two of the planned invasion: ‘the establishment of the advance base at Kabul, and operational bases on the Indian frontier.’

After months of secret talks and shady negotiations, the offensive was finally under way.

While Roy was busily acquiring equipment for his army, the Comintern had been engaged in propaganda warfare on a scale never hitherto undertaken. It organised a conference at Baku, on the shores of the Caspian, with the aim of bringing together Soviet revolutionaries and Islamic jihadis and uniting them in a common purpose.

Some 1,800 delegates were invited to the week-long rally which opened in September, 1920. Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, travelled from Moscow to Baku in order to declare the beginnings of a holy crusade that was intended to sweep away the democracies of the West.

Zinoviev was already infamous as a fiery demagogue, one whose speeches could set a crowd alight. In Baku, he surpassed all his previous performances with an oration that electrified his audience. Rising from his seat on the rostrum, he cast his eyes over an auditorium that was heaving with expectant delegates. Some were dressed in the khaki uniform of the Red Army. Many more were decked in the colourful
khalats
and headscarves of Central Asia. All fell silent as Zinoviev launched into his speech with a rousing call to arms.

‘Comrades! Brothers!’ he roared. ‘The time has now come when you can set about organising a true people’s holy war against the robbers and oppressors. The Communist International [Comintern] turns today to the peoples of the East and says to them: “Brothers, we summon you to a holy war, in the first place against British imperialism!” ’

His war cry was greeted with tumultuous applause. Indeed, the shouting and cheering was so loud that his voice was completely drowned out and it was some minutes before he could continue.

‘May this declaration made today be heard in London, in Paris, and in all the cities where the capitalists are still in power,’ he thundered. ‘May they heed this solemn oath sworn by the representatives of tens of millions of toilers of the East, that the rule of the British oppressors shall be no more in the East.’

This was greeted by another roar of approval. Fired with enthusiasm, the delegates unsheathed their swords and scimitars. Some even pulled out their revolvers and started brandishing them in the air. As the roar of the crowd increased in volume, the band pumped out ‘The Internationale’, playing it three times in succession. As it did so, the delegates shouted ‘Long live the Comintern! Long live those who have united the East!’

The Times
would later carry a report on the alarming nature of the congress. Sneering in its tone, it warned of the threat that the Comintern posed to the world at large and reserved much of its contempt for Zinoviev and Bela Kun, the Hungarian revolutionary who had accompanied him to Baku.

‘Of all the strange things which have happened in the last few years,’ it said, ‘none has been stranger than the spectacle of two Jews, one of them a convicted pickpocket, summoning the world of Islam to a jihad.’

Roy and his Red Army troops faced a long and dangerous train journey to Tashkent, for parts of the route were only nominally under the control of Bolshevik forces.

‘Roving detachments of White Guards, who had taken to banditry, still infested the steppes beyond the Ural River,’ wrote Roy. ‘They frequently tore up the railway line and held up trains to plunder.’ He was only too aware that his own trains, with their cargo of weaponry and money, would make an enticing target.

It took two days to reach the Volga River and another day and a half before they arrived at Orenburg, on the border with Turkestan. From here, it was a further one thousand miles across the bleak landscape of the Kirghiz Steppes.

Roy had been granted the rare privilege of travelling in the salon car of the Russian Imperial Train, now reserved for senior commissars and dignitaries. Its velvet drapes and luxurious cushions gave the illusion of comfort, but afforded little protection against the biting cold. He was relieved when they finally pulled into Tashkent after seven days of travel.

Roy stepped onto the platform and was greeted by General Sokolnikov. The general was to help him establish a military base and training camp for his projected army.

But first, Roy was taken to the building that was to be his Tashkent headquarters. It was centrally located and large enough to house his staff. But like so many of the city’s larger villas, it had been ransacked and gutted in the violence that followed the revolution. The furniture had been smashed, the electric wires cut and the water pipes had ruptured in the freezing weather.

‘A few kerosene lamps, feebly aided by flickering candles, tried in vain to dispel the sepulchral darkness of a deserted house,’ wrote Roy. ‘The vast porcelain stoves had not been lit since the arrival of the intense winter cold.’

He and his men were undeterred by the lack of comfort. In fact, they derived an ascetic pleasure from the hardships of revolution. ‘The joy of participating in the liberation of peoples downtrodden for centuries . . .’ wrote Roy, ‘added to the richness of life.’

His first task was to open a Tashkent office of the Comintern. This was a key ingredient for future success, since the Comintern was funding his revolutionary activity. Its central role was signalled by the building selected as its headquarters. It was the mansion that had formerly belonged to the Russian Imperial Bank, a building whose vaults still contained the viceregal crown jewels and all the most precious (and now requisitioned) possessions of the court nobility.

Roy found a profound significance in the choice of such a building. ‘[It was] as if the valuable booty of the Revolution was placed under the custody of the world proletariat, and the honour of holding the trust fell on me.’

Roy himself presided over the weekly meetings of the Comintern, occupying the throne of the deposed imperial dignitary for whom it had originally been made. It was richly carved in rare wood, upholstered in crimson velvet and bore the Romanov coat of arms embroidered in gold.

Roy was all too aware that he was working to an extremely tight time frame. He wanted his army ready within months, so that the thrust into India could begin while the country’s defences were still weak. He immediately set to work on establishing a military academy with training facilities, firing ranges and lecture rooms for teaching propaganda. This was achieved within a matter of weeks and Roy soon found himself his first set of recruits. They were a group of Pathan deserters from the Indian Army, along with a small band of Persian revolutionaries.

The men were swiftly enrolled into the Tashkent academy and trained to use Soviet light artillery. ‘Formidable with rifles, they quickly learned to handle machine-guns and operate the artillery.’

Within weeks, they were formed into an irregular brigade. ‘It was the first International Brigade of the Red Army,’ wrote Roy, ‘and the experiment was a success.’

Other deserters were also enlisted and drafted into an irregular force that began patrolling the Trans-Caspian railway.

Many expressed the desire to train as pilots for Roy’s planned air force. He had brought a large number of dismantled planes to Tashkent, aware that they were certain to play an important role in any assault by land. The havoc wreaked by British planes in the Anglo-Afghan war of 1919 had demonstrated the efficacy of airborne attack in the treacherous terrain of the North-West Frontier.

‘To learn aviation was the general craze,’ wrote Roy. ‘There was a general scramble; everyone wanted to learn flying.’ At least one of those who received training at Tashkent later went on to become a flying ace in the Red Army’s aviation unit.

Roy was delighted by the progress that was being made. ‘A step was taken towards the creation of a nucleus of the army to liberate India,’ he wrote. This ‘nucleus’ was initially commanded by Russians but it was not long before Indians were also raised to officer rank, encouraging yet more deserters to sign up.

‘The International Brigade soon became an effective auxiliary of the Red Army,’ wrote Roy. Armed with machine-guns, they began ambushing and killing British Indian troops on the Persian border and proved highly skilled in guerrilla warfare.

‘Persian groups of the International Brigade could penetrate deep into their country in various disguises and harass the flank of the British Army on the road south of Meshed.’ These were exactly the skills needed for waging war inside India.

Roy was filled with confidence and now set to work on recruiting from the ranks of the 50,000 itinerant
Muhajir
that were drifting through the region. These were from a very different background to the deserters from the British-Indian Army.

‘A refractory lot,’ wrote Roy, ‘moved only by religious fanaticism.’ He drafted an initial group of fifty into his growing army and was taken aback by their Islamic fervour. They had little interest in the revolutionary struggle. Rather, their motivation for fighting the hated British was ‘the possibility of going to heaven by laying down their lives in jihad.’