Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (6 page)

‘Were it favourable, he would chuckle, “Ha!” while a grimly roguish smile, boding no good to someone, would slowly spread over the broad face.’

Mansfield Cumming was soon engaged in work of vital importance to national security. The naval arms race with Germany and the First World War dominated the early years of his tenure. He despatched agents to France, Belgium and Germany, from where they sent back information on troop movements and naval manoeuvres.

He spent long hours at the office, working through weekends and public holidays. He only occasionally saw his wife, May, who lived for much of the time at their country house at Bursledon in Hampshire. A prim and rather demure Scottish lady, May had grown used to her husband’s long absences.

During the early years of his tenure as the Chief, Cumming undertook espionage missions in person, disguising himself with toupee, fake moustache and an outfit that even he described as ‘rather peculiar’. In preparation for one important assignment, he hired clothes from William Berry Clarkson’s theatrical costume shop in Soho. The disguise, he declared, was ‘perfect . . . its existence not being noticeable even in a good light.’

He delighted in showing visitors a photograph of himself pretending to be a heavily built German. ‘[He] was entranced when I failed to recognise the party in question,’ wrote Valentine Williams. ‘It was himself, disguised for the purposes of a certain delicate mission he once undertook on the Continent before the war.’

One of these foreign missions came very close to killing him. It also revealed a dogged, obsessive determination that was to become the hallmark of his working life.

In the summer of 1914, he had headed to France in the company of his only son, Alistair. They were driving at high speed through woodland in Northern France when Alistair lost control of the wheel. The car spun into a roadside tree and flipped upside down. Alistair was flung from the vehicle and landed on his head. Cumming was trapped by his leg in a tangle of smouldering metal.

‘The boy was fatally injured,’ wrote Compton Mackenzie in his account of the incident, ‘and his father, hearing him moan something about the cold, tried to extricate himself from the wreck of the car in order to put a coat over him; but struggle as he might, he could not free his smashed leg.’

If he was to have any hope of reaching his son, there was only one thing to do. He reached for his pocket knife and hacked away at his mangled limb ‘until he had cut it off, after which he had crawled over to the son and spread a coat over him.’ Nine hours later, Cumming was found lying unconscious next to his son’s dead body.

His recovery was as remarkable as his survival. He was back at his desk within a month, brushing aside any outer shows of mourning for his son. Cumming had the ramrod emotional backbone that so typified the gentlemen of his social class and era. Just a few months after his accident, one of his operatives visited him at his offices on the top floor of Whitehall Court.

Cumming, who had not yet received his artificial leg, was inching his substantial frame down six flights of stairs: ‘two sticks, and backside, edging its way down one step at a time.’ Little wonder that his friends described him as ‘obstinate as a mule.’

The spy, Edward Knoblock, recalled that when Cumming did finally acquire a prosthetic limb made of wood, he used it to theatrical effect. He would terrify potential recruits by reaching for his sharp letter knife and raising it high in the air. He would then slam it through his trousers and into his wooden leg, ‘concluding, if the applicant winced, “Well, I am afraid you won’t do.” ’

Mansfield Cumming kept in daily touch with Samuel Hoare during his long months in Russia. Hoare was a diligent head of bureau and could usefully have remained at his post until the end of the war. But he was disenchanted with life as a spy and left Petrograd shortly after Rasputin’s murder. He had been hoping for danger and excitement: all he got was bureaucracy and paperwork.

The rest of Hoare’s team remained in the city, including Oswald Rayner. He was lucky to escape censure or worse for his role in the murder of Rasputin. Although the tsar had voiced his suspicions, Rayner was neither apprehended nor even questioned by the Russian police. He spent the day after the murder chatting with Yusupov in his private chambers, making a hasty exit when Grand Duke Nicholas arrived to interrogate the prince.

At the time, Yusupov vehemently denied playing any role in the murder and used his formidable network of connections to ensure that he was never put on trial. The tsar banished him to his country estates in South-West Russia, a lenient punishment for someone widely believed to have orchestrated the murder of the tsarina’s favourite.

Whatever Yusupov and his conspirators may have hoped, Rasputin’s death made little change to the defeatist atmosphere on the streets of Petrograd. Daily hardships were on the increase and people began openly protesting about the regime. On 10 March 1917, the Petrograd correspondent of the
Daily News
, Arthur Ransome, took a stroll around the city and sensed that events were starting to spin out of control.

‘A rather precarious excitement,’ he wrote, ‘like a Bank Holiday with thunder in the air.’

The number of protestors on the streets had increased dramatically by the following morning. ‘Crowds of all ages and conditions made their way to the Nevsky,’ recalled Robert Wilton, correspondent for
The Times
. But the mood was still good-humoured and there was no inkling of the violence to come.

Accounts vary as to where and when the first shots were fired. Wilton was close to Moscow station at 3 p.m. when he heard the crack of gunfire. By the time he reached the scene, the crowd had been dispersed and the snow ‘was plentifully sprinkled with blood.’

Cumming’s team in Petrograd was by now seriously alarmed. There had been political demonstrations in the past and even open condemnation of the tsar. But the outbreak of large-scale violent protest was a worrying new development.

Unrest rapidly spread to other parts of the city. Later that afternoon, police armed with machine-guns began firing on the crowd in Znamenskaya Square. Some fifty protestors were shot dead.

In a telegram to the
Daily News
, Arthur Ransome reported that the bloodshed was of a different order to anything that had come before. The city, he noted, was ‘like a pot of porridge coming slowly to the boil, with bubbles, now here and now there, rising to burst on the surface.’ He felt that it was the beginning of a revolution.

On the following day, a Monday, angry demonstrators broke into the notorious Krestovsky Prison and released all the political prisoners. They then ran amok in the streets, smashing shop windows and attacking gendarmes.

‘Their faces had taken on a fanatical look,’ wrote one English eyewitness. ‘They were out for business and they carried crowbars, hammers and lengths of weighted, tarred and knotted rope.’ Among the rioters were many soldiers who had abandoned their regiments in order to protest against the tsar.

To many onlookers, there was a palpable sense that the old order was about to be engulfed in catastrophe. Russia was sliding towards an unknown future in which society was to be polarised. The aristocracy and intellectual elite for which pre-war St Petersburg had been so famous now stood jeopardised by the forces of revolution.

An Englishman, William Gibson, was witness to a direct confrontation between these two incompatible worlds. While of no consequence in itself, it provided him with a graphic illustration of the troubles to come.

He had been watching the street mob systematically ransack the mansions and palaces of the elite and he knew they would soon reach the marbled residence of his mother-in-law, the formidable Madame Schwartz-Ebehard. She was a pillar of the old order; ‘a massive woman of fifty-five, with tight lips and eyes which could turn to steel . . . a veritable tower of strength, both physically and morally.’

Gibson made his way to her house and warned her to flee before it was sacked by the mob. But Madame Schwartz-Ebehard remonstrated in the strongest terms. She was determined to defend her mansion against the illiterate thugs outside. Gibson was shamed into remaining as well.

When the mob finally smashed their way in, Madame Schwartz-Ebehard was ready for them. ‘Seizing the gong-stick from the brass Chinese gong which filled a corner, she had boomed out a peremptory tattoo.’

The men were stopped in their tracks. ‘Madame had drawn herself to her full height and had stared the rabble up and down.’ She pointed at her highly polished marble floor and then glared at the thugs.

‘Your boots are filthy,’ she declaimed coldly. ‘You should clean them before you come in here. You are spoiling the floor. Besides, you were not invited.’

She haughtily informed them they were
moujiki-bordiaji
– ‘scum of the gutters’ – and ordered them out. She had no intention of being intimidated by revolutionaries.

The men lifted their rifles and pointed them at her, but Madame Schwartz-Eberhard swept them aside. ‘Calmly and deliberately she had smacked the face of one desperado after another.’ Then, after flinging the ringleader backwards, she kicked them out and locked the door.

Madame Schartz-Eberhard was fortunate to escape with her life. In her glacial haughtiness, she personified the social grandeur of the old regime. In mansions such as hers, the old ways and manners had been kept alive. Now, those ways were in danger of being trampled underfoot.

Within hours of her foolhardy stand, the revolution was fully under way. The Preobrazhensky and Volynsky Regiments mutinied and soldiers from the Pavlovsky Regiment began firing on the police.

Colonel Alfred Knox, military attaché at the British Embassy, realised the situation was now desperate. A meeting with three senior Russian generals confirmed his conviction that the old regime was doomed. The only hope of quashing the revolution was for troops to be brought in from the countryside. But when these soldiers arrived, they greeted the crowds with warm affection and ‘in extreme brotherly love handed over their rifles.’

As the battle for the streets intensified, a political battle was also under way. The Duma or legislative assembly had been officially dissolved by the tsar. Now, it reconvened itself and established a Temporary Committee with one member for each party. When journalist Harold Williams entered the parliamentary chamber, he found it awash with soldiers listening to fiery orators ‘who had suddenly appeared from obscurity.’

Williams’ wife was meanwhile attending a rival gathering that seemed, to her eyes, to have sprung from nowhere. The Council of Workmen’s Deputies, better known as the Petrograd Soviet, was a body of revolutionary activists that was far more in tune with the mood on the streets.

It began issuing its own decrees, including the controversial Order No. 1, which instructed army units to obey the Duma only if its orders did not contradict those of the Petrograd Soviet. A power struggle was already under way.

Colonel Knox was by now seriously alarmed: the behaviour of the Petrograd Soviet was the clearest possible signal that the revolution had entered a new and more unpredictable phase. ‘Leaflets were distributed advocating the murder of officers,’ wrote Knox. ‘The outlook was very black on the evening of the 15th.’

The guardians of the old order were shortly to receive the greatest shock of all. On the same day that Colonel Knox wrote his report, Tsar Nicholas II announced his abdication. ‘We have thought it well to renounce the Throne of the Russian Empire and lay down the supreme power,’ he told the nation.