By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The 1917-18 Envoys' Plot and its
consequences in Russia Part Four
Description of
persons involved.
As pointed out the Anti-Bolshevik
Underground in Revolutionary Russia to a large part indeed hinged on the
extensive involvement of Allied interventionist forces, to form an
anti-Bolshevik and anti-German front in the wake of the signature of the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk.
Thus during the late
winter of 1917, the Allies’ ambitious, improbable plan matured some of it
partly based on luck or as Ian C. D. Moffat typified it in his 2015 book 'Chaos'.
Thus afraid by a
German encroachment, on 1 March 1918, the Murmansk government informed
Petrograd that they wanted to accept the Allied offer to assist in the defense
of the city. The Soviets acting on a positive reply by Trotsky placed regional
military authority into the hands of a council-controlled by Allied officers.
Defense of the port passed to the Allied forces with Russian cooperation. On 6
March, marines from HMS Glory landed in Murmansk. On 10 March that same year
Georgy Chicherin who served as People's Commissar for
Foreign Affairs told the British representative in Moskau
that the Bolsheviks were not concerned with Allied actions in North Russia and
would try to expel the Allies from Murmansk. This attitude changed when on 7
June news of a German-backed enemy force approaching the railway junction at
Kem reached Murmansk. The Murmansk government then acted on its own and
authorized the Allies to proceed against the enemy. On 23 June over a thousand
British troops commanded by General Maynard, arrived at the port, but as agreed
at a War Cabinet meeting, the men remained aboard ship, for the moment. But
when Chicherin protested, on 28 June the Murmansk
Presidium voted to ignore Moscow's orders, and two days later officially broke
with Moscow. And thus by now the intelligence-operations which were meant to
guarantee and safeguard communications capability became a military incursion.
This act heralded the start of the Allied
military build-up in North Russia.
Firstly, Japanese and
Allied soldiers would seize Vladivostok (which in fact they did on April 5,
against Bolshevik wishes) and then head west along the Siberian Railway.
Secondly, British and Allied troops would
occupy Murmansk and then travel south to take Archangel.
Thus when the
Bolsheviks changed their minds about scuttling Russia’s Baltic fleet, and the
Allies changed their minds about waiting for an invitation to occupy Murmansk
and Vladivostok, not yet in Archangel), it split those that had opposed
uninvited Allied intervention, and those that wanted it to be in co-operation
with the Bolsheviks. In his heart, Lockhart believed the latter arguments too,
but he had begun to waver. Denis Garstin (who knew
Russia from before the war) had written
the previous year that “England needs Russia just as much as Russia needs
England”; who in February 1918 had found the Soviet diplomat Alexandra
Kollontai (Коллонтай) “charming . . . she bowled me over”; and who still
judged Lenin to be “the biggest force I’ve ever felt in my life,” nevertheless,
had begun to waver too: “If you look at what the Bolsheviks want to do you feel
sympathetic,” he wrote, “but if you look at what they’ve done, you’re dead
against them.”1
The not-quite
like-but similarly-minded Journalist Arthur Ransome summarized their argument
in a pamphlet which he wrote at white-hot speed for the Red Cross colonel to
bring with him: On Behalf of Russia: An Open Letter to America.2
On May 14, Raymond Robins set out from Moscow via the
Siberian Railway, with the pamphlet, Lenin’s blessing, and the Bolshevik
leader’s signed laissez-passer to speed his train.3 He carried, too, Lenin’s
invitation to the American government to dispatch an Economic Commission to his
country to explore trade possibilities. He reached Vladivostok in good time and
in good spirits, although noting the Allied occupation of the port with
disapproval, and sailed for home on June 2. “The headlands of Asia fade from
view,” he wrote in his diary that night; “the only sound is the sweep of the
surging sea, the stars shine out, the way ahead is blue-black, and the Russian
tale is told and I have had my day!!!”
When the Red Cross
colonel arrived in America he met with senators, cabinet ministers, labor
leaders, and other leading figures, and experienced a rude shock. Almost
everyone in the US disapproved of his message. The president, upon whom he
pinned his hopes, remained inaccessible and silent while advocates of
intervention in Russia worked on him. Finally, on August 4, Wilson let it be
known that Japanese forces could march east after all, so long as US troops
accompanied them. He made no mention of Lenin’s invitation concerning
Russo-American trade. “The long trail is ended,” a bitter Robins finally
admitted to himself in his diary. “So finishes the great adventure.”4
As for Lockhart and
the remainder of his group back in Russia, it was full speed ahead for intervention now. Garstin first put into words to Whitehall the plan they had
begun to contemplate. On May 10, the young captain reported by a cable that he
had just “been approached secretly by two large organizations of the old army.”
They promised to mobilize near Nizhnii Novgorod, east
of Moscow as soon as the Allies took Vologda and secured the railheads of the
Archangel and Siberian Railways. Then they would launch the counter-revolution.
That he and Lockhart had weighed and
decided they approved of the offer before sending it seems evident, since Garstin recommended that London dispatch the same number of
Allied troops from Archangel to Vologda as Lockhart had suggested in earlier
telegrams: “at least two divisions.”5
Garstin was dabbling in counter-revolution here.6 So was
Captain Francis Cromie, the man once celebrated for
his ability to reconcile Bolshevik sailors and their Tsarist officers and now
scheming to destroy Russia’s Baltic fleet. And so too was Britain’s previous
leading champion of Anglo-Bolshevik cooperation, Robert Bruce Lockhart. No doubt
they both shared Garstin’s reservations about the
Bolsheviks. But the truth is that, also, all three of them believed that in
conspiring against the regime they were doing what the British government
wanted them to do. And this was decisive. And instead of the dovish, more sober
Robins and Ransome, they consulted with men who had been in the
counter-revolutionary camp all along.
This included the
French ambassador to Russia, Josef Noulens who
dominated the community of foreign diplomats still in Russia.7
Noulens shared the visceral anti-communism of the Quai
d’Orsay in Paris (the French Foreign Office). Although in March he once had
encouraged Trotsky to resist German invasion by promising French support, in
reality, he had always hated the Bolsheviks and never really believed France
could find common ground with them, not even against Germany. Bolshevism
threatened French business and financial interests in Russia. But, said Noulens, “We shall not be allowing any further socialist
experiments in Russia,” said Noulens.8
From April 1918
onward, following directions from Paris with which he completely agreed, he did
his best to help nearly every anti-Bolshevik schemer who approached him. In the
past, Lockhart had ridiculed him for his reactionary views. Now the British
agent followed in the Frenchman’s footsteps. Noulens,
he acknowledged, “commenced to finance and support these
[counter-revolutionary] organizations before I did.”9
But Lockhart was
primed now to collaborate with Noulens and the
others. On May 14, he bade farewell to Raymond Robins at a Moscow railway
station. Then, on May 15, the day after seeing off his erstwhile friend and
ally, he met “an agent sent to me by Boris Savinkoff
[sic].”
Boris Savinkov redux
Boris Viktorovich Savinkov (Russian: Бори́с Ви́кторович Са́винков) that he was the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Russian
Revolution, had he not also been a stone-cold
killer.
This son of a judge
was a poet, a novelist, a chain-smoking morphine addict, and the former head of
the prewar Socialist Revolutionary Party’s “Fighting Organization.”10 He had
been a terrorist during the Tsarist period. The Tsar’s courts convicted him of
complicity in the 1904 assassination of Russia’s Minister of the Interior,
Vyacheslav Plehve, but as with so many of their prisoners,
failed to hold him after they caught him. Free to follow his ruthless
inclinations, Savinkov had planned or taken part in
thirty-two additional killings, or at least so rumor had it.
In 1917, he served
for a brief period as Kerensky’s Assistant Minister of War, but then supported
General Kornilov’s abortive right-wing uprising against him. When the
Bolsheviks took power, he fled to the Don region, to contact the
counter-revolutionary Volunteer Army of Generals Alexeyev
and Kornilov. The latter two despised each other, as noted above, but they
despised Savinkov more. Alexeyev
wrote to Lockhart that he would rather cooperate with Lenin and Trotsky.11 No
sooner had Savinkov arrived in the White Army camp
than someone tried to assassinate him. Not surprisingly, he returned to Moscow,
dove underground and, independent of Alexeyev, with
whom despite everything he nevertheless remained in touch, began to plan an
anti-Bolshevik rising.
Moscow was by then an
anti-Bolshevik hothouse, as Lockhart was beginning to appreciate. A “Right
Center,” of counter-revolutionary monarchists, right-wing Kadets
and other conservatives, had pro-German leanings. A counter-revolutionary “Left
Center” of liberal Kadets and various anti-Bolshevik
socialists favored the Allies. Savinkov entered
neither body but encouraged them to combine in a “National Center,” which
eventually they did, although without ever relinquishing their distrust for
each other. The great conspirator refused to join but recruited from this body,
and promised to cooperate with it. Meantime he was organizing his own Union for
Defense of the Motherland and Freedom (UDMF). When he contacted Lockhart, he
had between two thousand and five thousand men under his command.12 He had
spies shadowing Lenin and Trotsky, preparing to assassinate them. And he had
begun to plan a rising in three towns north of Moscow to coincide with the
Allied intervention “on a large scale” that Lockhart’s new ally, ambassador Noulens, already had encouraged him to believe would take
place in late June or early July.13
Lockhart reported to
London on his meeting with Savinkov’s representative,
and added: “With your approval I propose to continue to maintain an informal
connection with [him] through third parties.” The Foreign Office did approve.
Lockhart would be safe enough: he is “so much identified with Bolsheviks that
he is hardly likely to be suspect,” noted one mandarin. Sir George Russell
Clerk, a more senior and experienced official, added more cagily still: “I
believe that the Bolsheviks know pretty well everything that goes on. I am not
quite sure of our cyphers, and I am confident that unless Mr. Lockhart gets
direct instructions to the contrary he will continue to keep in touch with Savinkoff [sic]. I should therefore leave this unanswered
for the present.”14
Cagey, yes; but Clerk
had set a precedent that would have significant consequences. At the end of
May, Lockhart took note that the Foreign Office remained silent on Savinkov, and understood, quite correctly, that it meant
for him to maintain the connection. In the middle of August, at a crossroads
again, and with the Foreign Office again incommunicado, he not unreasonably
drew a similar conclusion and plunged into even deeper waters, this time with
fatal results.
Boris Savinkov might have received money from the United States.
In May or June 1918, Xenophon Kalamatiano reportedly
met with a Russian agent linked to the SRs. On June 27, Kal
reported to DeWitt Poole that this man’s group planned to mount an uprising two
weeks later to turn out the Soviet government. That would coincide with the
July revolts that Savinkov planned.
Savinkov could have received payments from Washington through
an American official in Europe such as Oliver T. Crosby. He was a U.S. Treasury
special representative in Paris who had been assigned to pay Kaledin with U.S. funds laundered by Paris and London.
Czech intelligence reportedly contacted Crosby on April 27, 1918, to inquire
about the “promised funds” that Kal should have
raised for them through British agent Sidney Reilly.
If Kalamatiano could get funds for the Czechs, he likely could
have obtained cash for Savinkov.
But Boris testified
at his 1924 trial in Moscow that his attacks on the Soviets were financed by
French Ambassador Joseph Noulens and the Czechs. No
available evidence, though, indicates whether that money had originally come
from Washington.
The plan called for Savinkov’s army to seize Yaroslavl, Rybinsk,
Kostroma, and Murman. French forces would advance the
short distance from Archangel to take Vologda themselves. Vologda was important
because it was the largest town south of Archangel on the rail line down to
Moscow. Vologda was designated the link-up point for American, French, British,
and Czech forces that would then join Savinkov’s army
and march on the capital.
Savinkov said the French had advance knowledge that left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries were planning their own
Moscow uprising, and Savinkov’s attacks in the Upper
Volga should coincide with that, though he would not be cooperating with the
Left SRs.
Lockhart now,
self-confident and determined as ever, although pursuing a program
diametrically opposed to his initial one, he embarked upon a series of
dangerous, clandestine meetings, often accompanied by the equally fearless
Grenard. “I am in touch with practically everyone,” he reported to London on 23
May.15
Through Lieutenant
Laurence Webster, an intelligence agent acting as Passport Control Officer in
Moscow, he engineered a series of meetings with two leaders of the Moscow
Center, Professor Peter Struve, a former Kadet, and
Michael Feodoroff, a former Tsarist minister, both
now supporters of General Alexeyev.16 He also established links with
counter-revolutionary right Socialist-Revolutionaries, to whom he gave money.17
Quickly he realized that the Moscow hothouse was planning something big. Where
previously he would have talked things over with Robins and Ransome (who might
have acted as restraining influences), now he talked to Reilly, Garstin, and Cromie, and to Noulens, and Grenard and DeWitt Clinton Poole. They all
favored the forward policy.
Lockhart engaged
Captain Cromie in discussions about the destruction
of Russia’s fleet in the Baltic Sea. Britain’s naval attaché lived in the
Petrograd hothouse rather than the Moscow one and, as soon became apparent, he
was doing more than dabble in counter-revolution there. Where first Cromie had wanted to destroy Russia’s Baltic fleet so
Germany could not have additional ships, now he wanted to destroy Bolshevism so
Germany could not have Russia. Already he was “the moving spirit” among a group
of Petrograd anti-Bolshevik activists, including other Allied officials and
members of Savinkov’s UDMF. They often met near the
docks not far from the British embassy at a Latvian social club (of which more
later) that catered to sailors and their officers.17 These Petrograd
conspirators had a pipeline funneling White volunteers north to Archangel. They
had Russian and British agents already in situ planning to overthrow its
Bolshevik-dominated Soviet with the help of those volunteers, just as Poole’s
occupying forces (“not less than two divisions,” Cromie
also stipulated, no doubt after consultation with Lockhart)18 arrived from
Murmansk.19 Then they would establish a White counter-revolutionary Volunteer
Army in Archangel to accompany Poole’s troops when these marched upon Vologda,
and onward to aid Savinkov when he launched his
insurrection. In other words, Cromie and the
Petrograd hothouse knew what the Moscow hothouse was planning and intended to
help.20 Lockhart decided to help too.
As we will see
Latvians and their Rifle Brigade were to determine the shape and then the outcome
of most of the conspiracies and internal eruptions that convulsed Russia for
the rest of the year. It was troops from the brigade, led by Captain Eduard Berzin, who crushed the revolt of the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries in July, after they murdered the German ambassador. Meanwhile,
the Allied conspiracy, now managed by an erratic caucus of Lockhart, Cromie, Reilly and the French ambassador, Joseph Noulens, was in chaos. They had assumed that the British
force at Archangel, under General Frederick Poole, would advance south to seize
the junction town of Vologda. His march was supposed to be timed to support
counter-revolutionary risings in towns nearer Moscow, launched by their
fanatical fellow plotter Boris Savinkov, who was
involved in several attempted risings against the Bolsheviks. Unfortunately,
General Poole failed to tell them that he had decided to postpone his offensive
(he had previously requested reinforcements in the form of a brass band from
Britain – jolly good for recruitment). As a result, Savinkov’s
insurrections took place but were suppressed by the Red Army after brutal
street-fighting.
Lockhart did not
despair, though he now knew that Poole’s force was far too small to defeat the
Red Army. ‘Determined, competitive, hard-nosed, capable and supremely
confident, he set out to recoup the situation,’ Schneer
writes. He began by hurling money around. He gave Savinkov’s
clandestine National Centre a million roubles in
cash, and planned – with a French colleague – to raise this to 81 million (nearly
£60 million in today’s money). Then he began to think about the Latvians. How
loyal were the soldiers of the Rifle Brigade to Bolshevism, now that the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk had allowed the Germans to overrun Latvia? How loyal, indeed,
were they to Russia as opposed to their own country? Could they be persuaded at
least to move out of Poole’s way? In Petrograd Cromie
was recruiting Latvian seamen for his own plot to disable Russia’s Baltic
fleet, while Reilly was saying: ‘If I could buy the Letts, my task would be
easy.’ Lockhart began to look for disillusioned members of the Rifle Brigade.
Just when the
Bolsheviks became aware of the plot isn’t clear from Schneer’s
book. But they surely assumed its existence even before it took shape. Nothing
was more inevitable than that the envoys of the ‘bourgeois imperialist Entente’
would look for ways to subvert a communist revolution and incite its opponents
to rebel. The Cheka kept a close eye on the consulates and embassies in Moscow
and Petrograd, noticing that counter-revolutionary leaders were using them as
sanctuaries, even as bases.
From the American
side, David R. Francis the American ambassador to Russia was a key coordinator
of the Plot. He asked Washington for 100,000 troops to take Petrograd and
Moscow in support of the coup against Lenin:
The 1917-18 Envoys' Plot and its consequences in
Russia Part One
The 1917-18 Envoys' Plot and its consequences
in Russia Part Two
The 1917-18 Envoys' Plot and its consequences
in Russia Part Three
The 1917-18 Envoys' Plot and its consequences
in Russia Part Five
The 1917-18 Envoys' Plot and its consequences in Russia Part Six
The 1917-18 Envoys' Plot and its consequences
in Russia Part Seven
1. Walpole, “Denis Garstin
and the Russian Revolution,” p. 598: Garstin to
?, January 18, 1918.
2. Arthur Ransome, On
Behalf of Russia: An Open Letter to America, New York, 1918, p. 27.
3. Wisconsin State
Historical Society, Robins’ Diary Entry, May 14, 1918.
4. William Hard, Raymond
Robins’ Own Story, New York, 1920, online version, Chapter V, “The Bolshevik
‘Bomb,’” http://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/memoir/Robins/Robins5.htm
5. Oxford University,
New Bodleian Library (OUNBL), Milner Collection, Dep. 109, Box B, Lockhart to
Foreign Office, May 10, 1918.
6. Walpole, quoting
letters dated May 15, 1917, February 14, 1918, and July 17, 1918.
7. Michael Jabara Carley, “The Origins of the French Intervention in
the Russian Civil War,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 48, No. 3 (September
1976), pp. 413–39
8. Victor Serge, Year
One of the Russian Revolution, 2015, p. 231.
9. John W. Long,
"Plot and counter-plot in revolutionary Russia: Chronicling the Bruce
Lockhart conspiracy, 1918, Intelligence and National Security, Volume 10, 1995
- Issue 1
10. Winston
Churchill, Great Contemporaries, London, 1937, p. 103.
11. R H Bruce
Lockhart, British Agent,1933,p. 288.
12. Winston
Churchill, Great Contemporaries.
13. The National
Archives, London (TNA), WO 106/1186, Summary of telegrams on Russia; for Savinkov more generally, see, especially, Richard Spence,
Boris Savinkov, Boulder, CO, 1991. For the promise to
Savinkov made by Noulens,
see University of Indiana, Lilly Library, UILL, Lockhart Collection, Bruce
Lockhart, “The Counter-Revolutionary Forces,” p. 4. For just how complicated
this counter-revolutionary world really was, see Jonathan Smele,
The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–26, London, 2015.
14. TNA, FO 371/3332,
Lockhart to Foreign Office, and notes on file, May 15, 1918.
16. TNA, FO 371/3313,
Lockhart to Foreign Office, May 23, 1918.
17. TNA, FO 371/3348,
Bruce Lockhart, “Secret and Confidential Memorandum on the alleged ‘Allied
Conspiracy’ in Russia,” November 5, 1918, p. 1.
18. They alleged it
at the 1922 trial of right SRs. See N. V. Krylenko, Sudebnye rechi. Izbrannoe, Moscow, Iuridicheskaia
literature, 1964, pp. 157–8.
19. G. E. Chaplin, “Dva perevorota na Severe (1918),” Beloe delo: letoopis’ Beloi bor’by, vol. 4 (Berlin: Mednyi vsadnik, 1928), p. 14.
This is an extract of the autobiography in Russian of G. E. Chaplin, who took
part in the events discussed above (translation provided by Andrey Shylakhter). See also Benjamin Wells, “The Union of
Regeneration: The Anti-Bolshevik Underground in Revolutionary Russia, 1917–19,”
DPhil thesis, Queen Mary College, University of London, 2004, p. 62.
20. TNA, ADM
137/1731, Cromie to Admiralty, June 14, 1918.
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