Description of persons involved

By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

As we have seen in part one, the perception of Britain by Russian officials and ordinary people varied in historical periods. The communist revolution added a new connotation to the negative image of Britain.1 In the very existence of the British Empire, did Lenin and his followers see the main hindrance to the global revolution. To eliminate this obstacle, Bolshevik theorists suggested a spectrum of political means. Their dominant group, including Lenin himself, and the left socialist revolutionaries, acting temporarily as the Bolshevik political partners, anticipated revolts across the Central empires that would converge the world war into a class armed struggle for the establishment of the global republic of Soviets.2

However, Bolsheviks like Trotsky and others believed that any further interaction with the Entente and, foremost, Britain was not only desirable but also profitable to the Soviet regime. One former tsarist diplomat recounted that Trotsky, as the head of the Soviet delegation at the second stage of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany and its satellite-states, threatened to immediately revive the Eastern front in concord with London and Paris.3

The armistice that the Bolsheviks signed with the enemy states on 15 December 1917 spurred the British government to set up, first, The Russian Information Committee, chaired by Alfred  Milner, and later – the Russia Committee, headed by Robert  Cecil. These institutions comprised the Foreign Office pundits, military strategists from the War Office, and the Admiralty. Their activities were evidenced by the latter committee holding fifty-six meetings from January – to mid-July 1918. Typically, the initial points on the agenda were the demobilization of the active Russian troops and the prevention of grain supply from Ukraine to Germany and Austria-Hungary, suffering the Entente blockade.4

The principal issue remained, however, the Russo-German talks in Brest-Litovsk. As Thomas Jones, a high-ranking British employee, put it in his diary: 

The time now is to publish a declaration of war that aims to a counter-offensive to the offer of the Central powers to the Bolsheviks. The idea is to make it ultra-democratic, to go to the farthest points of concession to produce a maximum effect in Turkey and Austria, and not less to support the war spirit at home, which has seriously weakened, partly through weariness, through the atmosphere caused by soldiers returning, through the increasing difficulties in obtaining food and through the distrust of the Cabinet’s war aims. Lloyd George nevertheless sought, on the one hand, to secretly support anti-Bolshevik insurgencies inside Russia while dealing with the Soviet regime via Lockhart. Trotsky, from his side, compared the Entente leaders to the casino players who prudently put chips on each number during the roulette game.

Bruce Lockhart’s commitment as a new British extraordinary emissary to Soviet Russia could not be left without retaliation. On 4 January 1918, the soviet Narodnykh Komissarov (Council of People’s Commissars) SNK appointed Maxim Litvinov the provisional plenipotentiary in the UK, compelling the Home Office to release him and Georgy Chicherin from jail.5 

Above soviet diplomacy front-runners, 1918–24. (left to right: Maxim Litvinov, Georgy Chicherin, Lev Karakhan).’ 

Objections by the Entente diplomats in Petrograd followed the Foreign Office’s repudiation to accredit Litvinov as a new Russian delegate at the court of St James.

Litvinov did his best to make Konstantin  Nabokov consign to him the keys to the former residence of the tsarist ambassador. At the time, Litvinov’s personnel consisted of five employees, including Litvinov’s spouse, a secretary, and three assistants who were either political emigrants or members of the Russian military procurement commission in the UK. Besides that, he assumed consular functions, including visa support to repatriates trying to accumulate the financial resources of all other Russian representative offices. This ended the monthly allocations by the British Treasury to the former embassy and consulates in the British Isles.

Despite this feverish public activity, he was repeatedly mentioned in the personal files of the Scotland Yard Special Branch concerning the subversive activity of pacifists in Britain.

Litvinov’s lecture at a public meeting in London on 22 January 1918, along with his oration at the Labour Party’s annual conference in Nottingham on 23–25 of the same month, caused anxieties in Whitehall. 

Basil Thomson, the assistant commissioner of the Scotland Yard Special Branch, later the director of the Home Office intelligence department, reported to Lord Cave that Litvinov’ set up the Red guards detachments with the help of 23,000 political refugees from Russia of Jewish origin who had temporal registration in the London East End.91 

Russian emigrants also contributed to the demonization of Bolshevik diplomacy. On 28 January 1918, Bertie noted in the diary: ‘Maklakov [a prominent member of the Russian Constitutional Democratic Party] came to me to dissuade any engagement with the Bolshevik government. Lenin and Trotsky would attribute this position to our fear and intensify their propaganda in England’6.

To bolster Litvinov’s efforts and respond to Bruce Lockhart’s mission, Trotsky sent his brother- and the son-in-law Lev Kamenev, the chairman of the All-Russian central executive committee, and Ivan Zalkind, the deputy commissar for foreign affairs, to London on a special mission. On reaching Aberdeen, Kamenev and Zalkind were thoroughly checked by the local police, administrating the confiscation of the bank cheques to a value of £5,000 and £10,000, respectively. In addition, their personal belongings also discovered thirty secret blueprints of the Russian warships and the maps of the British submarines’ routes in the Baltic Sea.

 

1. Frederick Northedge and Audrey Wells, Britain and Soviet Communism: The Impact of a Revolution (London – Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 3; A. B. Davidson, ‘Obraz Velikobritanii v Rossii XIX – XX stoletii,’ Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 5 (2005): 56.// 

2. V. I. Lenin, ‘K istorii voprosa o neschastnom mire,’ in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. V. I. Lenin (Gospolitizdat, 1971), 35: 247. 

3. G. N. Mikhailovsky, Zapiski. Iz istorii rossiiskogo vneshnepoliticheskogo vedomstva, 1914–1920 (Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1993), 2: 56

4. Minute of the Russia Committee, 17 January 1918, The National Archive (TNA), FO 95/802. For further information about this structure and later established Caucasian Committee, see Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1: 84; Terence O’Brien, Milner. Viscount Milner of St James’s and Cape Town 1854–1925 (Constable, 1979), 292.Buchanan to the Foreign Office, 4 January 1918, TNA, T 1/12126. On Litvinov’s appointment and activities in the UK, see Peter Scheffer, ‘Maxim Litvinov: An Intimate Study,’ Current History 34, no. 4 (1931): 671; S. Yu.Vygodsky, U istokov sovetskoi diplomatii (Gospolitizdat, 1965), 45.

5. Buchanan to the Foreign Office, 4 January 1918, The National Archive(TNA), T 1/12126.

6. ‘The Communist Revolution in Hungary,’ Directorate of Intelligence Special Report, 31 May 1919, Part II (Russia, 1915–24), file 3, Templewood Papers, Cambridge University Library (CUL).

 

 

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