By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Description of persons involved

Enter the ace of spies

By the autumn of 1918, the counter-revolutionary wave had reached its highest level. It seems unlikely to find a more dramatic period in the history of the Russo British and French relations than that of the few weeks in August–September 1918 when according to the Bolshevik leaders, the regime was balancing on the verge of collapse.

The commencement of an open military interference by the Entente powers, the abolition of local Soviets in many regions (except several central provinces), and recurrent anti-Bolshevik rebellions in big cities against the background of economic disarray, widespread famine, and epidemics – threatened to bury the hopes of Lenin and his associates to hold power in Russia and expand it to Europe.

The initial plans of some leading Entente statesmen to overthrow the Bolshevik commissars dated back to March 1918. As previously mentioned, the Brest treaty turned Soviet Russia into a neutral state which enabled the Bolshevik government to embark on diplomatic maneuvering between the Entente Powers and the Central empires. Lacking comprehensive information about the Kremlin’s intentions and considering the Germans’ new offensive on the Western front, the Cabinet commissioned Sidney George Reilly (‘The ace of spies’), one of the most qualified MI6 officers, to examine the Russian situation during a kind of inspection trip. This choice was not accidental because Reilly was born in the province of Odessa and spent his childhood in the Russian empire. After emigrating to Europe, he volunteered for the British secret intelligence service under the surname of his second wife. During the Russo-Japanese War, Reilly contacted various tsarist politicians, public figures, industrialists, and aristocrats until the Russian revolution broke out in March 1917.

Captain Mansfield George Smith-Cumming (also known as C.), the director of MI6 at the time, awarded with two Russian military orders of St Stanislav and St Vladimir for the rapport in the sphere of military intelligence, recommended Reilly to Lloyd George as a liaison officer to be sent to Bolshevik Russia. This preference might be explained by Smith-Cumming having information about Reilly’s excellent knowledge of Russian political situation and his good command of foreign languages. Besides that, Reilly’s ability to obtain top secret documents, such as the German naval code in 1916, also predetermined Reilly’s appointment. 

On 15 March 1918, C. briefed the MI6 officer on the aims of his secret mission providing Reilly with cash to the value of £500 in banknotes and £750 in diamonds. Strange as it may seem, the Soviet ‘diplomatic representative’ Litvinov also contributed to the preparations when he handed the MI6 agent a letter of recommendation.

Ten days later, the British naval attache Francis Cromie received a wire about Reilly’s perspective on coming to Russia. However, there is no reason to suppose that Reilly’s reports played a decisive role in prompting Whitehall to launch an armed intervention in Russia. By all odds, Lockhart’s adjustment of his initially positive attitude towards the Bolshevik authorities could have influenced the British government’s position. The young diplomat was motivated by significant events such as the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) deliberation in favor of further reconciliation with Germany and the growing internal social resistance toward the Soviet regime.

Lockhart’s hesitation to maintain close contacts with the Bolshevik rulers may also be evidenced by Balfour sarcastically notifying the diplomat: 

You have at different times advised against Allied intervention in any form: against it by the Japanese assistance; against it at Vladivostok; in favor of it at Murmansk; in favor of it with an invitation; in turn of it without invitation whether the Bolsheviks desired it or not.

Anyway, the German supreme commandment’s decision to halt the further eastward advance into Russian territory on 23 May 1918 encouraged Bruce Lockhart to leave Moscow for Vologda, where the reduced personnel of the foreign diplomatic missions had been staying since the end of February. The British emissary aimed to sound out Noulance and Francis, the French and American ambassadors, respectively, on their vision of the Bolshevik policy towards the Central powers. Following a lively discussion, the Western diplomats decided to embark on preparations for a large-scale armed intervention in Russia, retaining minimal necessary contacts with the Kremlin to safeguard their interests against German increasing political pressure.

For his part, Dzerzhinsky offered a way to make the allies’ seditious activities benefit the interests of the Soviet regime. Predicated upon his subversive, revolutionary tactics, these ideas underpinned the Bolsheviks’ further maneuvers between the warring coalitions. That is why the ‘complot of ambassadors’ may arguably be also identified as a ‘Dzerzhinsky plot’ since the head of the Cheka oversaw any domestic turmoil and destabilizing activities by Western intelligence agencies.

The Soviet interpretation of the conspiracy originated in the statements of the All-Russian central executive committee, which informed the shocked Russian people of an overthrow of the Bolshevik government planned by the Entente diplomats and spies under their supervision. Commenting on the failed plot, the Kremlin appealed to soldiers and workers in the Entente states, exposing the conspirators’ goals, including the arrest of top Bolshevik administrators and the encouragement of ‘famine in the big cities of European Russia by performing acts of sabotage at railway stations and depots to cut them off from food supplies. Intending to cohere the revolt of the Moscow garrison with the anti-Bolshevik military units’ advance towards the Soviet capital, they ostensibly planned to introduce a military in Russia and resume hostilities against the Central empires to prevent the country from being transformed into Germany’s vassal-state. Some other information might be extracted from an open letter by Réne Marchand, the French correspondent to Figaro – one of the leading Paris journals. Addressing his message to Raymond Poincaré, the president of the Third Republic, Marchand wrote how Allied diplomats and military representatives concocted various scenarios of the anti-Bolshevik coup at the premises of the American consulate in Moscow on 25 August 1918.

Martin Latsis, the Cheka collegium member who had contributed to the creation of the Red guards, avowed that the total amount of 10 million roubles was spent on the organization of the plot. As he argued in his memoirs, the British and French secret agents established an extensive espionage network inside central Soviet administrative bodies. Their activities, therefore, led to the ‘counter-revolutionary surge raising to the highest level’ by the autumn of 1918 when everybody in Moscow ‘felt the coming storm’.

Another eminent Cheka official, Yakov Peters, who temporarily acted as its head (albeit only for a few weeks in July and August of the same year), narrated the acts of sabotage that the ‘Entente spies’ contrived to carry out before the coup. These included blowing up highway bridges and the railway overpasses in the suburbs of Petrograd. Peters assessed the Red terror as a spontaneous, although inevitable, reaction to the assassination of Moses Uritsky, the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka section, as well as to the abortive attempt on Lenin’s life on 30 August in Moscow.

Another period of attention to the plot coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution when a stream of publications flooded Soviet periodicals. Based on certain declassified documents and interviews with surviving participants, the belletristic versions of the ‘Lockhart plot’ made the accurate picture wholly obscure.16 The situation changed only in recent years when Russian historians moved away from the Communist propaganda truisms by reconsidering available primary sources.

From the beginning, their Western colleagues refuted any anti-Bolshevik conspiracy devised by the British or other diplomatic missions, blaming only individual adventurers such as Reilly. Amusingly, some authors accused Trotsky of being involved in the preparatory activities for the coup. 

One should bear in mind that Reilly and other MI6 officers involved in the matter had two alternatives: either to openly recover the British alliance with Russia by coercing the Bolshevik leaders to ignore the clauses of the Brest treaty or to surreptitiously arrange the overthrow of the Soviet regime with the help of various domestic counter-revolutionary forces.

Sidney Reilly

When Sidney Reilly arrived in Moscow, he was wearing the uniform of a British air lieutenant. He had been commissioned in the Royal Flying Corps as a volunteer at Toronto the year before but was not under RFC command in Russia:

With later Litvinov’s letter of recommendation and an identity card of the Petrograd Cheka criminal department that Reilly had managed to obtain through an old acquaintance of his, the ‘master-spy’ met Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, the SNK chief administrator, on five occasions during April–May 1918. Their extensive conversations resulted in Lenin and Trotsky’s consent to provide Reilly with information about the redeployment of German and Austria-Hungarian troops on the Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian territories. Moreover, Reilly negotiated with certain Kremlin top officials assistance in the organization of an anti-German uprising in the occupiers’ rear.

Apart from other ideas by C., the head of MI6 envisaged a new configuration of Russian intelligence under the British guidance to better interact with the Allies.

Meanwhile, Reilly contacted the members of the anti-Bolshevik Union for Protection of Motherland and Freedom chaired by Boris Savinkov – the notorious Socialist Revolutionary and Kerensky’s closest assistant in 1917.

Commodore Cromie arranged Reilly’s meeting with the members of the Union to prevent the Bolsheviks’ consignment of Russian battleships to the Germans. He designed to enroll former Russian naval officers into the British military service by appealing to their patriotic sentiments and promising that they would be lavishly paid by the Admiralty if neglecting the Bolshevik commands.

It is worth keeping in mind that up to 50,000 demobilized Russian army and navy officers had assembled in Petrograd by the spring of 1918. Scarcely one or two out of ten could survive on their miserable retirement pensions. The register list of Russian volunteers opting for British military service that was found at the premises of the Petrograd diplomatic mission during the Cheka search on 31 August 1918 attested to this estimation. According to the secret reports by the Main Staff registration office, since the beginning of 1918, ‘the British, French and American missions, especially the consulates [of these states], have been intensively visited by Russian officers.’ They applied for enlistment in the Allied troops or marine crews, imploring Western diplomats to reimburse travel costs to Britain, France, or the United States. On receiving subsidies in cash, however, many Russian officers preferred to vanish without a trace, making it challenging to uncover espionage networks.

 

Lockhart's support for Boris Savinkov

American, French, and British diplomats in Russia had been sharing information. America and France had spies in Russia, but the British Secret Service had not contributed any high-level agents, but that changed when Sydney Reilly and Bruce Lockhart joined the plot.

Lockhart tried to get the Foreign Office to plan with Savinkov in mind: Intervention from Archangel would be very stimulating, to Savinkov’s rebellion, he wired. Whatever help Allies can give [to Savinkov] will be supported out of all proportion. (The British National Archive, FO 371/3286, Lockhart to Foreign  Office, May 26, 1918.)

These messages worried George Clerk (an Assistant Clerk in the Foreign Office). He saw Britain’s man on the spot was getting ahead of the game. He was putting himself into danger after all, and not only himself but also Savinkov’s entire conspiracy, by cabling enthusiastic reports about counter-revolution that the Bolsheviks, if indeed they had cracked the British cipher, might read. Clerk had taken Lockhart’s measure by now. Britain’s agent in Russia was brash, capable, and flexible, as his political volte-face demonstrated. Clerk thought Lockhart was subtle too: he could read between the lines; could find meaning in silence; could understand nuance and misdirection. Clerk sent a note to the Foreign Secretary: “I think  we should caution Mr. Lockhart to have nothing whatever to do with Savinkoff’s [sic] plans, & to avoid enquiring further into them.” Balfour duly repeated these words to Lockhart in a cable, no doubt for Bolsheviks to read as well. It has mystified historians who did not piece together Clerk’s logic or the preceding chain of telegrams that makes the prohibition’s meaning clear. Lockhart’s masters in London now knew their agent would understand the cable to be a blinking yellow light, not the red one it appeared to be.

Moreover, Lockhart would have noted that the Foreign Office did not disavow or even question Savinkov’s ruthless program. Not surprisingly then, his next step, more dangerous than any so far, was to meet with Savinkov in person. The latter came to see him at the Hotel Elite wearing a French uniform and dark-tinted glasses as a disguise, but also his trademark yellow spats. Lockhart gave him money.

Thus, the month of June 1918 passed in a welter of confusion, falsehood, and misdirection. Raymond Robins had embarked upon an epic, ultimately unsuccessful, journey home to persuade President Wilson against intervening in Russia. Lockhart, now firmly in the interventionist camp along with the remnants of his circle and his new anti-Bolshevik allies, was barraging the Foreign Office with cables exhorting intervention in Russia as soon as possible and asking for the date. But London was prevaricating: it realized intervention would be beyond Britain’s power until she could find additional troops. Meanwhile, Cromie was secretly preparing to destroy Russia’s Baltic fleet and funneling White officers north to launch a coup in Archangel. The French ambassador was falsely assuring Russian counter-revolutionaries that Allied assistance was imminent and, as a result, Boris Savinkov was honing his plans for a rising. The Czechs occupied one town after another as they continued along the Siberian Railway, in the wrong direction from Britain’s point of view. The last page of the monthly calendar turned, and July dawned, hot and humid, storms brewing.

Once General Poole landed in Archangel, no one thought he would stop there; everyone thought he would march south, and no one believed any longer that he would then march west to reopen the Eastern Front and fight Germans. Everyone assumed the Allies intended to overthrow the Bolsheviks, whatever Allied leaders might say to the contrary...

Latvians and their Rifle Brigade were to determine the shape and 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. 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 wasn’t clear, they surely assumed its existence even before it took shape. Nothing was more inevitable than 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.

 

 

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