Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (36 page)

The German treaty was the first to be concluded at the Peace Conference. Clemenceau had worn down Wilson sufficiently to persuade him to accept terms that were deeply shocking for most Germans. Vast reparations were to be paid and war guilt was to be admitted; and Germany and Austria, regardless of what their peoples wanted, were forbidden to merge into a single German state. Wilson had considered lining up with Lloyd George against Clemenceau in order to soften the treaty, but the negotiations behind the scenes proved fruitless. Tired out and drained of practical ideas, Wilson gave up the struggle and, whereas the British and French experts remained active, American influence declined as the President faded.
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The treaty was solemnly signed in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919. The choice of place was deliberate. It had been there in 1871 that the French had been humiliated by the victorious Prussians. Germany had become a pariah power, its only consolation being that German ministers knew exactly what the Allies were demanding of them. Soviet Russia, the other pariah power, still had no idea what the Allied intentions towards it might ultimately be.

19. EUROPEAN REVOLUTION

While the Allied powers had been conferring in Paris, they were troubled by some of the news that reached them from central Europe. Their fear grew that communism might spread across Europe; and although the German government had crushed the Spartacists in Berlin in January 1919, the fact that an insurrection had even been attempted was a worrying sign that the political far left could exploit a situation where unemployment and food shortages were on the rise. Germany was unlikely to be the only country which experienced such disorder. The victor powers felt anxious about the peace.

The Bolshevik leaders in Moscow drew comfort from exactly the same situation. Having made their own revolution by taking advantage of Russia’s wartime disintegration, they remained convinced that European sympathizers would soon emulate them – and although they had not wished for the death of Rosa Luxemburg, her untimely removal meant that Lenin and his Politburo could more easily dominate Comintern. Lenin was in buoyant mood, predicting revolutions that would set the continent on fire. Despite all the military difficulties faced by the Bolsheviks in the Urals, he expressed disdain for the Allied expeditionary forces in Russia. He told Arthur Ransome that Lloyd George might just as well send his soldiers to a communist university.
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He predicted that if the captured conscripts witnessed Bolshevism at work they would quickly turn into Bolsheviks themselves. The Soviet authorities put Boris Reinstein – a former emigrant to America – in charge of propaganda among British POWs who were allowed to stroll around the streets of Moscow.
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After intercepting a letter from a Private A. J. Fardon who had exchanged captivity for a job in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, and seemed to be rather taken with the Soviet model, the Directorate of Military Intelligence in London grew worried about the Soviet tactic – and it was irritated with Ransome for facilitating Private Fardon’s correspondence with his family.
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Ransome had also riled Lenin by saying that, while communism could succeed for the Russians, it had no chance of doing the same in Britain. Lenin replied:

We have a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had abortive typhoid, and was going about with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe is already there.
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When Ransome quipped that any British political disturbances were merely the sign of an abortive revolution, Lenin swatted him aside:

Yes, that is possible. It is, perhaps, an educative period, in which English workmen will come to realize their political needs, and turn from liberalism to socialism. Socialism is certainly weak in England. Your socialist movement, your socialist parties . . . when I was in England I zealously attended everything I could, and for a country with so large an industrial population they were pitiable, pitiable . . . a handful at a street corner . . . a school class . . . pitiable . . . But you must remember one great difference between Russia of 1905 and England of today. Our first Soviet in Russia was made during the revolution. Your shop-stewards committees have been in existence long before. They are without programme, without direction, but the opposition they will meet will force a programme on them.
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Lenin stood by his ideas of historical inevitability. Where Russians had gone, the British would surely follow whether Ransome agreed or not.

The Allied governments knew only too well that this was Lenin’s objective and could see that he and his comrades had attracted foreign sympathizers in Moscow who might return home and stir up revolution. The French were the first to take preventive action when Jacques Sadoul indicated a desire to assume a role in public life in Paris and only a bout of typhus held him back in the winter of 1918–19. He planned to tell his compatriots what he knew – or thought he knew – about the Soviet order. He also aimed to divulge information about France’s actions in Russia. Attacks on him appeared in the French press. Sadoul suspected that ministers had instigated them so as to keep him in Moscow and pre-empt a political
scandal.
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When the French Socialist Party adopted him as a candidate in the national elections in honour of his struggle against Allied armed military intervention in Russia, the government in Paris forestalled him by setting up a court-martial for treason. He was tried
in absentia
and, in November 1919, sentenced to death for treason.
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The next attempt at communist revolution occurred not in Paris or London but in Munich. Soldiers had returned from the western front angry and exhausted. Unemployment was growing and food shortages increased. Resentment at the Allies’ demands was on the rise. Strikes and demonstrations spread and the Russian idea of workers electing their own councils was copied. Kurt Eisner, Bavaria’s Prime Minister, tried to dampen the fire. His moderating influence was not widely appreciated. Indeed, he was hated at both extremes of the political spectrum, and on 21 February 1919 a fiery young aristocrat gunned him down. The assassination encouraged Max Levien, a leader of the Munich Workers’ Council, to think that there would never be a better or more necessary time to seize power. Born and raised in Russia, Levien had come to Germany to take a degree in zoology and unlike other political emigrants he stayed in central Europe after the fall of the Romanovs. His political partner was Eugen Leviné, who hailed from St Petersburg and had studied in Heidelberg after being exiled to Siberia. Their German associates were heavily represented in the liberal professions. They were fervent admirers of the October Revolution, and Levien and Leviné put themselves forward as the Lenin and Trotsky of the political far left in southern Germany.

On 7 April 1919 they proclaimed the Bavarian Council Republic. Factories and large commercial enterprises were expropriated. Church, aristocracy and bourgeoisie were threatened. Patrols were instituted around the city’s central districts. Telegrams of victory were sent to Moscow. Lenin replied congratulating the insurrectionaries; yet again he thought he had the proof that communism would spread quickly and easily to the rest of Europe.

The fact that Levien and Leviné were of Jewish parentage and were Russian passport-holders did not go unremarked in Munich. In the eyes of Eugenio Pacelli, the papal nuncio who in 1939 would become Pope Pius XII, Levien was ‘a young man, about thirty or thirty-five, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and
sly.’
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The nuncio described the female communists as filthy sluts and he associated Levien and Leviné with dirt, slipperiness and even bestiality. Pacelli’s prejudices were shared by many Christians in those years, and the Council Republic was widely regarded as a foreign disease. But the leaders of the Council Republic, by mixing exclusively with people who shared their political extremism, failed to detect the revulsion that millions of Germans felt for their creed. Nor did they appreciate how the disruption of social and economic stability that had enabled their seizure of power was only a temporary phenomenon. Retaliation was inevitable. But Levien and his comrades underestimated their enemies’ capacity to do them damage – and at a time when Kolchak was threatening Moscow, there was no chance of armed support from the Red Army.

The Bavarian Council Republic lasted only as long as it took for the national government in Berlin to organize an attack. Levien and Levine´ were breathtakingly naive. Believing that common criminals were simply victims of the old Imperial order, they released all convicts from prison. (Neither Lenin nor Trotsky was ever tempted into such silliness.) The subsequent wave of robberies and murders in Munich made it a terrible place to live. The economic emergency intensified as businesses closed down. Levien and Leviné had no idea how to restore employment, and their period in power was characterized by a collapse of industry and commerce.

In May 1919 the Freikorps assembled in Bamberg 150 miles to the north and moved on Munich alongside regular army units. Known communists were shot in the streets. The official tally was six hundred deaths, but the reality could well have been twice that. The fighting was over within a few hours as workers’ militias quickly laid down their arms. Levien escaped to Vienna until he took refuge in Soviet Russia in June 1921. Leviné, a less worldly person, saw it as his duty to remain with his comrades in Munich. Arrested with the writer Ernst Toller, he was tried for sedition. He was resigned to his fate: ‘We communists are all dead men on leave.’
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He was executed after being found guilty of complicity in the shooting of hostages. The lamps of communism had failed to illumine central Europe. Although Soviet leaders were disappointed, they observed that German politics remained volatile and that the national government could not deal with its enemies on the political far left without bringing in the army and paramilitary forces. The economy was in tatters. Even if the
Munich experiment had proved unsuccessful, this did not mean that workers in Germany and elsewhere in central Europe would not eventually find the ingredients to produce a revolutionary order.

Hungarian communists gave grounds for optimism from 21 March 1919, when they swept to power in Budapest with a communist dominated coalition. The revolution was quickly spread to the entire country – or at least to those parts of Hungary left to the Hungarians by the Allies. Lenin and Trotsky greeted it with the same warmth as they had shown to the Bavarian Council Republic. Béla Kun, the Hungarian revolutionary leader, was a zealot for the Soviet order. He had spent time in Russia after being captured with the armies of Austria-Hungary on the eastern front. As an ex-POW he formed a Hungarian communist group in Moscow in March 1918, returning to Budapest as soon as the Great War was over. Kun had worked as a journalist and wrote lively pamphlets against the Western Allies and the prospect of a humiliating peace. He now found he had a talent for oratory, too. The unstable government that was striving to moderate the Allied terms threw him into prison. But when the social-democrats entered the cabinet they liberated Kun as a comrade on the political left. He walked straight from the cells into a ministerial post. He had been badly beaten while incarcerated and his face showed the wounds that he had received and fully intended to avenge.
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Like his friend and fellow communist Tibor Szamuely, Kun was a fanatic. Solidarity with Soviet Russia was proclaimed and reports of Bolshevik achievements were carried in the Budapest newspapers. The Red flag was hoisted on public buildings. Trade unions received a generous quota of free tickets to the theatres. The banks, mines and big textile factories were nationalized. Kun established a security police that soon gained notoriety for its terror against ‘class enemies’. Szamuely assembled the ‘Lenin Boys’ whom he sent into the villages to seize the harvest and impose a system of collective farms. (The same thing was happening in the Ukrainian countryside; but whereas in Ukraine it was against the instructions of Moscow, in Hungary it was on Kun’s orders.) Churches were desecrated and priests and landlords were arrested or murdered. When peasants objected to the violence, the Lenin Boys turned on them too. The communization of Hungarian society was undertaken at a faster pace even than in Russia after the October Revolution. Blood flowed copiously.

Such popularity as Kun retained lay in his unequivocal rejection
of the Allies’ schemes for Hungary. The Western Allies planned to reward Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia with territory that until then had been part of Hungary. Hungary would become a third of its previous size. As a result even Hungarians who were wary of Kun’s communist internationalist doctrines lent him their support. The communist leadership were willing to act rather than merely grumble.

Recruiting left-of-centre commanders from the Imperial armed forces, Kun mobilized the troops to fight for every patch of ‘Hungarian’ soil. He vowed to repel the growing incursions by Romanian and Czechoslovak troops. He paraded foreign POWs through the streets of Budapest. Hungary’s interests, he implied, were safe in his hands. Although he disliked the Hungarian national flag, he yielded when Ferenc Julier, Chief of the General Staff, told him that without it there might be trouble in getting an army into the field against the Romanians.
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Kun was cunning in his interviews for the foreign press, pretending to be much more moderate than he really was and claiming that it would be years before any truly communist policies would be applied. For a while he was successful and the communist regime threw back the Romanian and Czech invaders in April 1919.
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Its Red Army invaded Czechoslovakia, taking several towns before meeting effective resistance. It closed the Danube to shipping, and Austrian attempts to break the river blockade were disrupted ‘by the Hungarian Bolshevists who would fire on boats’.
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The Orient Express continued to run across Hungary from Romania, but Red Guards with their fixed bayonets and grenade belts made crossing the border an unpleasant experience.
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