Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (47 page)

He threw himself into the tasks of public speaking and writing for the socialist press; he also prepared a tendentious memorandum for the State Department denying that any parties other than the Bolsheviks had the slightest following. He wrote that the entire social structure in Russia had been transformed because the bourgeoisie had been dispossessed and turned into proletarians. He claimed that the former middle classes could freely ‘organize in the Soviets, but only to defend their [new] proletarian interests’. The truth was different. The Soviet Constitution expressly deprived those classes of civic rights. Reed stated that the USA was the foreign partner of choice for Sovnarkom because the British and the French had been unremittingly hostile. He added that it was in the Russian interest for Germany to be defeated in the Great War. The reality was that Lenin and Trotsky hoped for anti-capitalist risings across Europe and North America. Reed dropped his tactful tone just once, when saying of the Russians: ‘As for President Wilson, they don’t believe a word he says.’
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Reed wanted the US to recognize Soviet Russia and stop persecuting Bolsheviks in America – and he urged American politicians to get the Japanese to withdraw from eastern Siberia.
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Together with Max Eastman, he also produced a booklet that included translated pieces by Lenin and Chicherin. Lenin’s contribution was his ‘Letter to American Workingmen’. The booklet was distributed in a somewhat abridged edition ‘in deference to an extremely literal interpretation of the Espionage Act’. Eastman wrote an imaginary conversation between Lenin and President Wilson. This was wholly to Wilson’s disadvantage, with Lenin putting awkward questions to Wilson and exposing him as wealthy, ignorant, insincere and dangerous.
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Eastman was a communist sympathizer although he did not belong to an organized communist group. He was not alone in taking this position. The outstanding example in France was the
novelist Henri Barbusse, who contended that the Bolsheviks had ‘attenuated their implacable rigidity’ and were adapting to ‘the life of an innumerable, young people’.
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Barbusse implied that France had a superior civilization to Russia: he urged everyone not to expect too much of the Russians. But he insisted that, after a poor start, communism in Russia was changing for the better.

Reed and the other pro-Bolshevik commentators were not the only proponents of conciliation with the Russian communist leaders. A leading American critic of Soviet rule was John Spargo, whose comments were all the more persuasive inasmuch as he was a socialist friend of Georgi Plekhanov.
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Russia as an American Problem
, appearing in mid-November 1919, held that Bolshevism was an ‘inverted tsarist regime’ and an enemy of democracy.
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But Spargo argued that the Germans remained bent on the economic domination of Russia and that Japanese objectives were not dissimilar.
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He urged America to get involved before it was too late. US businessmen could help Russia back on its feet by trading in its natural resources. Exports of gold and timber would enable Russians to pay for the capital equipment vital for economic recovery. America should send some of its own experts and make financial credits available.
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He admitted that there were uncompromising extremists among the Soviet leadership, but suggested that Lenin and a few others were demonstrating a readiness for internal reform. Spargo had vociferously supported the White armies until their defeat in the Civil War; but when the Reds achieved military victory he judged that the resumption of international commerce was the surest way to erode Bolshevism’s grip on the country.
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In fact the person who gave the most effective succour to Moscow was the economist John Maynard Keynes. In
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
, published late in 1919, Keynes said that Clemenceau had been eaten up with a desire for vengeance on Germany. He thought Wilson was an innocent abroad whose intelligence was overstated, while Lloyd George seemed to lose his political compass when confronted by a Clemenceau on the rampage. Keynes took all Western leaders to task for their treatment of Germany,
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arguing that the Versailles treaty was a Carthaginian peace which had ruined the chances of recuperation and guaranteed chronic political instability. Territory had been grabbed from the Germans, reparations imposed.
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Keynes sombrely predicted that a devastated Russia and an
exhausted Germany would draw close; he argued that it could not be excluded that ‘Spartacism’ would win out in Berlin.
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But even if the political far left fell short of victory, he wrote, there could still be an alliance between German capitalism and Russian communism – and the British, Americans and French would be the losers unless they changed their policy. Keynes hailed the work of Herbert Hoover and the American Relief Administration – Hoover had condemned the treaty as too harsh while it was being negotiated, and Keynes called him ‘the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation’.
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Cheap grain shipments from the US Midwest were currently saving eastern and central Europe from famine. This vital relief, though, would not continue for ever and it behoved the Allies to enable the restoration of Russian cereal exports. Keynes claimed that without them there could be no European economic recovery or political stabilization. He insisted that since the Allies could not yet supply Russia with the agricultural implements needed to regenerate its farming, Germany would be doing everyone a service by trading with Moscow. The world had an interlinked economy and Keynes wanted policy to be adjusted in the light of this.
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He wrote his book in a spasm of fervour in autumn 1919 and it came out amid controversy at the end of the year. Few other works by him around that period had quite the same punch. The book was an instant best-seller in many languages, but disparagers quickly appeared in abundance. A London
Times
editorial applauded the Cambridge academic for his cleverness and erudition but denied that the Germans had been treated too severely. Supposedly Keynes was urging a policy that would ‘place Germany in effective control of Russia as a recompense for having let loose a war in which one of her principal objects was the economic enslavement of Russia’.
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The reviewer in the
New York Times
was blunter still, calling the book a ‘revolting melodrama’. Keynes had allegedly practised ‘the highly perfect art of slurring those who helped to win this war’.
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The French authorities and press were similarly negative.
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Only on the left did Keynes experience a warm reception. The
Manchester Guardian
praised him for his ‘conspicuous courage’.
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From donnish obscurity Keynes rose to international fame, leaving no one indifferent regardless of whether they liked or disliked his analysis of the Versailles treaty.

Soviet communist leaders acclaimed the book. Ioffe said it exactly coincided with his own opinions.
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Even Lenin, who only reluctantly
cited authors hostile to Marxism in his writings, welcomed
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
; but if he was flattered by Keynes’s reference to his ‘subtle mind’, he did not say so.
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Bolsheviks were delighted to witness one of the world’s most brilliant economists agreeing that a punitive peace had been inflicted on Germany and a disastrous blockade on Russia. While they waited for revolutions to roll out across Europe, they could at least enjoy watching others spreading their propaganda for them.

26. LEFT ENTRANCE

From late 1919 Sovnarkom denied accreditation to journalists of unfriendly foreign newspapers.
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Dispatches had to be submitted in advance to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Marguerite E. Harrison of the Associated Press noted that the official Soviet reviewer of Western press coverage mysteriously lost or delayed sanctioning the articles he disliked. He confessed: ‘Mrs Harrison, your article is perfectly correct in every particular, but I prefer Mr Blank’s article. It is more favourable to us. If they both came out in the American press at the same time it might produce a bad impression. I will send his first and hold yours for twenty-four hours.’
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Meanwhile a Central Bureau for the Service of Foreigners was created in the Russian capital with the idea of arranging evenings of cultural uplift for favoured reporters, and Party Central Committee member Anatoli Lunacharski helped out by compèring a concert by the State Stradivarius Quartet playing Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Debussy.
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Such efforts had only patchy success with the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who arrived in Russia early in 1920 after being deported from America. In line with the idea of winning friends who could influence international opinion, the Soviet authorities made a fuss of them and gave them rooms in a good Moscow hotel. Goldman had modified her doctrines of anarchism to the point where she no longer advocated non-violence as an absolute principle. But she was never likely to become a Bolshevik and indeed she remarked on the poverty, bureaucracy and fanatical intolerance that prevailed under Soviet rule. Communist functionaries filled their days with meetings with trade union activists and factory workers who would reliably spout the official Bolshevik line; but, as word of her presence got around Moscow, Russian anarchists made contact and told her of the persecution they had suffered since the October Revolution. By December 1921 she and Berkman had had enough and left Russia for good. They decamped to the Latvian capital Riga,
where they could write freely about the oppression they had witnessed. Joseph Pulitzer published their work in his
New York World
magazine and Goldman later integrated their articles into her book
My Disillusionment in Russia.
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Soviet leaders hoped for better luck with their efforts to influence the British political left. On 10 December 1919 the Trades Union Congress demanded ‘the right to an independent and impartial enquiry into the industrial, economic and political conditions of Russia’, aiming to send a joint delegation of the TUC, the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party to see things for themselves.
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The Supreme Allied Council decided that no harm would be done, and on 27 April 1920 the delegation left for Scandinavia en route for Petrograd.
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Lenin remained unconvinced that this was a good idea and called for a press campaign to denounce the projected ‘guests’ of Soviet Russia as ‘social-traitors’. Chicherin pleaded for the trip to happen without any molestation, and Lenin for once gave way.
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The British Labour delegation reached Petrograd on 11 May for their six-week trip.
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Off the train stepped Margaret Bondfield, H. Skinner and A. A. Purcell for the TUC; Ben Turner, Mrs Philip Snowden and Robert Williams for the Labour Party; and Clifford Allen and R. C. Wallhead for the Independent Labour Party. Dr Leslie Haden Guest and C. Roden Buxton travelled as secretaries and interpreters.
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Bertrand Russell joined them later after undergoing a special interview by British officials in London and overcoming Litvinov’s initial reluctance to issue him a visa in Stockholm.
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The delegates felt they were breaking through to a different world. As Ethel Snowden put it: ‘We were behind the “iron curtain” at last!’
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It is widely assumed that this phrase was coined by Winston Churchill, in his speech at Fulton, Missouri in 1946, as the Cold War started between the USSR and the USA. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels had in fact used it a year earlier as the Red Army swept into Romania.
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But though it was she who had coined it, Mrs Snowden’s meaning was quite different from Churchill’s. She believed that a curtain of ignorance separated the countries of the West from Soviet Russia. She denied that the Russian communists were a threat to Britain’s security – and she opposed any project to renew British armed intervention or giving material assistance to the enemies of Bolshevism.
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