A people's tragedy

fn5 In January 1919 President Wilson and Lloyd George agreed terms with the Bolsheviks for a peace conference on the island of Prinkipo, just off Constantinople. The Bolsheviks offered to honour Russia’s foreign debts, to make minor territorial adjustments and to suspend hostile propaganda against the West — although this was later explained by the Soviets as a diplomatic manæuvre. The White leaders would not have anything to do with the conference. They felt betrayed by the Allied suggestion that they should come to terms with the Reds. Churchill and the French backed them. The conference never convened, but Wilson continued peace talks with the Bolsheviks. William Bullitt, his principal foreign policy adviser, was sent on a secret mission to Moscow. Bullitt was favourably impressed by the Soviet experiment and recommended a separate peace, but this was scotched by the British and the French.

fn6 Such deception was facilitated by the fact that in 1918 most of the Soviets were still using the old zemstvo stationery.

fn7 The Komuch did make an effort to recruit the services of Brusilov; but this came to nothing.

fn8 It is doubtful, however, whether Knox played any part in the preparations for the coup. This was the mischievous contention of the French at the time — that Kolchak had been installed by the British as ‘their man’ in order to build up their influence in Siberia.

fn9 As Kolchak later acknowledged at his interrogation in 1920: ‘The general opinion … was that only a government authorized by the Constituent Assembly could be a real one; but the Constituent Assembly which we got … and which from the very beginning started in by singing the “Internationale” under Chernov’s leadership, provoked an unfriendly attitude … It was considered to have been an artificial and a partisan assembly. Such was also my opinion. I believed that even though the Bolsheviks had few worthy traits, by dispersing the Constituent Assembly they performed a service and this act should be counted to their credit.’ (Varneck and Fisher (ed.), Testimony, 106–7.)

Chapter 13

fn1 At that time (October 1918) there were 8,000 officers sitting as ‘hostages’ in the Cheka prisons (Revvoensovet Respubliki, 36).

fn2 Stalin’s rise to power was partly dependent on the mobilization of this anti-intellectualism against the Old Bolsheviks (those who had joined the party before 1917) among the rank-and-file Communists. Many of his most important allies in the 1920s were former members of the Military Opposition. Voroshilov, for example, joined the Politburo in 1925.

fn3 All party members had the right to carry guns. It was seen as a sign of comradely equality. They were not disarmed until 1935 — after the murder of Kirov.

fn4 No doubt a reference to Spiders and Flies, the best-selling pamphlet of 1917 which had done so much to shape the popular myth of the burzhooi (see here).

fn5 One exception was onions — no doubt the result of a bureaucratic slip. A boom in onion production soon followed, as the peasants sought to exploit this last remaining legal area of free trade.

fn6 Another consideration was that many of the joint-stock companies affected by the decree were German-owned and that under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty any of these companies which were nationalized after 1 July would have to be fully indemnified (Malle, Economic, 59–61).

fn7 The first official portrait of Lenin only appeared in January 1918.

fn8 According to Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin disapproved of the cult (Marxist ideology negated the significance of any individual in history) and put a brake on it when he recovered (Bonch-Bruevich, Vospominaniia o Lenine, 337–40).

fn9 It later emerged at the SR Trial in 1922 that Kaplan had been recruited by the SR Combat Organization, an underground terrorist outfit not officially connected with the SR Central Committee (most of whom had moved to Samara by August 1918) but supported by some of its members (e.g. Gots) who remained in Moscow. The Combat Organization assassinated the Bolshevik Commissar Volodarsky on 20 June. It also tried to murder Trotsky on his way to the Eastern Front; but he foiled the plan by changing trains at the last moment.

fn10 Soviet Russia set up its first foreign embassy in Berlin at this time.

fn11 The refusal of the British royal family to visit Russia for the next seventy-five years because of the murder of the Romanovs may thus seem to many readers to contain a large dose of typical British hypocrisy.

fn12 Until recently the role of Yakovlev was something of a mystery. It was argued both that he was working for the Bolsheviks and that he was a White secret agent planning to rescue the imperial family. New evidence now puts his role as an agent of Moscow beyond dispute, although it is true that in July, whilst in command of the Second Red Army on the Eastern Front, he defected to the Whites (see Radzinsky, Last Tsar, ch. 11).