Enemies Within. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ made mid-nineteenth-century revolutions: the urban forces that brought Louis Bonaparte to power in 1848 were, he wrote, a rabble of decayed roués, bourgeois chancers, ferret-like vagabonds, discharged soldiers, ex-prisoners, spongers, drifters, pickpockets, confidence-tricksters, pimps, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers and tinkers. Marx regarded universal suffrage as a fetish, Bonaparte as a reckless gambler, his election by popular vote as head of the French state as a pathological symptom, and Bonapartism as little different from tsarism. He regarded the working of economic laws as the paramount and predestined cause of revolution, and considered assertions of collective social will as subordinate factors. ‘The strength of Marxism’, wrote R. C. (‘Robin’) Zaehner, a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer in Iran during the 1940s, ‘is that it is a revolutionary creed which offers an earthly paradise here and now, which claims to be scientific, and which would have us believe that the classless society is the inevitable result of the evolutionary process.’ Communism, continued Zaehner, repudiates individualism, self-regard, personal enterprise and the rights of private property: indeed considers them as condemned at the bar of historic destiny.⁶

      The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 did not fit the principles of Das Kapital. Mechanized slaughter rather than, as Marx predicted, the breakdown of capitalism brought communist revolution to Russia. It was not the Bolshevik insurgents who made the revolutionary situation, but the European ‘total war’, which overwhelmed tsarist autocracy, brought military collapse, civilian exasperation, hunger and fatigue, and forced the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917. The decision of the provisional government, which replaced the Romanov monarchy, to continue participation in that war led to the swift rise of several distinct mass movements: the urban proletariat (organized in ‘soviets’, viz. councils elected by manual workers), the peasantry, soldiers and sailors, non-Russian nationalities and a numerically small number of bourgeois all coalesced into different groups. The war-induced crisis discredited monarchism, liberalism and moderate socialism in turn. The collapse of state authority in 1917 had little resemblance to the military coups of politically minded soldiers, such as overthrew the Obrenović royal dynasty in Serbia in 1903 or mustered for the Young Turk revolt of 1908. Nor did it resemble the crowd pressure represented by the March on Rome led by Mussolini in 1922. It arose from the mass mobilization of peasants, soldiers and workers who were provoked by the injustice, exploitation, inequity and incompetence of their rulers, and yearned to be freed from a failed autocracy.⁷

      On taking power the Bolsheviks sought to placate the mass movements. They signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, devolved power to the soviets, redistributed confiscated lands to the peasantry and tried to vest control of factories in their workers. A giddying spiral of economic collapse, unemployment and mass privation renewed urban proletarian and peasant discontent. ‘In the course of a bitter civil war, the Bolsheviks forged a Red Army that defeated a succession of enemies, including the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Whites, Allied interventionists, and peasant partisans,’ as the historian of communism Stephen A. Smith has put it. ‘In so doing, they instituted key elements of what would become the generic communist system: a highly centralized state under a single party, the crushing of dissent, and the curtailment of popular organizations.’ Some scholars argue that this outcome was the result of Lenin’s determination to concentrate power in a single party and to eliminate political opposition. Others contend that the totalitarian state was necessitated by ‘the desperate problems the Bolshevists faced in defeating the counter-revolution, in feeding the Red Army and the urban population, in maintaining production for the war effort and in combating tendencies to crime and social anomie’. Once the Bolsheviks had trounced their adversaries, they did not revert to the decentralized socialist structures that had achieved the revolutions of 1917.⁸

      Other preliminary points must be stressed in contextualizing the history of communist espionage in England. Nicholas II, whose Romanov dynasty had ruled since 1613, believed that he was a divine instrument, and that it was by God’s command that his subjects owed unconditional submission to his autocracy. He preferred sacred duties, mysticism and superstition to secular expertise: specialist cadres of ministers and bureaucrats were anathema to him. The Russian Orthodox Church had been a temporal instrument of the Romanov empire since the reign of Peter the Great: icons and local saints – but also devils and sprites – were vivid, active forces in the lives of the peasantry; apostasy was a criminal offence. Bolshevik Russia was the antithesis of the Tsar’s ramshackle theocracy: it was the first state in world history to be atheistic in its foundation and to deny the merit in any religion. ‘The working class has elaborated its own revolutionary morality, which began by dethroning God and all absolute standards,’ Trotsky declared in 1922. Although the Orthodox Church was one of the few Romanov institutions to survive 1917, its influence was truncated. Atheists across Europe welcomed the ruthless hostility of the pioneer socialist state to religious hocus-pocus. Kim Philby particularly but also Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were drawn to Marxism by its repudiation of Christianity.⁹

      Secondly, the civil war of 1917–22 was the crucible in which the Soviet Union was forged. By one reliable computation, deaths in combat, endemic disease, disappearances and emigration led to a fall in population of 12.7 million between 1917 and 1922. During those years of savage combat the Bolshevik leadership made the communist party into a disciplined fighting force: they shed the vitiating residue of revolutionary romanticism and utopianism; they abjured clemency, lenience and individualism; and they asserted the historical inevitability of victory. Bolshevism was set on breaking the sovereignty and capitalism of nation states, installing an international workers’ dictatorship and thus accomplishing global revolution. These great aims were used to justify the exaction of huge sacrifices by the present generation for the benefit of their successors; to justify, too, forced labour and show-trials.

      During the 1920s Litvinov developed a diplomatic negotiating style suitable for the dictatorship of the proletariat: exhausting, outrageous insistence on predetermined objects, regardless of truth, reason or facts. Soviet officials had neither the training nor the capacity to argue with foreign negotiators. They declared their position with immovable aggression, and never deviated from it. Molotov was true to his nom de guerre and during the 1930s and 1940s continued this hammering, defiantly mendacious manner of diplomatic exchanges. Andrei Gromyko, who in 1957 began his twenty-eight years as Minister of Foreign Affairs, was a past-master in the old Bolshevik brand of brutal diplomacy and ersatz furious indignation.

      During the civil war, the Bolsheviks lost control of large parts of the Romanov empire to the anti-Bolshevist, monarchist and nationalist forces known as the White armies. At first the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the Baltic provinces and central Asia were wrested back; but by the treaty of Riga in 1921 Ukraine was partitioned between the Soviet Union and an expanded Poland. Ground was lost in Finland, the Baltic littoral, western Belorussia and Bessarabia. Soviet Russia was seen by the Bolshevik leadership as a dismembered version of imperial Russia. Russian military advances into Poland and Finland in 1939–40 show the Stalinist priority in regaining the lost territories of 1918–20. In the spring of 1945 Russia was able to reoccupy Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and to begin renewing its territorial and ideological control elsewhere. Britain, with its history of intervention in the civil war and as the only western European power with a major Asiatic empire, was a primary adversary, which needed to be met with espionage, subversion and ultimately sabotage.¹⁰

      ‘How can you make a revolution without firing squads?’ Lenin asked in 1917. ‘Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very cruellest revolutionary terror?’ he demanded a year later. Soon he instituted so-called People’s Courts, which have been described by Victor Sebestyen as ‘essentially ad hoc mob trials in which twelve “elected” judges, most of them barely literate, would rule less on the facts of the case than with the use, in Lenin’s words, of “revolutionary justice”’. After issuing a decree in 1918 permitting the summary shooting by Red Guards of enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans and counter-revolutionary agitators, Lenin regretted that it would be impolitic to rename the Commissariat of Justice the Commissariat for Social Extermination.¹¹

      Walter СКАЧАТЬ