Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West by Robert Service

Author:Robert Service [Service, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230760950
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK

A crusade against Soviet Russia was anathema to troops who longed for demobilization and shipment home. Powerful resistance grew to making war on communism.

This was certainly the line taken by Labour Party candidates at the hustings before the general election on 14 December 1918. Ramsay MacDonald thought that it had served the Allies right that Lenin had dragged Russia out of the war; he was also sympathetic to the Bolsheviks as fellow socialists, despite being regularly insulted by them in print.6 The New Statesman, breaking its wartime silence about how to handle Russia, joined the Daily Herald, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Express in putting pressure on Lloyd George and the government to halt the intervention. Even the Daily Telegraph, usually a supporter of the Coalition, objected to ministers refusing to ventilate their considerations on Bolshevism in parliament or the press. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Milner, was an exception; he openly contended that it would be ‘an abominable betrayal, contrary to every British instinct of honour and humanity’, if the country abandoned those Russians who had supported the Allied forces of intervention – and he confided to ex-chargé d’affaires Konstantin Nabokov that his personal preference was to reinforce the military intervention.7 But generally the Coalition MPs avoided the Russian question save only for affirming that a vote for them would help defend the United Kingdom against Bolshevism. Their electoral tactic paid off. When the results were declared on 28 December the Coalition had triumphed.8

Robert Bruce Lockhart’s line was more belligerent than Milner’s. Newly returned from Moscow, he was acclaimed as a near-martyr who had done his patriotic duty. In the House of Commons only the Liberal MP Joseph King sounded a discordant note about him. King had got hold of the Soviet version of events and pointed out that Lockhart was no innocent but had tried to suborn the Latvian Riflemen into arresting Lenin and Trotsky.9 This isolated clamour drew no response from Lockhart, who maintained his focus on seeking to influence governmental policy; with Germany defeated, he favoured an all-out invasion of Russia. On 7 November, the first anniversary of the October seizure of power in Petrograd, he forwarded a memorandum to the Foreign Office emphasizing the strength that accrued to the Soviet government from its repressive zeal as well as its popularity with workers and peasants. The Bolsheviks were easily the biggest party in Russia; the counter-revolutionary forces were hopelessly divided. Lockhart pointed out that the communist leadership was intent on expanding the revolution into central Europe. He mapped out the various options before recommending military force ‘to intervene immediately on a proper scale’. He proposed sending British troops to Siberia and Archangel. But his idea was that the main offensive should be organized from the south: he called for 50,000 men to be dispatched to the Black Sea to link up with the Volunteer Army.10

Lockhart predicted success for an invasion at a time when the Red Army was weak and the Allies were not yet exhausted.

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