-Caveat Lector-
>From Constantine Fitzgibbon
Secret Intelligence in the 20th century
Chapter Nine
When Russia was Losing the War
(IIIb refers to the German intelligence dept)
The two great intelligence services - in the widest politico-military sense
- of the First World War became rapidly crystallized with the onset of
trench warfare on the Western and Italian:fronts. (The Turkish War was in
essence little more than a very expensive and moderately important
sideshow.) The Battle of the Somme in 1916 and the Battle of Verdun in that
same year should have showed those with eyes to see that the ratio of forces
in the West made a purely military victory - the ultimate defeat of one army
by another - a highly improbable outcome: and both sides were set on total
victory. Therefore other methods had to be invoked. The military historian
senses an undisclosed despair in the great French and British offensives of
1917 and even in that of the Germans in 1918. While we have the advantage of
hindsight, it is hard to believe that either side really thought that any of
these three huge operations, even the Ludendorf offensive of March 1918,
which was the only one to show a great measure of success, could 'end the
war'. Other means beyond shelling and slaughter were needed. In the
operational field, the Germans chose U-boats, with almost decisive effect;
the British chose strategic bombing, but too late for it to be tested. On
both sides, however, the closer connection of political activity with
intelligence was seen as likely to be a more effective preliminary to a
military victory. For the Western Allies this meant above all the
involvement of the United States in the War. For the Germans it meant
elimination of one or more of their enemies.
The Battle of Verdun, as indecisive as the contemporaneous Battle of
Jutland, resulted in nothing save more huge military cemeteries. The French
have always claimed Verdun as a victory, which it was in so far ,as the
Germans failed to capture Verdun and thence perhaps advance on Paris. But it
was a purely 'defensive victory, and one that in effect weakened the French
army even more than it did the Germans. When, a few months later, the French
attempted a counter-offensive, under General Nivelle, they suffered a major
defeat for which superior German and inferior French battlefield
intelligence were largely responsible. The elaborate French preparations for
the Nivelle Offensive were known to the Germans, who withdrew to fortified
lines. This was not known to, or at least not appreciated by, Nivelle, whose
vast force de frappe hit a near-vacuum. The complexity of lugging this great
infantry-artillery apparatus forward to the real German defensive lines was
almost beyond the technical ability of his staff officers, and the French,
already weakened almost beyond bearing by nearly three years of slaughter
culminating at Verdun, were bloodily defeated.
Parts of the French army mutinied, crying for revolution, and peace at any
price. However, the presence of a very considerable British army in France,
combined with the personality of Marshal Petain, and reinforced by America's
entry into the war, made it difficult, if not impossible, for the French to
react in 1917 as they were to do in 1940. The British took the military
weight off the French by launching the equally futile, equally bloody Battle
of Passchendaele. Petain shot a few mutineers and exerted his normal,
calming prestige. The French remained in the war, a brave but never again a
very formidable army. It is, in retrospect, hard to see a method by which
the Germans could have knocked France out of the enemy alliance, even after
the disastrous Nivelle Offensive of 1917. But it seemed at the time to be
almost a case of touch and go. The victory of 1918 was not a 'French'
victory, but the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 was most certainly a 'French'
revenge, and one that was eventually to be at least as expensive as the
Nivelle Offensive.
The attempts of German intelligence officers to undermine French morale were
not pursued with any particular enthusiasm or success. During the second
half of the war the number of French deserters increased, sometimes across
the lines, more usually into neutral Switzerland. IIIb saw that some of
these men might be useful in various ways, and an organization was set up,
with offices in Geneva and Antwerp among other places and with a
headquarters finally established at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, approximately half
way between those two cities. French deserters 'who were regarded as
suitable material were extremely well, indeed lavishly, treated,
particularly in Antwerp by Dr Elisabeth Sehragmtiler, known to the French as
'Mademoiselle Docteur'. They were sent back across the front with
assignments of varying importance. One was simply to spread defeatism and,
where possible, to encourage other French soldiers to desert. More important
was to glean order of battle intelligence. For example, when the Germans did
not know the location of a French division, a deserter would be sent back,
in his old uniform of course, but with false papers assigning him to a unit
of the division in question, and leave papers. He would then go to the Rail
Transport Officer of the nearest big railway station, say that he was. lost,
and enquire where 'his division' might be so that he might return to it.
Having acquired this item of intelligence he would then desert again, over a
prearranged route, and pass it to Mademoiselle Docteur or one of her people,
reaping no doubt a suitable reward. The French counter-intelligence soon got
on to this trick and by changing the colours of leave documents made the
operation far more difficult for German intelligence, and-eventually
impossible. The returned deserters could then only collect general
information, for which they were paid only enough to encourage them in
another such dangerous Operation Never-theless there is said to have been an
illiterate flower-seller from Marseilles with an astonishing memory who made
no less than fifteen such trips into France for the Germans1
Although the concept of eliminating France by a knockout blow was
never entirely abandoned by the German military leader-ship and was indeed
given one last try in 1918, politico-military intelligence was looking for a
way round the purely military Western Front confrontation at least as early
as 1916. One, as we know, was the elimination of Britain by U-boat warfare.
(The Germans of course had as little-interest in Irish national aspirations
as had the French in 1798 or the Spaniards in 1601; in all three cases the
foreigners' motives were the denial of the Irish ports and the entanglement
of British forces in Ireland.) The U-boat campaign could, according to the
calculations of the German Admiral Staff, not be launched until there were
200 operational U-boats available, that is to say before 1 February 1917.
And it had to succeed rapidly after that date, since it was realized by at
least the more perspicacious men in Berlin that it would provoke the United
States beyond Wilsonian tolerance.
For geographical reasons the elimination of Italy would have proved as
expensive in troops, and ultimately of as little value, to the Germany of
the First World ,War as it was to prove to the
Anglo-Americans of the Second World War. Austro-German military policy in
both wars was simply to tie down the maximum amount of enemy forces in the
long peninsula.
There remained Imperial Russia, isolated geographically from
Gemany's other foes, and here the prospects of success were from the very
beginning, and certainly after Tannenberg, far greater. Yet the Germans set
about this great endeavour in a curiously halfhearted way. Two myths have
come into being. One is that the so-called Kerensky Revolution of February
1917 and its-sequel, the Bolshevik November Revolution, were the result of
conspiracies between Russian traitors and the German Great General Staff.
The other is that both revolutions were 'spontaneous'. The second myth has
been propagated by official Soviet propaganda, the first by anti-Communists
then and later. George Katkov, writing about the background to the first,
the February, revolution, has described in his introduction the 'frequent
attacks of despair and despondency' that almost over-whelmed him as he
attempted to unravel the mass of lies and contradictions inherent in the
subject.* The ,mass of material, mostly false, and the pink spectacles worn
by so many Western 'liberal' historians, did not make his labours any
easier. And of, course our knowledge of the Russian archives of the period
is both fragmentary and highly selected to fit the changing theses of Soviet
historians. Mr. Katkov, on whom this writer has drawn with gratitude,
illuminates the extraordinary confusion prevalent in the Imperial Russian
war administration. For a more detailed outline of the murky confusion in
which German intelligence had to go fishing, the reader is referred to his
books. .
In her foreign relations the basic source of Russian strength has
always been a simple, one might even say a simplistic, patriotism, a peasant
patriotism profoundly connected with the land of Russia. So vast is that
land mass, so remote its simple farm labourers from all foreign contact,
that invasions from East or West, by Mongols or Frenchmen or Germans, have
usually evoked emotions of violent resistance only occasionally confused by
a desire for 'liberation'. And this basic, rooted patriotism was in large
measure instilled into the conquered, subject peoples of the czarist and
Soviet Empires. Only in the Ukraine, and in the border areas of the Baltic
states, the Chinese Orient, the Jewish 'pale' and nowadays the occupied
Eastern European countries have the Russians had to fear revolt and
collaboration with the enemy, and then only marginally. It is almost as
though Russian fatalism towards bad government is infectious.
For perhaps no great nation-state or empire under European influence has
been, for two centuries and more, so badly, so inefficiently and at times so
cruelly governed. Napoleon, bearing no matter how dishonestly the word
'freedom' on his banner, was accepted as the liberator in Germany and Italy.
He had every reason to expect an even more enthusiastic welcome in Spain and
Russia and indeed in those countries he received it, but only from a .tiny
minority among the governing class Which' had some knowledge of the
ideals called 'the Enlightenment' From the vast majority, the peasants in
arms, he met brute resistance and defeat. For it did not occur to any but a
minute number of Russian serfs, or their Spanish equivalents, that any
rulers could have any interest whatsoever in the well-being of those over
whom they ruled.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ripples of liberalism - in
the real sense of that word - had affected the Russian centre of power, only
to be greeted with dumb apathy by the masses, and the tide has repeatedly
ebbed more rapidly than ever it flowed, from the Czar Alexander to First
Secretary
Krushchev, and with an almost audible relief. Heads rolled, and all was once
again as it always had been.
After the demise of a bogus parliament in 1914, Russia remaimed, as
in 1814 and 1944, an autocracy, but unlike both its predecessor and its
successor an extraordinarily inefficient one. The liberal ripples had, at
the centre, undermined the sands upon which the autocrat sat enthroned.
Furthermore the Czar Nicholas II was a quite remarkably weak despot, the
weakest perhaps who has ever ruled the Russian Empire. And that empire was
governed with a quite remarkable ineptitude. The corruption and indeed
near-disintegration of its secret police has already been described. It was
paralleled in these by the other organs of government. The Russia that went
to war in 1914 could neither arm nor even pay its soldiers. To the German
mind of the period it seemed that this was the inefficient enemy that could
most easily be eliminated. Their German logic was impeccable, but as usual
their German methods were fallacious when dealing with Mother Russia.
The Russian state apparatus that lurched into a war situation in
July of 1914 was so cumbersome and inadequate even in peace that it could
not, logically, deal with the problems of a major war. Even the enormous
problems of mobilization were almost irreversible. That is to say that for
the Russian autocracy to mobilize meant to go to war, just as for the German
General Staff going to war meant the implementation of the Schlieffen Plan,
the invasion of Belgium and so on. If Imperial Germany's destiny
was sealed by an excess of skilful planning, Imperial Russia's may be
ascribed to a contrary weakness. Russia's war was improvised..
In part this can be ascribed to the little waves of liberalization. that had
undermined the sand-castle for well over a century; in part to the weak
character of the Czar, no doubt in some measure a Romanov inheritance but
one shared to a certain extent by all the famous monarchical families of
that age, blinded by diamonds and decorations which they had not themselves
won and seldom deserved; in part to the defective administration on-which
the autocracy had to rely in time of peace and a fortiori once the fatal
order for mobilization had been pinned to the walls of public buildings from
Kovno to Vladivostok, from Murmansk to ' Sebastopol.
The autocrat and his immediate advisers, who enjoyed the status of
government, were at the centre politically. Around this soft centre, with
its shell the corrupt Okhrana, revolved many forces, but usually in
elliptical motion, liable not only to mutual collision but also, after such
collision, to the destruction of the centre itself or, more exactly, to its
replacement. From the point of view of German military and political
intelligence in 1915, there were four such comets that might destroy Russian
ability to wage war at all, for to the German mind a war waged without a
central control was an impossibility. Apart from the Imperial Russian Army
itself, these centrifugal - but what was even more important for German
aims, centripetal - forces were of two sorts, the constitutional or
reformist movements and the revolutionaries.
The constitutional reformists were, politically, the heirs of the
almost defunct Duma, the last of the Czarist-style liberals, who clung to
the belief that Russian autocracy could be modified into a Western, even a
British, type of representative, elected parliamentary form of government
with a constitutional monarchy. Their 'right wing' or more conservative
leader was A. I. Guchkov who led the Octobrist Party, was a member of the
State Council (roughly the equivalent of a senate) and was always close to
the centre of power. He represented the rich and the landowners. The
president of the Duma's Lower Chamber, M. V. Rodzianko, was to prove of
greater, if ephemeral, importance. He might be said to have represented the
small, indeed nascent, Russian middle class. Both these men and their
followers were patriots who de-sired a Russian victory over the German and
Turkish foreign, indeed any foreign, enemy. Nor did they regard the
overthrow of the Czarist regime as essential.
More vulnerable in retrospect than the 'liberal' politicians was the
administrative and economic structure of Czarist Russia at war. And here the
Voluntary Associations were of the greatest importance.
These were again divided, both in function intent, and further
sub-divided.and
Even the great centralized Western European powers soon found that
the demands of 'total war' exceeded the capacities of government. Relying on
patriotism, the help of-voluntary, non-governmental organizations was
invoked by the authorities in Britain, France and Germany in such matters as
ambulance and hospital work (which appealed to the women) and to the
cooperation, usually granted, of the trade unions. Indeed m Britain, -at'
least until 1916, the new, vast armies and the enormously expanded navy
depended for its manpower entirely on volunteers. Labour was attracted, not
directed, into the war industries by inflated pay. The control of all these
forces, voluntary or other-wise, remained in the hands of the central
governments. This was far less so in Russia, where the Voluntary
Organizations were of an entirely different character from their namesakes
in the West and were also of considerable political- importance.
Their growing importance was based not only on the inefficiency of
the Russian central power, which stemmed in turn from e weakness of any
autocratic system facing the magnitude of a major war and in this case
aggravated by the lethargy and stupidity of the autocrat himself, but also
on the enormous geography of the Russian Empire. A more efficient emperor
might have been able to gather the strings, many of them decrepit, entangled
and -liable to snap, into reins with which to control his huge country
through a competent and obedient secretariat : Nicholas II was no Napoleon.
He listened above 'all to his wife, whose mind was in her son's nursery. The
Czar turned out to be above all the junior partner in a marriage and the
materfamilias an admirable wife and mother devoted above all else to the
preservation of their son and thus of the Romanov dynasty. It is touching
and indeed and pathetic that it was the Czar's friends, not his enemies,
who were opposed to his assumption of supreme control of the armies -surely
an essential role for an autocrat in time of war - since they feared lest
defeat further tarnish his tawdry reputation as a leader.
Thus was the enormous front not only divided for normal operational
purposes, but each of the three commanders was given a huge rear area in
which he had complete authority of every sort. Theoretically these huge
satrapies were to be assigned to members of the Imperial family and thus, by
a sort of cousinage, to the autocracy. This was attempted at first, but
there were -not enough Romanov generals. Soon enough the excellent Brusilov
was in command against the Austrians, while senior staff officers were in
fact in charge further north. It was these people who lost battles and who
carried out the forced removal of 'the Jews, among other follies - the Czar
was not to blame. He never was, except perhaps for sins of omission.
It would be wrong to suggest that the Voluntary Organizations filled a gap':
the gaps in the Russian administration were never filled, but at least these
essentially capitalist and patriotic associations helped keep the Russian
army going, even in some cases to the provision not merely of food but also
of weapons to the soldiers. So great were the distances, so poor the
communications in Russia - during the extreme crisis of late January/early
February 1917 the Czar himself was incommunicado for some forty-eight vital
hours aboard a train that had been obliged to take an alternative route from
G.H.Q., Mogilev, to Petrograd - that the various Voluntary Organizations, in
their increasingly important role of auxiliary quartermasters or even supply
ministries, became linked with the groups of armies in front of them,
particularly as those higher commands became more and more autochthonous.
Thus Brusilov would deal directly with the Voluntary Organizations in Kiev
and elsewhere behind his front, his colleagues to the north with Moscow or
Petrograd. That the autocracy did not fully control its fighting forces nor
even the supply services along the German, Austrian and Turkish fronts was
a sure indication of weakness that any enemy must try to exploit.
There were of course also centralized Voluntary Organizations. Them
were even Jewish organizations such as the Jewish Committee for the Aid of
War Victims, created as early as August 1914 in Petrograd and reproduced
elsewhere: a unified Jewish Committee contributed 31 million roubles to the
Russian war effort, some 12 per cent from Russian Jews, some 32 per cent
from international Jewry and the balance from government funds for war
victims. It is almost impossible to translate First World War currencies
into our own, equally fluctuating, values, but this figure can be compared
with a contemporary one? In December 1915, in a despatch to-the German
Chancellor, the German Minister in Copenhagen, Brockdortf-Rantzau, estimated
the total -cost of overthrowing the Imperial Russian system at 20 million
roubles.
There were other centres of the Voluntary Organization movement or apparatus
(neither word is satisfactory for so amorphous a force) and these were
generally in a loose political, alliance with the constitutionals, or
anti-absolutist, politicians whose party (again too exact a word in the
circumstances) has gone down in history as the Kadets. It was to these
people that German intelligence at first devoted most of its attention. The
Voluntary Organizations appeared to the Germans vulnerable, even
corruptible, and of worse'opposed to the system of government; they were,
however, generally patriotic and seldom of a revolutionary temperament. The
forces, political, economic and ;emotional, represented by this loose
conglomeration were probably the best that the Germans would have chosen to
win the war and preserve their society. Still, there was a quicker, and
therefore to the military mind more attractive, immediate alternative.
The revolutionary parties were basically three. On the one hand were the
anarchists, with- roots deep in one part of the Russian ethos, men often of
extreme intellectual brilliance and emotional honesty. By definition,
however, they could not form a political force that was either cohesive or
durable. An anarchist revolution, even an anarchist state, is a
philosophical possibility but a political impossibility in our age, at least
in any country even as moderately complex as was Russia sixty years ago. The
anarchists were to play their part in the elimination of Czarism; they were
then to be liquidated by the succeeding autocracy. They fought and died with
the utmost bravery and integrity, physical and mental, against two
tyrannies. Only their emotions and their morality linger on in Russia, and
perhaps elsewhere. Save as potential assassins they were certainly of no use
to Abteilung IIIb of the German Great General Staff.
When the Germans came to examine the other Russian revolutionary movements,
both inside and outside Russia, they were confronted with problems for which
the staff officer's methodology was and remains quite unsuited: it would be
impossible to establish an order of battle among the Okhrana-infiltrated and
highly fissiparous movements that regarded the overthrow of the Czarist
regime and its society as their primary objective. The mass of lies that
have accumulated about events and motives before, during and after 1917 have
not made this maze of personalities, feuds and treacheries any easier to
traverse. Nor is it this writer's intention to attempt that labour, save in
so far as to aim at a brief panorama of what was perhaps seen from Berlin in
1916.
Undoubtedly the largest revolutionary party, if such a word can be
used when dealing with a highly amorphous group of persons, was the
Socialist Revolutionaries. Briefly, they represented the peasants. And,
again briefly,, what the peasants wanted was the ownership of the land they
worked. The end of serfdom had not meant the end of the landlords. Russian
mobilization had meant, among other matters, the donning of military uniform
by millions of peasants. But they remained peasants, and their officers were
in large measure their old landlords, also now in uniform. Therefore when
the Revolution came, and the soldiers shot their officers and deserted to go
home, this 'voting with their feet', in Lenin's much-quoted phrase, was not
a vote for Lenin or even any sort of Marxist Socialism, but a defeat to see
the land returned to the people by the elimination of the land-lords. In so
far as any intellectual scheme can be applied, it has been described as a
desire for a return to the ancient communal ownership known in Russia as the
mir system, qualified by the imposed concept of ownership. (A similar
emotion, based on the vaguest historic memories and traditions, lay behind
the Land War in nineteenth-century Ireland: to get rid of the landlords and
go back to something like pre-Norman .or at least pre-Elizabethan conditions
of life.) It was to this deep-seated but inchoate emotional force that the
Russian Socialist Revolutionaries appealed above all, both in the army and
in the vast stretches of the steppes. This was not a force that could be
manipulated by a foreign power, though it could perhaps be encouraged
However, the destruction of land lordism, even in Russia, was - hardly a
crusade in which the German and Austrian governing class, themselves largely
landlords, would wish to be involved.
This applied even more to internal patriotism. Much as the
Ukrainians, Finns, Poles, Baltic peoples a.pd others might hate their
Russian imperial overlords, this hatred too was a weapon that the Central
European powers had to use very gingerly -which is precisely what they did,
both' in the British Empire, particularly Ireland, and in Russia. the effect
this-psychological weapon was to be of far greater use to the Western
Allies, particularly once America was in the war. The nationalism of the
subject peoples within the Austro-Hungarian' Empire was far better organised
and far more inflammable than that of their equivalents in the Russian
Empire. The proof is that despite defeat, revolution and civil war the
Russian Empire has remained intact and indeed been enlarged; the others have
vanished for ever.
There remained, then, one major, potential revolutionary force in Russia,
the Social Democrats. They were Marxists; they had had their representatives
in the Duma; and they were in theory a political party, with an
organizational apparatus. These three advantages, however, were from the
point of view of Department .'IIIb, the Foreign Office and the Kaiser only
mitigated assets. The Social Democrats in Russia, as elsewhere, represented
above all .the new urban proletariat, new in Russia that is, where it has
been estimated that genuine industrialization (as opposed to the mere
manufacture of weapons and explosives) had proceeded at a greater rate in
the decade just before the First World War than in any decade before or
since. However, the industrial proletariat was still a small minority save
in the Petrograd area, in Viborg (Finland) and to a lesser extent in Moscow
and some other growing cities. Marxism could not expect to command the
support that its creator had anticipated for Germany.
Indeed his ideology, his interpretation of past and future history, had
categorically ruled out primitive, peasant Russia as the powerhouse of
revolution, had specifically assigned that role to Germany. .
It is hardly surprising therefore that Marxism was in German governing
circles at least as unpopular as were the theories of national
self-determination in Austria, or peasant revolt in both countries.
Nor was the transitory representation of the Social Democrats in the
Duma regarded as an impressive performance. First of all the delegation was
very small, secondly it had been thoroughly infiltrated by the Okhrana, and
finally it had no internal cohesion. The split of the party into Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks after the failed revolution of 1905 had, in 1912, become
apparently total.
The leader of the Bolshevik faction was of course Lenin. He lived in
exile in Zurich, frequenting a cafe that was also patronized by another
'revolutionary' of a very different sort, cultural not political, named
James Joyce, Lenin's principal lieutenants in Russia, such as Stalin and
Sverdlov, were incarcerated in Siberia. He was almost penniless, and had the
greatest difficulty in meeting his printers' bills. His followers inside and
outside Russia have been estimated as being, in 1916, between five and ten
thousand, His definition of Bolshevism can be summed up in two phrases: the
absolute acceptance of Lenin's interpretation of Dar Kapital, and the
absolute acceptance of Lenin's personal authority. This second enabled him
to become the first totalitarian dictator, but few, if any, apart perhaps
from himself, foresaw this. He seemed, in effect, too unimportant for the
well-informed Okhrana to bother even to murder him, which would have been
extremely simple in Zurich in 1916. He himself, indeed, then foresaw no
Russian revolution in his lifetime.
The Menshevik wing of the Social Democrat Party was more solidly
grounded among the industrialized Russian proletariat.
It has been estimated that in the small Bolshevik Party two-thirds of the
members were, like Lenin himself, middle-class intellectuals.) It was
gaining strength in the crude trade union movement, though the most
successful trade unions were run by the Okhrana. The Menshevik leaders were
not subject to quite the same degree of persecution as the Bolsheviks. And
the most important of the Mensheviks, Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, alias
Trotsky, who had played an important part in 1905, al-though himself usually
in exile, had some of his own people at large, particularly in the Petrograd
area. His own two autobiographical books are as mendacious about this as
they are about so much else. In particular he is totally dishonest about the
funds provided for revolutionary purposes by the German govemment.5
The key figure in this murky business was a certain Alexander Israel
Helphand, whose pseudonyms included that of Parvus (which indeed may have
been his real name). He was, like Trotsky, a Russian Jew. Trotsky was born
in 1879, Helphand twelve years earlier. There is some doubt as to the date
when Helphand and Trotsky became friends and, inevitably with any friend of
Trotsky's, accomplices in revolutionary activities. Indeed it is suggested
by Mr. Carmichael that they collaborated-on Permanent
Revolution, a most important re-interpretation of the Marxian thesis which
did not deny the possibility of a pre-capitalist revolution and which has
therefore been of the greatest value to Chinese Communists. This thesis put
Trotsky to the 'left' of Lenin and made him the principal enemy of Stalin
when that dictator produced the equally Marxist policy of 'socialism in one
country', But any attempt, and there have been many, to see Trotsky as more
'liberal' in the Western sense than Stalin or Lenin is the purest nonsense.
To none of these people did the Western concept of liberalism or freedom
have any political meaning whatsoever. It would seem probable that Trotsky's
first encounter with Helphand took place around 1905.
Helphand was perhaps the first, but certainly not the last, millionaire to
be a Communist. His psychological motivation is easy to fathom despite its
apparent contradictions. As a Jew in pogrom ridden Russia the most obvious
escape from his predicament was to make a fortune; the next stage was to
destroy the corrupt and evil society that used anti-semitism for political
and social ends, For the East, to quote Carmichael, 'one gets the impression
that attractive blondes and torrents of champagne in posh hotel suites
surged back and forth against a background of vast business deals'. His
enormous wealth was not acquired by direct production but in the fringes of
capitalism, the shrewd purchase of commodity 'futures' and what is loosely
called 'import-export'. It is not hard to see that he came to despise an
economic system to which he contributed so little and from which he derived
so much. It is also not hard to see that he must have become so self-assured
as to assume that he would do equally well for himself in a more meaningful,
socialist society. By 1914 his financial enterprises reached from Stockholm
to Constantinople, which was his headquarters if such a word can be ascribe
to so international a financier. It is probably exact to describe him as the
perfect profiteer. Despite the state of war between Russia and Germany some
expensive trade between the two countries continued via Turkey, at least
until 1915, and later via Sweden. Helphand was a prime operator, with
contacts of the greatest value to IIIb, and also, of course, with prime
profits to himself.
Helphand had been involved before the war with the German Social
Democrats, who viewed him with a certain comprehensible distrust. It was in
about 1910 that he established himself in Constantinople. It will be
recalled that in 1914 the German Social Democrats were, with a very few
exceptions, unanimous in their patriotism; therefore Helphand's impeccable,
German, Marxist orthodoxy had small appeal for Trotsky.
Helphand's argument was that the victory of Imperial Germany over backward,
peasant Russia was the preliminary to revolution in both countries. It was a
theory that appealed more to Bolshevik Lenin than to Menshevik Trotsky.
This, however, did not prevent Trotsky and Martov, who edited a Menshevik
publication in Paris, from accepting money from a very rich Rumanian
socialist, by the name of Christo Rakovsky, who was himself on the payroll
of the German Foreign Office.
It was in January of 1915 that Helphand met the German ambassador in
Constantinople (Istanbul). Turkey was then still neutral. A month or two
later Helphand drafted a memorandum for the ambassador, which was passed to
Berlin. It is of great historical interest. In the memorandum Helphand
maintained that he held close the breach between Mensheviks and
Bolsheviks;-that it was possible thus to organize a Russian revolution; and
that furthermore he could organise rebellion against the Petrograd
government, in the Ukraine and elsewhere. For all this he needed German
money. This memorandum was read both by the German Foreign Office and of
course by Abteilung IIIb of the German Great General Staff. Its
recommendations were not, however, put into immediate operation, for the
Kaiser and his circle continued to believe that a more effective, and to
them more attractive, lever of corruption could be applied at higher social
levels in Russia. Nor, it seems, was Lenin informed at this time.
However, the bribing of the court, the powerful and the rich did not
prove successful. Indeed after its defeats of 1914 and 1915 the Russian
military machine was showing signs of an unexpected recovery in 1916. The
Imperial Russian soldiers were better equipped and better led than they had
been two years earlier. To German intelligence the Brusilov Offensive of
that year, though a failure, was ominous in view of Verdun and Jutland and
the general stalemate on the Western Front, while the effects of the
economic blockade were beginning to be felt in the Fatherland. Only a major
coup, Berlin realized, could prevent
defeat. Desperate times required desperate measures. A political-offensive
in the East, combined with a U-boat offensive in the West, seemed an ever
more attractive road to victory. From German documents captured. after 1945
we know that this policy was studied and finally endorsed by the Kaiser
himself; we have his marginal comments to Foreign Office and General Staff
documents concerning Russian affairs. .
For the Russian Communists it has been a point of ideological as
well as of patriotic pride to maintain that the two-stage Russian
Revolution, the so-called Kerensky Revolution of January-February and the
Bolshevik takeover of October-November 1917, were of purely Russian origin.
Ideologically, this misinterpretation fits, just, into the Procrustean bed
of Marxist historical materialism, if the public is prepared to accept the
some-what idiotic idea that the transitory, capitalist period between
feudalism and socialism can be squeezed into eight months of wartime. While
from the patriotic point of view, much emphasized by Stalin and his
successors, the fact that Soviet Russia had, as its midwife, a German
moneyman is highly bad publicity at least.
Even Trotsky in exile lied about the financing of Lenin's takeover,
with more effrontery than his lies about the February Revolution. Nor did
Kerensky tell all the truth, perhaps in his case from ignorance, in his
Memoirs. Fortunately Joel Carmichael, George Katkov and others who have had
access to the German archives have established the facts. The February
revolution was a chaotic spontaneity, caused by the lock-out at the Putilov
factory in Petrograd. When this turned out not to be of immediate military
advantage to the Germans, they stirred the pot by the importation of Lenin.
When Lenin and his closest colleagues ran away to Finland in July, the
Germans pumped a huge sum of money into Russia - probably by our currency
about half a billion dollars. These gold marks cemented the weak
Bolshevik-Menshevik realliance. Most of this enormous sum passed via
Helphand through Trotsky into newspapers. The second revolution took place,
and in January of 1918 the Russians denounced their French and British
alliances; two months later the Soviets signed an ignominious peace of
defeat at Brest-Litovsk. The German Great General Staff was already moving
divisions from the Eastern to the Western Fronts in preparation for their
last, the March, offensive.
This failed. And many of the German divisions from the East were
themselves tainted with revolutionary motives, after contact with the
Russians. The operations of Abteilung IIIb had secured their most
spectacular victory, but like so many victories it was a Pyrrhic one, and
yet another example of the truism that wars are not won, but lost.
To ascribe a measure of perspective to this tale of brains, skills
and lies, it is as well to recall the background. On the battle-,fields, the
rough statistics known to us show that throughout the First World War the
casualties, among all the armies and navies involved, were somewhere in the
nature of ten millions dead. this can be broken down: one young or
not-so-young corpse every six seconds, for some four years. It was against
this back-cloth that Hall, Nicolai, Helphand, Trotsky performed their parts
upon the stage of Europefirst attempt at continental suicide.
147
Katkov Russia 1917: The february revolution
Joel Charmichael 'German money and Bolshevik Honour' Encounter , vol xlii no
3 march 1974
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