Return to Moscow under the Bolsheviks

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2018-02-24/register/return-to-moscow-under-the-bolsheviks-mqj5s3vz2

After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the British cabinet struggled to decide what to do about Russia. Robert Bruce Lockhart was the man tasked with making sense of the chaos

Michael Tillotson

A painting by Nikolai Lukich Babasyuk of Lenin during the 1917 revolution

When Robert Bruce Lockhart, the former vice-consul in Moscow and future author of the bestselling Memoirs of a British Agent, returned to Petrograd on his way to Moscow in February 1918 he found the streets piled with blackening snow and mobs singing The Internationale. The tune was instantly identifiable but, although he was a fluent Russian speaker, the words were not.
At least not until he realised that each group had its own version. There was a soldiers’ Internationale, a workers’ variety and peasant interpretations. All was chaos and he welcomed the rumour, shortly to be confirmed, that the Bolshevik leadership was about to move to the old capital.
A German bombing raid on Petrograd on March 2 hastened the move and dispatch to London of the veteran social democrat Lev Kamenev to request British aid. In what must have appeared as a speedy demonstration of international solidarity, a company of Royal Marines was landed at the Barents Sea port of Murmansk a few days later. As we shall see, this was in response to an entirely different threat, but it looked good at the time.

Bruce Lockhart had been sent home from Moscow towards the end of 1917 to recover from mental and physical exhaustion brought about by struggling to grapple with and report sequential events in Petrograd. His period of “quiet reflection” was subjected to frequent interruption for interviews with cabinet members and businessmen with interests in Russia.
“Ah, the Mr Lockhart,” prime minister Lloyd George had exclaimed on meeting him; and it was not long before Lord (George) Curzon — that “very special person” and foreign secretary — was briefing him about his mission as an unofficial agent to the Bolsheviks in the Russian capital, after the withdrawal of the experienced ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, and his military attaché.

The British cabinet was in a quandary as to what to do about Russia after the indecisive — as they perceived it — Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. There were members primarily concerned about maintaining the Eastern Front against Germany, who were led by Winston Churchill (returned from the Western Front and now minister for munitions); and there was the more pragmatic Lloyd George, who feared for Allied prospects in the war if — through its continuation in the east — Russian oil and wheat lands fell into German hands, not to mention the stocks of warlike stores dumped by British ships in her northern ports and Vladivostok.

Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart at his home in Edinburgh in 1955GETTY IMAGES

Bruce Lockhart’s task was to try to make sense of all this and advise the cabinet whether it should support the Bolsheviks in the hope of restoring the Eastern Front and keeping the Germans out of Russia, or abandon them as a potential ally and economise on stores and shipping in futile attempts to support them.

Marshal Gustav Mannerheim

At the time of the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, Major-General Frederick Poole of the British Supply Mission had wired the Foreign Office: “Disabuse your minds and that of all others in London as to the idea of a ‘war party’ in Petrograd. A few stalwarts talk big about wanting to go on with the war, but it is all talk with no chance off action. The people are tired and will never fight again.”
During the pause in peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk he changed his mind and advised the director of military operations at the War Office: “If the (Western) Allies once recognised the Bolsheviks, they would turn anti-German and (re)-join us.”
Lloyd George was not impressed, noting that in the 12-day pause in peace negotiations the Germans had advanced 150 miles into Russia and needed only to turn south to threaten the oil fields on the Caspian Sea.

Lenin, left, and the social democrat Lev KamenevALAMY

On his way from England to Petrograd in February, Bruce Lockhart had crossed from Sweden to Haparanda on the northern shore of the Gulf of Bothnia to find Finland in a fast-spreading civil war. On Lenin’s declaration of the various freedoms the Bolsheviks would grant, the prime minister and half the cabinet of Finland, at that time a tsarist grand duchy, took the train to Finland Station in Petrograd and politely asked for theirs. Perhaps flushed with success and real power at last Lenin agreed, but the announcement of national independence led the “Red Finns”, influenced by the blandishments offered by the Bolsheviks over the border, to rise in revolt.
The government “White Finns” opposed them, but were in danger of being overwhelmed until the future Marshal Gustav Mannerheim was appointed to command the government forces. A former corps commander in the Russian army, Mannerheim had concentrated and organised the White forces in the west of the country, but the north and southeast initially remained largely in the hands of the Reds. This caused alarm in the mind of General Poole of the British Supply Mission in Archangel and it was his plea to London that brought the Royal Marines to Murmansk.

British reinforcements guard locomotives damaged by Bolsheviks during the Allied intervention on the Archangel and Murmansk fronts during 1918-19GETTY IMAGES

Archangel could receive Allied supplies only during the summer months because the White Sea, on which the port stands, froze in winter. This threw reliance on the less developed port of Murmansk on the Barents Sea that remained ice-free and connected to Petrograd by a recently completed railway. Inconveniently, in view of events in Finland, the railway ran parallel with the Russo-Finnish frontier lying a hundred miles or so to the west and it was not long before news reached Bruce Lockhart that Mannerheim, who spoke five languages including German, had asked Berlin to provide him with troops to help him clear the Reds out of southern Finland. He expressly intended no threat to Petrograd that lay only 15 miles beyond the Finnish frontier, but who was to say what the German general staff might have in mind? There was little to deter their troops from crossing the frontier and cutting the railway.
Moreover, the White Finns were closing in on the fishing port of Pechenga, a mere 60 miles west of Murmansk. General Poole had cause for concern for his line of supply from England and onwards to Petrograd. He urged London to disembark a fighting force at Murmansk and to reinforce him at Archangel. The landing of 130 Royal Marines at Murmansk by the Royal Navy on March 6, 1918, was London’s first demonstration in response.