fn12 The ladies of the nobility.
fn13 The Kadet leaders, Shingarev and Kokoshkin, were arrested by the Bolsheviks and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress after the demonstrations of 28 November in defence of the Constituent Assembly. They were transferred to the Marinskaya Hospital on 6 January after becoming seriously ill, and were brutally murdered there on the following night by a group of Baltic sailors, who broke into the hospital. The Ministry of Justice later revealed that the murders had taken place with the connivance of the Bolshevik Red Guard and the Commandant of the Hospital, Stefan Basov, who justified the murder on the grounds that there would be ‘two less bourgeois mouths to feed’. Basov was brought to trial and convicted, but none of the murderers was ever caught and the Bolshevik leaders, who at first condemned the murders, later sought to justify them as an act of political terror.
fn14 The Soviet anti-nuclear propaganda of the 1970s and 1980s, which was applauded by the anti-nuclear movement in the West, was the last, and in some ways the most successful, example of this ‘demonstrative diplomacy’.
fn15 The refusal of the Allies to regard the situation in Russia from anything but the perspective of the war no doubt helped to keep the Bolsheviks in power at this critical moment. The decision of the French government to give the Bolsheviks military aid coincided with its cancellation of support for the Volunteer Army, which was formed to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. The Allied governments were all badly informed of the true situation in Russia, and placed too much faith for far too long in the hope of getting revolutionary Russia to rejoin the war.
Chapter 12
fn1 A large flea-market in Moscow.
fn2 There was nothing to compare with it on the Red side — except perhaps the long march of the Taman Army, trapped by the White forces in the Taman Peninsula, during August and September 1918. This epic story formed the basis of Serafimovich’s famous novel The Iron Flood. The Taman Army had a heroic status under the Soviet regime. All the more ironic, then, that Yeltsin should have used it to bombard the parliament building in October 1993.
fn3 The Reds later claimed that they had been informed of the whereabouts of Kornilov’s headquarters by a defector from the Volunteers.
fn4 One Cossack delegate thought this was too kind and said it would be better simply to kill all the non-Cossacks.
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).
fn13 The imperial couple were afraid that he would be taken to Moscow and forced to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. The fact that they believed that the Bolsheviks should either need or want his signature for this is a telling sign of how far removed they had become from political reality (see Wilton, Last Days of the Romanovs, 206).
fn14 The only certain survivor was the spaniel Joy.
fn15 The Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas’s brother, had been killed in June.
fn16 Boris Savinkov, Kerensky’s Deputy War Minister during the Kornilov episode, led an uprising of army officers in the town of Yaroslavl’, to the north of Moscow, on 6 July. It gained the support of the local workers and peasants and spread briefly to the neighbouring towns of Murom and Rybinsk. Soviet troops regained Yaroslavl’ on 21 July. They shot 350 officers and civilians in reprisal for the revolt, which was said to be the joint work of the SRs, the White Guards, the Czechs and the Allies. Savinkov’s underground organization, the Union for the Defence of the Fatherland and Freedom, was linked with the National Centre in Moscow, which supported the Volunteer Army. It also received money from the Czechs and the Allies — who were both under the illusion that Savinkov’s sole purpose was to raise a new Russian army to resume the war against the Central Powers. There is no evidence linking the Allies with Savinkov’s plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks.