At the time of the German advance the Czechoslovakians, now amounting to more than two divisions, were billeted in the region of Kiev. They helped local Bolshevik elements obstruct the Germans until the signature of the peace. Then they fell back in good order towards Kursk and the Don River. Masaryk signed an agreement with the Bolsheviks for their evacuation across the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok and set off for Washington to try to arrange for their transport across the Pacific and across the United States to the western front. There was tacit agreement with the French and the British that, in return for their help in the war, Czechoslovakia would be recognized in the final settlement.
When Trotsky arrived in Moscow as Commissar for War the Czechs were already moving east. Needing every scrap of armament he could lay his hands on, he began to revise the arrangement which his government had signed with Masaryk. The Czechoslovak Legion must give up their rifles and guns. They must dismiss counterrevolutionaries and officers who had served under the Czar.
Communist agitators were sent down to lure the rank and file into a Congress of Prisoners of War being arranged in Moscow for the indoctrination of Austrian, Hungarian and German soldiers being shipped back to their homelands.
The Czechoslovaks balked. Some detachments allowed themselves to be despoiled of their artillery, but most of them hid their rifles and machineguns. They retained their officers. As Bolshevik demands grew so did the suspicions of the Czechoslovaks.
Meanwhile the French recognized what began to be known in the Allied press as the Czechoslovak Legion as part of the Allied forces and with the consent of their national council appointed the French General Janin to command them. In Paris and London the idea dawned that forty thousand Czechoslovaks might well make the spearhead of a force which, by overthrowing the pro-German Bolsheviks, would reconstitute the eastern front. Maps emphasizing the importance of the Trans-Siberian Railroad began to appear at meetings of the Supreme War Council at Versailles. In Washington ever more urgent arguments in favor of intervention were poured into the ears of President Wilson’s advisers.
Early in April the tense situation at Vladivostok, where the urban soviet was already operating under the guns of British, American and Japanese warships anchored in the harbor, broke out in violence. Some gunmen described as soldiers in uniform, held up a store and killed several Japanese. Claiming that he could get no satisfaction from the local authorities the Japanese admiral landed five hundred marines to protect the lives and property of his nationals. The British followed suit with fifty bluejackets. Under orders from Washington the American commander held off.
Chicherin, the shrewd little aristocratic bookworm who had taken Trotsky’s place as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, published one of his first appeals to the opinion of mankind. An attack from the old enemy strengthened the Bolsheviks with the newspaper reading stratum of Russian society.
In Vladivostok itself the presence of the Japanese was overshadowed by the continual arrival of detachments of armed Czechs. Under a certain amount of suspicion and surveillance from the Communist-controlled committees that managed traffic on the railroad, but without too much friction, the long freights and trooptrains of the Czechoslovak Legion continued their slow uncomfortable progress across Siberia.
The stringing of detachments of foreign troops along the very backbone of their dominion immensely complicated the problems of the Communists. As Lenin’s hopes of playing off the Allies against the Germans long enough to obtain the breathing spell he needed began to fade, a spirit of desperation permeated their leadership. They entrenched themselves behind the enormous walls, under the crushing painted vaults, and amid the tarnished splendors of the Kremlin of the ancient Moscow czars.
In their denunciations of those who disagreed with them, laden as they were with historical references to the French Revolution, terror began to be mentioned more and more as the rightful arm of the proletarian dictatorship. The names of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Fouquier-Tinville began to be pronounced in admiring tones. While Trotsky was training and disciplining his Red Army, Dzerdzinsky developed the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation into a powerful secret police.
Felix Dzerdzinsky was a cultivated Pole who had received the best possible education in the German universities. As a Social Democrat he had suffered much in czarist prisons. Stories were told of his strange self-abnegation towards the other prisoners. In a cell he was always the one to clean the latrine or wash the floor. He was a wanfaced man with long white hands. Lockhart described the strange stare of his eyes between their unblinking lids.
Dzerdzinsky threw himself into the work of repression with a total abnegation of all human feelings that culminated in a mystique of massacre for its own sake, a monstrous aberration of the human mind unknown to Europe since the days of the Spanish inquisitors, when Philip II could ask himself on his deathbed if he’d killed enough heretics for the salvation of his soul. Dzerdzinsky made his extraordinary commission so feared that people hardly dared pronounce the initials by which it was known.
Dzerdzinsky’s first public enterprise, after setting up his headquarters in the office of an extinct insurance company at Lubianka, 11, won the immediate approval of the foreign colony in Moscow. The American Red Cross people, and the small group of foreign correspondents and the members of the French military mission and of the British agencies, that were still carrying on partly aboveboard and partly undercover activities, were, like the rest of the city’s population, intimidated by marauding bands of selfstyled anarchists who set themselves up in the mansions of wealthy merchants, drinking up the winecellars, and sallying forth onto the streets to rob and murder at will. One April night the Cheka, with the assistance of Trotsky’s Red Army, carried out a sudden raid on the anarchist dens, shot down those that resisted and carted the rest off to prison.
Jacob Peters, Dzerdzinsky’s Latvian assistant, who had learned English working in a London office, was so proud of the job he took Lockhart and Robins around to see the results of his work next morning. The dead still lay among the silk hangings in pools of blood on the ruined Aubusson carpets of the departed rich. In one diningroom, heaped with spilled food and broken bottles, a young woman lay face downwards. “Peters turned her over. Her hair was dishevelled. She had been shot through the neck, and the blood had congealed in a sinister purple clump. She could not have been more than twenty. Peters shrugged his shoulders. ‘Prostitutka,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it is for the best.’ ”
By the time the German ambassador arrived with his suite at the end of April, law and order was perfect in the mediaeval streets of the ancient capital.
Though Count Mirbach-Harff came surrounded with German experts on Russian affairs, he seems to have been as unprepared as his British and French opponents in the diplomatic bout to deal with the revolutionary scene. He was housed in the insanely ornate mansion of a departed sugar magnate named Berg. One of his first experiences was to view from his automobile in the Red Square the May Day parade held to celebrate the proletarian triumph.
Lockhart watching Mirbach seated among his aides in an open car reported that the supercilious smirk left the German’s face as he watched the ranks and ranks of illclad illfed illorganized working men march by. There was a look of strength about them. “He looked serious,” wrote Lockhart.