Free Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution by Giles Milton Page B

of looting.
    One man was ‘strutting around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder; another found a plume of ostrich feathers, which he stuck in his hat. The looting was just beginning when someone cried: “Comrades! Don’t take anything. This is the property of the People!” ’
    Reed himself appropriated a jewelled sword that he tucked inside his winter coat. His sympathies with the Bolshevik revolutionaries did not preclude him from filching public property.
    It was not until the following morning that Ambassador Buchanan was brought the most unwelcome news of his entire tenure in Russia. He received confirmation that Lenin’s revolutionary Bolsheviks had seized power. Kerensky’s Provisional Government had been swept away, along with the last vestiges of law and order.
    Events now gathered apace. That very evening, 8 November, Lenin made his first public address at the Smolny Institute, a cavernous building with classical façade on the eastern fringes of Petrograd. It had previously been an elite finishing school for daughters of the nobility, but the powdered young ladies and their governesses had been evicted by a detachment of Red Guards. Now, it was the headquarters of the new revolutionary government.
    Lenin read out a proclamation calling for the transfer of all privately owned land into the hands of the Peasants Soviets – local councils – that had sprung up across Russia. He then demanded an immediate end to Russia’s participation in the First World War and made a dramatic call for revolution in the Western democracies. It was a portent of things to come.
    When Lenin had finished speaking, Trotsky took to the rostrum and harangued the crowd. ‘There are only two alternatives,’ he shouted. ‘Either the Russian revolution will create a revolutionary movement in Europe, or the European powers will destroy the Russian revolution.’
    Both men were already viewing the Western democracies as a far more dangerous enemy than the German Kaiser.

    George Hill was still in Petrograd when the revolutionary upheaval occurred. He was not yet working for Mansfield Cumming: he was still employed as a military advisor to the Russian armed forces.
    But he was increasingly drawn to unofficial intelligence work, gathering information on anything that seemed of relevance. When he learned that the Smolny Institute had become the temporary home of the new government, he immediately headed there and talked his way inside in order to see Lenin in person.
    He found the Bolshevik leader ‘a strong and simple man of less than middle height with a Slavonic cast of countenance, piercing eyes and a powerful forehead.’
    In a characteristically bold move, Hill stepped forward to shake Lenin’s hand. ‘His manner was not friendly, nor could it be said to be hostile; it was completely detached.’
    He found something chilling about Lenin, something that he was unable to pinpoint at the time. It was as if he was determined to push ahead with his revolutionary ideals, whatever the cost in human blood.
    Hill held out the vain hope that the Bolsheviks would keep Russia in the war. He also hoped that the new leaders would allow him and his colleagues to remain in Petrograd as military advisors to the Russian armed forces. But his visit to the Smolny Institute made him realise that this was most unlikely: the new regime looked certain to cut all its ties with the Entente governments. The Bolsheviks, he wrote, were ‘ruthless, ignorant, pig-headed, seeking to conduct affairs on a strict adherence to a few second-hand phrases.’
    The Bolshevik revolution rapidly consolidated itself, or so it seemed to outward observers. Revolutionary councils had sprung up across the length and breadth of Russia over the previous months. Now, representatives from these councils converged on Petrograd and met at the Smolny Institute as the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The congress ratified the revolutionary transfer of power into Bolshevik