Free Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West by Robert Service Page A

culture. The names of certain institutions, too, are simplified. For example, the People’s Commissariat for Army and Navy Affairs appears as the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. The book uniformly uses the Gregorian calendar even though the Russians in Russia officially used the older Julian one until January 1918. I recognize that this makes for one big oddity inasmuch as the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 is universally known as the October Revolution, but it would surely be perverse after all these years to start calling it the November Revolution. For purposes of concision, the US is referred to as one of the Allies even though it formally called itself an Associated Power.
    Robert Service
    March 2011

 
    INTRODUCTION
     
    The story of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 has been told a thousand times and usually the focus is on Russian events to the exclusion of the global situation. There is nothing wrong with examining ‘October’ and its consequences in such a fashion. But this book is an attempt to see things in a different light. The early years of Bolshevik rule were marked by dynamic interaction between Russia and the West. These were years of civil war in Russia, years when the West strove to understand the new communist regime while also seeking to undermine it; and all through that period the Bolsheviks tried to spread their revolution across Europe without ceasing to pursue trade agreements that might revive their collapsing economy. Looking at this interaction in detail reveals that revolutionary Russia – and its dealings with the world outside – was shaped not only by Lenin and Trotsky, but by an extraordinary miscellany of people: spies and commissars certainly, but also diplomats, reporters and unofficial intermediaries, as well as intellectuals, opportunistic businessmen and casual travellers. This is their story as much as it is the story of ‘October’.
    The communist leaders believed that their revolution would expire if it stayed trapped in one country alone; they were gambling on their hope that countries elsewhere in Europe would soon follow the path they had marked out in Russia. The October Revolution happened in Petrograd – as the Russian capital St Petersburg had been renamed to do away with its Germanic resonance – while the Great War between the Allies and the Central Powers raged across Europe, and until November 1918 the world’s powers gave little thought to revolutionary Russia except when examining how its situation could be exploited to their advantage. The Germans had signed a separate peace with Lenin’s government at Brest-Litovsk in March that year in order to redeploy their army divisions in the east to serve on the western front against France, Britain and the US; theFrench and British meanwhile increased their efforts to bring Russia back into the fight against Germany even if this meant bringing down the communist government. When peace came to Europe after the German surrender, the ‘Russian question’ was transformed in content as Western politicians at last gave priority to preventing the contagion of communism from spreading beyond the Russian borders into the heart of Europe. Sporadic revolutionary outbreaks in Germany, Hungary and Italy occurred but, to the frustration of the Russian communist leadership, petered out in failure. The Western Allies meanwhile undertook direct military intervention in Russia as well as the subsidizing of the anti-communist Russian armed forces. But in late 1919, when these enterprises ran into difficulty, they withdrew their expeditionary forces. Communist Russia had survived its first international trial of strength.
    At the same time the Russian communists were engaged in efforts to export their revolution. In 1918 they sent emissaries, including some of their most prominent leaders, to subvert Germany. In the following year they also founded the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow