II. TROTZKY'S PLANS FOR SOVIET RUSSIA: Difference between revisions
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<CENTER><FONT SIZE="+4" FACE="Times">II</FONT> | <CENTER><FONT SIZE="+4" FACE="Times">II</FONT><BR><BR> | ||
<FONT SIZE="+2">TROTZKV'S PLANS FOR SOVIET RUSSIA</FONT></CENTER> | <FONT SIZE="+2">TROTZKV'S PLANS FOR SOVIET RUSSIA</FONT></CENTER> | ||
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<BR><BR>Robins clung, though, to his one last hope. Lenin and Trotzky | <BR><BR>Robins clung, though, to his one last hope. Lenin and Trotzky | ||
had written that memorandum. He awaited, they awaited, in Moscow, | had written that memorandum. He awaited, they awaited, in Moscow, | ||
the reply from London, from Paris, from Washington.<HR | the reply from London, from Paris, from Washington. | ||
<HR> | |||
Latest revision as of 23:52, 1 October 2008
TROTZKV'S PLANS FOR SOVIET RUSSIA
ROBINS went to see Trotzky shortly after the Bolshevik revolution
had put Trotzky into office. I cannot quite think that he went
in complete ease and confidence of mind.
Robins had taken part in much propaganda, both by word of mouth
and by word of print, in support of Kerensky and therefore against
the Bolsheviks. This was known; and Colonel Thompson, Robins'
chief in the American Red Cross Mission, once quite naturally
said to him: "Robins, do you know what will happen to you
if our propaganda fails? You'll get shot."
When Robins came to Trotzky's door, there were soldiers there;
and when he got inside, there was a man standing by Trotzky's
desk who at once showed much excitement. "Kerensky-ite,"
he cried, pointing to Robins. "Counter-revolutionary."
He had heard Robins addressing the Russian soldiers against peace
and in favor of fighting Germany. "Counter-revolutionary,"
he continued.
Robins raised his arm in a gesture he hoped was commanding
and calm, and said to his interpreter:
"Tell Commissioner Trotzky it is true I did everything
I could to help Kerensky and to keep the Commissioner from getting
into power."
Trotzky frowned.
"But tell the Commissioner," said Robins, "that
I differ from some of my friends. I know a corpse when I see one,
and I think the thing to do with a corpse is to bury it, not to
sit up with it. I admit that the Commissioner is in power now."
Trotzky looked mollified.
"But tell the Commissioner," said Robins, "that
if Kornilov or Kaledine or the Czar were sitting in his place,
I would be talking to them."
Trotzky looked less mollified. Robins hastened to state his
whole errand.
"Tell the Commissioner," he said, "that I have
come to ask him: Can the American Red Cross Mission stay in Russia
with benefit to the Russian people and without disadvantage to
the Allied cause? If so, it will stay. If not, it will go."
Trotzky looked at Robins steadily, and considered. "What
proof do you want?" he said.
Robins was prepared to ask a certain very definite proof. He
mentioned it.
"I have thirty-two cars of Red Cross supplies," he
said, "and I want to send them from here to Jassy in Rumania,
consigned to the American Red Cross there. I want to change over
from Kerensky guards to your guards, and I want those cars to
go through to the Rumanian border under your Soviet frank. I want
you to order your military people and your railway people to pass
my train and to expedite it."
In making this request Robins had two purposes. He wanted to
discover two things. First: Did the Soviet have the power to give
protection to a train of supplies on its way across all central
western Russia from Petrograd thirteen hundred miles to the River
Pruth? Second: Would the Soviet be willing to move supplies away
from the Petrograd district, where the Germans might get them,
to Jassy, where the Germans were very unlikely to get them?
"Yes," said Trotzky, "I'll make the order."
He made it. It began:
To Comrades Podvoisky, Krylenko and Elizarov.
[They were, respectively, Minister of War, Commander-in-chief of the Army, and Minister of Ways and Communications. It continued:]
Kindly issue to the train of the American Red Cross Mission a paper asking all authorities, both military and railway, to give all aid and help.
L. TROTZKY,
People's Commissioner of Foreign Affairs.
The train went through on schedule. It went through really
on better than schedule. It arrived at Jassy in passenger-train
time. And it arrived without having been in any manner molested
or marauded on the way. Robins got a receipt in full for it from
Colonel Anderson, head of the American Red Cross Mission in Rumania.
Thereupon, when people told Robins that the Soviet would extend
no facilities to any Allied mission for any Allied purpose and
that anyhow the Soviet had no power and no authority in Russia
outside of Petrograd, Robins knew from his own experience that
they were slightly in error, at least for that part of Russia
extending from Petrograd southward. They were also slightly in
error northward.
<A HREF="image/Robins02.jpg"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/Robins02tn.jpg"
WIDTH="138" HEIGHT="144" ALIGN="LEFT" BORDER="1" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3"></A>Fig. 2.
KRYLENKO---HEAD OF THE RED ARMY
Robins had four hundred thousand cans of
condensed milk, and certain other supplies, medical supplies,
lying at Murmansk, the most northerly port of Russia. He wanted
to get them down to Petrograd (especially the milk) to use in
Red Cross relief work among the destitute. He discussed the prospect
with General Poole, head of the British Economic Mission in Russia.
The British had war-ships at Murmansk.
"Quite hopeless," said General Poole.
"Probably the Murmansk Soviet has grabbed all your milk
and drunk it by this time. Thieves. Might as well give it up."
Again Robins went to Trotzky. Again he got a Soviet frank,
a Soviet order. And again it worked. Major Allan Wardwell, under
Robins' command, got into a grand-ducal car, a car once a grand-ducal
car, now a Soviet car, but still retaining all its luxurious furnishings
of the Russian ancient régime, quite beyond the luxury
of American private cars; and he proceeded to Murmansk. There
the local Soviet perused the order from the headquarters of the
national Soviet at Petrograd; and some of the cans of milk that
had been stolen from the docks by real thieves were traced and
brought back; and all of Robins' supplies were put on Bolshevik
trains and were started to Petrograd.
They arrived in Petrograd, and they were distributed in Petrograd,
under Bolshevik protection, perfectly safely. There was a little
trouble, indeed, from hungry families. Robins wanted to hold the
milk in his warehouse for several weeks and to keep it ready for
the time when the greatest scarcity in the local milk-supply was
due to happen. Some frantic fathers and mothers tried to storm
the warehouse and get the milk out of it at once. Robins asked
for Soviet guards, on behalf of the property of the United States.
He got them, and they were effective. He held his supplies as
long as he wanted to, and then he distributed them exactly as
he wanted to, under a protection formally promised and scrupulously
delivered.
But again he went to Trotzky. This time he challenged him to
a sterner proof.
There existed then in Russia certain great accumulated stores
of raw materials, useful to the Russians but useful also and attractive
to the Germans. There were copper, lead, nickel, cotton, hides,
oils, fats. Often these things were hard to reach, because many
railroads were broken down or jammed. They were hard to reach,
but they were present, and the Germans were making every effort
to get them out. There was an embargo forbidding exports from
Russia to Germany. But the Germans were finding holes in it, surreptitiously.
At Viborg, a hundred miles northwest of Petrograd, Robins'
agents found fifty-four cars loaded with metals and destined to
Helsingfors in Finland, and thence to Sweden and to Germany. Robins
had prudently provided himself with agents who were vigorous enough
to stop those cars, but they could hold them, of course, only
temporarily. To do anything with them permanently, they needed
an order from Petrograd.
Robins said to Trotzky: "Will you stop those cars permanently,
and will you do more? Will you confiscate what's in them? It's
all contraband, contraband trying to run the embargo. Will you
issue an order of confiscation?"
Trotzky issued the order, and he went still farther. He sent
some of that contraband, useful for war, up to Murmansk, where
it lay under the guns of the resident British war-ships, quite
considerably secure from German seizure.
By this time Robins was convinced of one thing about Trotzky's
pro-Germanism, namely, that it took strange forms. Why should
Trotzky stop supplies on their way to Germany? And why should
he send any such supplies to a remote port, dominated, in the
military sense, by the Allies?
Robins knew, of course, that Trotzky had formerly served Germany
in ways which are puzzling to people who try to explain him as
a German spy. In 1914, for instance, as soon as the war broke
out, Trotzky wrote, in Switzerland, a pamphlet entitled "The
War and Internationalism." It was addressed to the working-men
of Germany and was smuggled into Germany by Swiss socialists.
It denounced the German Socialist party, as a party, for supporting
the Kaiser's war and it called on German working-men at large
and in general to stop supporting it. For this service the German
authorities tried Trotzky, then a vagrant refugee on the face
of the earth, and sentenced him to imprisonment when caught. Trotzky
had a clear recollection of the news of that sentence in the newspapers.
Three years later, in 1917, at Brest-Litovsk, when he was invited,
as Commissioner of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Republic, to
go to a German city to continue the peace negotiations, he remarked:
"I have to remind you that I still lie under a certain manifestation
of displeasure by the German imperial government."
Robins also knew that in 1905, when the Kaiser was giving the
Czar all possible support against the Russian revolution of that
year, Trotzky led the revolution in the Working-men's Soviet at
Petrograd. He was arrested. He was held in prison in solitary
confinement for twelve months. Then he was exiled for life to
Obdorsk in Siberia at the mouth of the Obi River on the Arctic
Ocean.
But it was his second experience with exile in Siberia by order
of the Czar. He had been exiled in 1902 to Ust-Kut on the Lena
River north of Irkutsk. He had come to know the ropes. On the
way to Obdorsk he broke loose and fled five hundred miles across
a roadless wilderness of snow in an Ostiak sled drawn by reindeer.
He fled successfully, all the way to Vienna. There, with Mrs.
Trotzky and his two sons, he lived in a house of three rooms and
wrote articles for revolutionary papers which went back into Russia
underground.
The Austrian government drove him from Vienna when the war
broke out. The French government drove him from Paris. The Spanish
government drove him from Madrid. At length, via New York, he
got back to Russia in the spring of 1917, admiring all governments---that
is, all "capitalistic" governments---equally.
But that was just the point. "This man Trotzky,"
argued Robins to himself, "does not like any of us. He does
not like any of us on either side. So why should he be unwilling
to trade with the Germans? The Germans need raw materials; Russia
has them. Russia needs manufactured products; Germany can furnish
them. Why should Trotzky maintain the embargo? Why should he not,
from his standpoint, lift the embargo and trade with Germany freely?"
Trotzky soon shed a light on that question. One day, at Smolny,
he turned to Robins and bluntly said:
"Colonel Robins, about this embargo on goods going from
Russia into Germany, how would you like to put your officers on
our frontier to enforce it?"
It was some time before Robins could gather his mind together
to speak a word in reply. Then he said:
"Mr. Commissioner, I am not a diplomat or a general, and
I can afford to be as ignorant as I am. I don't understand you.
Your proposition sounds good, but it sounds too good. In America
we would say there must be something on it. I have to ask you
frankly, Why do you make it?"
Trotzky was annoyed. Besides his power of being passionate,
he has a great power of being supercilious. He showed it now.
His black eyes blazed out his impatience. One of his vices is
intellectual pride. One of his virtues is that he confesses it.
In public speaking he does not flatter an audience. He will even
go to the other extreme. He will openly sneer at it. He will freeze
it with contempt. A Russian journalist once described him, on
such an occasion, as a freezing fire. His face then is the face
of a Mephistopheles, diabolically intelligent, diabolically scornful,
redeemed only by the eyes of much human suffering in a long and
relentless pursuit of a human co-operative Utopia.
<A HREF="images/Robins03.jpg"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/Robins03tn.jpg"
WIDTH="113" HEIGHT="144" ALIGN="LEFT" BORDER="1" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3"></A>Fig. 3.
LEON TROTZKY
His face is the face of a Mephistopheles, diabolically intelligent,
diabolically scornful.
"Listen to me carefully," said
Trotzky to Robins. "Follow me step by step.
"We have started our peace negotiations with the Germans.
We have asked the Allies to join us in starting peace negotiations
for the whole world, on a democratic basis---no forcible annexations,
no punitive indemnities, and a full acceptance of the principle
of the self-determination of all peoples. The Allies have refused
to accept our invitation. We still hope, of course, to compel
them."
"How?" interrupted Robins.
"By stirring up the comrades in France and in England
and in America to upset the policy of their governments by asserting
their own revolutionary socialist will."
"Some contract," said Robins, in good American, which
was at once put by the interpreter into good Russian. (Trotzky
speaks English, but prefers to speak Russian.)
"Yes, a large contract," said Trotzky, "and
we may fail at it. In that case we shall, continue negotiations
with the Germans alone. Our problem then is this: How to get the
Germans to sign a democratic peace for Russia? Now observe.
"Germany, of course, will not want to sign a democratic
peace. Germany will want a peace with annexations. But we have
these raw materials. Germany needs them. They are a bargaining-point.
If we can keep them away from Germany we have an argument in reserve,
a big argument, perhaps a winning argument. Therefore I want
to keep them away. Do you see?"
"I begin to see," said Robins.
"I want to keep them away," repeated Trotzky, "but
you know our difficulties at the front. The front is in chaos.
Send your officers, American officers, Allied officers, any officers
you please. I will give them full authority to enforce the embargo
against goods into Germany all along our whole front."
Robins, seeing, hastened. For a few months, anyway, the Germans
would get no goods from Russia. Several months would have to pass
before any peace could be signed. (Several months did pass.) During
that time the Germans would be cut off completely from Russian
raw materials. Robins ran with the good news to the diplomatic
and military circles of the Allied and American governments at
Petrograd.
But in those circles it was not good news at all. It was news
not worth carrying. It aroused only the mild wonder, Why did Robins
bother with it?
"Do you mean to tell me," said Robins, "that
you aren't interested in preventing hides and fats and oils and
nickel and copper and lead from going into Germany?"
The diplomats and the generals looked at him and felt sorry
for him.
"Don't you know, " they said, "that these people,
Lenin and Trotzky and Chicherin and Radek, and all, are going
to last about a month? Don't you know that they are going to last
about a week? The White Guards are coming down from Finland .
The armies of the Rada are coming up from the Ukraine. The Cossacks
are coming up from the Don. Somebody else is coming up from the
Urals. The Russian muzhik loves the Little Father. He pines for
the Little Father. In a few hours this Lenin and this Trotzky
will be gone. Forget them."
Just as under Kerensky, the Indoor Mind was again at work.
Its working was miraculous. The Russian muzhik, having got a slice
of fresh land for himself out of the revolution, was pining to
give it back. He wanted a landlord again. He wanted his rent-tax
again. He wanted the knout on his back again.
Robins did not believe in such peasants, and no such peasants
appeared. There were serious disturbances later, for other reasons.
But the uprisings and upcomings of Czar-loving peasants from the
Don and from the Urals and from the Ukraine and from the Finnish
marshes were phantoms. Trotzky and Lenin stood. They stood for
a week, and for a month, and for a year, and for then some more.
But the diplomats were most of them equally stubborn. Never in
all that time did they fail to see Trotzky and Lenin falling to-morrow.
Just one responsible military representative of the Allied
cause in Petrograd in 1917 was able to think of Russia and Germany
and raw materials in terms of actual Russian political fact. He
was punished for it by his government.
He was an American---Gen. William V. Judson. He had been official
American military observer in the Russo-Japanese War. He had been
a member of the Root Mission to Russia. When the Root Mission
left Russia, he was retained in Russia because of his special
intimate knowledge of Russian affairs. He became head of our Military
Mission on the Russian front and also military attaché
to our embassy.
General Judson saw that Lenin and Trotzky were going, in fact,
to last awhile. He saw, therefore, that if a separate undemocratic
peace between Russia and Germany was going to be prevented, it
would have to be prevented through Lenin and Trotzky; and he saw
also that if Russian raw materials were going to be kept out of
Germany in the winter of 1917-18, they would have to be kept out
through Lenin's and Trotzky's influence and consent. General Judson
was willing to work through anybody, good man or bad man or devil,
to keep raw materials out of Germany. He did not want Germany
to win. He did not want Germany to get copper to use in shells
to kill Americans. He went to see the man in Russia who could
keep copper from going to Germany. He went to see Trotzky. For
going to see Trotzky he was recalled to America by direct order
from Washington.
The Allied and American governments, rather than admit the
existence of Trotzky, let the Germans do all the grabbing of Russian
raw materials on the Russian frontier.
Nevertheless, it was absolutely necessary for the Allied and
American governments to talk to Trotzky on some subjects, at some
time, somehow. They had embassies in Petrograd; and these embassies
had to get police protection, for instance, and telegraph service,
and similar courtesies and facilities. In order to get them, they
absolutely had to talk to some Bolsheviks. They would not talk
to them "officially." But they talked to them "unofficially."
For the American embassy Robins was the "unofficial"
talker. He was not a "diplomat." He was not a member
of the club, so to speak; and, accordingly, he could go to Smolny
on behalf of the American ambassador without in the slightest
degree compromising the American ambassador. He went, and he kept
on going, month after month, at the American ambassador's request.
He was "unofficial," but he was recognized.
In all that follows it should, therefore, be thoroughly understood
that Robins was not going to Smolny in any merely private capacity.
To begin with, he was now head of the American Red Cross Mission.
Colonel Thompson had gone back to America in the hope of being
able to bring the facts of the Russian situation to American official
attention. Colonel Robins had taken his place.
Secondly, and especially, Robins was the American ambassador's
"unofficial" aide in all dealings with Smolny. Once
an order came from Washington forbidding Robins to go to Smolny
any more. The ambassador secured its cancelation. He wanted Robins
to go. Months later, when Robins was at Moscow, and when the ambassador
was at Vologda, Robins received a certain telegram from the ambassador.
It showed Robins' status clearly, and it to-day evidences the
nature of the opportunities through which Robins secured his knowledge
of Smolny's affairs. It said:
Do not feel I should be justified in asking you to remain longer in Moscow to neglect of the prosecution of your Red Cross work; but this does not imply any lack of appreciation of the service you have rendered me in keeping me advised concerning matters important for me to know and giving suggestions and advice as well as being a channel of unofficial communicationwith the Soviet Government.
"Unofficially" Robins got protection for the embassy
against the anarchists.
In America we think of anarchists as furtive individual criminals.
In Petrograd they were a regular organized political party. They
had headquarters and local branch offices and newspapers. Their
leading specialty was denouncing the Bolsheviks for being too
mild, too tame. The Bolsheviks were letting the capitalists live.
They were letting the bourgeois survive. The bourgeois should
be instantly expropriated, instantly exterminated. The Bolsheviks
were not doing it. Lenin and Trotzky were traitors to the proletariate.
They were lacking in "true proletarian ruthlessness."
Besides this leading specialty, the anarchists had a minor
one. It was to denounce the United States. The anarchists were
the earnest anti-American party. They wanted Mooney out of jail
in San Francisco---their comrade Mooney. If the Americans did
not let Mooney out, so much the worse for the Americans. "Violence
will answer violence."
In pursuit of this aim the anarchists used to threaten the
American embassy. One morning, at about eleven o'clock, the ambassador
spoke to Robins anxiously. A woman had called on the 'phone. She
would not give her name; but she had an important message, and
she would deliver that message personally if the ambassador would
send somebody to meet her. The ambassador sent Mr. Huntington
and Mr. Johnson, and the woman told her story.
She had given a party to some friends, at her house. There
was a knock at the door. A sailor stood outside, with wine, in
bottles, in a sack. He wanted to sell it. It was good wine, he
said. He had got it, he said, from the cellar of the Italian Embassy.
And he went on to say: "I'll soon have some more. We're going
to blow up the American Embassy to-night."
"So," said the ambassador, "that's where we
are! These anarchists are getting too strong. They're coming to
be the power. Smolny can't control them."
Robins went to the Embassy that night and stayed there till
on into morning. There was no blowing up. There never was. But,
clearly, there was an intention to frighten the embassy. But why
frighten the embassy? Why, except to drive it out of Russia? Robins
put detectives on the trail of the woman. They located her and
located her record. She was the divorced wife of an American business
man, and she was on the books of the British Secret Service and
of the French Secret Service and of the Italian Secret Service
as a German agent.
Robins went to the secretary of the Council of People's Commissioners---a
gentleman named Bonch Bruevich---and told him that "this
anarchist business is going too far." Did the Council of
People's Commissioners want to drive the American embassy out
of Russia? Or did it want the American embassy to stay? If it
wanted it to stay, it ought to do something.
That night the Council of People's Commissioners sent its soldiers
to the headquarters of the anarchists. The anarchists had machine
guns. There was a battle. The chief of the anarchists was shot.
Much material---sugar, shoes, tea, and so on---was captured. The
next day the anarchist newspaper Burevestnik said, bitterly:
The thieves and murderers from Smolny have broken into our headquarters and have shot our beloved leader and have stolen our supplies. Fellow-workmen, we live under a hell of a proletariangovernment.
At Moscow also the anarchists were a regularly organized political
party. When the Soviet government moved to Moscow, and when Robins
moved there after it, there was anarchist trouble again, which
again showed the method and the formula of German intrigue in
Russia.
Robins got into his motor-car one day to go down to the telegraph
station. The ambassador was at Vologda. Every day, at a certain
hour, the Bolshevik government placed at the disposal of Robins
and the ambassador a telegraph wire between Moscow and Vologda
for confidential secret official (or "unofficial") messages.
Robins got to the telegraph station, and sent off some messages
and received some, and came outdoors again to his car. As he came
out, some ten armed men were surrounding his car and saying, "Requisitioned."
"Requisitioned by whom?" said Robins. It did not
seem to be clear by whom. But the fact of requisition was perfectly
clear. When Robins got into the car, four of the ten armed men
got in after him and rested their bayonets on the sills of the
car's open windows, Robins' interpreter---Alexander Gumberg---got
on the running-board; and a few of the requisitioners accompanied
him there. The others climbed up beside the driver. The order
to start was given. The driver, very properly, obeyed. An address
was shouted. It was the address of the oldest and largest anarchist
club in Moscow---9 Povarskaya.
Gumberg, with a revolver held against his body, was still defiant.
"You aren't afraid, are you?" he said to the man who
held the revolver, as a truck-load of Soviet soldiers approached.
Gumberg thought he saw a rescue. But if anybody was afraid at
that moment, it was the truck-load of Soviet soldiers. They looked
at the requisitioning anarchists, and felt it was none of their
business, and went on.
Robins saw it was time to get out. Through Gumberg he told
the driver to slow the car. The driver, very creditably, taking
a long chance, slowed it almost to a standstill. Robins pushed
his way from the seat to the running-board. His captors gesticulated
and vociferated, but did not stop him. He and Gumberg alighted.
They turned and stood. A man on the running-board was holding
a rifle which was leveled directly at Robins' body, and his finger
was on the trigger. But he did not shoot. He was lacking in "true
proletarian ruthlessness." He only said something. What he
said was: "Sprechen sie Deutsch?" I speak only
English," said Robins, and his car jumped forward and proceeded
in the direction of 9 Povarskaya.
Robins himself proceeded, not without heat, to the rooms of
the Committee for the Suppression of Counter-revolution and Sabotage.
There he saw a member of the committee---Derjinski. To Derjinski
he expressed his indignation. Derjinski was sympathetic and confident.
"I'll get the car back for you in two hours," said Derjinski.
But the car was not back in two hours and it was not back the
next day.
Robins went to see Trotzky. Could he get that car? Trotzky
was sure of it. He called Derjinski on the 'phone and talked to
him quite awhile. Then he seemed not so sure. In fact, he seemed
quite uncertain.
Robins went to see Lenin. This car absolutely had to be got.
Everybody knew the anarchists had taken it. "If you can't
get it," said Robins to Lenin, "everybody will say that
the anarchists are stronger than the Soviet; and all the embassies
of all the Allies will be surer than ever that your days are numbered."
Lenin listened. On other occasions he was incisive, immediate,
all there. On this occasion, as he listened, he seemed very far
away. He gave no answer. That is, he gave no order and no promise
of one.
The next day Trotzky called Robins on the 'phone and asked
him to come to see him. Robins went, and Trotzky said:
"Colonel Robins, I'm going to tell you all about it, and
when I've told you you'll understand Russian politics better and
you'll see that Russian politics in some ways is very much like
politics anywhere else.
"These anarchists of ours in Russia took part in the revolution
against the Czar. They helped the revolution. Therefore they had
a certain standing when the revolution was successful. Kerensky
never dared to attack the club at 9 Povarskaya. The anarchists
continued under Kerensky. They continue now. You inform me that
they have thirteen centers in Moscow. You are mistaken. They have
twenty-six.
"Now I do -not need to tell you that the Germans are working
among them. You discovered that fact for yourself in Petrograd.
The Germans are working among them here. And every day we are
attacked in the anarchist press and at anarchist meetings. Why,
then, do we not raid them? Well, we will. We will in a few days.
You will see."
"But why not now?" said Robins.
"I'm going to tell you," said Trotzky. "You
have elections, I believe, in America. Well, we're having elections
in Russia, in Moscow, now. We are the party in power. We are being
charged by many of our opponents with ruling by the bayonet. Well,
we are cautious. We are not going to use bayonets during the period
of these elections, for any purpose. We are not going to have
any raids or riots whatsoever. We are going to have perfect peace.
So, Colonel Robins, you see! I'm sorry; but you'll have to do
without your car till these elections are over."
They happened to be over soon. They were over the very next
day. On the night of that day---or, rather, in the early morning
of the day ensuing-at 2 A.M.---the Bolsheviks attacked all twenty-six
centers of the anarchists in Moscow. They attacked with infantry,
cavalry, machine guns, cannon, and tanks. They settled the question
whether the Bolsheviks or the anarchists were on top in Russia.
They killed fourteen anarchists, wounded forty-two, captured six
hundred, and dispersed the rest. They confiscated their stores.
Among those stores was one exceedingly interesting entry. The
Bolsheviks laid their hands on it and increased thereby both their
military equipment and their diplomatic information. It consisted
of a set of machine guns of the newest German pattern---a pattern
so new, in fact, that these were the first specimens of it seen
in Russia.
But the German support of the anarchists was only, after all,
to be expected. It was in precise accordance with their favorite
formula of intrigue in Russia.
Under the Czar the Germans had spread their influence as widely
as they could among the officials of the extreme Right, who were
more reactionary than the Czar; and they had also sent their agents
among all the revolutionary factions fighting the Czar. Under
Kerensky they gave all possible aid to the friends of the deposed
Czar---conservatives; and, on the other hand, they added their
insincere peace propaganda to the genuine peace propaganda of
the radical enemies of Kerensky. Under Lenin and Trotzky they
offered support to many friends of the deposed Kerensky, some
of whom accepted it, in order to restore "law and order"
in Russia; while, simultaneously, they sent munitions from Germany
to the anarchists, in order to establish a society in Russia without
law and without order. They tried, of course, to keep their fingers
in all Russian parties, including the parties in power; but their
special favorite formula was to give special attention to the
parties at the most extreme conservative Right and to the parties
at the most extreme radical Left at any given time, and so at
all times to play both ends against the middle and against any
existing Russian government at all.
Trotzky, in return, was shooting at the Germans with his own
munitions, verbal munitions, merely verbal. But they had an effect
which the Germans in time sadly realized.
At Brest-Litovsk a certain German confronted Trotzky. His name
was Hoffmann---General Hoffmann. At Brest-Litovsk he was very
overbearing. As Trotzky said afterward, with violent resentment:
"Mr. Kuehlmann was Germany's diplomatic representative, but
General Hoffmann was Germany's military representative---and her
real representative. Showing no consideration for Mr. Kuehlmann's
diplomatic conventions, the general several times put his soldierly
boot on the table around which a complicated judicial debate was
developing. And we, for our part, did not doubt for a single minute
that just this boot of General Hoffmann's was the only element
of serious German reality in these negotiations."
But General Hoffmann lived to cease to despise the power of
Trotzky and Lenin and Bolsheviks. Fifteen months later, with the
war ended and with Germany in defeat and revolution, he said to
Ben Hecht, of The Chicago Daily News:
"Immediately after conquering those Bolsheviks, we were
conquered by them. Our victorious army on the Eastern front became
rotten with Bolshevism. We got to the point where we did not dare
to transfer certain of our Eastern divisions to the West. Our
military machine became the printing-press of Bolshevik propaganda.
It was Bolshevik propaganda that rotted Germany from the East
and broke her morale and gave us defeat and this revolution you
now see ruining us."
In an article in a New York Socialist paper in the spring of
1917 Trotzky had foreseen and foretold precisely that result.
He had said:
"The creation of a revolutionary labor government in Russia
will be a mortal blow to the Hohenzollerns because it will give
the final stimulus to the revolutionary movement of the German
proletariate."
Trotzky was keen-sighted---and blind. He was blind to the greatest
necessity going. He was blind to the necessity of Allied military
pressure on the Kaiser's armies. His hatred of "capitalism"
blinded him. If these "capitalistic" Allies were physically
victorious, said Trotzky, they would make a "capitalistic"
and anti-democratic Allied peace, just as a victorious Kaiser
would make a "capitalistic" and anti-democratic German
peace. Trotzky's propagandist campaign against Germany sprang
from no impulse to help the Allies. It sprang simply from an intense
impulse to help Socialism.
Robins' view was: "Here is a man who is shooting with
a powerful engine of propaganda at all 'capitalism.' But the first
'capitalism' he can hit, and the only one he can immediately and
effectively hit, is the one right next door to him on the map
---Germany. For Heaven's sake encourage him to shoot."
This policy, for a moment, we thought good. The government
at Washington, of its own motion, thought it good. A considerable
sum of public American money, out of the treasury of the United
States, came to Russia from Washington and was spent, to Robins'
knowledge, in putting Bolshevik propaganda into Germany. It was
spent by the American Committee on Public Information. Part of
it went through the Russian Revolutionary Bolshevik propaganda
bureau. The Germans could accuse us of having used certain Bolsheviks
as our "agents." But they were not our "agents."
They were serving their own purposes. Robins often saw how completely
independent they could be.
He heard once of certain Bolshevik "missionaries"
who were about to start for the front, to smuggle themselves into
Austria in order to carry on their propaganda there in person.
He took seventy-five thousand rubles and went to their farewell
meeting. He thought that the seventy-five thousand might do them
some good and might do the Kaiser some harm. He made a little
speech and offered his little contribution. It was rejected. His
hearers had calculated the expenses of their trip, they said,
and they happened to have all the money they needed. If any Americans
would like to come along personally, they would be welcome. But
the money was not necessary. So, with thanks, they departed to
dodge the Austrian sentries and to carry Bolshevik words into
German cities.
They had a little paper, Die Fackel (The Torch). It
was an argumentative paper, showing the dastardly diplomacy of
the German "capitalistic ruling classes." Of this paper
the Bolsheviks carried tons, in issue after issue, into and through
the Austrian lines and the German lines. The Bolsheviks also had
an illustrated paper, Die Russische Revolution in Bildern (The
Russia Revolution in Pictures), which showed Red Guards in
action, and barricades on the streets of Moscow, and the high
revolutionary tribunal, and other beauties and happinesses of
a land in which the people were ruling.
Also, and perhaps above all, they had innumerable "proclamations"
of the sort Trotzky actually took along with him to Brest-Litovsk
to give to General Hoffmann's soldiers, and did give to them,
in millions of copies. These "proclamations" pointed
out Russia's demand for peace, as shown in the votes of the Soviets,
and said, for instance: "If you will go back home and start
a revolution against. the Kaiser, no Russian soldier will follow
you. Our soldiers will not invade your country. If you doubt us,
ask them, in the trenches right opposite you. All they
want in Germany is that you should have a revolution like ours."
Such was the message of the propaganda, and such also was the
message of Trotzky's diplomacy. Everything Trotzky did at Brest-Litovsk,
everything he did as Commissioner of Foreign Affairs from the
time he took the office to the time he left it, had really just
one essential aim: to make a Socialist revolution in Germany,
in order to save the Russian Socialist revolution by getting
Russia's most dangerous neighbor and Europe's most developed center
swung over from "capitalism " to the "co-operative
commonwealth. "
Robins saw Trotzky often during the period of the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations. It was Trotzky's climax. It was the beginning of
his partial decline. He was in his most temperamental temper.
One midnight, at a meeting of the executive committee of the
All-Russian Congress of Soviets, he appeared in the doorway, pale
and exhausted and despairing. "The armistice is gone,"
he said. "General Hoffmann refuses to agree not to shift
troops from the Eastern front to the Western. We do not care for
the Allied governments. We are under no obligations to the Allied
governments. But it would not be a democratic peace if we allowed
that shifting. We will not allow it. Never will we allow it. I
have declared to General Hoffmann that we withdraw from the negotiations."
Almost in collapse, he disappeared. At four o'clock he returned.
He was fresh, in good color, exuberant. "General Hoffmann
has yielded," he cried. "He has agreed to our terms
against the shifting of troops. We told him that otherwise we
would address ourselves to the working-men of Germany and would
say to them: 'Do you know why there is no peace with Russia? It
is because German generals whose breasts are covered with medals
for the slaughters of masses of working-men on the Eastern front
are refusing to make peace with Russia unless they are permitted
to take German soldiers from the approaching safety of the Eastern
front and plunge them into the hell and death of the Western trenches.'
General Hoffmann heard. He has yielded. The armistice, on our
terms, is established."
This temperamentalism in speech led to temperamentalism in
action. Trotzky sometimes missed the facts of a situation in his
passion for his arguments. At Petrograd, in the end, his leadership
of the peace treaty failed to hold the Soviet. At Petrograd a
greater realism than his was wanted. But at Brest-Litovsk, for
Trotzky's purposes, there came the hour when all of Trotzky's
qualities, bad as well as good, had their accumulated Socialist
revolutionary use.
At Brest-Litovsk, to impress the German proletariate, there
was needed a reckless and totally unrealistic propagandist play,
which nevertheless had to be sincere. Trotzky furnished it, without
effort. When he said, "We refuse to sanction the terms which
German Imperialism is writing with the sword upon the bodies of
living nations"; when he said, "If the government of
Germany desires to rule over lands and over nations by title of
military seizure, let it perpetrate its work in the open. We refuse
to sanction and sanctify outrages. We leave the war. But we will
not sign this peace "---when he said such things, he really
believed that they constituted a practicable policy. He really
believed that Russia would not have to sign. At Petrograd in secret,
as at Brest-Litovsk in public, he insisted that Russia would not
have to sign.
He turned out to be totally wrong as a statesman. But in the
very moment of being totally wrong as a statesman he came to his
peak as a propagandist. His objective at Brest-Litovsk was the
German proletariate---the same objective which he had mentioned
in his article published in New York before he returned to Russia.
Many people said that at Brest-Litovsk he was talking to the world.
The speeches Robins heard him make in the Soviet at Petrograd
prove that he was not talking to the world at all. The world was,
indeed, a gallery; and Trotzky never objects to a gallery. But
the audience in the body of the house---the audience for whom
the words were chosen---was the working-men of Germany. To them
those words were conveyed by channels innumerable. And to them
Trotzky said, in sum:
"You are most of you Socialists. Your government is trying to impose imperialistic terms on the first Socialist government in the world. But we, the members of that first Socialist government, cannot and will not connive at imperialism. We are holding out against those terms. We are rejecting them. Are you going to march for them? Or are you going to rise and break your masterswho make you march?"
It was penetrating, and it penetrated in time. It was the most
poisonous dose in all the propaganda that General Hoffmann finally
saw driving his soldiers to sedition and revolution. The Bolshevik
propaganda worked---ultimately. But there was an immediate question.
Immediately, on the morrow of Brest-Litovsk, would the German
soldiers march?
"No," said Trotzky. Like all artists, he believed
in the irresistible appealingness of his work. He had shown the
German working-men the folly and wickedness of marching, and they
would not march.
"But they will," said Lenin.
There was a certain private meeting of certain members of the
All-Russian and Petrograd Soviets. It was a time of supreme tension,
of the stretching and snapping of many judgments and of many reputations.
The German government had made its open and full announcement
of its imperialistic and annexationistic policies toward Russia.
In the Soviet there was consternation, indignation, fury. But
would the Russian army, in the field, fight?
"It Will," said loud voices.
"It will not," said Lenin. "It did not fight
at Tarnopol. Kerensky was in power. He used all his power and
all his eloquence to make it fight. With the Allies he ordered
the great advance. But the Russian army did not fight. It ran,
and it had to run. It is not an army any more. It is only peasants
wanting bread and land. It is going home. The Russian army will
never fight again until it is reorganized into a new revolutionary
army. The present army will not fight."
Lenin spoke very calmly. He had written out his ideas into
"twenty-one theses," as if he were giving a course of
lectures in a college. Those "twenty-one theses" were
his reasons for believing that Russia would have to sign the peace.
They were crushing. But Lenin did not try to crush with them at
that meeting.
He spoke for only about twenty minutes, and he spoke very much
without emphasis. He merely stated his position. The Germans would
advance; the Russian army would not fight; and the Russian Socialist
republic, in order not to be trampled militarily out of existence,
would have to sign the peace.
Then Trotzky swayed the meeting. The revolution was afoot in
Germany. Trotzky saw it striding on. Comrade Lenin was mistaken.
The German comrades were not so base as to fight for the terms
of Brest-Litovsk. Besides, there was Poland, and there was Lithuania,
and there was Letvia. They must not be surrendered to the Germans.
The Polish comrades and the Lithuanian comrades and the Lettish
comrades must not be deserted. We must hold them for the revolution,
said Trotzky.
"We must not be intoxicated by the revolutionary phrase,"
said Lenin.
But Trotzky swayed the meeting. And Lenin let him. Robins afterward
asked Lenin why. Lenin said:
"I am willing to let Trotzky see if he can put off the
peace. I am willing to let him see if he can save us from it.
I would rejoice if he could. But I wanted the comrades to know
what I am thinking. I wanted them to know it, so that they can
remember it a few days from now. I have to keep their confidence."
During those few days, till they ended, Lenin was very unpopular.
Most of the leaders of the Soviet were on Trotzky's side. Lenin's
position seemed to many of them to be monstrous. At a Soviet meeting
Carl Radek, ablest of the Bolshevik journalists, rose in his place
and stared at Lenin and said:
"If there were five hundred courageous men in Petrograd,
we would put you in prison."
Lenin, in a tone as of thesis seventeen, said:
"Some people, indeed, may go to prison; but if you will
calculate the probabilities you will see that it is much more
likely that I will send you than you me."
And so it was. Everything was as Lenin said it would be. But
as he said each new thing he said it to a storm of protest.
"We will call the Fourth All-Russian Congress of Soviets,"
he said. "What?" was the answer. "Call the Congress
now? It can't be done. Russia can't send delegates now. It can't
bring its mind to think of sending them. And the delegates can't
come, they won't travel, at this time. Impossible!"
"We will call it at Moscow," said Lenin. "What?"
said the answer. "Moscow? The stronghold of the reaction?
Go to Moscow and the Hall of the Nobles and the haunts of the
old régime? Leave Petrograd, the revolutionary city? Never!"
But it happened. The Fourth All-Russian Congress of Soviets
was called, as Lenin had said. The Germans had advanced, as Lenin
had said. The Congress met at Moscow in the Hall of the Nobles,
as Lenin had said. It ratified the peace, as Lenin had said.
The shadow of Lenin grew upon Trotzky. It grew upon Radek.
It grew upon Karelin. It grew upon everybody. More than ever they
were eclipsed. More than ever Lenin was master. He had out-analyzed
and outseen everybody. His books and his documents and his reports
and his theses and all his scholastic methods and manners had
not hindered him---perhaps they had helped him---in becoming his
party's absolute realist and almost absolute ruler.
<A HREF="images/Robins04.jpg"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/Robins04tn.jpg"
WIDTH="107" HEIGHT="144" ALIGN="LEFT" BORDER="1" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3"></A>Fig 4.
NIKOLAI LENIN
The shadow of Lenin grew upon Trotzky. It grew upon Radek. It
grew upon Karelin. It grew upon everybody. More than ever Lenin
was master.
In his mind, as he went to Moscow, there
was, nevertheless, one doubt about the ratification of peace.
He had the same view as everybody else regarding the character
of the peace. Everybody in Russia called it the "robbers'"
peace, the "shameful" peace, the "rotten"
peace. Izvestia, the newspaper of the Soviet government,
and Pravda, the newspaper of the Bolshevik party, both
said that it was a peace of "masked indemnities, veiled annexations,
and complete betrayal of self-determination." Lenin said
so, too. He said also, however, that Russia could not physically
resist it without physically perishing. He was convinced that
it would have to be ratified. But in his conviction there was
one gap.
The Russian army was helpless and hopeless, yes. But could
some support be got from the Allies? Would the Allies promise
to intervene with help, with some sort of help, if at Moscow the
Russian Soviets, instead of ratifying the peace, should repudiate
it?
A memorandum was written. In it an inquiry was addressed to
the Allies. Their answer belongs to the third chapter of our diplomacy
in revolutionary Russia. In this second chapter there was simply
the memorandum itself. It asked the Allies what they would do
in certain circumstances.
But Lenin already suspected what they would do. So did Trotzky.
Trotzky had said to Robins one day:
"Haven't you Americans got a Russian Railway Mission of
Americans, somewhere?"
"Certainly."
"Where is it?"
" Nagasaki."
"Gone to Japan?
"Yes."
"What's it doing there?"
"Eating its head off."
"Why don't you send it in here?"
"Why, Mr. Commissioner, you know there are many Americans----"
"Yes, they think I'm a German agent. Well, now, suppose
I am. Just assume, for argument, that I am. You admit I have never
told you I would do a thing and then failed to do it. My motives
may be bad, but my actions go with my promises. Is that right?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, out of some motive, which you may assume
to be bad, I am willing to share the railway system of Russia
half-and-half with the United States; and if you will bring your
Railway Mission into Russia I promise you that I will give its
members complete authority over half the transportation of all
the Russia of the Soviets."
"What do you mean---half?"
"I mean this:
" I will accept anybody you Americans want to name as
your railway chief and I will make him Assistant Superintendent
of Russian Ways and Communications, and his orders will be orders.
Then, as well as we can, we will divide all our available transportation
facilities into two equal parts. You will use your half to evacuate
war-supplies from the front and to carry them away into the interior,
so that the Germans will not be able to get them. We will use
our half, you helping us, to move our food-supplies from the places
where we have a surplus to the places where we have a deficit.
You see?"
"Clearly. You want us Americans to reform and restore
your railway system for you, so that it can carry food successfully
and so that you can feed your people and keep your government
going."
"Yes. But I propose to pay you in precisely the coin you
most need and want. Colonel Robins, have you ever seen a gunmap
of our front?"
Trotzky unrolled it before him. It showed some six hundred
miles of locations of cannon and of shells-nests of cannon, dumps
of shells, usable stuff, quantities of it, the material leavings
of a once mighty army. It showed cannon that had never been fired---cannon
new and of the latest type, with their shells beside them.
"There it all lies, " said Trotzky. "It's of
no more use to us. Our army does not fight in any more foreign
wars just now. Lenin says the Germans will advance. If they do,
they will take all that stuff . We cannot move it back. We can
do small things on our railways now, but not big things. Most
of our technical railway managers are against us. They are against
the revolution. They are sabotaging the revolution. Our railways
are headless. The whole point is: our railways need new heads.
Will you supply them?"
"I'll inquire."
"But be sure you make this clear: My motive, whether good
or bad, is entirely selfish. I get a reorganized and effective
railway system for Soviet Russia. And your motive, so far as I
am concerned, is entirely selfish, too. You save a mass of munitions
from all possibility of falling into the hands of the Germans.
You get a benefit. I get a benefit. Mutual services, mutual benefits,
and no pretenses! What do you say?"
"I'll find out."
So again Robins ran to diplomatic circles with what he thought
was good news and again he was received without interest. Again
he heard the wisdom of the palaces. The peasants were really rising
now. Lenin and Trotzky were really falling now. The real Russia,
the Russia loving the whip, the Russia loving the strong man,
Kaledine, Alexeiev, somebody, was asserting itself. Up from the
Ukraine. Up from the Don. Up from the Urals. No use bothering
with Lenin and Trotzky. No use at all.
So those guns and those shells remained where they were, and
so the Germans took them and made use of them on the bodies of
Frenchmen and Englishmen and Americans in the March drive and
in the June drive of 1918 on the Western front; and Lenin and
Trotzky were still standing.
Lenin and Trotzky came to think that the Allies would never
co-operate with them for any purpose. They came to think the Allies
would co-operate with any sort of White government sooner than
with any sort of Red. They came to think that the Allies were
not so much interested in saving Russia from Germany as in destroying
the Red government at Petrograd. They thought too much, but they
had much reason.
In Russia, in the territory of the old Russia, along its eastern
frontier, there had emerged three governments. There was one in
Finland. There was one at Petrograd. There was one in the Ukraine.
The one at Petrograd was Red. The other two were White. In all
three regions there was a struggle between Whites and Reds. It
was the same struggle, involving everywhere the same fundamental
social issue.
In Finland the French gave formal recognition to the White
government. It was a "law and order" government. It
was fighting and killing Trotzky's and Lenin's Red Guards. It
was a "good" government. It at once called in the Germans
and accepted German troops and turned Finland into a German dependency.
In the Ukraine the Allies gave the White government their active
favor and support. This government also was a "good"
and a "law and order" government. It also was fighting
Lenin's and Trotzky's Red Guards. From Allied money it received
an official present of 130,000,000 francs. Four days later it
called in the Germans and filled the Ukraine with German troops;
and, of its own free will, not under foreign compulsion, but purely
for domestic reasons, in order to down its domestic Red enemies,
it turned the wheat-fields of all southern Russia into German
wheat-fields and Odessa into a German port.
The government at Petrograd, among these three governments,
was the only one that was Red, but it also showed another difference.
It was the only one that never called in German troops against
its domestic enemies and also the only one that at any time ever
did Germany the slightest harm. It did it the prodigious harm
described by General Hoffmann. It rotted the fiber of imperial
loyalty out of a whole section of the German army and out of a
whole section of the German population.
But this government was as weak in physical power as it was
strong in propaganda. Its army was dissolved---dissolved by economic
and moral exhaustion ensuing upon intolerable effort. The American
Committee on Public Information, which cooperated with the Bolshevik
government in propaganda but then became one of the Bolshevik
government's bitterest enemies, said, nevertheless:
"Russia fought on to utter exhaustion, and her army yielded
only when the power of further effort was gone."
In these circumstances, looking at the three governments and
observing that the government at Petrograd was by far the largest
and by far the most important, what did we do?
To the government at Petrograd we refused to give any officers
for keeping goods from going into Germany, and to the government
at Petrograd we refused to give any railway experts for the restoring
of the railway system and for the transporting of munitions away
into the interior and away from the Germans; but to the governments
of Finland and of the Ukraine, immediately thereafter outrightly
pro-German, we gave diplomatic support and even military physical
support in combats with the soldiers and with the friends of the
government at Petrograd. In the Ukraine, serving the Ukrainian
White government, officers appeared and munitions appeared from
Allied sources and under Allied orders.
Trotzky made this fact the peroration of his angriest and greatest
speech---the one in the Third Congress of Soviets at Petrograd
in January. He saw the Russian Soviet government attacked equally
by the Allies and by the Germans. He ended: "And at this
very moment, while the French ambassador sits at Petrograd, we
see French cannon, directed by French officers, shooting our comrades
on the plains of Bessarabia."
In that atmosphere Trotzky conducted his diplomacy, and in
that atmosphere Lenin went to Moscow to attend the Fourth All-Russian
Congress of Soviets and to debate the Peace of Brest-Litovsk.
Robins, under orders from the American ambassador, went to Moscow,
too. He had now seen another chapter of our diplomacy.
<A HREF="images/Robins05.jpg"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/Robins05tn.jpg"
WIDTH="144" HEIGHT="99" ALIGN="LEFT" BORDER="1" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3"></A>Fig. 5. ON THE
ROAD TO MOSCOW. In tonneau of car, left to right, are: Alexander
Gumberg, Colonel Robins' Russian secretary; Carl Radek (with pipe),
editor of Pravda, organ of the Bolshevik party; Mrs. Radek, and
Trotsky's sister.
He had seen it consist of a stifled indoor contradiction. He
had seen it consist of staying in Russia and of being unfriendly
to the existing Russian government. So he had seen it come to
the conclusion described by Gen. William V. Judson, when military
attaché of the American embassy, in a letter to the American
ambassador. General Judson said:
All American aid to the Russian people is at a standstill, while the German emissaries are everywhere, working day and nightin the interests of the enemy.
Robins clung, though, to his one last hope. Lenin and Trotzky
had written that memorandum. He awaited, they awaited, in Moscow,
the reply from London, from Paris, from Washington.