In our eyes, the Cold War tended to reduce the 1917 Russian Revolution to a morality play, with characters like Lenin and Trotsky marching about like cartoon villains.
The plot was thus: The Tsar was overthrown by the good revolutionaries, headed by Kerensky; the evil Bolsheviks stole the revolution and murdered all their opponents; the Western allies, appalled by the threat of World Communism, sent support to the good "White Russian" counter-revolutionaries. The tragic result was well known, and half the world map had been painted Red under a hammer and sickle.
The reality was more complex and more interesting; we in the West may now be ready to consider it more dispassionately.
The Western observer best qualified to analyze the Revolution -- by his background and training, and by his being in the right place at the right time -- was a young British diplomat named R. H. Bruce Lockhart. Lockhart was the British Vice Consul in Moscow at the outbreak of World War I, eventually assuming the role of Acting Consul-General when his immediate superior was transferred. When the Western allies failed to recognize the revolutionary governments after the fall of the Tsar in 1917, Lockhart remained in Moscow as a British agent, treated as a diplomat at times by both the British and the Soviets, but lacking diplomatic immunity. Following an assassination attempt on Lenin in 1918, critically injuring the Soviet leader, Lockhart was arrested and imprisoned awaiting trial. He was released in exchange for the release of Bolshevik detainees in Britain.
In 1932, Lockhart wrote a memoir of his years in Russia, based on his extremely detailed diaries, entitled Memoirs of a British Agent. The book became a best seller when released, and was made into a movie by Warner Bros.
Lockhart's memoir is well worth reading now, simply as his candid account of his early years as a young, personable and sociable vice consul, and for his descriptions of Russian landscapes, personalities, and pre-Revolutionary society. He became highly fluent in Russian, which gave him a significant advantage over other British diplomats, including the ambassador himself in St. Petersburg (the tsarist capital).
But even more interesting to us today are his observations of the causes and course of the March and October Revolutions. The cause of the Tsar's forced abdication, to Lockhart, was simple: the ineptitude and corruption of the tsarist government, qualities that lead to enormous Russian losses in the war, and disastrous defeats.
What it is important to realize is that from the first the revolution was a revolution of the people. From the first moment neither the Duma nor the intelligentsia had any control of the situation. Secondly, the revolution was a revolution for land, bread and peace -- but, above all, for peace. There was only one way to save Russia from going Bolshevik. That was to allow her to make peace. It was because he would not make peace that Kerensky went under. It was solely because he promised to stop the war that Lenin came to the top.
Alexander Kerensky, the Social-Revolutionary leader after the March revolution, was, for the first four months, "worshipped as a god." But he and his government made the fatal mistake of trying "to drive back to the trenches a nation that had already finished with the war."
The sole concern of the British Foreign Office throughout this period, with respect to Russia, was to keep Russia from making peace. Britain was fighting a war of attrition on the Western Front. She was desperate to keep Germany distracted by a threat on its Eastern Front. But Kerensky eventually lost the confidence of the people by his support of the war, and Lenin struck at the opportunity. ("History will not forgive us if we do not assume power!") Promising to end Russia's involvement in the war, the Bolsheviks seized control in November 1917 (by our calendar).
The British at the time did not oppose the Bolsheviks because they were Communists -- they didn't take Lenin and his party seriously, believing they were a rabble that would fall within months. (Many in the Foreign Office -- showing their total ignorance of the political situation in Russia -- suspected the Bolsheviks of being German agents.) Britain's sole concern with the revolution, again, Lockhart emphasizes, was that it not prejudice Russian status as an allied belligerent.
After the Soviets signed a separate peace with the Germans (Brest-Litovsk, Feb. 1918), Lockhart remained a lonely voice in Moscow, urgently trying to build ties between the Western allies and the new Soviet rulers. He argued that Britain had nothing to lose in maintaining correct relations with the newly neutral government, especially since its leaders showed some interest in leaning as neutrals toward the West and away from Germany. The Allies, however, since before the revolution, had troops stationed in Archangel and Murmansk to protect allied shipping, troops that they now used to occupy and control those critical Arctic ports. The Foreign Office insisted that Lockhart pressure the Soviets into permitting intervention of allied forces against the Germans, passing from those ports through Soviet territory to the German front.
While Lockhart attempted to deal with Trotsky (at that point, his primary Soviet contact), the Allies were secretly planning to intervene in Russia, with or without Soviet permission. Lockhart's reasonably friendly personal relations with the Soviet leaders faded as suspicions grew as to Allied intentions and, therefore, as to his own integrity. The planned Allied intervention was wholly unsuccessful, the number of forces committed to the action being ludicrously small. In the summer of 1918, the assassination of Lenin was attempted, almost costing him his life. Lockhart and other foreign nationals were arrested, and "the Terror" against suspected opponents of the government was underway, a campaign conducted in direct retribution for the shooting.
The unfolding in Russia of these threatening and historic developments, described against the background of Lockhart's personal life and his rapidly deteriorating relations with his own Foreign Office, makes gripping reading. His observations of many of the well known Russian and Bolshevik leaders1 -- such as this description of the contrasting personalities of Lenin and Trotsky -- are perceptive:
Trotsky was all temperament -- an individualist and an artist, on whose vanity even I could play with some success. Lenin was impersonal and almost inhuman. His vanity was proof against all flattery. The only appeal that one could make to him was to his sense of humour, which, if sardonic, was highly developed. ... Trotsky was a great organizer and a man of immense physical courage. But morally, he was as incapable of standing against Lenin as a flea would be against an elephant.
When Lockhart returned to Britain at the age of 31, after being released from Soviet detention, he had virtually no allies left in the Foreign Office. Playing Cassandra is no way to make friends among your superiors, especially when your views and advice have been proved correct in virtually all respects and your powerful superiors' obstinancy and blunders have resulted in disastrous consequences for your nation.
Lockhart performed occasional services for the British government during his remaining years -- but his career in the foreign service was ruined and finished. He had been sentenced, in absentia, to death in Russia. He could never return to the country he loved, in which he had spent the most exciting and productive years of his life, and in which he had left behind many friends. He died in 1970 at the age of 83.
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He was a kind, old gentleman, who was susceptible to flattery and swallowed any amount of it. His knowledge of anything beyond banking and poker was severely limited. He had a traveling spittoon -- a contraption with a pedal -- which he took with him everywhere. When he wished to emphasize a point, bang would go the pedal, followed by a well-aimed expectoration.
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