Chapter I: Foreword

If ever there was a period when people blindly hitched their wagons to shibboleths and slogans instead of stars it is the present. In the helter-skelter of events which constantly outrun mankind, the essential meaning of commonly used words is becoming increasingly confused. Not only the abstract ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but more concrete and more recently popularized ones such as proletariat, bourgeois, soviet, are already surrounded with a sort of fungous growth concealing their real meaning, so that every time they are employed they have to be freshly defined.

The phenomenon of Red Russia is a supreme example of the triumph over reason of the shibboleth, the slogan, and the political catchword. War-weary and politics-weary, the Russian people easily succumbed to those who promised wildly what nobody could give, the promisers least of all. Catchwords such as “All Power to the Soviets,” possessing cryptic power before their coiners seized the reins of government, were afterward discovered either to have no meaning whatsoever, or else to be endowed with some arbitrary, variable, and quite unforeseen sense. Similarly, words such as “workers,” “bourgeois,” “proletariat,” “imperialist,” “socialist,” “co-operative,” “soviet,” are endowed by mob orators everywhere with arbitrary significations, meaning one thing one day and another the next as occasion demands.

The extreme opponents of Bolshevism, especially amongst Russians, have sinned in this respect as greatly as the extreme proponents, and with no advantage to themselves even in their own class. For to their unreasoning immoderation, as much as to the distortion of ideas by ultra-radicals, is due the appearance, among a certain class of people of inquiring minds but incomplete information, of that oddest of anomalies, the “parlour Bolshevik.” Clearness of vision and understanding will never be restored until precision in terminology is again re-established, and that will take years and years.

It was the discrepancy between the actualities of Bolshevist Russia and the terminology employed by the Red leaders that impressed me beyond all else. I soon came to the conclusion that this elaborate catch-phraseology was designed primarily for propagandist purposes in foreign countries, for the Bolsheviks in their home press indulge at times in unexpected spurts of candour, describing their own failures in terms that vie with those of their most inveterate foes. But they still cling to anomalous terms, such as “workers’ and peasants’ government” and “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

It is to such discrepancies that I have sought to draw attention in the following pages. My point of view was neither that of the professional politician, nor of the social reformer, nor of the stunt-journalist, but simply that of the ordinary human individual, the “man in the street.” As an official of the intelligence service the Soviet Government has charged me with conspiracies and plots to overthrow it. But I went to Russia not to conspire but to inquire. The Soviet Government’s references to me have not been felicitous and I may be pardoned for recalling one or two of the most striking. At the close of 1920 I received an intimation from the Foreign Office that on January 16, 1920, a certain Mr. Charles Davison had been executed in Moscow and that to the British Government’s demand for an explanation the Soviet Government had replied that Mr. Davison was shot as an accomplice of my “provocative activities.” The letter from the British Foreign Office was, however, my first intimation that such a person as Mr. Davison had ever existed. Again, on the occasion of the last advance of General Yudenich on Petrograd the Bolshevist Government asserted that I was the instigator of a “White” Government which should seize power upon the fall of the city, and a list of some dozen or so ministers was published who were said to have been nominated by me. Not only had I no knowledge of or connection with the said government, but the prospective ministers with one exception were unknown to me even by name, the exception being a gentleman I had formerly heard of but with whom I had never had any form of communication.

It would be tedious to recount the numerous instances of which these are examples. I recognize but few of the names with which the Bolshevist Government has associated mine. The majority are those of people I have never met or heard of. Even of the Englishmen and women, of whom the Bolsheviks arrested several as my “accomplices,” holding them in prison in some cases for over a twelvemonth, I knew but few. With only one had I had any communication as intelligence officer. Some of the others, whom I met subsequently, gave me the interesting information that their arrest and that of many innocent Russians was attributed by the Bolsheviks to a “diary” which I was supposed to have kept and in which I was said to have noted their names. This “diary” has apparently also been exhibited to sympathetic foreign visitors as conclusive evidence of the implication of the said Russians and Britishers in my numerous “conspiracies”! I barely need say that, inexperienced though I was in the art and science of intelligence work, I made it from the outset an invariable rule in making notes never to inscribe any name or address except in a manner intelligible to no living soul besides myself, while the only “diary” I ever kept was the chronicle from which this book is partly compiled, made during those brief visits to Finland which the reader will find described in the following pages.

It goes without saying that this book is not designed to rectify this record of inaccuracies on the part of the Soviet Government. It was impossible in writing my story to combine precision of narrative with effective camouflage of individuals and places. The part of this book which deals with my personal experiences is therefore not complete, but is a selection of episodes concerning a few individuals, and I have endeavoured to weave these episodes into a more or less consecutive narrative, showing the peculiar chain of circumstances which led to my remaining in charge of the intelligence service in Russia for the best part of a year, instead of a month or two, as I had originally expected. To my later travels in Bielorussia, the northern Ukraine, and Lithuania I make but little reference, since my observations there merely confirmed the conclusions I had already arrived at as to the attitude of the Russian peasantry. In writing, I believe I have achieved what I was bound to regard as a fundamental condition, namely, the masking of the characters by confusing persons and places (except in one or two instances which are now of small import) sufficiently to render them untraceable by the Bolshevist authorities.

“Even when one thinks a view unsound or a scheme unworkable,” says Viscount Bryce in _Modern Democracies_, “one must regard all honest efforts to improve this unsatisfactory world with a sympathy which recognizes how many things need to be changed, and how many doctrines once held irrefragable need to be modified in the light of supervenient facts.” This is true no less of Communist experiments than of any others. If in this book I dwell almost entirely on the Russian people’s point of view, and not on that of their present governors, I can only say that it was the people’s point of view that I set out to study. The Bolshevist revolution will have results far other than those anticipated by its promoters, but in the errors and miscalculations of the Communists, in their fanatical efforts to better the lot of mankind, albeit by coercion and bloodshed, lessons are to be learned which will be of incalculable profit to humanity. But the greatest and most inspiring lesson of all will be the ultimate example of the Russian people, by wondrous patience and invincible endurance overcoming their present and perhaps even greater tribulation, and emerging triumphant through persevering belief in the truths of that philosophy which the Communists describe as “the opium of the people.”

“... Nothing is more vital to national progress than the
spontaneous development of individual character.... Independence
of thought was formerly threatened by monarchs who feared the
disaffection of their subjects. May it not again be threatened by
other forms of intolerance, possible even in a popular government?”

BRYCE, _Modern Democracies_.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

PAGE

ONE OF THE CROWD 1

The Revolution of March 1917--Recalled to London--Offered work
in Secret Service--Archangel--Helsingfors--Melnikoff--Departure
for Russia--Forging passports--Crossing the frontier.

CHAPTER II

FIVE DAYS 30

Petrograd--An unpleasant encounter--Dearth and stagnation--A
secret café--Stepanovna--Quarters for the night--An
eating-house--Welcomed as English--Mr. Marsh--Maria--The
“Journalist”--The “Policeman”--A raid on an
eating-house--Captain Zorinsky--The Extraordinary
Commission--Mr. Marsh escapes.

CHAPTER III

THE GREEN SHAWL 79

Allies expected in Petrograd--A story of Archangel--Proposals to
attack Bolsheviks--Arranging Mrs. Marsh’s escape--News of
Melnikoff under arrest--Attempts to arrange his escape--Buying a
disguise--In the prison of the Extraordinary Commission--Mrs.
Marsh’s escape--Across the frontier in the snow.

CHAPTER IV

MESHES 113

Back in Petrograd--“The Metropolis of the World
Revolution”--Communists employing bourgeois
specialists--Zorinsky supplies information and asks
questions--Certificates of exemption from military
service--Plans to rescue Melnikoff.

CHAPTER V

MELNIKOFF 181

Bolshevik Saints--Melnikoff’s Doctor uncle--Zorinsky suspected
of double dealing--A Bolshevik demonstration--A new
passport--Unrecognized by former housekeeper--A letter of
introduction--News of Melnikoff’s execution.

CHAPTER VI

STEPANOVNA 152

New acquaintances--A raid on a public
market--“Speculators”--Confiscation of furniture--Stepanovna in
trouble.

CHAPTER VII

FINLAND 162

Escape to Finland over the ice--Running the gauntlet of the
searchlights--Pursued--Hiding on the bare ice--Arrest by Finnish
patrols--Arranging for a service of couriers--Intrigues in
Finland--Back into Russia--On ski through the forest--A trying
experience.

CHAPTER VIII

A VILLAGE “BOURGEOIS-CAPITALIST” 181

A Russian peasant’s house--Music--The troubles of a thrifty
peasant--A village Soviet--Smuggling food and matches into
Petrograd--Attempt to stop “sackmen”--Recollections of March
1917.

CHAPTER IX

METAMORPHOSIS 193

Unrest in Petrograd--Attempts at arrest--A narrow escape at the
“Journalist’s”--A new disguise--A friend of
Melnikoff--Zorinsky’s treachery confirmed.

CHAPTER X

THE SPHINX 209

At work in a factory--Joining the Red army--Tsarist officers in
the Red army--Military service helpful to intelligence work--To
Moscow.

CHAPTER XI

THE RED ARMY 215

The uniform--Terrorizing Tsarist officers--Relatives used as
hostages for good behaviour--Jews in the Red army--Bronstein or
Trotzky--Trotzky conciliates Tsarist officers--Penalties of
refusing service--Mistakes of the White leaders--Discipline by
terror--A mutiny--Revolutionary Tribunals--Desertion--The army
oath--System of political control--A conscientious
commissar--Cultural-Enlightenment Committees--A regimental
entertainment.

CHAPTER XII

“THE PARTY” AND THE PEOPLE 251

“Government of Workers and Peasants” a misnomer--A gulf between
the Communist Party and People--The Third International--Its
relation to the Soviet Government--Disturbances in
Petrograd--Suppression and arrests--A speech by Lenin--“Sackmen”
legalized--Free trading permitted--Welfare of people subordinate
to interests of party--A party purge--Of what did the party
consist?--Training members--Three degrees of membership--What is
a Soviet?--Bolshevism not Soviet Government--Soviet elections--A
meeting of the Petrograd Soviet.

CHAPTER XIII

ESCAPE 285

Plans for escape--To join British Fleet in Gulf of Finland--Sent
to Latvian frontier on military service--Train searched--The
Green Guards--Across Lake Luban.

CHAPTER XIV