Red Dusk and the Morrow

By Paul Dukes.

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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,” “cooperative,” “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 reestablished, 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 Belorussia, 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?”

Red Dusk and the Morrow

Adventures and Investigations in Red Russia

I

One of the Crowd

The snow glittered brilliantly in the frosty sunshine on the afternoon of March 11, 1917. The Nevsky Prospect was almost deserted. The air was tense with excitement and it seemed as if from the girdling faubourgs of the beautiful city of Peter the Great rose a low, muffled rumbling as of many voices. Angry, passionate voices, rolling like distant thunder, while in the heart of the city all was still and quiet. A mounted patrol stood here or there, or paced the street with measured step. There were bloodstains on the white snow, and from the upper end of the Prospect still resounded the intermittent crack of rifles.

How still those corpses lay over there! Their teeth grinned ghastlily. Who were they and how did they die? Who knew or cared? Perhaps a mother, a wife. … The fighting was in the early morning. A crowd—a cry—a command—a volley—panic—an empty street—silence—and a little group of corpses, hideous, motionless in the cold sunshine!

Stretched across the wide roadway lay a cordon of police disguised as soldiers, prostrate, firing at intervals. The disguise was an attempt to deceive, for it was known that the soldiers sided with the people. “It is coming,” I found myself repeating mechanically, over and over again, and picturing a great cataclysm, terrible and overwhelming, yet passionately hoped for. “It is coming, any time now—tomorrow—the day after—”

What a day the morrow was! I saw the first revolutionary regiments come out and witnessed the sacking of the arsenal by the infuriated mob. Over the river the soldiers were breaking into the Kresty Prison. Crushing throngs surged round the Duma building at the Tauride Palace, and towards evening, after the Tsarist police had been scattered in the Nevsky Prospect, there rose a mighty murmur, whispered in awe on a million lips: “Revolution!” A new era was to open. The revolution, so thought I, would be the Declaration of Independence of Russia! In my imagination I figured to myself a huge pendulum, weighted with the pent-up miseries and woes of a hundred and eighty millions of people, which had suddenly been set in motion. How far would it swing? How many times? When and where would it come to rest, its vast, hidden store of energy expended?

Late that night I stood outside the Tauride Palace, which had become the centre of the revolution. No one was admitted through the great gates without a pass. I sought a place midway between the gates and, when no one was looking, scrambled up, dropped over the railings, and ran through the bushes straight to the main porch. Here I soon met folk I knew—comrades of student days, revolutionists. What a spectacle within the palace, lately so still and dignified! Tired soldiers lay sleeping in heaps in every hall and corridor. The vaulted lobby, where Duma members had flitted silently, was packed almost to the roof with all manner of truck, baggage, arms, and ammunition. All night long and the next I laboured with the revolutionists to turn the Tauride Palace into a revolutionary arsenal.

Thus began the revolution. And after? Everyone knows now how the hopes of freedom were blighted. Truly had Russia’s foe, Germany, who despatched the proletarian dictator Lenin and his satellites to Russia, discovered the Achilles heel of the Russian revolution! Everyone now knows how the flowers of the revolution withered under the blast of the Class War, and how Russia was replunged into starvation and serfdom. I will not dwell on these things. My story relates to the time when they were already cruel realities.

My reminiscences of the first year of Bolshevist administration are jumbled into a kaleidoscopic panorama of impressions gained while journeying from city to city, sometimes crouched in the corner of crowded boxcars, sometimes travelling in comfort, sometimes riding on the steps, and sometimes on the roofs or buffers. I was nominally in the service of the British Foreign Office, but the Anglo-Russian Commission (of which I was a member) having quit Russia, I attached myself to the American Y.M.C.A., doing relief work. A year after the revolution I found myself in the eastern city of Samara, training a detachment of boy scouts. As the snows of winter melted and the spring sunshine shed joy and cheerfulness around, I held my parades and together with my American colleagues organized outings and sports. The new proletarian lawgivers eyed our manoeuvres askance, but were too preoccupied in dispossessing the “bourgeoisie” to devote serious attention to the “counter revolutionary” scouts, however pronounced the anti-Bolshevik sympathies of the latter. “Be prepared!” the scouts would cry, greeting each other in the street. And the answer, “Always prepared!” had a deep significance, intensified by their boyish enthusiasm.

Then one day, when in Moscow, I was handed an unexpected telegram. “Urgent”—from the British Foreign Office. “You are wanted at once in London,” it ran. I set out for Archangel without delay. Moscow, with its turbulences, its political wranglings, its increasing hunger, its counterrevolutionary conspiracies, with Count Mirbach and his German designs, was left behind. Like a bombshell followed the news that Mirbach was murdered. Leaning over the side of the White Sea steamer, a thousand kilometres from Moscow, I cursed my luck that I was not in the capital. I stood and watched the sun dip low to the horizon; hover, an oval mass of fire, on the edge of the blazing sea; merge with the water; and, without disappearing, mount again to celebrate the triumph over darkness of the nightless Arctic summer. Then, Murmansk and perpetual day, a destroyer to Pechenga, a tug to the Norwegian frontier, a ten-day journey round the North Cape and by the fairyland of Norwegian fjords to Bergen, with finally a zigzag course across the North Sea, dodging submarines, to Scotland.

At Aberdeen the control officer had received orders to pass me through by the first train to London. At King’s Cross a car was waiting, and knowing neither my destination nor the cause of my recall I was driven to a building in a side street in the vicinity of Trafalgar Square. “This way,” said the chauffeur, leaving the car. The chauffeur had a face like a mask. We entered the building and the elevator whisked us to the top floor, above which additional superstructures had been built for war-emergency offices.

I had always associated rabbit-warrens with subterranean abodes, but here in this building I discovered a maze of rabbit-burrow-like passages, corridors, nooks, and alcoves, piled higgledy-piggledy on the roof. Leaving the elevator my guide led me up one flight of steps so narrow that a corpulent man would have stuck tight, then down a similar flight on the other side, under wooden archways so low that we had to stoop, round unexpected corners, and again up a flight of steps which brought us out on the roof. Crossing a short iron bridge we entered another maze, until just as I was beginning to feel dizzy I was shown into a tiny room about ten feet square where sat an officer in the uniform of a British colonel. The impassive chauffeur announced me and withdrew.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Dukes,” said the colonel, rising and greeting me with a warm handshake. “I am glad to see you. You doubtless wonder that no explanation has been given you as to why you should return to England. Well, I have to inform you, confidentially, that it has been proposed to offer you a somewhat responsible post in the Secret Intelligence Service.”

I gasped. “But,” I stammered, “I have never—May I ask what it implies?”

“Certainly,” he replied. “We have reason to believe that Russia will not long continue to be open to foreigners. We wish someone to remain there to keep us informed of the march of events.”

“But,” I put in, “my present work? It is important, and if I drop it—”

“We foresaw that objection,” replied the colonel, “and I must tell you that under war regulations we have the right to requisition your services if need be. You have been attached to the Foreign Office. This office also works in conjunction with the Foreign Office, which has been consulted on this question. Of course,” he added, bitingly, “if the risk or danger alarms you—”

I forget what I said but he did not continue.

“Very well,” he proceeded, “consider the matter and return at 4:30 p.m. tomorrow. If you have no valid reasons for not accepting this post we will consider you as in our service and I will tell you further details.” He rang a bell. A young lady appeared and escorted me out, threading her way with what seemed to me marvellous dexterity through the maze of passages.

Burning with curiosity and fascinated already by the mystery of this elevated labyrinth I ventured a query to my young female guide. “What sort of establishment is this?” I said. I detected a twinkle in her eye. She shrugged her shoulders and without replying pressed the button for the elevator. “Good afternoon,” was all she said as I passed in.

Next day another young lady escorted me up and down the narrow stairways and ushered me into the presence of the colonel. I found him in a fair-sized apartment with easy chairs and walls hidden by bookcases. He seemed to take it for granted that I had nothing to say. “I will tell you briefly what we desire,” he said. “Then you may make any comments you wish, and I will take you up to interview—er—the Chief. Briefly, we want you to return to Soviet Russia and to send reports on the situation there. We wish to be accurately informed as to the attitude of every section of the community, the degree of support enjoyed by the Bolshevist Government, the development and modification of its policy, what possibility there may be for an alteration of regime or for a counterrevolution, and what part Germany is playing. As to the means whereby you gain access to the country, under what cover you will live there, and how you will send out reports, we shall leave it to you, being best informed as to conditions, to make suggestions.”