Added 31
July
2011.
Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart (1887-1970) was a Scot from a family of schoolmasters. At the age of 21 he was seduced by the call of the East and went out to Malaya to become a rubber planter. Despite his love of the country and the lifestyle, his brief career in this role ended abruptly when he caused a scandal among the local people by a relationship with the ward of a Malay prince; although the lady moved in with him and was fiercely loyal to him, Lockhart contracted malaria and, seriously ill, was forced to leave Malaya forever. After enforced convalescence in Canada and Scotland he entered the diplomatic service, and soon after was sent to Russia, where he was to be caught up in the events of the First World War and then the revolutions of 1917, and finally get a taste of “Red Terror” before leaving the country forever.
The book deals with Lockhart’s life in an autobiographical manner from birth to his last day in Russia, playing games on the Finnish border with fellow-diplomats in front of the detachment of Latvian soldiers guarding them. Although for many readers the main interest will be Lockhart’s activities in Russia, the period he describes in Malaya is no less interesting, talking about a bygone world of colonial paternalism and Malay nobility where tropical diseases were still a dreadful scourge. His small vignettes of his fellow countrymen, particularly his headstrong Presbyterian grandmother who seemed determined to shape the policy of her local church, are no less interesting.
The real meat of the story, though, picks up when Lockhart is assigned to Moscow. He describes his first visit to a restaurant:
As I walked through the hall to the restaurant, my first impressions were of steaming furs, fat women and big sleek men; of attractive servility in the underlings and of good-natured ostentation on the part of the clients; of great wealth and crude coarseness, and yet a coarseness sufficiently exotic to dispel repulsion. I had entered into a kingdom where money was the only God. Yet the God of roubles was more lavish, more spendthrift, less harsh than the God of dollars.
In the light of the extremes of wealth and poverty which reinvaded Russia in the 1990s, this passage seems almost timeless.
Lockhart begins a round of diplomatic life but also takes the time and effort to learn Russian, and after a while gets to know many of the local dignitaries. He soon finds out that one well-to-do family, the Ertels, are representative of the “intelligentsia”:
The Ertels,
in fact, were typical representatives of the intelligentsia. When at ten o’clock every
evening
they assembled around the samovar, they would sometimes sit far into
the night
discussing how to make the world safe by revolution.
But when the morning of action came they
were fast asleep in bed. It
was
very harmless, very hopeless, and very Russian.
But for the War and the antiquated
inefficiency of the Russian military organisation, the Tsar would still
be on
his throne.
An interesting and related anecdote relates similarly to how the Harry Charnock, managing director of a cotton mill in Russia, attempted to deal with vodka-drinking and political agitation by forming a soccer club at the mill.
It soon became apparent to Lockhart, however, that Russia was not the military monolith that the Entente believed in, if only because of its political leadership:
Never have I seen a finer body of men
than the Cossack troops who formed the Emperor’s bodyguard. Well may the pre-war
foreign military
attachés be forgiven for over-estimating the military power of Russia.
Yet the
real symbol of Russia’s strength was the frail, bearded figure with the
strange, wistful eyes who rode at the head of his troops and whose
feeble
shoulders seemed incapable of supporting the mantle of autocracy which,
like a
shroud hung over them. Even
on that
day, when revolution was far from most men’s minds, the Tsar inspired
pity
and sympathy more than admiration.
Later he describes Nicholas II as “man of all the domestic virtues.. of no vices and no will-power” and elsewhere notes the German-born Tsarina’s influence on him, as well as Rasputin’s behaviour and attempt to foist people on to the administration.
An interesting aside is thrown on the Okhrana, the supposedly all-powerful Tsarist secret police:
I do not profess ever to have
mastered
the psychology of the Tsarist police.
I refuse, however, to believe in either its efficiency or
honesty. The
dreaded “Okhrana”
of the Seton Merriman novel was a myth more fearful by its name than by
its
omniscience. It was
an organisation
run by bunglers and clever crooks, and in it the bunglers outnumbered
the
brains by nine to one.
During this period Lockhart’s analysis of pre-revolutionary Russia shows that revolution need not have been inevitable, nor her military defeat inevitable – patriotism was high at the beginning of the war, even among liberals who detested the Tsar’s regime. However military setbacks slowly eroded morale at home, while Nicholas’s prevarication, refusal to adopt reforms and fatal assumption of the position of Commander-in-Chief at the front were all to prove milestones on the road to Golgotha, to use Lockhart’s expression.
When the February Revolution broke out, the British and French were chiefly concerned with keeping Russia in the war. However it became increasingly apparent to Lockhart that events had assumed a momentum of their own, galloping rapidly out of control. Of Chelnokoff, the pre-war Russian politican, he writes “The man who yesterday had been too revolutionary for the Emperor was already too reactionary for the revolution”. Lockhart gives his own succinct summary of the reasons for the revolution:
The revolution took place because the
patience of the Russian people broke down under a system of
unparalleled
inefficiency and corruption. No
other nation would have stood the privations which Russia stood, for
anything
like the same length of time. As
instances of the inefficiency, I give the disgraceful mishandling of
food-supplies, the complete break-down of transport, and the senseless
mobilisation of millions of unwanted and unemployable troops. As an example of the
corruption, I quote
the shameless profiteering of nearly everyone engaged in the giving and
taking
of war contracts. Obviously,
the
Emperor himself, as a supreme autocrat, must bear the responsibility
for a
system which failed mainly because of the men (Stürmer,
Protopopoff, Rasputin) whom
he appointed to control it. If
he
had acted differently, if he had been a different man.... these
arguments are
childish.
He also notes, in an argument that seems largely to be agreed upon, that the revolution was one for bread, land and peace, but mainly the last of these, and that this was why Kerensky fell and Lenin succeeded. Nevertheless Lockhart met Kerensky on many occasions, and formed a favourable impression of him and remained his friend even into the 1920s, when, as he says, anti-Soviet Russians and even Englishmen reviled him, and is critical of those who made Kerensky the scapegoat for the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia. He also rates Kerensky’s oratory skills very highly and describes an example of this which had even Tsarist generals in tears. However, he notes that Kerensky in exile confessed his naivete to Lord Beaverbrook and adds, “Naivete is Kerensky’s proper epitaph... He lacks, as he has always lacked, the ruthlessness of the successful revolutionary” – perhaps an indictment more of human nature, at least in the twentieth century, than of Kerensky himself.
Lockhart says that the Kerensky period was the unhappiest of his career, a time in which the Allies sought in vain to keep Russia in the war. What ended his official employment in Russia, however, was his private attachment to a Russian Jewess, which was instrumental in his recall to London. Back in London, Lockhart was sceptical of the pundits’ view that the October Revolution would only last a few weeks and that Russia could be made to reenter the war, and suggested that a better policy would be the promotion of an anti-German peace in Russia. To cut a long story short, Lockhart ended up being sent back to Russia as an unofficial agent to sound out the Bolsheviks about future prospects, including possibly Allied intervention on her behalf on Russian territory against the Germans, who were admittedly unpopular for their occupation of the Ukraine and rule over occupied territory. For students of Soviet history this is perhaps the most rewarding part of the book as we get an insight into the day-to-day life of Russia in the earliest days of the Soviet regime and snapshots of many of the principal architects of the revolution, including Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin made an impression on Lockhart:
There was nothing in his personal
appearance to suggest even faintly a resemblance to the super-man... he
looked
at the first glance more like a provincial grocer than a leader of men. Yet in those steely eyes
there was
something that arrested my attention, something in that quizzing,
half-contemptuous, half-smiling look which spoke of boundless
self-confidence
and conscious superiority..... 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..... There was not a commissar who did not regard Lenin as a demi-god, whose decisions were
to be accepted without
question. In his
creed of world
revolution Lenin was as unscrupulous and as uncompromising as a Jesuit,
and in
his code of political ethics the end to be attained justified the
employment of
any weapon. On
occasions however he
could be amazingly frank, and my interview was one of them.
This picture fits well with the portrait drawn by Dimitri Volkogonov.
Trotsky Lockhart found to be something of a diva:
He was what Lenin called a Trotskist – that is to say, an
individualist and an
opportunist. A
revolutionary with
the temperament of an artist and with undoubted physical courage, he
had never
been and could never be a good party man....Trotsky was all temperament
–
an individualist and an artist, on whose vanity even I could play with
some
success.... Trotsky was a great organiser 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.
The impression given at this stage is that Soviet society had not yet settled into the harsh rigidity which was later to define its character, at least until the death of Stalin. Life in St Petersburg seemed to go on as before in a rather unreal way, with newspapers critical of the Bolsheviks, cabarets crowded and people still going to the racetracks. The main danger was in fact from gangs of brigands, or “Anarchists” as Lockhart calls them, who included several ex-army officers in their ranks and who appear to have been a combination of armed squatters and robbers. But the first sign of Red Terror was to come about when the Bolsheviks finally moved against these gangs.
At about this time Lockhart formed yet another dalliance (despite having married before the First World War), this time with Moura Budberg, who, although it is not mentioned in the book, was in fact widely suspected of being a double-agent for both British and Soviet intelligence, and had relationships with Maxim Gorky and H G Wells (see the Wikipedia article for further information). Most of his attention, however, was taken up with attempts to persuade the Bolsheviks to accept Allied intervention against the Germans, especially after the Brest-Litovsk treaty (which Lockhart notes as being more severe than that of Versailles). Lockhart grew to believe however that intervention by any foreign power, Allied, German or other, was never going to be welcomed by the Bolsheviks, even as official Allied opinion swung towards favouring it. With the growing openness of Allied preparations for this event, he found himself in an untenable situation, one that was exacerbated by the pitifully inadequate resources that were given to the interventionist forces when they finally landed in northern Russia (the English, at Archangel, mustered less than 1,200 men, a move the author compares with worst of the Crimean War). This, together with increasingly febrile atmosphere in Moscow caused by the crushing of the Left Social-Revolutionaries, the assassination of the head of the Petersburg Cheka and the attempt on Lenin’s life by Fanny Kaplan, ended up with Lockhart being dragged from his bed one night and taken to the soon-to-be notorious Lyubyanka for questioning and detainment. His chief interrogator was Yakov Peters, a Latvian Bolshevik who ironically was himself to perish in Stalin’s purges in 1938.
Another interesting note in Lockhart’s memoirs concerns Sidney Reilly, whom some may remember as featuring in the television series “Reilly, Ace of Spies”. Lockhart does not dismiss Reilly lightly, but appears to have regarded him as a man with a fantastic imagination and a Napoleonic streak, courageous and indifferent to danger, attractive to women but not particularly intelligent. In fact the book Ace of Spies was written by Lockhart’s son, Robin Bruce Lockhart. Reilly was shot by the Soviet secret services in 1925 after he had returned to Russia. Further encounters stand out: one was with Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka (the original name for the Soviet secret police) and later to be known as “Iron Felix”, whom Lockhart describes as
... a man of correct manners and
quiet speech but without a ray
of humour in his character. The
most remarkable thing about him was his eyes.
Deeply sunk, they blazed with a steady
fire of fanaticism. They
never twitched.
Lockhart continues:
... I also shook hands with a strongly-built man with a sallow face, black moustache, heavy eyebrows and black hair worn en brosse. I paid little attention to him. He himself said nothing. He did not seem of sufficient importance to include in my gallery of Bolshevik portraits. If he had been announced then to the assembled Party as the successor to Lenin, the delegates would have roared with laughter. The man was the Georgian Djugashvilli, known today to the whole world as Stalin, the man of steel.
The Bolshevik Lunacharsky, by contrast, comes across as a pleasant and cultured, if rather enthusiastic, individual, whereas Lockhart finds Krylenko (later a public prosecutor) the most repellent of the Bolsheviks. In general Lockhart notes of the Bolsheviks that they were men "who worked eighteen hours a day and who were obviously inspired by the same spirit of sacrifice and abnegation of worldly pleasure which animated the Puritans and early Jesuits".
Although released by the Cheka, Lockhart was soon rearrested after going to the authorities to appeal for the release of his paramour Moura. Although only detained for a month, and mainly not in conditions of discomfort, Lockhart describes the period of one of acute mental strain. However he mentions that not all of his guards and jailers were unpleasant, and that his relationship with Peters, oddly enough, was cordial. Nevertheless he was also to witness disconcerting scenes of Red Terror, with men pleading for their lives before being shot, including Tsarist ex-ministers and an Orthodox bishop. Lockhart pays due respect to the American and neutral diplomats who, appalled at his treatment, worked behind the scenes to have him released, and eventually Peters himself was to release the Briton, the unofficial mission and sundry other Allied personnel being then sent to Finland and freedom, but for Lockhart with the bitter knowledge that he would no longer see Moura Budberg.
Lockhart himself is a discernible personality throughout the book. His faults might be cited (and are sometimes cited by himself in the narrative) as romanticism, pride and sometimes recklessness, this latter appearing to be mainly the case with the women in his life. Yet he also appears to enjoy some trust, if not from his own superiors at home then at least from fellow diplomats and the Russians of all stripes which whom he has to deal. His judgements are of course given with historical hindsight (the book was written ten years after the end of the Russian Civil War), but he also admits his failings in submitting to the interventionist policy once the die was cast. On the whole there seems to be a good case for Lockhart’s argument that the Allied intervention in Russia, ostensibly to stop the Germans, was aimed more at the de facto Bolshevik government and that it only exacerbated the Red Terror and led to a great many deaths without in any way helping the cause of the Whites.
The book itself is very readable, with a formal but racy style
and
interspersed with historical portraits, respects paid to worthy men and
women
and several humorous episodes. For
a fresh insight into the transitional world of Russia from Tsarism
to the USSR, as well as the attitudes of the West, it is almost
indispensable.
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