RUSSIAN ROULETTE
A Deadly Game: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Post
Giles Milton
Sceptre; $39.99; 378 pages
On April 16, 1917, a "little man with Asiatic features" stepped off a train at Finlyandsky Station in Petrograd, modern-day St Petersburg. Apart from the crowd of fervid supporters waiting to receive Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov "Lenin" from his long exile, three Englishmen unobtrusively observed the event.
To Arthur Ransome, a journalist, Lenin was an unimpressive figure, not even worthy of mention in that evening's despatches.
Paul Dukes, a courier with the British embassy, was also underwhelmed, but Lenin's message of world revolution disturbed him enough to warn the foreign office back home. His telegram was treated as a joke.
The third observer was William Gibson, merchant and adventurer, who did not make the cardinal mistake of underestimating this unimpressive, "ugly bald man … with eyes like daggers".
As history showed, Dukes' and Gibson's instincts about Lenin were right and the implications for contemporary geopolitics were profound. After all, the First World War was under way and Britain was a Russian ally, having shed much blood in a disastrous Dardanelles campaign against the Ottoman Empire to help Russia gain access to a warm-water outlet to the Mediterranean.
The British had hoped this campaign would encourage Russia to divert troops and materiel from the Balkans and Turkey and break the bloody, trench-bound stalemate on the Western Front. The subsidiary objective was to forestall Russia from making a separate peace with Germany.
Lenin's revolution upset all these calculations. A year later, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took Russia out of the war after Lenin signed a deal with the Germans surrendering generous amounts of land and resources.
But even worse for the British were Lenin's actions after he wrested power from the provisional government. He tore up the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, which set out spheres of influence along the frontiers bordering India, and issued "a rallying cry to Asia's oppressed millions … to follow the lead of the Bolsheviks and cast off colonial rule".
So, the former ally became a dangerous enemy, one who had resumed the Great Game along the frozen fastness of Central Asia, and the timing couldn't have been worse. Most of India's colonial troops were overseas fighting for the war that was supposed to end all wars even as civil unrest was roiling the subcontinent.
Observing Lenin's early days in power, it rapidly became clear that conventional diplomacy would no longer work in securing British interests. Inevitably, the focus shifted to espionage and to the Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6) headed by a former wooden-legged naval officer who took early retirement because he suffered chronic seasickness.
As the old order and old contacts collapsed, the inspirational and secretive Mansfield George Smith Cumming, universally known as "C" (yes, the inspiration for James Bond's unseen boss), rapidly expanded his agent network inside Russia and along its borders.
The real challenge was to penetrate Lenin's administration. To this end, "C" and his Russian bureau assembled an extraordinary cast of characters - charlatans, freebooters, freelancers, journalists, businessmen and future authors (Somerset Maugham and Compton Mackenzie among them).
For instance, Ransome spied from the heart of the regime, being the lover of Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky's personal secretary. Then there was Robert Bruce Lockhart, the audacious unofficial British representative to the Bolshevik government, and Sidney Reilly, an honourable bounder. Among the other more storied spies were Paul Dukes, a master of disguise, and Frederick Bailey, who lived undercover in Tashkent disguised as an Albanian merchant.
Their stories of derring-do are certainly the stuff of vintage spy novels and Giles Milton does them full justice. Were they effective? Sometimes they failed spectacularly, as in Lockhart's and Reilly's plot to assassinate Lenin. One notable success was against the Army of God, a ragtag bunch of Islamic fighters that the Bolsheviks financed and equipped in Central Asia to invade India. It was led by Father Martin, alias Roberto Allen, alias Mr White, best known as Manabendra Nath Roy, the Bengali revolutionary on the run from the British for plotting revolution in India .
Roy's activities, however, were no secret to the British, thanks to its network of agents on the North-West Frontier, a circumstance that played a significant role when Lenin launched his New Economic Policy following the failure of his economic programme. When the Bolsheviks approached the British for an urgently needed trade deal, details of Roy's activities were duly revealed. Forced into a corner, the Russians agreed to cease all activities against the British Empire.
Mr Milton is an eminently readable writer rather than a rigorous historian. His book tells a familiar story (with minor new details), but it lacks context. One of the unintended consequences of this account is to suggest that British spies predominated in Russia in those early days. A cursory reading of Robert Service's excellent 2011 Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West will show how every Allied power had its legions of colourful oddballs who traded information and brokered deals.
Mr Milton acknowledges Peter Hopkirk's classic The Great Game. But a broad-brush reference to the events described in Mr Hopkirk's 1994 book, On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire, would have been helpful. That book is a deeply researched account of Kaiser Wilhelm's "Holy War" against the British and the Russians that was playing out at the same time in the Caucasus - indeed, some of the spy networks overlapped - and would have provided a more rounded account of a tumultuous period that truly shook the world.
As a popular history, Russian Roulette can be depended on to generate a warm afterglow of nostalgia as the British get ready to follow the US out of Afghanistan later this year. Having achieved something less than success yet again in that troubled region, the old stories of yesterday's intrepid spies can be a comforting reminder of past glories.
