83. Kurt Riezler.
Rebuffed by Moscow, the Allied missions in Russia had to confine themselves to desultory talks with pro-Allied opposition groups. Noulens, who was the most active in this regard, viewed Russians much like his German counterpart, Mirbach, as inept and passive, waiting on foreigners to liberate them. The Russian “bourgeoisie” impressed him as utterly devoid of initiative.30
In the second half of April 1918, Russia and Germany exchanged embassies: Ioffe went to Berlin, and Mirbach came to Moscow. The Germans were the first foreign mission accredited to Bolshevik Russia. To their surprise, the train in which they traveled was guarded by Latvians. One of the German diplomats wrote that the reception given them by the Muscovites was surprisingly warm: he thought that no victor had ever been so welcomed.31
The head of the mission, Count Mirbach, was a forty-seven-year-old career diplomat with considerable experience in Russian affairs. In 1908–11 he had served as counselor in the German Embassy in St. Petersburg and in December 1917 headed the mission to Petrograd. He came from a wealthy and aristocratic family of Prussian Catholics.† A diplomat of the old school, he was dismissed by some colleagues as a “rococo count,” ill suited to deal with revolutionaries, but his tact and self-control earned him the confidence of the Foreign Office.
His right-hand man, Kurt Riezler, a thirty-six-year-old philosopher, also had much experience in Russian affairs.* In 1915, he played a part in Parvus’s unsuccessful attempt to secure Lenin’s cooperation. Posted to Stockholm in 1917, he served as the principal intermediary between the German Government and Lenin’s agents, whom he paid subsidies from the so-called Riezler Fund for transfer to Russia. He is said to have assisted the Bolsheviks in carrying out the October coup, although his exact role in it is not clear. Like many of his compatriots, he welcomed the coup as a “miracle” that could save Germany. At Brest he advocated a conciliatory policy. Temperamentally, however, he was a pessimist who thought Europe was doomed no matter who won the war.
The third prominent member of the German mission was the military attaché, Karl von Bothmer, who reflected the views of Ludendorff and Hindenburg. He despised the Bolsheviks and believed Germany should be rid of them.32
None of the three German diplomats knew Russian. All the Russian leaders with whom they came into contact spoke fluent German.
The Foreign Office instructed Mirbach to support the Bolshevik Government and under no conditions to enter into communication with the Russian opposition. He was to inform himself of the true situation in Soviet Russia and of the activities there of Allied agents, as well as to lay the groundwork for the commercial negotiations between the countries stipulated by the Brest Treaty. The German mission, twenty diplomats and an equal number of clerical staff, took over a luxurious private residence on Denezhnyi Pereulok, off Arbat, the property of a German sugar magnate who wanted to keep it out of Communist hands.
Mirbach had been to Petrograd several months earlier and must have known what to expect: even so, he was appalled by what he saw. “The streets are very lively,” he reported to Berlin a few days after his arrival,
but they seem populated exclusively by proletarians; better-dressed people are rarely to be seen—it is as if the previous ruling class and the bourgeoisie had vanished from the face of the earth.… The priests, who previously had made up a goodly part of the public, have similarly disappeared from the streets. In the shops one can find mainly dusty remains of previous splendors, offered at fantastic prices. Pervasive avoidance of work and mindless idling are the characteristics of this overall picture. Since the factories are at a standstill and the soil remains largely uncultivated—at any rate, that was the impression we gained from our trip—Russia appears headed for a still greater catastrophe than the one inflicted on her by the [Bolshevik] coup.
Public security leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, one can move about freely and alone in the daytime. In the evening, however, it is no longer advisable to leave one’s house: one hears the frequent sounds of shooting and there seem to be continuous smaller and larger clashes …
Bolshevik mastery over Moscow is maintained, first and foremost, by the Latvian battalions. It depends furthermore on the numerous automobiles which the government has requisitioned: these constantly race across the city, delivering the troops, as they are needed, to endangered spots.
Where these conditions will lead cannot be determined as yet, but one cannot deny them for the moment the prospects of a certain stability.33
Riezler was equally depressed by Bolshevik-ruled Moscow: he was struck most by the pervasive corruption of Communist officials and their loose habits, especially their insatiable demand for women.34
In mid-May, Mirbach met with Lenin, whose self-confidence surprised him:
Lenin, in general, believes with rocklike firmness in his star and professes, over and over again, in an almost insistent manner, to a boundless optimism. At the same time, he also concedes that even though his regime still remains intact, the number of its enemies has grown and the situation calls for “more intense attention than even one month ago.” He bases his self-confidence above all on the fact that the ruling party alone disposes of organized power, whereas all the other [parties] agree only in rejecting the existing regime; in other respects, however, they fly apart in all directions and have no power to match that of the Bolsheviks.* 35
After one month in the Soviet capital, Mirbach began to experience misgivings about the viability of the Bolshevik regime and the wisdom of his government’s basing its entire Russian policy on it. He continued to believe that the Bolsheviks were likely to survive: on May 24, he warned the Foreign Office against Bothmer and the other military men who predicted the imminent collapse of the Soviet regime.36 But aware of the activities of Allied diplomatic and military personnel in Russia and their contacts with the opposition groups, he worried that should Lenin fall from power, the Germans would be left without any source of support in Russia. He favored, therefore, a more flexible policy combining reliance on the Bolsheviks with political insurance in the form of openings to the anti-Bolshevik opposition.
On May 20, Mirbach sent home the first pessimistic report on the situation in Soviet Russia and the dangers confronting German policy there. Popular support for the regime, he wrote, had greatly eroded in recent weeks: Trotsky was said to have referred to the Bolshevik Party as a “living corpse.” The Allies were fishing in these muddied waters, generously distributing funds to the SRs and Mensheviks-Internationalists, Serbian prisoners of war, and Baltic sailors. “Never was corruptible Russia more corrupt than now.” Thanks to Trotsky’s sympathies for them, the Allies had increased their influence over the Bolsheviks. To prevent the situation from getting out of hand, he required money to renew the subsidies to the Bolsheviks which the German Government had terminated in January.37 Funds were needed to prevent both a shift of the Bolsheviks toward the Allies and a Bolshevik collapse followed by a power seizure by the pro-Allied SRs.38