This report, followed by others couched in progressively gloomier tones, did not go unheeded in Berlin. Early in June, Kühlmann reversed himself and authorized Mirbach to initiate talks with the Russian opposition.39 He also allocated to him discretionary funds. On June 3, Mirbach cabled to Berlin that to keep the Bolsheviks in power he needed 3 million marks a month, which the Foreign Ministry interpreted to mean a total of 40 million marks.40 Kühlmann, who concurred that preventing the Bolsheviks from switching to the Allies “would cost money, probably a great deal of money,” approved the transfer of this sum to the Moscow embassy for secret Russian work.41 It cannot be established exactly how this money was spent. Only about 9 million was actually allocated: it appears that about one-half of that sum went to the Bolshevik Government and the rest to their opponents, mainly the anti-Bolshevik Provisional Government of Siberia, centered in Omsk, and the Kaiser’s favorite anti-Bolshevik, the Don Cossack ataman, P. N. Krasnov.*
The stumbling block confronting the Germans in their effort to reach the anti-Bolshevik opposition was Brest. No political group other than the Bolsheviks would accept this treaty, and even the Bolsheviks were divided. As Mirbach had observed, atrocious as conditions were in Soviet Russia, no non-Bolshevik Russian would purchase German help against the Bolsheviks if the price was acceptance of the Brest Treaty. In other words, to gain support from anti-Bolsheviks, Germany had to agree to substantial treaty revisions. In Mirbach’s opinion, the opposition might acquiesce to the loss of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, but not to the surrender of the Ukraine, Estonia, and probably Livonia.42
Mirbach entrusted to Riezler the delicate task of dealing with Russian opposition groups under the noses of the Cheka and Allied agents. Riezler dealt mainly with the so-called Right Center, a small conservative circle formed in mid-June by respected political figures and generals who had concluded that Bolshevism posed a greater threat to Russia’s national interests than Germany and were prepared to come to terms with Berlin to be rid of it. Although they claimed solid contacts with financial, industrial, and military circles, they really had no significant following, because the overwhelming majority of politically active Russians regarded the Bolsheviks as a creation of Germany. The leading personality of the Right Center was Alexander Krivoshein, Stolypin’s director of agriculture, a decent and patriotic man who might have made an acceptable figurehead in a Russian Government installed by the Germans, but who, being a typical bureaucrat of the ancien régime, was more used to obeying orders than giving them. Involved also was General Aleksei Brusilov, the hero of the 1916 offensive. Through intermediaries, Krivoshein informed Riezler that his group was prepared to overthrow the Bolsheviks and had the military means to do so but in order to act required Germany’s active support.43 For such collaboration to materialize, the Germans had to consent to changes in the Brest Treaty.
The Germans had little respect for the Russian opposition, even as they negotiated with it. Mirbach thought the monarchists “lazy,” while Riezler spoke scornfully of the “moans and whines of the [Russian] bourgeoisie for German aid and order.”44
Ioffe arrived in Berlin with his mission on April 19. German generals, correctly anticipating that Russian diplomats would engage mainly in espionage and subversion, wanted the Soviet Embassy located at Brest-Litovsk or some other city away from Germany, but the Foreign Office overruled them. Ioffe took over the old Imperial embassy at Unter den Linden 7, which the Germans had maintained in immaculate condition throughout the war. Over it he unfurled the red flag emblazoned with hammer and sickle. Subsequently, Moscow opened consulates in Berlin and Hamburg.
Initially, Ioffe’s staff consisted of 30 persons, but it kept on expanding, and in November, when the two countries broke relations, numbered 180. In addition, Ioffe gave employment to German radicals to translate Soviet propaganda materials and carry out subversive missions. He maintained constant cable communications with Moscow: the Germans intercepted and decoded some of this traffic, but the bulk of it remains unpublished.*
The Soviet diplomatic representation in Berlin was no ordinary embassy: rather it was a revolutionary outpost deep in enemy territory, whose main function was to promote revolution. As an American journalist later put it, Ioffe acted in Berlin in “perfect bad faith.”45 Judging by his activities, he had three missions. One was to neutralize the German generals, who wanted the Bolshevik Government removed. This he accomplished by appealing to the interests of the business and banking community and negotiating a commercial treaty that gave Germany unique economic privileges in Russia. His second task was to assist revolutionary forces in Germany. The third was to collect intelligence on domestic conditions.
Ioffe carried out revolutionary activities with remarkable brazenness. He counted on German politicians and businessmen developing such an overriding interest in subjugating Russia to their economic exploitation that they would persuade the government to overlook his violations of diplomatic norms. In the spring and summer of 1918, he engaged mainly in propaganda, working closely with the Independent Socialist Party’s extreme left wing, the Spartacist League. Later, as Germany began to disintegrate, he supplied money and weapons to stoke the fires of social revolution. The Independent Socialists, having turned into an affiliate of the Russian Communist Party, coordinated their activities with the Soviet Embassy: on one occasion, Moscow sent an official delegation to Germany to address that party’s convention.46 For this work, Ioffe was allocated by Moscow 14 million German marks, which he deposited with the German bank of Mendelssohn and withdrew as the need arose.*
84. A. Ioffe.
Ioffe opened branches of the Soviet Berlin Information Bureau in a number of German provincial cities as well as in neutral Holland, from where propaganda was fed to Allied media.47
In 1919, Ioffe recounted, with evident pride, his accomplishments as Soviet representative in Berlin:
The [Soviet Embassy] directed and subsidized more than ten left-socialist newspapers … Quite naturally, even in its informational work, the plenipotentiary representation could not confine itself only to “legal opportunities.” The informational material was far from limited to that which appeared in print. All that the censors struck out, and all that was not presented to them, because it was assumed beforehand that they would not pass it, was nevertheless illegally printed and illegally distributed. Very frequently it was necessary to utilize the parliamentary tribune: the material was passed on to members of the Reichstag from the Independent faction [of the Social-Democratic Party], who used it in their speeches; in this way it got into the papers anyway. In this work one could not confine oneself to Russian materials. The [Soviet mission], which had superb connections in all strata of German society and its agents in various German ministries, was much better informed even about German affairs than the German comrades. The information which it received it eventually passed on to the latter, and in this manner many machinations of the military party became in good time public knowledge.
Of course, in its revolutionary activity the Russian Embassy could not confine itself to information. In Germany there existed revolutionary groups which throughout the war had conducted underground revolutionary work. Russian revolutionaries, who had more experience in this kind of conspiratorial activity as well as greater opportunities, had to work, and indeed did work, in concert with these groups. All of Germany was covered with a network of illegal revolutionary organizations: hundreds of thousands of revolutionary pamphlets and proclamations were printed and distributed every week in the rear and at the front. The German Government once accused the Russians of importing into Germany agitational literature and, with an energy worthy of better application, searched for this contraband in the baggage of couriers, but it never entered its mind that that which the Russian Embassy brought into Germany from Russia represented only a drop in the sea compared to what was printed with the help of the Russian Embassy inside Germany.