90. Lieutenant-Colonel A. P. Perkhurov.
Savinkov managed to escape from Rybinsk. He later joined Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s armies and organized raids behind Bolshevik lines. After Kolchak’s defeat, he fled to Western Europe, where he kept busy organizing anti-Bolshevik movements and smuggling agents into the Soviet Union. In August 1924, under the illusion that he could play an important role in post-Leninist Soviet Russia, he allowed himself to be lured by the GPU (the successor to the Cheka) into illegally crossing the frontier. He was promptly arrested. At a public trial later that year, he confessed to all his crimes, stressing the alleged involvement of the Allies in his subversive activities and pleading for mercy. His death sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. He died the following year in jail under highly suspicious circumstances: officially, he was said to have committed suicide, but it is more likely that he was killed by the GPU—according to some accounts, by being pushed from a window.164
Perkhurov also joined Kolchak’s forces, where he was raised to the rank of general and earned the sobriquet Perkhurov-Iaroslavskii. Captured by the Bolsheviks, he managed to disguise his identity and obtain a commission in the Red Army. His true identity was discovered in 1922. Tried by a Military Collegium of the Supreme Tribunal he was sentenced to death: in prison, he was made to write his confessions, which were subsequently published.165 Rather than kill him in its dungeons, the GPU sent him to Iaroslavl, where on the fourth anniversary of the uprising he was paraded through the streets, taunted by the crowds and pelted with rocks, following which he was executed.166
Riezler, who took charge of the German Embassy, was regarded by some of his colleagues as confused and absentminded.167 He spent less time on routine diplomatic affairs and more on negotiations with Russian opposition groups, which Berlin had instructed him to terminate on July 1. He did so out of an unalterable conviction that the Bolsheviks would not last and Germany needed contacts with their potential successors. His first reaction to Mirbach’s murder was to urge severance of relations with Moscow;168 this advice was rejected, and he was instructed to continue helping the Bolsheviks. In September 1918 he would state, without elaborating, that the Germans had on three occasions used “political” means to help save the Bolsheviks.169
While carrying out his government’s directives, Riezler bombarded the Foreign Office with cables that the Bolsheviks were a spent force. On July 19, he wired:
The Bolsheviks are dead. Their corpse lives [sic!] because the gravediggers cannot agree on who should bury it. The struggle which we presently wage with the Entente on Russian soil is no longer over the favors of this corpse. It has already turned into a struggle over the succession, over the orientation of the Russia of the future.170
While he agreed that the Bolsheviks were rendering Russia harmless for Germany, by the same token they were rendering it useless.171 He recommended that Germany take charge of the “counterrevolution” and assist bourgeois forces in Russia. He thought it would require minimum effort to be rid of the Bolsheviks.
Acting on his own, Riezler laid out the groundwork for an anti-Bolshevik coup. The first step was to station a battalion of uniformed Germans in Moscow. Their ostensible mission would be to protect the embassy from future terrorist acts and to assist the Bolsheviks in the event of another rebellion; their true purpose would be to occupy strategic points in the capital if Bolshevik authority collapsed or Berlin decided the time had come to remove them from power.172
Germany agreed to dispatch a battalion to Moscow but only if the Soviet Government gave its approval. It also authorized Riezler to initiate discreet talks with the Latvian Rifles to sound them out about their intentions. Riezler, who had established good contacts with the Latvians, asked if they were prepared to defect. He was told they were. Vatsetis, the Latvian commander, describes as follows his thinking in the summer of 1918:
Strange as [it may sound], at the time it was believed that central Russia would turn into a theater of internecine warfare and that the Bolsheviks would hardly hold on to power, falling victim to the hunger and the general discontent in the country’s interior. One could not exclude the possibility of a move on Moscow by the Germans, Don Cossacks, and White Czechs. This latter version was at the time especially widespread. The Bolsheviks had under their authority no military power capable of combat. The units, over whose formation M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, the Military Director of the Supreme Military Council, labored so intelligently and cleverly, owing to the hunger in the western zone of European Russia, scattered in search of food, turning into robber bands dangerous to Soviet authority. Such armies—if one can apply to them this honorable title—fled at the very sight of the German helmet. On the western border instances occurred of German forces being called upon to pacify mutinous Red units.… In connection with all these speculations and rumors, I was extremely troubled by the question of what would happen to the Latvian regiments should there be further German intervention and should the Cossacks and White armies make an appearance in the center of Russia. Such a possibility was then seriously contemplated: it could have led to the complete annihilation of the Latvian Rifles …173
From his talks, Riezler learned that the Latvians were anxious to return to their German-occupied homeland, and if guaranteed amnesty and repatriation, would at least stay neutral in the event the Germans intervened against the Bolsheviks.174
Riezler also resumed conversations with the Right Center. Its new representative, Prince Grigorii Trubetskoi, Imperial Russia’s wartime Ambassador to Serbia, pleaded for prompt German assistance to rid Russia of Lenin. He posed several conditions for the cooperation of his group: the Germans should allow the Russians to assemble their own military force in the Ukraine, so that Moscow would be liberated by Russians, not Germans; a pledge to revise the Brest Treaty; no pressure on the government that would replace the Bolsheviks; and Russia’s neutrality in the World War.175 Trubetskoi claimed that his group had contact with 4,000 combat-ready officers, who only needed weapons. Time was of the essence: the Bolsheviks were engaged in a regular “manhunt” for officers, executing dozens every day.176
By the time Mirbach’s successor, Karl Helfferich, arrived in Moscow (July 28), Riezler had a plan for a full-fledged coup d’état. Once the German battalion took over Moscow (the Latvian Rifles guarding the city having been previously neutralized with pledges of amnesty and repatriation), it would take little to bring about a collapse of the Bolshevik Government. This would be followed by the installation of a Russian Government completely dependent on Germany, on the model of Hetman Skoropadski’s regime in the Ukraine.177
Riezler’s plans came to naught. Their key provision, the installation of a German battalion in Moscow, was vetoed by Lenin and dropped by Berlin. Yielding to Hindenburg’s pressure, Wilhelmstrasse sent a note to the Soviet Government, which Riezler handed to Chicherin in the evening of July 14. It assured the Soviet Government that in proposing to send a uniformed detachment to Moscow, Germany had no intention of infringing on Soviet sovereignty: its only purpose was to ensure the safety of its diplomatic personnel. Furthermore, the note went on, should there be another anti-Bolshevik uprising, this force could help the Soviet Government to quell it.178 Chicherin communicated the German note to Lenin, who was resting out of town. Lenin immediately saw through the German ploy. He returned to Moscow that night and consulted with Chicherin. This was an issue on which he was not prepared to yield: he would give the Germans almost anything they wanted as long as they did not threaten his power. The following day he addressed the Central Executive Committee on the German note.179 He hoped, he said, that Germany would not insist on its proposal because Russia would rather fight than allow foreign troops on her soil. He promised to provide all the personnel needed to ensure the security of the German Embassy. Then he held out the bait of extensive commercial relations as a means of inducing German business interests to exert pressure on his behalf: it materialized in the form of the Supplementary Treaty concluded the following month. It is doubtful that Lenin could have stood up to the Germans had they been truly determined: he was now even weaker than in February, when he had capitulated to their every demand. But he was not put to the test, because the Foreign Office, apprised of his reaction, quickly dropped Riezler’s proposal. It instructed Riezler “to continue supporting the Bolsheviks and merely [maintain] ‘contact’ with the others.”180