Book review: Spies and Commissars

IT’S HARD to think of anything that has had as profound an effect on 20th-century history as the Russian Revolution.

The knock-on result from the two uprisings of 1917 not only defined the foreign policy of the world’s leading nations for the next 70 years but heralded the dawn of a new ideological era. In his latest book, Oxford historian Robert Service attempts to shed light on the transition between dream and dictatorship .

The title suggests a history dominated by stories of espionage and covert missions. In reality, however, Service devotes the majority of his work to a commentary on Russia’s evolution from the Romanov dynasty, through the short-lived Menshevik bourgeois democracy to the world’s first Communist state.

His most startling revelation is just how close this ‘new’ state came to failure early on. He manages to capture the fragility of the infant nation in meticulous and vivid detail. Guiding the reader through the maze of manipulation by the Bolsheviks to undermine the Menshevik regime; examining the naive notion that the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty to secure a Russian exit from the First World War would be quick; exposing the new regime’s reliance on a prolonged struggle on the western front, Service unearths the full extent of Russia’s reliance on the West. The Bolshevik leaders depended on their ideological enemies having neither the will, nor the means to attempt a toppling of “the advance guard of Marxist science and revolutionary progress” now ensconced in Moscow.

There are tales of diplomats, journalists, businessmen and other foreigners woven into the historical narrative, but these do little more than serve to appease the title. This is not a tale told primarily through first-hand accounts, and the book would have made for a more compelling read had the many individual experiences explored had a larger impact on Russian history. As it is, the two strands of narrative and primary accounts are not sufficiently interwoven, leaving the reader without any lasting impression of those who shaped day-to-day relations between East and West.

Service does unearth a number of anecdotes which illustrate the times perfectly, such as the papers bought by British agents alleging the Bolsheviks were paid employees of the Germans. These were soon discovered to be forgeries. However, instead of this information being shared with other Allies, the documents were placed back on the market and subsequently bought by the American Information Service in order to recoup costs.

For all that, Service manages to give a credible portrait of an ill-understood, perhaps even misunderstood, time. His belief that “Russian history cannot be written satisfactorily on the basis of Russian archives alone” should be celebrated. In examining the inherent weakness of the Bolshevik government which “refused to see a contradiction between demanding official recognition and encouraging worldwide subversion”, Service looks at how European and American diplomacy dealt with countries on either side of the rapidly falling Iron Curtain .

What emerged was not simply a difference of political ideals but a whole-hearted severance of previously agreed norms. A delegation of European diplomats met Lenin in January 1918 following the arrest of the Romanian ambassador.

At that meeting, Ivan Zalkind, a Lenin aide, explained: “we like the brutality of expression better than diplomatic language”. By 1920, members of the British Labour delegation felt they “were breaking through to a different world”.

Ultimately Service reveals a universal truth about diplomacy and intelligence gathering: its limitations are not the quality or quantity of the intelligence but whether the content suits the prejudices of those who make the decisions. One of his key conclusions is that national leaders “behaved largely on the basis of instinct and preconception. Policy was quickly decided and intellectual self-doubt was suppressed”.

While there are some extraordinary tales of secret agents, one cannot help but feel short-changed by a book that lures with the promise of espionage and the thrill of the spying game when these take a back seat to a discussion of the high politics and international relations of a continent at war.

• Spies and Commissars by Robert Service, Macmillan, 400pp, £25