The Spy Who Changed History

In a country devoid of hope, many gave up their dreams of change and chose to emigrate in order to try their luck abroad, most often in America. The first wave of Russian emigration saw two and a half million former subjects of the Tsar settling in the United States between 1891 and 1914.18 Many were economic migrants; others escaped anti-Semitic measures inflicted on them by the government; others still were frustrated firebrand revolutionaries. New York and other cities quickly developed large and thriving socialist undergrounds, eventually providing a refuge in the Bronx for Leon Trotsky before the 1917 Revolutions. Trotsky wrote for the radical Socialist Party’s Yiddish newspaper Forverts (Forward), which had a daily circulation of 275,000. Russian emigrants came to dominate areas such as Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and Bergen County, New Jersey, keeping many of their ‘old country’ traditions alive. It was in these exile communities dotted around the US that many future spies found homes or were born. Arthur Adamsfn8 escaped Tsarist torture to become a founder member of the North American Communist Party and later a successful Soviet Military Intelligence spy.19 Like Gertrude Klivans20 and Raisa Bennett,21 Georgi Koval’s22 parents emigrated to the US to escape anti-Jewish measures. The families of Harry Gold,23 Ben Smilg24 and Ted Hall boarded boats to a new life.fn9 Later Shumovsky would find a warm welcome in the Boston émigré circle.25 Many maintained in secret their radical beliefs and links to international socialist organisations despite their outward embrace of all things American.

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Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of All Russia, was, like the young Shumovsky, a flying fanatic. For a man who devoted his life to resisting change, unusually Nicholas committed close to one million roubles of his money to the construction of an Imperial Russian Air Force.26 The popular enthusiasm for aviation allowed the government to launch a successful voluntary subscription campaign, to which the Shumovskys contributed, for the design and purchase of new aircraft and the training of pilots. In 1914, to his delight, Russia arrived on the world stage as a leading aviation power. Its first major aviation pioneer, Igor Sikorsky, later famous for his helicopters, constructed a long-distance four-engined passenger plane, the Ilya Muromets.27 The revolutionary aircraft featured innovations such as internal heating, electric lights, and even a bathroom; its floor, disconcertingly, was glazed to allow the twelve passengers to leave their wicker chairs to gaze at the world passing beneath their feet. As a sign of his confidence, Sikorsky flew members of his immediate family on long trips to demonstrate his invention. Until the First World War intervened, the first planned route for the airliner was from Moscow to Kharkov; sadly the monster Ilya Muromets was destined to be remembered not as the world’s first passenger airliner but, with a few modifications, as the world’s first heavy bomber. (In 1947 Tupolev would reverse the trick, turning a warplane into the first pressurised passenger aircraft.)

Russia created strategic bombing on 12 February 1915. Unchallenged, ten of Sikorsky’s lumbering giants slowly took to the air, each powered by four engines. Turning to the west, the aircraft, laden with almost a half-ton of destruction apiece, headed for the German lines. The Ilya Muromets were truly fortresses of the sky. The aircrew even wore metal armour for personal protection. Despite the planes’ low speed, with their large number of strategically placed machine guns no fighter of the age dared tackle even one of them, let alone a squadron. Today the Ilya Muromets remains the only bomber to have shot down more fighters than the casualties it suffered. It was only on 12 September 1916, after a full eighteen months of operations, that the Russians lost their first Ilya Muromets in a fierce dogfight with four German Albatros fighters, and even then it managed to shoot down three of its assailants. The wreck was taken to Germany and copied.28

Named after the only epic hero canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church, the aircraft became the stuff of legend. The medieval hero had been a giant blessed with outstanding physical and spiritual power. Like its namesake, Ilya Muromets protected the homeland and its people. Newspaper stories trumpeted the plane’s achievements to flying fanatics and ordinary readers alike. Its propaganda value was inspirational to Russians, including the teenage Shumovsky, used now to a series of morale-sapping defeats inflicted by the Kaiser’s armies.

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The Tsar’s decision in 1914 to mobilise against both Austria-Hungary and Germany had triggered world war, setting his country on the road to revolution. In August 1914, Russia initially appeared to unite behind his decision to fight. There were no more industrial strikes and for a short while the pressure for change subsided. A few months later, however, Shumovsky could feel the mood change in his city as, day by day, Russia’s war stumbled from disaster to disaster and the human and financial cost mounted. Shumovsky distributed anti-war leaflets that proclaimed the real enemy to be capitalists, not fellow workers in uniform. Student discussion groups exchanged banned socialist literature and copies of the many underground newspapers. Students of the time treasured the writings of utopians, many moving rapidly from religious texts to find heroes among the French Revolutionaries. School reading clubs were the breeding ground for the future leaders of the revolution.

The Shumovsky family’s comfortable lifestyle was steadily undermined by rampant inflation. Prices for increasingly scarce staples rocketed, and Shumovsky’s father’s state pay was no longer sufficient for his family’s needs. They invested their savings in government war bonds that fell in value as the guns grew closer. His father complained bitterly at home about the irrational decision to secretly devalue the rouble by issuing worthless, limitless amounts of paper money. Savvy, distrustful citizens hoarded the real gold, silver, and the lowest denomination copper coins; the resulting shortage of small change compelled the government to print paper coupons as surrogates. Even the least financially aware, let alone a smart accountant, knew that the once strong rouble was fast becoming worthless. At the start of a financially ruinous war, the Tsar had done something remarkable, renouncing the principal source of his country’s revenue. Having convinced himself that drunkenness was the reason for the disastrous defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution that followed, he banned the sale of vodka for the duration of the war.29

While failing to curtail Russians’ drinking, he thus created a major fiscal problem for the Treasury. Before the war, the Tsar’s vodka monopoly had been the largest single source of government revenue, contributing 28 per cent of the entire state budget. It was the middle class that was hardest hit by the increased tax burden. Their resentment focused on the widespread corruption and prominent war profiteers, viewed as the Tsar’s cronies. There were plentiful signs that Kharkov’s workers were growing restive. The sharply rising food prices caused strikes, and these led to riots. The protesters first blamed their ills on greedy peasants who hoarded food and avaricious shopkeepers, but transferred their anger to treacherous ethnic Germans, Jews, police officers, bureaucrats, and ultimately to the monarch. Catastrophic defeats and vast retreats left Kharkov a critical staging post uncomfortably close to the front line. Day and night, trains pulled into the station with cargoes of fresh troops and munitions for the front. On their return, the same wagons carried away a tide of misery; the broken and dispirited remains of a defeated army. Kharkov became a city of despair, frustration and anger.

In 1915 Shumovsky’s father moved the family 1,400 miles to the south-east corner of the empire, away from the war. He decided to settle in the seemingly idyllic ‘little Paris of the Caucasus’, Shusha.30 It was an easy choice to make, despite the distance. The town was far away from the fighting, the cost of living low, there was ample food, and as a servant of the crown he held a position of respect. The Shumovskys packed up their possessions and made the arduous journey by rail and on foot to this remote region of Transcaucasia. Shusha resembled a picture-perfect Swiss mountain town with a few modern multi-storey European-style buildings nestled in wide boulevards. Justly famous for its intricate formal flower garden, as well as for its ice and roller-skating rinks, the town also boasted an Armenian theatre and two competing movie houses, The American and The Bioscope. Movies were shown inside in the winter, out of the cold, and outdoors in the hot summers. Shusha was the educational and cultural capital of the region, boasting excellent schools and assembly rooms that hosted cultural evenings of dances and concerts.31

The Caucasus had recently become part of the Russian Empire at the point of the bayonet. Oil had made the region one of the richest on the planet. The small Russian population of several hundred held all the top jobs, shoring up their position by favouring the Christian Armenians over the Muslim Azeris. Even at the best of times the Tsarist government had only just kept a lid on the simmering ethnic tension, but in November 1914 Russia went to war with the neighbouring Muslim Ottoman Empire, ratcheting up the tension several notches. Adam Shumovsky soon came to regret the decision to move to Shusha.

In September 1915, despite lacking the relevant military experience, Tsar Nicholas felt compelled to take personal charge of – and hence full responsibility for – the conduct of the war. He was blamed for the countless deaths of soldiers sent unarmed to the front lines and the decision to face sustained poison gas attacks without masks. Fifty times the number of Russian soldiers died from the effects of poison gas as American servicemen.32 There was little food for the army, a catastrophic lack of artillery shells and, consequently, disastrous morale. The future White General Denikin wrote that the ‘regiments, although completely exhausted, were beating off one attack after another by bayonet … Blood flowed unendingly, the ranks became thinner and thinner and thinner. The number of graves multiplied.’33

Until 1916 the Kaiser was more interested in fighting the British and French in the West. But as Russians died in their hundreds of thousands, their Western allies appeared to profit. The allies provided loans and paid extravagant bribes to keep Russia in the fight. There was nothing France, Britain and later America would not do to keep the war in the East going. If the Eastern Front collapsed, then German troops would be freed to move west to crush the remaining Entente powers.

Finally, in February 1917 the whole situation became too much. Paying for the government’s mistakes had destroyed the very glue that had held the Russian Empire together for centuries. Inflation was making life in the cities miserable; peasants enjoyed good harvests but declined to sell their grain surpluses at the artificially low price fixed by the state. Food trickled into the markets, but at exorbitant prices which workers could not afford. The cities were starving. Autocracy had relied on the loyalty of its paramilitary gendarmes and the military to suppress the inevitable protests, but the defeated army now sided with the people. They would no longer obey orders to fire on the crowds of starving women.

By taking personal charge of the war Tsar Nicholas had gambled the future of the ancient system of autocracy, and lost. The Tsar had always been seen as appointed by God and omniscient. Faced with open mutinies, his own court now persuaded Nicholas to abdicate – a disastrous step. The linchpin that for so long had kept the Russian Empire going was gone. Just a few weeks after Lenin proclaimed that he would not see a revolution in his lifetime, the first uprising of 1917 toppled Tsar Nicholas and ended the Romanov dynasty. The nobles had sacrificed their monarchy to satisfy their greed; they wanted the allies’ bribes, designed to keep the war going, so that they could have a share of war profits. They particularly wanted an end to the income tax that eroded the value of their landed estates. Their selfish agenda set Russia back a century. The common people wanted peace, bread and land, and only the Communists promised these. In the words of the great Soviet aviator Sigismund Levanevsky, ‘I felt that the Communists would bring good. That’s why I was for them.’34 A second revolution in October 1917 (according to the old style calendar)fn10 brought the Communists to power.

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Russian society was shattered by the twin revolutions of 1917, and the effects of the cataclysm were felt most dramatically in the country’s far-flung corners. In Shusha, government authority vanished overnight in February 1917 and with the October Revolution any semblance of law and order disappeared. In nearby Baku, the future capital of independent Azerbaijan, Communist oil workers and the Armenian minority joined forces to seize control, creating a short-lived commune and proclaiming Soviet power. Already a committed Communist, Shumovsky was keen to join the Soviet troops in Baku but was prevented from doing so by his parents. On 28 May 1918, Muslim Azerbaijan declared itself an independent state including, controversially, Shumovsky’s home province of Karabakh. The Christian Armenian population there categorically refused to recognise the authority of the Muslim Azeris, and so on 22 July 1918, in his hometown of Shusha, the local Armenians proclaimed the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh and established their own people’s government.

The new Armenian-dominated government restored order in the city by shooting ‘robbers and spies’. There was a massacre. Murders were accompanied by looting, the theft of property and the burning of houses and mosques. In response, the Azerbaijanis subdued Nagorno-Karabakh with the overwhelming help of Turkish troops and headed on to Baku, now controlled by the British. For a while, Shusha was occupied by Azerbaijani and Turkish forces. They disarmed the Armenians and carried out mass arrests among the local intelligentsia.

Later, in November 1918, the tide would change after the capitulation of Turkey to the Entente. Turkish troops retreated from Karabakh, and British forces arrived. In the void, Karabakh returned to Armenian control. But the perfidious British, Armenia’s ally, prevaricated on the controversial question of who should rule the territory until the wider Paris Peace Conference took place. The British supported those whom they considered the most likely to grant them oil concessions. However, they did approve a governor-general of Karabakh appointed by the government of Azerbaijan. The Armenians were shocked not only at the open support shown by their fellow Christian British for Muslim Azerbaijan but by the selection of the governor-general; he was one Khosrov Bey Sultanov, known for his Pan-Turkic views and his active participation in the bloody massacres of Armenians in Baku in September 1918.

Sultanov arrived in Shusha on 10 February 1919, but the Armenians refused to submit to him. On 23 April, in Shusha, the fifth Congress of the Armenians of Karabakh declared ‘inadmissible any administrative program having at least some relationship with Azerbaijan’.35 In response, with the full connivance of the British and American officials now present in the region, Sultanov embargoed any trade with Nagorno-Karabakh, causing a famine. At the same time, irregular Kurdish-Tatar cavalry troops under the leadership of his brothers killed Armenian villagers at will. On 4 June 1919, the Azerbaijani army tried to occupy the positions of the Armenian militia and the Armenian sector of the city by force. After some fighting, the attackers were repulsed, until, under promises of British protection, the Azerbaijani army was allowed to garrison the city. According to the National Council of the Armenians of Karabakh, Sultanov gave direct orders for massacres and pogroms in the Armenian neighbourhoods, saying: ‘you can do everything, but do not set fire to houses. Houses we need.’36

The foreigner’s decisive intervention in local affairs added a new level of confusion to an already complicated situation. The local oil industry was too valuable a prize for anyone to ignore. The area around Baku was strategically precious. Since 1898, the Russian oil industry, with foreign investment, had been producing more oil than the entire United States: some 160,000 barrels of oil per day. By 1901, Baku alone produced more than half of the world’s oil.37 There were already millions of dollars of foreign capital sunk into the derricks, pipelines and oil refineries, and now it was all up for grabs. Every city, indeed seemingly the whole country, was the pawn of foreign powers. Shumovsky had seen the British arrive first, to be kicked out by the Turks, only to return later, while each time their local proxy allies set about massacring the innocent inhabitants who were unlucky enough to be born on the wrong side. He perceived this not just as a civil war of Reds versus Whites, but also as an embodiment of the worst excesses of imperialism and deep-seated ethnic hatred – precisely the cataclysm described in the leaflets he had distributed in Kharkov. Only the unity of the working people could fight off the massed forces of imperialism descending on Russia.

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Within the wider tragedy was a family one. Despite the danger and vast distance involved, Shumovsky’s mother Amalia overcame her fear of war each summer after the family’s dramatic flight and went back to Volyn (today in the far west of Ukraine) to visit her father. He was still serving as an estate manager. In 1918 disaster struck when she failed to return to the family home by the expected date. Shumovsky’s father sent a letter, care of his father-in-law, asking for information about the whereabouts of his wife. The letter came back, and written on the envelope were the stark words: ‘not delivered owing to the death of the recipient’.38

By the summer of 1918, Shumovsky woke each day to see parts of his city burning and fresh bodies lying in the streets. Fear was in the air. Mobs attacked churches and mosques in turn, and random ethnic murders were commonplace as the city’s population was divided down the middle. When Shumovsky arrived in the Caucasus, the army presence had kept an uneasy peace for the past fifty years. Now army deserters returned from the collapsed Turkish front, armed to the teeth, so the ethnic violence became organised and prolific. Shumovsky had played a role in the underground revolutionary movement in Kharkov with his classmates. Aged just sixteen, he decided to move on from distributing leaflets and reading underground newspapers quoting Lenin to fighting for his vision of a better future.

Shumovsky had completed his five years of secondary education. By his own account, he was already a gifted linguist, speaking Russian, Polish and Ukrainian as well as French and German, although not English. The anarchy now gripping Shusha led to the eventual closure of his prestigious technical school. Although the landmark building survived the violence, it was left abandoned, a shadow of its former glory, after the factional fighting subsided. One of the few non-Armenian pupils, Shumovsky had been a star student, studying mathematics and the sciences. Now he made his first life-changing decision, to join the Red Army to fight in the Civil War. He was one of a very small number of Communists, who were a tiny minority in the country at large. Shumovsky was turning his back decisively on his Polish and aristocratic roots, a fact clearly indicated when he changed his patronymic from the Polish-sounding Adam to the Russian Anton.39 On volunteering for the Red Army, indeed, Shumovsky concealed much about his privileged upbringing, telling the recruiters he was the son of a Ukrainian peasant worker who somehow spoke French and German.40

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The destruction and loss of life during the Russian Civil War was among the greatest catastrophes that Europe had seen. The conflict would rage with enormous bloodshed from November 1917 until October 1922. As many as 12 million died, mostly civilians who succumbed to disease and famine.41 It was a time of anarchy. The armed factions lived off the land, extracting supplies and recruiting ‘volunteers’ at gunpoint while fighting to determine Russia’s political future. The two largest combatant groups were the Red Army, fighting for the Bolshevik form of socialism, and the loosely allied forces known as the White Army. The divided White factions favoured a variety of causes, including a return to monarchism, capitalism and alternative forms of socialism. At the same time rival militant socialists, anarchists, nationalists, and even peasant armies fought against both the Communists and the Whites.

Shumovsky and his unit were stationed in southern Russia, at the centre of the bloodiest fighting. In all the carnage and suffering he was one of many teenagers given positions of responsibility in the army. There was nothing in his genteel background to prepare Shumovsky for the terrors he faced on the battlefield. In August 1918, he made a long, daunting and arduous journey of several hundred miles on foot to join a determined band of Communist partisans under their charismatic leader Pyotr Ipatov, based far behind the main battle lines.42 On his arrival Shumovsky was given a red armband, a rifle and a cartridge belt. He was in action within two days. Ipatov’s band supported the village militia units raised by local councils to fend off marauding armed bands of foragers from the White ‘Volunteer’ armies sent out by Generals Kornilov, Alekseyev and Denikin.43 The White leader, General Kornilov, ruled by fear. His slogan was ‘the greater the terror, the greater our victories’. In the face of the peasant resistance he was sticking to his vow to ‘set fire to half the country and shed the blood of three-quarters of all Russians’.44 In small towns and villages across the province Kornilov’s death squads put up gallows in the square, hanged a few likely suspects and reinstalled the hated landlords by force. Rather than quell the unrest, such punitive action encouraged the Red partisan movement. Shumovsky’s unit had grown strong enough to take the fight to the enemy, carrying out successful raids on White outposts to capture arms and ammunition. The fighters enjoyed the active support of Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov, who were leading the defence of the nearby city of Tsaritsyn.45

Shumovsky’s band of partisans, 1918

By the time young Shumovsky joined the fight, the Whites’ patience with the guerrilla attacks had reached breaking point. They decided to crush the partisan movement for good with an overwhelming force. Ahead of the harvest, the Whites unleashed a punitive expedition consisting of four elite regiments of troops supported by Czech mercenaries. When the partisans received the news of the approach of this powerful force, they prepared a last-ditch ambush at the village of Ternovsky. Shumovsky helped to dig deep defensive trenches around the village. Eager to fight, two thousand volunteers streamed into the village responding to the desperate call for help. Ipatov’s force had rifles, some machine guns and a captured field gun. The balance of defenders were enthusiastic but untrained farmers, armed only with homemade weapons.

The enemy approached in strength at dawn, expecting little resistance from the village militia. To the defenders’ surprise, the Whites attacked head-on in a column, not even deploying properly for an attack. Maintaining uncharacteristic discipline, the partisans opened fire on the advancing enemy when they were just 150 yards away. The first volley stunned the Whites, who struggled to respond, not even returning fire. The partisan force, having quickly run out of ammunition, charged out of their trenches in pursuit of their broken enemy, waving pitchforks, shovels, axes, iron crowbars and homemade spears. No prisoners were taken. Shumovsky’s first taste of action had been brief, bloody and chaotic. The defenders celebrated their decisive victory and the booty of arms and ammunition that had fallen into their laps.46