The Spy Who Changed History

The disparate village guerrilla groups combined in September 1918 to form the 2nd Worker-Peasant Stavropol Division.47 Despite the grand-sounding name, the Division could only stage raids at night due to an acute shortage of weapons and ammunition, their weakness concealed by the cover of darkness. Ipatov, a former gunsmith, built a mobile cartridge factory manufacturing 7,000 rounds per day. Even so, by the end of the month the guerrillas, cut off from any outside supplies, were almost out of ammunition. Often, the guerrillas went into battle with only three or four rounds each. Outnumbered and outgunned, under constant pressure from the advancing White Guard, the partisan units had to retreat into the interior of the province and then beyond. They were proud to record that even in this difficult period, the division was able to organise a massive transport of grain to Stalin, besieged in the nearby city of Tsaritsyn. In return, Stalin, commanding the desperate defence of the city that would later bear his name – Stalingrad – gave the partisans much-needed weapons and ammunition.48

In late November 1918, the band suffered its first defeat and serious casualties in a failed attack on a White base. They lost hundreds of men. Exhausted by four months of continual fighting and retreats, the survivors were forced further and further to the north-east, away from their homes and support. From December 1918, the partisans started fighting against a new and formidable enemy, the well-armed Cossacks. Their new opponent was highly mobile and well versed in guerrilla war techniques. It was bitter, unrelenting winter warfare, pushing Shumovsky’s hungry unit onto the desolate Kalmyk steppe, a region known by Russians as ‘the end of the world’. In the freezing winter conditions, Shumovsky’s fighters suffered extreme hardship. For the hungry, poorly clothed and exhausted men, barely surviving on the bleak steppe, the final straw was a typhus epidemic. The disease was soon rampant not only in the army but in the rare settlements. By February, the steppe front was one large typhoid camp. It became necessary for the healthy to abandon the thousands of sick men, leaving them without protection from the advancing enemy. In early March, the 10th Red Army absorbed the remains of the partisans, and the survivors became the 32nd Infantry Division.49 Now a member of the Red Army, Shumovsky swore the solemn oath he would keep for his whole life, that ‘I, a son of the working people, citizen of the Soviet Republic, Stanislav Shumovsky swear to spare no effort nor my very life in the battle for the Russian Soviet Republic.’

The Red Army was an army in name only. After a succession of defeats, it was on the point of collapse when Shumovsky joined. Only a quarter of the former Russian Empire remained under Communist control and the Reds were in full undisciplined retreat. The leadership had eschewed the services of professional military officers and logistics, a sure recipe for disaster. Their defeats were down to cowardice, treachery and panic. Even the senior commanders ran away at the sound of the first shot. It was not the use of superior tactics but a lack of ammunition that, often as not, determined the outcome of battles. In the circumstances, promotion through the ranks was rapid for a dedicated young Communist such as Shumovsky. He was made first a squad leader then a machine-gun commander, and eventually a commissar. In the Civil War, fanatical teenagers, skinny boys in oversized uniforms, were regularly given command of large units made up of unreliable conscripts and recaptured deserters. The daily struggle for food took priority over military duties as the army lived off the land. Uniforms, including boots, were unavailable. The army provided its troops with no basic training, nor did it even teach its leaders rudimentary military tactics. With their inability to confront the Whites in a set-piece battle, the Red Army’s military strategy depended on encouraging the feverish formation of local militia units to stand against Denikin’s advancing volunteer army and supporting guerrilla attacks on the Whites’ weak civil administration. In practice, none of the individual Red guerrilla units were sufficiently organised to be effective. However, there were so many groups that they became a veritable plague on the Whites.

After their run of bitter defeats, the Red Army finally introduced military discipline. The Soviet government established a Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic with a single commander-in-chief for all fronts. Unity of command would save the Red Army in the large-scale battles of 1919. The army developed the ability to transfer troops between fronts at times of pressing need. The establishment of an overall operational command and an insistence on the strict execution of combat orders led to an improvement in fighting ability over the lacklustre performance of the independent amateur partisan units. The reintroduction of the basic principles of a regular professional army – namely complete submission to orders, a strict hierarchy and rigid discipline – helped strengthen the combat capability of the Red Army to first confront, then overpower the Whites. The Red Army officers were now appointed according to military ability, not elected by the popular acclaim of their troops. Orders and plans were no longer put forward to the troops for debate. In extremis, Leon Trotsky introduced the infamous ‘blocking troops’. He ordered the positioning of machine-gunners behind Red Army attacks to shoot waverers, deserters and shirkers.

The most important reform, however, was the introduction of a system of dual command. Professional military officers were paired with committed commissars, such as Shumovsky, to jointly command units. Commissars monitored not only the activities of military experts, but carried out the Communist Party’s policy in the armed forces to ‘provide class rallying, enlighten and educate personnel in the spirit of Communism’. This was a euphemism for removing the criminal elements in uniform that preyed on the civilian population.

The large-scale battles of 1919, stretched over southern and central Russia, involved hundreds of thousands of combatants on each side, and would determine the outcome of the Civil War. In the south of Russia, the Red Army faced its largest and most determined opponent, the well-equipped army of the fierce General Denikin. He was heavily supported both financially and militarily by the British and the Americans, while the Western powers turned a blind eye to the mounting evidence of an unpalatable genocide – known as the ‘White Terror’ – behind Denikin’s front lines. There were large-scale massacres of suspected Communists and Jews, who were often seen as one and the same, in the territory that fell under Denikin’s control. In their vast summer offensive, the Whites were able to deploy tanks, armoured cars and significant quantities of artillery, and advanced with the support of mercenary British pilots who bombed the retreating Reds. Denikin’s goal was to deliver a coordinated knockout blow on Moscow. He believed its capture would ensure the complete destruction of Communism.

Denikin’s army came close to achieving its goal, driving the enthusiastic but largely inept Red opponents before them. However, his army overran its supply lines and, lacking reserves, allowed the hard-pressed Red Army to bring up reinforcements first to halt the advance and then launch a large-scale counter-attack. In the midst of the renewed savage fighting in November 1919 for the critical Stavropol region, Shumovsky was wounded in the head by shrapnel near Kamyshin.50

By the end of the seesaw campaigning season of 1919, it was clear that the Communists would not only survive but were in the ascendancy. Winston Churchill, Britain’s Minister of War and the architect of foreign intervention, was forced to bow to his public’s war-weariness and pull his troops out of Russia, having failed to strangle Communism in the cradle as he had pledged.51 Without British finance, arms, advisors and strong diplomatic hands to guide them, the White opposition movement squabbled among themselves and teetered on the brink of complete collapse. Their armies retreated on all fronts, a mere shadow of their former military power. By January 1920 the reformed Red Army had advanced to knock on the door of the Caucasus. Shumovsky was wounded for a second time, this time in the leg, during the rapid advance on the strategic town of Rostov-on-Don.52 The defeated White General Denikin lost half his army in a disastrous retreat to Novorossiysk and was replaced as overall White commander by the more capable General Baron Wrangel, who is immortalised in the popular marching song of the Red Army:

The White Army and the Black Baron

Are preparing to restore to us the Tsar’s throne,

But from the taigafn11 to the British seas

The Red Army is the strongest of all!

But the feared Baron Wrangel could only hole up with what remained of his beaten forces in Crimea to await his inevitable exile. Lenin decided the time was now right to seize Baku’s oil wealth. The 11th Army – into which Shumovsky had been transferred – was given the task of supporting a planned workers’ uprising. The tide of war had turned, bringing him home.

• • •

Following the Turkish withdrawal, the British had returned in force, determined to stay in the region. They found Baku, a once beautiful town which had fallen into decay, much to their liking. When oil was discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, the city had become almost overnight one of the wealthiest on earth, with every famous European luxury store opening a branch on Baku’s elegant tree-lined avenues. British naval officers requisitioned the oil barons’ magnificent palaces and villas as they set about building a strong naval force to control the Caspian Sea. The ruthless British tactics involved first disarming their allies before moving out to attack the weak Red Navy. The Communist flotilla in the Caspian Sea was no match for the better-equipped British-backed forces. The British complained to London that the Reds refused to come out of port to fight them. But by March 1920, on Winston Churchill’s orders, the British were long gone, and the region was a ripe plum ready to fall into Communist laps. The opposition, such as it remained, was deeply divided. The Whites refused to countenance any rapprochement with the Nationalists. Independent Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan dissipated their energies fighting territorial disputes between themselves. Each was in a state of financial and economic collapse. Epidemics of typhus raged unchecked, brought in by the hordes of refugees from the fighting. Just days after the campaign started, and without firing a shot, Shumovsky and the victorious 11th Army were marching down the streets of Baku. Soon Lenin was preparing a grander plan to establish Soviet power over the whole Caucasus region.

On his eighteenth birthday, 9 May 1920, his very first opportunity to do so, Stanislav Shumovsky became a full member of the Soviet Communist Party. He was to remain an active Party member for the rest of his life, earning the right to one of the first fifty-year anniversary membership medals awarded.fn12 53

Although the government in Baku had no stomach for a fight with the Reds, many in Azerbaijan were not so eager to abandon their religion and embrace the ideals of Communism. Civilian revolts and mutinies centred on the old capital of Ganja. Shumovsky’s army was tasked with suppressing the revolts in Azerbaijan and Dagestan, dangerous counter-guerrilla operations. On the hot summer’s day of 3 July 1920, as he was slogging up the mountain roads at Agdam at the head of his unit, advancing towards his hometown of Shusha, Shumovsky suffered his third and most severe wound when he was shot through the neck.54 During his recuperation, the 11th Army mopped up all remaining opposition to Communist rule in the Caucasus in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. The agonies of the Civil War were over.

• • •

As an able, committed soldier, Shumovsky would serve in the Red Army for a further six years,55 taking on increasingly important administrative roles in major cities across the Soviet Union. He married Vera, and in 1922 they had a daughter, Maya.56 In December 1924, he transferred to Smolensk to fulfil his childhood dream – for in the spring of 1925, Shumovsky climbed into the front pilot’s seat of a two-man Polikarpov R-1 at an airfield of the newly formed Red air force at Smolensk.57 The mechanic spun the propeller and the engine coughed into life. Turning the aircraft into the wind, Shumovsky pointed its nose down the long grass runway, revving the motor. Opening the throttle close to maximum, he waited for sufficient speed to finally pull back on the stick to adjust the flaps, giving the plane enough lift to gently rise off the ground. With a broad grin spread across his face, Shumovsky had joined his boyhood band of heroes as a pilot. His observer reached forward to pat him on the head, congratulating him on his first successful take-off.

For nine months, Shumovsky would learn first to be the observer and then the pilot in the 2nd Independent Reconnaissance Squadron. He flew in the R-1, the first new aircraft built in the Soviet Union after the Revolution and the first Soviet plane ever sold for export.58 The R-1 set the tone for future Soviet aircraft development. It was a copy of a captured de Havilland DH-9, but with substantial improvements on the original British plane. The Soviets lacked a design for a powerful aircraft engine and the ability to make them in large numbers. They had no access to the advanced aluminium moulding necessary to build powerful but lightweight engines. Old motors were bought abroad for the first aircraft and eventually copied in large numbers. The fuselage design was adapted to Russian conditions and materials, mahogany being replaced with local wood. The Russian plane was more robust and less powerful than its Western brother, but over 2,400 were built cheaply in a decade.59

Shumovsky clocked up many happy hours as a pilot in the skies over Smolensk and many more over a nine-month period as the rear-seat observer. But a crash brought an abrupt end to his flying career. He walked away, but the impact had damaged his left arm so seriously he was unfit to be a pilot. In the mid-1920s he sent his family a photograph of himself in uniform. His brother Theodore noticed ‘the three rhombuses on the lapel collar’.60 Aged just twenty-five, Stanislav was already an army commander. He had reached a rank equivalent to what we would understand today as a full general.fn13 His final military posting was to the prestigious Kronstadt naval base at the electro-mining school of the Baltic fleet, alma mater of fellow spy Arthur Adams.61 After the Kronstadt assignment, Shumovsky transferred into the military reserves and became the Ministry of Finance’s head investigator for military affairs.62

Shumovsky’s letter was not the only surprising communication sent to the Caucasus. In 1926, eight years after her apparent death a letter arrived from his mother saying that she was still alive in Warsaw and earning a livelihood giving music lessons in private homes. One of a vast number of refugees displaced by war and trapped outside the Soviet Union, she was unable to return home, as tension between the USSR and Poland was at an acute level. When the demand for music lessons dried up, Amalia moved to Łódz′, where she had to work as a weaver. It was only in 1932 that she was able to return to the Soviet Union and finally live close to her family in Moscow. Broken by her experiences, she died soon afterwards; her only consolation was knowing that, in a time of blood, chaos and disaster, her eldest son had followed his beliefs and achieved great success.63

2

‘WE CATCH UP OR THEY WILL CRUSH US’

The Communist victors of the Russian Civil War inherited a ruined and backward land surrounded by enemies. By 1921, the level of the country’s economic activity had plunged to less than a quarter of that in 1913. Agricultural production had tumbled to a point where it was insufficient for the country to feed itself. The Communists were big dreamers, but their initial grandiose projects to modernise the transport network at a stroke by buying thousands of railway locomotives abroad and carrying out a national electrification scheme were soon scaled back when no foreign nation would advance them credit. In frustration, the leadership turned once more to their political vanguard and gave them a new task. The country had to be rebuilt and modernised and the Party’s elite was to bring to the factory floor the energy, drive and commitment responsible for the successes on the battlefield. Men like Shumovsky left the Red Army to lead the drive for industrialisation. The zealots were assigned to central roles in industry to replace the old, tired management teams.

In 1925, Shumovsky transferred to the military reserves and was assigned the pivotal role as head investigator of the armaments industry on behalf of the People’s Commissariat (Ministry) of Finance.1 War with the capitalists was expected to break out at any time and the armaments industry needed to be ready. Shumovsky brought his military experience and Party loyalty to the role. On his factory visits, he saw the dire state of Soviet industry, which after decades of neglect was suffering from an absence of training, underinvestment, and a lack of leadership. The plants he toured struggled under the burden of pre-war machinery that was worn out and outmoded. As a result, the end product was of poor quality and frequently obsolete. Across the armaments industry, productivity was unacceptably low, and this was not merely because of the quality of the machinery. Labour relations in the workers’ state were a complicated and delicate issue. Factory directors, former Tsarist middle managers of questionable loyalty and motivation, lacked authority on the factory floor as workers did not respect their orders. Foreign consultant engineers brought in to advise on improvements despaired at Russian working practices. They noticed large numbers of Soviet workers disappearing on endless smoking breaks. Female workers often carried out heavy manual work in factories, while the men sat idly watching.

Early, piecemeal efforts to improve matters had failed. With their scant foreign exchange reserves, the Soviets had bought small amounts of expensive new manufacturing machinery abroad, which the unskilled Russian workers promptly ruined. Shumovsky noted that most of the new machinery sat unused in the factories, either uninstalled or broken. Spare parts were never on hand, nor were there engineers trained to conduct the regular maintenance required to service the machines. Faulty installation of new equipment was often to blame for the poor quality of the final output. In their current state, Soviet arms factories were incapable of making precisely engineered products even in small numbers. Above all, a chronic shortage of young engineers versed in the latest techniques and methods held the country back. Owing to a decade of war and strife, none had been trained. The armaments industry was in no state to support even a small-scale conflict. Shumovsky’s reports to the Finance Commissariat detailed his dire conclusions. The reports matched similar ones written by the other inspectors, visiting factories across the whole of Soviet industry. The flow of bad news exacerbated a building sense of crisis.

The leadership was aware of the desperate issues and, under an ailing Lenin, a gradualist approach had been adopted. Lenin was a deep admirer of US invention, if not of its capitalist system. He spent considerable time in his office in Moscow’s Kremlin flicking through his subscription copy of the magazine Scientific American, the Advocate of Industry and Enterprise. The US monthly showcased all the latest technological inventions and innovations. Lenin wanted to secure the technology to help build Communism. On the day before his death, 20 January 1924, the leader of the world’s first proletarian state passed the day watching a film about the workings of a tractor assembly line in a Ford factory.2 While Lenin believed that in the American factory, owners used machinery as a means of oppressing the working class, in the USSR the same US-made technology and modern production methods would help build Communism. Introducing modern machines together with efficiency measures in Soviet factories would eventually allow workers greater free time and higher living standards.

Lenin hoped that greedy American businessmen would sell his government everything it wanted, even if the Soviets’ ultimate goal was the destruction of capitalism. He was said to have joked that if he announced the execution of all capitalists, one would sell him the rope to hang the others. As he predicted, the US was intent on selling its technology and had the best on sale, but only for hard cash. Lenin’s plans were expansive, but in the absence of credit he could buy only a limited number of US-built tractors, other advanced farm machinery and some factory equipment. In his business dealings, Lenin favoured market leaders, the likes of International Harvester and Ford, as his trusted partners. When the money ran out, which it soon did, he sold the nation’s treasures. The Kremlin’s famous bells had to be saved by the curator of its museum from being auctioned off abroad.3 It was not only the crown jewels that were given away; in a sign of the Russians’ commercial naivety, Trotsky negotiated to exchange the rights to exploit all Siberia’s vast mineral resources for the next seventy years to one American company for a pittance.4 The Communists had returned to the Tsar’s method of offering long-term concessions to foreign investors. In desperation, the Soviets even resorted to barter; to its complete bemusement, the Douglas Aircraft Company was offered payment for an aircraft in oriental rugs and antiques. For US entrepreneurs venturing into the USSR, the experience of doing business under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was disappointing. Once profits began to flow from their Soviet concessions, the intrepid US investors complained that they were subject to unexpected taxes or the sequestration of assets. For the Russians, the results of the programme were all too slow and involved tolerating a wild free market, risking social chaos at the hands of a class of newly rich ‘NEP men’, Russian capitalists who thrived by exploiting others.

The exchange of American ideas for Soviet cash or concessions should have been mutually beneficial. But ideological issues sharply divided the two societies. There were those in the US who flatly opposed doing any business with the Russians. They believed that under direct orders from Moscow, the US Communist Party members were secretly working to destroy the whole American way of life. They argued that if Communism were to spread to the US, it would mean taking away religious freedom, private property and access to justice. To the Communist way of thinking, America was a society built entirely on unfairness and the institutionalised mass exploitation of the working class for the benefit and enrichment of a few. The greatest success of the US had been to mobilise mass consumer demand. The American working class was not political and aspired to a life of consumption that the Soviets viewed as a shallow, material existence. Every Soviet visitor to America would comment on the extraordinary proliferation of advertising hoardings cajoling consumers to purchase the latest model of automobile, Coca-Cola or cigarettes.

The key barrier to greater trade was the US government’s implacable opposition to lending the Communists any money while Russia owed vast sums to US investors. Assets granted to American businessmen by the Tsar had after the revolution been expropriated by the Communists, who refused to pay any compensation. With the debt issue unresolved, the Soviets could not legitimately buy technology in the quantities they required. So they adopted a roundabout approach, which US manufacturers learned about the hard way: the unlicensed reproduction of foreign technology. Foreign cars, tractors, and other machinery exhibited at Soviet trade fairs were examined and copied. Henry Ford’s deputy, Charles Sorensen, on a visit spotted near-perfect copies of Fordson tractors manufactured under the name Red Putilovets.5 The Soviet design originated from technical drawings based on a dismantled American vehicle. Following the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, the first American ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, would be plagued by constant complaints from US firms about infringement of their patents.