Читать книгу The Spy Who Changed History - Svetlana Lokhova - Страница 12

Joining^fn1 an exhilarated crowd heading back to Moscow from Tushino airfield and thrilled by the successful parade of new Soviet air power, Stanislav Shumovsky reflected on his extraordinary life. His mind drifted to the very first time he had seen a man fly, in his home city of Kharkov where he had stood as an eight-year-old in another large crowd, gripping his father’s hand tightly with excitement. It was the summer of 1910 and, just like the rest of the vast Russian Empire, the young Shumovsky had caught aviation fever.

A year before, Shumovsky had clipped from the newspaper a picture of his lifetime hero, the French aviator Louis Blériot, taken after his epic flight across the English Channel.^fn2 The news announced an era of daring long-distance flight. For the sprawling Romanov domain, now covering over a sixth of the world’s land surface from the frontiers of Europe to the Far East, powered flight opened a world of new possibilities. Shumovsky also saved a newspaper clipping from the same year of the now-forgotten Dutchman who had been the first to pilot a flimsy plane from Russian soil. Unfortunately, he managed just a few hundred yards, but even this meagre feat enraptured the nation. The next summer, Shumovsky’s clippings book bulged with articles showing, to the delight of vast crowds, intrepid Russians^fn3 climbing aboard imported aircraft to ascend a short, noisy distance into the sky. Everyone, but especially Shumovsky, wanted to see with their own eyes these miraculous machines and the heroes who flew them. Now, finally, it was Kharkov’s turn. Determined not to miss the event, Shumovsky had made his father promise weeks before that they would go together.

The day was set to become a landmark event in his life. For the last week, the local newspapers had been posting on the boards outside their offices stories designed to whip up excitement to see the new triumph of science. A French-designed, but Russian-built Farman IV had finally come to town. The early plane with its many wings looked to the sceptical eyes of the crowd more like an oversized kite, yet somehow the wheezy engine of this ungainly, flimsy jumble of pine, fabric and wire was capable of propelling the pilot and his nervous passenger into the sky. The crowd held its breath and after an uneven and uncomfortable take-off, the plane lifted from the ground, then turned slowly to the left to circle the field before attempting an even bumpier landing. Shumovsky pulled at his father’s hand to be allowed to join those chasing after the landing aircraft, eager to congratulate the pilot and his passenger, and to see up close this conqueror of gravity. The flight had lasted only a few minutes but its impact on Shumovsky was to last a lifetime. It fired a passion for aviation: he wanted to become a pilot.

Stanislav Shumovsky was born on 9 May 1902,¹ the eldest of four sons of Adam Vikentevich Shumovsky and his wife, Amalia Fominichna (née Kaminskaya). His parents were not ethnic Russians but Poles. The family treasured their traditions, practising Catholicism and speaking Polish at home.² Shumovsky belonged to an old noble family dedicated to public service. According to family legend, the Shumovskys had moved to Poland from Lithuania about six hundred years before with the conquering King Jagiello.³ The Polish government commissioned a statue of this long-forgotten king for their display at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.^fn4 (The prize-winning Soviet stand, adorned with statues of Lenin and Stalin, in contrast boasted a full-scale model of a Moscow metro station.)⁴ Since the family move, successive generations of Shumovskys had valiantly served first the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania and now the twin-headed Russian eagle.⁵

Shumovsky’s father was an accountant and bank official working for the Tsar’s State Treasury in the thriving commercial city of Kharkov. His mother Amalia was born a noble. Her own father was the manager of the large estates of the noted Polish Prince Roman Damian Sanguszko in nearby Volyn province. Amalia was a talented pianist⁶ and ensured her boys spoke French and German.⁷ As was expected among the tiny professional class of the time, family life revolved around musical and literary evenings where their mother would showcase her talent. The youngest of the Shumovsky boys, Theodore, recalled a vivid memory of their genteel, comfortable life. He described in his autobiography (appropriately, as events turned out, entitled The Light from the East) ‘a large room with two windows; in the space between the windows stood a piano, that my mother plays. Her face, framed by her wavy black hair and her eyes focused far away, as always happens, when one surrenders to music.’⁸ Theodore grew up to become a dissident academic and today is celebrated in Russia while his elder brother Stanislav, who devoted his entire life to building the Soviet Union, is almost forgotten.^fn5

As a member of the gentry, Shumovsky’s father Adam was entitled to patronage. For his four sons that privilege meant they could attend the Gymnasium in Kharkov.⁹ Its curriculum encompassed a view of the world that included modern science, Shumovsky’s passion. Less fortunate children growing up in the city at the same time managed, like the overwhelming majority of the Emperor’s 125 million subjects, perhaps three brief years in a church charity school¹⁰ where the priests reinforced the principles of autocracy, unquestioning loyalty to God and His representative on earth, the Tsar. At Shumovsky’s school, the teachers explaining the miracle of powered flight only increased his desire to see the sight for himself.

The annual International Trade Fair was the one time of year when the inventions and curiosities of the world were brought to the excited citizens of Kharkov. Like the country, the city was in the midst of massive social transformation. Kharkov was proud of its place at the forefront of developments and firmly part of a new Russia. Like its rival, the then capital city of St Petersburg, it was a window through which Russia looked to the West, to Europe. In contrast with provincial Moscow and Kiev, which were far more traditional, religious and backward, Kharkov embraced progressive thought and modern inventions. Blessed with a wealth of natural resources such as coal, iron ore and grain, the city was newly affluent. Sitting in the centre of the rich black soil of the Ukrainian plains and with an enormous new railway station, Kharkov was the leading transport hub and undisputed commercial centre of southern Russia. Shumovsky’s father’s job was to help regulate the numerous private sector banks that financed the ever-growing agricultural and mining enterprises. The city was a hive of steel-making and coal-mining, the epicentre of Russia’s Industrial Revolution. Almost 300 automobiles jostled to drive along the few paved roads, past the horse-drawn taxis and slow-moving peasant carts.¹¹

It should have been a wealthy and happy place. It wasn’t; indeed, it was impossible to live in the sprawling city and remain unmoved by the inequality and social division which were the result of its rapid economic expansion. Shumovsky saw the evidence each day on his way to school as he passed the dispossessed peasants sleeping rough on the street. While Kharkov’s grain found its way to the hungry cities of Western Europe, few enjoyed the profits that trickled back. The arrival of modern factories, steelworks and locomotive manufacturers had brought home to the city the issues and problems associated with Russia’s rapid industrialisation. Government policy had been to finance this enormous investment through heavy taxes on peasants, forcing millions to work unwillingly in towns. Armed police, Cossacks and the army ruthlessly suppressed the many protests. Each spring thousands wandered hungrily into the city, vainly searching for a way to improve their lot and the lives of their families back in their home villages. These new peasant workers trailed miserably into the foreign-owned factories, exchanging one form of slavery for another. As Shumovsky would later remember, ‘Most industrial enterprises, in fact, were under foreign control. In my home city, for example, the gas business was run by a Belgian company, the tramways by a French company, a big plant for producing agricultural machinery by a German company, and so on.’¹²

Russian industrial workers were not only the lowest paid in Europe but struggled under a burden of often unfair and inhumane practices. On his way to school, Shumovsky would pass children his own age heading to a long day at work.^fn6 Workers only had to be paid in cash once a month; the rest of their wages were returned to the factory owners’ pockets by a voucher system, requiring the employees to pay their rent and buy overpriced goods in the company stores. Russian industrial labourers worked eleven-hour days, although shifts often exceeded this, in conditions that were unsafe and unhygienic. Kharkov’s population had increased and housing conditions were awful – it was no surprise that the city would soon become a hotbed of radicalism and politically motivated strikes. The official reaction to even mild protest was confrontational and violent.

Kharkov bore the vivid scars of the 1905 Revolution and the Tsar’s broken promises. The large locomotive works where Ivan Trashutin (one of the students who would travel with Shumovsky to the US) was later employed had been extensively damaged by fierce artillery shelling at the climax of official efforts to dislodge its striking unarmed workers.¹³ The revolution began after the army and police shot dead 4,000 peaceful protesters in St Petersburg who were taking a simple petition to the Russian Emperor asking for improved working conditions and universal suffrage.¹⁴ The peaceful demonstration was organised and led by an agent of the Tsar’s secret police, the feared Okhranka, in one of the agent provocateur missions for which it was renowned.^fn7

In revulsion, the whole country rose in revolt at the lack of any reaction to or remorse for this bloodshed on the part of Tsar Nicholas II. Joseph Stalin’s close friend Artyom (Stalin later adopted his son) set Kharkov alight with months of army mu-tinies and strikes. Barricades were set up on the main street, and there was armed insurrection. Large-scale street fighting broke out between the citizens demanding a voice and the paramilitary Cossacks. Across Russia’s cities an alliance of radical students, workers and the peasants brought the autocracy almost to its knees. Shumovsky learned that secondary school children played their part by cooking up sulphur dioxide bombs in the chemistry laboratory. The schools and the universities were proud to be the headquarters of revolutionaries. Tsar Nicholas eventually caved in to the people, offering great concessions and even promising a Duma, a parliament, but as soon as the strikes ended, he went back on his word. The people felt betrayed by their Tsar. Each year as Shumovsky was growing up, there were demonstrations in Kharkov under the slogan ‘We no longer have a Tsar’, commemorating the deaths of the 15,000 hanged for their part in the countrywide protests.

The Russian middle class, including the Shumovskys, became alienated from their government. They witnessed the shocking, violent crackdowns on peaceful protesters and the lamentable official failure to promote better social conditions. There was now a Duma for which men of property like Adam Shumovsky could vote, but in practice the Tsar was as autocratic as ever. The electoral laws were changed to exclude those considered to have been misled to vote for critical, radical parties and to promote and support conservatives, and the parliament was contemptuously referred to as a ‘Duma of Lackeys’.¹⁵ Although officially banned, discussions raged on in drawing rooms across the country about the latest scandals of the court faith healer Rasputin and the not-so-clandestine involvement of the Okhranka in terrorist activities, including assassinations and bombings.¹⁶

As Tsar Nicholas implacably set his face against change, opposition politics and debate moved ever further leftwards in search of radical alternatives. The certainty of change promised by the Marxist dialectic appealed to the methodical minds of Kharkov’s citizens. In the face of an official policy of Russification, meanwhile, each of the empire’s nationalities increasingly aspired to independence. Russian Jews were subject to harsher discrimination. Official quotas to limit the number of Jewish students were re-imposed at schools and universities, and violent anti-Semites formed savage gangs known as the ‘Black Hundreds’.

Despite the holiday atmosphere of the International Trade Fair of 1910, new waves of strikes had begun. Kharkov contained a dangerously rich cocktail of workers seething with resentment at the failure of the 1905 Revolution, a free-thinking professional class reading socialist literature smuggled in from abroad and a rebellious, radical student body. All that was lacking was the spark. The province remained restive and occasionally erupted into violence. Peasants who stayed in their villages felt excluded from the economy. Their fathers had been virtual slaves; now their sons had no future on the land. Gangs of dispossessed peasants roamed the countryside, burning manor houses and murdering landowners. The army tried to keep order by shooting bands of miscreants. Meanwhile, the urban radicals had learned their lesson after the recent betrayals; there would be no half-measures next time. The revolutionaries were more determined than before. During Shumovsky’s childhood, he would learn not just about flying, but of the tragic events in his country’s recent history such as the 1905 Bloody Sunday killings of unarmed demonstrators marching to the Winter Palace to present their petition to the Tsar and the 1912 Lena Goldfields Massacre, when Tsarist troops shot dead dozens of striking workers protesting about high prices in the company shops.¹⁷ Graphic postcards of dead bodies from the Lena massacre circulated, inflaming anti-government attitudes. In short, Russia was a country teetering on the brink of war with itself.

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 Adams^fn8 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.

• • •

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.

• • •

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.

• • •

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.

• • •

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

• • •

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

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 taiga^fn11 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