The Russian Revolution полностью

A Pole by nationality, a metalworker by profession, and a thief by avocation, Malinovskii had served three jail sentences for theft and burglary. Driven, according to his own testimony, by political ambitions but unable to satisfy them because of his criminal record, and always in need of money, he offered his services to the Department of Police. On its instructions, he switched from the Mensheviks and in January 1912 attended the Prague Conference of the Bolsheviks. Lenin was most favorably impressed by him, praising Malinovskii as an “excellent fellow” and an “outstanding worker-leader.”¹⁰⁷ He appointed the new recruit to the Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee, with authority to add members at his discretion. On his return to Russia, Malinovskii used this authority to co-opt Stalin.¹⁰⁸

On orders of the Minister of the Interior, Malinovskii’s criminal record was suppressed to allow him to run for the Duma. Elected with the help of the police, he used his parliamentary immunity to deliver fiery speeches against the “bourgeoisie” and socialist “opportunists,” some of which were prepared and all of which were cleared by the security services. Despite doubts voiced in socialist circles about his loyalty, Lenin unreservedly backed Malinovskii. One of the greatest services that Malinovskii rendered Lenin was to help found—with the permission of the police and very likely with its financial support—the Bolshevik daily Pravda. Malinovskii served as the newspaper’s treasurer; the editorship went to another police agent, M. E. Chernomazov. The party organ, protected by the police, enabled the Bolsheviks to popularize their views inside Russia much better than the Mensheviks. For the sake of appearances, the authorities occasionally fined Pravda, but the paper kept on appearing, printing the text of the speeches that Malinovskii and other Bolsheviks delivered in the Duma as well as Bolshevik writings: Lenin alone, between 1912 and 1914, published 265 articles in the paper. With the help of Malinovskii, the police also founded in Moscow the Bolshevik daily Nashput’.¹⁰⁹

While engaged in these capacities, Malinovskii regularly betrayed the party’s secrets to the police. As we shall see, Lenin believed that he gained more than he lost from this arrangement.

Malinovskii’s career as double agent was suddenly terminated in May 1914 by the new Deputy Minister of the Interior, V. F. Dzhunkovskii. A professional military man without experience in counterintelligence, Dzhunkovskii was determined to “clean up” the Corps of Gendarmes and put an end to its political activities: he was an uncompromising opponent of police provocation in any form.* When, on assuming his duties, he learned that Malinovskii was a police agent and that through him the police had penetrated the Duma, fearing a major political scandal, he confidentially apprised Rodzianko, the Duma’s chairman, of this fact.* Malinovskii was forced to resign, given 6,000 rubles, his yearly salary, and sent abroad.

The sudden and unexplained disappearance of the Bolshevik leader from the Duma should have put an end to Malinovskii’s career, but Lenin stood by him, defending him from Menshevik accusers and charging the “liquidators” with slander.† It is possible that in this case Lenin’s personal loyalty to a valued associate outweighed his better judgment, but this seems unlikely. At his trial in 1918, Malinovskii said that he had informed Lenin of his criminal record: since such a record precluded a Russian from running in Duma elections, the mere fact that the Ministry of the Interior did not use the information at its disposal to bar Malinovskii from the Duma should have alerted Lenin to his police connections. Burtsev, Russia’s leading specialist in matters of police provocation, concluded in 1918, from conversations with onetime officials of the tsarist police who testified at Malinovskii’s trial, that “according to Malinovskii, Lenin understood and could not help understanding that his [Malinovskii’s] past concealed not merely ordinary criminality but that he was in the hands of the gendarmerie—a provocateur.”¹¹⁰ The reason why Lenin might have wanted to keep a police agent in his organization is suggested by General Alexander Spiridovich, a high tsarist security officer:

The history of the Russian revolutionary movement knows several major instances of leaders of revolutionary organizations allowing some of their members to enter into relations with the political police as secret informers, in the hope that in return for giving the police some insignificant information, these party spies could extract from it much more useful information for the party.¹¹¹

When he testified before a commission of the Provisional Government in June 1917, Lenin hinted that, indeed, he may have used Malinovskii in this manner: