After one month in the Soviet capital, Mirbach began to experience misgivings about the viability of the Bolshevik regime and the wisdom of his government’s basing its entire Russian policy on it. He continued to believe that the Bolsheviks were likely to survive: on May 24, he warned the Foreign Office against Bothmer and the other military men who predicted the imminent collapse of the Soviet regime.36 But aware of the activities of Allied diplomatic and military personnel in Russia and their contacts with the opposition groups, he worried that should Lenin fall from power, the Germans would be left without any source of support in Russia. He favored, therefore, a more flexible policy combining reliance on the Bolsheviks with political insurance in the form of openings to the anti-Bolshevik opposition.
On May 20, Mirbach sent home the first pessimistic report on the situation in Soviet Russia and the dangers confronting German policy there. Popular support for the regime, he wrote, had greatly eroded in recent weeks: Trotsky was said to have referred to the Bolshevik Party as a “living corpse.” The Allies were fishing in these muddied waters, generously distributing funds to the SRs and Mensheviks-Internationalists, Serbian prisoners of war, and Baltic sailors. “Never was corruptible Russia more corrupt than now.” Thanks to Trotsky’s sympathies for them, the Allies had increased their influence over the Bolsheviks. To prevent the situation from getting out of hand, he required money to renew the subsidies to the Bolsheviks which the German Government had terminated in January.37 Funds were needed to prevent both a shift of the Bolsheviks toward the Allies and a Bolshevik collapse followed by a power seizure by the pro-Allied SRs.38
This report, followed by others couched in progressively gloomier tones, did not go unheeded in Berlin. Early in June, Kühlmann reversed himself and authorized Mirbach to initiate talks with the Russian opposition.39 He also allocated to him discretionary funds. On June 3, Mirbach cabled to Berlin that to keep the Bolsheviks in power he needed 3 million marks a month, which the Foreign Ministry interpreted to mean a total of 40 million marks.40 Kühlmann, who concurred that preventing the Bolsheviks from switching to the Allies “would cost money, probably a great deal of money,” approved the transfer of this sum to the Moscow embassy for secret Russian work.41 It cannot be established exactly how this money was spent. Only about 9 million was actually allocated: it appears that about one-half of that sum went to the Bolshevik Government and the rest to their opponents, mainly the anti-Bolshevik Provisional Government of Siberia, centered in Omsk, and the Kaiser’s favorite anti-Bolshevik, the Don Cossack ataman, P. N. Krasnov.*
The stumbling block confronting the Germans in their effort to reach the anti-Bolshevik opposition was Brest. No political group other than the Bolsheviks would accept this treaty, and even the Bolsheviks were divided. As Mirbach had observed, atrocious as conditions were in Soviet Russia, no non-Bolshevik Russian would purchase German help against the Bolsheviks if the price was acceptance of the Brest Treaty. In other words, to gain support from anti-Bolsheviks, Germany had to agree to substantial treaty revisions. In Mirbach’s opinion, the opposition might acquiesce to the loss of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, but not to the surrender of the Ukraine, Estonia, and probably Livonia.42
Mirbach entrusted to Riezler the delicate task of dealing with Russian opposition groups under the noses of the Cheka and Allied agents. Riezler dealt mainly with the so-called Right Center, a small conservative circle formed in mid-June by respected political figures and generals who had concluded that Bolshevism posed a greater threat to Russia’s national interests than Germany and were prepared to come to terms with Berlin to be rid of it. Although they claimed solid contacts with financial, industrial, and military circles, they really had no significant following, because the overwhelming majority of politically active Russians regarded the Bolsheviks as a creation of Germany. The leading personality of the Right Center was Alexander Krivoshein, Stolypin’s director of agriculture, a decent and patriotic man who might have made an acceptable figurehead in a Russian Government installed by the Germans, but who, being a typical bureaucrat of the
