Of course, in its revolutionary activity the Russian Embassy could not confine itself to information. In Germany there existed revolutionary groups which throughout the war had conducted underground revolutionary work. Russian revolutionaries, who had more experience in this kind of conspiratorial activity as well as greater opportunities, had to work, and indeed did work, in concert with these groups. All of Germany was covered with a network of illegal revolutionary organizations: hundreds of thousands of revolutionary pamphlets and proclamations were printed and distributed every week in the rear and at the front. The German Government once accused the Russians of importing into Germany agitational literature and, with an energy worthy of better application, searched for this contraband in the baggage of couriers, but it never entered its mind that that which the Russian Embassy brought into Germany from Russia represented only a drop in the sea compared to what was printed with the help of the Russian Embassy inside Germany.
In sum, according to Ioffe, the Russian Embassy in Berlin “worked constantly in close contact with German socialists in preparing the German revolution.”48
It further served as a channel for distributing revolutionary literature and subversive funds to other European countries: through it passed a steady stream of couriers (between 100 and 200 was the German estimate) carrying diplomatic pouches for dispatch to Austria, Switzerland, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. Some of these “couriers,” after arriving in Berlin, vanished from sight.49
The German Foreign Office received frequent protests from military and civil authorities concerning these subversive actions,50 but it refused to act, tolerating them for the sake of what it perceived to be higher German interests in Russia. When once in a while it ventured to object to some especially outrageous behavior on the part of the Soviet mission, Ioffe had an answer ready. As he explains:
The Brest Treaty itself furnished the opportunity for its circumvention. Since the contracting parties were governments, the prohibition on revolutionary action could be interpreted to apply to governments and their organs. It was thus interpreted by the Russian side, and every revolutionary action which Germany protested against was at once explained as the action of the Russian Communist Party and not of the government.51
Ioffe’s operations in Germany made the timid attempts of Mirbach and Riezler in Moscow to communicate with the opposition look like a harmless flirtation.
From the point of view of Moscow’s immediate interests, no less important than promoting revolution in Germany was gaining the support of German business circles so they would act jointly to block the anti-Bolshevik forces there.
Big business interests in Germany could hardly wait to lay their hands on Russia: and because they knew that only the Bolsheviks would allow them to do so, they turned into the most enthusiastic supporters of the Bolshevik regime. In the spring of 1918, following the signing of the peace treaty, numerous German Chamber of Commerce organizations petitioned their government to reopen commercial relations with Soviet Russia. On May 16, Krupp hosted in Düsseldorf a conference of prominent German industrialists, among them August Thyssen and Hugo Stinnes, to discuss this subject. The conference concluded that it was imperative to stop the penetration of “English and American capital” into Russia and to take steps that would enable German interests to establish there a dominant influence. Another business conference, held the same month under the auspices of the Foreign Office, stressed the desirability of Germany’s taking control of Russian transport, a goal facilitated by Moscow’s request for German help in reorganizing its railroads.52 In July, German businessmen sent a trade delegation to Moscow. The bankers lionized Ioffe on his arrival in Berlin. “The director of the Deutsche Bank frequently visits us,” Ioffe boasted to Moscow, “Mendelssohn has long sought a meeting with me, and Solomonssohn has already come three times under various pretexts.”53
