Perkhurov also joined Kolchak’s forces, where he was raised to the rank of general and earned the sobriquet Perkhurov-Iaroslavskii. Captured by the Bolsheviks, he managed to disguise his identity and obtain a commission in the Red Army. His true identity was discovered in 1922. Tried by a Military Collegium of the Supreme Tribunal he was sentenced to death: in prison, he was made to write his confessions, which were subsequently published.165 Rather than kill him in its dungeons, the GPU sent him to Iaroslavl, where on the fourth anniversary of the uprising he was paraded through the streets, taunted by the crowds and pelted with rocks, following which he was executed.166
Riezler, who took charge of the German Embassy, was regarded by some of his colleagues as confused and absentminded.167 He spent less time on routine diplomatic affairs and more on negotiations with Russian opposition groups, which Berlin had instructed him to terminate on July 1. He did so out of an unalterable conviction that the Bolsheviks would not last and Germany needed contacts with their potential successors. His first reaction to Mirbach’s murder was to urge severance of relations with Moscow;168 this advice was rejected, and he was instructed to continue helping the Bolsheviks. In September 1918 he would state, without elaborating, that the Germans had on three occasions used “political” means to help save the Bolsheviks.169
While carrying out his government’s directives, Riezler bombarded the Foreign Office with cables that the Bolsheviks were a spent force. On July 19, he wired:
The Bolsheviks are dead. Their corpse lives [sic!] because the gravediggers cannot agree on who should bury it. The struggle which we presently wage with the Entente on Russian soil is no longer over the favors of this corpse. It has already turned into a struggle over the succession, over the orientation of the Russia of the future.170
While he agreed that the Bolsheviks were rendering Russia harmless for Germany, by the same token they were rendering it useless.171 He recommended that Germany take charge of the “counterrevolution” and assist bourgeois forces in Russia. He thought it would require minimum effort to be rid of the Bolsheviks.
Acting on his own, Riezler laid out the groundwork for an anti-Bolshevik coup. The first step was to station a battalion of uniformed Germans in Moscow. Their ostensible mission would be to protect the embassy from future terrorist acts and to assist the Bolsheviks in the event of another rebellion; their true purpose would be to occupy strategic points in the capital if Bolshevik authority collapsed or Berlin decided the time had come to remove them from power.172
Germany agreed to dispatch a battalion to Moscow but only if the Soviet Government gave its approval. It also authorized Riezler to initiate discreet talks with the Latvian Rifles to sound them out about their intentions. Riezler, who had established good contacts with the Latvians, asked if they were prepared to defect. He was told they were. Vatsetis, the Latvian commander, describes as follows his thinking in the summer of 1918:
Strange as [it may sound], at the time it was believed that central Russia would turn into a theater of internecine warfare and that the Bolsheviks would hardly hold on to power, falling victim to the hunger and the general discontent in the country’s interior. One could not exclude the possibility of a move on Moscow by the Germans, Don Cossacks, and White Czechs. This latter version was at the time especially widespread. The Bolsheviks had under their authority no military power capable of combat. The units, over whose formation M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, the Military Director of the Supreme Military Council, labored so intelligently and cleverly, owing to the hunger in the western zone of European Russia, scattered in search of food, turning into robber bands dangerous to Soviet authority. Such armies—if one can apply to them this honorable title—fled at the very sight of the German helmet. On the western border instances occurred of German forces being called upon to pacify mutinous Red units.… In connection with all these speculations and rumors, I was extremely troubled by the question of what would happen to the Latvian regiments should there be further German intervention and should the Cossacks and White armies make an appearance in the center of Russia. Such a possibility was then seriously contemplated: it could have led to the complete annihilation of the Latvian Rifles …173
From his talks, Riezler learned that the Latvians were anxious to return to their German-occupied homeland, and if guaranteed amnesty and repatriation, would at least stay neutral in the event the Germans intervened against the Bolsheviks.174
