Books: Scot in Moscow

BRITISH AGENT—R. H. Bruce Lockhart —Putnam ($2.75).

Few who have been in such personal and political scrapes as Bruce Lockhart, one-time (1915-17) British consul-general at Moscow, have admitted them in writing. With a canny candor that makes his book exciting reading, that is just what Author Lockhart does. Women and Bolsheviks were his trouble: between the two he has had some narrow escapes.

Of purely Scottish blood, Bruce Lockhart eschewed English universities, finished his education in France and Germany, then went to Malaya as a rubber planter. There he achieved sufficient fame as a footballer, too much notoriety when he took native royalty for a mistress. Timely malaria got him out of that scrape, sent him home to his outraged family. For lack of something better to do he took the examinations for the Foreign Office and passed at the head of the list, much to his surprise. In 1912 he was sent to Moscow as British vice-consul. He liked and got on well with Russia, Russian and Russians, had a high old time in Moscow, saw many a dawn break over the Kremlin. When he married an Australian girl he turned over a new leaf—for a while. Then rumors of his goings-on with a Russian Jewess reached his Ambassador, who spoke to him sorrowfully, extracted a pledge of good behavior. Three weeks later, the pledge broken, Lockhart was sent to England "for a rest." When he went back as head of the British Mission in 1918 his wife stayed behind and his mistress lived with him openly until he left Russia for good, two years later. Frank about his domestic misadventures, Lockhart does not dwell on them, spends more time on his eyewitness account of Russia in revolt.

Though he was in England, apparently in disgrace, during the "ten days that shook the world" (Nov. 7-17, 1917), as best-informed British expert on Russia he was considered indispensable. Early the following year he was sent back again as head of a special mission, to establish unofficial relations with the Bolsheviks. His job: "to do as much harm to the Germans as possible, to put a spoke in the wheels of the separate peace negotiations, and to stiffen ... the Bolshevik resistance to German demands." His complicated and delicate job was made harder by the muddled policy of his own government. "There was no British policy, unless seven different policies at once can be called a policy."

Lockhart met Lenin infrequently, Trotsky often. He thinks Lenin was extraordinarily impersonal, coldly logical; Trotsky brave, bitter, emotional; both able. No friend to the Tsarist regime (". . . unparalleled inefficiency and corruption. No other nation would have stood the privations which Russia stood for anything like the same length of time"), Lockhart admired many a Bolshevik bureaucrat, got in hot water with his colleagues and his government for holding out strongly against intervention. Finally he changed his mind, thus losing the Bolsheviks' confidence without gaining anybody else's. When Lenin was shot the Bolsheviks arrested Lockhart as a spy, held him in jail for a month. Lenin recovered; no evidence was found against Lockhart; he was allowed to leave Russia. He went back to England with a heavy heart, full of sad memories, gloomy forebodings.