Lockhart Plot or Dzerhinskii Plot?

Abstract

The summer of 1918 found Bolshevik fortunes at low ebb. The heady days of November were long past, and the new rulers had to cope with the enormous problems left in the wake of their seizure of power. Russia was in ruins, and the attempt to extricate her from the World War had been only partly successful. The ruinous Peace of Brest-Litovsk had been signed with Imperial Germany in March, but Soviet Russia still found herself drawn inexorably into the vortex of war. Ambitious German generals sought to detach ever larger areas from the new Soviet state, while the Allied and Associated Powers maneuvered relentlessly to restore in Russia an eastern front against Germany. Within Russia civil war grew more intense. Counterrevolutionary forces of every hue and complexion, from monarchists to Mensheviks, were organizing to overthrow the Soviet regime. With each passing day the Soviets seemed to weaken as their enemies multiplied and grew bolder in their attacks. Soviet Russia seemed virtually to disintegrate. As early as May the revolt of the Czech Legion, then in transit across Siberia, had created a solid base for the enemies of bolshevism. By late June forces opposed to Lenin controlled all of Siberia from Vladivostock to Samara. In early July it was the turn of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Thoroughly disillusioned in their alliance with the Bolsheviks, they left the coalition in a hail of bullets and exploding bombs, unleashing insurrection in Moscow and assassinating the German ambassador. The insurrection failed, but it shook the Soviet government to its foundations, a shock intensified by coincident blows aimed at the Bolsheviks by Boris Savinkov and M. A. Muraviev. While the Socialist Revolutionaries struck in the Soviet capital, Savinkov attempted to seize the strategically important region of the Upper Volga, and Muraviev, the commander of the Red Army on the Middle Volga, suddenly renounced his allegiance to Moscow, turned his away from the enemy, and nearly opened the entire front to the advancing Czech Legion. Simultaneously, the German government, outraged by the murder of their ambassador, demanded the right to station a battalion of security troops in Moscow; the Allies, asking no leave of the Bolshevik government, simply seized control of the north. In July Murmansk fell to their forces, and on August 2