There was no clean dividing line between war and peace. Hostilities between the new Russia and Germany, Austria and Turkey were formally ended in December 1917 by the armistice of Brest-Litovsk and that of Erzincan, but German forces stayed on to occupy Ukraine. Then, when Germany and its allies themselves capitulated late in 1918, Allied troops occupied Murmansk in the far north, and set up camps in southern Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East, where a large Japanese force operated until 1922. A bitter, chaotic civil war between Bolshevik ‘Reds’ and anti-Bolshevik ‘Whites’ had been waged since 1918 and was to continue into 1920, while, in a desperate attempt to link up with Marxist insurgents in Germany, the new regime also fought a losing war with the reconstituted state of Poland. Russia was engaged in total war for six years, not three, and when hostilities eventually petered out the country was bankrupt and ravaged, its people exhausted. No other power in modern times except, perhaps, for Germany in 1945 has presented so many scenes of desolation.
When Lenin and his supporters replaced the Provisional Government in the old imperial capital and occupied governmental posts, they found them to be only the shell of an imperial system in an advanced state of decomposition. These circumstances, as well as his innate distrust - a characteristic of conspirators - persuaded the new leader to use his small but disciplined Bolshevik Party to monitor government agencies at every level and to undertake executive tasks. The Party also enforced his ideas of the politically correct, for Lenin set the highest value on ideology. Lenin had never imagined that his Bolsheviks could survive in power except as part of an international Marxist revolution, or at least without a revolution in Germany which would then come to his aid. Events were eventually to show that even this hope was futile. Not until December 1924 was the doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’ to be proclaimed and the Empire reconstituted in the guise of a free association of socialist states, though by then Lenin was dead.
Hard experience and practical necessity slowly eroded parts of the theoretical Marxist model with which the Bolsheviks had set out. Indeed, in some respects the new regime came to bear a startling resemblance to its tsarist predecessor. As the American correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor in Russia was to observe in the 1930s, though ‘the masks are new … the technique of government’ was strikingly similar to that of the Empress Anna two centuries before, when ‘espionage became the most encouraged state service; everyone who seemed dangerous or inconvenient was eliminated from society [and] masses were banished.’ 1However, the empress had been primarily concerned to supervise the morals of her courtiers. The call now was for security which was comprehensive and severe.
The process had begun with the need for the new regime to secure itself against its competitors, as any regime must do. Recognizing this, Lenin created a new security agency to guard the Revolution, appointing a Pole, Felix Dzerzhinskii, to run it. Known as the Cheka, this was the forerunner of the KGB. It maintained a surveillance system which kept every foreigner and suspected ‘class enemy’ in its sights and set up detention camps, interrogation centres and all the other apparatus needed by an efficient secret police service. Given the war conditions that prevailed when it was established and the regime’s vulnerability in its early years, the Cheka’s zeal and cruelties were hardly surprising, but the characteristics became ingrained.
In March 1921 a serious armed rising was mounted by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, who were more radical even than the Bolsheviks. As under the old regime, there were recurring peasant disturbances, in particular a huge one in the province of Tambov, a regular scene of large-scale rural protests in tsarist times. It was in suppressing these efficiently that a former lieutenant in the imperial army, Mikhail Tukhachevskii, commended himself to the new regime. A massive emigration of the old elite was still in progress; most of the officer corps gravitated to the anti-Bolshevik Whites, but a surprising number of them stayed on to serve the Reds. In fact the new Red Army employed no fewer than 75,000 former tsarist officers, including 800 of general rank.
Inertia was the principal reason. Many opted to keep their jobs rather than concern themselves too much with the regime. Others felt that any firm government, even a Bolshevik one, was preferable to anarchy; and straightforward patriotism was a factor too. As the celebrated General Brusilov, hero of the successful offensive against Austria-Hungary in 1916, confessed:
I thought it the duty of every citizen to stand by the country and live in it whatever the cost. At one moment under the stress of family troubles … I was tempted to retire to the Ukraine, and then to leave Russia. But my doubts did not last, and I returned to my heartfelt convictions. It is not every nation that has had to pass through so vast and so distressing an upheaval as the agony of Russia. The path may be hard, but I can choose no other, even if it should cost me my life. 2
But once enrolled in the Red Army many officers stayed on out of fear, for the Bolsheviks were terrified of subversion and — especially in times of danger, as when the White commander General Yudenich moved his troops on St Petersburg in 1919 - they would shoot their ex-imperial officers on mere suspicion of betrayal.
The transition was distressing, the suffering widespread. In the countryside, food requisitioning became a scourge of the peasantry. Used as an emergency wartime measure to ensure food supplies to the cities, it was adopted by the Bolshevik regime, which sent teams of young Party men into the countryside to requisition grain, confiscate hidden stores of it, or simply steal it. The practice caused anger and distress, and it had been an issue in both the Kronstadt and the Tambov rebellions. But the root cause of the food shortage lay in a shattered economy. Cities faced starvation because peasants did not market enough grain, and the peasants did not market enough grain because there was nothing to buy with the proceeds. Industry could not be rebuilt without capital, and Russia was devoid of capital. Nor could capital be raised abroad as it had been before the war.
The first three years of war had cost the Empire 16.5 billion gold rubles -four times the internal debt of 1914 — not counting the massive issues of paper money which had fed inflation. On the eve of the World War, thanks largely to railway-building, the Russian economy had already been dependent on foreign credits, but by 1918 its foreign debt had grown from under 4 billion to nearly 14 billion gold rubles. About half this enormous sum consisted of war loans. The major creditors were Britain and France, its erstwhile allies and new-found enemies. Russia was in no position to repay, and Lenin had no intention of doing so. In January 1918 he annulled ‘all foreign debts without any exception or condition’. Four years later, in 1922, an international conference held in Genoa tried to resolve the problem. Russia’s creditors recognized that loans were needed for reconstruction, but insisted that the debt, which the country could not repay, be recognized. However, Moscow (the capital again from March 1918) was obdurate, and so Soviet Russia was isolated by the international community — until in March 1922 at Rapallo Russia made common cause with the other outcast European state, debt-ridden Germany. 3
The country’s economic rebuilding had to proceed without benefit of foreign investment. Foreign trade surpluses might have contributed, but as late as 1926—7 they were only a third of what they had been before the war. World demand for grain had slumped in the aftermath of war. Somehow the economy had to be lifted, but it was clear that the Bolsheviks’ original ideas would not work. They had started out by nationalizing the banks and business. They had even abolished money. With industrial production in 1920 down to a fifth of what it had been in 1913, 4 theory was soon sacrificed to necessity. In the spring of 1921 an attempt was made to stimulate activity by means of a ‘New Economic Policy’. This permitted small-scale private enterprise, including private shops, and commercial middlemen. Farmers were now allowed to rent land and hire labour; state subsidies for raw materials and wages were abolished, and taxation reduced somewhat, 5 though large enterprises remained firmly under central control and subjected to stri
ct central planning and discipline. In October 1921 a state bank was set up, run by a Constitutional Democrat who had served as a minister before the war. It proceeded to issue paper banknotes, of apologetically tiny dimensions, and even a gold coin.
These concessions to reality eased the situation. Enough food and consumer goods appeared to avert immediate catastrophe. Nevertheless, the country’s economic problems were so great that only central direction could get the country moving. In the judgement of the historian best acquainted with the early Soviet period, planning was a product of national emergency rather than doctrine. 6 Even so, serious economic problems were to recur. Meanwhile the Party was alternately mounting campaigns to recruit enough members to enforce its line in every outpost factory and farm and being ‘cleansed’ or ‘purged’ of ‘opportunists’ and ‘adventurers’ who rushed in when the ranks were opened.
And despite all these pressing concerns, the new regime set about building an empire — albeit an empire of a different kind to that of the tsars.
In November 1917 Lenin and Stalin, his commissioner for nationalities, published a Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia. It proclaimed them to be equal and sovereign, and asserted their ‘right to free self-determination, up to the point of secession and the formation of independent states’. It also pledged the ‘free development of national minorities and national groups inhabiting the territory of Russia’. 7 On 24 January 1918 the situation was clarified by a Declaration of the Rights of Oppressed Nationalities. This transformed Russia, and by implication the Empire - or what could be salvaged of it - into ‘The Republic of the Soviets [Councils] of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’Deputies. The Soviet Republic’, it continued, ‘is constituted on the basis of a free union of free nationalities as a Federation of Soviet National Republics.’ The declared aim was to create a genuinely ‘free and voluntary union of the working classes of all the nationalities of Russia’. 8 The fact that the term ‘Russia’ itself denoted both a nationality and an empire was not addressed. The policy, based on the idea that nationalities could realize themselves while happily coexisting with one another, could be traced back to the earliest followers of Herder. Yet, as we now know, nations will compete and even fight unless restrained by some higher authority or greater force. How the new regime would be able to square the circle of nationalism remained to be seen, but the declaration conveyed the message that nationalism was consistent with socialism.
In the short term the policy enjoyed some success, but it was military power rather than political ideology that often decided outcomes on the ground. Indeed, the policy was founded on interest as well as principle. The new regime wanted to win over the non-Russian nationalities in its struggle against the anti-Communist White forces. That was why, in the words of one historian, ‘the Russian Communist Party bent over backwards to appease non-Russians’, even to the extent of ejecting Terek Cossacks from their farms and handing the land over to Chechens, with whose Sufi leader, Ali Mitaev, it was in momentary alliance. 9 It was therefore thanks to the Soviet regime that Chechens were able to claim a moment of sovereignty in 1921, though Mitaev was to meet his death at Soviet hands only a few years later.
In the wake of the German withdrawal from the Baltic provinces in 1918, Bolshevik forces moved into Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to help establish Soviet republics. There was some indigenous support for these regimes, but in the end they could not hold out against opposing forces, and the three Baltic entities became independent states. Lenin had already launched Finland into independent statehood and abrogated any claim to Poland, but he was not prepared to write off the idea of a zone of nations around the Russian Republic which would cohere with it.
The first success was Ukraine, which fell into the throes of civil war and chaos following the departure of the Germans. Local Bolsheviks fought supporters of Ukrainian independence. Polish forces occupied a substantial part, including all Galicia; anti-revolutionary White Russian forces under General Denikin also entered the fray, while independent gangs of robbers, ‘Cossacks’ and anarchists caused mayhem in many districts. Serious famine added to Ukraine’s woes, as did outbreaks of black typhus, massacres and pogroms. Humanitarian aid sent in from the West, as it was into Russia, barely touched the problem, and the proximity of French troops did not help. At last, with the help of Ukrainian groups which decided to throw their lot in with the Bolsheviks, but mainly thanks to the disintegration of the White forces, most of the country emerged as the ‘Ukrainian Soviet Republic’. Since a Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic had come into existence at the beginning of 1919, the new Soviet Russia could be said to have achieved a second ‘ingathering of the Russian lands’, first achieved by Ivan III (see Chapter 4).
How much freedom nationalistic Ukrainians would be allowed soon became apparent. Ukrainian, recognized as a distinct language by the former imperial government only in 1913, became the official language, though Russian was soon given the status of second official language. Mikhail Hrushevsky, doyen of Ukrainian historians and a notable patriot, became president of the new Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Newspapers were published in Ukrainian; theatres, museums and libraries were Ukrainianized, and Ukrainians were given prominent posts in Ukraine’s government and Party. Agreements with Russia were sometimes dignified by the status of international treaties, but key decisions were taken by Moscow. There was freedom for cultural nationalism, not for political nationalism. The new Soviet Union could be a federation of independent nations provided a central Communist Party supervised them all from Moscow. 10
Though Stalin was a Georgian, as well as being a former trainee for the Orthodox priesthood, he did not at first support the idea of Georgian independence. Instead he lumped Georgia together with Armenia and Azerbaydzhan in an attempt to create a Transcaucasian Federation. Such a federation had been formed in the wake of the Revolution, only to split up into three ephemeral independent states, and it was force, as represented by a victorious Red Army, which eventually decided the matter. So it was that in the spring of 1921 the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic came to replace the Georgian Democratic Republic. Azerbaydzhan was brought into the union in September 1920, and Armenia a year later. In 1922 representatives of a ‘Transcaucasian Republic’, which subsumed all these, signed a union treaty with the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian republics, but Transcaucasia proved too fissile to survive.
Further east, most Kazakhs seem to have favoured autonomy and, like the local Cossacks, sided with Admiral Kolchak’s White army against the Reds. The fighting was heavy, widespread and prolonged, but by the end of 1919 the Reds had prevailed in eastern Siberia, Orenburg and the northern Kazakh territories. By the spring the Seven Rivers territory was also in their hands. Famine followed. Although the Soviet regime had established political dominance, it discovered that it could not administer an economy based largely on semi-nomadic livestock-herding. 11 In both the Kazakh areas and the rest of what had become Soviet Central Asia officials had to cope with societies seriously different from those to the west. These societies were largely Muslim and poorly educated. Some regarded the new regime as liberating, but rather more disliked their new rulers much as they had the old. Still further east Bolshevik rule took longer to establish. Eighty thousand Japanese troops had occupied the Amur region in 1918, and, though the Communists had soon set up a ‘Far Eastern Republic’ in Siberia east of Lake Baikal, it was 1922 before the Soviet Union secured that region. The United States had put 7,000 troops into Vladivostok, and the British a further 800. 12Only in 1923 did Chukhotka and Yakutia become Communist.
In 1924 a constitution for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was promulgated. The Union was to be a ‘federal multinational socialist federation’ based on the principle of self-determination. It consisted of three Republics of the Union - Russia, Ukraine and Belarus - and eleven Autonomous Republics - including Kazakhstan, Karelia and the Crimea, and others for Buriat-Mongols, Volga Germans, Tatars and others. There were
also thirteen Autonomous Provinces designed to accommodate, inter alia, the Udmurts of western Siberia, the Koni, the Chechens and the Maris. Jews were allotted Birobijan in the Amur region of the Far East as a national home; the Ulch and other small peoples were given ‘national districts’. However, Kazakhstan and Ukraine contained large minorities of ethnic Russians, and not a little ethnic-Russian territory was parcelled off to Estonia and Latvia, which were outside the Soviet Union. 13 Political and ethnic frontiers were not congruent in the Soviet Union, but, given the propensity of peoples to reproduce at different rates, to acculturate and to migrate, they never could be. How genuinely the values earnestly proclaimed in the Constitution were reflected in the Union is open to question, but if it really was an empire that had taken shape it was a new kind of empire.
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