by S. A Smith
Some see the military advantages of the Reds as overwhelming, but that is to make too much of hindsight. A military victory for the Whites was by no means an impossibility: if Kolchak and Denikin had advanced on Moscow simultaneously in 1919, rather than five months apart, or if Kolchak had struck a deal with the Finnish general Mannerheim (both of which were on the cards), the Red Army might well have gone under.
If military and strategic factors are paramount in explaining the White defeat, socio-political factors cannot be ignored. By 1919 all the White administrations recognized that they could not simply shelve the thorny issues of land reform, national autonomy, labour policy, and local government. The policies they concocted, however, offered too little,
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too late and exposed deep division in White ranks. First, with regard to the land, all White administrations accepted that there could be no return to the status quo ante, yet there were enough cases of officers returning former landowners to their estates to fix in peasant minds the notion that a White victory would bring about the return of the landlords. Whenever the Whites threatened, therefore, peasants swung behind the Reds. Second, the Whites had to deal with non-Russian nationalities; yet their hatred of what Denikin called the 'sweet poisonous dreams of independence' prevented them from making serious concessions. They would not recognize the independence of Finland and the Baltic states; they would not negotiate with J. Pilsudski, President of Poland from November 1918; they would not recognize a 'separatist' Ukrainian state. By contrast, the Bolsheviks, however much they alienated nationalists at times, were willing to grant a measure of self-government. Finally, despite trumpeting their devotion to the £ Russian people, the Whites failed to forge a concept of the nation with g which peasants and workers could identify. With the Church on their e side, they might have tried to play on the Orthodox faith of the jg majority, yet they proved too hidebound by a militaristic and narrowly 1 elitist ethos to adapt to the world of mass politics. Ironically, it was the internationalist Bolsheviks who tapped into patriotic sentiment, exploiting the Whites' dependence on the Allies to portray them as playthings of foreign capital.
By the end of the civil war the Red Army had become the largest institution of state, enjoying absolute priority in the allocation of resources. In the absence of a numerous or politically reliable proletariat, it became by default the principal social base of the regime. Fighting to defend the socialist motherland, living in collective units, subject to political education, the army proved to be the seeding ground for the cadres who came to staff the apparatus of the party-state in the 1920s. It also proved to be the agency through which the revolution was brought to new areas. Instead of socialism being spread through mobilizing workers, the Bolsheviks came to believe that what
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N. I. Bukharin called 'red intervention'was the best means of furthering socialism. In 1920, without the least embarrassment, the leading Bolshevik, К. В. Radek, could claim: 'We were always for revolutionary war. The bayonet is an essential necessity for introducing communism.'
Nationalism and empire
By October 1917 it looked as though the Russian empire might break up, in the way the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires did, so it was important that the Bolsheviks should have a clear policy on the question of self-determination for the non-Russian peoples. In fact, they were divided on the matter. Lenin was sensitive to the oppression that the non-Russian peoples had experienced under tsarism and believed that they must be given the right to secede from the empire if there was to be any chance of them cooperating with the Russian proletariat in the longer term. The majority did not share his view. In December 1917 the new Commissar of Nationalities, Stalin, expressed the consensus view when he argued that self-determination should be exercised only by the labouring classes, and not by the bourgeoisie. Because they had no firm position, therefore, Bolshevik policy was determined to a large extent by pragmatic considerations.
On 31 December 1917 the Bolsheviks recognized the independence of Finland, something the Provisional Government had been reluctant to do. In the Baltic as a whole, however, they fought movements for national independence since support for soviet power was strong. In Latvia German occupation undermined the Soviets and paved the way for a nationalist government. In Estonia, where Soviets ran many towns, Bolshevik indifference to nationalist sensitivities, combined with failure to expropriate the German barons, strengthened support for the Maa pa ev which repelled the Red Army in early 1919, with assistance from Whites, the British, and Finnish volunteers. By 1920 the Bolsheviks were reconciled to the loss of Estonia and Latvia. In Belorussia and
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Lithuania nationalism was weak and the defeat of Germany left a power vacuum which Poles and Reds sought to fill. After the Germans withdrew, the feeble government in Belorussia collapsed, allowing the Reds to take over. In March 1919 they merged Belorussia with Lithuania to form the Litbel soviet republic. The following month, however, Poland occupied Vilnius, the putative capital of independent Lithuania, reinstated landowners, and made Polish the official language. Nationalism was weak in Lithuania, the population being largely peasant and the small urban population Jewish or Polish, yet nationalists rather adeptly exploited the Soviet-Polish war to gain independence albeit within much reduced borders. By the Treaty of Riga, the Bolsheviks recognized the independence of the Baltic states and of a Poland whose eastern border extended well into Belorussian and Ukrainian-majority territory. Signed in March 1921, the treaty reflected the inability of either Russia or Poland to establish their hegemony in the Baltic in the way £ that Germany once had.
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e The loss of Ukraine was somethinq the Bolsheviks found much harder to .2
jg contemplate. No fewer than nine governments came and went in the 1 space of three years, testifying to the inability of nationalists, Whites, or Reds to enforce control. Caught between the Reds and Whites, the intermittent nationalist governments turned for protection first to Germany, then to the Entente, and finally to Poland. Torn by political division, they found themselves increasingly at odds with a peasantry that looked for protection to the guerrilla bands of Makhno and the other otomany, or chiefs. The civil war devastated Ukraine but had a paradoxical effect on social identities. Ukrainian peasants turned inwards as centralized power broke down, yet their identification with the Ukrainian nation was strengthened as a result of independent statehood. Twice the Bolsheviks gained control of Ukraine and each time their promise of self-determination proved hollow. Only in 1920 after Moscow cleared Russian chauvinists out of leadership of the Ukrainian Communist Party did the new Soviet administration seriously address aspirations for self-determination. And in a pattern replicated
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elsewhere, radical nationalists, recognizing that they must settle for less than they would ideally like, accepted the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a framework in which they could work.
Aspirations for Transcaucasian unity proved transient once the Russian
army withdrew from the region in winter 1917-18. As Russian power
receded, so Turkish influence increased, exacerbating ethnic tension,
especially between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Baku. In May this led
to the collapse of the Transcaucasian Sejm and the emergence of three
separate states, all of which were beset by fearsome economic
difficulties, predation by the big powers, and mutual conflict over
territorial boundaries. In Azerbaijan Musavat nationalists enjoyed little
backing from the peasantry and support for soviet power remained-
strong in Baku. Falling oil revenues led to high unemployment and*
rocketing inflation. Independent Armenia, confined to a small^
landlocked territory around Erevan contested by i
ts neighbours, was in £.
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an even more wretched state, inundated by refugees and wracked byg.
starvation and disease. The Dashnaktsutiun formed a government of|"
national emergency that quickly dropped any pretension to socialism. In^
Georgia, by far the most viable of the three states, the Mensheviks won£>
80% of the popular vote in 1919. Despite the economic chaos, theyg-
carried out land reforms and allowed trade unions and cooperatives to^
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operate freely. The one blot on their record was the brutal treatment of |-
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ethnic minorities within Georgia.
Because of its petroleum and mineral resources, the Bolsheviks were determined to regain control of Transcaucasia. In April 1920 the Red Army invaded Azerbaijan and in September Armenia turned to it for help after it became embroiled in war with Turkey. By this stage, many nationalists in both countries saw in their own soviet republics the only viable form of statehood. In Georgia, however, this was not true. In May 1920 Moscow recognized Georgia against the wishes of Georgian communists such as S. Orjonikidze, one of Stalin's most loyal supporters. Yet in January 1921, in contravention of Moscow's orders
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'not to self-determine Georgia', the Red Army marched in to the country.
On 24 Novemberthe Bolsheviks invited Muslims to ordertheir national life 'freely and without hindrance', yet soviet power was everywhere established by ethnic Russians with a classically colonialist attitude towards the Muslim people. The claim of Tatar merchants, mullahs, and intellectuals to represent the community of Islam was widely resented by Muslims, not least by the Bashkirs of the southern Urals who, though closely related, were patronized by them for having given up nomadism relatively late. Radical Tatars, such as M. S. Sultangaliev, in the absence of a sizeable proletariat, seized on the creation of a Muslim Red Army as a vehicle to establish a Tatar-Bashkir state stretching from the mid-Volga to the Urals. Initially, Bashkirs sought to realize their aspirations by turning to the Whites, but it was not long before reform-minded £ Muslims and political radicals turned to the communists. Fearful of g becoming junior partners in a Tatar-Bashkir state, they insisted on and e got their own autonomous soviet socialist republic (ASSR) in March jg 1919. As early as June 1920, however, some began to defect to the 1 guerrilla movement, known as the basmachi, in disgust at interference in their affairs by Russian communists on the ground. In Crimea, too, the left wing of the nationalist Milli Firka joined the communists; and once the Cheka had extirpated all opposition, a Crimean ASSR was proclaimed in October 1921. Meanwhile in the middle Volga a Tatar ASSR was finally established in May 1920, but it left 75% of the scattered Tatars outside its borders. Sultangaliev and his allies, who formed the core of theTatarstan Communist Party, for a brief period brilliantly used the opportunity of having their own state to promote national identity among the Tatars.
In Turkestan there was still little agreement as to whether nationhood should be realized on an all-Turkestan scale or whether its constituent peoples should form separate states. In the steppes, the Alash Orda proclaimed Kazakh autonomy in December 1917 and turned to the
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Whites in the face of the Red Army advance. By spring 1919, however, Kolchak's hostility to Kazakh autonomy swung it towards a compromise with the Bolsheviks. In August 1920 the Kazakhs received a polity of their own in the shape of an ASSR, clan and village structures being reconfigured into Soviets. In Tashkent the Turkestan Council of People's Commissars refused to recognize the Kokand autonomous government, dominated as it was by reform-minded Muslims and conservative clerics. In February 1918 it carried out an appalling massacre, putting Kokand to the torch and slaughtering almost 60% of its inhabitants. Moscow stepped in to curb these excesses and ensured that ten Muslims were given positions in a new Turkestan Republic. This new government, however, managed to alienate the native population by seizing clerically held lands, closing religious schools, and abolishing shariat courts, so that by 1919 over 20,000 had joined the guerrillas. Following the capture of Bukhara in September 1920, the guerrilla movement spread to the whole of Central Asia, acquiring a pronounced Islamist character. It was not finally put down until 1925. The people's republics of Khorezm and Bukhara - their pre-industrial economies precluded their being called 'socialist' - along with the Turkestan ASSR lasted until 1924, when separate Uzbek, Turkmen, Tadzhik, and Kazakh republics were formed.
Overall, the civil war strengthened national identities yet deepened divisions within nationalist movements. Most nationalists proved unable politically or militarily to remain neutral in the contest between Reds and Whites and many ended up in hock to Germany, Turkey, Allied interventionists, or Poland. Most lacked solid popular support (there were exceptions, such as Georgia) and most fell prey to damaging conflicts over social and economic policies, especially concerning the land. By the end of the civil war, the Bolsheviks offered nationalists less than many wanted - although it is worth remembering that in 1917 few had aspired to complete national independence - yet far more than was on offer from Whites, the Allies, the Germans, or Turks. At the same time, they exploited the weakness of nationalism to reintegrate the bulk
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of the non-Russian territories into the Soviet Union. By 1922 the territory of the Soviet state was only 4% smaller than that of the tsarist empire. Moreover, the logic of this reincorporation was determined by many of the same geopolitical, security, and economic considerations that had governed the expansion of the tsarist state. A colossal territory unbroken by well-defined geographical or ethnic features, the unfavourable location of mineral resources, and above all, competition with rival states encouraged the reconstitution of a centralized quasi-imperial state. This did not mean that the Bolsheviks were simply old-style imperialists whose commitment to national self-determination was fraudulent. Despite the rampant racism of certain Bolsheviks on the ground, and the fact that the centre was never unequivocally in favour of granting national autonomy, policy in this period was generally animated by internationalism. It is not possible otherwise to explain why so much energy went into forging alliances with national £ movements or devising political frameworks for self-determination. g Prior to 1917 the Bolsheviks had opposed the concept of federalism, e preferring 'regional autonomy' within a unitary state. Yet, haphazardly, jg in response to forces that defied their control, they proceeded to 1 restructure the former empire as a federation of soviet republics constituted along ethno-national lines. A form of federalism that gave non-Russian peoples a measure of political autonomy plus broad rights of cultural self-expression seemed to be the best means of reconciling the centrifugal impulses of nationalism with the centralizing impulse of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Party dictatorship
In December 1917 the Cheka was set up to 'liquidate all attempts and acts of counter-revolution and sabotage'. It quickly turned into one of the most powerful organs of state, involved not only
in eliminating counter-revolutionaries - of whom there were not a few - but also in combating speculation, corruption, and crime. By autumn 1918 the Cheka was associated above all with the Red terror. The Bolsheviks
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initially insisted that terror was a legitimate method of defending the dictatorship of the proletariat, but they promised to use it only as a last resort. As early as January 1918, however, Lenin warned:'Until we use terror against speculators - shooting them on the spot - nothing will happen,' prompting the Left SR, I. N. Steinberg, to ask why in that case he should waste his time serving as Commissar of Justice. It was only with the near-fatal attack on Lenin by the anarchist F. Kaplan on 30 August 1918 that terror became elevated to official policy. In Petrograd the leading newspaper shrieked:'For the blood of Lenin ... let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie - more blood, as much as possible.'
My words to you, you bloodthirsty beast You intruded into the ranks of the revolution and did not allow the Constituent Assembly to meet. You said: 'Down with prisons, Down with shootings, Down with soldiering. Let wage workers be secure.' In a word you promised heaps of gold and a heavenly existence. The people felt the revolution, began to breathe easily. We were allowed to meet, to say what we liked, fearing nothing. And then you, Bloodsucker, appeared and took away freedom from the people. Instead of turning prisons into schools, they're full of innocent victims. Instead of forbidding shootings, you've organized a terror and thousands of the people are shot mercilessly every day; you've brought industry to a halt so that workers are starving, the people are without shoes or clothes. Letter from a Red Army soldier to Lenin, 25 December 1918
