A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  In believing that an accommodation with Russia could be reached, the Prime Minister carried on the traditions of the Liberal Party to which he belonged. His former colleagues, Asquith and Grey, had believed the Russians to have legitimate grievances in the Middle East, such as lack of access to a warm water port, which, if satisfied, would leave them content not to advance any further. In the same vein, Lloyd George argued that the alleged Russian threat to India was a fantasy. Bolshevik Russia lacked the resources to pose such a threat, he believed, and even “When Russia was well equipped, the Russians could not cross the mountains.”14 He agreed that Bolshevik propaganda in India might be a danger, but observed that “you can’t keep ideas out of a country by a military cordon.”15

  During 1920 and early 1921 Lloyd George engaged in the negotiation of a trade agreement with Moscow that was to give the Bolshevik regime de facto recognition and bring Russia back into the family of nations. He told Riddell that as a condition preliminary to negotiation he would insist that all Bolshevik propaganda abroad in Persia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the East should cease; and Riddell noted in his diary that “L.G. thinks Lenin will agree.”16 Quite the contrary proved to be true. The Soviet government, in a cable of instructions to its representative, indicated that “We can only agree to concrete concessions in the East at a political conference with England and on condition that we receive similar concessions from England also in the East. What these concessions are to consist of will be discussed when the time comes.”17 This hinted at continuing Russian imperial ambitions in the Middle East that were considerably more far-reaching than Lloyd George had supposed.

  55

  MOSCOW’S GOALS

  I

  While Britain’s leaders were disagreeing with one another about the relationship between Bolshevik communism and Russian imperialism, the Bolshevik leaders themselves were debating the nature of that relationship, with all of its implications for their postwar policy in the Middle East.

  Until the decade before the First World War, the Russian Empire had been expanding at the expense of its neighbors at a prodigious rate and for a long time. It has been calculated that, at the time, the Russian Empire had been conquering the territory of its neighbors at an average rate of 50 square miles a day for 400 years.1 With the acquisition of foreign territories came foreign peoples. At the time of the first scientific census in 1897, most of the Russian Empire’s subjects were not Russians. The Turkish-speaking peoples alone were more than 10 percent of the population, and Moslems were at least 14 percent.

  Now, Lenin’s Russia had to decide whether to try to reconquer the Moslem and other non-Russian peoples whom the czars had subjected to their rule. Lenin, for years, had argued that the non-Russian peoples should enjoy the right of self-determination. In theory he was a firm opponent of what he called Great Russian chauvinism. In 1915 he wrote that “We Great Russian workers must demand that our government should get out of Mongolia, Turkestan, and Persia…”2

  In 1917 he overcame the resistance of his colleagues at the Seventh Social Democratic Congress and pushed through a resolution declaring that the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire should be free to secede.

  The colleague whom he placed in charge of the nationalities issue was, however, of a different frame of mind. He was the Transcaucasian Bolshevik Joseph Dzhugashvili, who, after calling himself by many other aliases, had given himself the Russian name of Stalin. Although for a time he outwardly deferred to Lenin’s views on the nationalities question, Stalin did not share them; indeed he was fiercely at odds with Lenin over the nationalities issue and the constitution of the Soviet Union. Lenin’s proposal was for each of the Soviet countries—Russia, the Ukraine, Georgia, and the various others—to be independent; they were to cooperate with one another as allies do, on the basis of treaties between them. Stalin’s plan, on the other hand, was for the Ukraine, Georgia, and all the others to adhere to the Russian state—and Stalin prevailed. On 30 December 1922, the First Congress of Soviets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics approved the formation of a Soviet Union dominated by Russia.

  II

  How significant in practice were the differences between Lenin and Stalin?

  Lenin argued that the European nations within the Russian Empire should be allowed independence—and, in that, he certainly disagreed with Stalin. There is some evidence, however, that he privately believed that the Middle Eastern nationalities should not be allowed independence until a much later date*—which was different from Stalin’s belief that they should never be independent, but in the short run came to the same thing.

  Although he was opposed to compelling non-Russians to submit to Russian rule, Lenin, like Stalin, had no qualms about compelling non-Bolsheviks to submit to Bolshevik rule—and here, too, Lenin’s policy in practice did not appear as widely different from Stalin’s as it did in theory. Under Lenin’s leadership, Soviet Russia conquered non-Russian portions of the former Russian Empire and imposed local Bolshevik Soviet regimes upon them by force of arms. In each case a political police force, acting as a branch of Soviet Russia’s secret police, was established by Lenin’s government to help maintain the local Soviet regime. This was entirely in line with what Lenin had done in Russia: his was a minority regime that had seized power by force and that held on to power by employing as many as a quarter of a million secret policemen.

  But in Russian Central Asia, the Bolshevik minority consisted of Russians, while the non-Bolshevik majority consisted of natives; for Bolsheviks to rule non-Bolsheviks (which was Lenin’s policy) was, in practice, for Russians to rule non-Russians (which was Stalin’s policy).

  III

  In the beginning, the Bolshevik government promised the native populations of Central Asia their freedom. At the end of 1917, after seizing power in Petrograd, the Soviets issued an appeal for support, under the signatures of Lenin and Stalin, recognizing the Moslem population’s right to “Organize your national life in complete freedom.”4

  Would the Bolshevik leaders nonetheless try to reconquer the Czar’s Middle Eastern colonies? Their policy in this regard would offer London an important clue as to whether they were communist revolutionaries or Russian imperialists.

  The Russian Middle East—Russian Turkestan*—was a colonial empire that the czars had carved out of the previously independent Moslem world. Like Algeria, Morocco, the Sudan, or a score of other tribal areas in Africa and Asia, it had been subdued by force of modern European arms. Like other such colonies, it found that its economy was exploited for the benefit of its European masters. Like them, too, it resented being settled by colonists from Europe; there was nobody that a Turkish-speaking Moslem hated more than a Russian who came to take possession of his soil.

  Located deep in the heart of Eurasia, Turkestan is an area that remains little known to the outside world. The Russian-ruled part of it is about half the size of the continental United States: about one and a half million square miles. Vast mountain ranges on its eastern frontier block the moisture-laden clouds from the Pacific, so that most of its territory is an arid, largely unforested, plain. At the time of the First World War, about 20 to 25 percent of its population could be classified as nomads or semi-nomads, while the rest of its nearly ten million, largely Turkish-speaking, people lived in clusters around the fertile oasis towns.

  The 1914 war and the revolutions of 1917 brought confusion and anarchy to Central Asia. In part this was due to the extent and topography of the country and to its mixed population. It was a frontier country, and, even in the best of times, tribal conflicts, as well as the opposition of the indigenous peoples to Russian colonization, kept the area in disorder. While Turkestan was remote from the war, it had been the scene of a tribal revolt against wartime measures; and it had suffered a breakdown in government as a result of the two revolutions in Petrograd. Social conflicts emerged, as a small urban middle class resisted an attempt by feudal leaders to reassert authority. Too many leaders and too many ca
uses raised their banners and took to the field. Armies, armed bands, and raiding parties swept across the deserts and vast empty plains, appearing out of nowhere and as suddenly disappearing.

  War and revolution had thrown up their human wreckage: refugees seeking a way out and adventurers seeking a way in. From the disbanded prisoner-of-war camps, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, and soldiers of a dozen other nationalities streamed out in search of one goal or another. In the caravans and in the rickety railroad carriages that lurched across the treeless landscape of Central Asia were to be found an assortment of human types whose identities, missions, and motives were difficult to fathom; and the Soviet regime believed—or affected to believe—that foreign-inspired conspiracies were flourishing and ripening everywhere in the semi-tropical sunshine.

  During the years of post-revolutionary chaos, new indigenous regimes proclaimed their existence throughout the region; and Moscow treated them as challenges to be overcome. At the end of 1917 Moslems in Central Asia set up a regime in Khokand, seat of what had once been a khanate in the western Fergana valley, in opposition to the Tashkent Soviet (which was composed of Russian settlers and did not include a single Moslem among its members). Lacking money and arms Khokand looked for allies but found none. Stalin curtly dismissed its claims to function as a regime. On 18 February 1918 the Red Army captured and sacked Khokand, destroying most of the city and massacring its inhabitants. From its ruins, however, arose a loosely organized movement of marauding guerrilla bands called Basmachis who plagued the Russians for years afterward.

  During the next few years Soviet Russia destroyed one center of resistance after another. As the people of the Kazakh country learned in 1918, no support was to be obtained from the White Russians, for they, too, were opposed to native aspirations. The Kazakhs of the Central Asian plains had proclaimed their autonomy and asked the aid of the Czarist commander, Admiral Kolchak, in defending themselves against the Bolsheviks—only to find that he, too, was their enemy.

  The most serious threat to Soviet ambitions was posed by the “Native States” of Khiva and Bukhara, two former Czarist protectorates in Central Asia. As frontier states neighboring on Persia, Afghanistan, and China, they enjoyed contact with the outside world and could serve as a focus of anti-Soviet alliances.

  Moscow took advantage of internal strife in Khiva; the Red Army captured it on 13 September 1920, and installed a regime that allied itself with the Soviets. Thereafter Moscow ordered a series of liquidations of the Khivan leadership that paved the way for Khiva’s eventual incorporation into the Soviet Union.

  That left only Bukhara; and in dealing with the last bastion of native Turkish resistance, it occurred to the Soviets to make use of the Young Turkey leader Enver Pasha—whom British Intelligence had pictured as a member of the conspiracy directing the Bolshevik movement all along.

  56

  A DEATH IN BUKHARA

  I

  According to British Intelligence, the Young Turkey leaders were members of the German and Jewish conspiracy that controlled the Bolshevik regime. Yet from 1918 to 1922, as Britain’s leaders tried to fathom the intentions of the Bolshevik leaders, so did the fugitive leaders of the Young Turks—who did not control the Bolsheviks or even know very much about them.

  In November 1918, Enver Pasha, Djemal Pasha, and Talaat Bey escaped from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire with the aid of the retreating Germans and fled across the Black Sea toward Odessa. Eventually Enver and Talaat found their way to Berlin and there, in the late summer of 1919, they visited the Bolshevik representative Karl Radek in his jail cell. Radek had been one of the intermediaries between the German General Staff and Lenin in the Helphand-inspired funding of the Bolshevik Party. In 1919 he was imprisoned by the new German government in connection with the suppression of the communist uprising in Germany; but he was treated as a person of consequence and transacted political business from his cell.

  The startling political proposal that Radek made to the Young Turk leaders was that Enver should proceed to Moscow to negotiate a pact between Russian Bolshevism and Turkish nationalism directed against Britain. Enver was a lifelong foe of Russia and no friend to Bolshevism; but Radek assured him that “in Soviet Russia everyone was welcome who would support the offensive against English imperialism.”1

  A close friend of Enver’s in Berlin was General Hans von Seeckt, the brilliant creator and head of the new German army—the much-reduced and limited military force that the Allies permitted Germany to maintain pursuant to restrictions contained in the Treaty of Versailles. With his monocle and his rigid features, the 53-year-old von Seeckt was the prototype of the professional German officer to whom the Young Turks finally had turned for guidance during the war; and indeed during the final months of the war, von Seeckt had served as chief of staff of the Turkish army.

  Von Seeckt now agreed to help Enver make the difficult and dangerous trip to Moscow across chaotic eastern Europe, where nationalist forces in Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Hungary battled against communist revolutionaries or Russian Bolsheviks, as the Russian Civil War continued to rage. Enver gave von Seeckt a new appreciation of the possibilities afforded by the Bolsheviks for striking at the Allies. Karl Radek later wrote that Enver “was the first to explain to German military men that Soviet Russia is a new and growing world Power on which they must count if they really want to fight against the Entente.”2 These ideas, passed on by Enver to von Seeckt, bore fruit when von Seeckt, several years later, moved toward an alliance between the German military machine and Soviet Russia.

  An officer on von Seeckt’s staff arranged for Enver to be flown to Moscow in October 1919 in the company airplane of an aircraft manufacturer. But the arrangements miscarried; there was engine trouble, and the plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Lithuania. Enver carried false papers, and his true identity was not discovered; nonetheless, he was kept prisoner for two months in Lithuania—which, along with Latvia and Estonia, was at war with Soviet Russia—as a suspected spy. Once released, he returned to Berlin, and started out on a second effort to reach Moscow, this time being arrested and imprisoned in Latvia. According to his later account, he was questioned repeatedly by intelligence officers but succeeded in persuading them that his name was Altman and that he was “a Jewish German Communist of no importance.”3 By the summer of 1920 Enver finally reached Moscow, almost a year after first leaving Berlin.

  His political odyssey away from anti-communism and anti-Russianism seemed to have been complete. Enver wrote from Moscow to von Seeckt on 26 August 1920 urging him to help the Soviets. He claimed that

  There is a party here which has real power, and Trotsky also belongs to this party, which is for an agreement with Germany. This party would be ready to recognize the old German frontier of 1914. And they see only one way out of the present world chaos—that is, cooperation with Germany and Turkey. In order to strengthen the position of this party and to win the whole Soviet Government for the cause, would it not be possible to give unofficial help, and if possible sell arms?4

  At the same time Enver reported to von Seeckt that “The day before yesterday we concluded a Turkish-Russian treaty of friendship: under this the Russians will support us with gold and by all means.”5 (If the Bolshevik leaders really intended at the time to support Enver’s bid to assume the leadership of the Turkish rebellion, however, they later changed their minds when they were made aware of the complexity of the Turkish political situation.)

  II

  On 1 September 1920 the Bolsheviks convened the “first congress of peoples of the east” in Baku, the capital of recently captured Moslem Azerbaijan. The congress brought together 1,891 delegates of various Asian peoples, of whom 235 delegates were Turks. The congress was sponsored by the Third (or Communist) International—the Comintern, as it was called—but a significant percentage of the delegates were not communists. Enver attended the congress as a guest of the Comintern, whose representatives at the congress were Karl Rad
ek, Grigori Zinoviev, and the Hungarian Bela Kun. Zinoviev, the leader of the Communist International, acted as president of the congress.

  Although Enver claimed to have been received by Lenin and was sponsored at the congress by Zinoviev, he was best known as the partner of imperial Germany and the killer of the Armenians; there was substantial opposition among the delegates to his being allowed to participate. A compromise was reached according to which a statement by Enver was read to the congress rather than delivered in person; even so it was punctuated by boos and protests. In his statement Enver claimed to represent a “union of the revolutionary organizations of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Egypt, Arabia, and Hindustan.”6 More to the point, he aspired to resume the leadership of Turkey; but Turkish delegates who supported Kemal made it plain to the Soviets that Moscow would antagonize them if it backed Enver.

  Although the invitation to the congress had been phrased in the communist language of world revolution, Zinoviev, once at the congress, seemed to be calling on the assembled delegates for aid in a national struggle between Russia and Britain. In his opening address he cried out “Brothers, we summon you to a holy war, in the first place against English imperialism!”7 Since many of those who were called upon to join in the crusade were non-communist or even anti-communist, the Comintern felt obliged to defend itself against the accusation that it was cynically using them as instruments of Soviet foreign policy. Karl Radek told the congress that “The eastern policy of the Soviet Government is thus no diplomatic manoeuvre, no pushing forward of the peoples of the east into the firing-line in order, by betraying them, to win advantages for the Soviet republic…We are bound to you by a common destiny…”8 Enver’s presence as the Comintern’s guest belied this; that, at least, is what was said in European socialist circles within the next few weeks. The Comintern, according to a former colleague of Lenin’s, had succumbed to a temptation “to regard the peoples of the east as pieces on the chessboard of the diplomatic war with the Entente.”9 A Social Democrat argued that at Baku the Bolsheviks had given up socialism in favor of power politics.10