This not only took the world by surprise — it was also widely thought to be an internal phenomenon, safely quarantined from other countries. Yet Soviet foreign policy had not lost its potential to destabilize politics in Europe. As ex-Ambassador Boris Bakhmetev observed, Bolshevism ultimately had to expand westwards or risk withering away. Militarism was inherent in its situation whether it liked it or not.20 The Kremlin’s rulers needed foreign revolutions for their own security since the treaties with capitalist governments could bring only temporary relief — and the possibility of an anti-Soviet crusade was a permanent one. The Bolsheviks were anyway convinced that global capitalism was vulnerable to profound inner instabilities, inevitably leading to world wars and economic depression that would offer opportunities for communist political expansion. Comintern continued to send agents, advice and finance around the globe. Under its guidance dozens of new communist parties promoted the cause of socialist revolution. There had been another, equally disastrous attempt at insurrection in Germany in 1923. Apart from an initial objection by Stalin, it had been supported by the entire Politburo. There were also attempts at urban risings in Estonia and Bulgaria. Despite such disappointments, the communist leaders in Moscow did not give up hope of foreign revolutions — and Germany remained the great target.
Publicly they continued to pretend that the German Communist Party would have to make revolution without external assistance. This was just as misleading as the notion that the Comintern was independent of Moscow. Behind closed doors the Soviet leadership accepted that they would have to send in the Red Army to support any German revolution that might break out. The Western Allies would never tolerate the existence of a communist state in the heart of Europe and would oppose any attempt to contravene the treaty of Versailles. There was unlikely to be a ‘European socialist revolution’ without yet another great European war.21 Revolution in Berlin would be the first step towards a continental bloodbath. Bolshevik leaders thought this a price worth paying in the Marxist revolutionary cause. Small wonder that the peoples of eastern and east-central Europe refused to take a casual approach to the possibility that communism might soon be on the march again. Owners of businesses worried for their property; priests and their congregations fretted that spiritual freedom might be crushed. Millions of people yearned simply for peace. The Bolsheviks had no intention of giving them rest.
So a first Cold War took place between the USSR and the Allies even before 1945. Obviously the Iron Curtain that Ethel Snowden had in mind in 1920 was not the same as the one that stretched down the middle of Europe after 1945. What she mainly meant was Russia’s isolation from the world rather than a political, ideological and military stand-off between two global military and political coalitions. Yet the potential for the first Cold War to turn into an even bigger and more dangerous one was already present — and it became a reality when the Soviet Union became a great power by dint of the country’s industrialization in the 1930s and its victory on the eastern front against the Third Reich in 1944–5.
The October Revolution had lasted longer than most observers had thought possible back in 1917. After breaking the spine of the Wehrmacht in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, the Red Army was the first armed force into Berlin in 1945. The spread of communism that had been the dream of Lenin and Trotsky was fulfilled as Stalin communized the entire eastern half of Europe. Immediately he directed the USSR’s new industrial might at achieving military parity with the US. The two great military coalitions of NATO and the Warsaw Pact avoided all-out war with each other. Instead there was a second Cold War involving intensified political, economic and ideological competition — and by the 1970s a quarter of the globe’s land area was governed by communist states. The tensions between the USSR and the US frequently came close to military clashes, but mercifully the two sides held themselves back from the brink. When deep structural reforms were undertaken in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Cold War began to fade in ferocity, and on the very last day of 1991, seventy years after Lenin and Trotsky had seized power in Petrograd, the USSR collapsed under the pressures of its own internal transformation.
From 1917 through to 1991 the West had dealt with Soviet Russia in a confused fashion. There was endless controversy. Some foreigners became communists and worked for revolutionary change in their countries; others aimed at a peaceful coexistence with Russia and hoped that trade and cultural contacts would steadily erode Bolshevik extremism. Another trend of thought regretted that any such compromise was made. There were few advocates of an anti-Soviet crusade in the 1920s, but many argued for the reimposition of an economic quarantine.
The history of the USSR proceeded by sharp twists and turns that nobody could predict in the early years of the Soviet communist dictatorship, and the temptation must be avoided to judge the naivety of contemporaries with the privilege of hindsight. They faced a difficult situation. The war between the Allies and the Central Powers demanded the full attention of the combatant countries. No Allied government was willing to recognize the Soviet revolutionary state, and normal diplomatic relations were suspended. The obvious weaknesses of Bolshevik rule, however, made it sensible for foreign powers to query the capacity of the Bolsheviks to survive. Nor was it easy to adopt genuinely effective methods to bring down the Soviet government or counteract its external menace. All Western leaders wanting a tougher line to be taken on Bolshevism had to cope with obstruction by their labour movements and with pressures from political and commercial lobbies. In any case, their military expeditions were constantly too small to overturn communism. The Whites, even with Allied assistance, were ultimately no match for the Reds; and Western attempts at outright subversion failed. But this does not mean that the Soviet victory was preordained. Not at all: the Bolsheviks came close to being overturned by their own peasants, sailors and workers in early 1921; and Russian and Western critics of Lloyd George had some justification in complaining that he chose that precise moment to sign a trade treaty, helping to bail out the Soviet economy.
After all the excuses are made for them, however, Western political leaders undeniably had abundant information about the purposes and potential of Soviet communism — and if Winston Churchill could always see Soviet Russia for what it was, other politicians could have done the same. The West’s diplomats and intelligence officers served them well. And when the diplomats left Russian soil, the spies and telegraphists as well as the journalists filled most of the gaps in international reportage: communism was never obscured from view for the leaders who took the big decisions. It is true that the information was often patchy and even contradictory, but it was good enough for judgements to be made. Yet the politicians acted on reports only when the content suited them. They behaved largely on the basis of instinct and preconception. Policy was quickly decided and intellectual self-doubt was suppressed.
Soviet leaders, too, trusted their intuition and accepted only such counsel as fitted their prejudices. There was still heavier pressure on them than on Western leaders to act quickly and decisively. The Revolution was ceaselessly threatened. Every Bolshevik knew that inactivity in foreign and security matters was not a safe option. Even a treaty with one or more of the Western Allies could bring only temporary relief. Soviet Russia, they thought, would remain vulnerable until such time as a Soviet Germany existed. Communists interpreted everything that happened to them after 1917 through the prism of their long-held suppositions. They saw the maleficent hand of the West in every setback for the October Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin agreed at least about this. Victory in the Great War placed the Allies in dominion over the world, and it was their Allied businessmen who reaped the advantage. Soviet Russia had to be on its guard against a crusade to bring down the communist order. The Kremlin was alert to any opportunity to manoeuvre among the victor powers; but at a time when the world seemed to spin on a revolutionary axis, the ideological core of communist thinking remained a fixed one.
Looking out on the world in the early
1920s, the communist leaders breathed more easily than they had done a few months earlier. Western leaders for a while turned their faces away from the Russian question. They had failed to supplant communism in 1917–21 and now they had many other dilemmas of their own to resolve. They hoped that Russia’s tumult would stay within Russian borders. For many years it did. But when the Red Army crossed Poland into Germany in 1945, it came with even greater menace to its neighbours and the rest of the world.
POSTSCRIPT
Many of the men and women who have populated this history of early Soviet Russia continued to influence public affairs long after the extraordinary events of 1917–21. There were also some who settled down to lives of quiet seclusion. The October Revolution of 1917 had briefly brought them all together — either in solidarity or else in collision. It was an intense experience; indeed it was the most intense that most of them ever had. But soon after the revolutionary whirlwind had swept them into its vortex, it forcefully scattered them to every point of the compass where they encountered a variety of fates. Although some survived into old age, others came to an abrupt, untimely end.
Lenin could never have imagined what awaited him in death. The body of this militant atheist was embalmed and laid out for worshipful display under a glass canopy in a mausoleum specially erected on Red Square, where it remains to this day. Communists in the USSR and other countries saluted his memory as he was turned into the object of quasi-religious devotion. After the Second World War, ‘Marxism-Leninism’ became the official ideology of states in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. Even today, decades after the dissolution of the USSR, Lenin is treated with reverence in Russia. The same is not true of Trotsky. In 1929, after losing his struggle with Stalin for political supremacy, Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union and then sentenced to death in absentia in one of the notorious show-trials of the late 1930s. Despite founding an international communist organization to rival Comintern, he never recovered the level of influence he had enjoyed in his period in government. After exile in Turkey, France and Norway, Trotsky eventually found sanctuary in Mexico where in 1940 he was murdered by an assassin sent by the Kremlin; and although his followers still venerate him, their imprint on current politics is small and getting smaller.
Felix Dzerzhinski, who became disenchanted with the official leadership after Lenin’s death, succumbed to chronic ill health and died in 1926. Adolf Ioffe joined Trotsky in political opposition but in 1927 fell into despair and committed suicide, leaving Trotsky a note in which he urged him to keep up the fight against Stalin. Georgi Chicherin retired in 1930, worn down by illness and by Stalin’s growing disregard for his advice on policy; his funeral in 1934 was a quiet one. Lev Karakhan and Karl Radek disappeared in the Great Terror of the late 1930s. That Karakhan had stayed aloof from the oppositionist activity failed to save him. Radek by contrast had openly supported Trotsky. Although he tried to save his career by doing a political somersault and attacking Trotsky, he was dragged out for a show-trial and shunted into the labour-camp system where he perished in 1939. Maxim Litvinov died a free man in 1951. He had served Stalin punctiliously while privately telling Ivy about his objections,1 and lived for years in dread of arrest. Ivy Litvinov somehow found the strength to endure. In 1972 she gained permission to leave for England, where she devoted herself to her writing until her death five years later.2
The anti-Bolshevik army commanders had mixed fortunes after leaving Soviet-held territory. Pëtr Wrangel ended up in Serbia. His sudden death in 1928 gave rise to suspicion that his butler’s brother had poisoned him for some unexplained reason. Nikolai Yudenich retired to the French Riviera and shunned émigré affairs through to his peaceful end in 1933. Anton Denikin lived on fairly quietly until 1947 in France and the US. Symon Petliura also went to France where, in 1926, he was assassinated on a Paris street. This was also the year when Józef Pilsudski, the most effective of the commanders who fought the Reds, organized a coup d’état in Warsaw. Despite refusing to become President, he held the real power in Poland and dominated its foreign and military policy until his death in 1935.
The leaders of the Western Allies retained some influence after the Great War. Woodrow Wilson achieved his goal of establishing a League of Nations even though he failed to secure America’s entry. Physical debilitation prevented him from standing for a third Presidency and he died in 1924. Herbert Hoover, one of his main associates in developing policy to deal with Soviet Russia, became US President in 1929 only to lose power at the next election as the effects of the Great Depression were registered; but in Europe, country after country saluted his pioneering humanitarian efforts that had saved them from famine at the end of the Great War. Georges Poincaré became French premier a further four times after the Versailles treaty and sent the army into the Rhineland in 1923 to enforce Germany’s payment of reparations; he died in 1934. Georges Clemenceau retired soon after Versailles, widely celebrated as the ‘Tiger’ who had defeated the mighty Germans. He died in 1929. Although David Lloyd George outlived all of these leaders, his own coalition ministry of 1918 turned out to be his last and he lost power in 1922, never to regain it. Among his follies in the 1930s was his advocacy of accommodation with Hitler and the Third Reich. Lloyd George died in 1945, by which time his friend and rival Winston Churchill had supplanted him in national esteem. The anti-Soviet warmonger of 1918 became the ally of Stalin and the USSR in 1941. After the Second World War, Churchill resumed his hostility towards Soviet communism; and although he was defeated in the 1945 elections, he returned to the office of Prime Minister in 1951. At his funeral in 1965, he was mourned as the wartime saviour of his country.
The Western ambassadors of 1917–18 behaved with the discretion associated with their profession. Joseph Noulens returned to French national politics, becoming a senator in 1920 and going to his grave in 1944. Sir George Buchanan remained fitfully active in public debates about Russia; but his health was never good and he passed away in 1924. David Francis followed him in 1927. As things turned out, William C. Bullitt was the diplomat who went on to capture most attention in later years. His criticisms of the Paris Peace Conference had commended him to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the best person to open the US embassy in Moscow in 1933. Although the new ambassador had shed his early illusions about communist Russia, Soviet leaders welcomed him as someone who might get them a sympathetic hearing in Washington.
In 1924 Bullitt had married none other than John Reed’s widow Louise Bryant. But he divorced her in 1930 after finding she had been unfaithful. Had Bryant died of typhoid with her first husband, she might have joined him in his resting place beneath the Kremlin Wall. Instead she was consigned to the footnotes of history along with the other cheerleaders of the early years of Russian communism. Albert Rhys Williams consistently avoided criticism of the USSR even though he was well aware of the oppressive conditions there. In the Second World War he gave speeches across America drumming up support for Stalin. In Britain, Morgan Philips Price was elected as a Labour MP in 1929 and entered Ramsay MacDonald’s national government in 1931. This rightward movement in Philips Price’s politics did not stop him writing fondly of the times he had spent close to Lenin; he died in 1973.3 Bessie Beatty switched careers from news reporting to writing film scripts for MGM Studios; she also served as the American Secretary of the International PEN Club, a writers’ defence organization, and worked as a radio show presenter in New York until her death in 1947.
Although John Reed had died in 1920 his book lived on and was published in the world’s main languages. In 1922 a Russian famine relief edition came out in America, complete with a preface by Lenin.4 Reed was an admired figure in Comintern and the book was published in Russian translation in Moscow with a frontispiece photo of his monument outside the Kremlin.5 American communists founded John Reed Clubs in his honour. Reed’s chronicle made no mention of Stalin, however, and indeed he had expressed a lively appreciation of communist leaders such as Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinovie
v. By the end of 1940 every single one of them was dead, killed as an enemy of the people. The book was withdrawn from Soviet libraries and further foreign editions were blocked by Comintern, which held some of the translation copyrights. After Stalin’s death in 1953 his successor Nikita Khrushchëv relicensed publication even though Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were still refused posthumous rehabilitation in the USSR. Khrushchëv’s scribes handled this situation by annotating the text with ‘explanatory’ footnotes.6 The world communist movement fell into lock-step with this compromise and Reed’s book went into fresh editions around the world — Fidel Castro said how much it had meant to him as a young man.7
Most of the Western witnesses of the October Revolution had already departed Russia by the early 1920s. But there were a few exceptions. Jacques Sadoul, having been sentenced to death in France in absentia, could not safely set foot on French soil. But he cut a dash in Moscow, as an American reporter noticed: ‘He struck me as being thoroughly happy, absolutely at ease in his strange surroundings. He was dressed, when I saw him, in a knickerbocker suit of English tweeds, with woollen golf stockings, and smart brown shoes that betokened a rather fastidious care of appearances.’8 After various assignments for Comintern, Sadoul in 1924 returned to France and surrendered to arrest and trial. Fifteen sessions of the Council of War were needed before, to the surprise of many at the time, he was acquitted and had his military rank restored to him. He subsequently became the Paris correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya and spoke up for Stalin’s foreign policy before and during the pact between Hitler and Stalin.9 When the USSR entered the war against the Third Reich, Sadoul with relief began working against the German occupation of France. He died in 1956, the year that Khrushchëv denounced Stalin in Moscow.
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