History of the Soviet Union

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The first to take advantage of the situation were the Socialist Revolutionaries. Since the October revolution they had been uncertain and divided about how to meet the Bolshevik threat. On walking out of the Second Congress of Soviets they had declared the seizure of power ‘a crime against homeland and revolution, which means the beginning of civil war’. But they had been reluctant to back this declaration with actions. One inhibiting factor was the fear of finding themselves along with the ‘Kornilovites’ on the side of counterrevolution: they still felt the lingering ties of socialist brotherhood with the Bolsheviks. All the same some Socialist Revolutionaries, without the approval of their Central Committee, did organize the assassination of the German ambassador and attempted to seize power by a coup in the new capital, Moscow, in July 1918. This coup was supplemented by an armed rising in Yaroslavl and one or two other northern towns, timed to coincide with an Allied landing at Arkhangelsk. The landing, however, was postponed, and the risings put down.

Taking advantage of the Czech revolt, the Socialist Revolutionaries set up a government at Samara on the Volga, which they called the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, or Komuch. As their title implied, they wanted to reconvene the Constituent Assembly on non-Bolshevik territory. They saw themselves as a ‘third force’, between the emerging ‘Red’ and ‘White’ orientations. Their programme declared, for example, that the land was ‘irrevocably the property of the people’, which was not to the taste of most of the generals. In Omsk a Provisional Government headed by the Kadet, P. Vologodsky, promised, on the contrary, that all nationalized property, including land, would be restored to its former owners. The two governments eventually reached a compromise and formed a joint Directory, but this in its turn was overthrown by officers and Cossacks, who objected to its (moderately) left-wing programme, and installed Admiral Kolchak as supreme ruler and ‘commander-in-chief of all the land and naval forces of Russia’. In this way political uncertainty and disunity undermined the efforts of the Whites, while the attempts to found a ‘third force’ all failed, since such a force always needed support from army officers, which meant the Whites.

The emerging White armies did have some degree of foreign support, from Russia’s former allies, especially Britain and France. The effectiveness of this support should not, however, be exaggerated. The truth was that Allied governments, though worried by the incipient power vacuum in Russia, and by the growth of communism there, were not sure what they wanted to achieve, nor of the best means for doing so. In the summer and autumn of 1918 the main aim was to get the Russians back into the war against Germany. When that objective lapsed in November 1918, some Western politicians still took the view that it was necessary to rid Russia of Bolshevism, which might otherwise sweep Europe like the plague (Trotsky’s vision in reverse). The majority, on the other hand, felt that after a long war the first priority must be to bring the troops home at last, and that in any case anti-communism was a policy that would split public opinion at home. Some British soldiers, indeed, mutinied. For that reason, most Allied troops left Russia during 1919, though the Japanese stayed on longer in the Far East, where they had more durable geopolitical interests.

Perhaps the most important contribution the Allies made was to supply the Whites with arms, ammunition and equipment, without which they could scarely have mounted an effective military challenge to the Communists. On the other hand, they never committed enough men to make a decisive difference to the outcome of the war, and, by committing what they did, they opened the Whites to the charge of being unpatriotic, of encouraging foreigners to intervene in Russian affairs. They also gave the Communists impeccable grounds for believing, as Lenin had warned them, that the imperialists were out to crush the young Soviet state. The foundations of many a myth were laid by the Allied intervention.

The Whites were able, at any rate, to mount a very serious threat to the Soviet Republic. Two moments of crisis stand out in particular. The first was in August 1918, when the Czechs and other White forces captured Kazan, on the Volga. This was some four hundred miles from Moscow, but there was no significant force of the infant Red Army ready to interpose itself, so that the capital was very vulnerable. Trotsky, now commissar for war, rushed in what was to become his famous armoured train, to assemble a force to defend the town of Svyazhsk, on the road to Moscow. He succeeded in doing so, and in recapturing Kazan. This was when he issued his command, ‘I give a warning: if a unit retreats, the commissar will be shot, then the commander.’ This crisis gave the decisive impulse towards the creation of a full-scale Red Army, as well as to the declaration of the Red Terror (see below, page 70).

The second period when it seemed as if the Reds might be defeated was in the autumn of 1919. The Volunteer Army, having finally become a formidable force under General Denikin, took advantage of a Cossack rising against the Reds to conquer most of the south and the Ukraine, and by October had advanced as far as Chernigov and Orel, the latter less than two hundred miles from Moscow. At the same time, General Yudenich, using the Baltic region as a base, advanced on Petrograd, and penetrated as far as the suburbs of the city by October. In both cases the Red Army proved equal to the challenge, and was able to drive the attackers back.

The Whites were, then, ultimately unsuccessful. This was partly because of political disunity, as has been suggested: at the very least they failed to act as a focus for all the various anti-Bolshevik forces. They failed even to attract a mass following among the population, though both the workers and the peasants were becoming very disillusioned with Bolshevik rule as it had turned out in practice. The Whites’ political programmes were vague and inadequate: they did nothing to reassure the peasants that the land they had won in 1917 would not be taken away from them again in the event of a White victory. They failed to offer the workers a secure status for the trade unions, factory committees and other new representative organizations of 1917. In fact their only consistent political message was ‘Russia one and indivisible’–which of course alienated the non-Russian nationalities who might otherwise have been inclined to support the Whites as Bolshevik nationality policy began to reveal itself in practice.

All this might not have mattered so much if the Whites had demonstrated by their behaviour towards the population that they were fairer and more responsible rulers than the Bolsheviks. But this was not the case. Dependent for quartering and food supplies on the regions where they were fighting, they requisitioned and pillaged less systematically, but scarcely less ruthlessly, than the Bolsheviks. They never glorified in terror as a system of rule, but they often applied it nevertheless. Moreover, the White generals continually lost control of their subordinates, so that, even if Kolchak and Denikin were themselves morally blameless, they proved powerless to prevent their armies committing excesses. As Kolchak wrote to his wife: ‘Many of the Whites are no better than the Bolsheviks. They have no conscience, no sense of honour or duty, only a cynical spirit of competition and money-grabbing.’ That was no recipe for winning a civil war, especially against opponents who were such masters of political propaganda.

The creation of the Red Army was one of the clearest examples of the way in which the Communists reversed the slogans of the revolution. The Bolsheviks had come to power by undermining the old army. Insofar as they had thought about what might replace it, they had envisaged an armed people’s militia, on the model of the Red Guards. This was what made the Left Communists’ programme for a ‘revolutionary war’ against the Germans so logical and appealing. Even for some time after Lenin had secured the defeat of that idea at Brest-Litovsk, the regime left itself with only a small new army, the so-called Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, structured on the principles the Bolsheviks had proclaimed in 1917: there were no insignia or ranks, and each unit was run by an elected committee, one of whose jobs was to choose officers. Military discipline was recognized only in active combat, and even there unit commanders had to operate for the time being without the sanction of the death penalty.

This structure, however, did not last for long. During the confusion of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the Germans actually resumed their advance for a time. This was a cruel reminder of just how helpless and quixotic the new Russian army was. Trotsky decided to scrap it, and to rebuild on more traditional principles. He set up a Supreme Military Council, under the tsarist General Bonch-Bruevich, to organize the task of creating a new army. A network of military commissariats was distributed over Red-controlled territory to raise recruits, at first voluntarily, then, after the Czech revolt, by compulsory conscription. Most of the Red Guard and militia units were disbanded as unreliable, with a few party members drawn from each to constitute the nucleus of newly formed and conventionally constituted regiments. But who was to command the new units? The party did not possess anywhere near enough men with the necessary degree of military training and experience to lead troops in modern warfare. With Lenin’s support, Trotsky turned to officers of the old Imperial Army, at least those who had not fled to serve with the Whites: their insignia and ranks were not restored, but otherwise they were given the disciplinary powers to which they had been accustomed, up to and including the death penalty. There was no longer any nonsense about ‘soldiers’ committees’: they were simply abolished and replaced by ‘political commissars’. These were party-approved appointees, placed at the side of the officers–some of whom, at least initially, were reluctant to serve the Reds–to ensure their loyalty, pass on political instructions and raise the level of political consciousness among the conscripts. The commissar was explicitly not subordinated to the officer but was his equal, with the right to execute him if he committed treason towards the Red Army.

Trotsky’s methods aroused much criticism, both in and outside the party. In VTsIK the Menshevik, Dan, exclaimed, ‘Thus the Napoleons make their appearance’, while inside the party a so-called Military Opposition called for a return to the militia principle and the dismissal of old-regime officers. However that might be, Trotsky did create an effective fighting organization under ultimate party control. Considering how hastily it was put together, and the magnitude of the tasks it faced, the Red Army fought remarkably well, and it can probably be asserted that morale inside it was better than in any other section of the Russian population. Its troops were, of course, better fed than almost anyone else at the time, and service in the Red Army was an excellent means of advancing oneself in the new society. Hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants in the Red Army joined the party, and some of them later advanced through it to positions of power and responsibility in the new society. Trotsky, in fact, did his best to ensure that Red soldiers were given special training and promoted to command positions as soon as possible. By the end of the civil war, these new promotees constituted two-thirds of the officer corps: among them were some destined to become household names during the Second World War. All this had a profound effect upon the social structure of the party (see below, pages 86–7).

The revolutionary regime’s other main instrument was the Cheka. As we have seen, this was established in such a way that it was not subject to the supervision either of the party or of the soviets. It arose outside even the rough and ready legal norms which the new regime set before itself. It might be said, indeed, that the Cheka directly embodied Lenin’s ambivalence about democracy and authoritarianism. ‘The workers and soldiers’, he exhorted the presidium of the Petrograd Soviet in January 1918, ‘must realize that no one will help them except themselves. Malpractices are blatant, profiteering is monstrous, but what have the masses of soldiers and peasants done to combat this? Unless the masses are aroused to spontaneous action, we won’t get anywhere. … Until we apply terror to speculators–shooting on the spot–we won’t get anywhere.’

From the beginning it was the Cheka, as the ‘avenging sword’ of the proletariat, which in fact carried out these functions, though Lenin talked of ‘spontaneous mass action’. With Lenin’s at least implicit encouragement, it soon overstepped the restrictions that had initially been placed on it: it proceeded from mere investigation of counterrevolutionary crime to the arrest of suspects, and from there to staging trials, deciding sentences and even carrying them out. The first person shot by the Cheka was a certain exotically named Prince Eboli, an extortionist who particularly offended the Cheka head, Felix Dzerzhinsky because he claimed to be a member of his organization. ‘Thus’, said Dzerzhinsky, ‘does the Cheka keep its name clean.’ The Cheka also received the right to create its own armed formations to carry out its growing duties.

From January to July 1918 the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were represented on the ruling Collegium of the Cheka, and they resisted summary justice and the application of the death penalty (traditionally abhorred by Russian revolutionaries). Steinberg, the Left Socialist Revolutionary commissar for justice, sought to restrict the Cheka’s judiciary functions in the name of the ‘revolutionary tribunals’, which, though not necessarily gentle with their accused, were at least elected by the soviets and to some extent under their control. They more nearly, in fact, embodied popular involvement in justice.

After the rising of July 1918, however, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were expelled from the Cheka, and the republic entered a more dangerous period, when emergency justice became more acceptable. A start was made with the insurgents of Yaroslavl. The future prime minister, N. A. Bulganin, there headed a Cheka detachment which summarily shot 57 rebels, mostly officers, while a commission of investigation selected a further 350 captives for execution. This was still an isolated incident, but with the proclamation on 5 September of the Red Terror, such operations became routine. The decree stated that ‘it is essential to protect the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating these in concentration camps; all persons involved in White Guard organizations, plots and insurrections are to be shot.’ It became unnecessary for an actual crime to be proven against any person of non-worker and non-peasant origin. His very existence could be held to imply that he was at war with the Soviet system, and therefore with the people as a whole. The sinister term ‘enemy of the people’ began to creep into official instructions and propaganda. Latsis, chairman of the eastern front Cheka, told his officers in November 1918:

We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror.

The imagery of public hygiene became part of the standard language of Soviet propaganda. Already in December 1917 Lenin had called for ‘a purge of the Russian land from all vermin’, by which he meant the ‘idle rich’, ‘priests’, ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘slovenly and hysterical intellectuals’. And on 31 August 1918 Pravda exhorted: ‘The towns must be cleansed of this bourgeois putrefaction. … All who are dangerous to the cause of the revolution must be exterminated.’

Concentration camps served the same sanitary purposes, by isolating the class enemy from the ordinary people. Lenin first proposed their establishment in a letter to the Penza provincial soviet on 9 August 1918 (the town was in an exposed position on the vulnerable eastern front): ‘It is essential to organize a reinforced guard of reliable persons to carry out mass terror against kulaks [rich peasants], priests and White Guardists; unreliable elements should be locked up in a concentration camp outside the town.’ Such camps were mentioned again in the decree on Red Terror, and were evidently already in existence, although the enactment authorizing them was not passed by VTsIK till 11 April 1919. By 1922 it appears from official figures that there were some 190 camps containing 85,000 inmates. According to Solzhenitsyn and others, conditions in most of them (there were notorious exceptions) were still tolerable compared with later days: prisoners still worked an eight-hour day and received a small regular wage. Perhaps something of the genuine notion of ‘corrective labour’ still survived. On the other hand, the inmates were hostages, liable to be summarily shot or taken out in a barge and drowned in a river in retribution for some action of the Whites in the civil war.

It is impossible to know how many people died at the hands of the Cheka during this period. Latsis stated that 12,733 persons were shot by them up to December 1920. Chamberlin in his standard history of the revolution makes an estimate of more like 50,000, while more recently Robert Conquest has given a figure of 200,000 for the period 1917–23, reckoning that a further 300,000 died as a result of other repressive measures, such as the suppression of peasant risings, strikes and mutinies.

These figures yield something by comparison with Stalin’s later efforts, and of course it must be remembered that they occurred in a period of genuine civil war, when the other side was also committing atrocities. One has the impression that White brutality was sporadic and sometimes committed without the knowledge of White leaders, while the Reds frankly and proudly acknowledged terror to be part of their system. Lenin’s attitude we have seen above, and Trotsky (in Terrorism and Communism, 1920) called terror ‘no more than a continuation … of armed insurrection’. Perhaps these distinctions are tenuous. What one can say with certainty is that Lenin introduced and made habitual the ruthless use of violence against all real and imagined ‘enemies’, while also creating, outside soviet or party control, the extra-legal institutions to enable this to be done.

Whatever may have been the Bolsheviks’ intentions when they came to power, there can be no doubt that during the civil war they withdrew or nullified most of the benefits they had given to the people in October, while submitting the democratic institutions they had helped create to rigid and often brutal control from above. ‘During the civil war’ does not, however, necessarily mean ‘because of the civil war’: in fact, there is considerable controversy among historians on this point. Soviet historians, and some Western ones, would attribute the extreme authoritarianism of Bolshevik rule at this time to the emergencies which the regime faced. Many Western historians, on the other hand, have always insisted that such authoritarianism was to be found in Lenin’s attitudes from the outset and in the way he organized his own faction and broke with all those who were unable to agree with him wholeheartedly.

There is in fact no need no posit any total incompatibility between these two views. By their very method of seizing power the Bolsheviks plunged Russia into a situation akin to civil war–which later developed into actual civil war. Futhermore, some of their most authoritarian measures were taken either before or after the most critical phases of the civil war. The war, in fact, merely offered the Bolsheviks the first occasion to grapple with reality, to move out of the realm of fantasy into that of practical politics. They were guided by the vague but powerful preconceptions they had brought to the situation. Wartime, moreover, in some ways provided them with the best opportunity to combine democracy (in the sense of contact with the masses) and authoritarianism in the manner of Lenin’s exhortations of November and December 1917. In State and Revolution he had urged that ‘to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service … all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat–this is our immediate aim.’ If one substitutes for ‘armed proletariat’ ‘the party and the Red Army’ that is a pretty close approximation to what War Communism actually was. But of course that substitution is the whole point. Lenin easily made the transition from the concept of ‘proletariat’ to that of ‘party’, without seeing the enormity of the questions begged. He displayed the same ambivalence in his article ‘The immediate tasks of Soviet power’, of April 1918, in which he was able to assert at one and the same time that ‘without full-scale state accounting and supervision of production and the distribution of products, the workers’ rule cannot hold, and a return to the yoke of capitalism is inevitable’, yet also that ‘each factory, each village is a producers’ and consumers’ commune, with the right … of deciding in its own way the problem of acounting for production and distributing the products’. Perhaps such ambivalence was natural in what was still largely a utopian programme being tempered by reality.

At any rate, there can be no doubt that the actual measures adopted even before, but especially during and after the civil war increased the power of the state enormously, and withdrew or nullified the benefits the Bolsheviks had granted to the people in October. The essence of War Communism consisted in (i) the nationalization of virtually all industry, combined with central allocation of resources; (ii) a state trade monopoly (which, because it could not satisfy people’s needs, was accompanied by a vigorous black market); (iii) runaway inflation, leading to a partial suspension of money transactions (welcomed by those Bolsheviks who considered that money had no place in socialist society) and the widespread resumption of barter and of wage payments in kind; (iv) requisitioning of peasant surplus (or even non-surplus) produce. Alec Nove has summed it up trenchantly: ‘A siege economy with a communist ideology. A partly organized chaos. Sleepless, leather-jacketed commissars working round the clock in a vain effort to replace the free market.’

Already gravely overstrained by more than three years of a huge war, and then by the fears and conflicts of revolution, the economy finally collapsed. By 1921 heavy industrial production was at about a fifth of its 1913 level, and in some spheres had virtually ceased altogether. Food production declined somewhat less severely, as far as we can tell from the inevitably unreliable figures we have, but the trading and transport systems to bring it to the consumer had broken down. The situation of both cities and countryside was indescribable. Evgeny Zamyatin thus evoked Petrograd in the winters of War Communism: ‘Glaciers, mammoths, wastes. Black nocturnal cliffs, somehow resembling houses; in the cliffs, caves.... Cave men, wrapped in hides, blankets, wraps, retreated from cave to cave.’ And Pasternak, in Doctor Zhivago, depicted the devastation on the railways:

Train after train, abandoned by the Whites, stood idle, stopped by the defeat of Kolchak, by running out of fuel and by snowdrifts. Immobilized for good and buried in the snow, they stretched almost uninterruptedly for miles on end. Some of them served as fortresses for armed bands of robbers or as hideouts for escaping criminals or political fugitives–the involuntary vagrants of those days–but most of them were communal mortuaries, mass graves of the victims of the cold and typhus raging all along the railway line and mowing down whole villages in its neighbourhood.

In the countryside the peasants had already set about the welcome task of expropriating private land and dividing it up among themselves. Under the terms of the Bolshevik Land Decree, this process was mainly managed by the old village communes, which of course tended to be dominated by the more established and wealthier (or less poor) village families. The redistribution engendered a lot of friction, was probably not strictly egalitarian in its results, and was in any case vitiated by the discovery that, even when all private, church and state land had been absorbed, each peasant household could only add, on average, half a desyatina (just over an acre) to their holding.

Before the process was complete, moreover, the peasants were being importuned by supply officials looking for produce and unable to offer much in the way of money or goods to pay for it. This problem, of course, was inherited from the Provisional Government, but with the increasing hunger of the towns in the winter of 1917–18 it now became much more severe, and clashes became more bitter. Given their political philosophy, the Bolsheviks were bound to regard this problem as one of class warfare, and therefore to react much more sharply than the Provisional Government. In January Lenin suggested that the Petrograd Soviet should send out armed detachments to find and confiscate grain, and that they should be empowered to shoot the recalcitrant. And in May VTsIK and Sovnarkom issued a joint decree dubbing those who were reluctant to deliver grain to the state as a ‘peasant bourgeoisie’ and ‘village kulaks’. ‘Only one way out remains: to answer the violence of the grain owners against the starving poor with violence against the grain hoarders.’ To organize class war in the village, and to make the search for hidden stocks more effective, ‘committees of poor peasants’ (kombedy) were set up in every village and volost. Theoretically these were to consist of all peasants whose holdings did not exceed the local norms laid down at the land redistribution. But, in practice, whatever the village’s internal disputes, peasants were more and more reacting with united resentment against outsiders. Few except down-and-outs were prepared to help the hated intruders, and the kombedy degenerated into bands of louts looting for their own benefit or getting senselessly drunk on home-brewed ‘moonshine’. The Bolsheviks themselves quickly came to the conclusion that the kombedy were doing more harm than good, and abolished them in November 1918.

In fact, then, much of the provisioning of the towns was carried on outside the state supplies monopoly. Peasants trudged with their sacks of produce into the towns and there either sold it for high prices or–in view of the unreliability of money–bartered it for manufactured items tendered directly by artisans or workers. Intellectuals and non-manual workers bargained away furniture and family heirlooms in the desperate struggle to stay alive, sometimes themselves going out to the villages to do so: Zoshchenko’s story in which a bewildered peasant accepts a grand piano in return for a sack of grain was only a slight exaggeration. Half of Russia was on the roads or railways, carrying or trundling objects with which to trade. These were the so-called meshochniki, or ‘bagmen’, who became part of the daily scene. Such urban markets as the famous (or notorious) Sukharevka in Moscow became arenas of permanent lively and desperate haggling, as people sought the means to survive. Of course the Communists deeply disapproved of this commerce: it offended their trade monopoly and their ideological instincts. At times they set up road blocks round cities to apprehend the ‘bagmen’. But they never really tried to eradicate the illicit trade, since they knew that to do so would finally bring mass starvation.

These experiences, and the kombedy episode, naturally inflamed peasant feelings against the Communists. Further fuel was added to the flames by the closures of churches and the arrests of priests, as well as by compulsory conscription for the Red Army. Between the spring and autumn of 1918 rural violence against Communists and against supply officials increased markedly. It was still somewhat restrained, perhaps, by the fear that if the Communists were overthrown by the Whites, then the peasants would lose the land they had recently gained. But in the autumn of 1920 and spring of 1921, when the Whites no longer represented any danger, sporadic violence broke out into full-scale peasant insurrection.

According to the Dutch historian Jan Meijer, a typical peasant rising would begin with a meeting of the skhod, the traditional gathering of heads of households. There an act of condemnation would be formulated, and local Communists or members of kombedy taken prisoner or shot. Arms would be seized from the local military training unit (set up by the Red Army), and the requisition team driven off. The peasants would then endeavour to cut themselves completely off from the outside world and to defend this isolation by force.

These risings culminated in the huge insurrections of the black-earth provinces, the Volga basin, North Caucasus and Siberia (the major grain-producing areas) in 1920–1. The largest of them was probably that in western Siberia, where armed rebels may have numbered as many as 60,000: they occupied two large towns (Tobolsk and Petropavlovsk) and cut several stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railway for three weeks in February-March 1921. We know very little about this rising, however, whereas that in the black-earth province of Tambov left somewhat more in the way of written evidence, which has been exhaustively investigated by the American historian, Oliver Radkey. Much of what he discovered may well be true of other risings too.

The Tambov movement was a peasant rising in the classical sense, with no direct influence or support from any political party. The Socialist Revolutionary Party, who would have been their natural sponsors, were reticent in their support for the insurrection, perhaps because their civil war experience suggested to them that fighting meant sub-ordination to generals, and they wanted no more of that. It is true that the leader of the rising, Antonov, had once been a Left Socialist Revolutionary, and that there were Socialist Revolutionary features in the programme issued by the Union of the Toiling Peasantry, which was the civilian branch of the movement: reconvening the Constituent Assembly, renewed guarantees of civil liberties, full socialization of the land, and restoration of the mixed economy. But the latter two were natural peasant demands anyway.

At first Antonov’s men consisted of odd bands of deserters from the Red Army, dispossessed peasants and other people ‘on the run’ for a variety of reasons. It was not until the final defeat of Denikin that Antonov extended his forces any further. Then began a campaign of murdering Bolshevik and soviet officials, raiding village soviets and court rooms (burning documents, like the French peasants of 1789), railway stations, and grain collection points.

Full-scale insurrection came only in August-September 1920, with the appearance of the requisition teams to claim their share of the harvest, which that year was a poor one. Battles broke out between grain teams and villagers, to whose aid Antonov came. At first he was very successful: thousands of peasants flocked into the Green Army (as it became known), and, since Bolshevik morale and strength in Tambov was low, they were able to liberate whole rural districts and establish a civilian administration. The Green Army was in some ways remarkably like the Red Army in structure, complete with political commissars, though naturally with few trained officers: even the Reds’ opponents found themselves imitating Red methods. At its height the Green Army numbered up to 20,000 men, with a good many more fighting as irregulars. It cut no fewer than three main railway lines on which the Bolshevik government depended for communications with the Volga and North Caucasus. By December 1920 Lenin was so alarmed by the situation that he created a Special Commission for Struggle with Banditry, initially under Dzerzhinsky. Surviving local Bolsheviks and Cheka officials were pulled out of Tambov province, and special troops sent in under the command of Antonov-Ovseyenko (formerly of the Petrograd MRC) and later Tukhachevsky (fresh from suppressing the Kronstadt rising–see below, pages 90–1). These troops took control of villages one by one, shooting whole batches of peasants suspected of having fought with Antonov’s army. Some villages they actually burned down. At the same time they flushed the Green forces out of the relatively sparse woodland into the open fields, where armoured units with machine-guns could function more effectively against them.

Repression was, however, combined with concessions. Grain requisitioning was abolished in Tambov on Lenin’s specific order, and scarce supplies were brought in from elsewhere. In effect, the New Economic Policy (see below, page 119) was given a preliminary trial in Tambov, and seemed to work well, when combined with ruthless repression, in reducing the peasant will to fight.

It remains to be explained, however, why this and other peasant risings failed. After all, their aims were shared by most peasant communities, especially in the grain-producing regions, and even in some measure by urban workers. Yet there was never any consistent link, either between individual peasant movements, or with the workers. The peasants remained too localized and rural in their consciousness. The Green Army did once mount an attack on the town of Tambov, but seems to have been repulsed relatively easily by Red Guards. Above all, there was a lack of political coordination, such as might have been supplied by the Socialist Revolutionaries, had they not been already organizationally weakened and reluctant to take up arms; and in any case the peasants were by now distrustful of all political parties and of all help from urban intellectuals.

In some ways, given the anti-rural prejudices of most Marxists, it was not surprising that relations between the Bolsheviks and the peasants should have deteriorated so sharply. Matters were not much better, however, among the workers, who should have been the new government’s natural allies. We have already seen that by the summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks had nationalized most of industry and subordinated the factory committees to the trade unions, centralizing ‘workers’ control’ to a point where it no longer came from the workers. This certainly contributed to the revolution’s loss of its ideals, but nevertheless such centralization was often accepted by the workforce as an alternative to the even graver threat of hunger. The fact was that the peace policies of the Bolsheviks, popular though they undoubtedly were, created a great deal of unemployment. It has been estimated that as many as 70 per cent of Russia’s factories were working in some way for the war effort–and these tended to be the larger enterprises, employing large numbers of workers. State defence contracts ended abruptly with the ceasefire of December 1917, and in Petrograd some 60 per cent of the workforce was laid off between January and April 1918. The factories which survived very often went over to one-man management, since Lenin was now very keen on clear lines of authority, and began to pay piecework wages. Since the managers who took over were sometimes the old capitalist ones, now working under state supervision, factory discipline became once again reminiscent of pre-revolutionary days.

At the same time, food prices rose: in Moscow the price of potatoes doubled between January and April 1918, while rye flour (the main ingredient of the staple Russian loaf) quadrupled. In Petrograd rations fell to 900 calories a day, as against 2300 considered necessary for non-manual labour. Productivity declined as workers became malnourished and exhausted. To supplement their rations, many pilfered, resorted to the black market, went out to the villages to barter, or even to resettle there permanently, if they still had relatives or communal rights. Many workers of course joined the Red Army. The great depopulation of the major cities began. Between mid-1917 and late 1920 the number of factory workers declined from around 3½ million to barely over a million. Those who stayed behind either sought a career in the new party and state institutions (which gave preference to entrants from the proletariat), or they remained cold, hungry, insecure and powerless.

The demonstrations over the Constituent Assembly offered the first opportunity for the workers to express their new discontents. The shooting of unarmed workers by the Red Guards was widely denounced, while workers in a number of factories condemned Sovnarkom, demanded the disarming of the Red Guards (in some resolutions compared to the tsarist gendarmerie) and called for new elections to the soviets. On 9 January (which happened to be the anniversary of Bloody Sunday in 1905) a huge procession accompanied the funeral of those killed.

The non-Bolshevik political parties were too restrained and disorganized to offer effective articulation to the movement. All the same, some dissident Mensheviks managed to organize in Petrograd a so-called Extraordinary Assembly of Delegates from Works and Factories, which met in March 1918. It is not clear how the assembly was elected, but it did contain a number of working-class activists of 1917, especially from among the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. Their speeches gave abundant evidence of renewed discontent among the workers: at hunger, unemployment, the closure and evacuation of factories–the capital had just been moved to Moscow–at arbitrary arrests by the Cheka, and the muzzling of the soviets. Above all, the workers felt powerless: they no longer had any institutions speaking for them. The factory committees were turning into obedient organs of government, the trade unions were no longer in a position to protect their interests, the soviets would no longer permit them to recall delegates of whom they disapproved in order to choose new ones. ‘Wherever you turn’, complained one worker delegate, ‘you come across armed people who look like bourgeois and treat the workers like dirt. Who they are we don’t know.’ In general, they felt that they had been promised bread and peace, but given food shortages and civil war; they had been promised freedom and given something nearer to slavery. The assembly called for the resignation of Sovnarkom, the repudiation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly.

The Assembly movement did spread to other parts of Russia, and organized a number of stoppages and protests directed against Communist policy. It looks as if the movement mainly attracted workers from sectors such as metalworking and armaments, which had suffered particularly severe dislocation at the end of the war. The assembly’s debates reflect the alarm and disorientation of such workers. On the other hand, many workers continued to identify ‘soviet power’ with the Communists, seeing them as their best hope in a bewildering and dangerous world. In June 1918 the Communists received working-class support in the elections to the Petrograd Soviet, while the general strike called by the assembly on 2 July fizzled out. Its failure was partly due to increased governmental pressure. The whole Moscow bureau of the Extraordinary Assembly was arrested, and the Red Army cordoned off the entire Nevsky district of Petrograd (the southern industrial area where the assembly was especially strong) and declared martial law there.

By the summer of 1918, though many, perhaps most workers were profoundly disillusioned with Communist rule, they had no convincing alternative to which to look. This may account for the haphazard and inconclusive nature of their activity, compared with the previous year. Most, in any case, were more preoccupied with survival. In 1917 they had felt themselves to be on an upswing, creating the future through the new democratic institutions they had themselves brought into being. Now they had ostensibly achieved their aims, yet were faced by poverty, insecurity and oppression such as they had never known before. The institutions they had created were now being used against them. Of the two political parties who might have articulated and channelled their grievances, the Mensheviks had pledged themselves to strictly legal activities through the soviets, while the Socialist Revolutionaries were divided and ambivalent about whether to oppose the Bolsheviks outright. One Menshevik summed up the workers’ political mood in June 1918 as follows: ‘To hell with you all, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the whole of your political claptrap.’

This disillusionment and uncertainty, combined with the increasing repression now being applied by the Communists, probably explain the failure of the Assembly movement. On 21 July, the Cheka finally arrested all 150 participants at a congress and took them to the Lubyanka, where they were accused of plotting against the Soviet government and threatened with the death penalty. In the event, however, they were all gradually released over the next few months. The age of rigged trials against supporters of the October revolution had not quite arrived.

The workers were not again able to mount such a widespread challenge to Communist rule, but their voting behaviour in the soviets during 1919–21 showed the extent to which they had become disillusioned. Some of their support went to the Mensheviks, who maintained a strong presence in the trade unions, especially among the printers. The Mensheviks also sent an increasing number of delegates to the soviets, even though they were banned from them for several months after June 1918. Even after they were readmitted they faced constant official harassment: the candidates would be detained shortly before an election, or Menshevik votes would be disqualified on technical grounds. Since soviet voting was by show of hands, moreover, it was easy for Menshevik voters to be victimized. In view of all this, it is a tribute to their tenacity that they still had any deputies at all in the soviets: one or two were elected as late as 1922, after which the party’s Central Committee (or its surviving members in emigration) forbade further participation in soviet elections, as too dangerous for the voters. By that time, anyway, all the party’s leaders still inside Russia had been arrested by the Cheka. The Mensheviks’ main political activity thereafter was to publish an émigré journal, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (The Socialist Herald), which evidently claimed an extensive network of correspondents inside the country: over the next decade it published abundant accounts of working-class life in the Soviet Union, which are invaluable to historians.

The working-class movement was also, of course, gravely weakened by hunger, poverty and the drain of so many town-dwellers. By 1921 the industrial working population was at about a third of its 1917 level, and was poorer in every respect. The Communists had their own ideas about how to restore this supposed social base of their rule. To absorb soldiers coming out of the Red Army at the end of the civil war, the Central Committee resolved early in 1920 to convert certain army units into ‘labour armies’–thus the Third Army became the First Labour Army. The railways and certain key industrial enterprises were placed under military discipline, and political commissars from the Red Army were brought in to replace trade union officials. ‘Labour soldiers’ felled trees, cleared roads, rebuilt bridges and restored railway lines. All this was supposed to facilitate the transition to a peacetime planned economy, without the disruption which demobilization would have brought. Some Communists thought that in any case the ‘labour army’ was the appropriate industrial unit in a socialist society. ‘In a proletarian state, militarization is the self-organization of the working class,’ proclaimed Trotsky. And in an Order of the Day he exhorted them, ‘Begin and complete your work … to the sound of socialist songs and anthems. Your work is not slave labour but high service to the socialist fatherland.’

Not everyone agreed. The Workers’ Opposition (see below, pages 89–90) were strongly resistant to the idea, and in the great crisis of February-March 1921 (pages 90–2) Lenin came over to their way of thinking (on this issue alone). Apart from the enormous resentment the labour armies aroused among soldiers who wanted to get back home, their actual work achievements were unimpressive. In 1921 they were abolished.

By 1921, the Communists were the only significant political force in Soviet Russia. They were also an enormously important social force. Most of the other classes of Russian society had been destroyed or gravely weakened in the revolution and civil war–even the working class in whose name the Communists ruled. In the absence of any ruling class, the full-time officials of the Communist Party and the Soviet state came closest to fulfilling that function. Of course they could not yet be regarded as a social class in the full sense: their power and their institutions were as yet embryonic, likewise their customs and their culture, and they certainly had not devised a means of perpetuating their power and privilege. In many ways the history of Soviet Russia might be regarded as the history of their efforts to extend this embryonic power and privilege into a permanent, secure and accepted acquisition, such as any ruling class expects to have.

Anyone who had known the Bolsheviks in February, or even October, 1917, would have found them in many ways difficult to recognize in 1921. In February they had been a party of underground and exile, small, loosely organized (in spite of Lenin’s principles), quarrelsome, but lively, spontaneous, and beginning to make real contact with the mass of the population, especially the workers and soldiers. In October the party still looked much the same, though by then it had perhaps ten times as many members, and close contact with the mass of workers and soldiers, to whose aspirations it was far more sensitive than any other party at the time. By 1921, it had changed in almost every respect. It now had a mass membership, including many who were in it for careerist reasons; it was tightly organized, rigid, intolerant of divergent views, and out of touch with the mass of the people, indeed regarded by most of them with resentment and fear. The Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 sanctified the final stages of this transformation.

What had made this difference? Basically it had been the experience of holding power and of conducting a civil war; and both those experiences had resulted directly from Lenin’s decision to go it alone in seizing power in October.

The most obvious external change was the growth in membership. After their rapid rise in 1917, numbers grew a further three- to fourfold by March 1921, when officially membership stood at nearly three quarters of a million. The climb had been by no means smooth. There was, for example, a considerable influx immediately after October, but then a large-scale exodus, probably mainly of workers disillusioned with Bolshevik rule. Growth resumed during the civil war as Red Army soldiers joined, but there were also periodic ‘purges’ designed to weed out the half-hearted, the corrupt and the merely careerist.

These ups and downs reflected in part anxiety in the leadership about their rank and file. Membership policy was dictated by two considerations which were in tension with one another. The Communists were unequivocally the ruling party, but on the other hand they also called themselves a mass party. Now, ruling parties inevitably have many members who, whatever their social origin, become unmistakably middle-class in their lifestyle. With the working-class base fading away, and the peasants increasingly alienated by the party, it constantly faced the threat of becoming largely a party of officials. Between 1917 and 1921 working-class membership reportedly sank from 60 per cent to 40 per cent. In reality, it probably fell a good deal further than that, since many who declared themselves workers were actually by now administrators, commissars, Red Army commanders and the like. Indeed, party records show that in October 1919 only 11 per cent of members were actually working in factories, and even some of them were in administrative posts.

Another natural result of numerical growth was that the proportion of pre-October Bolsheviks declined. In the summer of 1919 it was discovered that only one fifth of the members had been in the party since before the revolution. This proportion must have declined further thereafter. The formative experience of most Communists was no longer the revolutionary struggle in the factories (still less the deprivations and theoretical wrangles of underground and exile), but rather the fighting of the civil war. The archetypal Communist was no longer a shabbily dressed intellectual, but rather a leather-jacketed commissar with a Mauser at his hip, and promotion in party ranks now tended to go to the poorly educated, theoretically unsophisticated, direct, resourceful, often brutal types who had risen to prominence in the Red Army. If they were of worker or peasant origin–and most were–they were only too glad to have risen beyond it. It would be too much to say that the party now became militarist in outlook, but it is true that most party officials were by now used to solving problems by willpower, effort and coercion. This wartime experience reinforced Lenin’s dictum that politics was essentially about who defeats whom (kto kogo).

The civil war and the experience of power also profoundly affected the party’s internal organization. If in 1917 it had been possible for Sverdlov and Stasova, in the Secretariat, to handle all the party leadership’s correspondence and to keep the membership records more or less in their heads, that was clearly no longer satisfactory once the party had governmental responsibility. All the same, it took quite a long time before the party’s structure assumed clearly defined forms, and for a year or more after October improvization was often the order of the day.

When it did come, the hardening of the party’s institutional structure owed as much to pressure from below as from above, as emerges clearly from recent research by Robert Service. During the emergencies of the civil war, local party organizations often found themselves desperately short of capable organizers, since their best men had gone off to fight. They were only too glad to be sent emissaries or instructions from the Central Committee in Moscow. Local party secretaries, deprived of colleagues or assistants, would take important decisions themselves: party meetings would become perfunctory formalities, with resolutions passed ‘at a cavalry gallop’, as someone complained. The practice of electing party officials, and of seriously discussing alternative candidates and policies, withered away. It became the norm for officials and committees to be appointed from the next higher level, and for commissars from the centre to arrive in an emergency and take all the really important decisions.

Of course, all this suited Lenin’s leadership style–and Trotsky’s too, for that matter. Both men were used to dealing with local difficulties by firing off peremptory telegrams cutting through Gordian knots. What happened now was that their instinctive authoritarianism received institutional form.

This meant that, especially at the medium and upper levels of the party, a stratum of full-time officials was emerging, whose main function, given the grip the party now had over the soviets and the Red Army, was simply the exercise of power. At the very top, 1919 also saw further hardening of the structures, owing both to the war and to Sverdlov’s death in March. The Central Committee, currently a body of nineteen full members and eight candidates, was already too large for speedy decision-making, and the Eighth Party Congress (March 1919) set up a Political Bureau (or Politburo) of five to do this. Its initial five members were Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev and Krestinsky. Alongside it an Orgburo was installed to concentrate on the organizational and personnel work of the Central Committee, and this soon developed a formidable array of files and card indices on cadres (as the party’s staff came to be called) all over the country. Originally there were only two joint members of the Politburo and Orgburo: Krestinsky and Stalin. The Secretariat was also now formalized to conduct the party’s correspondence and deal with ‘current questions of an organizational and executive character’, the Orgburo being entrusted with ‘the general direction of the organizational work’. In practice these two bodies had overlapping functions. Stalin did not move into the Secretariat until 1922, but when he did so, he not only took charge of it as General Secretary, but also became the only man to sit on all three of the party’s directive committees.

From the outset, the new bodies, especially the Politburo, took over much of the de facto power of the Central Committee. In theory the latter was supposed to meet once a fortnight, but during the rest of 1919 it met less than half that often, while between April and November the Politburo held 29 separate meetings, and 19 joint ones with the Orgburo, while the latter met no less than 110 times on its own.

The party’s relationship with the rest of society was also beginning to take shape. The party rules passed in December 1919 laid down that, where there were three or more party members in any organization whatever, they had the duty to form a party cell ‘whose task it is to increase party influence in every direction, carry out party policies in non-party milieux, and effect party supervision over the work of all the organizations and institutions indicated’. To ensure that suitable people were selected for this authoritative role, the Ninth Party Congress recommended party committees at all levels to keep lists of employees suitable for particular kinds of work and for promotion within their field. Such lists, coordinated and extended by the Secretariat, became the nucleus of the nomenklatura system of appointments, not just in the party, but in all walks of life.

Not everyone in the party approved of these developments. Some prominent members, not in the top leadership, were disturbed by them, feeling that they ran counter to the ideals which had brought the party to power. Two groups in particular emerged during 1919–20. The Democratic Centralists called for restoration of the ‘democratic’ element in Lenin’s theory of party organization: that is, the restoration of genuine elections and genuine debate over matters of principle. The Workers’ Opposition were worried by what they saw as the ‘growing chasm’ between the workers and the party which claimed to act in their name. They spoke in the language Lenin had used in October 1917, calling for ‘self-activity of the masses’, and proposing specifically that industry should be run by the trade unions, rather than by the managers and specialists that the government had installed under Vesenkha. Alexandra Kollontai, the most flamboyant and imaginative member of this group, argued that what had taken the place of ‘self-activity’ was ‘bureaucracy’, buttressed by the system of appointments within the party, and she therefore also urged a return to genuine elections and spontaneous debate by the rank and file. Although fundamental research on this issue still needs to be done, it does seem that the Workers’ Opposition had substantial support among the industrial workers.

Before binding discussion of these issues took place, however, the party was faced by a crisis even more threatening to its ideals than the civil war. Towards the end of February 1921, first of all in Moscow, then in Petrograd, strikes and demonstrations broke out among the industrial workers. Their immediate cause was a further cut in the bread ration, but the workers’ demands rapidly took on a political colouring as well, and began to reflect the effects of more than three years of hunger and repression. The demands, in fact, were remarkably similar to those being made at the same time by the peasants of Tambov province (see above, page 77). The workers called for free trade, an end to grain requisitioning, and abolition of the privileges and extra rations enjoyed by specialists and by Bolshevik officials. Their political demands reflected the influence of both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, who were regaining popularity, despite their semi-legal status: freedom of speech, press and assembly, the restoration of free elections to factory committees, trade unions and soviets, an amnesty for socialist political prisoners. There were some calls for the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly.

Zinoviev, the party leader in Petrograd, closed down some of the most affected factories (in effect instituting a ‘lockout’) and declared martial law in the city. Special troops and kursanty (Red Army officer cadets) were drafted in and posted to key positions. Selected workers and the most prominent Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were arrested. At the same time emergency supplies were rushed into the city, road blocks were dismantled, and Zinoviev let it be known that there were plans to abolish grain requisitioning.

These measures did eventually quieten the Petrograd disorders, but not before they had spread to the nearby naval base of Kronstadt, where the Baltic Fleet had its head-quarters. The sailors of Kronstadt had a long revolutionary tradition, dating back to 1905, when a soviet had first been set up there. They had played a vital part in the October seizure of power. Central to the anarchism which had been the dominant mood in Kronstadt was the original conception of the soviet as a free and self-governing revolutionary community. This ideal of course had been unceremoniously pushed aside by the Bolsheviks, and now, more than a year after the virtual end of the civil war, there was still no sign of an improvement.

A delegation of sailors went to meet the Petrograd workers and reported back to a general meeting of the sailors on 1 March. In spite of the presence of Mikhail Kalinin (president of the Russian Soviet Republic), the meeting unanimously passed a resolution which repeated the demands of the Petrograd workers (though there was no mention of the Constituent Assembly). Pride of place was given to the following demand: ‘In view of the fact that the present soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, immediately to hold new elections by secret ballot, the pre-election campaign to have full freedom of agitation among the workers and peasants.’

The Soviet government reacted forthwith by declaring the Kronstadt movement ‘a counterrevolutionary conspiracy’. They claimed it was led by one General Kozlovsky–who was actually one of Trotsky’s numerous appointees from the former Imperial Army, sent to take charge of the Kronstadt artillery. The Communists appointed their own army commander, Tukhachevsky, to head a special task force and storm the fortress across the ice before the March thaw. Once again, special duty troops and kursanty were used, in larger numbers. On 17 March they finally stormed Kronstadt, capturing it with huge losses on both sides. These were compounded on the rebel side by the subsequent repression, in which the Cheka shot hundreds of those involved.

Assembling under the direct shadow of these events, the Tenth Party Congress took some decisions which confirmed the rigid centralization the party had developed since 1917. Lenin admitted that the Kronstadt revolt had awakened echoes in many industrial towns, and warned that this ‘petty bourgeois counterrevolution’ was ‘undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak combined’. He admitted, too, that relations between the party and the working class were poor: much more ‘solidarity and concentration of forces’ was required, he exhorted. He submitted two resolutions, one explicitly condemning the Workers’ Opposition as a ‘syndicalist and anarchist deviation’, the other, entitled ‘On Party Unity’, condemning the practice of forming ‘factions’ and ordering that all future proposals, criticisms and analyses be submitted for discussion, not by closed groups, but by the party as a whole. ‘The Congress orders the immediate dissolution, without exception, of all groups that have been formed on the basis of some platform or other, and instructs all organizations to be very strict in ensuring that no manifestations of factionalism of any sort be tolerated. Failure to comply with this resolution of the Congress is to entail unconditional and immediate expulsion from the party.’ Such was the besieged mood at the Congress that these resolutions were passed by overwhelming majorities, which even included members of the Workers’ Opposition. One of the delegates, Karl Radek, made a portentous and perceptive comment: ‘In voting for this resolution I feel that it can well be turned against us, and nevertheless I support it … Let the Central Committee in a moment of danger take the severest measures against the best party comrades if it finds this necessary... That is less dangerous than the wavering which is now observable.’

No less important was the justification which Lenin gave for the suppression of all opposition parties, as was now finally done. ‘Marxism teaches us that only the political party of the working class, i.e. the Communist Party, is capable of uniting, educating and organizing such a vanguard of the proletariat and of the working masses as is capable of resisting the inevitable petty bourgeois waverings of those masses … [and] their trade union prejudices.’

It is true that factions and programmes survived a few years longer, in spite of these resolutions. Nevertheless, with the Tenth Congress the party finally sanctified the substitution of itself for the working class, and gave into the hands of its leaders the means for the suppression of all serious criticism and discussion.

4 (#ulink_c1180738-401f-5bae-af45-8cbc5702c079)

The Making of the Soviet Union (#ulink_c1180738-401f-5bae-af45-8cbc5702c079)

The country which the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 was the largest territorial state on earth. It was also a great multinational empire, containing a bewildering variety of peoples: their formation as nations and their absorption into Russia had been going on ever since the Middle Ages.

The Tatar invasion began the process. We saw in the first chapter that the rule of the eastern hordes did much to develop Russians’ sense of their identity as a nation. But it also divided them. Those Russians in the north-west who remained outside the Tatar empire developed their language and culture (Bielorussian) separately: this later became the official language of a Lithuanian state, which in its turn amalgamated with Poland. Thereafter Bielorussian became largely a peasant language, which absorbed marked Polish elements, while agriculture and land tenure tended to follow Polish patterns. In the south and south-west another branch of the old Russian nation, the Ukrainians (which means ‘border folk’), also evolved separately, first under Tatar, then Polish rule. Like the Bielorussians, some of them became Catholics, while even some of those who remained Orthodox in their liturgy recognized the Pope as head of their church (the so-called Uniate Church). They absorbed many Cossacks, or ‘freemen’, fleeing from taxation, military service and serfdom in Muscovy. These became fiercely independent local communities of fighting men, living in a kind of no man’s land between Russia, Poland and Turkey. Their traditions were invoked when Ukrainian national feeling began to revive in the nineteenth century, even though by that time Cossack units had been reintegrated into the Russian army, and indeed were performing internal security duties for the tsar.

By the time the Bielorussians and most Ukrainians were reabsorbed into Russia during the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, their languages and cultures were very distinct from that of Great or Muscovite Russia; but the nations themselves were largely peasant, while the urban and rural elites were composed of Russians, Poles or even Jews.

Over the centuries the course of Russian expansion brought under Russian rule many people who had no kinship with Russia at all. Already in the sixteenth century the Russians were beginning to reverse the Tatar invasion (though at a much slower pace), conquering territories in the Volga basin still inhabited by Tatars as well as by Bashkirs and other pagan or Islamic peoples. In the eighteenth century the Russians conquered the last independent Tatar Khanate, in the Crimea, and began the subjugation of the Islamic mountain peoples of the Caucasus–which, however, took them nearly a century. The Caucasians proved to be fierce fighters and under their leader, Shamil, waged a jihad or ‘holy war’ against the infidel invaders.

During the mid- and late nineteenth century Russian armies struck across the steppes and deserts of Central Asia, into the oasis regions beyond, in the foothills of the mountains, where a variety of Turkic peoples lived, again of Islamic faith. The aim of the advance was partly better to secure existing frontiers, partly to acquire Central Asian cotton, and partly the desire for sheer military glory. Once the armies had passed, the nomad Kazakh people of the steppes were gradually displaced from their best grazing land by Russian and Ukrainian peasant settlers, while in the oasis regions of Turkestan, colonies of Russian workers immigrated to the towns, including eventually large numbers of railwaymen, as the railway followed conquest and trade. The resentment aroused among the local population by this incursion culminated in a major anti-European rising in 1916: much blood was shed on both sides, and many Central Asian Muslims fled across the border into China.

Just beyond the Caucasus mountains, surrounded by Muslims on all sides (and with Turkey just across the border), were two of the oldest Christian peoples in the world, the Georgians and the Armenians. They both came under Russian rule in the early nineteenth century. Although they tended to regard the Russians as uncouth upstarts, both peoples acquiesced in Russian suzerainty, for it meant the protection of a strong Christian power against Islam. In other respects the Georgians and Armenians were very different from one another. The Georgians were a rural people, mostly nobles or peasants, though with a lively intelligentsia: they had a reputation for immense national pride, love of their homeland and lavish hospitality. The Armenians, on the other hand, were more urban and cosmopolitan, successful bankers and traders, often to be found outside their homeland, throughout the Caucasian region, and indeed the whole Middle East.

Along the coast of the Baltic Sea, Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century conquered regions which had been ruled since the Middle Ages by the Teutonic Knights and their German descendants. There German landowners and burghers of Lutheran faith ruled over a largely peasant population of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. The Estonians spoke a language related to Finnish, but the other two nations were completely isolated in the European community of languages. During the nineteenth century they began to generate their own native intelligentsia, often centred on the church to begin with: by the early twentieth century, with the coming of industry to these relatively advanced regions, a native working class was beginning to develop. In fact the growing national consciousness led to especially violent clashes there in the 1905 revolution.

The annexations of Poland in the late eighteenth century brought several million Jews into the Russian Empire. Speaking Yiddish and practising their own faith, they ruled themselves in self-governing communities (the kahal) under the general protection of the crown. Most of them were traders, artisans, innkeepers and the like. They were usually prohibited from owning land, so that very few practised agriculture. The Imperial government decided to restrict them to the territories where they already lived, which became known as the Pale of Settlement. Only Jews with higher education or certain professional qualifications were permitted to live elsewhere. Official discrimination against them was aggravated by powerful popular prejudice, which sometimes flared up into violent pogroms, especially from the 1880s onwards. Jews began to seek a way out of their situation, some by setting up their own socialist party (the Bund), others by calling for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine (the Zionists).

Altogether, the peoples of the Russian Empire were at very different stages of national integration by the early twentieth century: some were still primitive nomadic clans, while others had their own literate intelligentsia and working class. In all cases, however, the social changes of the time–urbanization, industrialization, the growth in commerce, the rise of primary education–tended to intensify and accentuate national feelings, both among Russians and non-Russians. More and more citizens of the empire were faced with the question: do I belong primarily to the Russian Empire or to my national homeland? On the answer depended language, culture, career, often religion.

The 1917 revolution posed the same question again, in even sharper form. Marxism had no ready formula for the national question. Marx himself had tended to underestimate the whole thing, assuming that the existing industrial nations of Europe had a natural right, at least for the time being, to speak for the proletariat everywhere, while ultimately national differences were less important than economic ones.

In the spectrum of European Marxism, Lenin occupied an intermediate position on the national question. Unlike the Austrian Marxists, Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, he did not regard nations as permanent historical entities: he held that they were conditioned, like all other social formations, by economic forces. On the other hand, he did not believe, like Rosa Luxemburg, that as soon as the socialist revolution took place they could all be merged forthwith in an international community. Like most Marxists, Lenin was inclined to underestimate the strength of national consciousness as a social force, but he was very well aware that in the circumstances of 1917, the desire of the subject nations of the former Russian Empire to enjoy greater independence was a powerful potential ally. His observations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had made him conscious of the power of national feelings during what he called the ‘bourgeois’ revolution.

Besides, during the First World War, Lenin became increasingly impressed by the revolutionary potential of the colonized nations of the world, especially those in Asia. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) he developed the view that the class struggle was now taking place on an international scale, and that the colonized nations as a whole were being exploited by the advanced industrial nations of Europe and North America. It followed that, at the present stage of history, the slogan of national self-determination was a revolutionary one, and in particular that the subject nationalities of Russia, led if necessary by their ‘national bourgeoisie’, should be encouraged to over-throw their oppressors and decide their own future.

Lenin, then, viewed national aspirations as real and powerful. Nevertheless, he did believe that in the long run they were secondary. And since Lenin always tended to hope that ‘the long run’ might be speeded up, the result was considerable ambivalence on the national question, an ambivalence reflected in his policy after October. His intention was that nations of the old Russian Empire should be allowed either to declare their complete independence from Soviet Russia or to join the new state as a constituent part of it. He did not envisage any intermediary position. In fact, however, as it turned out, what most nations actually desired in 1917 was neither complete independence nor total assimilation, but some form of associate or autonomous status within a multinational federal state.

In this significant way, the Bolsheviks were out of tune with the aspirations of the nationalities. Furthermore, in the absence of world revolution, Lenin was in no position to offer them genuine internationalism: the most he could extend to them was membership in a multinational state dominated in numbers, language, culture and administrative power by Russians. Without the safeguards of a federal structure, this threatened to mean actual Russification, the very evil against which they had struggled, with Lenin’s support, under the tsars. This danger was intensified by the Bolsheviks’ explicit subordination, in theoretical terms, of national independence to ‘proletarian internationalism’: as Lenin frequently reiterated, the primary concern of the proletarian party was ‘the self-determination, not of peoples, but of the proletariat within each nation’.

In order to meet these dilemmas, the Bolsheviks in government had from the beginning to compromise, and to accept in practice what they denied in theory, a federal structure. The Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, of January 1918, explicitly called the new Soviet state ‘a federation of Soviet national republics’. At that stage, of course, even this was a mere aspiration, since the Bolsheviks did not control most of the outlying regions of the empire in which the intended national republics were situated: federation was accepted temporarily as preferable to disintegration. Nevertheless, the use of the word had long-term implications. It harmonized with the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia (2 November 1917), which recognized the equality and sovereignty of all peoples, abolished all national privileges and restrictions, and established the right to self-determination ‘up to and including secession and the formation of an independent state’.

To deal with the manifold and delicate problems of relations with the nationalities, Lenin set up a People’s Commissariat of Nationality Affairs (Narkomnats for short) under Stalin. It mediated in conflicts between national groups, and advised generally on the ways in which Bolshevik policies would affect the non-Russians. As more nationalities gradually passed under Soviet rule, Narkomnats also became a real instrument of political influence. At its head was a ‘collegium’, a kind of large committee on which elected representatives of the nationalities sat. Narkomnats thus collated and aggregated national opinion as well as providing a means by which orders could be passed down from above.

Whenever national self-determination clashed with ‘proletarian internationalism’, it was the latter which took precedence. This can be seen even in the case of Finland, which had been a Russian protectorate for only a century. It is true that when a non-socialist government led by Svinhufvud declared independence, the Soviet government in Petrograd recognized this. It also, however, simultaneously supported a Red rising inside Finland, designed to instal a pro-Soviet government in Helsinki. This rising was crushed after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, when the Germans intervened on the side of the Finnish Whites. Here for the first time a danger appeared which was to recur frequently: that of Red troops being regarded by the local population as Russifiers and being therefore resisted as foreign invaders.

The history of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was somewhat similar. In Estonia and Latvia a National Council took advantage of the Soviet Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples and announced their independence from Russia, only to be arrested by Red Guards who installed a Soviet regime. These in their turn were swept aside by the German occupation troops following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Then, after November 1918, with the defeat of the Germans, all three national movements struggled to consolidate the existence of independent republics in a dual war against both the Red Army and local socialists (who were especially strong in Latvia). They succeeded in this, at least partly owing to armed support both from irregular German units and from the British navy, which was trying to clear the region of both Russian and German influence. In this way Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became independent republics which lasted till 1940.

Poland’s independence from Russia was already a fait accompli when the Bolsheviks came to power, since the whole of the Congress Kingdom (the Russian sector of Poland) had been occupied by the Germans in 1915. Recognition of this was a pure formality. What reopened the question was the decision of Pilsudski, the Polish leader, in 1920, to invade the Ukraine and attempt to reincorporate territory which had been ruled over by the Poles before the partitions of the late eighteenth century. The Poles did very well at first, and in fact captured Kiev, but the Red Army then regrouped itself from its victories over Denikin and managed to drive the Poles back out of the Ukraine. The question then arose: should the Red Army profit by its impetus, pursue the enemy into Poland itself, and try to set up a Soviet republic in Warsaw? On this the Soviet leaders were themselves divided, and their divisions were significant. Trotsky took the immaculately internationalist line that socialist revolution in Poland should proceed from the efforts of the Polish workers themselves: for the Red Army to invade would merely persuade them that the Russians had returned, albeit under a new banner, to occupy and rule over their country as before. Lenin, on the other hand, took the view that circumstances were once again favourable for world revolution: encouraged by the heroism of the Red Army against their own bourgeoisie and landowners, the Polish workers would rise against their native oppressors and overthrow their government. Beyond that, too, the revolution might spread to Germany and even the rest of Europe. For a brief intoxicating moment the dreams of October 1917 returned: a Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee, headed by the Social Democrat Marchlewski, waited in Moscow to take up the reins of power in Warsaw (a scene to become familiar in Europe in 1944–5), while Stalin began to elaborate plans for the creation of a super-confederation of Soviet republics, to include Poland, Hungary and Germany.

This Polish war brought the final stage in the reintegration of part of the old officer corps into the new Red Army. General Brusilov, perhaps the most distinguished of the former tsarist commanders, and a man who had hitherto held aloof from the Communists, published an appeal in Pravda: ‘Forget the wrongs you have suffered. It is now your duty to defend our beloved Russia with all your strength, and to give your lives to save her from irretrievable subjugation.’ Many fellow officers responded to his words. And in case anyone should worry about the revival of Russian nationalism in Communist guise, the internationalist Radek provided a ready justification: ‘Since Russia is the only country where the working class has taken power, the workers of the whole world ought now to become Russian patriots. …’ This was of course only an extension of the arguments Lenin had used to justify the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: it marked a stage in the eventual emergence of the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’.

In the end, the Red Army failed to capture Warsaw for reasons which have been the subject of controversy ever since (Trotsky ascribed the failure to Stalin’s military insubordination). Lenin, however, summed it up as follows: ‘The Poles thought and acted, not in a social, revolutionary manner, but as nationalists, as imperialists. The revolution in Poland which we counted on did not take place. The workers and peasants, deceived by Pilsudski, … defended their class enemy and let our brave Red soldiers starve, ambushed them and beat them to death.’

The war of 1920 showed, in fact, that Soviet Russia was prepared to act as a new kind of great power with a traditional army, and that its actions would be so interpreted by its neighbours, even where the ostensible aim was the promotion of international proletarian brotherhood. The ambiguity of Soviet ‘fraternal aid’ has remained to the days of the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’.

The immediate result was a frontier settlement relatively favourable to the Poles. By the Treaty of Riga, concluded in October 1920, Poland was awarded territories that included large numbers of Bielorussian and Ukrainian peasants, and until 1939 her eastern frontier ran only just west of the capital of the Soviet Bielorussian Republic, Minsk.

The Ukraine offers an example of a national movement which, though far from negligible in pre-revolutionary Russia, received considerable fresh impetus from the revolutions of 1917. Ukrainian nationalism had been slow to develop in nineteenth-century Russia, partly because of government repression (it was livelier across the border in Austria-Hungary, where the authorities were less opposed to it). Something of a flowering followed the revolution of 1905, with the easing of national restrictions, and a Ukrainian urban intelligentsia began to develop, particularly in Kiev and the western regions. It remained true, however, that the great majority of Ukrainian speakers were peasants, and that the towns were very strongly influenced by Russian, Jewish and Polish cultural life. Many of the industrial workers were Russian, especially in the modern industries of Kharkov (the largest city in the Ukraine), the Krivoi Rog region and the Donbass: generally the eastern Ukraine had a much higher proportion of Russians than the west.

After the February revolution, a Ukrainian central Rada (Ukrainian for soviet) convened in Kiev, elected rather haphazardly (though no more so than the Russian soviets of the time) by those inhabitants, particularly in the towns, who felt themselves to be Ukrainian. In June, after abortive negotiations with the Provisional Government, this rada issued a ‘Universal’ (or decree, in old Cossack usage) proclaiming an ‘autonomous Ukrainian republic’. The rada was under pressure from a Ukrainian Military Congress, representing Ukrainian officers and soldiers from the Imperial Army: they had gathered in St Sophia’s Square in Kiev and vowed not to disperse until such a proclamation appeared.

During the summer of 1917 a great variety of congresses met, representing Ukrainians from all walks of life: from peasant communes and agricultural cooperatives, from zemstvos and municipalities, from universities and schools, from hospitals and army units. All of them took a pride in using the Ukrainian language and in stressing those traditions which distinguished them from the Russians. What was taking place was the explosive creation of a Ukrainian nation, discovering and confirming its identity in this multiplicity of organizations and meetings, rather as the Russian working class was doing at the same time. For most urban Ukrainians at this moment, however, national, not social, consciousness was paramount. It is not clear that the same was true of the peasants, many of whom shared the grievances and aspirations of their Russian counterparts, and wanted above all more land.

After the October revolution in Petrograd, the rada (in its Third Universal, of 7 November 1917), supported again by the Ukrainian Military Congress, confirmed the existence of a Ukrainian People’s Republic, and promised an early land reform and the convening of a Ukrainian Constituent Assembly. At this stage the rada did not insist on complete independence from Soviet Russia–Ukrainian intellectuals had always thought of themselves as part of Russia, but wanted to be a self-ruling part–yet, all the same, bitter disputes soon broke out between Kiev and Petrograd. With encouragement from the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, separate from the rada, were established in Kiev and other Ukrainian towns: because of the national composition of the population, these were normally dominated by Russians. Troops loyal to the rada closed some of these soviets down, rather as the Bolsheviks themselves were doing to their opponents in other parts of Russia; but in fact Ukrainian national feeling was so strong, even in the soviets, that when an all-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets opened in Kiev in December, it turned out to have a non-Bolshevik majority anyway. The Bolsheviks, dismayed by this result, withdrew from it and called an alternative congress in Kharkov, where they could be surer of working-class Russian support. So in the Ukraine too the Bolsheviks found themselves acting as agents of Russification.

In this way the scene was set for civil war on Ukrainian territory, with Red troops and Ukrainian military formations facing one another. The Reds succeeded in capturing Kiev before the fighting was halted by the German occupation of the Ukraine in March 1918.

During the following two and a half years at least eight different kinds of regime ruled in the Ukraine, and not one of them was able to consolidate itself, or even to claim the adherence of a majority of the population. This was not only because of the multiplicity of forces interested in the region, but also because of the divisions of interest in the population itself. It is scarcely surprising that the Germans, the Poles and the Whites under Denikin (who would have crushed Ukrainian autonomy) were unable to command mass support. But it is perhaps more surprising that the rada, or the later Ukrainian nationalist government under Petlyura, were not able to attract a more stable following. This may have been because, as Vinnichenko, leader of the rada government, later confessed, the rada had not done enough to win over the peasants by carrying through a thorough land reform. After all, the great majority of Ukrainian speakers were peasants, for whom the agrarian issue was at least as important as the national one: to ignore their interests was to deprive oneself of a vital source of support. This impression is strengthened by the enthusiastic support given by many Ukrainian peasants to Makhno, the Anarchist leader, who seems to have filled a much-felt need, without being able to lay the foundations of stable and lasting government because he had so little support outside the peasantry.

Lacking a convinced peasant following, the Ukrainian nationalists could expect little enthusiasm from the Russians, who preferred rule from Moscow to that from Kiev, and still less from the Jews, whom Petlyura alienated by his encouragement of vicious pogroms against them. The Ukrainian national movement was thus defeated in its hour of apparent victory, and the Reds were eventually able to establish themselves permanently in Kiev.

The Ukraine’s brief and turbulent independence did, however, leave a heritage. The victorious Ukrainian Bolsheviks were themselves affected by it. It is true that in October 1919 the Ukrainian Communist Party had its own Central Committee abolished and was directly subordinated to the Russian Communist Party in Moscow. But many Ukrainian Communists never really accepted this decision: indeed they protested to Moscow and succeeded in provoking from Lenin a ringing denunciation of Great (i.e. Muscovite) Russian chauvinism. He recommended that the Ukrainian Communist Party should rule in a coalition government with the Borotbisty (equivalents of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries), and that party members should ‘act by all means available against any obstacles to the free development of the Ukrainian language and culture’, for example by making it a condition that all administrative offices should have a kernel of Ukrainian speakers, and that no one should be officially employed who did not have some knowledge of Ukrainian.