A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

17 Compromise and Preparation

The end of the Civil War presented the Soviet leadership with a whole series of new issues, some immediate and some more long term. If the White armies were defeated, internal discontent was growing rapidly, fueled by the catastrophic economic situation and resentment of the party dictatorship. In 1920 in the Tambov province in central Russia a major revolt of the peasantry broke out, largely unpolitical but no less fervent. It required major army forces under Tukhachevskii to suppress it. As the army moved into Tambov province, the sailors of Kronstadt rose in revolt. The revolt at the naval base in the harbor of Petrograd was much more visible and more political. The sailors had been crucial supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917, and now they were calling for Soviets to be elected without Communists, a direct challenge to the emerging Soviet system. At the end of March, 1921, Trotsky sent troops across the ice to retake the fort with much loss of life, the whole event illustrating the fragility of Soviet power. The revolts and the obvious failure of War Communism led to a sharp turn in economic policy. As the fighting raged in Kronstadt, Lenin and the party abolished the system of compulsory grain deliveries, substituting a tax in kind and permitting the peasantry to trade freely in the products left after the payment of the new tax. This step was the foundation of the New Economic Policy, known as NEP. A return to a money economy soon followed, and with it came permission from the state, even encouragement, for private individuals to trade and set up businesses to supply a population starved of the most basic consumer goods. Socialism was no longer on the immediate agenda. Industrial recovery would eventually provide a basis for further development, and at an indefinite point in the future peasant agriculture would be drawn somehow into the socialist system (a process called “collectivization”).

The next immediate issue was the famine that appeared in 1922, the result of years of devastation, neglect of equipment and infrastructure, the absence of peasants from the fields while fighting in the various armies during the Civil War, the Soviet grain requisitions that discouraged farming, and general death and destruction. The Soviets took up the offer of the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, fresh from relief operations in Belgium, to provide food to stricken areas in the south and the Volga region. Relief and the return of peace could contain the famine, but longer-term issues remained. The outcome of the revolution and civil war was that the peasantry finally controlled virtually all arable land in Russia. With the urban economy devastated, however, they at first had little incentive to sell their grain to the cities. Yet NEP depended precisely on the peasant sale of grain for consumer goods, and eventually it worked. The peasants now had cloth, industrially manufactured consumer goods, and some farm equipment to buy in return for their grain. At this point, the party did little to advance any sort of socialist agriculture. It abandoned the experiments with the “communes” of the Civil War era, and settled for modest cooperatives among the peasants while trying to build a basic party network among them, especially from younger peasants who had served in the Red Army.

The result was a certain return to normalcy on the part of urban society, but that was very much a matter of the surface of things. In reality, all had changed. The old state, upper classes, and much of the intelligentsia were gone, dead, marginalized, or abroad. In their place was the new party-state, the core of which was the Communist Party. In the old palaces of the nobility the Party set up museums and kindergartens, party offices and schools, and Cheka headquarters and administrative offices. Interspersed among drab new institutions were the more garish shops and restaurants of the Nepmen (as the new businessmen were called) with their hints of luxury and hedonism. Bright lights reappeared and private restaurants featured jazz bands and European cabaret acts. Advertisements for privately manufactured rubber boots and champagne hung alongside banners calling for world revolution. Prostitutes and smugglers rubbed shoulders with German Comintern agents and Latvian Cheka officers. Workers were enrolled in instant higher education projects (the “Workers’ Faculties”) and peasants came to the cities looking for unskilled work as before.

The Soviet Union of the 1920s was a colorful place, but there was more than an easier daily life in the cities. The economy revived from the catastrophic situation of 1920; indeed it revived much faster than the party leadership expected. Instead of decades of rebuilding, production in almost all areas had rebounded by 1926 to pre-war levels, in some areas exceeding them. Of course this was merely a revival, and in the years since 1914 the world had not stood still. Especially in the United States and Germany, new technologies were changing the landscape, and the Soviet Union had merely rebuilt the pre-war world. Automobiles, new chemical industries, aircraft, and radio technology were all new and growing rapidly in the West. The USSR would have to move very fast just to catch up. Unfortunately one crucial area lagged behind: agriculture. The problem was not total production, for the country produced almost exactly the same amount of grain – the crucial commodity – as in 1914, but now much less came to market. On average the peasants marketed only a bit more than half of the amount of grain marketed before the war. Explanations for this phenomenon vary, but it seems that it was the result of land seizures in the summer of 1917. Large estates, which had been market-oriented, disappeared, and the distribution of land among the peasants was radically equalized. Well-off peasants (the kulaks) did remain in the villages, but most land went to middling producers who consumed more of their harvest than before the war. Soviet pricing policies increased the problem, as the peasants thought the state purchase prices were too low. Here was the dilemma: if the country was to continue to industrialize, and to keep up with the West, it would need vast new industries and new cities, and their workers would need food. How to get it? Agriculture would have to become more productive, but how and how fast? Thus the rather technical questions of balancing industrial growth rates and modernizing agriculture became the object of increasingly acrimonious debate and vicious internal struggles inside the leadership of the Communist Party. The outcome of these debates and struggle was the supreme power of Joseph Stalin.

The Civil War had further centralized an already centralized party and also imbued it with a civil war mentality. All disagreements became necessarily matters of life and death – all opponents were covert enemies of the entire revolutionary idea. Lenin and Trotsky defended and practiced terror against the Whites and other enemies. The remaining moderate socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Left SRs as well as the anarchists were suppressed. Not surprisingly, the end of the Civil War had no effect on the Bolshevik mentality, and the demands for ideological unity, if anything, became sharper. Personality clashes and differences in strategy, however, militated against unity. Lenin, in his last writings, was critical of all of the major figures – Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and others – but offered no clear choice among the leadership. The first major dispute broke out in 1923, as Lenin’s health deteriorated after several strokes. Trotsky and a number of his allies from the Civil War began to criticize the “bureaucratic tendencies” in the party. Then in January 1924, Lenin died. The mantle of leadership was not passed on to any one man: Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were the dominant figures. In 1922 the Party Congress had appointed Stalin General Secretary of the party, a position he held until his death. It gave him control or at least knowledge of all appointments in the party to any positions of significance. Bukharin, as editor of Pravda, the party newspaper, was their most important ally. Trotsky still possessed great power and prestige but the others did not trust him. As the Commissar of War for many years, he seemed the most likely to become the Bonaparte of the Russian Revolution. If not as well educated as Bukharin, he was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and arrogant – too aloof to form powerful allies. Trotsky’s Menshevik past continued to haunt him. He also seriously underestimated Stalin, thinking him a provincial boor who was only good at bureaucratic maneuvers. Stalin, as a Georgian with a heavy accent, was in some ways even more of an outsider than Trotsky, but he had to his credit long years of faithful service to the party and an unflinching loyalty to Bolshevism. He had not spent long years abroad before 1917, and in that sense was more part of the Russian scene and more familiar to the party rank and file than the other leaders. Unlike Trotsky, he did not read French novels when bored at party meetings.

These biographical details would be only curiosities of the time if they did not come into play when real and basic issues arose in the party leadership over the future of the country. The most important of these was the controversy over “socialism in one country,” both for its own sake and for the implications it had for decisions in so many areas.

The struggle began in the last years of Lenin’s life, the first major one being Trotsky’s 1923 opposition platform. Trotsky’s main point was that the party was becoming less democratic and more bureaucratic through the practice of appointing its officials through Stalin’s secretariat rather than by election. His letter to the party leadership on this issue sparked an intense discussion that eventually came out into the open just on the eve of Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924. His opponents were Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev on this issue, the three forming a triumvirate that ruled the party and the country after Lenin’s death. Trotsky’s opposition for the moment produced some concessions, but the triumvirate remained in control. In any case the dispute was not as radical as it might seem, as Trotsky was a principled supporter of a centralized and authoritarian party. All he wanted was a little room for maneuver. More basic disagreements quickly emerged. Trotsky believed that the revolution could not survive, and socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union unless there were revolutions in the advanced countries of the West. Only fraternal socialist aid could overcome Russia’s backwardness. In the meantime, the USSR needed to pursue a policy of super-accelerated industrialization. The economist Evgenii Preobrazhenskii supported Trotsky on the issue of party structure, but also propounded a more detailed economic platform. His idea was simply to strip resources from the countryside by confiscations and other methods reminiscent of War Communism and use them for extremely rapid industrialization. The dilemma, as Preobrazhenskii saw it, was that the existence of private, small-scale peasant farming would lead to the strengthening of capitalism within the Soviet Union. He shared with Trotsky the idea that the Soviet Union could never survive as a socialist society encircled by capitalism: revolution in the advanced countries was essential to the building of socialism in the USSR, but in the short run extreme measures were necessary to ensure that the country would still be around when the revolution came in the West. This was the platform of the Left Opposition, as it came to be known.

This perspective met furious rejection from Bukharin, whose position as editor of Pravda meant that his views would receive wide circulation. Bukharin’s platform was a strident defense of NEP. He ridiculed the super-industrialization schemes of the opposition and explained that the crucial issue was the recovery of agriculture and the gradual enrichment of the peasants. As long as the party controlled the state and industry remained in state hands, there was nothing to fear from the peasants and the country would move rapidly toward a socialist industrial society. Stalin allied with Bukharin and himself began to formulate the notion of “socialism in one country,” the idea that the USSR alone could totally transform its society, including its agriculture, before the ultimate triumph of socialism in the West. For Stalin did not reject the prospect of world revolution, as he was convinced that the capitalist powers would eventually unleash a new world war and that revolution would come out of it if not earlier. Where he differed from Trotsky was in the belief that the Soviet Union could manage to build a socialist society on its own while waiting for revolution abroad.

The effect of the struggle was first to marginalize Trotsky, who lost his position as head of the War Commissariat and other offices in 1925. In that same year Zinoviev and Kamenev switched their allegiance, coming out in opposition to Stalin and Bukharin. For Zinoviev and Kamenev the main issue before had been fear of Trotsky: now they feared Stalin more. The now united opposition failed to win much support in the party and in 1926 Stalin had Zinoviev removed from his position as head of the party in Leningrad (Petrograd had acquired another new name on Lenin’s death). Thus the opposition had no longer any substantial base in the organization of the party. Stalin and Bukharin triumphed at the end of 1927. The NEP policy triumphed, it seemed, if with an increased push toward industrialization. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were expelled from the party along with their followers. Zinoviev and Kamenev soon recanted their errors and were readmitted, but Trotsky went first into exile in Alma-ata, and then was expelled from the country in 1929. Stalin had utterly defeated the opposition, and it seemed that NEP might continue.

Stalin’s victory went along with increasing prohibitions on dissent in the party and particularly on the formation of factions and oppositional platforms. Before the principle of absolute ideological unity could triumph, one last major dispute shook up the party leadership. Starting early in 1928, Stalin and his supporters changed their plans entirely. The cause was a drop in grain procured by the state agencies to feed the cities at the end of 1927. Stalin believed that the peasantry, mainly the kulaks, were simply holding grain back in the hopes of better prices or even to harm the Soviet state. His response was to organize an expedition of party officials led by himself into the Urals and Siberia early in 1928 to seize the grain. His expedition returned with freight cars loaded with grain, and he proclaimed it a success. Stalin and his allies now moved toward a policy of rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, effectively the end of NEP. The new policy provoked opposition from Bukharin as well as from Mikhail Tomskii, the head of the trade unions, and Aleksei Rykov, the Soviet Prime Minister. Basically their platform was simply that NEP was working out well, in spite of occasional problems, and that there was no need to force the pace, either in industry or the countryside. The Right Opposition was less of a defined group than the Left and had much more support in the party than the small group of Trotskyists and followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev. Nevertheless, Stalin fought it to extinction, expelling the Rights from the leadership and from the party by the end of 1929. Their many followers, especially in the party organization in Moscow, followed them into defeat. Stalin now had complete control over the central leadership of the party.

NEP, for all the concessions to the peasantry, implied a centralized, state-owned, and managed industry, and that implied a new kind of state. The Soviet state did not just regulate industry, it also directly managed it at every level. The overall structure was a refined form of the one established in 1918, the Supreme Economic Council placed at the center over a series of units for each branch of industry, one for iron and steel, another for coal, yet another for machine-building, grouped along regional lines. These units made the decisions that in capitalist economies are made by businessmen, and the decisions were subject to a single overall plan. That plan was the work of the State Planning Committee, or Gosplan. For most of the time from its foundation in 1921 to 1930 Gosplan worked under the leadership of Gleb Krzhizhanovskii. An exception to the norm among Bolshevik leaders, he was both a trained electrical engineer (from the St. Petersburg Technological Institute) and an Old Bolshevik. The original Gosplan was primarily an advisory office for the Supreme Economic Council, but it soon worked out an electrification plan for the whole country. By 1925 it was compiling “control figures,” a sort of crude general economic plan, and by the late twenties it moved to writing the first five-year plan adopted in 1929.

The state’s management apparatus for the economy, however, did not match these ambitious goals. In the 1920s most of the state officials were not Communist Party members. Even in the Supreme Economic Council and Gosplan, most were economists or engineers who neither belonged to the party nor were particularly sympathetic to its goals. Many had been active as Mensheviks, SRs, or even liberals before 1917, but they did have the technical skills the Bolsheviks needed. Lenin had always maintained that they would grow to accept the new order, but it was far from clear that this was the case. The party’s instrument in all these offices was a small number of People’s Commissars and chairmen of committees appointed by the party from its own leadership ranks – men with political rather than technical experience. The same was true at the factory level: the director was usually a party official, but the engineers and clerical workers were not. Thus the party gave orders to the economic managers and factories, but did not have full control. Even so, the party’s Politburo and Central Committee spent long hours on the technicalities of economic administration, the timber industry or the acreage sown of sugar beets as well as arcane issues of monetary circulation and foreign trade. Some of these issues also had a political side and were involved in the factional battles of Trotsky, Stalin, and the “Rightists,” so that economic decisions were frequently decided on political grounds. Indeed Stalin and the other leaders thought that politics should go ahead of “narrowly” economic concerns.

The other side of the new state was its federal structure based on a hierarchy of national units. Soviet federalism was about ethnicity, not just territory, and it grew out of the experiences of 1917–1920. The Bolshevik party had always maintained that the Russian Empire was a “prison of peoples” that combined the worst of European colonialism with the old military despotism of the tsars. Therefore they advanced the slogan of self-determination for the non-Russian peoples (including full independent statehood if desired) well before the First World War. During the revolution most of the national groups of the empire formed nationalist parties, if they did not have them before (as in Finland and Poland), parties that advocated some sort of national autonomy. Before most of them had time to formulate a clear platform and build a base, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. With most cities speaking Russian and following the Reds, more or less, the nationalists had as their constituency only the local intelligentsia and, potentially, the peasantry. As most of the periphery was occupied by the Whites or interventionist troops until 1920, the Reds dealt only with the Ukraine and Belorussia in the west and the Muslim peoples of the Volga, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. In each case the situation differed.

Belorussia was a largely artificial creation mandated by the party authorities in 1919–20 to counter Polish designs on the area. Most of the population was indifferent to the issue and the local Communists were flatly opposed to a local ethnic republic. Lenin (and Stalin, as Commissar of Nationalities) overruled them. The Ukraine was quite different. Here the nationalist movement was quite well established among the minority of the intelligentsia that considered itself Ukrainian and was initially able to mobilize wide support among the peasantry. They faced, however an insurmountable obstacle in the cities, largely Russian and Jewish in population. The working class was absolutely uninterested in the Ukrainian cause and most intellectuals were Russian or identified with Russia (meaning the White cause). Jews followed one or another of the Russian or Jewish parties (Zionists, the Bund), not the Ukrainians. Nevertheless the Bolsheviks in Moscow realized that they had to provide some sort of Ukrainian framework if only to neutralize the nationalists and thus they forced local Communists to form a Ukrainian Communist Party and proclaim (in 1919) a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Both the Belorussian and the Ukrainian republics were de jure independent of Moscow, but their Communist Parties were not. They were explicitly subject to the orders of the Central Committee in Moscow.

The Muslim peoples were a wholly different issue. In the North Caucasus nationalism was very weak and the predominant identity was Islamic and very local. Some groups had allied with the Cossacks against the Reds and supported the White armies, but the hostility of the latter toward any sort of local autonomy made allies for the Reds, especially in Daghestan, and this led to a multi-sided struggle of extraordinary complexity. The outcome was decided by the victories of the Red Army, and in 1920 the Soviet government began to set up a series of local autonomous republics in the mountains. Each of the local peoples acquired its political unit (some of the smallest combined).

The other main Muslim groups with whom the Reds had to deal were the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga and Urals. These were substantial minorities, several million each, living in relatively prosperous areas and largely surrounded by Russians and in mainly Russian cities. Under the Provisional Government the Muslim Duma deputies and other political figures had formed local parties in favor of national culture and autonomy but supported the Provisional Government. In the course of the Civil War the nationalist groups had started out on the side of the Whites but some of them switched to the Reds, unable to stomach Admiral Kolchak’s nationalist orientation. In March 1919 the Bolsheviks set up a Bashkir Soviet republic as an autonomous unit within Russia and a year later a Tatar republic. Central Asia had provided yet another challenge, as fighting lasted until 1922, but the establishment of Soviet rule did bring a single Turkestan Soviet republic within Soviet Russia in 1918. Here nationality was an especially problematic issue that was not addressed until 1924.

In one way the most important of the Muslim peoples in 1920 was in the Caucasus. These were the Azeris, for the simple reason that their largest city, Baku, was also the principal center of oil production in the previous Russian Empire. The rapid conquest of the area led to the formation of a united Transcaucasian Federal Soviet Republic in 1921. The idea came at the insistence of Stalin and Ordzhonikidze over the objections of other Georgian Communists, for Stalin did not want to encourage the aspirations of the larger nationalities. The brief years of independence had seen Georgian Mensheviks refuse to grant national rights to Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia as well as repeated Azeri-Armenian clashes. The solution was a federation that gave some sort of autonomy to all of the many ethnic groups of Transcaucasia, and in that way provided an obstacle, it seemed, to nationalism among the larger groups.

By 1922 Moscow was the center of several Soviet republics, technically independent but ruled by Communist Parties subordinate to the Russian Central Committee. Stalin decided to change this clumsy arrangement. His plan was to simply incorporate the other republics into Russia as autonomous units rather like Bashkiria but with somewhat more autonomy. His plan met opposition from Lenin, who believed that the greatest danger to party rule was Russian chauvinism. He did not want to provoke nationalist resistance on the periphery, and of course Russian nationalism had been the ideology of the Whites. Lenin’s objections led to a new scheme, in which all the Soviet republics, including Russia, formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In this scheme the larger non-Russian units entered the union on an equal legal status with Russia. In the 1920s only some functions were formally centralized in Moscow. There was no Commissariat of Agriculture or Education for the whole union, only in the republics. At the same time the Communist Party was centralized in the Politburo and Central Committee and gave orders to all the republican party organizations. In addition, the management of most of the industrial economy from Moscow was a powerful centralizing element.

The new union now had to face a series of unresolved issues throughout the country. The basic presumption of the Soviet leadership was that nationality was a matter of language. Though both Lenin and Stalin added common history and culture to this definition, in practice it meant language was the deciding factor. This criterion that worked fairly well in the European part of the country did not fit other areas so well. It committed the Soviets to forming autonomous units wherever there were language differences, and thus they began to set up autonomous units among small Siberian peoples without any political or national consciousness in the modern sense. Even among peoples of European Russia there were problems. The small Volga people who spoke a Finno-ugric language that Russian scholars called Mordovian had a common language but no common word for both of the two Mordovian subgroups. The Soviet authorities simply declared them all Mordovians and introduced the Russian word for their nationality into their language. In the Ukraine large cities with few Ukrainian speakers such as Odessa soon had no newspapers in Russian, only in Ukrainian. Multi-national cities like Baku were a particular problem.

The language issues in the western parts of the country paled compared to the situation in Central Asia. The Kazakh population of the northern steppes was a relatively coherent group and received the status of an autonomous republic within Russia in 1924 (and a union republic in 1936). Farther south, the population of the Syr-Darya and Amu-Darya river basins presented tremendous difficulties. Identity in these areas did not fall along linguistic lines. Most of the people thought of themselves first as Muslims, and then only as parts of one or another group. The urban and much of the settled village population fell under the category of Sarts, whether they spoke a Turkic or Iranian language. “Uzbek” usually meant Turkic-speaking nomads around and among the settled areas. The great cities, Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarkand had been the centers of Uzbek dynasties but their traditional culture was both Turkic and Persian. The area more or less compactly settled by Iranian speakers had no large urban center. The most prosperous agricultural area, the Ferghana valley, was also one of the most ethinically diverse. While the Turkmens, Kazakhs, and Kirgiz formed relatively coherent units, they were also divided along tribal lines. The Soviets took all of this as merely backwardness and feudalism and proceeded to create republics along linguistic lines, though in the Ferghana Valley this meant leaving large minorities on all sides of the new borders. The outcome was five republics: Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, Turkmenia, Uzbekistan (the most populous) and Tadjikistan (the Iranian-speaking area).

In the 1920s the conditions of NEP meant that there were few grand plans to transform the new republics. Starting in 1924–25 the party pursued a policy of “nativization” of the party and state apparatus outside the Russian republic. The main thrust was the promotion of non-Russian cadre at all levels, though the key positions were usually exempt from this policy, being reserved by Moscow for its most trusted workers. These party leaders were not necessarily Russians, however: Georgians, Armenians, Latvians (especially in the political police), and Jews were prominent in the leadership of the non-Russian republics, far from their presumed home territories. Both culture and the peasantry were to a large extent left to the republics during the 1920s, not surprisingly as in Bolshevik ideology the peasants were the reserve of nationalism and the intelligentsia were the carriers of the local national cultures. In the NEP years, both were to be conciliated and indeed local cultures could not be advanced or created without the native intelligentsia.

The cultural autonomy of the new republics went along with a largely centralized political and economic system. While the republican Communist parties managed their own day-to-day affairs, the guidelines and top personnel were firmly in the hands of the leadership in Moscow. Economic management was split between the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR in Moscow and analogous offices in the republics. The most important centers of production, such the Donbass and the huge metal industry of the Ukrainian republic, were under the authority of the center. This situation led to complaints from all the republican governments, including even the Russian republic.

The Soviet Union came into existence at the end of years of war and during upheaval around the world. Lenin and the Bolsheviks believed that their revolution was only the first of a series that would soon come, and not even the most important. The whole Bolshevik leadership believed that a revolution was imminent in Germany, and the overthrow of the Kaiser in 1918 seemed to be the beginning, the German version of Russia’s February Revolution. For the next few years it seemed that the German October was just around the corner. The brief establishment of a Hungarian Communist government in 1919 and upheavals around the rest of Europe seemed to confirm the prognosis, but the anticipated revolution never came. In 1923 the German Communists made a last failed attempt, and Lenin and the Soviet leadership recognized that the revolutionary wave had ebbed.

The Soviet Union was now isolated in a world of hostile capitalist powers. It needed to survive, and its leaders, including Stalin, also believed that the world revolution would come sooner or later. This was the basic contradiction of Soviet foreign policy, and it remained until the final end of the Soviet state. The revolutionary side of Soviet relations with the world in the 1920s was the province of the Communist International (the Comintern). Founded in 1919 as the Communist answer to the Socialist International of moderate (and mostly formerly pro-war) socialists, it aimed to organize and promote revolution throughout the world. It boasted an international leadership and staff, but its headquarters in Moscow was firmly under Soviet control, in the person of Grigorii Zinoviev until 1925. It brought together under its leadership all the many groups of socialists who had opposed the First World War and then had gone on to espouse revolution in its aftermath, forming Communist Parties in nearly every country in the world. These were fractious parties, most of them with tactics far more militant than Moscow approved, but the Soviet leadership soon brought them into line.

The Soviet government also realized that it needed to break out of its isolation. Early in 1921 Britain had made a trade agreement, the first breach in the economic blockade imposed by Western powers in 1918. Then in 1922 the Soviets made an agreement with Weimar Germany, an agreement that included recognition, mutual trade, and a secret military protocol that allowed German military officers to train on Soviet territory and other forms of military cooperation. Weimar Germany, as the main victim of the peace settlement of Versailles, wanted maneuver room, and Lenin accommodated them. For the next decade relations with Germany warmed and then cooled, but the military agreement remained intact and trade expanded. In contrast, relations with Britain took a sharp downward turn, in large part the result of Soviet and Comintern policies in the East.

The policies of the Soviet leadership in Asia formed a historic turning point, both in Russian history and in world history, generally. Their impact has far outlasted the particular goals of Lenin and the Comintern in 1919–20. Lenin’s conception of imperialism implied that the European colonial empires provided crucial resources for the dominance of capitalism in the world and over the European working classes in particular. The oppressed people of the colonies were therefore crucial allies of the proletariat in the battle for socialism. The first meetings of the Comintern proclaimed this principle loud and clear, and its agents and supporters around the world spread the news. In Paris a young Vietnamese working at painting pseudo-asian pottery in a French factory read that the Comintern wanted to support the colonized peoples, and he decided to join the Communists. His name was Ho Chi Minh. At the time, however, it was the events in China that took most of the attention of the Comintern’s Asian sections and the Soviet government. In 1911 nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen had overthrown the Ching dynasty and established a republic, but the struggle raged to make the republic work and to expel, or at least radically weaken, the treaty regime that held China in bondage to the Western powers and Japan. The Comintern and the infant Chinese Communist Party supported the Nationalists, only to have Chiang-kai Shek turn on them and virtually exterminate the Communists in 1927. The Chinese Communists would recover, but for the time being Soviet policy in China was one of the major reasons Britain broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1927, provoking a war scare in Moscow that lasted for several months. The small groups of Communists in the various Asian colonies continued to exist, largely ignored by all but the colonial administrations, but their actions would eventually have enormous consequences that the modest growth of Communism in Europe could not match.

In spite of the failure in China the Soviet leadership was convinced that the setbacks were only temporary. Stalin, as well as his opponents in the party, was convinced that a new war was inevitable sooner or later – a war between the western powers, for the “contradictions”, in Marxist terminology, between Britain, France, and Germany were too serious to be resolved in any other way. War would lead to another social crisis like that after World War I. In 1928 the Comintern made a sharp turn to the left, proclaiming that a new era of instability and revolution was coming soon, a notion that the depression beginning in 1929 seemed to confirm. Stalin was entirely behind the new Comintern line, especially as it urged the Communists to focus their attack on Social Democrats in the hopes of weaning the working class away from moderate leaders. At the same time he did not want to provoke a war with the great powers, and the policy of the Soviet state was much more conciliatory than the Comintern’s proclamations. Stalin needed peace on his frontiers, as he was about to launch a giant upheaval.