Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

3

The Red Empire^*

The first nationwide census of the Russian Empire, conducted in 1897, indicated that its population (exclusive of the Grand Duchy of Finland) numbered 126 million.^† The proportion of Russians depended on one’s definition. The Imperial government included under this category three Slavic groups that in the twentieth century have come to be recognized as distinct nations: Russians proper, or “Great Russians” (56 million); Ukrainians, or “Little Russians” (22 million); and Belorussians (6 million). Counted as one, they made up two-thirds of the total.^‡ If the Ukrainians and Belorussians were treated as nations in their own right, then the Russians (or, more exactly, Russian-speakers) were reduced to a minority (44.2 percent). It was in good measure to conceal this unpalatable fact that the tsarist regime persecuted Ukrainian nationalism with particular savagery, to the point of outlawing the publication of printed materials in the Ukrainian language.

The Belorussians and most Ukrainians shared with the Great Russians a common religion, and at a time when religious affiliation took precedence over national identity for the majority of the Empire’s inhabitants, this was a significant bond. The tsarist authorities treated members of the three Slavic Orthodox groups as equals in terms of advancement in the civil and military service, which facilitated assimilation. Intermarriage further contributed to this end: in the 1926 census, which listed separately national status and linguistic preference, one in seven Ukrainians and Belorussians considered Russian to be their native tongue.

This said, the differences separating the three eastern Slavic groups were more significant than the similarities. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries the Ukrainians and Belorussians had been subjects of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a Catholic country, culturally close to Western Europe. As a consequence, until the second half of the eighteenth century, when they came under Russian rule, they had been exposed to a far greater extent than Muscovite Russians to Western influences. Specifically, the Ukrainians and Belorussians had much shorter experience with the three institutions that shaped the lives of Great Russians: patrimonial autocracy, serfdom, and communal landholding. At the turn of the century neither was as yet a fully formed modern nation, and such sense of national identity as they possessed was confined to a thin layer of native intelligentsia. As was the case with Great Russians, most Ukrainians and Belorussians thought of themselves as members not of a nation but of the Orthodox community, and as natives of the province in which they happened to live. The Ukrainian nationalist movement, encouraged and financed by the Austrians as a means of weakening Russia, acquired a broader constituency only during the Revolution and Civil War.

The 1897 census showed that the Empire had 85 distinct linguistic groups, the smallest of which numbered in the hundreds. Interesting as such communities may be to the anthropologist and ethnographer, for the historian most of them are of marginal importance.

Politically, the most active of Russia’s ethnic groups were her 8 million Poles. They had been acquired by Russia in the partitions of the eighteenth century and at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. By 1900, as punishment for two rebellions (1830–31 and 1863), the Poles had lost the right to self-government: after 1863, all traces of Polish statehood were obliterated and the very name of Poland disappeared from Russian maps. Although the Poles were Slavs, their Catholicism caused them to be regarded by Russians as foreigners.^* It is difficult to understand how the Russians hoped to keep an ancient people, culturally much superior to the mass of their own people, in permanent subjugation. But Poland was geopolitically too important to St. Petersburg to relinquish: if the Ukrainians and Belorussians gave Russians a numerical preponderance in the Empire, Poland served them as an outpost from which to exert political and military influence on Europe. Some Polish intellectuals believed that only by holding on to Poland could Russia claim status as a European power.

Next, in terms of numbers, came various Turco-Tatar groups professing Islam and scattered from the Black Sea to the Pacific. For the most part, they were descendants of the nomadic tribes that in the thirteenth century had conquered the proto-Russian (Kievan) state, and later migrants who had moved from the Chinese border to the steppes south of the Russian homeland in the forest zone (taiga). Some of them pursued a nomadism or transhumance, while others settled down to engage in trade and artisanship. They were concentrated in three regions. The largest was Central Asia (the Steppe and Turkestan), inhabited by 7 million Muslims, most of them Turks but some of Iranian ancestry or a mixture of the two. Another major Muslim settlement, and the earliest to come under Russian rule, comprised Turkic groups living along the middle Volga and the Urals. Two million of them were Tatars, a partly commercial, partly agrarian people, and 1.3 million were largely nomadic Bashkirs. A third area of concentration was Muslim communities in the northern Caucasian mountains and to the south, in Transcaucasia (Azeri Turks, Daghestanis, Chechens, and so forth), as well as in the Crimean peninsula. Muslims totaled 14–15 million, or II percent of the Empire’s population.

The Imperial government treated its Muslim subjects indulgently because it saw in them no political threat. In the early twentieth century a modernist cultural movement emerged among the Volga and Crimean Tatars; known as Jadidism, and, not unlike the Jewish Haskalah, its main objective was secularizing Muslim education. Potentially nationalistic, it did not assume political forms of expression until after the outbreak of the Revolution. The nomadic Turks enjoyed tribal autonomy and in the nineteenth century were protected by the government from Slav encroachments on their grazing lands. Most Muslims enjoyed exemption from military duty.

Russia acquired Finland from Sweden in 1809 as a present from Napoleon. Finland formed in the Russian Empire a semi-sovereign entity with her own legislature: the Russian tsar ruled there as Grand Duke, in which capacity he was subject to constitutional restraints. It was a satisfactory arrangement that began to fall apart toward the end of the nineteenth century owing to encroachments by the Russian bureaucracy on Finland’s constitutional rights. The result was the emergence of a Finnish nationalist movement. The inhabitants of Finland were exempt from Russian laws and service in the Russian army.

In the Baltic areas, then known as Livonia, Courland, and Estonia, the politically dominant element was Germans who controlled most of the land and dominated commerce. The Latvians and Estonians formed a lower class of peasants and industrial workers. No ethnic group in Russia showed greater loyalty to the tsarist regime than the Baltic Germans, and as a reward, St. Petersburg allowed them a free hand in running their provinces.

The Georgians (1.4 million) and Armenians (1.2 million) of Transcaucasia were Orthodox Christians with their own “autocephalous” hierarchies. Surrounded by hostile Muslims, they tended to look to the Russians for security. In the late eighteenth century the Georgians requested Russia’s protection and signed with her accords that the latter violated in 1801 by incorporating Georgia. Armenia was acquired in the early nineteenth century from the Ottoman Empire, in which the majority of Armenians continued to reside.

The 5 million Russian Jews were in a category all their own. Threatened in the early modern period by proto-Reformation movements known as the “Judaizing heresy,” the Orthodox Church insisted that no Jew be allowed to set foot on Russian soil. This exclusionary policy received support from Russian merchants, whose primitive commercial culture placed them at a great disadvantage in competition with Jewish traders. Until the middle of the eighteenth century there were no Jews in Russia. This situation changed drastically in the second half of the eighteenth century, when, as a result of the partitions of Poland, Russia acquired over one million Jewish subjects. The Jews had an extremely high reproduction rate: despite the steady outflow of emigrants, at the turn of the century they constituted the single largest non-Slavic nationality in the Russian Empire. They were not only the largest Jewish community in the world but the center of rabbinical learning, Yiddish culture, and Zionism.

Catherine II tried to extend civil rights to Jews, but she had to abandon these efforts because of the hostility of the Russian merchant class and the Poles. In the early 1800s the principle was established that with minor exceptions Jews could reside only in the territories of what had been the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (known as the Pale of Settlement). Furthermore, they were inscribed in the registers of the burgher estate (mesh-chane), which entitled them to engage in trade and crafts, but barred them from agriculture as well as from the civil and military services. The economic situation of the Jews squeezed into the towns of the Pale of Settlement and rapidly multiplying was harsh and deteriorating: many sought to escape this hardship, as well as the pogroms that first broke out in 1881–82, by emigrating to Western Europe and the Americas. Some Jews managed to gain a foothold in the interior of Russia by qualifying for residential exemptions or bribing police officials; many others, especially youths, turned to revolutionary activity. The Imperial authorities regarded the Jews as the most dangerous ethnic group not only because of their involvement in radical movements, but also because of their resistance to assimilation, links to coreligionists abroad, and capitalist entrepreneurship, which—so the bureaucracy believed—threatened to destabilize the rural economy.

But the Jews encountered hostility not only from the Imperial authorities. In the Pale of Settlement they formed a socioeconomic group identified by its religious practices: a middle-class layer between a Catholic and Orthodox nobility and an Orthodox peasantry. Culturally superior to the population in the midst of which they lived by virtue of nearly universal male literacy, strong family bonds, and sobriety, they invited much envy, which created a propitious climate for the pogroms of the Civil War.

Apart from the Poles, who would be satisfied with nothing short of sovereignty within borders that extended deep into Russia, and possibly the Finns, the non-Russians did not give the Imperial authorities much trouble. What came to be known as the “nationalities problem” presented as yet more a potential than a tangible threat to the Empire’s unity, in that the spread of mass education and literacy and the secularization of life had the effect of raising ethnic awareness. As a rule, the treatment of the minorities by the Imperial government stood in inverse ratio to their cultural level: the better educated they were and the higher their living standards, the more dangerous they seemed and the more carefully they were watched.

National identity among the non-Russians was stimulated by the 1905 Revolution and the constitutional regime that emerged from it. In 1905–06, the major ethnic groups convened congresses to air grievances and formulate wants. In the electoral campaigns for parliament (Duma) many ran their own candidates. Most were affiliated with Russian parties, usually either the liberals (Constitutional-Democrats) or the socialists, but even so they had their own agendas and followed the practice of caucusing. A considerable number of Ukrainians cast ballots for the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party (UPSR) or the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party (USDP). Muslim Duma deputies formed a Muslim Union, which cooperated on legislative matters affecting their constituencies. There were national parties to represent the Armenians (led by the nationalist party called Dashnaktsutiun), the Jews, and the Azeri Turks. These parties and groupings (the Poles always excepted) confined themselves to expanding their nations’ rights within the framework of a unitary Russian Empire: their leaders believed that the introduction of democracy and expanded self-government in the country at large would in and of itself satisfy their needs.

Considering the important role the nationality question was to play in the Revolution and Civil War, it may seem surprising how unaware Russians were of its existence, since even politically active intellectuals treated nationalism and nationality as marginal matters. Behind this attitude lay a combination of historic and geographic factors. Unlike the European empires, which emerged only after national states had been put in place, the Russian Empire grew concurrently with the state: historically, the two processes were virtually indistinguishable. Furthermore, since Russia is not a maritime nation, her colonies were territorially contiguous, rather than—as was the case in Europe—separated by oceans: this geographic factor further blurred the distinction between metropolitan and Imperial possessions. To the extent that they gave the matter any thought, most educated Russians expected the minorities eventually to assimilate, and their country, like the United States, to form a single nation. The analogy had little in its favor, since unlike the United States, which, except for Native Americans and imported African slaves, consisted exclusively of voluntary migrants, the Russian Empire was made up of historic regions conquered by force of arms. But the attitude was deeply ingrained, as we have seen in the example of the White generals, who in this respect reflected public consensus.

Russian political parties treated this issue in a perfunctory manner: none was prepared even to contemplate the breakup of the Empire along ethnic lines. (The Bolshevik Party after 1913 formed an exception, but as will be indicated below, its advocacy of national self-determination was merely a tactical ploy: Lenin, too, wanted the Empire to remain intact.) The socialist parties viewed all expressions of nationalism as a legacy of capitalism, which the “ruling class” exploited to sow divisions among the masses. Liberals believed that democratization accompanied by regional autonomy would satisfy the minorities’ legitimate grievances. The right-wing parties wanted “Russia One and Indivisible.” The tsarist government, for its part, followed a policy of benign neglect: it dealt harshly with separatist trends, especially among the Poles, but believed that time was working in its favor and that eventually the minorities, succumbing to superior Russian political and economic power, would dissolve.

Such a policy worked as long as Russia remained relatively stable and her government exercised effective control over the country.

The nationality question arose in an acute form within days of the outbreak of the February Revolution. The collapse of tsarism gave the various ethnic groups the opportunity not only to articulate their demands, but to insist on their prompt satisfaction. Grievances that in the regions inhabited by Russian majorities assumed economic, social, or political forms, in the non-Russian regions combined in nationalism. Thus, for example, to the Kazakh-Kirghiz nomads, the Russian colonists who had taken over their grazing lands were not so much class enemies as ethnic enemies. To the Ukrainian peasants, the unwelcome prospect of having to share with Russians from the north the land acquired in 1917–18 similarly assumed ethnic forms.

The first to stir were the Ukrainians, who on March 4, 1917, formed in Kiev a regional soviet called Central Rada. Initially moderate in their demands, the Ukrainian nationalist leaders turned radical in proportion as central authority weakened. On June 10, the Rada issued a manifesto called, in remembrance of seventeenth-century proclamations of Cossack hetmans, a “Universal,” in which it claimed to be the only institution entitled to speak on behalf of the Ukrainian nation: henceforth, it declared, the Ukraine would decide her own fate. The Universal presented the Provisional Government with the earliest overt challenge from an ethnic minority: for although the Rada stopped short of demanding independence, it soon set up a regional authority that for all practical purposes behaved like a sovereign body. In August 1917, the Provisional Government, by now fatally weakened, had no choice but to acknowledge the Rada’s claims.

At this stage, Ukrainian separatism was largely a movement of the intelligentsia, encouraged and financially supported by the Austrians and Germans.^* In the course of 1917 it acquired a mass following because of the peculiar nature of the region’s land question. The southern regions of the Empire, the area of black earth, had more productive and therefore more valuable land than the Great Russian provinces. The inhabitants of the Ukraine and the Cossack Host had, therefore, no interest in participating in a nationwide distribution of privately held land, under which they would have to share the soil they obtained, or hoped to obtain, from the Revolution with the landless and land-poor communal peasants of the north. Ukrainian politicians accordingly insisted that the land distribution question be solved locally: the popular Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party advocated the creation of a Ukrainian Land Fund, which would take control of the soil in that region and distribute it for the exclusive benefit of the indigenous population.

The Muslims, too, began to organize. In March and April 1917 they held regional conferences, which culminated on May I in the First All-Russian Muslim Congress in Moscow. The movement was dominated by politicians close to the Russian liberals: their quarrel was not so much with the Russians as with the conservative mullahs. Inasmuch as their population was scattered, Muslim politicians advanced, as yet, no territorial claims. The Congress appointed a spiritual head to serve the Islamic population and granted women equal rights—an event without precedent in the history of Islam. On the nationality question, two trends emerged: one, dominated by the Volga Tatars, wanted cultural autonomy in a unitary Russian state; the other called for a federal solution. Submitted to a vote, the federal platform gained a decisive majority. The Congress established a National Central Council, or Shura, for Russia’s Muslim inhabitants.

The national institutions of Muslim life soon weakened as a result of the disintegration of the state, and, in the latter part of 1917, the center of political activity shifted to the regions. In the Crimea and in Bashkiriia regional governments came into existence. The bitterest national conflict erupted in the Kazakh-Kirghiz steppe of Central Asia. Even before the Revolution, in July 1916, the Kazakh-Kirghiz revolted against the tsarist authorities in protest against orders mobilizing them for construction work in the rear—orders they saw as a violation of their traditional exemption from military service. In the ensuing violence, nearly 2,500 Russians and Cossacks lost their lives, and some 300,000 Kazakh-Kirghiz were dispossessed and forced to flee into the desert and neighboring China.¹

A Kazakh-Kirghiz Congress met in Orenburg in April 1917. Three months later, its organizers formed a national party named Alash Orda, which called for Kazakh-Kirghiz autonomy. In reaction, local Russians and Cossacks demanded the expulsion of refugees of 1916 who had returned and claimed their lands. Semireche province, the scene of the most savage fighting between Slavs and Turks, was placed in September 1917 under martial law.

Farther to the south, in Turkestan, where Muslims outnumbered Russians, who were mostly officials and colonists, nearly 17 to 1, a Turkestan Muslim Central Committee came into being in April 1917. It lacked all authority, however, and soon dissolved, along with the nine-man Turkestan Committee, made up of five Russians and four natives, which the Provisional Government had appointed to administer the area. Here, as in Kazakhstan, Russians (along with Russified Ukrainians) of all political persuasions joined hands against their common enemy—the native Muslim population. The Congress of Soviets, which in early November carried out the Bolshevik coup in Tashkent, the capital of Turkestan, passed an extraordinary resolution that barred Muslims from serving in the soviets. In 1918–19, Central Asia would be the scene of violent clashes in which social (“class”) conflicts expressed themselves mainly in national and even racial animosity.

In the Caucasus, the situation was complicated by an unusually intricate ethnic distribution, and aggravated by the intervention of the Germans and Ottoman Turks.

Politically, the Georgians were the most advanced nation in the area. Georgia was a stronghold of Social Democracy, especially Menshevism: in 1917, Georgian Marxists like Irakli Tsereteli and Nicholas Chkheidze played leading roles in the Petrograd Soviet. Georgia’s national aspirations were closely linked to Russian democratic movements: the striving for independence emerged here only after the Bolshevik coup in Russia had crushed the prospect of democracy.

The majority of the estimated 3 million or more Armenians resided in the Ottoman Empire, mainly in eastern Anatolia, across the Russian frontier: about one-third lived under Russian rule. During World War I, the Turks, charging the Armenians with pro-Russian sympathies, ordered them deported from eastern Anatolia: the deportations, in 1915, assumed the form of massacres, in the course of which hundreds of thousands perished. Their situation in 1917–18 was extremely precarious, given that they were surrounded by hostile Muslims and could no longer count on Russian help. Ideally, they would have liked to come under the protection of a friendly European power; barring that, they were not averse to a Russian protectorate, even if it meant Bolshevization.

The Shiite Azeris resided partly in Iran and partly in the Russian Caucasus. They were in every respect—culturally, economically, and politically—the least developed of the Transcaucasian groups. And, finally, the Caucasian mountains were home to over one million Muslims of different ethnic and linguistic affiliations, living in villages separated by high ranges.

Compared to the rest of the Russian Empire, Transcaucasia remained relatively peaceful during 1917. As in other parts of the country, representatives of the various nationalities held discussions and issued proclamations, but there was less lawlessness. The Armenians and Georgians looked north, to Russia, for support against the Muslim majority, while the Azeri Turks, to the extent that they thought of independence, kept such ideas to themselves from fear of being charged with treasonous pro-Turkish sympathies.

As Russia dissolved, politicians representing the ethnic minorities became more assertive. The same held true of their constituencies. Returns from the elections to the Constituent Assembly, held in late November 1917, indicated that a high proportion, possibly the majority, of non-Russians voted for national tickets. Some of these continued their traditional partnership with Russian parties, but as the year drew to a close and Russian political organizations, under Bolshevik terror, disintegrated, they cut loose and turned into full-fledged nationalist parties. If early in the year the ethnic minorities wanted to assert their specific rights in a democratic Russia, later, after October, they sought to isolate themselves from the Russian dictatorship and the Civil War it unleashed.

Within days of assuming power, the Bolshevik government issued, over the signatures of Lenin and Stalin, a “Declaration of Rights” of the national minorities. It affirmed, without conditions or qualifications, that every nation had the right to self-determination up to and including separation. The Bolsheviks were the only party in Russia to advance such a drastic solution; and since it ran contrary to their centralist political philosophy, some explanation of its background is in order.²

In common with Marx and other socialists, Lenin favored large states over small ones, since bigger size promoted the development of capitalism, which had the effect of intensifying class conflicts. Once Communism triumphed, the greater its territory the easier would be the exercise of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Lenin had no sympathy for nationalism in any form and was a complete stranger to the feelings of both patriotism and xenophobia. He desired the most rapid assimilation of the non-Russian nations, for which reason he rejected all solutions to the nationality problem that institutionalized ethnic differences. The programs most in vogue among Social-Democrats in the early years of the century were either “extraterritorial national-cultural autonomy” or federalism. The former, formulated by the Austrian socialists Karl Renner and Otto Bauer as a way of preserving the political integrity of the Hapsburg Empire, called for granting minority citizens the right to an education in their native languages and to other cultural activities regardless of where they happened to reside. This program appealed to many socialists because it satisfied what they considered the legitimate demands of the minorities, thus defusing national antagonisms, without causing the empire to disintegrate. Lenin, however, rejected this formula, because it perpetuated and even strengthened the cultural differences among the minorities. He liked no better the federalist solution and for the same reason. He wanted assimilation, but he realized that tactically it was an unacceptable slogan, since it was certain to alienate from the Bolsheviks one-half of Russia’s population.

His solution, formulated in 1913, was to redefine the vague slogan of “national self-determination” of the Social-Democratic platform to mean one and one thing only: separation from Russia. Every ethnic group was entitled to independent statehood, if such was its desire. If it did not choose to avail itself of this right, it could claim no special privileges within the unitary Russian state. When his followers objected that his program would Balkanize Russia, Lenin responded with two counterarguments. First, capitalism had promoted the economic interdependence of the regions of the Russian Empire to such an extent that it was highly unlikely any of the borderlands would choose separation. Secondly, the right to national self-determination had to be understood as subordinated to that of “proletarian self-determination.” By this he meant that even if, contrary to his expectations, in disregard of economic realities, some or even all of the borderland areas chose to leave Russia, a Bolshevik government would have the right to bring them back into the fold. Thus, an extremely liberal policy on the nationalities promised substantial advantages—the support of the ethnic groups—without carrying any risks.

Events disappointed Lenin’s expectations and forced him to renege on the promise of self-determination. Some of the areas once part of the Russian Empire were in late 1917 under German occupation, and since it was German policy to dismember the Empire, Berlin encouraged them to proclaim sovereignty. On December 6, 1917 (NS), Finland, which had German military contingents on her soil, declared independence. Next came Lithuania (December 11, NS), followed by Latvia (January 12, 1918, NS). Estonia broke away in February 1918. At Brest-Litovsk in early 1918, the Central Powers recognized the Ukraine as a sovereign nation and signed a separate peace treaty with her. Under German pressure, Moscow was compelled to initiate negotiations leading to diplomatic recognition of the Ukraine. When, in January–February 1918, the Bolsheviks advanced on Kiev in disregard of their pledges, the Germans marched in and forced them to withdraw. From then until the end of the year, when the German army evacuated, the Ukraine was nominally a separate political entity under German occupation.

Elsewhere in what had been the Russian Empire the centrifugal tendencies were impelled mainly by the desire to escape the Bolshevik regime. How influential this consideration was may be seen on the example of Russian Siberia, which in the spring of 1918 declared independence while expressing the hope that someday she would reunite with the Russian homeland.³

Transcaucasia separated herself from Russia in early 1918, largely under the influence of the Germans and Turks. As the Russian front in the Caucasus crumbled and the Turkish armies advanced, the Georgians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis agreed to create a regional authority. On November 11 (OS), two weeks after the Bolsheviks had taken power in Petrograd, they formed a Transcaucasian Commissariat, which served as a de facto government for the region without, as yet, claiming sovereignty. Urged by the Turks, who saw this area as their proper sphere of influence, and behind them, the Germans, on April 22, 1918, the Commissariat proclaimed an independent Transcaucasian federation. It was by its very nature a transient arrangement, given that the three principal nationalities here had little in common save territorial proximity.

In Central Asia, separatist movements were aborted by the Russian inhabitants, who established something akin to colonial ascendancy, which the Muslims were too weak to challenge. These Russians remained loyal to Moscow no matter who was in charge there.

In early 1918, Lenin confronted a situation he had neither desired nor foreseen. The empire had fallen apart. The slogan of “national self-determination” not only failed to persuade the nationalities to support his regime, but gave them a legitimate excuse to go their own way. On every occasion when able, he dispatched pro-Bolshevik armies to topple the newly formed nationalist regimes: in the Ukraine, Belorussia, Finland, and the Baltics. He did not always succeed in reconquering them, but when he failed it was not for want of trying.

What was he to do? Lenin, who had no difficulty changing tactics when necessary, decided now to abandon—in effect, though not in name—the principle of national self-determination in favor of federalism. It was to be not genuine federalism, under which the member states are equal and endowed with powers over their territory, but a peculiar species of pseudo-federalism that provided neither equality nor power. Under the regime he had established in Russia, state (governmental) authority nominally derived from a hierarchy of democratically elected soviets. In reality, the soviets were only a facade to conceal the true sovereign, the Communist Party. This arrangement proved adaptable to dealing with the nationalities. Once they were reconquered and reincorporated into the new, Soviet empire, they could be granted the semblance of statehood, given that their governmental institutions, too, would be controlled (“paralyzed” was the word Lenin used) by the Russian Communist Party. And as for the Party, Lenin did not intend to divide it along ethnic lines. The result would be formal federalism, with all the trimmings of statehood, presumably able to satisfy the aspirations of the non-Russian peoples, concealing a rigidly centralized dictatorship centered in Moscow. It is this model that Lenin adopted and in 1922–24 incorporated in the constitution of the new state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He assumed that as other countries went Communist, they would join the U.S.S.R. on the same principles.

Once the Germans had lost the war and evacuated the Ukraine, the puppet government of Hetman Skoropadski, which they had installed, collapsed and vanished (December 1918). The Ukraine became the arena of bloody struggles involving Ukrainian nationalists, Cossack brigands under contending warlords, Communists, “Greens,” and, eventually, the Volunteer Army. The year 1919 was a period of violent anarchy:

The entire territory fell apart into innumerable regions isolated from each other and the rest of the world, dominated by armed bands of peasants or freebooters who looted and murdered with utter impunity. In Kiev itself governments came and went, edicts were issued, cabinet crises were resolved, diplomatic talks were carried on—but the rest of the country lived its own existence where the only effective regime was that of the gun. None of the authorities which claimed the Ukraine during the year following the deposition of Skoropadski ever exercised actual sovereignty.⁴

After briefly joining forces against Skoropadski, the Communists and Ukrainian nationalists turned enemies. The leading Ukrainian political-military force, the Directory under Semen Petlura, installed itself in Kiev. Moscow pitted against him the Communist Party of the Ukraine (KPbU), a branch of the Russian Communist Party, composed of a mixture of Ukrainians and Russians loyal to Moscow but in favor of a limited degree of self-government. Late in November 1918, on orders from Moscow, the KPbU proclaimed a rival government, headed by G. L. Piatakov. Its military arm, made up of units of the Red Army and brigand bands that joined the Communists, took to the field against the Directory: in January it occupied Kharkov, and in February, Kiev. Defeated, the Directory withdrew to the western part of the Ukraine.

The Communist government, whose base of support was exclusively urban, turned out to be no more able to administer than its predecessor. Soon its partisan allies (Makhno, Zelenyi, Grigorev) abandoned it in favor of brigandage and anti-Jewish pogroms.

When in the summer of 1919 the Volunteer Army and its Cossacks moved into the Ukraine, the Communists proved powerless to stop it. In August and September, the eastern and central regions of the Ukraine fell under the control of Denikin, while its western areas were in the hands of the Poles and Petlura. Ukrainian Communists fled to Moscow.

What ensued would be repeated time and again in the relations between the Communist leadership and its non-Russian followers. In principle, Communists active outside Russia acknowledged the need for centralized control and for following orders from the capital. In practice, they resented the wrongheaded orders that Moscow, unfamiliar with local conditions, often issued. They demanded to be heard. Moscow, convinced that its regional agents did not see the whole picture and scornful of their inability to hold on to power, ignored them. The result was conflict that invariably ended with Moscow removing such troublesome proxies on grounds of nationalism and replacing them with more pliable agents. The phenomenon that came to be known as “Titoism” after World War II appeared in the Communist movement inside Soviet Russia as early as 1919. It was inherent in the contradiction between the goals of a centralized movement with global aspirations and the infinitely complex reality that required adjustments to local conditions and therefore a measure of decentralization.

The deposed officials of the KPbU split between “centralists” and “federalists.” The latter wanted a new party, allied with radical Ukrainian nationalists, which would have considerable discretion in making decisions affecting the Ukraine. Moscow treated this trend as a deviation and backed the “centralists.” It dissolved the Central Committee of the KPbU and formed a new organ staffed with subservient personnel. It is this group that, in late 1919, after the defeat of Denikin, took charge of the Soviet Ukrainian Republic. The area was considered exceptionally hostile to Soviet authority and Moscow endowed the Cheka with extensive arbitrary powers to subdue local “kulaks” and “bandits.”⁵

The Bolsheviks had virtually no following among the Muslim intelligentsia, which was minuscule to begin with and which, insofar as it inclined toward socialism, showed a preference for the Mensheviks and Socialists-Revolutionaries. For this reason Moscow made friendly approaches to the leaders of the all-Russian Muslim movement even though it knew them to be far from sympathetic to its objectives. In his capacity as Commissar of Nationalities, Stalin made generous offers to Muslim politicians to work with the Soviet government. When they refused to collaborate, their organization was dissolved. The new regime now concentrated on gaining the support of individual Muslim intellectuals. The few who did go over found employment in the Muslim Commissariat, a department of the Commissariat of Nationalities, with the mission of spreading Communism to Muslims in Russia and abroad.

21. Stalin in Tsaritsyn, 1918.

When efforts to unite Russian Muslims had collapsed and the all-Russian Muslim organization was dissolved, the movement fell apart along territorial lines: unity yielded to regionalism. Attempts to create Islamic republics were made in Tatarstan and Bashkiriia, Kirghiziia (Kazakhstan), Turkestan, and Azerbaijan.^*

The Bashkir region was inhabited by semi-nomadic herdsmen whose spokesman in 1917 was Zeki Validov, a 27-year-old teacher. Commanding a small army, Validov joined the Whites, but disappointed with Kolchak’s treatment of the minorities, in February 1919 he defected with his troops to the Red Army. As a reward, he secured the pledge of an autonomous republic for his people. His partnership with the Communists also ran into trouble, in part because the Bashkirs interpreted it as giving them license to expel Russian settlers, and in part because they mistakenly interpreted autonomy to mean independence. Both the Communist Party and the soviets on Bashkir territory were staffed by Russians, who sided with the settlers and opposed Bashkir autonomy as a matter of principle. In May 1920, after Moscow had made public a decree regulating Bashkir self-government that Validov saw as a violation of previous commitments, the entire Bashkir government fled to the Ural mountains. Russian workers and peasants eagerly joined punitive detachments to fight the Bashkir rebels. The new government of Baskiriia installed in the summer of 1920 had in it no natives.^*

The neighboring Tatars, wealthier and better educated than the Bashkirs, had ambitious visions of a Volga-Ural (Idel-Ural) Republic embracing Bashkiriia. Moscow rejected these plans and after long and complicated intrigues, agreed to the establishment of a Tatar Autonomous Republic. Similar arrangements were made for the Chuvash, Mari, and Votiak peoples, who were accorded the status of autonomous “Regions” with even less authority.

Central (or Inner) Asia comprised two geographic zones, differing in economic conditions and demographic structure. The northern steppe zone was a grassy plain populated by Kazakh-Kirghiz whose principal occupation was raising sheep and cattle. The political party representing Kazakh-Kirghiz interests, Alash Orda, like the Bashkirs, initially cooperated with the Whites and then switched sides. Moscow promised it autonomy, but in this instance, too, its pledges were sabotaged by Russian settlers and urban inhabitants who refused to treat the natives as equals. Kazakh-Kirghiz protests to Moscow yielded few results and the Kirghiz Autonomous Republic, established in October 1920, was theirs only in name.^† On the critical issue of land, Moscow promised to stop further colonization but to allow Slavic settlers to keep their possessions, including land they had seized from the natives in 1916 and 1917.

The southern region of Central Asia, Turkestan, was largely desert, interspersed with cities and fertile valleys. The indigenous population here was partly Persian, partly Turkic, and partly a mixture of the two. The Slavic inhabitants consisted mostly of government officials, merchants, and military personnel, nearly all living in cities. Tsarist Russia administered this region, in many respects similar to British Egypt, as a colony, principally valuable as a supplier of cotton and as an outpost for future incursions into Afghanistan and India. It tolerated two self-governing protectorates, the khanate of Khiva and the emirate of Bukhara, bastions of Muslim fundamentalism. Land here was not an issue. The potential conflict concerned foreign rule of a population that was much more committed to Islam than that of the Volga-Ural region or the steppe.

In the latter part of 1917, two governments emerged in Turkestan: a Soviet one in Tashkent, the region’s capital; and a Muslim one in Kokand. The former had the support of virtually the entire Russian population, regardless of social or economic status. Here more than in any other part of the onetime Russian Empire, social conflicts assumed ethnic forms.

In mid-November 1917 the Bolsheviks and Left SRs convened in Tashkent a Regional Congress of Soviets that declared Turkestan to be under Soviet rule. In discussing the role of the native population, the Congress by substantial majorities not only rejected the idea of Turkestani autonomy, but barred Muslims, who constituted 97 percent of the area’s population (1913),⁶ from participating in Soviet institutions. The relevant resolution read as follows:

At the present time one cannot permit the admission of Muslims into the higher organs of regional revolutionary authority, because the attitude of the local population toward the Soviet of Soldiers’, Workers’, and Peasant Deputies is quite uncertain, and because the native inhabitants lack the proletarian organizations that the [Bolshevik] faction could welcome into the organ of the higher regional government.⁷

The Communist historian G. Safarov has quite properly defined the course of events in Turkestan in 1917–18 a “colonial revolution.”

To protest their treatment, Muslim political figures withdrew to Kokand in the Ferghana valley, populated almost exclusively by Muslims, where they felt secure from the pro-Bolshevik Russians. Here, at the end of November, they proclaimed Turkestan an autonomous region “united with the Russian democratic federative republic.” The nature of this autonomy was left to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly to determine. A Provisional Government was created in which two-thirds of the seats were allocated to Muslims, and one-third to Russians.

These actions the Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik elements in Tashkent would not tolerate. In mid-February, they dispatched a detachment of Russian soldiers accompanied by Austrian and German POWs to Kokand. The invading force made short shrift of the defenders, following which its troops were given license to loot and kill. Before withdrawing, they poured gasoline over the city and burned most of it to the ground.

Moscow, in receipt of disquieting reports from Turkestan, intervened. On its orders, in April 1918, local Communists proclaimed the region an autonomous republic. However, this was a mere formality, because being cut off from the Center by the White armies and therefore free of the Center, they continued to act as they had before. Tashkent next tried to conquer the emirate of Bukhara (March 1918), but its fanatical inhabitants beat off the invasion.

The colonial practices of the small Russian minority, which not only dominated the native population but excluded it from any voice in government, produced a regime described by a Communist eyewitness and historian as “feudal exploitation of the broad masses of the native population by the Russian Red Army man, colonist, and official.”⁸ It sparked a native revolt that began in the Ferghana valley and thence spread to the rest of Turkestan. The Turkic guerrillas, known as Basmachis, were independent bands, nearly always on horseback, not unlike those operating in the Ukraine at the same time, and like them combining brigandage with opposition to Russian rule.

It was only in 1919 that Moscow was able to impose its will on Turkestan. Yielding to its demands, local Russians allowed the natives to reopen their bazaars and invited them to join both the Communist Party and state institutions. These concessions in some measure mollified the natives and took some wind out of the Basmachi movement, but not for long. Once the Communists were firmly in the saddle, following the defeat of Kolchak, they introduced a regime of food expropriations and a variety of other measures that the native population resented, not so much on ethnic as on economic grounds. The Basmachi movement flared up anew, reaching its apogee in the years 1920–22. It was fully suppressed only at the end of the decade.

In February 1920 the Red Army captured Khiva. The fate of Bukhara was left to the discretion of Mikhail Frunze, the commander of the Turkestani Red Army.⁹ He attacked in the fall and captured the city in fierce fighting. In both instances, the invaders availed themselves of the help of fifth columns made up of radical youths (“Young Khivans” and “Young Bukharans”). The emir of Bukhara fled to Afghanistan. The conquests gained new recruits for the Basmachis.

The treatment of Asians by pro-Bolshevik Russians led the most prominent Soviet Muslim Communist to revise the orthodox Marxist theory of class struggle. The Tatar Mirza Sultan-Galiev was in his youth a teacher in the reformed schools. In late 1917 he went over to the Communists and made a rapid career as Stalin’s protégé in the Commissariat of Nationalities.¹⁰ In articles published toward the end of 1919 in the official organ of his Commissariat, Sultan-Galiev argued that it was a fundamental mistake to rely on the West to bring about a global revolution because the weakest link in the chain of imperialism lay in Asia. This view was tolerable to the Kremlin since it did not contradict Lenin’s theory of imperialism. But Sultan-Galiev did not stop there, and broadened his ideas into a full-fledged heresy in which some historians see an anticipation of Maoism.¹¹ He developed doubts whether even if the revolution in the industrialized countries were to succeed, it would improve the condition of colonial peoples. The Western working class was interested not in abolishing colonialism but in turning it to its own advantage. “We assert,” he is quoted as saying,

22. Sultan-Galiev.

that the formula that offers the replacement of the worldwide dictatorship of one class of European society (the bourgeoisie) with another (the proletariat), that is, with another European class, will not bring about a major change in the social life of the oppressed element of mankind. At any rate, such a change, even if it were to occur, would be not for the better but for the worse.… In contradistinction to this we advance another thesis: that the material premises for the social transformation of mankind can be created only through the establishment of the dictatorship of the colonies and semi-colonies over the metropolitan areas.^*

To implement his ideas, Sultan-Galiev called for the creation of a “Colonial International” to counterbalance the Communist International, dominated by Europeans; he also urged the establishment of a Muslim Communist Party. For these ideas, in April 1923 he was expelled from the Party and imprisoned on charges of forming an illegal nationalistic organization.¹² L. Kamenev called him the earliest victim of a Stalinist purge. Released after he had “repented,” he was rearrested in 1928 and perished either in the 1930s or during World War II.

In 1918, the Caucasus was under the influence of the Central Powers. The Germans were interested in Georgia with its rich manganese deposits, as well as Baku, the center of Russia’s petroleum production. Some of them, notably General Ludendorff, entertained visions of Georgia serving as the nucleus of a German-dominated “Caucasus Bloc.”¹³ The Turks, too, had ambitions in this region, especially in Azerbaijan, whose population was ethnically and linguistically related to them. The Caucasus probably would have been occupied by the Turks, who advanced into it in the spring of 1918, had it not been for German involvement. Promised German protection, the Georgians seceded from the Transcaucasian Federation on May 26, 1918, and proclaimed independence. Two days later the Azerbaijanis and Armenians followed suit.

The Turks occupied Baku in September. They soon clashed with the Azerbaijan government, which was dominated by socialists of the Mussavat party advocating a radical land reform, and made themselves generally unpopular with the population. Following the Armistice in the West, the Turks evacuated Baku, which was occupied by a small British expeditionary force.

The Armenian Republic was in dire straits, crowded with refugees fleeing Turkish and Azeri pogroms, and diplomatically isolated: unlike the Azeris, who had the Turks, and the Georgians, who were on friendly terms with the Germans, the Armenians had no one to fall back on. General Denikin, who was at odds with Georgia and Azerbaijan, was their only friend, but he was in no position to help. Very unwisely, the Armenian government in May 1919 occupied and annexed territories in eastern Anatolia, which, prior to the massacres of 1915, had been inhabited by an Armenian majority. This action ensured the hostility of the new national government of Turkey led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and intensified Armenia’s isolation.

Georgia was the most successful of the three successor states to the Transcaucasian Federation. From May to November 1918, the country lived under de facto German occupation, which provided a degree of stability. The government, headed by Noi Zhordaniia, was run by Mensheviks, better educated and with greater international connections than neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenia. Enforcing a land reform program, it expropriated properties in excess of forty acres: these it subdivided and either leased or sold to farmers. It also nationalized large industries and transport. In consequence of these socialist measures, in 1920, 90 percent of Georgia’s workers were employed in state or cooperative enterprises. Tiflis had serious difficulties with several minorities, notably the Ossetians and Abkhazians, whose claims to self-government Tiflis refused to acknowledge. But, on balance, during her three years of independence, Georgia proved herself capable of statehood.

In the winter of 1919–20, as the White Army of the south was in headlong flight, the Allied Supreme Council in Paris granted the three Transcaucasian republics de facto recognition. It rejected, however, their petition for a League of Nations mandate; the United States Congress, for its part, rejected a bill submitted by President Wilson calling for an American mandate over Armenia. Following the withdrawal of British units from Baku (August 1919), therefore, Transcaucasia faced the prospect of a Communist invasion.

Moscow had never given up its claims to this region, which before the Revolution had provided Russia with two-thirds of her petroleum, three-quarters of her manganese, and one-fourth of her copper, as well as a high share of her subtropical produce (fruits, tobacco, tea, and wine). The reconquest was carried out in two stages—April 1920 and February 1921—accomplished by highly perfected tactics that combined external aggression with internal subversion. The critical factor that enabled Soviet Russia to reassert dominion over this region was diplomatic. Moscow secured the friendly neutrality of Kemal Atatürk, who depended on it for support against the Allied powers.^* Kemal disavowed any pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic aspirations and, in exchange for Moscow’s pledge to refrain from Communist agitation in his country, acquiesced to Russia’s reconquest of the Caucasus. Russo-Turkish collaboration doomed the independent republics; Allied lack of interest sealed their fate.

Preparations for the Caucasian campaign got underway after March 17, 1920, when Lenin ordered the capture of Azerbaijan and Georgia.¹⁴ The following month, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party created a Caucasian Bureau (the Kavbiuro), headed by a close friend of Stalin’s, the Georgian Sergo Ordzhonikidze, to establish Soviet rule in the Caucasus and to extend assistance to “anti-imperialist” forces in the Middle East. The Kavbiuro worked closely with the staff of the Eleventh Red Army, which was to carry out the operation. It worked out a detailed plan of power seizure in the three republics involving regular military units, partisan detachments, and internal subversion.¹⁵

Azerbaijan was the first to fall. At noon on April 27, the Central Committee of the Azerbaijani Communist Party handed the Baku government an ultimatum to surrender power within twelve hours. Before the time was up, the Eleventh Red Army crossed the border and advanced on the Azerbaijani capital; other Communist units occupied strategic points in Baku. The next day, unopposed, the Eleventh Army entered the city. Ordzhonikidze, who arrived the next day with his deputy, Sergei Kirov, introduced a reign of terror that was to typify his methods of rule in the region. Defiance of Soviet occupation in the provinces was brutally suppressed. Ordzhonikidze arrested and executed a number of Azerbaijani leaders, including the Prime Minister and the Chief of Staff of the deposed government.

23. Ordzhonikidze.

Without stopping in Baku, the Eleventh Army continued the offensive, advancing on Erevan and Tiflis. On May 4, Ordzhonikidze cabled Lenin and Stalin that he expected to be in Tiflis no later than May 12.¹⁶ But this was not to be, because at this very time a Polish-Ukrainian army, which on April 25 had invaded the Soviet Ukraine, was menacing Kiev. The situation was threatening and Moscow decided to suspend operations in Transcaucasia. On May 4, Lenin sent Ordzhonikidze a cable instructing him to pull back the Red Army troops that had penetrated Georgia.¹⁷ Thanks to the Russo-Polish war, Georgia and Armenia were given a temporary reprieve. On May 7, the Soviet government signed a treaty with Georgia in which it recognized Georgia’s independence and pledged to refrain from interfering in her internal affairs. In a secret clause, Georgia consented to legalize the Communist Party.¹⁸ Moscow appointed as its envoy to Tiflis Sergei Kirov, Ordzhonikidze’s deputy, who calmly proceeded to lay the groundwork for the future conquest of Georgia. The following month, Moscow recognized the independence of Armenia within the boundaries of the pre-1914 Erevan province. Here, too, the Soviet mission, headed by Boris Legran, served as the headquarters of Communist subversion.

The campaign against the Caucasus resumed in December 1920, by which time the conflict with Poland was over and the last White forces had evacuated.

The Sovietization of Armenia occurred as a result of her unresolved territorial dispute with Turkey over eastern Anatolia, parts of which the Allied powers at Sèvres had assigned to her but the Armenians had occupied. In late September 1920 the Turks invaded. The tide of battle soon turned in the latter’s favor and the Armenians had to sue for peace. In negotiations held in November, the Turks demanded that the Armenians surrender to them the seized territories.

Moscow lost no time in taking advantage of Armenia’s predicament. On November 27, Lenin and Stalin communicated with Ordzhonikidze, instructing him to move into Armenia.¹⁹ The move was intended to stop the Turkish advance. Two days later, the Soviet diplomatic mission in Erevan presented the Armenian government with an ultimatum calling for the immediate transfer of authority to a “Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia” located in Soviet Azerbaijan. Concurrently, the Red Eleventh Army marched into Armenia. The invasion was welcomed by the Armenian government and population alike as offering protection from the Turks. In December Armenia became a Soviet Republic; its first government was a coalition of Communists and representatives of Armenia’s governing party, the Dashnaktsutiun.

Georgia was surrounded. Under the terms of the treaty signed with Moscow in May, Tiflis released from prison nearly one thousand Communists held on charges of armed rebellion. They promptly resumed preparations for a coup under the direction of Kirov, who maintained relentless pressure on the Georgian government with constant accusations that it was violating the terms of the treaty. The leading Georgian Communist Philip Makharadze admitted years later that the Party was fully preoccupied with preparing an armed uprising.²⁰ Ordzhonikidze was burning with impatience to enter his homeland as its conqueror: Georgian intelligence reported as early as December 9 that Soviet troops in Azerbaijan and Armenia were preparing, without Moscow’s knowledge, to invade.²¹ A meeting of local Communists and military commanders, convened in Baku on December 15 on the initiative of the Kavbiuro, decided on immediate action. As soon as he learned of this decision, Lenin ordered it canceled at once. Chicherin cabled Kirov on December 18 that the Politburo was determined to conduct a peaceful policy in the Caucasus, and that its decision was binding on all, Georgian Communists included.²²

Moscow hesitated because it was in receipt of conflicting military assessments and inhibited by considerations of international diplomacy. The Commander of the Eleventh Army, Anatolii Gekker, sent Moscow an assessment, which the Georgians intercepted, stating that the invasion had every chance of success provided the Turks remained neutral.²³ This was not the view of his superior, S. S. Kamenev, the Commander in Chief of the Red Army, who submitted to Lenin three reports in which he raised troubling questions about the proposed operation. In the last of these, dated February 14, 1921, when the invasion of Georgia was already underway, he emphasized that the Eleventh Army was severely depleted by desertions and could not be reinforced any time soon because troops were needed to suppress revolts raging throughout Russia. He also pointed to the risk of both Allied and Turkish intervention on Georgia’s side. On these grounds, he recommended against proceeding with the operation. He further expressed displeasure with the habit of the Caucasian army to take independent decisions capable of embroiling the country in unpredictable difficulties.²⁴

Foreign policy considerations also mitigated against an invasion of Georgia. At the beginning of 1921, the Politburo, faced with a collapse of the economy and widespread peasant unrest, was contemplating a major shift in economic policy from “War Communism,” or forced socialization, to a more liberal course. An essential element in economic reconstruction was foreign credits and investments. Lenin feared—unnecessarily as it turned out—that a military conflict in the Caucasus could jeopardize Russia’s chances of receiving such assistance, especially since he could not be certain of Britain’s reaction.

Faced with the threat of invasion, the Georgian government split between those who opposed any concessions to Moscow and wanted to seek a counterweight in Turkey, and those, headed by President Zhordaniia, who thought some kind of accommodation with Moscow possible.²⁵ In any event, in view of menacing concentrations of Red Army troops along Georgia’s frontier with Azerbaijan and Armenia, Tiflis ordered a partial mobilization. It had little hope that foreign powers would come to Georgia’s aid. The leaders of the Second (Socialist) International, who hailed Georgia as the only truly socialist country in the world, gave her much favorable publicity: in September 1920, a delegation of its luminaries, including Karl Kautsky, Emile Vandervelde, and Ramsay MacDonald, visited Georgia and returned very favorably impressed. But the Second International had neither a government nor an army. On January 27, 1921, the Supreme Allied Council accorded Georgia de jure recognition, but this step, too, had little concrete significance. Archival documents show that Britain, the only power able to prevent a Soviet invasion, was unwilling to commit herself and treated Georgia’s fall as inevitable.²⁶

Georgia might have survived but for the relentless pressure on Lenin by Stalin, Ordzhonikidze, and Kirov, the latter two of whom came to Moscow on January 2, 1921, to make a personal appeal in favor of immediate action. In a memorandum submitted on that day they argued for the immediate “sovietization” of Georgia on the grounds that the Menshevik republic served the cause of the counterrevolution, had an adverse influence on Soviet Armenia, helped strengthen Turkey’s position in the Caucasus, and endangered the whole Soviet position in the area. “One cannot hope for an internal explosion. Without our help Georgia cannot be sovietized.… As a motive, one can raise an uprising in Abkhazia, Adzhariia, etc.,” they wrote.²⁷ In a note of January 4, Stalin supported these arguments: Lenin jotted down on Stalin’s letter, “Do not postpone.”²⁸ A critical factor in overcoming his hesitation is said to have been a confidential assurance given by Lloyd George to Leonid Krasin, the head of the Soviet trade mission to England, that Britain considered the Caucasus to lie in the Soviet sphere of influence and had no plans to intervene militarily on its behalf.²⁹

On January 26, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party adopted a complicated resolution drafted by Lenin that called for pressure on Georgia, and if that did not yield satisfactory results, for the Eleventh Army to march in.³⁰ This, the last Soviet territorial conquest until 1939, followed what by now had become a classic pattern. First came a “rebellion” of the disaffected masses. It was staged by the Kavbiuro on the night of February 11–12 in Borchalo, a region contested between Georgia and Armenia. Military “help,” however, was delayed for nearly a week due to Lenin’s continued hesitations. Finally, on February 14, Lenin agreed to the invasion but still in a rather qualified manner. On February 14, the Politburo approved Lenin’s orders to Ordzhonikidze. Lenin wrote that the Central Committee was “inclined” to permit the Eleventh Army to march into Georgia provided its Revolutionary Military Committee guaranteed success.³¹ S. S. Kamenev was not shown the dispatch and Trotsky, who was absent from Moscow, was not informed.³²

On February 15, Ordzhonikidze sent Stalin a coded message in Georgian: “The situation demands we begin immediately. In the morning we cross [the frontier]. There is no other way out.”³³ On February 16, units of the Eleventh Army penetrated the southeastern frontier of Georgia from Azerbaijan and headed directly for Tiflis, 80 kilometers away. They were assisted by cavalry of the Thirteenth Army under Budennyi. The invading force numbered over 100,000 professionally led and fully equipped troops, more than double the defending force, which lacked artillery. The Georgians fought bravely and managed for over a week to hold at bay a greatly superior enemy. In the end they succumbed, and on February 25, Red troops entered Tiflis. The Menshevik government intended to make a stand in western Georgia, but this was prevented by an invasion of Turkish troops, who on February 23 presented it with an ultimatum demanding the surrender of Batum. On March 18 the Georgians capitulated to the Red Army, signing an accord with it which ensured that Batum would remain Georgian. The same day the Georgian Government embarked on an Italian ship bound for Europe.

When asked about the invasion, Lenin on February 28 disclaimed any knowledge of it.³⁴ So did the Soviet envoy in Tiflis, who said that as far as he knew the conflict was one between Georgia and Armenia over Borchalo. In the West, some outrage was voiced, but the fall of Georgia was accepted as a fait accompli.

Even after the optimists had proven correct, Lenin worried about the consequences of Georgia’s “sovietization.” He had a high opinion of the popularity of the fallen Menshevik government, and correspondingly low esteem for Ordzhonikidze’s diplomatic skills and tact. He urged Ordzhonikidze to be prepared to make far-reaching concessions to the Georgian intelligentsia and petty bourgeoisie, and to seek a political compromise with Zhordaniia and his fellow Mensheviks.³⁵ Lenin also impressed on him the necessity of displaying utmost discretion in dealings with Georgian Communists. This advice Ordzhonikidze and his Moscow patron, Stalin, chose to ignore, igniting conflicts with both the population at large and local Communists that before long would precipitate a major crisis in the Communist Party.

Soviet Russia had now acquired the boundaries that she would retain until 1939. Formally composed of six sovereign republics, she was a constitutional anomaly, since neither the relations among her constituent republics nor the role of the Russian Communist Party in the new multinational state were even approximately defined. The structure of the new state, from which emerged the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was conclusively formulated in 1922–23. It would become one of the subjects of violent disagreement between the dying Lenin and the rising Stalin.

^* This chapter summarizes the contents of my book The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923, originally published in 1954, and in a revised edition ten years later. The book provides ample documentation, which enables me to dispense with the usual scholarly apparatus, except where new materials, made available since 1964, have caused me to revise my earlier views.

^† This figure and those that follow are taken from N. A. Troinitskii, ed., Obshchii svod … pervoi vseobshchei perepisi naseleniia … 1897 goda, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1905).

^‡ The criterion used by the 1897 census-takers was not nationality but “native language,” which inflated the number of Russians, since their language was the empire’s lingua franca. According to the 1926 census, the number of citizens who considered Russian to be their native tongue exceeded those who claimed to be Russian by 8.2 percent.

^* Several million Ukrainians living in the western provinces joined the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century on terms that allowed them to continue practicing Orthodox rituals. The tsarist authorities and the Orthodox Establishment treated these so-called “Uniates” as apostates. Their church was abolished and its members forcibly integrated with the official church in the 1940s under Stalin.

^* In The Formation of the Soviet Union I paid hardly any attention to the role of the Central Powers in the rise of nationalism among the Russian minorities during the Revolution because at the time of writing (1950–53), the German Foreign Ministry archives were unavailable to scholars. The information that has come to light since then indicates that encouraging and backing nationalism among the minorities, especially the Ukrainians and Georgians, was an essential element in the Central Powers’ strategy aimed at dismembering Russia.

^* The Azerbaijani Republic will be discussed in connection with events in Transcaucasia.

^* Validov fled to Central Asia, where he joined anti-Communist partisans, and after the rebellion’s suppression, to Europe. Turning scholar, he became professor of Turcology at the University of Istanbul under the name Zeki Velidi Togan.

^† It was later renamed the Kazakh Republic. The modern Kirghiz Republic was formed in 1924 from parts of Turkestan.

^* Cited in A. Arsharuni and Kh. Gabidullin, Ocherki panislamizma i pantiurkizma v Rossii ([Moscow], 1931), 78–79. These quotations are known only from Stalinist histories and therefore cannot be taken entirely at face value.

^* See below, Chapter 4.