Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

8

NEP: The False Thermidor

Thermidor” was the month of July in the French revolutionary calendar when Jacobin rule came to an abrupt end, yielding to a more moderate regime. To Marxists the term symbolized the triumph of the counterrevolution, which ultimately led to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. It was a development they were determined at all costs to prevent. When, in March 1921, confronting economic collapse and massive rebellions, Lenin felt compelled to make a radical turnabout in economic policy resulting in significant concessions to private enterprise, a course that came to be known as the New Economic Policy (NEP), it was widely believed in the country and abroad that the Russian Revolution, too, had run its course and entered its Thermidorian phase.¹

The historical analogy turned out to be inapplicable. The most conspicuous difference between 1794 and 1921 lay in the fact that whereas in France the Jacobins had been overthrown in the Thermidor and their leaders executed, in Russia it was the Soviet equivalent of the Jacobins who initiated and carried out the new, moderate course. They did so on the understanding that the shift was temporary: “I ask you, comrades, to be clear,” said Zinoviev in December 1921, “that the New Economic Policy is only a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat, a clearing of the land for a new and decisive attack of labor against the front of international capitalism.”² Lenin liked to compare NEP to the Brest-Litovsk treaty, which in its day had also been mistakenly seen as a surrender to German “imperialism” but was only a step backward: however long it would last, it would not be “forever.”³

Secondly, unlike the French Thermidor, the NEP limited liberalization to economics: “As the ruling party,” Trotsky said in 1922, “we can allow the speculator in the economy, but we do not allow him in the political realm.”⁴ Indeed, in a deliberate effort to prevent the limited capitalism tolerated under the NEP from sliding into a full-scale capitalist restoration, the regime accompanied it with intensified political repression. It was in 1921–23 that Moscow crushed what remained of rival socialist parties, systematized censorship, extended the competence of the secret police, launched a campaign against the church, and tightened controls over domestic and foreign Communists.

The tactical nature of the retreat was not generally understood at the time. Communist purists were outraged by what they saw as the betrayal of the October Revolution, while opponents of the regime sighed with relief that the dreadful experiment was over. During the last two years of his conscious life, Lenin repeatedly had to defend the NEP and insist that the revolution was on course. Deep in his heart, however, he was haunted by a sense of defeat. The attempt to build Communism in a country as backward as Russia, he realized, had been premature, and had to be postponed until the requisite economic and cultural foundations were in place. Nothing went as planned: “The car is out of control,” he let slip once, “a man drives and the car does not go where he steers it, but where it is steered by something illegal, something unlawful, something that comes from God knows where.”⁵ The internal “enemy,” acting in an environment of economic collapse, confronted his regime with a graver danger than the combined armies of the Whites: “On the economic front, with the attempt of transition to Communism, we have suffered by the spring of 1921 a defeat that was more serious than any inflicted on us by Kolchak, Denikin, or Pilsudski, far more serious, far more basic and dangerous.”⁶ It was an admission that he had been mistaken in insisting as early as the 1890s that Russia was fully capitalist and ready for socialism.⁷

Until March 1921, the Communists tried and in some measure succeeded in placing the national economy under state control. Later this policy came to be known as “War Communism”—Lenin himself first used this term in April 1921 as he was abandoning it.⁸ It was a misnomer coined to justify the disastrous consequences of economic experimentation by the alleged exigencies of the Civil War and foreign intervention. Scrutiny of contemporary records, however, leaves no doubt that these policies were, in fact, not so much emergency responses to war conditions as an attempt as rapidly as possible to construct a Communist society.⁹ War Communism involved the nationalization of the means of production and most other economic assets, the abolition of private trade, the elimination of money, the subjection of the national economy to a comprehensive plan, and the introduction of forced labor.¹⁰

51. Peasant “bag men” peddling grain.

These experiments left Russia’s economy in shambles. In 1920–21, compared to 1913, large-scale industrial production fell by 82 percent, worker productivity by 74 percent, and the production of cereals by 40 percent.¹¹ The cities emptied as their inhabitants fled to the countryside in search of food: Petrograd lost 70 percent of its population, Moscow over 50 percent; the other urban and industrial centers also suffered depletions.¹² The nonagricultural labor force dropped to less than half of what it had been when the Bolsheviks took power: from 3.6 to 1.5 million. Workers’ real wages declined to one-third of the level of 1913–14.^* A hydralike black market, ineradicable because indispensable, supplied the population with the bulk of consumer goods. Communist policies had succeeded in ruining the world’s fifth-largest economy and depleting the wealth accumulated over centuries of “feudalism” and “capitalism.” A contemporary Communist economist called the economic collapse a calamity “unparalleled in the history of mankind.”¹³

The Civil War ended, for all practical purposes, in the winter of 1919–20, and if war needs had been the driving force behind these policies, now would have been the time to give them up. Instead, the year that followed the crushing of the White armies saw the wildest economic experiments, such as the “militarization” of labor and the elimination of money. The government persevered with forcible confiscations of peasant food “surplus.” The peasants responded by hoarding, reducing the sown acreage, and selling produce on the black market in defiance of government prohibitions. Since the weather in 1920 happened to be unfavorable, the meager supply of bread dwindled still further. It was now that the Russian countryside, until then relatively well off compared to the cities in terms of food supplies, began to experience the first symptoms of famine.

The repercussions of such mismanagement were not only economic but also social: they eroded still further the thin base of Bolshevik support, turning followers into enemies and enemies into rebels. The “masses,” whom Bolshevik propaganda had been telling that the hardships they had endured in 1918–19 were the fault of the “White Guards” and their foreign backers, expected the end of hostilities to bring back normal conditions. The Civil War had to some extent shielded the Communists from the unpopularity of their policies by making it possible to justify them as militarily necessary. This explanation could no longer be invoked once the Civil War was over:

The people now confidently looked forward to the mitigation of the severe Bolshevik regime. It was expected that with the end of the Civil War the Communists would lighten the burdens, abolish wartime restrictions, introduce some fundamental liberties, and begin the organization of a more normal life.… Most unfortunately, these expectations were doomed to disappointment. The Communist state showed no intention of loosening the yoke.¹⁴

It now began to dawn even on those willing to give the Bolsheviks the benefit of the doubt, that they had been had, that the true objective of the new regime was not improving their lot but holding on to power, and that to this end it was prepared to sacrifice their well-being and even their very lives. This realization produced a national rebellion unprecedented in its dimensions and ferocity. The end of one Civil War led immediately to the outbreak of another: having defeated the White armies, the Red Army now had to battle partisan bands, popularly known as “Greens” but labeled by the authorities “bandits,” made up of peasants, deserters, and demobilized soldiers.¹⁵

In 1920 and 1921, the Russian countryside from the Black Sea to the Pacific was the scene of uprisings that in numbers involved and territory affected greatly eclipsed the famous peasant rebellions of Stenka Razin and Pugachev under tsarism.¹⁶ Its true dimensions cannot even now be established, because the relevant materials have not yet been properly studied. The Communist authorities have assiduously minimized its scope: thus, according to the Cheka, in February 1921, there occurred 118 peasant risings.¹⁷ In fact, there were hundreds of such uprisings, involving hundreds of thousands of partisans. Lenin was in receipt of regular reports from this front of the Civil War, which included detailed maps covering the entire country, indicating that vast territories were in rebellion.¹⁸ Occasionally, Communist historians give us a glimpse of the dimensions of this other Civil War, conceding that some “bands” of “kulaks” numbered 50,000 and more rebels.¹⁹ An idea of the extent and savagery of the fighting can be obtained from official figures of the losses suffered by the Red Army units engaged against the rebels. According to recent information, the number of Red Army casualties in the campaign of 1921–22, which were waged almost exclusively against peasants and other domestic rebels, came to 237,908.²⁰ The losses among the rebels were almost certainly as high and probably much higher.

Russia had known nothing like it, because in the past peasants had traditionally taken up arms against landowners, not against the government. Just as the tsarist authorities had labeled peasant disorders kramola (sedition), so the new authorities called them “banditry.” But resistance was not confined to peasants. More dangerous still, even if less violent, was the hostility of industrial labor. The Bolsheviks had already lost most of the support they had enjoyed among industrial labor in October 1917 by the spring of 1918.²¹ While fighting the Whites they had managed, with the active help of the Mensheviks and SRs, to rally the workers by playing on the fear of a monarchist restoration. Once the Whites had been defeated, however, and the danger of a restoration no longer existed, the workers abandoned the Bolsheviks in droves, shifting to every conceivable alternative, from the extreme left to the extreme right. In March 1921, Zinoviev told the delegates to the Tenth Party Congress that the mass of workers and peasants belonged to no party, and a good portion of those who were politically active favored the Mensheviks or the Black Hundreds.²² Trotsky was so shocked by the suggestion that, as he interpreted it, “one part of the working class muzzles the remaining 99 percent,” that he asked that Zinoviev’s remarks be struck from the record.²³ But the facts were irrefutable: in 1920–21, except for its own cadres, the Bolshevik regime had the whole country against it, and even the cadres were rebelling. Had not Lenin himself described the Bolsheviks as but a drop of water in the nation’s sea?²⁴ And the sea was raging.

They survived this national revolt by a combination of repression, enforced with unrestrained brutality, and concessions embodied in the New Economic Policy. But they also benefited from two objective factors. One was the disunity of the enemy: the second Civil War consisted of a multitude of individual uprisings without a common leadership or program. Flaring up spontaneously, now here, now there, they were no match for the professionally directed and well-equipped Red Army. The other factor was the rebels’ inability to conceive of political alternatives, for neither the striking workers nor the mutinous peasants thought in political terms. The same applied to the numerous “Green” movements.²⁵ A characteristic trait of the peasant mind—an incapacity to conceive government as something capable of being changed—survived the Revolution and all its revolutionary changes.²⁶ The workers and peasants were very unhappy with what the Soviet government did; that there was a connection between what it did and what it was eluded them, exactly as it had under tsarism, when they had turned a deaf ear to radical and liberal agitation. For this reason, now, as then, they could be appeased by having their immediate grievances satisfied while everything else remained in place. This was the essence of the NEP: to purchase political survival with economic handouts that could be taken back once the population had been pacified. Bukharin put it bluntly: “We are making economic concessions to avoid political concessions.”²⁷ It was a practice learned from the tsarist regime, which had protected its autocratic prerogatives by buying off its main potential challenger, the gentry, with economic favors.²⁸

Communism affected the rural population in contradictory ways.²⁹ The distribution to the communes of private land enlarged allotments, and reduced the number of both rich and poor in favor of “middle” peasants, which satisfied the egalitarian propensities of the muzhik. Much of what the peasant had gained, however, he lost to runaway inflation, which robbed him of his savings. He was also subjected to merciless exactions of food “surpluses” and forced to bear numerous labor burdens, of which the duty to cut and cart lumber was the most onerous. Throughout the Civil War, the Bolsheviks waged intermittent warfare on the village, which passively and actively resisted food requisitions.

Culturally, Bolshevism had no influence on the village. The peasants, for whom severity was the hallmark of a true government, respected Communist authority and adapted to it: centuries of serfdom had taught them how to appease and, at the same time, outwit their masters. Angelica Balabanoff noted with surprise “how quickly they had picked up Bolshevik terminology and newly coined phrases and how well they understood the various articles of the new legislation. They seemed to have lived with it all their lives.”³⁰ They adjusted to the new authority as they would to a foreign invader, as their forebears had done under the Tatars. The meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution, the slogans the Bolsheviks propagated, however, remained for them a mystery not worth solving. Investigations by Communist scholars in 1920s found the postrevolutionary village self-contained and closed to outsiders, living, as it always had done, according to its own unwritten rules. Communist presence was hardly visible: such party cells as managed to establish themselves in the countryside were staffed principally with people from the cities. Antonov-Ovseenko, whom Moscow sent in early 1921 to pacify the rebellious Tambov province, in a confidential report to Lenin wrote that the peasants identified Soviet authority with “flying visits by commissars or plenipotentiaries” and food-requisitioning units: they “have become accustomed to viewing the Soviet government as something extraneous, something that does nothing but issue commands, that administers with great zeal but little economic sense.”³¹

Literate peasants ignored Communist publications, preferring to read religious and escapist literature.³² Only the faintest echoes of foreign events reached the village, and those that did were twisted and misunderstood. The muzhiks showed little interest in who governed Russia, although by 1919 observers noted signs of nostalgia for the old regime.³³ Hence it is not surprising that the peasant revolts against the Communists had negative objectives: “[The rebels] aimed not to march on Moscow so much as to cut themselves off from its influence.”^*

Rural unrest sputtered throughout 1918 and 1919, forcing Moscow to commit major military forces to contain it. At the height of the Civil War, vast areas of the country were under the control of Green bands, which blended anti-Communist, anti-Jewish, and anti-White sentiments with ordinary brigandage. In 1920 these smoldering fires exploded in a conflagration.

The most violent of the anti-Communist jacqueries broke out in Tambov, a relatively prosperous agricultural province with little industry, 350 kilometers southeast of Moscow.³⁴ Before the Bolshevik coup it had produced up to 60 million puds (one million tons) of grains annually, close to one-third of which was normally shipped abroad. In 1918–1920, Tambov experienced the full brunt of forcible food exactions. This is how Antonov-Ovseenko described the causes behind the outbreak of “banditry” there:

The requisition assessment for 1920–1921, though reduced by half as against that of the year before, proved to be entirely excessive. With huge areas unsown and an exceedingly poor harvest, a considerable part of the province lacked enough bread to feed itself. According to the data of the commissions of experts of the Guberniia Supply Committee there were 4.2 puds of grain per head (after the deduction of seed grain but with no deduction for fodder). In 1909–1913, consumption had averaged … 17.9 puds and, in addition, 7.4 puds of fodder. In other words, in the Tambov province last year the local harvest hardly met one-quarter of the requirements. Under the assessment, the province was to deliver 11 million puds of grain and 11 million puds of potatoes. Had the peasants fulfilled the assessment one hundred percent, they would have been left with 1 pud of grain and 1.6 puds of potatoes per person. Even so, the assessment was fulfilled almost fifty percent. Already by January [1921], half the peasantry was starving.³⁵

52. Alexander Antonov.

The rebellion broke out spontaneously in August 1920 in a village near the city of Tambov that refused to surrender grain to a requisition team, killed several of its members, and fought off reinforcements.³⁶ In anticipation of a punitive detachment, the village armed itself with such weapons as it had on hand: some guns, but mainly pitchforks and clubs. Villages nearby joined. The rebels emerged victorious from ensuing encounters with the Red Army. Encouraged by their success, the peasants marched on Tambov, their mass swelling as they neared the provincial capital. The Bolsheviks brought in reinforcements, and in September counterattacked, burning rebellious villages and executing captured partisans. The insurrection might have ended then and there had it not been for the appearance of a charismatic leader in the person of Alexander Antonov.

Antonov was a Socialist-Revolutionary, the son of either an artisan or a metal worker, who in 1905–07 had participated in robberies (“expropriations”) organized by his party to replenish its coffers. Caught and convicted, he was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia.³⁷ In 1917 he returned home and joined the Left SRs. Subsequently he collaborated with the Bolsheviks, but broke with them in the summer of 1918 in protest against their agrarian policies. For the next two years, he staged terrorist acts against Bolshevik functionaries, for which he was sentenced to death in absentia. He managed to elude the authorities and soon became a popular hero. He acted on his own with a small band of followers, under SR slogans, although he no longer maintained a connection with that party.

Antonov reappeared in September 1920 and took charge of the peasants, who had lost heart after failing to capture the city of Tambov. An able organizer, he formed partisan units that carried out hit-and-run attacks on collective farms and railway junctions. The authorities proved unable to cope with such tactics not only because the attacks came at the most unexpected places (sometimes Antonov’s men disguised themselves in Red Army uniforms), but because after each such operation the guerrillas returned home and melted into the mass of peasants. Antonov’s followers had no formal program: their purpose was to “smoke out” the Communists from the countryside as they once used to “smoke out” landlords. Here and there, as in all opposition movements of the time, anti-Semitic slogans were heard. The Tambov SRs at this time formed a Union of Toiling Peasants, which produced a platform calling for political equality for all citizens, personal economic liberty, and the denationalization of industry. But it is doubtful that this platform meant anything to the peasants, who really wanted two things only: an end to food requisitions and the freedom to dispose of their surplus. Suspicions have been voiced that the platform was tacked on by SR intellectuals who could not conceive of acting without a formal ideology: “Words came as an afterthought” to deeds.³⁸ Even so, the Union helped the rebels by organizing village committees, which recruited for the partisans.

By the end of 1920, Antonov had up to 8,000 followers, most of them mounted. In early 1921, he went over to conscription, by which means he increased his force to somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000—the number is in dispute. Even at the more modest estimate, it was comparable to the force raised by Russian history’s most famous peasant rebels, Razin and Pugachev. Patterned on the Red Army, it was divided into 18 or 20 “regiments.”³⁹ Antonov organized good intelligence and communications networks, assigned political commissars to combat units, and enforced strict discipline. He continued to avoid direct encounters, preferring quick surprise raids. The center of his rebellion was the southeastern part of Tambov province, but it spilled over, without igniting comparable risings, into the adjoining provinces of Voronezh, Saratov, and Penza.⁴⁰ Antonov succeeded in cutting the railroad line that carried the confiscated grain to the center; such grain as he did not need, he distributed to peasants.⁴¹ In areas under his control, he abolished Communist institutions and killed captured Communists, often after brutal tortures: the number of his victims is said to have exceeded one thousand. By such methods he managed to sweep from large areas of Tambov province all traces of Communist authority. His ambitions were grander, however, for he issued appeals to the Russian people to join him and march on Moscow to liberate the country from its oppressors.⁴²

53. Captured Antonov partisans.

Moscow’s initial reaction (August 1920) was to place the province under a state of siege. In public pronouncements, the government described the rebels as “bandits” acting at the behest of the SR Party. It knew better: in internal communications, Communist officials conceded that the uprising was of spontaneous origin and ignited by resistance to requisition teams. Although many local SRs did offer support, the central organs of the party repudiated any connection with the rebellion: the SR Organization Bureau described it as a “semi-bandit movement,” and the party’s Central Committee forbade its members to have any dealings with it.⁴³ The Cheka, however, used the Tambov uprising as a pretext for arresting every SR activist it could lay its hands on.

When it became apparent that the regular army could not cope, Moscow delegated Antonov-Ovseenko to Tambov in late February 1921 to head a plenipotentiary commission. Endowed with broad discretionary powers, he was instructed to report directly to Lenin. But success eluded him as well, in good measure because many Red Army soldiers under his command, mostly peasant conscripts, sympathized with the rebels. It became apparent that the only way to quell the disorders was to strike at the rebels’ civilian supporters in order to isolate them, and this required resort to unrestricted terror: concentration camps, executions of hostages, mass deportations. Antonov-Ovseenko requested and obtained Moscow’s authorization to employ such measures.⁴⁴

During the winter of 1920–21, the food and fuel supply situation in the cities of European Russia recalled that on the eve of the February Revolution. The breakdown of transport and peasant hoarding caused a precipitous fall in deliveries; Petrograd, due to its remoteness from the producing areas, once again suffered the most. Factories closed for lack of fuel; more inhabitants fled the city. Those who stayed headed for the countryside to barter for food manufactured goods issued them gratis by the government or stolen from places of work, only to be stopped on their way back by “barring detachments” (zagraditel’nye otriady) that confiscated the produce.

It was against this background that in February 1921 the sailors of Kronshtadt, Trotsky’s “beauty and pride of the Revolution,” raised the banner of revolt.

The spark that ignited the naval mutiny was a government order of January 22 reducing by one-third the bread ration in a number of cities, including Moscow and Petrograd, for a period of ten days.⁴⁵ The measure was necessitated by shortages of fuel, which had shut down several railroad lines.⁴⁶ The first protests erupted in Moscow. A conference of partyless metallurgical workers of the Moscow region at the beginning of February heard sweeping denunciations of the economic policy of the regime, demands for the abolition of “privileged” rations for all, including members of the Sovnarkom, and for the replacement of random food exactions with a regular tax in kind. Some speakers called for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. On February 23–25 many Moscow workers went on strike, demanding that they be allowed to obtain food on their own, outside the official rationing system.⁴⁷ These protests were quelled by force.

Disaffection spread to Petrograd, where food rations for industrial workers, the most privileged caste, had been reduced to 1,000 calories a day. In early February 1921, some of the largest enterprises there were forced to shut down for lack of fuel.⁴⁸ From February 9, sporadic strikes broke out: the Petrograd Cheka determined that their cause was exclusively economic, there being no evidence of “counterrevolutionary” involvement.⁴⁹ From February 23 on, workers held meetings, some of which ended in walkouts. Initially, the Petrograd workers demanded only the right to scour the countryside for food, but before long, probably under Menshevik and SR influence, they added political demands calling for honest elections to the soviets, freedom of speech, and an end to police terror. Here, too, anti-Communist sentiments were occasionally accompanied by anti-Semitic slogans. At the end of February, Petrograd faced the prospect of a general strike. To avert it, the Cheka proceeded to arrest all leading Mensheviks and SRs in the city, a total of 300. Zinoviev’s attempt to calm the rebellious workers was unsuccessful: his audiences were hostile and prevented him from speaking.⁵⁰

Confronted with worker defiance, Lenin reacted exactly as had Nicholas II four years earlier: he turned to the military. But whereas the last tsar, weary and unwilling to fight, soon caved in, Lenin was prepared to go to any length to stay in power. On February 24, the Petrograd Committee of the Communist Party formed a “Defense Committee”—“defense” from whom was not specified—that in words reminiscent of General S.S. Khabalov’s orders of February 25–26, 1917, proclaimed a state of emergency and prohibited all street gatherings. The committee was chaired by Zinoviev, whom the anarchist Alexander Berkman called “the most hated man in Petrograd.” Berkman heard a speech by a member of this group, the Bolshevik M. M. Lashevich, looking “fat, greasy and offensively sensuous,” who dismissed the protesting workers as “leeches attempting extortion.”⁵¹ The striking workers were locked out, which had the effect of depriving them of food rations. The authorities kept on arresting Mensheviks, SRs, and anarchists in Petrograd and in other parts of the country to keep them away from the rebellious “masses.” Whereas in February 1917, the main source of disaffection had been the garrison, now it was the factory. Even so, the Red Army units stationed in Petrograd gave cause for concern, since some of them declared they would not take part in suppressing worker demonstrators. These units were disarmed.

News of labor unrest in Petrograd reached the naval base of Kronshtadt. The 10,000 sailors stationed there had traditionally shown a preference for anarchism of no particular ideological orientation, dominated by hatred of the “bourgeoisie.” In 1917, these sentiments had served the Bolsheviks; now they turned against them. Bolshevik support at the naval base began to erode soon after October, and although in 1919 the sailors had fought valiantly for the Reds in the defense of Petrograd, they were far from enthusiastic about the regime, especially after the Civil War was over.⁵² In the fall and winter of 1920–21, half the members of the Kronshtadt Party organization, numbering 4,000, turned in their cards.⁵³ When rumors spread that striking workers in Petrograd had been fired upon, a delegation of sailors was sent to investigate: on its return it reported that workers on the mainland were treated as they once were in tsarist prisons. On February 28, the crew of the battleship Petropavlovsk, previously a Bolshevik stronghold, passed an anti-Communist resolution. It called for the reelection of soviets by secret vote, freedom of speech and press (but only “for workers and peasants, anarchists, and left socialist parties”), freedom of assembly and trade unions, and the right of peasants to cultivate their land as they saw fit provided they did not employ hired labor.⁵⁴ The following day the resolution was adopted with near-unanimity by an assembly of sailors and soldiers in the presence of Kalinin, who had been sent to pacify the mutineers. Many Communists present at the rally voted for the resolution. On March 2, the sailors formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee to take charge of the island and organize its defense against the anticipated assault from the mainland. The rebels had no illusions about their ability to withstand for long the might of the Red Army, but they counted on rallying the nation and the armed forces to their cause.

54. A typical street scene under War Communism.

55. Muscovites destroying houses for fuel.

In this expectation they were disappointed, for the Bolsheviks took prompt and effective countermeasures to prevent the mutiny’s spread: in this respect, the new totalitarian regime proved far more competent than tsarism. The sailors found themselves isolated, and locked in a military struggle they could not possibly win.

It is interesting to observe how quickly the Bolsheviks assimilated the habit of the old regime of attributing any challenge to their authority to dark, foreign forces. Then they had been the Jews; now they were “White Guardists.” On March 2, Lenin and Trotsky declared the mutiny to be a plot of “White Guard” generals, behind whom stood the SRs and “French counterintelligence.”^* To keep the Kronshtadt mutiny from contaminating Petrograd, the Defense Committee ordered troops to disperse crowds and to fire if disobeyed. The repressive measures were coupled with concessions: Zinoviev withdrew the “barring detachments” and dropped hints that the government was about to abandon food requisitioning. The combination of force and concessions mollified the workers, depriving the sailors of vital support.

One week after the outbreak of the Kronshtadt mutiny, the Bolshevik leadership gathered in Moscow for the Tenth Party Congress. Although it was on everyone’s mind, the mutiny was not on the agenda. In his address, Lenin made light of it, dismissing it as a counterrevolutionary plot: the involvement of “White generals” had been “fully proven,” he declared, and the whole conspiracy had been hatched in Paris.⁵⁵ In reality, the leadership took this challenge very seriously.

Trotsky arrived in Petrograd on March 5. He ordered the mutineers to surrender at once and to throw themselves on the mercy of the government; the alternative was military retribution.⁵⁶ With minor changes, his ultimatum could have been issued by a tsarist governor-general. One appeal to the rebels threatened that if they continued resistance they would be “shot like partridges.”⁵⁷ Trotsky ordered the mutineers’ wives and children residing in Petrograd to be taken hostage.⁵⁸ Annoyed with the insistence of the head of the Petrograd Cheka that the Kronshtadt rebellion was “spontaneous,” he asked Moscow to have him dismissed.⁵⁹

Upon learning of Trotsky’s actions, the defiant Kronshtadt mutineers recalled the order to the security forces on Bloody Sunday in 1905, attributed to the governor of St. Petersburg, Dmitrii Trepov—“Don’t spare bullets.” The “toilers’ revolution,” the rebels vowed, will “sweep from the face of Soviet Russia, stained by their actions, the vile slanderers and aggressors.”⁶⁰

Kronshtadt is an island, which at any other season than winter would have been very difficult to capture by force: but in March, the waters surrounding it were still solidly frozen. This fact facilitated the onslaught, the more so that the rebellious sailors ignored the advice of their officers to break up the ice with artillery. On March 7, Trotsky ordered the assault to begin. The Red forces were under the command of Tukhachevskii. In view of the undependability of the regular troops,⁶¹ Tukhachevskii interspersed in their midst units from special elite divisions formed to combat internal resistance.^*

The attack, launched from a base northwest of Petrograd, began in the morning of March 7 with an artillery barrage from mainland batteries. That night, Red troops wrapped in white sheets stepped onto the ice and ran toward the naval base. In their rear were deployed Cheka machine-gun detachments with orders to shoot any soldiers who retreated. The assault turned into a rout as the attackers were cut down by machine-gun fire from the naval base. Some Red soldiers refused to charge; about one thousand went over to the rebels. Trotsky ordered the execution of every fifth soldier who disobeyed orders.

The day after the first shots had been fired, the Izvestiia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronshtadt published a programmatic statement, “What we are fighting for,” calling for a “Third Revolution.” The document, anarchist in spirit, bears all the hallmarks of having been written by an intellectual, but that it expressed the sentiments of the defendants is proven by their willingness to fight and die for it.

In carrying out the October Revolution, the working class hoped to achieve its liberation. The outcome has been even greater enslavement of human beings.

Power has passed from a monarchy based on the police and gendarmerie into the hands of usurpers—Communists—who have given the toilers not freedom but the daily dread of ending up in the torture chambers of the Cheka, the horrors of which exceed many times the rule of tsarism’s gendarmerie.

The bayonets, the bullets, the coarse shouts of the oprichniki^† from the Cheka—this is the fruit of the long struggles and sufferings of Soviet Russia’s toilers. The glorious emblem of the toilers’ state—the hammer and sickle—Communist authority has in truth replaced with the bayonet and the iron bar, created to protect the tranquil and careless life of the new bureaucracy, the Communist commissars and functionaries.

56. Red Army troops assaulting Kronshtadt.

But basest and most criminal of all is the moral slavery introduced by the Communists: they have also laid their hands on the inner world of the working people, compelling them to think only as they do.

By means of state-run trade unions, the workers have been chained to their machines, so that labor is not a source of joy but a new serfdom. To the protests of peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings, and those of the workers, whom the very conditions of life compel to strike, they have responded with mass executions and an appetite for blood that by far exceeds that of tsarist generals.

Toiling Russia, the first to raise the red banner of the liberation of labor, is thoroughly drenched with the blood of the victims of Communist rule. In this sea of blood, the Communists drown all the great and bright pledges and slogans of the toilers’ revolution.

It has become ever more clear, and by now it is self-evident, that the Russian Communist Party is not the protector of the working people that it claims to be, that the interests of the working people are foreign to it, and that, having gained power, its only fear is of losing it, and hence that all means [to that end] are permissible: slander, violence, deception, murder, revenge on the families of those who have revolted.

The long suffering of the toilers has drawn to an end.

Here and there the red glow of revolt against oppression and coercion is lighting up the country’s sky.…

57. After the assault.

The current revolt finally offers the toilers a chance to have their freely elected, functioning soviets, free of violent party pressures, to refashion the state-run trade unions into free associations of workers, peasants, and the working intelligentsia. At last, the police baton of Communist autocracy is smashed.⁶²

During the week that followed, Tukhachevskii assembled reinforcements, all the while keeping the defenders off balance with nightly raids. The morale on the island declined from the lack of mainland support and the depletion of food supplies. The Red command was apprised of this fact by Kronshtadt Communists, whom the rebels allowed freedom of movement and access to telephones. To keep up the spirit of their own troops, reluctant to attack their comrades, the Communists initiated an intense propaganda effort that depicted the rebels as witless tools of the counterrevolution.

The final assault by 50,000 Red troops began during the night of March 16–17: this time, the main Red force charged from the south, from Oranienbaum and Peterhof. The defenders numbered 12,000–14,000, of whom 10,000 were sailors, and the rest infantry. The attackers managed to creep up close to the island before being noticed. Ferocious fighting ensued, much of it hand to hand. By the morning of March 18, the island was under Communist control. Several hundred prisoners were slaughtered. Some of the defeated rebels, leaders included, managed to save themselves by fleeing across the ice to Finland, where they were interned. It was the intention of the Cheka to distribute the surviving prisoners in the Crimea and the Caucasus, but Lenin told Dzerzhinskii that “it would be more convenient” to have them concentrated “somewhere in the north.”⁶³ This meant isolation in the most savage concentration camps on the White Sea, from which few ever emerged alive.

The crushing of the Kronshtadt uprising was not well received by the population. It did not enhance the reputation of Trotsky: although he loved to dwell on his military and political triumphs, in his memoirs he omitted any mention of his role in this tragic event.

Lenin and Trotsky received regular reports from the field staff of the Revolutionary-Military Council about combat operations against the “bands” operating in Tambov, as if it were a regular war front.⁶⁴ Although the staff reported one victory after another, now scattering, now pulverizing the rebels, it was evident that this enemy, waging highly unconventional warfare, could not be defeated by conventional military means. Lenin, therefore, decided to call on Tukhachevskii to mount a decisive campaign.⁶⁵ Arriving in Tambov at the beginning of May, Tukhachevskii assembled a force which at the height of the operation numbered over 100,000 men.⁶⁶ Assisting the Red Army were “International Units” of Hungarian and Chinese volunteers. Tukhachevskii realized that he confronted not only a military force—thousands of guerrillas—but also a hostile population of millions. Reporting to Lenin after he had broken the back of the insurrection, he explained that the struggle “had to be regarded not as some kind of more or less protracted operation but as an entire campaign and even war.”⁶⁷ “Our supreme command decided not to be captivated by punitive measures but to conduct a regular campaign,” explained another Bolshevik. “It was decided to conduct all operations in a cruel manner so that the very nature of the actions [taken] would command respect.”⁶⁸ Tukhachevskii’s strategy was to conquer the territory methodically, so as to separate the partisans from the civilian population that supplied them with recruits and provided other forms of assistance.⁶⁹ Since conquering and occupying a whole province exceeded the capabilities of the force assigned to the mission, Tukhachevskii relied on “cruelty,” that is, exemplary terror.

Essential to this strategy was good intelligence. Using paid informers, the Cheka obtained lists of the partisans: a special directive (No. 130), issued by Antonov-Ovseenko’s commission, ordered their families to be held as hostages. Using these lists, to which it added the names of peasants designated “kulaks,” the Cheka herded thousands of hostages into concentration camps especially built for the purpose. Areas of particularly intensive partisan activity were singled out for what official documents referred to as “massive terror.” According to Antonov-Ovseenko’s report to Lenin, to break the silence of the inhabitants, Red commanders used the following procedures:

A special “sentence” is pronounced on these villages which enumerates their crimes against the laboring people. The entire male population is placed under the jurisdiction of the Revolutionary Military Tribunal; all the families of bandits are removed to a concentration camp to serve as hostages for the relative belonging to a band; a term of two weeks is given the bandit to give himself up, at the end of which the family is deported from the province and its property (until then sequestered conditionally) is confiscated for good.⁷⁰

Savage as they were, these measures still did not produce the desired results, because the partisans retaliated by taking hostage and executing families of Red Army soldiers and Communist officials, often in a very sadistic manner.⁷¹ Antonov-Ovseenko’s commission therefore issued another directive on June 11 (No. 171), which raised still higher the level of terror by ordering the execution without legal formalities of numerous categories of offenders:

Citizens who refuse to give their name are to be executed on the spot.

Villages that conceal weapons … are sentenced to having hostages taken. These are to be shot if the weapons are not surrendered.

In the event hidden weapons are found, the eldest worker in the family is to be shot on the spot without a trial.

A family that has concealed a bandit is to be arrested and exiled from the province. Its property is to be confiscated, and its oldest member to be shot on the spot without a trial.

A family that gives shelter to members of a bandit’s family or hides the property of a bandit is to be treated as bandits; the oldest worker of the family is to be shot on the spot, without a trial.

In the case of the flight of a bandit’s family, its belongings are to be distributed among peasants loyal to Soviet authority and the abandoned dwellings to be burned.

This order will be carried out strictly and mercilessly. It is to be read to village assemblies.⁷²

As a result of these orders, hundreds, if not thousands, of peasants were killed: liable to execution, as later under Nazi rule, were persons whose only crime was giving refuge to the abandoned children of “bandits.”⁷³ In many villages, hostages were executed in batches. According to Antonov-Ovseenko, in “the second most pro-bandit uezd,” 154 “bandit hostages” were shot, 227 families of “bandits” taken hostage, 17 houses burned, 24 pulled down, and 22 turned over to the “village poor” (a euphemism for collaborators).⁷⁴ In instances of particularly stubborn resistance, entire villages were “relocated” to neighboring provinces. Lenin not only approved of these measures but instructed Trotsky to make certain that they were accurately implemented.⁷⁵

Tukhachevskii’s campaign got underway in late May 1921. He had been authorized to resort to poison gas against the rebels and lost no time warning them that he meant to use it:

Members of White Guard bands, partisans, bandits, surrender! Otherwise, you will be mercilessly exterminated. Your families and your belongings have been taken hostage for you. Hide in the village—you will be turned over by your neighbors. If anyone gives shelter to your family, he will be shot and his family arrested. If you hide in the woods—we will smoke you out. The Plenipotentiary Commission has decided to use asphyxiating gas to smoke the bands out of the forests.…⁷⁶

Ten days later Antonov’s army was surrounded and destroyed, but Antonov himself managed to escape. Another guerrilla army loyal to him held out for a couple of weeks. Eventually, all that remained of his once formidable force were small partisan detachments that carried out desultory raids. The population, terrorized, but also mollified by the abandonment of food exactions in March 1921, withdrew support of the rebels. The next year, 1922, was a good one for Russian peasants: the crops were abundant and the taxes reasonable.

Forsaken by all, Antonov became a hunted quarry. The end came on June 24, 1922: betrayed by his onetime supporters, he was tracked down and killed by the GPU. It is said that the peasants welcomed his death, cursing his body as it was borne through their villages to Tambov and cheering his killers.⁷⁷ But then, the entire incident may well have been staged.

The remarkable success of guerrilla leaders like Antonov in standing up to the regular army made a deep impression on the Soviet High Command. M. V. Frunze, the Red Army’s Chief of Staff and later Trotsky’s successor as Commissar of War, ordered studies to be undertaken of unconventional warfare for future use against a technically superior enemy.⁷⁸ On the basis of these investigations, the Red Army would resort to partisan warfare on a large scale against the invading Nazis. And the Nazi command, in turn, would replicate the methods of terror against the civilian population which the Red Army had developed in 1921–22 in its campaign against peasant guerrillas.

The need to pacify the peasantry became apparent to Lenin even before Kronshtadt: the matter was discussed in the Politburo in February 1921. The event that may have prompted these deliberations was the peasant uprising in western Siberia that broke out on February 9.⁷⁹ The partisans, numbering in the tens of thousands, occupied several major towns, including Tobolsk, and cut the railroad line linking central Russia with eastern Siberia. With local forces unable to cope, the Center mobilized 50,000 troops in the area.⁸⁰ In intense battles, the regular army eventually succeeded in suppressing the guerrillas. But the two-week disruption of food shipments from Siberia was a calamity that compelled the Soviet leaders, while the uprising was still in progress, to rethink their whole agrarian policy.⁸¹

58. A “food detachment” about to depart for the village.

The sailors’ mutiny finally forced their hand: it was on March 15, as the Red Army stood poised to launch the final assault on the naval base, that Lenin announced what was to become the linchpin of the New Economic Policy, the abandonment of arbitrary food confiscation known as prodrazvërstka in favor of a tax in kind. Prodrazvërstka had been the most universally despised feature of “War Communism”—despised by peasants, whom it robbed of their produce, but also by the urban population, whom it deprived of food.

Requisitioning had been enforced in an appallingly arbitrary manner. The Commissariat of Supply determined the quantity of foodstuffs it required—a quantity determined by what was needed to feed the consumers in the cities and the armed forces, without regard to what the producers could provide. This figure it broke down, on the basis of inadequate and often outdated information, into quotas for each province, district, and village. The system was as inefficient as it was brutal: in 1920, for example, Moscow set the prodrazvërstka at 583 million puds (9.5 million tons) but managed to collect only half that amount.⁸²

Collectors acted on the premise that peasants lied when they claimed that the grain they were forced to surrender was not surplus but essential to provide food for their families and seed, and that they could compensate for the loss by digging up their hoard. This the peasants may have been able to do in 1918 and 1919. But by 1920 they had little if anything left to hoard: as a result, as we have seen in the case of Tambov province, prodrazvërstka, even if incompletely realized, left them with next to nothing. Nor was this all. Zealous collectors impounded not only “surplus” and food needed for sustenance, but grain set aside for the next season’s sowing: one high Communist official admitted that in many areas the authorities appropriated one hundred percent of the harvest.^* Refusal to pay resulted in the confiscation of livestock and beatings. In addition, collecting agents and local officials, empowered to label resistance to their demands as “kulak”-inspired or “counterrevolutionary,” felt at liberty to appropriate food, cattle, even clothing for their personal use.⁸³ The peasants resisted fiercely: in the Ukraine alone, they were reported to have killed 1,700 requisition officials.⁸⁴

A more self-defeating policy would be hard to conceive. The system operated on the absurd principle that the more the peasant produced the more would be taken from him; from which it followed with inexorable logic that he would produce little if anything beyond his own needs. The richer a region, the more it was subjected to government plunder, and the more prone it was to curtail production: between 1916–17 and 1920–21, the decline in the sown acreage in the center of the country, an area of grain deficits, was 18 percent, whereas in the main region of grain surpluses it was 33 percent.^† And since yields per acre declined from shortage of fertilizer and draft animals as well, grain production, which in 1913 had been 80.1 million tons, dropped in 1920 to 46.1 million-tons.⁸⁵ If in 1918 and 1919 it had still been possible to extract a “surplus,” by 1920 the peasant had learned his lesson and made sure there was nothing to surrender. It apparently never occurred to him that the regime would take what it wanted even if it meant that he went breadless and seedless.

Prodrazvërstka had to be abandoned for both economic and political reasons. There was nothing left to take from the peasant, who faced starvation; and it fueled nationwide rebellions. The Politburo finally decided to drop prodrazvërstka on March 15.^* The new policy was made public on March 23.⁸⁶ Henceforth, the peasants were required to turn over to government agencies a fixed amount of grain; arbitrary confiscations of “surplus” were terminated.

In announcing the new policy, Lenin emphasized its political significance: in Russia, where the peasantry constituted the vast majority of the population, one could not govern effectively without its support. In an internal communication, Kamenev listed “introducing political tranquillity to the peasantry” as the policy’s first objective (followed by encouraging increases in the sown acreage).⁸⁷ Previously viewed as a class enemy, the peasant was henceforth to be treated as an ally. Lenin now acknowledged a fact that had eluded him earlier, namely that in Russia, in contrast to much of Western Europe, the majority of rural inhabitants were neither hired hands nor tenants but independent small producers.⁸⁸ To be sure, the latter were a “petty bourgeoisie,” and concessions to them were a regrettable retreat, but it was temporary: Lenin justified it as an “economic breathing spell,” while Bukharin and D. B. Riazanov spoke of a “peasant Brest [-Litovsk].”⁸⁹ How long the “breathing spell” would last was left unsaid, but at one point Lenin conceded that “transforming” the peasant could take generations.⁹⁰ These and other remarks of Lenin’s on the subject suggest that although collectivization remained his ultimate objective, he would not have launched it as early as did Stalin.

As spelled out in April 1921, the new policy imposed on peasant households a standard tax in grain, potatoes, and oil-yielding seeds. Later that year, other agricultural products were added to the list: eggs and dairy products, wool, tobacco, hay, fruits, honey, meat, and raw leather.⁹¹ The size of the grain tax was determined by the minimal requirements of the Red Army, industrial workers, and other nonagricultural groups. Its allocation, left to the discretion of village soviets, was to be commensurate with the ability of a given household to pay, as determined by its size, the quantity of arable land at its disposal, and local grain yields. To encourage the peasants to increase their output, the decree based the amount of land subject to the tax not on that actually under cultivation but on that capable of being cultivated, that is, the total arable. The principle of “collective responsibility” (krugovaia otvetstvennost’) for meeting state obligations was abandoned.⁹²

The first tax in kind was set at 240 million puds, 60 million less than obtained in 1920 and only 41 percent of the prodrazvërstka quota previously set for 1921. The government hoped to make up for the shortfall by offering the peasant, on a barter basis, manufactured goods for his surplus grain: this was to bring in an additional 160 million puds.⁹³ None of these expectations was met because of the severe drought that struck the principal grain-producing areas in the spring of 1921: since the afflicted areas provided next to nothing, instead of 240 million puds, the tax brought in only 128 million.⁹⁴ Nor did the proposed exchange bring in any grain, because there were no manufactured goods to barter.

Although the new policy resulted in no immediate improvement—indeed, initially it yielded less food than prodrazvërstka—it marked a significant advance in Communist thinking that in the longer run was to prove highly beneficial. For in contrast to past practices that treated peasants as mere objects of exploitation, the tax in kind, or prodnalog, also took their interests into account.

While the economic benefits of the new agrarian policy were not immediately apparent, the political rewards were reaped at once. The abandonment of food requisitioning took the wind out of the sails of rebellion. The following year, Lenin could boast that peasant uprisings, which previously had “determined the general picture of Russia,” had virtually ceased.^*

When they introduced the tax in kind, the Bolsheviks had no idea of its ramifications, for they meant to keep intact the centralized management of the national economy: the last thing they wanted was to abandon the state monopoly on trade and manufacture. They fully expected to absorb the grain surplus by giving the peasant manufactured goods in exchange. It soon became evident, however, that the expectation was unrealistic, in consequence of which, they were compelled, step by step, to carry out ever more ambitious reforms that in the end produced the unique hybrid of socialism and capitalism known as the New Economic Policy. (The term first became current in the winter of 1921–22.)⁹⁵ The tax in kind

necessarily implied the restoration for the peasantry of the right to trade in that part of the surplus produce which remained at their disposal (otherwise the leaving of this surplus at their disposal would have been no more than a nominal concession, possessing very little influence as an incentive to increase peasant production). This in turn implied the revival of a market in agricultural produce, the recreation of market relations as an essential link between agriculture and industry, and a restored sphere of circulation for money.⁹⁶

Prodnalog thus unavoidably led, in the first place, to the restoration of private trade in grain and other foodstuffs—this barely fifteen months after Lenin had sworn that he would rather have everyone die than relinquish the state monopoly on the grain trade.⁹⁷ It further meant a return to conventional monetary practices, with a stable currency backed by objects of acknowledged value. It also implied the abandonment of the state monopoly on industry, since the peasant was likely to part with his surplus only if he could obtain for it manufactured goods: this, in turn, required privatizing a good part of the consumer industry. In this manner, an emergency measure designed to quell a nationwide uprising against them led the Communists into uncharted waters that could end in the restoration of capitalism and its corollary, “bourgeois democracy.”^*

Between 1922 and 1924, Moscow abandoned the ideal of a moneyless economy and adopted orthodox fiscal practices. The transition to fiscal responsibility was difficult because the government required mountains of paper money to cover budgetary deficits. In the first three years of the NEP, the Soviet Union had, in effect, two currencies circulating side by side: one, the virtually worthless “tokens” known as denznaki or sovznaki; the other, a new gold-based ruble called a chervonets.

Paper rubles were produced as rapidly as the printing presses would allow. In 1921, the issuance was 16 trillion; in 1922, it rose to nearly two quadrillion: “An amount that has sixteen places and that under brighter economic skies is associated with astronomy rather than with finance.”⁹⁸ The peasants refused paper tokens and used commodities, mainly grain, as a medium of exchange.

While continuing to flood the country with worthless paper, the government took steps to create a new, stable currency. Fiscal reform was entrusted to Nicholas Kutler, a banker and a minister in Sergei Witte’s cabinet, and, following his retirement from government service, a Kadet Duma deputy. Kutler was appointed to the board of the State Bank (Gosbank), which was brought into being in October 1921 on his recommendation. It was also on his advice that the regime issued the new currency, and denominated the state budget in tsarist rubles.⁹⁹ (Two years later, a similar reform would be carried out in Germany under the aegis of Hjalmar Schacht.) In November 1922, the State Bank was authorized to issue chervontsy, banknotes in five denominations, backed 25 percent by bullion and foreign reserves, and the rest by commodities and short-term obligations: each new ruble represented 7.7 grams of pure gold, the gold equivalent of 10 tsarist rubles.^† Chervontsy, intended for large-scale transactions and settlements between state enterprises rather than as legal tender, nevertheless circulated alongside the old tokens, which despite their astronomical denominations were needed for small retail transactions. (Lenin, embarrassed by having to restore gold to its traditional place in monetary policy, promised that as soon as Communism triumphed globally its use would be confined to the building of lavatories.¹⁰⁰) By February 1924, nine-tenths of all accounts were denominated in chervontsy.¹⁰¹ In February 1924, token rubles were withdrawn from circulation and replaced with “State Treasury Notes” with the gold content of one tsarist ruble. At this time, peasants were permitted to meet their state obligations partly or wholly in money rather than produce.

The tax system, too, was reformed along traditional lines. The state budget, calculated in gold rubles, was regularized. The deficit, which in 1922 amounted to more than half of the outlays, gradually narrowed. Laws issued in 1924 prohibited the issuance of banknotes as a device for covering deficits.¹⁰²

Despite resistance from managers of the nationalized enterprises, decrees were passed encouraging small-scale private and cooperative industries, which were accorded the status of juridical persons and allowed to employ a limited number of salaried workers. Large enterprises remained in the state’s hands and continued to benefit from government subsidies. Well aware that the NEP risked eroding the socialist foundations of the state, and, with it, his power base, Lenin made certain that the government retained control over the “commanding heights” of the economy: banking, heavy industry, and foreign trade,¹⁰³ as well as transport. Middle-sized enterprises were ordered to follow sound accounting practices and to become self-supporting, a practice known as khozrazchët. Those that were either idle or unproductive were designated as primary candidates for leasing:¹⁰⁴ over 4,000 such enterprises, a high proportion of them flour mills, were leased either to their previous owners or to cooperatives.¹⁰⁵ These concessions were mainly significant in the principles they established, especially in allowing hired labor, a practice socialists regarded with utmost repugnance. Their effect on production was limited. In 1922, state enterprises accounted for 92.4 percent of the nation’s industrial output as measured by value.¹⁰⁶

The transition to khozrazchët forced the abandonment of the elaborate structure of free services and goods, by virtue of which in the winter of 1920–21 the basic needs of some 38 million citizens had been provided at government expense.¹⁰⁷ Postal services and transportation were to be paid for. Workers received money wages and had to purchase whatever they needed on the open market. Rationing, too, was gradually eliminated. Step by step, retail trade was privatized. Citizens were permitted to deal in urban real estate, to own publishing firms, to manufacture pharmaceuticals and agricultural implements. The right of inheritance, abolished in 1918, was partially restored.¹⁰⁸

The NEP bred an unattractive type of entrepreneur, very unlike the classic “bourgeois.”¹⁰⁹ The environment for private enterprise in the Soviet Union was basically so unfriendly, and its future so uncertain, that those who took advantage of economic liberalization spent their profits without thought for tomorrow. Treated as pariahs by government and society alike, the “nepmen” repaid them in kind. Living lavishly and conspicuously in the midst of poverty, they crowded expensive restaurants and nightclubs, flaunting their fur-wrapped mistresses.

59. The Sukharevka Market in Moscow, center of the black market under War Communism and retail trade—under the NEP.

The aggregate results of the measures subsumed under the fully developed New Economic Policy were undoubtedly beneficial, although unevenly so. Just how beneficial it is difficult to determine, for Soviet economic statistics are notoriously unreliable, differing, depending on the source one employs, by as much as several hundred percent.^*

The benefits appeared first and foremost in agriculture. In 1922, thanks to donations and purchases of seed grain abroad as well as favorable weather, Russia enjoyed a bumper crop. Encouraged by the new tax policy to increase the cultivated acreage, peasants expanded production: the acreage sown in 1925 equaled that of 1913.¹¹⁰ Yields, however, remained lower than before the Revolution, and the harvest proportionately smaller: as late as 1928, on the eve of collectivization, it was 10 percent below the 1913 figure.

Industrial production grew more slowly due to shortages of capital, obsolescence of equipment, and similar causes that defied quick remedies. The foreign concessions on which Lenin had counted to boost production amounted to little because foreigners hesitated to invest in a country that had defaulted on loans and nationalized assets. The Soviet bureaucracy, hostile to foreign capital, did all in its power to obstruct concessions by resort to red tape and other forms of chicanery. And the Cheka, and later the GPU, did their part by treating all foreign economic involvement in Russia as a pretext for espionage. In the final year of NEP (1928) there were only 31 functioning foreign enterprises in the Soviet Union, with a capital (in 1925) of a mere 32 million rubles (16 million dollars). The majority of these enterprises engaged not in manufacturing but the exploitation of Russia’s natural resources, especially timber: the latter accounted for 85 percent of the foreign capital invested in concessions.¹¹¹

60. A Moscow produce market under the NEP.

The NEP precluded comprehensive economic planning, which the Bolsheviks regarded as essential to socialism. The Supreme Council of the National Economy gave up any idea of organizing the economy and concentrated on managing, as best it could, Russia’s virtually inoperative industries by means of “trusts.” The trusts received from the state financial as well as material subsidies; other materials they were free to purchase on the open market. After their costs were covered, their entire production was turned over to the government. For purposes of economic planning Lenin created in February 1921 a new agency, popularly known as Gosplan, whose immediate task was to carry out a gigantic program of electrification that would provide the basis for future industrial and socialist development. Even before the NEP, in 1920, Lenin had created a State Commission for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO), which he expected over the next 10 to 15 years vastly to expand the electric power capacity of the country, mainly by developing hydroelectric energy. He entertained fantastic expectations of this project’s ability to solve problems that had defied other solutions. The hope found expression in his celebrated slogan, whose precise meaning remains elusive to this day, “The soviets plus electrification equal Communism.”¹¹² In the resolutions of the Twelfth Party Congress (1923), electrification was described as the central focus of economic planning and the “keystone” of the country’s economic future. For Lenin its implications were grander still. He genuinely believed that the spread of electric power would destroy the capitalist spirit in its last surviving bastion, the peasant household, and undermine religious belief: Simon Liberman heard him say that for the peasant, electricity will replace God and that he will pray to it.¹¹³

The entire program was but another Utopian scheme that ignored costs and came to naught for lack of money: for it soon became apparent that it required annual outlays of one billion gold rubles (500 million dollars) over a period of 10 to 15 years. “Given the fact that the nation’s industry was virtually at a standstill,” writes a Russian historian, “and that there were no exports of grain for the purchase abroad of the necessary equipment and technical specifications, the program of electrification in reality resembled ‘electro-fiction.’ ”¹¹⁴

In their totality, the economic measures introduced after March 1921 marked a severe setback for the hopes once entertained of introducing Communism into Russia. Triumphant wherever sheer force decided the issue, the Bolsheviks were defeated by the inexorable laws of economic reality. In October 1921 Lenin admitted as much:

We had counted—or, perhaps it will be more correct to say, we had assumed without adequate calculation—on the [ability] of the proletarian state to organize by direct command state production and state distribution of goods in a Communist manner in a country of small peasants. Life has demonstrated our mistake.¹¹⁵

To the Bolsheviks, the loosening of economic controls, which allowed, however conditionally, the reemergence of private enterprise, spelled political danger. They made certain, therefore, to accompany liberalization of the economy with a further tightening of political controls. At the Eleventh Party Congress Lenin explained the reasoning behind these seemingly contradictory policies as follows:

It is very difficult to retreat after a victorious grand advance. Now the conditions are entirely different. Before, even if you did not enforce discipline, all pushed and rushed forward on their own. Now, discipline has to be more deliberate. It is also a hundred times more necessary, because when the entire army is in retreat, it does not know, it does not see where to stop: all it sees is the retreat. Here a few panicky voices are enough to produce general flight. Now the danger is immense. When such a retreat occurs in a real army, they deploy machine-guns, and when an orderly retreat turns into rout, they order: “Tire.” And rightly so.^*

The period 1921–28 thus combined economic liberalization with intensified political repression. The latter took the form of persecution of such independent institutions as still survived in Soviet Russia, namely the Orthodox Church and the rival socialist parties; increased repression of the intelligentsia and the universities, accompanied by mass expulsions from the country of intellectuals considered especially dangerous; intensified censorship; and harsher criminal laws. To those who objected that these measures would create a bad impression abroad at the very time when the Soviet state was gaining favor for its economic liberalization, Lenin responded that there was no need to please Europe: Soviet Russia should “move further in strengthening the interference of the state in ‘private relations’ and civil affairs.”¹¹⁶

The main instrument of such interference was the political police, which under NEP was transformed from an agency of blind terror into an all-pervasive branch of the bureaucracy. According to an internal instruction, its new tasks were to keep close watch on economic conditions, prevent “sabotage” by anti-Soviet parties and foreign capital, and ensure that goods destined for the state were of good quality and delivered on time.¹¹⁷ The extent to which the security police penetrated every facet of Soviet life is indicated by the positions held by its head, Felix Dzerzhinskii, who served, at one time or another, as Commissar of the Interior, Commissar of Transport, and Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy.

The Cheka was thoroughly hated, and the disrepute it was held in for shedding innocent blood was brought still lower by its venality. In late 1921, Lenin decided to reform it along the lines of the tsarist secret police. The Cheka was now divested of authority over ordinary (other than state) crimes, which were henceforth to be dealt with by the Commissariat of Justice. In December 1921, while acclaiming the Cheka for its accomplishments, Lenin explained that under NEP new security methods were required and that “revolutionary legality” was the order of the day: the stabilization of the country made it possible to “narrow” the functions of the political police.¹¹⁸

61. In the middle, Dzerzhinskii; on his right, Demian Bednyi, 1920.

The Cheka was abolished on February 6, 1922, and immediately replaced by an organization innocuously named State Political Administration, or GPU (Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie). (In 1924, following the creation of the Soviet Union, it was renamed OGPU or “United State Political Administration.”) The management remained unchanged, with Dzerzhinskii as head, Ia. Kh. Peters as Deputy, and everyone else in place so that “hardly a Chekist stirred from the Lubianka.”¹¹⁹ Like the tsarist Department of Police, the GPU was made part of the Ministry (Commissariat) of the Interior. It was to suppress “open counterrevolutionary actions, including banditry,” combat espionage, protect railroads and waterways, guard Soviet borders, and “carry out special assignments … for the defense of the revolutionary order.”¹²⁰ Other crimes fell within the purview of the courts and Revolutionary Tribunals.

On the face of it, the GPU enjoyed fewer arbitrary powers than the Cheka. But the reality was different. Lenin and his associates believed that problems were caused by people, and that one solved them by getting rid of troublemakers. In March 1922, barely one month after he had brought it into existence, Lenin advised Peters that the GPU “can and must fight bribery” and other economic crimes by shooting the offenders: a directive to this effect was to be sent to the Commissariat of Justice through the Politburo.¹²¹ A decree of August 10 authorized the Commissariat of the Interior by the device of administrative procedure to exile citizens accused of “counterrevolutionary activity” either abroad or to designated localities in Russia for up to three years.¹²² An appendix to this decree, issued in November, licensed the GPU to deal with “banditry” as it saw fit, without resort to legal procedures, “up to execution by shooting”; it was further empowered to combine exile with forced labor.¹²³ In January 1923, the judiciary prerogatives of the GPU were expanded still further, with the authority to exile “persons whose presence in a given locality (and within the borders of the [Russian Republic]) appears, from their activity, their past, [or] their connection with criminal circles, dangerous from the point of view of safeguarding the revolutionary order.”¹²⁴ As under tsarism, exiles reached their destination guarded by an armed convoy, partly on foot, under harsh conditions. In theory, exile was imposed by the Commissariat of the Interior on the GPU’s recommendation, but in practice, a recommendation from the GPU was tantamount to a sentence. On October 16, 1922, the GPU received the power to punish without trial, and even to execute, persons guilty of armed robbery or banditry and caught in the act.¹²⁵ Thus, within less than a year of its creation as an organ of “revolutionary legality,” the GPU reacquired the arbitrary powers of the Cheka over the lives of Soviet citizens.

The GPU/OGPU evolved a complex structure, with specialized departments responsible for matters not strictly within the purview of the political police, such as economic crimes and sedition in the armed forces. It was compelled to reduce its staff—from 143,000 in December 1921 to 105,000 in May 1922¹²⁶—but even so, it remained a formidable organization. For in addition to its civilian personnel, it disposed of a sizeable military force in the form of an army that in late 1921 numbered in the hundreds of thousands, as well as a separate corps of border guards of 50,000 men.¹²⁷ Deployed across the country, these troops performed functions analogous to those of the tsarist Corps of Gendarmes. The GPU established “agencies” (agentury) abroad with the twin mission of surveillance and disruption of Russian emigration, and supervision of Comintern personnel. GPU also helped Glavlit implement censorship laws and administered most prisons. There was hardly a sphere of public activity in which it was not involved.

Under the NEP, the network of concentration camps expanded: from 84 in late 1920 to 315 in October 1923.¹²⁸ Some were run by the Commissariat of the Interior, others by the GPU. The most notorious of these camps were located in the far north (the “Northern Camps of Special Designation,” or SLON), where escape was virtually impossible. Here, along with ordinary criminals, were confined captured officers of the White armies, rebellious peasants from Tambov and other provinces, and Kronshtadt sailors. The death toll among the inmates was high: in one year (1925) SLON recorded 18,350 deaths.¹²⁹ When, in the summer of 1923, these camps became overcrowded, the authorities converted into a concentration camp the ancient monastery on Solovetsk Island, which had been used to confine persons accused of antistate or antichurch crimes since the reign of Ivan the Terrible. In 1923, the Solovetskii Monastery camp, the largest operated by the GPU, held 4,000 inmates, including 252 socialists.¹³⁰

The principle of “revolutionary legality” was routinely violated under the NEP, as before, not only because of the extensive extra-judiciary powers given the GPU but also because Lenin regarded law as an arm of politics and courts as agencies of the government. His conception of law became clear in 1922 during the drafting of Soviet Russia’s first criminal code. Dissatisfied with the draft submitted by the Commissar of Justice, D. I. Kurskii, Lenin gave precise instructions on how to deal with political crimes. These he defined as “the propaganda and agitation or participation in organizations or assistance to organizations that help (by means of propaganda and agitation)” the international bourgeoisie. Such “crimes” were to be punished by death, or, in the event of extenuating circumstances, by imprisonment or expulsion abroad.¹³¹ Lenin’s formulation resembled the equally vague criteria of political crimes given in 1845 in the criminal code of Nicholas I, which mandated severe punishment for persons “guilty of writing or spreading written or printed works or representations intended to arouse disrespect for Sovereign Authority, or for the personal qualities of the Sovereign, or for his government.” Under tsarism, however, such actions were not punishable by death.¹³² Implementing Lenin’s instructions, jurists drew up Articles 57 and 58, omnibus clauses that gave courts arbitrary powers to sentence undesirables for alleged counterrevolutionary activity, which Stalin would later use to give the appearance of legality to his terror. That Lenin realized the implications of his instructions is evident from the guidance he gave Kurskii: the task of the judiciary, he wrote, was to provide “a principled and politically correct (and not merely narrowly juridical) … essence and justification of terror.… The court is not to eliminate terror … but to substantiate it and legitimize it in principle.”¹³³ For the first time in legal history, the function of legal proceedings was defined to be not dispensing justice but terrorizing the population.

Communist legal historians, discussing the legal practices of the 1920s, defined law as “a disciplining principle that helps strengthen the Soviet state and develop the socialist economy.”^* This definition justified the repression of any individual or group that, in the judgment of the authorities, harmed the interests of the state or inhibited the development of a new economic order. Thus the “liquidation” of “kulaks,” carried out by Stalin in 1928–31, in which millions of peasants were dispossessed and deported, mostly to death camps, was carried out strictly within the terms of Leninist jurisprudence.¹³⁴ According to Article No. 1 of the first Soviet Civil Code (1923), the civil rights of citizens were protected by law only to the extent that these rights did not “contradict their socioeconomic purpose (naznachenie).”¹³⁵

To make it easier forjudges to carry out their new responsibilities, Lenin freed them from customary courtroom procedures. Several innovations were introduced. Crime was determined not by formal criteria—the infraction of a law—but by its perceived potential consequences, that is, by a “material” or “sociological” standard, which defined it as “any action or inaction dangerous to society, which threatens the foundations of the Soviet regime.”¹³⁶ Guilt could also be established by proving “intent,” the object of punishment being “subjective criminal intention.”^* In 1923, in an appendix to Article 57 of the Criminal Code, “counterrevolutionary” activity was defined in so broad a fashion as to cover any deed of which the authorities disapproved. It stated that in addition to actions committed for the express purpose of overthrowing or weakening the government or rendering assistance to “the international bourgeoisie,” “counterrevolutionary” qualified also actions that

without being directly intended to attain [these] objectives, nevertheless, as far as the person committing the act was concerned, represented a deliberate assault (pokushenie) on the fundamental political and economic conquests of the proletarian revolution.¹³⁷

Under this definition the desire to make a profit, for example, could be interpreted as counterrevolutionary activity and merit capital punishment. Commenting on this revision of Article 57, N. V. Krylenko remarked that such “elasticity” of punitive measures was required to deal with “concealed forms of counterrevolutionary activity,” their most prevalent form.¹³⁸ The principle of “analogy” made it possible to charge citizens for crimes not directly defined but similar in nature (Article 10 of the Criminal Code.)^†

Such standards were infinitely flexible. The Communist jurist A. N. Trainin, pushing the party’s legal philosophy to its logical conclusion, argued in 1929, before Stalin’s terror got underway, that there are “instances in which criminal repression is applied also in the absence of guilt.’ ”¹³⁹ It was hardly possible to go further in the destruction of law and legal process.

The purpose of trials staged on such principles was not to demonstrate the existence or absence of a crime—that was predetermined by the appropriate party authorities—but to provide yet another forum for political agitation and propaganda for the instruction of the citizenry. Defense lawyers, who had to be party members, were required to take their client’s guilt for granted and confine themselves to pleading extenuating circumstances. As long as Lenin was alive, full contrition combined with false testimony against other defendants was likely to secure acquittal or, at least, a reduced sentence. Later on, even such actions would prove insufficient.

The principal victims of such a travesty of law were, of course, the defendants whose fate was decided by political and propagandistic considerations. But society at large also paid a heavy price. The mass of Russians had always held justice in low esteem, an attitude the court reform of 1864 had slowly taught them to overcome. This lesson was now quickly unlearned: justice, Bolshevik practices confirmed, was what pleased the strong. And to the extent that respect for law is fundamental to the proper functioning of society, Lenin’s formalized lawlessness was antisocial in the fullest sense of the word.

Lenin thrived on combat: political warfare was his true métier. To pursue it, he required enemies. Having been twice defeated—first by failing to spread Communism abroad, and then by failing to construct a socialist economy at home—he now turned his energies to fighting imaginary foes. The enemies he selected for repression were “guilty” not by virtue of anything they had done or even intended to do, but because by the mere fact of their existence they defied the revolutionary order.

The principal victims of his wrath were the clergy and the socialists.

Kronshtadt, Tambov, and the emergence within the Communist Party itself of democratic deviations (see below, pages this page–this page) convinced Lenin that the SRs and Mensheviks were at work, exploiting the economic crisis to undermine his regime. He could not admit even to himself that the discontent had valid causes: like a typical tsarist police official he suspected behind all disaffection the handiwork of hostile agitators. In fact, the SRs and Mensheviks had adapted themselves to Lenin’s dictatorship, which allowed them to do what they had done under tsarism: grumble and criticize without bearing responsibility. They enrolled in the Communist Party by the thousands. In October 1920, the SR Central Committee ruled out all armed resistance against the Bolsheviks. But in the peculiar world of Bolshevik reasoning, what one wanted “subjectively” and what one was “objectively” were entirely different things. As Dzerzhinskii told an arrested Socialist-Revolutionary: “Subjectively you are a revolutionary such as we would wish to have more of, but objectively you serve the counter-revolution.”^* In the words of another Chekist, Peters, it was immaterial whether or not the socialists took up arms against the Soviet government: they had to be eliminated.¹⁴⁰

As long as the Civil War was in progress, the SRs and Mensheviks had been tolerated because they helped Moscow against the Whites. Their persecution began the instant the Civil War was over. Surveillance followed by arrests started in 1920 and intensified in 1921. On June 1, 1920, the Cheka distributed to its agencies a circular outlining how to deal with SRs, Mensheviks, and for good measure, Zionists. They were instructed “to pay particular attention to the destructive activity of Mensheviks working in the trade unions, in cooperative organizations, especially among the printers. Materials for indictment should be painstakingly collected, to bring them to account not as Mensheviks, but as speculators and inciters to strikes, and so forth.” In regard to Zionists, the security organs were to register known adherents and subject them to oversight, forbid them to hold meetings and disperse illegal ones, read their mail, refuse them permits for railroad travel, and “gradually, under various pretexts, occupy [Zionist] quarters, justifying this with the needs of the military and other institutions.”¹⁴¹

But the harassment and arrests of socialists did not solve the problem as long as their ideas appealed to significant segments of the population: Lenin had to discredit the socialists by showing them up as traitors and, at the same time, demonstrating that to criticize his regime from the left no less than from the right was tantamount to counterrevolution. In the words of Zinoviev: “At the present time, all criticism of the party line, even the so-called ‘left’ kind, is, objectively speaking, Menshevik criticism.”¹⁴² To drive this point home, Lenin staged Soviet Russia’s first political show trials.

As victims he chose the Socialists-Revolutionaries rather than the Mensheviks, because the former enjoyed almost universal following among the peasantry. Arrests of SRs began during the Tambov rebellion: by the middle of 1921 thousands of them, including all the members of the SR Central Committee, sat in Cheka prisons.

Then, in the summer of 1922, came mock court proceedings.¹⁴³ The decision to try the SRs was taken on December 28, 1921, on the recommendation of Dzerzhinskii,¹⁴⁴ but implementation was delayed for half a year to give the Cheka time to fabricate the evidence. Its centerpiece was a book by G. Semenov-Vasilev, an ex-SR terrorist turned Cheka informer, published in Berlin in February 1922.¹⁴⁵ Like any successful deception it was a compound of truths and lies. Semenov, who had been involved in Fannie Kaplan’s attempt on Lenin’s life in August 1918, provided some interesting details on this event, but falsely implicated the SR leadership. Later he would stand trial as both defendant and star witness for the prosecution.

On February 20, 1922, one week before the SR trial was announced, Lenin sent an angry letter to the Commissar of Justice complaining that he was too lax in dealing with political and economic crimes. The repression of Mensheviks and SRs was to be intensified by means of Revolutionary Tribunals and People’s Courts.^* He wanted “exemplary, noisy, educational trials”:

the staging [postanovka] of a series of model trials (in rapidity and vigor of repression, in the elucidation to the masses, through the court and the press, of their meaning) in Moscow, Petrograd, Kharkov, and a few other important centers; pressure on the people’s judges and members of Revolutionary Tribunals through the party in the sense of improving the activity of the courts and intensifying repression—all this must be done systematically, persistently, with mandatory accounting.¹⁴⁶

Trotsky supported Lenin’s proposal and in a letter to the Politburo called for a trial that would be “a polished political production (proizvedenie).”¹⁴⁷ As with the clergy, what followed resembled more agit-prop theater than a tribunal: the actors were handpicked, their roles assigned, the evidence made up, a suitable atmosphere of violence created to justify conviction, the sentences predetermined by party organs, and the “masses” involved as in street theater. The most elementary procedural formalities were set aside, the defendants being accused of crimes that were not crimes when allegedly committed, since the code under which they were tried had been issued only one week before the trial, when they were in prison.

The announcement of February 28 that the leaders of what was called “Right SRs” would be tried by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal for counterrevolutionary activities, including terroristic and military actions against the Soviet government,¹⁴⁸ aroused excitement in Western socialist circles, where the Socialists-Revolutionaries had many friends. As will be explained below (this page), it so happened that at this time Moscow was interested in pursuing a “united front” with the European socialists. To propitiate them, Radek pledged at the joint conference of the socialist and communist internationals in Berlin in April 1922 that the accused would be free to choose their counsel and that capital punishment would not be applied. Lenin was furious at these concessions (“We paid too much” was the title of an article he wrote on the subject) and reneged on the promise that there would be no death penalty. He did, however, allow the SR defendants foreign counsel, making certain that they would be unable to carry out their duties.

The cast of characters was carefully chosen. The accused, of whom there were thirty-four, were divided in two groups. Twenty-four were the true villains: they included twelve members of the SR Central Committee, headed by Abraham Gots and Dmitrii Donskoi. The second category consisted of minor figures: they were “friendly defendants,” whose role it was to provide evidence for the prosecution, confess, and repent their “crimes,” for which they were to be rewarded with acquittals. The purpose of the spectacle was to persuade the rank-and-file SRs to break all links with their party.¹⁴⁹

The part of chief prosecutor was assigned to Nicholas Krylenko, who is on record as favoring executing the innocent as a means of impressing the populace.¹⁵⁰ The SR trial would give him experience for Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s, in which he would serve as prosecutor. He was assisted by Lunacharskii and the historian M. Pokrovskii. The presiding judge was Grigorii Piatakov, a member of the Communist Central Committee. The accused were defended by three teams of lawyers, one of which, composed of four socialists, came from abroad: its head, the Belgian Emile Vandervelde, was Chairman of the International Bureau of the Second International and a former Minister of Justice of Belgium. On the train journey to Moscow, the foreign lawyers were treated to hostile and at times menacing demonstrations from crowds assembled for the purpose. They were welcomed in Moscow by an organized mob that shouted, “Down with the traitors of the working class!” Dzerzhinskii instructed Cheka personnel to begin a regular “campaign” to discredit Vandervelde by publicizing his habit of manicuring his nails and wearing laced boots.¹⁵¹ Another team of defense counsel had been appointed by the spectacle’s producers: it included Bukharin and Michael Tomskii, both members of the Politburo. Their role was to plead for the “moral rehabilitation” of the friendly defendants.

During the preliminary investigation, which lasted over three months, Krylenko had rounded up many witnesses. Torture was not applied, but the witnesses were pressured in various ways to cooperate. The members of the SR Central Committee refused to comply. Their intention was to emulate political prisoners of the 1870s by using the trial as a forum from which to assail the government. Throughout the proceedings, they behaved with impressive dignity: the SRs always displayed greater courage than wisdom.

The trial opened on June 6, 1922, one month after the conclusion of the proceedings against the Moscow clergy, and four days before similar action was initiated against the Petrograd clergy. The indictment charged the accused in general with waging an armed struggle against the Soviet state as well as with acts of treason and terrorism, and, in particular, with organizing both Fannie Kaplan’s attempt on Lenin’s life in August 1918 and the Tambov rebellion. Admission to the trial, which took place in the ballroom of what had been the Moscow Club the Nobility, was by tickets, which were issued almost exclusively to reliable party activists. Throughout, the audience acted as it would at the performance of a political play, applauding the prosecution and jeering the defendants and their lawyers. The foreign counsel objected at the outset to several features of the proceedings: to the fact that all the judges belonged to the Communist Party, that many witnesses for the defense were barred from testifying, that admission to the court was denied to all but a few of the defendants’ friends. These and other objections the judges brushed aside on the grounds that a Soviet court was not obliged to observe “bourgeois” rules. On the eighth day of the trial, after Radek had withdrawn his promise that no death sentences would be passed, and after their other requests, including the right to have their own stenographer, had been rejected, the four foreign defenders announced they were quitting “the parody of justice.” One of them subsequently wrote of the trial, “People’s lives [were] dealt with as though they were merchandise.”¹⁵²

62. The reading of the charges at the SR trial, 1922.

After two weeks, the proceedings took an even uglier turn. On June 20, the authorities organized a massive demonstration in Moscow’s Red Square. The crowd, in the midst of which the presiding judge marched alongside the prosecutor, demanded death sentences for the defendants. Bukharin harangued the crowd. The accused were forced to appear on the balcony and expose themselves to the jeers and threats of the mob. Later, a hand-picked “delegation” was let into the courtroom and screamed “Death to the murderers!” Bukharin, who played a sordid role in this mock trial, which was not very different from the one that sixteen years later would condemn him to death on even more fabricated charges, praised the lynching rabble for articulating the “voice of the workers.” Cameras directed by Dziga Vertov, a luminary of Soviet cinema, filmed the incident.¹⁵³

Although they could obtain nothing resembling a fair hearing, the SRs did have the opportunity to subject the Communist regime to uninhibited criticism—the last time this would be possible at a Soviet political trial. In 1931, when it was the Mensheviks’ turn to stand in the dock, their testimony would be carefully rehearsed and the lines scripted by the prosecution.¹⁵⁴

The verdict, announced on August 7, came as no surprise, since Lenin had broadly hinted at what to expect. At the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922, having ridiculed their views, he had said, addressing the Mensheviks and SRs: “Permit us to put you for this against the wall.”¹⁵⁵ Walter Duranty reported to the New York Times on July 23 that the proceedings had demonstrated the “truth” of the charges, that the condemnation of the majority of the defendants was “certain,” and that “several death sentences will be carried out.”¹⁵⁶ The accused were sentenced under Articles 57 through 60 of the Criminal Code. Fourteen were condemned to death, but three who had collaborated with the prosecution received pardons.^* Defendants who had turned state’s evidence were also pardoned. Those in the first group admitted to nothing: they refused to stand up when the judges entered to announce the verdict, for which they were expelled (in the words of Duranty) “from their own funeral.”¹⁵⁷

Although Radek’s rash Berlin pledge was declared by the court to have no validity and although the SRs refused to petition for pardon, the judges announced a stay of execution. This surprising clemency was due to Lenin’s morbid dread of assassination. Trotsky writes in his memoirs that he warned Lenin against proceeding with the executions and suggested instead a compromise: “The death sentence by the tribunal was inevitable [!], but carrying it out meant just as inevitably a retaliatory wave of terrorism.… There was no alternative but to make the execution of the sentence dependent on whether or not the party continued the terrorist struggle. In other words, the leaders of the [SR] party must be held as hostages.”¹⁵⁸ Trotsky’s fertile mind thus came up with another legal innovation: first, to sentence a group of people to death for crimes that they had not committed and that, in any event, were not legally crimes when allegedly committed, and then, to keep their lives hostage to crimes others might commit in the future. Lenin, according to Trotsky, accepted his suggestion “instantly and with relief.”

The judges were instructed to announce that the eleven condemned to death would not be executed “if the Social[ist]-Revolutionary Party actually cease[d] all underground and conspiratorial acts of terrorism, espionage and insurrection against the Soviet Government.”¹⁵⁹ In January 1924 the death sentences were commuted to five-year prison terms. This the prisoners learned only after a year and a half spent in Lubianka, awaiting execution.

They were executed in any event. In the 1930s and 1940s, when no danger of terror against the Soviet leadership remained, the SRs were systematically killed off. Only two active Socialists-Revolutionaries, both women, are known to have survived Stalin.¹⁶⁰

Superficially, Russian cultural life under NEP continued to display the comparative diversity of the regime’s early years. But processes were at work that paved the way for the stultifying uniformity of the Stalinist era. Once the principle had been established that culture was to serve the Party and that its function was to help create a Communist society, and once the instruments to enforce this principle had been put in place through censorship and the state monopoly on publishing and performing, it was only a matter of time before culture was turned into a handmaiden of politics.

Unusually, the pressure for uniformity in this instance came from below. The Party’s leaders faced a difficult choice. They wanted culture to serve them; at the same time, they knew that unlike guns and tractors, art and literature of any quality could not be produced on order. They settled, therefore, on a compromise: silencing overt anti-Communists, but tolerating fellow-travelers. It was spelled out by Trotsky:

There are realms where the party leads directly and commandingly. There are others where it controls and cooperates. And, finally, there are yet others where it merely keeps itself informed. The realm of art is not one where the party is called upon to command … [but] the party must repudiate overtly poisonous, destructive tendencies in art, applying the political criterion.¹⁶¹

In practice this precept meant that the authorities would keep a close eye on art and literature but not interfere; in journalism, they would interfere; and in higher education, they would direct.¹⁶² And, indeed, under NEP, when the regime permitted private initiative in manufacture and trade, it could hardly insist on orthodox rigidity in respect to culture.¹⁶³ The view was shared by Lenin and Bukharin.

Such tolerance for non-Communist culture came under vigorous assault from self-styled “proletarian” writers.¹⁶⁴ These hacks, whose very names are forgotten, had no audience for their books: according to the director of the State Publishing House, his enterprise received “no requests for a single proletarian author.”¹⁶⁵ Their survival depended entirely on state patronage, preferably of an exclusive sort. To obtain it, they wrapped themselves in the banners of Communism, attacking politically neutral literature as counterrevolutionary and demanding that all culture serve party needs.¹⁶⁶ They enjoyed the support of the semi-educated party cadres, most of them of nonintelligentsia origin, who took charge of “the cultural front.” These apparatchiks had no patience with arguments that creative intellectuals, and they alone, should be exempt from party controls.¹⁶⁷ Their cause was helped by the fact that in early 1924 Trotsky, the leading champion of tolerance for fellow-travelers, was falling into disgrace.

The controversy reached a point where the Party felt it had to take a stand. This it did, in a somewhat ambivalent fashion, in May 1924, at the Thirteenth Congress, in a resolution stating that while no one literary school or “tendency” had the right to speak in the Party’s name, something had to be done to “regulate the question of literary criticism.”¹⁶⁸

It was the first time that non-political literature had been the subject of a resolution at a party congress. It was the last time that the party formally reserved its neutrality between different literary “trends, schools and groups”; and this neutrality could in the long run scarcely prove compatible with the necessity of scrutinizing literary productions in a party light.¹⁶⁹

Even science was no longer exempt from ideological scrutiny and vilification: by 1922 Communist publications were beginning to assail Einstein and other “idealistic” scientists.¹⁷⁰

Russia had experienced periodic crop failures throughout her history: in the years immediately preceding the Revolution, they occurred in 1891–92, 1906, and 1911. Long experience taught the muzhik to cope with natural disasters by setting aside sufficient reserves to carry him through a year or even two of bad crops. Normally, crop failures spelled hunger rather than starvation, although intermittently famine did stalk the land. It took three years of remorseless, methodical ruination of agriculture by the Bolsheviks to acquaint Russia with famine in which people died in the millions.^*

The famine was precipitated by a drought that first made itself felt in 1920. Disaster was temporarily averted by the reconquest of the Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus, which, having escaped Soviet rule, had managed to accumulate large grain reserves: in 1921 half the food obtained by the government under the new tax in kind would come from the Ukraine.¹⁷¹ However, because in 1920 the food-gathering apparatus in the Ukraine and Siberia had not yet been put fully in place, a heavy burden of requisitioning still fell on the depleted central provinces.¹⁷²

The climatic factors that caused the 1921 famine resembled those of 1891–92. The fall of 1920 was unseasonably dry. In the winter, little snow fell, and that which did, quickly melted. In the spring of 1921, the Volga ran low and did not spill over its banks. Then came scorching heat and drought, which burned the grass and cracked the soil. Vast stretches of the black-earth belt turned into dust bowls.¹⁷³ Locusts consumed much of the vegetation that survived.

But the natural disaster only contributed to the tragedy; it did not cause it. The famine of 1921 confirmed the peasant proverb “Neurozhai, ot Boga; golod, ot liudiei”—“Bad crops are from God, hunger comes from men.” The drought accelerated a catastrophe that was bound to happen sooner or later as a result of Bolshevik agrarian policies: a knowledgeable student of the subject states that the drought would have been of minor consequence were it not for political and economic factors.¹⁷⁴ The mindless confiscations of “surplus” that as often as not was not surplus but grain essential for the peasants’ survival, ensured catastrophe. By 1920, in the words of the Commissar of Supply, the peasant harvested just enough to feed himself and provide for seed. There was thus no margin of safety left: no reserves of the kind that in the past had cushioned the peasantry against adverse weather.

The 1921 drought struck approximately half of the food-producing areas; 20 percent of these areas experienced total crop failure. The population afflicted by the famine was recorded in March 1922 in Russia at 26 million and in the Ukraine at 7.5 million, for a total of 33.5 million, more than 7 million of them children. An American expert estimated that some 10 to 15 million of the victims faced either death or permanent physical injury.^* Worst affected was the Volga Black Earth region, in normal times a prime supplier of cereals: the provinces of Kazan, Ufa, Orenburg, and Samara, where the 1921 harvest yielded less than 5.5 puds per person—half the quantity required for the peasants’ sustenance, with nothing left for seed.^† Also affected were the Don basin and the southern Ukraine. In most of the rest of the country, the harvest yielded between 5.5 and 11 puds, which was barely enough to feed the local population.¹⁷⁵ Production in the twenty food-growing provinces of European and Asian Russia afflicted by the famine, which before the Revolution had yielded 20 million tons of cereals annually, in 1920 declined to 8.45 million tons, and in 1921 to 2.9 million, or by 85 percent.¹⁷⁶ In 1892, by contrast, when climatic conditions caused the worst crop failure in late tsarist Russia, the harvest was only 13 percent below normal.¹⁷⁷ The difference has to be attributed in large measure to Bolshevik agrarian policies.

The extent to which this catastrophe was due to human actions can be further demonstrated with figures indicating that the areas that had traditionally produced the biggest crops now yielded the smallest. The German Autonomous Republic on the Volga, for instance, usually an oasis of prosperity, was among the worst to suffer, its population declining by over 20 percent: here, in 1920–21, 41.9 percent of the gross grain harvest had been requisitioned.¹⁷⁸

In the spring of 1921, the peasants in the provinces struck by the drought had to resort to eating grass, tree bark, and rodents. As the hunger persisted, with no relief from the government in sight, enterprising Tatars marketed in the stricken areas a substance advertised as “edible clay,” which fetched as much as 500 rubles a pound. With the onset of summer, the peasants, driven mad by hunger, began to abandon their villages and head on foot or by cart for the nearest railroad stations in the hope of making their way to regions where, rumor had it, there was food: first to the Ukraine and, later, Turkestan. Soon millions of wretched human beings congested the railway depots: they were refused transportation because until July 1921 Moscow persisted in denying that any catastrophe had occurred. Here they waited “for trains which never came, or for death, which was inevitable.” This is what the Simbirsk railroad station looked liked in the summer of 1921:

Imagine a compact mass of sordid rags, among which are visible here and there, lean, naked arms, faces already stamped with the seal of death. Above all, one is conscious of a poisonous odor. It is impossible to pass. The waiting room, the corridor, every foot thickly covered with people, sprawling, seated, crouched in every imaginable position. If one looks closely, he sees that these filthy rags are swarming with vermin. The typhus-stricken grovel and shiver in their fever, their babies with them. Nursing babies have lost their voices and are no longer able to cry. Every day more than twenty dead are carried away but it is not possible to remove all of them. Sometimes corpses remain among the living for more than five days.…

A woman tries to soothe a small child lying in her lap. The child cries, asking for food. For some time, the mother goes on rocking it in her arms. Then suddenly she strikes it. The child screams anew. This seems to drive the woman mad. She begins to beat it furiously, her face distorted with rage. She rains blows with her fist on its little face, on its head, and at last she throws it upon the floor and kicks it with her foot. A murmur of horror arises around her. The child is lifted from the ground, curses are hurled at the mother, who, after her furious excitement has subsided, has again become herself, utterly indifferent to everything around her. Her eyes are fixed, but are apparently sightless.¹⁷⁹

“It is useless to try in a few lines to depict the whole horror of the disaster,” wrote an eyewitness from Samara, “nor will one find words able to express it. One has to see with one’s own eyes these skeleton-people, these skeleton-children, with their sallow, often swollen faces, with eyes in which burns the fire of hunger, to hear that timid, dying whisper: ‘Kusochek’ [a teeny piece] ”¹⁸⁰

There were numerous reports of the hunger-maddened killing and eating neighbors and even their own. Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian philanthropist, who visited Russia at the time, spoke of cannibalism as a phenomenon spreading “to a terrific degree.”¹⁸¹ A professor of Kharkov University who undertook to investigate these reports authenticated 26 cases of cannibalism: in “seven cases … murder was committed and the bodies sold for pecuniary gain … disguised in sausage form and placed on the open market.”¹⁸² Necrophagia—the consumption of corpses—also occurred.

Visitors to the stricken areas passed village after village with no sign of life, the inhabitants either having fled or lying in their cottages, too weak to move. In the cities, corpses littered the streets: they were picked up, loaded on carts—often after having been stripped naked—and dumped into unmarked mass graves.

The famine was accompanied by epidemics, which ravaged bodies weakened by hunger. The main killer was typhus, but hundreds of thousands also fell victim to cholera, typhoid fever, and smallpox.

It is instructive to compare the attitude of the Bolshevik regime to the famine with that of the tsarist government when confronted with a similar tragedy thirty years earlier, when some 12.5 million peasants were afflicted with hunger.¹⁸³ Contrary to propaganda spread at the time by radicals and liberals and repeated since then that it did nothing and that such relief as was provided came from private organizations, records show that the tsarist authorities moved quickly and effectively. They arranged food supplies to be delivered to 11 million victims and supplied generous emergency aid to local governments. As a result, the fatalities attributable to the 1891–92 famine are estimated at 375,000 to 400,000—an appalling number, but only one-thirteenth of those suffered by the starving under the Bolsheviks.¹⁸⁴

The Kremlin watched the spread of the famine as if struck with paralysis. Although reports from the countryside had alerted it to impending disaster, and, after it had occurred, to its dimensions, it did nothing because it could not acknowledge a national calamity that it could not attribute to “kulaks,” “White Guardists,” or “imperialists.”^* Secondly, it had no obvious remedies: “The Soviet Government was confronted with a problem which, for the first time, it was unable to solve with resort to force.”¹⁸⁵ In May and June 1921, Lenin ordered purchases of food abroad, but that was to feed the cities, his principal concern, not the peasantry.¹⁸⁶ The famine troubled him only insofar as it threatened potentially adverse political consequences: in June 1921, for instance, he spoke of a “dangerous situation” developing as a result of the hunger.¹⁸⁷ And he used it, as we have seen, as a pretext for launching an offensive against the Orthodox Church. In July 1921 Dzerzhinskii warned the Cheka of the threat of counterrevolution in areas affected by the famine and ordered harsh preventive measures.¹⁸⁸ The press was forbidden to make any allusion to the crop failure, and even in early July continued to report that all was well in the countryside. The Bolshevik leaders studiously avoided any overt association with the famine: Kalinin, the Kremlin’s ambassador to the peasantry, was the only one to visit the affected areas.¹⁸⁹ On August 2, when the famine was at its height, Lenin issued an appeal to the “international proletariat” in which he noted in an offhand manner, “In Russia in a few provinces there is hunger which, apparently, is only slightly less than the misfortune of 1891.”¹⁹⁰ In none of Lenin’s writings or speeches of that period can one find one word of sympathy for the millions of his subjects who were perishing from hunger. Indeed, it has been suggested that the famine was to him not unwelcome politically because it so weakened the peasantry that it “wiped out any likelihood of peasant resistance” and “pacified” the village even more rapidly than did the repeal of food requisitioning.¹⁹¹

63. One victim of the 1921 famine.

64. Starving mother and child.

65. Corpses of starved children.

In July, the Kremlin finally had to acknowledge what everyone knew, that the country was in the grip of a catastrophic famine. But it did not do so directly, preferring to make the painful admission and plea for help through private channels. On July 13, certainly with Lenin’s approval, Gorky issued an appeal “To All Honorable People” soliciting food and medicines. On July 21, the government approved the request of a group of civic leaders to allow the formation of a voluntary, private organization to help the starving. Called the All-Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry (Vserossiiskii Obshchestvennyi Komitet Pomoshchi Golodaiushchim, or Pomgol), it had on its staff 73 members of diverse political affiliations, among them Maxim Gorky, Countess Panina, Vera Figner, S. N. Prokopovich and his wife, Ekaterina Kuskova, along with well-known agronomists, physicians, and writers.¹⁹² The committee replicated the Special Committee for Famine Relief formed in 1891 to assist the tsarist government in a similar predicament, with the difference that on Lenin’s orders it had a “cell” of twelve prominent Communists: Kamenev served as chairman and Aleksei Rykov as his deputy. This was to make certain that the first independent organization licensed in Communist Russia did not deviate from the narrow functions assigned to it.

On July 23, Herbert Hoover, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, responded to Gorky’s appeal. Hoover had founded and operated with great success the American Relief Administration (ARA) to supply food and medicines to postwar Europe. Although intensely anti-Communist, he set politics aside and threw himself energetically into famine relief. He posed two conditions: that the American organizations responsible for administering the relief be allowed to operate independently, without interference from Communist personnel, and that American citizens in Soviet prisons be released. The demand that American relief personnel enjoy extraterritoriality infuriated Lenin: “The baseness of America, Hoover, and the League of Nations is rare,” he wrote the Politburo. “One must punish Hoover, one must publicly slap his face, so that the whole world sees; the same goes for the League of Nations.” Hoover he described privately as “impudent and a liar,” and the Americans as “mercenaries.”¹⁹³ But he had no choice in the matter and yielded to Hoover’s terms.

On July 25, Gorky, on behalf of the Soviet government, accepted Hoover’s offer.¹⁹⁴ On August 21, ARA signed with Maxim Litvinov in Riga an accord for American assistance. Hoover started with an 18.6-million-dollar contribution from the U.S. Congress, to which were added private contributions and 11.3 million dollars realized by the Soviet government from the sale of gold. By the time it terminated operations, the ARA had spent 61.6 million dollars (or 123.2 million gold rubles) on Russian relief.^*

The instant the accord was reached, Lenin made short shrift of Pomgol: he had used the organization as a go-between to avoid the embarrassment of having to beg help from the “imperialist” enemy. It had served this purpose and now had to bear the brunt of Lenin’s wrath. On August 26, Lenin asked Stalin to demand from the Politburo the immediate dissolution of Pomgol and the imprisonment or exile of its leaders, on the ostensible grounds of “unwillingness to work.” He further ordered that the press be directed in a “hundred ways” to “ridicule” and “badger” its members at least once a week for two months.¹⁹⁵ At the Politburo meeting at which Lenin’s request was discussed, Trotsky, who supported it, pointed out that during negotiations with ARA, the Americans had never alluded to the committee.¹⁹⁶ The following day, as the advance ARA party arrived in Russia and the members of Pomgol assembled to meet with Kamenev, all but two were arrested by the Cheka and incarcerated in Lubianka. (Gorky did not attend, apparently forewarned.)¹⁹⁷ They were subsequently accused in the press of all manner of counterrevolutionary crimes. It was widely expected that they would be executed, but Nansen’s intercession saved them; after being released from prison, some were exiled to the interior and others abroad.¹⁹⁸ Pomgol lingered on for another year as a government committee before it was dissolved.¹⁹⁹

In the summer of 1922, when its activities were at their height, ARA fed up to 11 million persons a day. Other foreign organizations supplied an additional three million. Overall, food imports by the Soviet government and foreign relief agencies during this period amounted to 115–120 million puds, or two million tons.²⁰⁰ In consequence of these activities, by early summer 1922, “reports of actual death from starvation practically ceased.”²⁰¹ ARA also provided medicines worth 8 million dollars, which helped contain epidemics. Furthermore, it provided seed grain in 1922 and 1923, which made possible two bumper harvests in succession. Under the arrangement worked out by Hoover, an ARA staff of several hundred Americans supervised the distribution of food and medicines, assisted by thousands of Soviet citizens. Although Communist authorities had agreed not to interfere, ARA’s activities were closely watched by the Cheka and its successor, the GPU. Lenin made certain that ARA was thoroughly infiltrated with spies, ordering Molotov to organize a commission to keep an eye on foreigners employed by it and to mobilize “the maximum number of Communists familiar with the English language to introduce them into Hoover’s commissions and use for other forms of surveillance and information.”²⁰² Later, after it had been disbanded, Soviet authorities sought to impute to ARA the most sinister motives, including espionage and unloading on Russia goods no one else wanted.²⁰³ Later still, after World War II, apparently to justify Stalin’s rejection of Marshall Plan aid, some of the surviving Soviet employees of ARA were made to sign statements incriminating themselves in espionage.

66. American Relief workers feeding Russian children during the 1921–22 famine.

Once the American and other foreign organizations assumed the principal responsibility for feeding starving Soviet citizens, Moscow diverted its resources to other purposes. On August 25—three days after signing an agreement with Hoover—Litvinov informed Moscow that he had sold to an English party jewels worth 20 million gold rubles and that the buyer was prepared to purchase additional jewels for the value of 20 million pounds (100 million dollars)²⁰⁴—a sum exceeding the combined U.S. and European donations to starving Russians. In early October 1921, Trotsky instructed the Soviet agent in Germany, Victor Kopp, in strictest secrecy, to place orders for rifles and machine guns worth 10 million gold rubles (5 million dollars).²⁰⁵ These facts were not known at the time. What became known and caused great consternation in American relief circles was evidence that at the very time the Soviet government was relying on Western charity to feed its people, it was offering foodstuffs for sale abroad.²⁰⁶ In the fall of 1922 Moscow made it known that it had millions of tons of cereals available for export—this at a time when its own estimates indicated that during the coming winter 8 million Soviet citizens would still require food assistance, only half of which could be met with native resources.²⁰⁷ When questioned, the Soviet authorities explained that they needed money to purchase industrial and agricultural equipment. The action outraged American relief officials: the Soviet government was “endeavoring to sell part of its food supply in foreign markets, while asking the world to contribute food to replace what had been exported.”²⁰⁸ Hoover protested against “the inhumanity of a government policy of exporting food from starving people in order that through such exports it may secure machinery and raw materials for the economic improvement of the survivors.”²⁰⁹ But with the worst of the famine over, Moscow could defy foreign opinion. Reports of its grain exports made it impossible to raise additional funds for Russian relief and in June 1923 ARA suspended operations in Soviet Russia.

The casualties of the 1921 famine are difficult to ascertain because no one kept track of the victims. The greatest losses occurred in the provinces of Samara and Cheliabinsk and in the German and Bashkir Autonomous Republics, the combined population of which declined by 20.6 percent.²¹⁰ In terms of social status, the worst sufferers were the rural poor, especially those lacking a cow, possession of which saved many a family from death.²¹¹ In terms of age, the heaviest losers were the children, many of them abandoned by their starving parents. In 1922, over 1.5 million peasant children were on the loose, begging and stealing; mortality in the asylums for the besprizornye attained 50 percent.²¹² The Soviet Central Statistical Bureau estimated the population deficit between 1920 and 1922 at 5.1 million.²¹³ The 1921 famine in Russia was the greatest human disaster in European history until then, other than those caused by war, since the Black Death.

The losses would have been much greater still had it not been for Hoover’s philanthropic activities, estimated to have rescued at least 9 million lives.²¹⁴ In a letter to Hoover, Gorky hailed his actions as without precedent in human history: “Your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of the millions of Russians … whom you have saved from death.”^215* Many statesmen occupy a prominent place in history for having sent millions to their death; Herbert Hoover, maligned for his performance as president, and soon forgotten in Russia, has the rare distinction of having saved millions.

The New Economic Policy affected also Soviet foreign policy, which now, more than ever, operated on two distinct and conflicting levels: the conventional diplomatic-commercial, and the unconventional subversive. Moscow was anxious to enter into regular relations with foreign powers in order to facilitate trade and investments, which formed an integral part of the NEP. Armed action was given up: apart from a hastily improvised and unsuccessful putsch in Germany in 1923, no more attempts were made to stage uprisings in Europe. Instead, the Comintern followed the strategy of gradual penetration of Western institutions.

We have noted that inside Soviet Russia, the corollary of economic liberalization was intensified political repression. The same held true of the international Communist movement. The 21 Points forced on them in 1920 subordinated foreign Communist organizations to Moscow, but preserved the illusion that the Comintern was a federation of equals. This illusion was dispelled in December 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. Its resolutions made it explicit that, first, foreign Communist parties had no right to hold independent opinions, and second, whenever the two happened to come in conflict, the interests of the Soviet state took precedence over those of foreign Communist movements.

Paradoxically, the abandonment of the idea of imminent revolution in Europe strengthened Moscow’s position vis-à-vis its affiliates abroad:

Precisely because the world revolution was no longer a current possibility, [foreign] Communists were compelled to pin all their hopes on Soviet Russia. Russia alone had emerged victorious from the class struggles of the revolutionary period, and she had successfully defended herself against innumerable foes. She was a living symbol of the coming world revolution and a powerful bulwark against world capitalism. The more difficult it seemed to Communists abroad to capture power in their own countries, the more firmly they were forced to rally to Soviet Russia. In this depressing world situation nothing was more natural than that Soviet Russia should become a fatherland of Communists throughout the world.²¹⁶

To those for whom, as for the author of these remarks, the stabilization of the postwar world was “depressing” news, Moscow indeed seemed the only hope. And Moscow drew from this reality the appropriate conclusions.

In preparation for its Fourth Congress, Moscow decided to eliminate all remaining traces of federalism from the Comintern’s organizational structure. Bukharin, who was placed in charge, interpreted Point 14 of the 21 Points, requiring foreign Communists to help Soviet Russia repel the “counterrevolution,” to mean that they were under the obligation at all times to support the foreign policy of the Soviet government.²¹⁷ In effect, a Communist was to have only one fatherland, Soviet Russia, and one government, the Soviet government. He had to approve of everything this government did in the conduct of foreign relations, even alliances between the Soviet Union and a “bourgeois country”—including his own—if this served the needs of Soviet Russia as determined by the Russian Politburo. This provision was specifically designed to silence criticism of the Soviet-German treaty concluded at Rapallo in April 1922.

To prevent foreign parties from questioning or interfering with the resolutions of the Comintern’s highest nominal authority, its congresses, the Fourth Congress laid it down that henceforth the constituent Communist parties would convene their meetings only after the Comintern Congresses had met. This procedure was to ensure that their delegates would have no authority to move independent resolutions. Delegates to Comintern Congresses were specifically forbidden to bring binding mandates from their parties: such mandates would be null and void because they “contradicted the spirit of an international, centralized, proletarian party.” It had been a practice of the Comintern since 1919 to send observers to the meetings of the national Communist parties: this was now formalized in a provision authorizing the Executive “in exceptional circumstances” to send agents to the foreign parties, endowed with “the most comprehensive powers” to oversee their implementation of the 21 Points and the decisions of the Congress, that is, to overrule the national parties and to expel undisciplined members. The national parties were even deprived of the right to send representatives of their choice to the Comintern Executive: these were to be selected by the Congress. No resignations of Comintern officials would be countenanced unless authorized by the International’s Executive, on the grounds that “every executive post in a communist party belongs not to the person holding it, but to the Communist International as a whole.” Of the 25 members of the new Executive, 15 were required to reside in Moscow.²¹⁸

All of this had been implicit in the practices of the Bolshevik Party since 1903 and in the statutes of the Comintern adopted at the Second Congress. New was the bluntness of the 1922 resolutions, which dropped all pretense of even formal equality between the Russians and their foreign adherents. Hugo Eberlein, the German delegate whom Moscow used as a mouthpiece, brushed aside complaints of Russian high-handedness:

For us it is self-evident that in the future, too, in the management of the Communist International, in its Presidium and Executive, the Russian comrades must be accorded a stronger, and the strongest, influence, since it is precisely they who in the field of the international class struggle have accumulated the greatest experience. They alone have really carried out a revolution, as a consequence of which background they far surpass in experience all the delegates from the other sections.²¹⁹

The Fourth Congress adopted the new rules unanimously, with one dissent from the delegate from Brazil.

The Communist International had now been transformed into a Bolshevik world party, rigidly centralized and with military-type discipline; ready, as the [Fourth] Congress had demonstrated, to accept Russian orders without question. And the Communist parties all over the world had now, in fact, become sections of the Russian Communist party, ruled by the Politbureau which also ruled the Russian state. They had thus been reduced to agencies of the Russian government.²²⁰

This transformation, often attributed to Stalin, took place while Lenin was in charge of setting Comintern policy.

The GPU entered now into close working relations with the Comintern Executive, to help oversee its foreign subsidiaries. It opened branches in nine foreign capitals, mostly in Soviet diplomatic missions; each had responsibility for several neighboring countries. Thus, the Paris bureau of the GPU controlled covert operations in seven West European countries besides France, including Great Britain and Italy. Among the functions of the foreign branches of the GPU was supervising Comintern agents.²²¹ The activities of the Comintern diversified. In 1922–23 it financed 298 publications in 24 languages.²²² It also operated a school to train students from colonial countries in agitational techniques.

European socialists, vexed but not disheartened by these developments, did not give up hope of cooperation with the Comintern. They chose to ignore that the Comintern, treating them as “social fascists,” methodically split their ranks, weakening thereby the international socialist movement. They were ever ready for conciliation. For a while, the hope seemed to bear fruit. After the fiasco of the 1921 German revolt, Lenin formulated the tactic of a “united front” with the socialists: because the Communists were too weak in the West to act on their own, he decided, up to a point, on collaboration with the trade unionists and socialists. He presented this idea to the Executive Committee of the Comintern, where it ran into stiff opposition from Zinoviev, Bukharin, and others. With Trotsky’s help Lenin managed to overcome the resistance and to present his proposal to the Third Congress of the Comintern (June–July 1921). The idea of cooperation with the “social imperialists” and “social traitors” produced great indignation, but in the end, the Congress approved it.²²³ At the same time, Lenin allowed no collaboration with the Russian socialists (Mensheviks and SRs), ostensibly because they were “enemies of Soviet authority,” but in reality because, unlike foreign socialists, they were serious contenders for power.²²⁴

The result of the new tactics was the Comintern’s participation in April 1922 at a meeting of the Second (Socialist) International in Berlin for the purpose of formulating a common program of struggle against the growing strength of “capitalism” and for the recognition of Soviet Russia.²²⁵ In May 1923, the European socialist parties gathered separately in Hamburg. The delegates represented 6.3 million members and 25.6 million voters—many times the strength of the parties affiliated with the Comintern.²²⁶ A new organization was formed, called the Labor and Socialist International (LSI). Structurally, it was federated, the member parties being at liberty to decide on internal matters. Menshevik and SR delegates painted for the assembled a devastating picture of conditions in Soviet Russia and the fate of socialists there. They were politely listened to but ignored. An English delegate, to stormy applause, reminded the Congress that “it is the capitalist governments of the West who are chiefly to blame for the victims in Russian prisons, for those who have been executed and for those exiled!”²²⁷ The resolution on Soviet Russia denounced all foreign interference in her internal affairs. While condemning the Soviet government’s “terrorist methods,” it asserted:

Any intervention [by capitalist governments] would be aimed not at remedying the errors of the current phase of the Russian Revolution, but at destroying the Revolution itself. Far from establishing genuine democracy, it would merely set up a government of bloody counter-revolutionaries, to act as a vehicle for the exploitation of the Russian people by Western Imperialism. [The] Congress, therefore, calls on all socialist parties … not only to oppose intervention, but to campaign for full diplomatic recognition of the Russian government and rapid restoration of normal diplomatic and trade relations with Russia.²²⁸

In essence, the European socialist parties and trade unions, while verbally condemning Communist rule in Russia, which they were powerless to do anything about, aligned themselves with Moscow by endorsing policies that they were in a position to influence. This they did by defining Bolshevism as a “phase” in the Russian Revolution, with the implication that its objectionable features were transient; claiming that the only alternative to it was government by “bloody counter-revolutionaries”; and demanding diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia and the restoration of normal trade relations with it.

The “united front” collapsed almost at once from its inner contradictions—for how was it possible to unite with the socialists whom one was committed to dividing?—and from strong opposition within the ranks of both the Second and Third Internationals. Soon the Comintern resumed treating socialists as “social-fascists.”

Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s (and, for that matter, in the 1930s) focused on Germany, which was seen as both the arena of the next revolution and a potential ally against Britain and France, Soviet Russia’s principal adversaries. Moscow simultaneously pursued both objectives—subversion and collaboration—even though they were mutually exclusive, thereby clearing the path for Hitler’s march to power.

The most consequential event in post-Versailles international relations, second only to America’s refusal to join the League of Nations, was the Rapallo Treaty, which Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic sprang on the unsuspecting world on April 16, 1922, in the course of an international conference at Genoa.

The Genoa Conference was convened for two purposes: to settle the political and economic problems of Eastern and Central Europe left unresolved at Versailles, and to reintegrate Russia and Germany into the international community—the invitations issued to the two countries were the first they had received since the end of World War I. A subsidiary interest of Allied statesmen was forestalling a potential Russo-German rapprochement, of which they had worrisome intimations. As it turned out, the Genoa Conference achieved none of its objectives: its only accomplishment was the very Soviet-German rapprochement it was meant to prevent.

Germany had weighty reasons to come to terms with Soviet Russia. One was the desire for commerce. Germany had traditionally been Russia’s leading trade partner. The two economies were well matched in that Russia had an abundance of raw materials and the Germans the high technology and the managerial skills Russia needed. German business circles felt that in the postwar world, certain to be dominated by the “Anglo-Saxon” powers, Germany’s only hope of maintaining a viable economy lay in close cooperation with Moscow. The introduction of NEP opened promising perspectives of such cooperation. In 1921–22 German businessmen laid ambitious plans for the development of commercial relations with Soviet Russia, in which that country was treated as something of a potential colony.²²⁹ They were enthusiastic about the prospect of exploiting the vast forests of northern Russia and Siberia, and the Siberian iron and coal mines, which would make up for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine.²³⁰ Grandiose projects were discussed for transforming Petrograd with German technical and financial assistance into a major center of shipping and industry. Trade negotiations between the two countries got underway in early 1921, following Lenin’s invitation to foreign firms to invest in Russia.²³¹ In May, German industrial executives presented Krasin with a proposal calling for large-scale investments to help rebuild the Soviet economy in exchange for control over some of its key sectors.²³²

But commercial interests took second place to geopolitical considerations, namely the conviction that only with the help of Soviet Russia could Germany shake off the shackles imposed on her at Versailles. A large part, perhaps the majority, of Germans considered the terms of the peace treaty so humiliating and so onerous that they were prepared to go to any lengths to be rid of them. Germany’s unwillingness (or, as she claimed, inability) to fulfill her obligations under the treaty provoked French retaliations, which undermined the position of pro-Western German politicians still further. Under these circumstances, nationalist circles in Germany looked for an ally, and who better fitted this role than Communist Russia, another great nation condemned by the Allies to pariah status?

The Genoa Conference was prompted by a statement of the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, George Chicherin, on October 28, 1921, that the Russian government was prepared, under certain conditions, “to recognize the obligations towards other States and their citizens which arise from State loans concluded by the Czarist Government before 1914.” To this end, he proposed “an international conference … to consider the claims of the Powers against Russia and of Russia against the Powers, and to draw up a definite treaty of peace between them.”²³³ Lloyd George found this declaration an irresistible opportunity finally to settle the issues arising from the Russian Revolution. On January 6, 1922, the Supreme Allied Council resolved to hold an international conference to consider the economic reconstruction of central and eastern Europe, including the restoration of property rights violated by “confiscation or withholding.”

We have noted before (Chapter 4) the role German generals led by Hans von Seeckt had played in opening in early 1919 backdoor channels to Communist Russia. The decisive steps leading to Soviet-German military collaboration were taken in the spring of 1921, following the introduction of the New Economic Policy and the signing of the Treaty of Riga terminating the war with Poland. Surprised and worried by the dismal showing of the Red Army against the Poles, Lenin requested Germany’s help with the army’s modernization. In this realm, the interests of the two countries coincided, for Germany was no less eager to enter into military collaboration. By the terms of the Versailles Treaty, she was forbidden to manufacture weapons essential to modern warfare. Soviet Russia, for her part, also wanted these weapons. On the basis of this common interest, a deal was eventually struck by virtue of which Soviet Russia provided the German army with a sanctuary in which to build and test advanced weapons in exchange for some of this equipment and the training of the Red Army in their use. This collaboration continued until September 1933, nine months after Hitler came to power. It greatly benefited both armies. When the arrangement was finally terminated, Tukhachevskii, then Deputy Commissar for War, told the German chargé d’affaires in Moscow that “in spite of the regrettable developments” in Germany, “it would never be forgotten that the Reichswehr had decisively aided the Red Army in its organization.”^234*

Lenin formally requested the German army to help reorganize the Red Army in mid-March 1921.²³⁵ In anticipation of such a development, Seeckt had some time earlier organized within the Reichswehr Ministry “Sondergruppe R,” a clandestine group staffed with officers who had experience dealing with Russians. After Lenin made his request, the negotiations proceeded rapidly. On April 7, Kopp reported to Trotsky from Berlin that the German “Group” had proposed to engage three German arms manufacturers—Blöhm and Voss, Albatrosswerke, and Krupp—to furnish technical personnel and manufacturing facilities for the production, respectively, of submarines, airplanes, and artillery guns and shells. The Germans offered Moscow both credits and technical assistance in building these industries, which were to work concurrently for the Red Army and the Reichswehr. Lenin approved of Kopp’s report.²³⁶ Before long, representatives of “Sondergruppe R” arrived in Moscow to open a branch office. The Germans insisted on strict secrecy. The collaboration was so successfully concealed that for a year and a half Germany’s socialist President, Friedrich Ebert, was in the dark: he first learned of it from Seeckt in November 1922, at which time he gave his belated consent.²³⁷

The decisive turn toward Soviet-German political collaboration occurred in May 1921, after the Allies had rejected a German request for revisions in reparation payments. Gleefully, the most conservative and nationalistic elements in Germany now sought to punish the Allies by making common cause with the Russian Communists.

Soviet interest in such a rapprochement also had obvious motives: in addition to the political and military, they were economic. Lenin believed that the reconstruction of the Soviet economy required massive engagement of Western capital and know-how, and these he could obtain most readily from Germany. The Allies wanted to trade with Soviet Russia but they were unwilling to grant her credits until the debt issue had been satisfactorily resolved. This was not a major obstacle in Russo-German relations, since German losses from Soviet defaults and nationalizations were much lighter and, in any event, substantially made good by the terms of the 1918 treaties between the two countries. Another obstacle to Allied-Soviet trade was Allied insistence that Soviet ministries deal not with individual Western firms but with consortia. This did not suit Moscow at all, for it preferred to pit foreign firms against each other. In contrast to the Allies, the Germans had no objections to letting the Russians deal with their enterprises on a one-on-one basis: Rathenau actually promised Radek that his country would not join any trade consortia without Moscow’s approval.²³⁸

On September 21 and 24, Krasin met with German officers from the General Staff, one of them Seeckt’s deputy, to work out the details of Russo-German military cooperation.²³⁹ As he reported to Lenin, he proceeded on the assumption it was pointless to involve German bankers and industrialists who thought only of profits and were easily frightened by the Allies: it was best to deal with those Germans “who thought seriously about revenge.” The cooperation was to be kept strictly secret from the German government and remain confined to the military. Germany would provide the financing as well as the technical and managerial personnel to run the projected war industries in Soviet Russia, formal supervision of which would be vested in a Soviet “Trust.” The whole undertaking, according to Krasin, was to be disguised as an effort to modernize the Red Army, although its actual immediate purpose was to enable Germany to equip with up-to-date and forbidden weapons an army of hundreds of thousands.

Once he had made up his mind to strike a deal with Germany, Lenin used a ploy that Stalin would replicate in 1939 with even greater success: pretending to seek agreement with the Allies, he pressed the Germans into signing a separate accord. This tactic helped overcome the opposition of pro-Western elements in government and business in Germany which feared antagonizing France and England.

In late January 1922, Radek turned up in Berlin bearing startling news: Moscow was on the verge of concluding an accord with France calling for de jure recognition of Soviet Russia and commercial credits, in return for assurances that Moscow would help enforce the Versailles Treaty. If Russia were willing to do so, France, he claimed, might even cut loose of Poland.^* Radek urged Rathenau to forestall such a development by coming to terms with Russia. And this involved a great deal of money. Rathenau offered credits of 5 billion paper marks, protesting that the Russians were “blackmailing” him, but Radek dismissed the figure (50–60 million marks in gold) as too paltry to influence Soviet policy.^† Rathenau equivocated, worried about the Allied reaction and skeptical about Russia’s ability to pay for imports. The claim of an imminent accord with France had no substance, but it ultimately served Radek and his friends in the German Foreign Office to sway Rathenau: if Germany wanted to avoid a revival of the pre-1914 Franco-Russian alliance, she had to act, and act quickly. To speed up the construction of a modern armament industry in Russia, Radek confided to Seeckt that the Red Army was preparing in the spring to attack Poland: she desperately needed airplanes. The gullible Germans believed these fabrications and hastened in April 1922 to open a Junker air facility at Fili, near Moscow. They also initiated staff discussions with the Red Army on the imaginary invasion of Poland.²⁴⁰ Radek received support from Chicherin, who arrived in Berlin at the beginning of April en route to Genoa. He brought the draft of a proposed Soviet-German accord, which, after being revised with the help of experts from the German Foreign Ministry, would serve as the basic text of the Rapallo Treaty.²⁴¹

The Politburo had approved on February 28 Lenin’s agenda for the Genoa Conference as centering on economic accords and encouraging a split in the “bourgeois” camp by separating the “pacifist” wing:

We should regard and designate “the pacifist part” of the [bourgeois] camp (or use another polite expression especially chosen) the petty bourgeois, pacifist, and semipacifist democracy of the type Second International, Two and a Half International, also of the Keynes type, and so on. One of our principal, if not the principal, political tasks in Genoa is to separate this wing of the bourgeois camp from the camp as a whole, to try to flatter it, to let it know that we find it acceptable and desirable, from our point of view, to conclude with it not only commercial but also political accords (as one of the few chances of the peaceful evolution of capitalism to the new order, about which we, as Communists, are not very optimistic, but are willing to help in the attempt and regard it as our duty, as representatives of one power, in the face of the hostile majority of the others).

Do everything possible and some things which are impossible to strengthen the pacifistic wing of the bourgeoisie and enhance even a little bit its electoral prospects. This is first. Secondly: divide the bourgeois powers that in Genoa will stand united against us. This is our double task in Genoa. Under no circumstances [is it our task] to promote Communist views.²⁴²

67. Chicherin in Genoa.

When Chicherin protested that pacifism, the linchpin of Lenin’s strategy for Genoa, was a “petty bourgeois illusion,” Lenin explained with unconcealed irritation that while this was indeed the case, it was no reason not to “utilize the pacifists for the purpose of breaking up the enemy, the bourgeoisie.”²⁴³

The Genoa Conference opened on April 10. The Soviet delegation was headed by Chicherin rather than Lenin: Lenin had intended to go and had actually assumed its chairmanship, but decided to stay home after being warned by Krasin of the danger of assassination. He also refused to allow either Trotsky or Zinoviev to take his place.²⁴⁴ On the first day, Chicherin announced a comprehensive “pacifist” program of general disarmament. It was a cynical move, given that Soviet Russia had at the time the largest army in the world (over 800,000 men under arms),²⁴⁵ which it was modernizing with German help. At France’s request, the proposal was tabled as irrelevant to the meeting’s agenda.

The principal economic Soviet objective in Genoa was securing foreign loans and investments. Count Harry Kessler, a fellow-traveler who in 1918 had served as a liaison between the German Foreign Ministry and the Soviet Ambassador, Adolf Ioffe, was told by the head of the Eastern Department of the German Foreign Office that “all that interests the Russians is money, money, money.”²⁴⁶ Lenin indeed had written in Pravda on the eve of the conference that the Russians were going to Genoa “not as Communists but as merchants.”²⁴⁷ Soviet policy at Genoa was to concentrate on the Germans: “An independent German economic policy in Russia,” a leading Soviet newspaper argued, “opens the road to a rational employment of German capital, not only in Russia herself, but further to the east, the road whither runs through Russia, and [an area] which Germany is unable to reach by another route.”²⁴⁸

The Allied proposal called for the Soviet government to acknowledge Russia’s foreign debts and compensate foreigners for losses suffered through its “action or negligence.” Foreign claims were to be met by the emission abroad of Soviet bonds.²⁴⁹ Chicherin expressed a willingness, couched in highly conditional terms, to compensate foreigners for their losses, provided his country received diplomatic recognition as well as loans needed for reconstruction.²⁵⁰ While pretending to negotiate on these terms, the Russian delegation was quietly working toward a separate treaty with Germany.

In this endeavor they were helped by Lloyd George’s diplomatic ineptitude. To establish himself as primus inter pares, the Prime Minister held in Genoa lunches with the various delegations, including the Soviet. His private encounters with the Russians unwittingly confirmed Radek’s and Chicherin’s warnings to the Germans of an impending Allied-Russian accord.²⁵¹ Convinced by advisers that something untoward was about to happen, Rathenau overcame his misgivings and on April 16, at the Hotel St. Margherita in nearby Rapallo, placed his signature to a Soviet-German accord, essentially as drafted in Moscow.^* Subsequently, to counter charges of duplicity, the Germans justified their action with the argument that the Allies, too, were working for a separate treaty with Moscow.²⁵²

By the terms of the accord, the signatories granted each other diplomatic recognition and most-favored-nation status.²⁵³ They renounced mutual claims arising from the war and pledged to promote friendly economic relations. Germany further relinquished claims for losses suffered by her government and citizens from Soviet nationalization measures. Rapallo marked the third occasion since the Armistice that Germany had acted in foreign policy independently of the Allies and contrary to their wishes: in each case she did so in favor of Russia—first by refusing in 1919 to join the blockade, and then by denying France in 1920 permission to ship war matériel across her territory to Poland.

Caught by surprise, the Allies sent the Germans a collective protest accusing them of a unilateral initiative on issues subject to international negotiations: Germany had been invited as an equal partner and had responded by violating the spirit of unity. By this action, she excluded herself from further joint discussions with Soviet Russia.²⁵⁴ The Genoa Conference broke up. The West was probably less alarmed by the provisions of the Rapallo Treaty than by its implications, namely a looming “union of an angry Germany and a hungry Russia.”²⁵⁵

Rapallo was the first international treaty signed by Germany after Versailles. Most German politicians supported it on the grounds that it opened up Russia to German economic and political penetration. The Social Democrats dissented, warning that Russia was using Germany for purposes of world revolution.²⁵⁶

The Treaty did enhance Soviet-German trade, at the expense of Russia’s trade with Britain. In 1922 and 1923, one-third of Soviet imports came from Germany. In 1932, this figure rose to 47 percent.²⁵⁷

For Moscow, it was essential to keep the Allies and Germany at daggers drawn, and to this end it found in the Versailles Treaty a perfect vehicle. And inasmuch as the SPD, Germany’s leading socialist party, sought to work within the Treaty’s terms and to keep on friendly terms with the Allies, the Communists turned to the most reactionary, nationalistic elements in Germany. In December 1920 Lenin declared that the German “bourgeoisie” was being driven toward an alliance with Soviet Russia:

[Germany], constrained by the Versailles Treaty, finds herself in conditions that make existence impossible. And in this situation Germany naturally pushes for an alliance with Russia. 3 … An alliance with Russia of that suffocating country … has produced in Germany political confusion: the German Black Hundreds have been moving with sympathy toward the Russian Bolsheviks and Spartacists.²⁵⁸

68. Germany and Russia reemerging united after Rapallo: a contemporary German magazine cartoon.

In truth, it was not the German “Black Hundreds” who courted the Communists but the Communists who fawned on the Black Hundreds, that is, on the Nazis and their kindred souls. Communist-“Fascist” collaboration came to a climax after January 1923, when the French and Belgians, declaring Germany in default on reparation payments, occupied the Ruhr. The Comintern Executive at once backed Germany in her confrontation with France, and Moscow promised help should the Poles attack at France’s behest.²⁵⁹ In May 1923, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) adopted a resolution that acknowledged the feasibility of recruiting the nationalist masses.²⁶⁰

Lenin’s main agent in dealing with Germany’s conservative and radical right circles was Karl Radek. Radek felt that the only way open to the German Communists to break out of their isolation was the formation of alliances with nationalistic elements. Such a turnabout he justified with the argument (which Zinoviev echoed) that in the case of “oppressed nations,” nationalism was a “revolutionary” phenomenon.²⁶¹ To the despondent Germans he proposed a united front against the Allies. He advised the German government that in the event of a war with France, Soviet Russia would pursue a policy of “benevolent neutrality” and the German Communist Party would offer active support.²⁶² In June 1923, in a speech to the Executive of the Communist International, he lavished praise on Albert Schlageter, a Nazi thug shot by the French for sabotaging transport in the Ruhr: he was the “martyr of German nationalism,” a “brave soldier of the counterrevolution” who had earned “the sincere respect of the soldiers of the revolution.” “If the patriotic circles in Germany,” he declared, “do not resolve to make the cause of the majority of the people their own and in this manner form a front against the Allied capitalists and German capital, then Schlageter’s journey will have been a journey into a void.”²⁶³ Radek later revealed that the text of this sensational speech had the approval of both the Politburo and the Comintern Executive.²⁶⁴ The organ of the German Communists (KPD), Die Rote Fahne, now opened its pages to Nationalists; Nazis spoke at Communist rallies and Communists at Nazi ones. The KPD put out posters that blended the swastika with the red star.²⁶⁵ The Spartacist Ruth Fischer, herself Jewish, exhorted German students to “trample” and “hang” Jewish capitalists.²⁶⁶ This collaboration ended in August 1923, when the Nazis pulled out.

To confuse the situation still further, Moscow accompanied two aspects of its German policy—alliance with the government and cooperation with its right-wing enemies—with a third, social revolution. To prevent the new Prime Minister, Gustav Stresemann, from realizing his policy of negotiating with the Allied powers for financial assistance and for an easing of the Versailles terms, which would place Germany firmly in the Western camp, the Politburo decided on August 23, 1923, to overthrow his government.²⁶⁷ Hoping to take advantage of a wave of strikes that broke out at the time in Germany, Trotsky dispatched there a military mission headed by General Alexis Skoblevskii to organize the coup.²⁶⁸ One million tons of grain were stockpiled in Petrograd and at frontier points to help the Germans withstand an anticipated Allied blockade; a relief fund of 200 million gold rubles was also set aside.²⁶⁹ Trotsky discussed the revolutionary tactics with German Communists, on whose advice it was decided to begin the coup in Saxony and Thuringia. But German workers failed to respond to revolutionary appeals and the coup, which was concurrent with the right-wing Kapp putsch, failed miserably. From November 1923 to March 1924 the German Communist Party was outlawed.

Rapallo accelerated military cooperation between the two countries. On July 29, 1922, an agreement was concluded between A. P. Rozengolts, a member of the Soviet Military-Revolutionary Council, and representatives of General Seeckt. (The document has not been located so far.^*) A Soviet mission, headed by E. M. Sklianskii, Trotsky’s deputy during the Civil War, arrived in Berlin in January 1923. It offered to purchase weapons for 300 million gold marks, to be paid for by German credits, but the Germans rejected the proposal on the grounds that their manufacturing facilities were unable to meet their own needs.²⁷⁰ Soviet Russia then agreed to let Germany produce weapons prohibited by the Versailles Treaty on Russian territory in facilities financed and managed by Germany. She further consented to have German military personnel trained there in their use.²⁷¹ In return, the Germans undertook to instruct Soviet officers.²⁷² The following year, the Reichswehr allocated 75 million gold marks for this purpose and opened a branch office in Moscow.²⁷³ Representatives of the two countries discussed in confidence joint military operations against Poland and even against the Allies.²⁷⁴

The production of weapons proved something of a disappointment to the Germans because of the primitiveness and inefficiency of the Soviet economy. The principal benefit to both parties from this military collaboration derived from the testing of and training in advanced weapons designed for the next world war.

By 1924, several leading German armament manufacturers had concessions in the Soviet Union. Three German military facilities in Soviet Russia have been identified: the one in Fili to manufacture Junker airplanes, another in Samara province to produce mustard gas and phosgene, and a third in Kazan to build tanks.²⁷⁵ German officers, disguised as civilians, traveled to Russia for combat practice.²⁷⁶ From early 1924 on, German pilots received training at Lipetsk, flying Fokker fighters secretly purchased in Holland: ultimately, 120 pilots and 450 flight personnel underwent instruction there. They constituted the core of Hitler’s air force.²⁷⁷ According to General Helm Speidel, a member of “Sondergruppe R,” the training at Lipetsk laid the “spiritual foundation of a future Luftwaffe.”²⁷⁸ The experience gained in Russia is said to have given the German air force a ten-year advantage over the Allies.²⁷⁹ Russian pilots and ground personnel, too, received training at the Lipetsk base.

German officers also practiced tank and chemical warfare at Kazan and Samara. An unknown quantity of the weapons produced in Soviet Russia was surreptitiously shipped to Germany. In 1926, German pacifists would discover three Soviet ships in the port of Stettin loaded with 300,000 artillery shells produced in Soviet Russia. The discovery enabled the socialist leader Philipp Scheidemann to reveal the military collaboration between the two countries and to accuse the government of using Soviet ammunition against German workers.^* But the German hopes of developing large-scale manufacture of forbidden equipment in Russia were disappointed. The production of poison gas ran into difficulties. Even more problems afflicted the airplane plant at Fili: the failure of the Russians to place orders caused the Reichswehr in 1925 to shut it down.²⁸⁰ The submarine project apparently never left the drawing table.

Beginning in 1925, Soviet officers, variously disguised, some posing as Bulgarians, observed Reichswehr exercises. Others were detailed to Germany to attend secret courses taught at the General Staff by Hitler’s future generals, including Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the first Nazi Defense Minister, as well as generals Model, Brauchitsch, Keitel, and Guderian; among the students are said to have been Tukhachevskii and Iakir. “During these courses the Russians were able to see and study all directives, tactical and operational studies, methods of recruitment and training, and even the organizational plans of the illegal rearmament itself. Nothing seems to have been withheld from them.”²⁸¹

Obviously, collaboration on such a scale could not go unnoticed. In fact, Polish and French intelligence had gotten wind of it and it became public knowledge after Scheidemann’s revelations. But the Allies for some reason were not alarmed. They did nothing to stop it, and in the years that followed, technical cooperation between the two countries continued without interruption.

In this manner, Soviet Russia helped lay the foundations of a revived German army, which Hitler would put to his own uses. The tactics of dive bombing, of motorized warfare, and of combined air and land operations, which formed the basis of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, were first tested on Soviet soil. The Red Army, for its part, owing to this collaboration proved better prepared for the German assault during World War II than the Allied forces.

The German generals who engaged in collaboration with the Soviet Union were preparing for a World War II that would abrogate the Versailles Treaty and win for Germany the continental hegemony that had eluded her in World War I. Obviously, they would not have initiated the Russians into their military secrets unless they expected them to be on their side in future hostilities. Thus the outlines of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which unleashed World War II, and in which Germany, with Moscow’s benevolent neutrality, conquered most of Europe, took shape in the early 1920s, when Lenin was alive and in charge.

^*E. G. Gimpelson, Sovetskii rabochii klass, 1918–1920 gg. (Moscow, 1974), 80; Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Institut Ekonomiki, Sovetskoe narodnoe khoziaistvo v 1921–1925 gg. (Moscow, 1960), 531, 536. Closer scrutiny of these statistics reveals that in 1920 the Soviet state had only some 932,000 industrial workers, because more than one-third of the employees counted as workers were in fact artisans working alone or with the help of a single assistant, often a family member: Gimpelson, loc. cit., 82, and Izmeneniia sotsial’noi struktury sovetskogo obshchestva: Oktiabr’ 1917–1920 (Moscow, 1976), 258.

^*Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War (Oxford, 1989), 322–23. An exception was the leader of the Tambov peasant insurgents, Antonov (see below).

^*Pravda, No. 47 (March 3, 1921), 1. Later on, Stalin’s propaganda would go further still, claiming that the Kronshtadt rising had been financed by Washington: E. B. Genkina, Perekhod sovetskogo gosudarstva k Novoi Ekonomicheskoi Politike (1921–1922) (Moscow, 1954), 39.

^*In 1919, for the specific purpose of combating counterrevolution, Moscow created an elite army staffed primarily with Communist officers and noncommissioned officers known as “Units of Special Designation” (Chasti Osobogo Naznacheniia, or ChON). These numbered in December 1921 a cadre of 39,673 and 323,373 conscripts: G. F. Krivosheev, Grif sekretnosti sniat (Moscow, 1993), 46n. In addition, there was an Army of Internal Service (Voiska Vnutrennei Sluzhby, or VNUS), created in September 1920 for a similar purpose, which had in late 1920 360,000 men under arms. Ibid., 45n.

^†Men employed by Ivan IV in the 1560s in the terror campaign (Oprichnina) against his presumed enemies.

^*I. I. Skvortsov in Desiatyi S”ezd, 69. Instructions exist from Lenin directing the requisitioning even of the grain the peasants needed for their own consumption and seed: Lenin, PSS, XLIII, 219. In mid-1921, the Commissariat of Supply ordered half of the seed grain to be shipped out of Tambov province to Samara: TP, II, 550–51. On the abuses of prodrazvërstka, see Izvestiia, No. 42/1,185 (February 25, 1921), 2.

^†Frank A. Golder and Lincoln Hutchinson, On the Trail of the Russian Famine (Stanford, 1927), 8; RR, 697–98. Nationwide, Kamenev estimated that in 1920 the sown acreage diminished by 25 percent: Pravda, July 2, 1921, in M. Heller, Cahiers, XX, No. 2 (1979), 137. The curtailment of sown acreage was also necessitated by shortages of draft animals caused by requisitions the opposing armies carried out during the Civil War: the number of draft horses and oxen in Russia and the Ukraine in 1920, compared to the immediate prerevolutionary times, declined by 28 and 31 percent, respectively: Genkina, Perekhod, 49.

^*Desiatyi S”ezd, 856–57. Trotsky recalled in his autobiography (Moia zhizn’, II, Berlin, 1930, 198–99) that he had proposed to the Central Committee that prodrazvërstka be abandoned in favor of a tax in kind as early as February 1920, but was outvoted. His proposal is in L. Trotskii, Sochineniia, XVII, Pt. 2 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), 543–44. It is remarkably prescient.

^*Lenin, Sochineniia, XXVII, 347. The text of this passage in the latest edition of Lenin’s collected works (PSS, XLV, 285) reads differently.

^*Although it is commonly believed that “War Communism” was improvised and NEP planned, in reality it was the other way around.

^†In tsarist Russia, “chervonets” was the name given gold coins; although most Soviet chervontsy were paper notes, some were minted.

^*Thus, at the Tenth Party Congress Zinoviev claimed for the “proletarian” trade unions in 1921 a membership of 4.5 million (Desiatyi S”ezd, 343). According to another Communist source, however, Soviet Russia in 1922 had only 1.1 million workers: Akademiia Nauk, Institut Ekonomiki, Sovetskoe narodnoe khoziaistvo v 1921–1925 gg. (Moscow, 1960), 531.

^*PSS, XLV, 88–89. Lenin had referred to machine guns as a means of solving political problems at the previous, Tenth Party Congress. When a spokesman for the Workers’ Opposition objected to the threat of turning machine guns on dissenters, Lenin, in what must be a unique instance in his career, apologized and promised never again to use such an expression: Desiatyi S’ezd, 544. He must have forgotten his pledge, because he did use it again the following year.

^*Sorok let sovetskogo prava, I (Leningrad, 1957), 72. This conception continued, in spirit if not in words, tsarist traditions. According to a leading constitutional authority before the Revolution, in Russia the function of law was not so much to ensure justice as to maintain public order: N. M. Korkunov, Russkoe gosudarstvennoe pravo, I (St. Petersburg, 1909), 215–22.

^*Rudolf Schlesinger, Soviet Legal Theory (New York, 1945), 76. Here, too, Muscovite precedent was followed in that according to the Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, in cases involving crimes against the state, no distinction was drawn between intent and deed: Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London-New York, 1974), 109.

^†The principle was applied as follows: “[Articles 57 and 74 give] a general definition of counterrevolutionary crimes and crimes against the system of administration. On the basis of Articles 57 and 74, if an act had been committed that falls under the general concept of crime against the state, but is not foreseen specifically, then … it is permissible to apply the article of the same chapter that is most approximate.” A. N. Trainin, Ugolovnoe pravo R.S.F.S.R.: Chast’ Osobennaia (Leningrad, 1925), 7.

^*Marc Jansen, A Show Trial under Lenin (The Hague, 1982), 19. By this criterion, of course, “objectively” Lenin in 1917–18 was a German agent.

^*This document, omitted from previous editions of Lenin’s works, was first published in full in 1964 in Lenin, PSS, XLIV, 396–400. Lenin had prohibited any public mention of its contents because “it is stupid to reveal to enemies our strategy” (ibid., 399).

^*Bukharin requested clemency for G. Semenov: NYT, August 6, 1922, 16. At Bukharin’s show trial sixteen years later, Semenov’s name would be invoked to charge Bukharin with terrorist designs against the Soviet leadership: Marc Jansen, Show Trial under Lenin (The Hague, 1982), 183. Semenov, along with Bukharin, perished in the Stalinist purges.

^*It is understandable why Soviet historians were unable to devote to this subject the attention it deserves. It is less apparent why Western scholars should have ignored it. E. H. Carr, for example, in his three-volume History of the Russian Revolution, where he finds space for the most esoteric information, dismisses this calamity in a single paragraph on the specious grounds that “estimates of those who perished are unreliable.” (The Bolshevik Revolution, II, 285). Similar reasoning has been used by neo-Nazi historians as a basis for ignoring the Holocaust. At the time of writing, there exists not one scholarly monograph on the 1921 famine.

^*Izvestiia, No. 60/1499 (March 15, 1922), 2; Hutchinson in Golder and Hutchinson, On the Trail, 17. Somewhat different figures are given in Pomgol, Itogi bor’by s golodom v 1921–22 gg. (Moscow, 1922), 460. The figure for children comes from Roger Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward (Oxford, 1990), 105.

^†Although the figures varied somewhat from region to region, a rough estimate held that the peasant needed annually a minimum of 10 puds (163 kilograms) of grain for sustenance and an additional 2.5 to 5 puds (40–80 kilograms) for seed. RevR, No. 14–15 (1921), 13. L. Kamenev estimated the average grain consumption in Russia per person before 1914 to have been 16.5 puds a year (seed grain included): RTsKhIDNI, F. 5, op. 2, delo 9, list 2.

^*Although on occasion Lenin did try: e.g., PSS, XLIV, 75, 312–13.

^*H. H. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia (New York, 1927), 553. The proceeds of Soviet gold sales apparently went to purchase food for the cities exclusively. The earliest instance of foreigners helping to feed Russians during famine occurred in Novgorod in 1231–32, when the population, decimated by hunger, was saved by a shipment of food from Germany: Novyi Entsikopedicheskii Slovar’, XIV (St. Petersburg, n.d.), 40–41.

^*How curious, therefore, to have an American historian attribute to Hoover the “fantastic belief that the “federal government should not … feed starving people.” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (Boston, 1949), 28.

^*Shortly before, in May 1933, when the possibility of military cooperation with Nazi Germany still seemed realistic, Tukhachevskii told a visiting German delegation: “Always bear in mind: you and we, Germany and the USSR, can dictate our terms to the whole world if we stand together.”: Iu. L. Diakov and T. S. Bushueva, Fashistskii mech kovalsia v SSSR (Moscow, 1992), 25.

^*Wipert von Blücher, Deutschlands Weg nach Rapallo (Wiesbaden, 1951), 154–55. Gerald Freund, citing this information, calls Radek “irresponsible” (Unholy Alliance, New York, 1957, 112–13), intimating that he acted on his own initiative. But, of course, in matters of such gravity nothing was done without the approval of the Politburo and Lenin personally. Proof that this was indeed the case is that the Soviet delegation to Genoa, headed by Chicherin, used the identical tactic two months later to prod the Germans into signing the Rapallo Treaty. Freund, loc. cit., 116–17.

^†RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 2, delo 1124. Report from Berlin dated February 14, 1922. In a memorandum to Lenin of February 22, 1922, outlining the strategy for Genoa, Chicherin insisted that without foreign capital there was no hope of reconstructing Soviet transport and industry: ibid., delo 1151.

^*Two months later he paid with his life for the Rapallo Treaty, murdered by nationalist assassins as a “pro-Communist Jew.”

^*Rolf-Dieter Müller, Das Tor zur Weltmacht (Boppard am Rhein, 1984), 100. It is referred to in a document (“Aus Tagebuch Hasse”) in the archive of von Rabenau, N 62/39, H. 5, Bl. 60, on the basis of information from Seeckt: Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, Nachlass von Rabenau, 62/39, Bd. 2 (1938), Heft 5. Cf. Freund, Unholy Alliance, 124. On Rozengolts, who perished in 1938 in Stalin’s purges, see P. V. Volobuev in Revvoensovet (Moscow, 1991), 318–25.

^*F. L. Carsten in Survey, No. 44–45 (1962), 121; Freund, Unholy Alliance, 211; Müller, Das Tor, 146. Apparently forewarned, the Soviet press on the same day—December 16—admitted the existence of German installations in the U.S.S.R., but depicted them as defensive: Pravda, No. 291/3,520 (December 16, 1926), 1. Cf. Karl Radek in Izvestiia, No. 291–92 (December 16, 1926), 2. These seem to have been the only references in the Soviet press to military collaboration with Weimar Germany.