Stalin, Volume 1

CHAPTER 9

VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY

I know Russia so little. Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, exile, and that’s about it!

Lenin, Island of Capri, responding to someone talk about the Russian village, c. 1908, in reminiscences of Maxim Gorky1

The isolated existence of separate Soviet republics is unstable and impermanent in view of the threats to their existence posed by the capitalist states. The general interests of defense of the Soviet republics, on the one hand, and, on the other, the necessity of restoring productive forces destroyed by the war, and, as a third consideration, the necessity of the food-producing Soviet republics to supply aid to the grainless ones, all imperatively dictate a state union of the separate Soviet republics as the sole path of salvation from imperialist yoke and national oppression. . . .

10th Party Congress resolution based upon Stalin’s report, March 15, 19212

REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR had broken out in the Russian empire, a startlingly heterogeneous state spanning two continents, Europe and Asia. That said, this realm had not presented an especially difficult governing challenge from the point of view of nationalism. Imperial Russia had had no “republics” of Georgia or Ukraine; officially, Ukrainians did not even exist (they were “Little Russians”). True, imperial Russia had countenanced two so-called protectorates (Bukhara, Khiva), while Finland had enjoyed a measure of self-rule, but the rest of the empire was divided into governorships (gubernii). Then the world war, German military occupation, and civil war midwifed an independent Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, none of which the Red Army managed to reconquer. World war, occupations, and civil war also helped create Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, all of which the Red Army did reconquer, but even after falling to Red forces, those national republics retained important attributes of statehood. Nation was suddenly central.

The Great War irrevocably altered the political landscape, helping dissolve all three major land empires, but unlike Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire, Russia was resurrected, albeit not in toto, and not in the same form. What set Russia apart, and transformed its civil war into a partly successful war to recover territories of the former Russian empire, was a combination of instruments and ideas: the Communist party, Lenin’s leadership (actual and symbolic), the Bolsheviks’ belated discovery of the device of federalism, the vision of world revolution—not just a Russian revolution, which made “self-determination” a flexible concept—and Stalin’s machinations. An extremely broad spectrum of imperial Russian political figures, from tsarist statesman Pyotr Stolypin and others on the right to Stalin and others on the left, with the Constitutional Democrats in between, had alighted upon the necessity of forms of local-national autonomy, but only under the aegis of a strong state (gosudarstvennost’).3 The story of how Stalin arrived at that point is a lesser known aspect of his civil war odyssey; it is also one of the uncanny successes of Bolshevik state building.

“From the very beginning of the October Revolution,” Lenin had remarked in November 1918, “foreign policy and international relations became the main issue before us.”4 Bolshevism was not just a state-building enterprise but an alternative world order. The Bolshevik recourse to federation recognized a formal right to succession of the dependent peoples in Soviet Eurasia, in a clarion call for colonial peoples everywhere.5 State structure, domestic minority policy, colonial policy, and foreign policy became indistinguishable.

Germany, Russia’s former nemesis, had recognized the new Soviet state but then collapsed, while Britain and France, Russia’s former allies, were now antagonists: they recognized the new independent republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, without recognizing Soviet Russia. But Greater Poland and Greater Romania, two big winners at Versailles, emerged as the most immediate Soviet antagonists to the West. On the other flank, the former Russian Far East fell under the occupation of Japanese troops, partly as a result of American president Woodrow Wilson’s request to Japan to supply troops to a planned eleven-country, 25,000-man expedition to rescue the Czechoslovak Legion and safeguard military storehouses in Siberia. Initially, the Japanese had declined to intervene militarily in Russia, but in 1918 sent even more troops than were requested, motivated by a desire to reverse historic territorial losses as well as anti-Communism. Japan’s occupation of the Soviet Far East grew to more than 70,000 troops, entangled against many different enemies, and turned out to be domestically divisive and costly, perhaps 12,000 dead and nearly 1 billion yen. Nonetheless, after the Americans left Vladivostok in 1920, the Japanese stayed.6 The upshot was that Japan, Poland, Romania, and Britain combined to constitute a kind of ring around the Soviet Socialist Republics, although, as we shall see, Soviet revolutions poked through briefly in Iran, thanks to the reconquest of the South Caucasus, and enduringly in Mongolia.

By 1921, with the outcomes of the wars of reconquest more or less clear, the population of the Soviet republics amounted to perhaps 140 million, including about 75 million Russians and, among the 65 million non-Russians, around 30 million Turkic and Persian speakers. Around 112 million of the total Soviet-area population were peasants. The national question was also ipso facto the peasant question: they comprised the vast majority of people in every nation in Russian Eurasia.

Not peasants per se but Communist party members undergirded the Red victory against the Whites.7 During a purge in 1919, nearly half the party’s paper membership was expelled; in 1920, during a renewed purge, more than a fourth was kicked out, but the party had kept growing.8 The party expanded from 340,000 (March 1918) to more than 700,000 by civil war’s end, while party members in the Red Army grew from 45,000 to 300,000. But even if peasants were not decisive, they made up, often reluctantly, three quarters of the Red Army troops at any given time. Peasant soldiers often deserted with their army rifles. They also availed themselves of hunting rifles and homemade weapons. In 1920–21, at least 200,000 peasants in the Ukraine, the Volga, Don, and Kuban valleys, Tambov and Voronezh provinces, and especially Western Siberia took up arms against Bolshevik misrule, a revolt fed by the onset in September 1920 of Red Army demobilization. The regime replied with notable brutality, but also major concessions. In 1921, the peasants forced an end to requisitioning upon Lenin and he, in turn, forced upon the 10th Party Congress a so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed peasants to sell much of what they grew. Confiscations did not cease: a state that was built upon the idea and practices of class warfare took time to adjust to a NEP. But the civil war outcome across much of Eurasia—the creation of the Bolshevik monopoly party-state—went hand in hand with a federation that acknowledged national identity and with legalized markets that acknowledged the parallel peasant revolution.

Kaleidoscopic does not begin to capture the civil war in Eurasia, particularly in the years 1920–21. Eurasia needs to be understood geographically. In Russian, as well as German and English, the term “Eurasia” had arisen in the late nineteenth century to denote Europe plus Asia, but in the early twentieth century its meaning had shifted to something distinct from either, something mystical.9 A tiny group of inventive intellectuals, who had been cast abroad by the revolution, and happened to be Ukrainian-Polish-Lithuanian in heritage, suddenly declared that the geographic and ethnic composition of the dissolved Russian empire had fused eastern Christianity and steppe influences into a transcendent new synthesis. “Russians and those who belong to the peoples of ‘the Russian world’ are neither Europeans nor Asiatics,” the exiles who had fled westward wrote in their manifesto Exodus to the East (1921). “Merging with the native element of culture and life which surrounds us, we are not ashamed to declare ourselves Eurasians.”10 Their Eurasia, ruled from Moscow, economically self-sufficient and politically demotic (of the people but not democratic), was allegedly some sort of symphonic unity.11 Nothing could have been further from the truth, as we shall see, and as Stalin fully recognized, because he was managing the diversity. Despite his admiration for the Great Russian nation and the Russian working class, and his persistent preference for centralized authority and party rule (class) over national interests, he recognized the necessity of fashioning appeals and institutions to accommodate different nations.12 Early on he made linguistic equality and nativization of administration the centerpiece of his views on the national question.13 Of course, the flip side of the Russian Communist party’s attempt to capture natives’ allegiance by embracing national states was that nationally inclined Communists in those states obtained vehicles for their aspirations. Had there really been a “Eurasian” synthesis the way the emigres fantasized, Stalin’s life would have been far simpler.

Russia’s civil war amounted to a kind of “voyages of discovery,” even if, unlike Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, the voyagers did not cross literal oceans. A bewildering cast of characters dance across this stage: the Polish marshal Józef Piłsudski and the Polish Bolshevik Józef Unszlicht; the mustachioed leader of the Red Cossacks Semyon Budyonny and the Armenian horseman Haik Bzhishkyan, known as Gai Dmitrievich Gai, who rode Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s flank; the two Tatar Muslim Communists Sahib Garei Said-Galiev and Mirsayet Soltanğaliev, who wanted to kill each other, and a Bashkir non-Communist, Akhmetzaki Validi, who blocked Soltanğaliev’s Tatar imperialism; Danzan and Sukhbaataar, two Mongol nationalists who cooperated until drawing daggers against each other; Mirza Kuchek Khan, the mild-mannered would-be liberator of Persia from foreign influence, and Reza Khan, the ruthless leader of a rightist putsch in Tehran; the Belorussian Jew Georgy Voldin, known as Safarov, a commissar in Turkestan, and the Latvian Jekabs Peterss, an old-school Chekist in Turkestan who nearly destroyed the career of the great proletarian commander Mikhail Frunze; the peasant rebels’ leader Alexander Antonov and his Bolshevik nemesis Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, who had stormed the Winter Palace and arrested the Provisional Government but could not subdue Tambov peasant fury; the workerist Bolsheviks Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, who led a Communist party internal opposition; the nationally inclined Ukrainian Communist Mykola Skrypnyk and nationally inclined Georgian Communists Pilipe Makharadze and Budu Mdivani; the forgettable former tsarist major general Alexander Kozlovsky on the Kronstadt island fortress and the unforgettable former tsarist Cossack officer Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German riding in the footsteps of Chinggis Khan. And yet the principal character, even more than Lenin, turned out to be the Georgian reincarnation of Stolypin in the national sphere. Stalin pursued a statist agenda that sought to combine retention of a grand unitary state with provision for national difference, and an iron fist for separatism, even though Stalin, both in appearance and fact, was a quintessential man of the borderlands.14

The unexpected significance of the national question in the civil war proved to be yet another issue that empowered Stalin, and brought him into a close working relationship with Lenin. The two, often in the face of hostility from both hard-line Bolsheviks opposed to nationalism at all and national-minded Bolsheviks opposed to centralization, groped toward a workable federalism consonant with Marxist tenets, faits accomplis on the ground, and geopolitics.15

ACCIDENTAL FEDERALISTS

Four watchwords had accompanied the coup in 1917: peace, land, and bread, but also national self-determination, yet the latter notion had long vexed the left. “The nationality of the worker is neither French nor English nor German, it is labor,” Marx wrote in his early years. “His government is neither French nor English nor German it is capital. His native air is neither French nor German nor English it is factory air.”16 But as a result of the Irish Question, Marx later in life changed his position; a right to self-determination had been included in the program of the First International.17 Karl Kautsky’s essay “Modern Nationality” (1887) constituted the first major Marxist effort to elaborate the orthodox position that capitalist commodity relations had produced nations, which would presumably disappear with capitalism (the essay was translated into Russian in 1903). A hard-line Marxist position on nations had been outlined in 1908–9 by Rosa Luxemburg, who also argued that capitalism had generated nationalism, dividing the international proletariat by tying it to its ruling classes, but who denied self-determination except for the exploited working class, a position that attracted class-fixated leftists in polyglot Eastern Europe.18 Then a countervailing Marxist view emerged in Austria-Hungary, where Otto Bauer and others argued for an elaborate program of “national cultural autonomy” independent of territory to reconcile nation with class.19 Stalin’s essay “The National Question and Social Democracy” (1913) rejected what he saw as the Austro-Marxist attempt to substitute “bourgeois” nationality (culture) for class struggle (Luxemburgism), questioning, for example, who had appointed the Muslim beys and mullahs to speak for Muslim toilers, and noting that many “cultural” practices (religion, bride kidnapping, veiling) would have to be eradicated. Stalin especially targeted the Caucasus echoes of Austro-Marxist “national cultural autonomy” (Jordania and the Georgian Mensheviks), insisting that autonomy should only be territorial (i.e., not extended to nationals outside their homelands). Still, he concluded that nationalism could serve the worldwide proletariat’s emancipation by helping win over workers susceptible to nationalist appeals.20 Lenin—who has wrongly been credited with commissioning Stalin’s refutation of the Austro-Marxists—targeted Luxemburg’s dismissiveness of nationalism in an essay in a Russian emigre journal in Geneva in 1914.21 He distinguished between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and the nationalism of the oppressed (such as the Irish cause that had influenced Marx), and partially accepted a right to self-determination not merely for tactical reasons, à la Stalin, but also for moral political reasons: emancipation of the toilers of oppressed nations.22 In Lenin’s mind, one could not be both for socialism and for imperialism (national oppression by a big state).

Such, then, was the Marxisant corpus, polemics written for one another—orthodox Kautsky (a majoritarian citizen of Germany), hard-line Luxemburg (a Pole assimilated into Germany), and soft-line Bauer (an Austro-Hungarian multinationalist) versus Stalin (a Georgian assimilated into imperial Russia) versus Lenin (a majoritarian subject of Russia). These ideas became an even greater battleground in the real context of Russia’s civil war.

Bolshevik ranks embodied the wildly multinational character of imperial Russia (as the names, given in this book in the original, demonstrate) but the Bolsheviks were thoroughly Russified, too (as shown by the more typical spellings of their names). Still, they were conscious of the difference between ethnic Russia and imperial Russia. Trotsky, a Russified Jew, painted Russia in profoundly negative cultural terms, demanding a “final break of the people with Asianism, with the seventeenth century, with holy Russia, with icons and cockroaches.”23 Lenin, vehemently excoriating Great Russian chauvinism as a special evil that “demoralizes, degrades, dishonors and prostitutes [the toiling masses] by teaching them to oppress other nations and to cover up this shame with hypocritical and quasi-patriotic phrases,” still allowed that a popular nationalism could emerge among ethnic Russians.24 Stalin had once been a passionate critic of Russification. “Groaning under the yoke are the oppressed nations and religious communities, including the Poles, who are being driven from their native land . . . and the Finns, whose rights and liberties, granted by history, the autocracy is arrogantly trampling,” he had written in Georgian, in the periodical Brdzola (November–December 1901). “Groaning under the yoke are the eternally persecuted and humiliated Jews who lack even the miserably few rights enjoyed by other subjects of Russia—the right to live in any part of the country they choose, the right to attend school, the right to be employed in government service, and so forth. Groaning are the Georgians, Armenians, and other nations who are deprived of the right to have their own schools and be employed in government offices, and are compelled to submit to the shameful and oppressive policy of Russification.”25 But Stalin had quickly shed this Georgian nationalism, denying in Proletariatis Brdzola in September 1904 that national characteristics or a national spirit existed.26 By 1906, still writing in Georgian language, he was arguing that national autonomy would sever “our country [Georgia] from Russia and link it to Asian barbarism.”27 Thus, whereas Lenin railed against Russian chauvinism, Stalin worried about non-Russian backwardness and came to see Russian tutelage as a lever to lift other nations up—an echo perhaps of his personal experience in Russian Orthodox schools.28 This difference would prove consequential.

As the recognized expert in the party’s innermost circle on the national question, by virtue of his Georgian heritage and 1913 essay, Stalin emerged as the most significant figure in determining the structure of the Soviet state. It was no accident that the first Bolshevik government included a commissariat of nationalities, headed by him.29 The Russian empire’s dissolution in war and revolution had created an extraordinary situation in which the revolution’s survival was suddenly inextricably linked to the circumstance that vast stretches of Russian Eurasia had little or no proletariat. In order to find allies against “world imperialism” and “counterrevolution,” the party found itself pursuing tactical alliances with “bourgeois” nationalists in some territories, especially those without industry, but even those where a proletariat did exist. The first efforts in this regard had involved Polish-speaking lands: already in November 1917 the nationalities commissariat set up a Polish suborgan to recruit Polish Communists and retain Poland as a part of the Soviet Russian space. Never mind that the regime controlled no Polish territory at this time, and that serial rhetorical promises made by the competing Great War belligerents had continually upped the ante for an independent Poland. Stalin’s ethnic Polish deputy commissar Stanisław Pestkowski oversaw the plans to Sovietize Poland, and his unreconstructed Luxemburgism did little more than intensify splits in the Polish left and generate friction between local soviets and local-branch ethnic Polish committees.30 Poland, events would show, was not just a nation but a geopolitical factor in its own right. Similar suborgans in the nationalities commissariat emerged for Lithuania, Armenia, Jews, Belorussia, and so on, but the commissariat, and Stalin’s attention, became especially absorbed by the Muslim territories of Russian Eurasia and the search for tractable Muslim collaborators. A Muslim suborgan was established, but its leaders pursued their own agenda: an “autonomous” Tataria encompassing nearly all Muslims in former tsarist Russia. Stalin had initially supported this Greater Tataria in May 1918 as a way to assert some political control, but very soon he undermined it as a dangerous vehicle at odds with Bolshevik monopoly and a threat to winning the allegiance of non-Tatar Muslims.31 Stalin, despite his greater familiarity with Eurasia, had a learning curve, too.

Federalism, Stalin’s key instrument, had started out with little support among Bolsheviks. Whereas in the American Revolution the federalists were those who argued for a strong central government, in the French Revolution, against an absolutist state, federalists wanted to weaken central power. It was the French understanding that influenced Marx, who rejected federalism. (The anarchists were the ones who supported looseness, decentralization, federalism.)32 Lenin had written (1913) that “Marxists are of course hostile to federation and decentralization,” further explaining in a private letter the same year that he stood “against federation in principle” because “it weakens the economic link and is an unsuitable form for a single state.”33 Stalin in March 1917 had published “Against Federalism,” arguing that “federalism in Russia does not and cannot solve the national question, [but] merely confuses and complicates it with quixotic ambitions to turn back the wheel of history.”34 But the wheel had turned, and quickly. In 1918, in power, Stalin conceded federalism—not “forced unification” as under the tsars, but a “voluntary and fraternal union of the working masses of all nations and peoples of Russia”—as a necessary but temporary expedient, a “transitional” phase toward socialism.35 A constitutional commission for Soviet Russia was hastily thrown together on April 1, 1918, with Stalin as the only member also in the Council of People’s Commissars; he wrote the theses that served as the basis for the draft document published on July 3, when it was submitted for approval to the Central Committee. Formally, the constitution was adopted at the Congress of Soviets, which took place July 4–10—the one that occurred during the Left SR quasi-coup in Moscow.36 Soviet Russia, officially, became the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or RSFSR.37 The term “federation” occurred in the constitution’s title and initial principles, but not in the body of the text specifying the governing machinery, that is, the federation in practice.38 Nonetheless, even as most of the “self-governing” entities that comprised the RSFSR quickly fell to White occupation armies and other anti-Bolshevik forces, Soviet Russia remained a federation.

Stalin was the one who developed the Bolshevik rationale for federalism, which, in his description, entailed a way to bind the many peoples into a single integrated state. “Soviet power has not yet succeeded in becoming a people’s power to the same extent in the border regions inhabited by culturally backward elements,” he wrote in Pravda (April 9, 1918). He saw the Bolshevik task as splitting the masses from “bourgeois” nationalists by promoting “schools, courts, administrations, organs of power and social, political, and cultural institutions in which the laboring masses . . . use their own language.”39 In other words, Stalin’s understanding went beyond mentorship: even if Great Russia as a higher culture extended a helping hand to the various peoples, the latter still needed education and propaganda in their native tongues and participation in managing their own affairs. Here was the Communist version of a discovery that had been made by Russian Orthodox missionaries in remote areas of the empire: namely, that the Bible had to be taught in the empire’s vernacular languages, in order to get non-Christians to read it and convert. So it would be with Communism. This was not a question of a direct Orthodox missionary influence on Bolshevism, but of structurally similar circumstances leading to similar approaches.40 Stalin showed himself to be a missionary de facto.

The first major party discussion of the national question occurred at the 8th Party Congress in March 1919. This was also the congress that reaffirmed the use of tsarist officers, whose presence necessitated political commissars, which solidified the basic structure of a dualist party-state. On the national question, Bukharin, Pyatakov, and other leftist Communists at the congress demanded a hard-line Luxemburgist position (an end to the slogan of self-determination for nations).41 After all, federalism was the stance of the Mensheviks, the Jewish Bund, the Armenian Dashnaks, and non-socialist Ukrainian nationalists. Lenin responded that nations existed “objectively” and that “not to recognize something that is out there is impossible.”42 He prevailed in the vote, which acknowledged nationalism as a “necessary evil.” The congress even wrote the principle of self-determination into the Communist party program, albeit only after rejecting Stalin’s formulation (“self-determination for the working masses”) in favor of what was called self-determination from the “historical class viewpoint.” In fact, Stalin could live with this formulation, which meant that if a nation was moving from bourgeois democracy to soviet democracy, then the proletariat was the class deserving of self-determination, but if from feudalism to bourgeois democracy, then “bourgeois” nationalists could be engaged in political coalition.43 But what was most consequential about the 8th Congress was a resolution establishing the strictly non-federal nature of the party. “All decisions of the Russian Communist Party are unconditionally binding on all branches of the party, regardless of their national composition,” the resolution stated. “The Central Committee of the Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian Communist parties enjoy the rights of regional committees of the party and are wholly subordinated to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.”44 Thus, the 8th Congress, while retaining a federal state, confirmed a non-federal party. Federalism, in other words, had to be kept subordinate to “the proletariat.”

SUPREMACY IN EASTERN EUROPE

Poland did not exist between 1795 and 1918. Józef Piłsudski (b. 1867), a descendant of nobility, a graduate of the same Wilno gymnasium as Felix Dzierzynski, and a former political terrorist against tsarism on behalf of Polish independence, had fought in the Great War on the side of the Central Powers but refused to swear an oath to Germany, which got him imprisoned. On November 8, 1918, three days before the armistice, the Germans released him; he returned on a train to Warsaw, not unlike Lenin’s return to Petrograd the year before. As Poland returned to the map 123 years after the partitions, its borders remained undetermined. Six worthless currencies, not to mention bureaucrats of three defunct empires (Austria, Germany, Russia), remained in circulation; crime, hunger, and typhus spread.45 Piłsudski, the new head of state, negotiated the evacuation of the German garrison from Warsaw as well as other German troops from Ludendorff’s kingdom of Ober Ost (many left their weapons to the Poles). He also set up an espionage-sabotage unit called the Polish Military Organization, and with French assistance, began improvising an army. “Literally everything needs to be rebuilt, from the bottom to the top,” wrote one French trainer, Charles de Gaulle, fresh from a German POW camp.46 Beginning in early 1919, against expansionist-minded Bolsheviks as well as local nationalists, the makeshift Polish legions under Piłsudski conquered parts of tsarist Belorussia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, including the Galician oil fields.47 By fall 1919, the Poles offered to take Moscow for Britain, with an army of 500,000, at a proposed cost of anywhere from 600,000 to 1 million per day; no one proved willing to pay (the British were still backing Denikin).48 In December 1919, Piłsudski put out feelers to Paris for support of a major Polish offensive against Bolshevism; France saw in Poland the eastern bastion of the Versailles Order, but offered only an ambiguous reply.49 The Soviets also appealed to France, and fantasized about obtaining German military help against Poland from the circle around Ludendorff.50 In the end, Poland and Soviet Russia would fight a war largely on their own.

The Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20 mirrored neighboring armed border skirmishes—Romania with Hungary over Transylvania, Italy with Yugoslavia over Rijeka/Fiume, and Poland with Germany over Poznan/Pomerania and with Czechoslovakia over Silesia. Greater Romania especially, with its monarchy intact, emerged as a new power on the southwestern Soviet frontier. But the Warsaw-Moscow conflict was larger, a full-scale battle for supremacy in Eastern Europe that would profoundly shape the interwar period.51 It would also shape Bolshevik internal politics.

Lenin and Piłsudski had lived in Habsburg Krakow on the same street and at the same time as exiles from tsarist Russia. Piłsudski had even been arrested in the same plot to assassinate Alexander III that had led to the execution of Lenin’s brother. But overlapping maps of the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth (1569–1795), once the largest state in Europe and of the Russian empire, the largest state in world history, gave inspiration to two competing imperialisms.52 In power, Lenin and Piłsudski issued mostly bad-faith peace proposals to the other and claimed they were undertaking military actions defensively, even as they harbored grandiose ambitions. Lenin viewed “bourgeois” Poland as the key battleground for the revolution against the Versailles Order: either an Entente springboard for intervention in socialist Russia—which had to be prevented—or a potential corridor for Bolshevik fomenting of revolution in Germany.53 Piłsudski, a Social Democrat and Polish nationalist who now added the title of marshal, sought a truncated Russia and a Greater Poland in the form of a Polish-dominated “federation” with Belorussia and Lithuania, allied with a small independent Ukraine.54

Historic Ukraine—at different times and in different ways part of both Poland-Lithuania and imperial Russia—had seen its own opening from the dissolution of the three major land empires in 1918, yet unlike the case of Poland, the decision makers at Versailles had refused to recognize Ukraine’s independence. Puppet governments of Germany, Bolshevik Russia, and Poland, not to mention General Denikin, rose and fell, but amid the competing claims, the countryside remained ungovernable to any would-be rulers. In April 1920, the deposed Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura, whose so-called Directory controlled very little Ukrainian territory and who was in asylum in Warsaw, signed a military alliance with Piłsudski, known as the Treaty of Warsaw. In exchange for Polish assistance in battling for an independent Ukraine against the Bolsheviks, Petliura relinquished claims to eastern Galicia (centered on Lwów/Lviv), for which the Ukrainian-speaking majority there roundly denounced him. Piłsudski faced uproar from Polish nationalists opposed to Ukraine’s existence at all, but he argued that Polish forces could not garrison all of a huge Ukraine and that given the history of Russian imperialism, “there can be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine.” At the same time, he claimed territories for Poland with large western Ukrainian-speaking populations.55 The latter included his native Wilno/Vilna/Vilnius, which was also sought by Lithuania and Belorussia. The Poles, additionally, had captured Minsk, also claimed by Belorussia and even by some Lithuanians. (Belorussia, in its greatest form, encompassed the imperial Russian provinces of Grodno, Vilna, Minsk, Mogilyov, and Vitebsk; Brest-Litovsk was in Grodno province.)

In Moscow, amid these weighty considerations, an anti-Poland demonstration scheduled for April 22, 1920, was postponed so that Soviet Russia could instead celebrate Lenin’s fiftieth birthday. The regime’s two principal newspapers were devoted almost exclusively to the Bolshevik leader, with encomia by Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Stalin, who hailed Lenin’s extirpation of enemies.56 But at the regime gathering on April 23, Stalin made so bold as to recall Lenin’s political errors, including his vociferous demands, not indulged, that the October coup be carried out before the Congress of Soviets had met. “Smiling and cunningly looking at us,” Stalin noted, “he said, ‘Yes, you were probably right.”’ Lenin was not afraid to acknowledge his mistakes.57

The same day, Lenin submitted a peace offering to Poland to cede all of Belorussia and much of Ukraine.58 This proposal would make any Polish military advance farther eastward resemble an unprovoked aggression. Had the Polish marshal called the Bolshevik bluff by accepting Lenin’s peace offer, Piłsudski would either have exposed it as a fraud, when the Bolsheviks failed to live up to the proposed terms, or obtained a Polish border far to the east without having to fight. Instead, on April 25, citing a supposed need to preempt a Bolshevik offensive, Piłsudski rolled the iron dice, sending some 50,000 Polish troops into historic Ukraine.59 Assisted by Ukrainian nationalist forces, Piłsudski’s army captured Kiev on May 7, 1920, announcing the liberation of Ukraine from Russia. In fact, the Bolsheviks had abandoned the eastern Slav mother city without a fight, seeking to inflame Russian feeling against the Poles and to conserve Red forces, which were massing to the north.

Lenin saw in Piłsudski’s eastward march not a messianic Polish nationalist drive but a contrivance of world imperialism, and in Bolshevik propaganda, this was a class-based conflict. “Listen, workers, listen, peasants, listen Red Army soldiers,” Trotsky proclaimed. “The Polish szlachta [gentry] and bourgeoisie have attacked us in a war. . . . Death to the Polish bourgeoisie. On its corpse we have concluded an alliance with worker-peasant Poland.”60 But Trotsky himself privately warned not to expect a supportive Polish worker uprising.61 Stalin, ever attentive to the power of nationalism, also voiced early skepticism. While Denikin and Kolchak had possessed no rear “of their own,” he wrote in Pravda (May 25 and 26, 1920), “the rear of the Polish army appears to be homogenous and nationally knit together. . . . Surely the Polish rear is not homogenous . . . in the class sense, [but] the class conflicts have not reached such intensity as to damage the feeling of national unity.” National feeling trumping class among the Poles: heresy but true. Stalin agreed with Lenin on one point, though: he, too, saw the hand of the Entente behind Poland.62 Indeed, Piłsudski’s very recklessness seemed prima facie evidence of this supposed backing. Furthermore, the British War Office would end up shipping rifles and artillery to Piłsudski; these had been contracted for the previous year, but in the new context they looked like British support for Polish “aggression.” In fact, the British, as well as the French, were irritated at Piłsudski’s eastern offensive in spring 1920.

Whatever the clash’s national and international versus class dimensions, this began as a Great War military surplus clash. Perhaps 8 million Poles had fought for the Central Powers in the Great War; 2 million fought in the tsarist army.63 Now the Poles were still wearing their Austrian or German gear, to which they affixed a white eagle pin. Many Poles who had become POWs in the West got French uniforms. The Red troops in many cases wore tsarist uniforms, to which they affixed red ribbons, as well as pointed hats with red stars. Some Poles, too, wore their old tsarist Russian uniforms.

As for the field of battle, it resembled a triangle, with points at Warsaw in the west, Smolensk in the north, and Kharkov in the south. Inside the triangle lay the Pripet Marches, meaning that an advance westward could take place only on either side of the forested bogs: via the northern Smolensk-Wilno-Grodno-Warsaw axis (Napoleon’s route, in reverse); or via the southern Kiev-Rivne/Równe-Lublin-Warsaw axis (which the Soviets designated the Southwestern Front). These two lines eventually met up, but they lacked a single base in their rear or a single headquarters, complicating Red military operations.64 But the Polish dash to Kiev had put them far from home, overextended, and vulnerable to counterattack. In a battlefield innovation, the Russian side fielded the First Cavalry Army, formed in fall 1919 to counter the Cossacks. The leader of these Red Cossack equivalents was Semyon Budyonny, a tall, big-boned, and breathtaking horseman, holder of the St. George Medal for Bravery in the tsarist army, where he had been a sergeant major. Voroshilov served as the First Cavalry Army’s political commissar, meaning their higher patron was Stalin. They grew to 18,000 sabers—former Cossacks, partisans, bandits—and in their ranks could be found young commanders such as Georgy Zhukov (b. 1896) and Semyon Timoshenko (b. 1895). Trotsky, typically, was condescending: after visiting the cavalry force, the war commissar called it “a horde” with “an Ataman ringleader,” adding “where he leads his gang, they will go: for the Reds today, tomorrow for the Whites.”65 But Budyonny and his army, formed to counter the Whites’ devastating Cossack cavalry, had pushed Denikin’s forces into the sea at Novorossiysk in the southeast in February 1920. Their tactics combined supreme mobility with mass: they probed for enemy weak spots, then concentrated all forces upon that point to smash through and wreak havoc deep in the enemy rear, thereby forcing a panicked enemy retreat, which they savagely converted into a rout. To reach the southwestern front from Novorossiysk, the Red’s First Cavalry Army traveled westward more than 750 miles on horseback.66 In late May 1920, Polish intelligence, from an airplane, spotted the dust storm that the Red cavalry’s horses were kicking up en route.67

Before the Red cavalry swept across Ukraine, on April 29, 1920, Sergei Kamenev, Red supreme commander, had written to Lenin requesting that Mikhail Tukhachevsky be placed in overall charge of the army in the field for a Polish campaign.68 Tukhachevsky was not merely an aristocrat; he could trace his ancestry back to a twelfth-century noble clan of the Holy Roman Empire that had served the princes of Kievan Rus. His mother was a peasant. He was graduated first in his class at the Alexander Military School in 1914 and chose the Semenov Guards, one of the empire’s two oldest and most prestigious regiments, which were attached to the court. “He was a well-proportioned youth, rather presumptuous, feeling himself born for great things,” recalled a friend.69 Another classmate recalled that Tukhachevsky behaved despotically toward underclassmen and that “everyone tried to avoid him, being afraid.” (Three younger cadets he disciplined were said to have committed suicide.)70 During the Great War, Tukhachevsky fell captive to the Germans in June 1915, becoming one of 5,391 Russian officers held as POWs. Unlike General Lavr Kornilov, who quickly escaped, Tukhachevsky languished two and a half years in Ingoldstadt, a camp outside Munich (the same place de Gaulle had been interned). He made it back to Russia just days before the Bolshevik seizure of power, volunteered for the Red Army early, and even joined the party (April 1918).71 In summer 1918, White forces had captured him in Simbirsk but the young Bolshevik activist Jonava Vareikis rescued him.72 In fall 1918, Tukhachevsky smashed the Whites at Simbirsk (Lenin’s hometown), and in 1919 he triumphed in the Urals uplands, chasing Kolchak’s army into Siberia, where it would be annihilated.73 By the time he spoke at the General Staff Academy in December 1919, outlining a theory of “revolutionary war,” he was recognized as the top Red commander. In spring 1920 his star rose higher still when, as the commander of the Caucasus front, he helped smash Denikin’s army. Twenty-seven years old in 1920, the same age as his idol Napoleon during the fabled Italian campaign, he arrived at western front headquarters in Smolensk the week that Kiev had fallen to the Poles, and began to amass forces for a major strike to the northwest.

Another former tsarist officer, Alexander Yegorov (b. 1883)—a metalworker and lieutenant colonel who had taken over Tsaritsyn from Voroshilov and lost it, then lost Oryol to Denikin, but then initiated a spectacularly successful counteroffensive—was named top commander of the southwestern front. This is where Stalin had recently been appointed commissar. The southwest’s responsibilities included mopping up Wrangel’s White remnants in Crimea, but also, now, assuming a secondary part of the counterattack against Poland. On June 3, 1920, Stalin telegrammed Lenin demanding either an immediate armistice with Wrangel or an all-out offensive to smash him quickly. Lenin wrote to Trotsky aghast (“This is obviously utopian”). Trotsky was affronted that Stalin had bypassed his authority as head of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and gone to Lenin. “Possibly this was to make mischief,” Lenin admitted. “But the question must be discussed urgently.”74 No immediate decision was made on Wrangel. On June 5, in Ukraine, Budyonny’s cavalry ruptured Polish lines. “We have taken Kiev,” Trotsky gloated on June 12, adding that “the retreating Poles destroyed the passenger and freight rail stations, the electric station, the water mains, and the Vladimir Cathedral.” He advised publicizing these stories to exert international pressure on the Poles to stop destroying more infrastructure as they retreated.75 The advancing Reds, meanwhile, would loot and desecrate everything in their path: churches, shops, homes. “The universal calling card of a visit by Red soldiers,” one writer explained, “was shit—on furniture, on paintings, on beds, on carpets, in books, in drawers, on plates.”76

Stalin publicly expressed doubts about mission creep in the Polish campaign to a newspaper at southwestern front HQ in Kharkov on June 24, 1920. “Some of them are not satisfied with the successes on the Front and shout, ‘March on Warsaw,’” he observed, in words evidently aimed at Tukhachevsky. “Others are not satisfied with the defense of our republic against enemy attack, and proudly proclaim that they can make peace only with ‘a red Soviet Warsaw.’”77 But such doubts were lost in the euphoria spurred by battlefield successes. “Soldiers of the workers revolution!” Tukhachevsky stated in a directive issued at western front HQ in Smolensk (his hometown) on July 2, cosigned by western front commissars Ivar Smilga and Józef Unszlicht. “The time for payback has arrived. Our soldiers are going on the offensive across the entire front. . . . Those taking part smashed Kolchak, Denikin, and Yudenich. . . . Let the lands ruined by the Imperialist War testify to the revolution’s blood-reckoning with the old world and its servants. . . . In the West will be decided the fate of the world revolution. Across the corpse of White Poland lies the way to world conflagration. On our bayonets we will carry happiness and peace to laboring humankind. . . . To Vilna, Minsk, and Warsaw—march!”78

Eight days later, in the south, Budyonny, having completely rolled Polish forces back, occupied what had been Piłsudski’s field headquarters at the launching-off point of his Ukrainian campaign, the town of Rivne/Równe, and its richly symbolic Hotel Versailles.79 (Lenin liked to denounce Poland as the “bastard child” of Versailles.) The Red Army now stood upon the Bug River, the rough divide between mostly Polish-speaking territories and mostly Ukrainian-speaking ones.80 Even though Tukhachevsky had already called for a march on Warsaw, strategy remained undecided in the Red camp. Trotsky, Stalin, Dzierzynski, and Radek—just back from a year in a Berlin prison, and considered well informed on Polish affairs—argued that an offensive on Warsaw would never succeed unless the Polish working class rose in rebellion, a remote prospect.81 Stalin added, in a public warning in Pravda (July 11, 1920), that “it is laughable to talk about a ‘march on Warsaw’ and more broadly about the solidity of our successes while the Wrangel danger is not liquidated.”82 That very day, however, Minsk fell to forces directed by Tukhachevsky. Poland’s government again appealed to the Allies. The French government, still angry at Piłsudski’s recklessness, nonetheless suggested an anti-Bolshevik operation; the British government, on July 11, sent the Bolsheviks a note signed by Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon proposing an armistice on western territorial terms favorable to Soviet Russia, an armistice with Wrangel and a neutral zone in Crimea (Wrangel’s sanctuary), accompanied by a stern warning not to cross into “ethnographical” Polish territory. The note seemed to establish a Polish-Soviet boundary some fifty miles east of the Bug (essentially the 1797 border between Prussia and imperial Russia); it would become known as the Curzon Line.83 The Poles were taken aback: the British appeared to be giving away eastern territories the Poles viewed as their “historic” patrimony (whoever might be living there as of 1920).84 To Lenin, it looked like the British wanted, Gibraltar style, to annex the Crimean peninsula, pointing a dagger, like White Poland, at the Reds; on July 12–13, he urged “a frantic acceleration of the offensive against Poland.”85

Battlefield momentum helped fulfill Lenin’s wishes: the First Cavalry Army had already advanced into ethnic Polish lands. Isaac Babel (b. 1894), a city boy from Odessa attached to one of Budyonny’s divisions, kept a diary that he later used to write short stories collected in Red Cavalry, making poetry out of their savagery.86 Tukhachevsky’s parallel northerly advance was also led by horsemen, the Third Cavalry Corps, under Haik Bzhishkyan. Known as Gai Dmitrievich Gai (b. 1887), he had been born in Tabriz, Persia, the son of an Armenian father and Persian mother who had emigrated from the Caucasus but in 1901 had returned to Tiflis; Gai fought for Russia in the Great War. Although just half the size of the First Cavalry Army, on which it was modeled, and without a Babel to immortalize its exploits, Gai’s Third Cavalry Corps would manage to cover twice the ground at twice the speed of Budyonny’s sabers, and against the main Polish concentrations, whose lines they pierced repeatedly. Gai personally could not match Budyonny in horsemanship, but he did so in terror tactics and, what is more, he knew how to employ cavalry as a spearhead for infantry.87 (This would be the last significant reliance on cavalry in European history.) Impatiently, Lenin instructed foreign affairs commissar Georgy Chicherin, who was negotiating a treaty with Lithuanian nationalists (signed July 12), that “all these concessions are unimportant. . . . We must occupy and Sovietize. . . . We must ensure that we first Sovietize Lithuania and then give it back to the Lithuanians.”88 In fact, Gai chased the Poles from Wilno/Vilna, entering the city on July 14, ahead of the Lithuanian nationalists.89 The next day Gai received his second Order of the Red Banner.90

Sergei Kamenev, on July 14, advised war commissar Trotsky that whatever position the regime adopted toward the Curzon Note, with the Poles on the run, “it would be more desirable to enter peace negotiations without ceasing combat operations.”91 Two days later, the Central Committee assembled to discuss the Curzon Note, among other issues; Stalin, at southwestern front headquarters in Kharkov, was the only politburo member absent. Trotsky urged negotiations, arguing that the Red Army and the country were exhausted from war.92 But the majority followed Lenin in rejecting Entente mediation and continuing the military action.93 On July 17, Lenin telegraphed the two top frontline commissars, Stalin and Smilga (western front), crowing about his policy victory and instructing them, “Please expedite the order for a furiously ramped up offensive.”94 Already on July 19, Gai’s forces seized Grodno. Red Supreme Commander Sergei Kamenev arrived in Minsk, the new western front HQ, to survey the situation; around midnight on July 22–3, he directed Tukhachevsky that Warsaw be captured no later than August 12, 1920, a mere six weeks into the Red Army campaign.95

Lenin had ridden to power by denouncing the “imperialist” war. Had he accepted the Curzon Note as a basis for a peace settlement—whether of his own volition or, because the unthinkable happened and Trotsky and Stalin teamed up to impose their well-founded skepticism upon the politburo—then the Poles reluctantly would have been forced to accept the Curzon Note as well. This would have put Ukraine, most of Belarus, and Lithuania in Soviet hands. Instead, Lenin dreamed of igniting a pan-European revolutionary blaze. He rolled the iron dice.

LENIN’S FLIGHT OF FANCY

Moscow formed a “Polish Revolutionary Committee” on July 23 consisting of a handful of Polish Bolsheviks, including the Chekists Dzierzynski and Unszlicht. That same day, Stalin’s southwestern front redirected its forces from the Lublin-Warsaw salient farther south, toward Lwów/Lviv, Galicia’s eastern capital.96 Partly this was because the northern-salient offensive was going so well. In addition, Greater Romania, the power in southeastern Europe, whose forces had crushed the Hungarian Soviet republic, had occupied tsarist Bessarabia and clashed with Soviet troops; Stalin sought to deter Romanian forces.97 Trotsky, too, was worried Romania might go on the offensive now that the Red Army had crossed the Curzon Line. Occupying Lwów/Lviv, therefore, could secure the Soviet flank with Romania and furnish a base for the offensive military revolutionizing in Central Europe that Lenin sought. Lev Kamenev, negotiating with the British in London for recognition of the Soviet Union, had written to Lenin on the urgency of capturing Lwów/Lviv, because Curzon had acknowledged it as Russia’s and because it was a gateway to Hungary.98 On July 23, a giddy Lenin wrote to Stalin of a Sovietization thrust all the way to the Italian peninsula: “Zinoviev, Bukharin, and I, too, think that revolution in Italy should be spurred on immediately. . . Hungary should be Sovietized, and perhaps also the Czech lands and Romania.” Stalin, indulging Lenin, responded the next day from Kharkov that it would indeed be “sinful not to encourage revolution in Italy. . . . We need to lift anchor and get under way before imperialism manages little by little to fix its broken-down cart . . . and open its own decisive offensive.” Stalin also observed that Poland essentially was already “defeated.”99

Full speed ahead: On the northern Smolensk-Warsaw axis, on July 30, the Polish Revolutionary Committee set up HQ in a commandeered noble palace overlooking Białystok/Belostok, which happened to be a majority Yiddish-speaking city.100 Here the handful of imported Polish Bolsheviks pronounced themselves a “provisional” government for a socialist Poland.101 Local government and community organizations were dissolved. Factories, landlord property, and forests were declared “nationalized.” Shops and warehouses (mostly Jewish owned) were looted.102 “For your freedom and ours!” proclaimed the Polish Revolutionary Committee’s manifesto.103 On August 1, Tukhachevsky’s armies, slicing through Polish lines, seized Brest-Litovsk, richly symbolic and just 120 miles from Warsaw. His shock attacks, designed to exert psychological as well as military pressure, were encircling the enemy, with Gai bounding ahead on the right flank to annihilate any Polish soldiers in retreat. Gai’s cavalry soon dashed to the vicinity of Torun, northwest of Warsaw, a mere 150 miles from Berlin, but he was under orders not to cross the German border.104 At the same time, the advancing Red Army was forced to live off the land, and its ranks were diminishing. “Some were barefoot, others wore bast leggings, others some kind of rubber confections,” one observer commented of the Red rank-and-file. A parish priest in a Polish town, hardly pro-Soviet, observed of the Red Army invaders that “one’s heart ached at the sight of this famished and tattered mob.”105 Furthermore, once the stubborn Tukhachevsky fully acknowledged how badly his headlong charge had exposed his left flank, he and Sergei Kamenev belatedly sought to cover it by hastily shifting the southwestern front forces under Yegorov and Stalin northward, and transferring them to Tukhachevsky’s command.106 But the shift and transfer from the southwestern front to the western Polish front never took place.

The Bolsheviks were divided about whether to press on while the battlefield was fast-moving. The British government was threatening military intervention or sanctions against the Bolsheviks and on August 2, the politburo (in Stalin’s absence) discussed the possibility of concluding a peace with “bourgeois Poland.” But for Lenin Poland as well as Crimea were of a piece—two toeholds for world imperialism, at the pinnacle of which he saw London. And so, it was now decided that the fight would continue, but the southwestern front should be divided, with a part diverting to the southern front (against Wrangel) and the rest folding into Tukhachevsky’s western front (against Piłsudski). Stalin and Yegorov resisted, however. On August 3, Lenin wrote to Stalin, “I do not fully understand why you are not satisfied with the division of the fronts. Communicate your reasons.” Lenin concluded by insisting on “the accelerated liquidation of Wrangel.”107 The next day Lenin asked for Stalin’s assessment. “I do not know, frankly, why you need my opinion,” Stalin replied testily (August 4), adding “Poland has been weakened and needs a breathing space,” which should not be afforded by peace talks. The offensive into Poland, though not his idea, was now on.108 A Central Committee plenum met on August 5 and again endorsed the politburo decision to continue the military operations; Sergei Kamenev passed on the orders.109

But the key forces under Stalin that were ordered northward, Budyonny’s now battle-scarred First Cavalry Army, had been encircled near Lwów/Lviv, far from Warsaw. They broke out on August 6, but were said to be “collapsing from exhaustion, unable to move,” and sought several days’ respite to lick their wounds. Also, Budyonny intended to resume the siege on Lwów/Lviv and complete its capture.110 In addition, Yegorov and Stalin, who were supposed to fight Wrangel, simply did not want to give up their prize cavalry to Tukhachevsky.111 Lenin telegrammed Stalin on August 7 that “your successes against Wrangel will help remove the vacillation inside the Central Committee” about continuing military operations against Poland, but he added that “much depends on Warsaw and its fate.”112 Already on August 10, Tukhachevsky’s forces approached Warsaw’s outskirts.113 The imperative to send Budyonny to link up with Tukhachevsky seemed diminished. The next day, Lenin again telegrammed Stalin: “Our victory is great and will be greater still if we defeat Wrangel. . . . Make every effort to take all of the Crimea with an immediate blow whatever the cost. Everything depends on this.”114 On August 11 and 12, Kamenev repeated his orders to redirect southwestern front units from Lwów/Lviv toward Lublin.115 Stalin ignored both Sergei Kamenev’s orders (about Lublin) and Lenin’s instructions (about Wrangel), in apparently blatant insubordination.116

What was Stalin thinking? Trotsky would speculate that because Tukhachevsky was going to capture Warsaw, Stalin at least wanted Lwów/Lviv, and therefore “was waging his own war.”117 Whatever Stalin’s vanity, however, not taking Lwów/Lviv, at that moment, seemed idiotic. Soviet reports had the western front march on Warsaw proceeding splendidly on its own, while the transfer orders for the southwestern front were close to pointless, given that it was near impossible for Budyonny or others to fight their way up near Warsaw in time to make a difference (the Reds now envisioned the Polish capital’s capture on or about August 16).118 Moreover, Lenin, had initially approved Stalin’s capture of Lwów/Lviv in order to acquire a revolutionary springboard. Still, on August 13, Sergei Kamenev repeated the transfer order.119 Stalin and Yegorov replied that their units were deep in battle for Lwów/Lviv and that altering their battle tasks was “already impossible.”120 On August 14, Stalin was summoned to Moscow to clear up the dispute face to face. (Budyonny would finally abandon the siege of Lwów/Lviv, reluctantly, on August 20—a strategic blunder—only to be shifted one direction one day, another direction the next.)121

But here was the most intriguing piece of all: Tukhachevsky was ordered not to attack Warsaw directly, but to circle around to its northwest, partly in order to block the Entente from supplying the Poles from Danzig and the Polish Corridor, but mainly to turn those territories over to Germany. Politically, Germany vacillated between loathing Communism versus looking for international aid against Poland. One Polish official observed that the German government “found it impossible to reconcile its foreign policy, which demanded the annihilation of Poland, with its domestic policy, which was very largely directed by the fear of a Spartacist revolution.”122 In fact, the German government was committed to border revisionism, but only by peaceful means; the Red Army, of all instruments, was voluntarily going to restore Germany’s 1914 borders—in order to strike a death blow at the Versailles Order. Frontline Red commanders even told German observers they were prepared to march with Germany on France.123

What was Lenin thinking? All during the key decision making regarding operations in Poland, from July 19 through August 7, 1920, Lenin had been exultantly preoccupied with the Second Congress of the Communist International, which had drawn more than 200 attendees, far more than the pitiful founding congress back in March 1919.124 Arriving in Petrograd, site of the first socialist breakthrough, they were treated to a sumptuous meal in Smolny’s Great Hall, participated in a march with workers, then, at the former stock exchange, watched a costume drama performed by a cast of thousands titled Spectacle of the Two Worlds. Lenin in his opening speech prophesied that the Versailles Treaty would meet the same fate as Brest-Litovsk.125 When the delegates traveled to Moscow, to continue, the Bolshevik authorities assembled what they claimed were 250,000 workers in the Red capital to greet them (workers were granted paid time off to appear, followed by minibanquets in canteens).126 The proceedings resumed in the former Vladimir’s Hall, a throne room of the medieval Kremlin. (The delegates were housed at the Delovoi Dvor, a former Moscow merchant hotel emporium.) Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which criticized almost all non-Bolshevik socialists and was written in April 1920, came out in June in Russian and, in July, in German, English, and French; each delegate received a copy. More immediately, the congress sessions transpired under an oversized map of Poland on which Red Army advances were recorded as each news flash arrived. This was the context in which Lenin had enthused to Stalin, in the telegram of July 23 about going beyond Poland, gushing that “the situation in the Comintern is superb.”127

The Comintern Congress came on the heels of mass demonstrations against colonialism in Korea and China and although the largest non-Russian delegations were from Germany, Italy, and France, compared with the First Comintern Congress, whose meager Asian representation had included only a few Chinese and Korean emigres, the Second Congress had at least 30 Asian delegates. Lenin stressed that “the whole world is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and a very small number of oppressor nations that are enormously rich and strong in the military sense,” and that Soviet Russia was leading this struggle. What he did not say outright at the Comintern Congress was that Germany—his ally since 1917—was supposed to help smash world imperialism and Versailles.

Here was the source of Tukhachevsky’s harebrained military maneuver to regain Danzig and the Corridor for Germany. Egged on by Lenin, Tukhachevsky’s troops north of Warsaw entered a void, without reserves, and with a still utterly exposed left flank (the one closest to Warsaw). He had to assume, or hope, that the retreating Piłsudski would not manage to regroup. Piłsudski had pulled back all Polish forces to the very gates of Warsaw, facilitating Tukhachevsky’s heady advance, but also buying time. Still, the Polish marshal enjoyed nothing of his subsequent prestige, having led his pre-1914 political party to division, his legions in the Great War to internment, and his invasion of Ukraine to an invasion of Poland. The Entente had given him up for a political and military corpse—just as Lenin and Tukhachevsky did. But on the very morning of the day the Bolsheviks expected Warsaw to fall (August 16), Piłsudski launched a counteroffensive: five divisions shot through a nearly 100-mile gap on Tukhachevsky’s left wing, advancing 40 miles in twenty-four hours without encountering the Red Army. Piłsudski, beginning to suspect a trap, toured the front in his car in search of the enemy. By nightfall, the Poles, deep in Tukhachevsky’s rear, had seized the heavy Soviet guns that were being moved up to hammer Warsaw.

Shock! As late as August 17, an oblivious Pravda was still reporting that “Polish white troops flee backward under the strikes of the Worker-Peasant fist.” That same day, Stalin, in Moscow as a result of his recall from Kharkov, requested to be relieved of all his military duties. Tukhachevsky, at HQ in Minsk, belatedly became aware of the Polish breach of his left wing and ordered a retreat. “Years on he would say of that day that he had aged ten years,” one contemporary observed.128 Sergei Kamenev called Minsk just after midnight on August 18–19, demanding to know why the Polish counterattack had come as such a surprise, showing his own profound ignorance.129 On August 19, Lenin desperately begged Radek, who had just been added to the Polish Revolutionary Committee “government” preparing for installation in Warsaw, to “go directly to Dzierzynski and insist that the gentry and the kulaks are destroyed ruthlessly and rather more quickly and energetically,” and “that the peasants are helped effectively to take over estate land and forests.”130 Already the next day, however, Lenin informed Lev Kamenev in London, “It is unlikely that we will soon take Warsaw.”131 Pravda (August 21) lamented: “Just a week ago we had brilliant reports from the Polish front.” Kamenev responded that “the policy of the bayonet, as usual, has broken down ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances’”—an undisguised rebuke of Lenin.132

Piłsudski scored a spectacular victory, the “miracle on the Vistula.” In the ensuing rout retreat, Tukhachevsky lost three of his five armies, one to annihilation and two to flight; the other two were severely maimed.133 It was a staggering defeat, the likes of which often end military careers. Gai fled with his celebrated cavalry into German East Prussia, where they were disarmed and arrested.134 Finger-pointing was inevitable. Because the total strength of the Red Army in the final assault on Warsaw had been 137,000, and Red operations in Crimea and Lwów/Lvov combined had numbered 148,000, those troops were viewed as the decisive missing factor. And Yegorov and Stalin had failed to transfer them.135 Never mind that the transfer of Budyonny’s cavalry in time was no simple task. An order had been given. On September 1, 1920, the politburo accepted Stalin’s resignation from his military posts.136 The way was open to scapegoat his insubordination. And Piłsudski’s army was still on its eastward march.

PEOPLES OF THE EAST

In the South Caucasus (known in Russian as Transcaucasia), following the simultaneous breakup of the Ottoman and Russian empires (and, in the case of Armenia, following military clashes with the Ottomans), eastern Armenia, northern Azerbaijan, and Georgia emerged as independent states. But on April 27, 1920, without a fight, the Bolshevik Red Army captured Baku, capital of the Musavat or nationalist Azerbaijan government, whose flag combined blue for Turkic civilization, green for Islam, and red for European socialism. The Georgian Bolshevik Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze (the main political commissar) and none other than Tukhachevsky (the military commander) had found an opportune moment to attack when the Azerbaijanis decided to send 20,000 units of their 30,000-troop army to respond to communal clashes between Armenians and Azeris in a disputed mountain region known as Karabakh.137 Additionally, Baku—uniquely in Muslim-populated areas—had a substantial population of industrial workers, some of whom belonged to the Bolshevik party and welcomed a Red invasion. Indeed, Baku, in one of the instances when Stalin and Trotsky agreed, became a springboard. At dawn on May 18, 1920, a Soviet naval force of perhaps thirteen gunboats, which amalgamated Soviet sailors, Soviet Azerbaijan infantry and cavalry, and ethnic Iranian longshoremen from Baku, invaded Iran, in pursuit of Russian ships and ammunition formerly controlled by the White military leader Denikin and now in the hands of a British military occupation of Iran.138

The landing was led by Fyodor Raskolnikov as well as Orjonikidze, who reasoned the British might try to reequip the ships and send them back into action against the Reds. But now the British military handed everything over and retreated inland toward Tehran. “English colonial policy was confronted with the real forces of the Workers’ State at Anzali and experienced a defeat,” wrote the Soviet journalist Larissa Reisner, who was married to Raskolnikov.139 On May 24, Mirza Kuchek Khan (b. 1880), leader of a long-standing anticolonial and constitutionalist movement in northern Iran’s Gilan forest, who opposed both Russian and British involvement, was persuaded to take advantage of the Red incursion and, citing the Bolshevik claim to be anti-imperialist, declared himself head of a Persian Soviet Socialist Republic in Gilan province.140 Lev Karakhan, a foreign affairs official accompanying the invasion force, telegrammed Moscow that “the toilers and the bourgeois democrats should be made to unite in the name of Persia’s liberty and be instigated to rise up against the British and expel them from the country,” though he cautioned against full Sovietization given the underdevelopment.141 But Georgy Chicherin, foreign affairs commissar, complained bitterly to Lenin, dismissing the episode as “Stalin’s Gilan republic.”142

Kuchek’s coalition—ultraleftists and constitutionalists, anarchists and Kurdish chieftains, anti-imperialists and Russians—was unstable, and he abjured the role of Lenin-style autocrat; in fact, he departed the province’s capital (Resht) back to the forest in July 1920, allowing Soviet operatives and Iranian Communists to take over.143 Bolsheviks in Iran contemplated combining their motley 1,500-person guerilla force of Iranian forest partisans, Azerbaijanis from both sides of the border, Kurds, and Armenians with Red Army reinforcements in a march on Tehran. This never came to pass, owing to Iranian counterforces. But flush with success in northern Iran, Orjonikidze helped suggest and plan, beginning in late July 1920, what would be a weeklong Congress of the Peoples of the East to take place in Baku, now the Caspian showcase for Moscow’s appeal to Muslims.144

The Congress of the Peoples of the East, the largest ever gathering under the Comintern aegis, opened on September 1, 1920, not long after the Bolshevik debacle in the West against Poland. The Comintern aimed the gathering at the “enslaved masses’” of Turkey, Armenia, and Persia, and as if on cue, the August 20, 1920, Treaty of Sevres that the Entente imposed on the defeated Ottoman empire showcased the British and French diktat over the Near East: Entente oil and commercial concessions in Ottoman lands were confirmed, German property there was taken by the Entente, and the partitioning of Ottoman lands—one of the Entente’s secret war aims—was begun with the declaration of mandates and protectorates. In Baku, meanwhile, nearly 1,900 delegates massed, about 60 of whom were women; the largest contingents were Turkic and Persian speakers, followed by Armenians and Russians, then Georgians. Delegations also arrived from India (15 attendees) and China (8). A substantial number, perhaps a majority of the attendees, were not Communists but radical nationalists.145 The congress’s manifesto demanded “liberation of all humanity from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery.”146 Russian speeches were translated into Azerbaijani Turkish and Persian instantaneously. Karl Radek, the Hungarian exile Bela Kun, and the American John Reed gave speeches, but the featured orator was Zinoviev, Comintern chairman. “Brothers,” he thundered, “we summon you to a holy war, in the first place against British imperialism!” (Tumultuous applause, prolonged shouts of “Hurrah.” Members of the Congress stand up, brandishing their weapons. The speaker is unable to continue for some time. All the delegates stand up and applaud. Shouts of “We swear it.”)147

Comintern policy in fact was divided over the colonial world. Lenin had argued that given the limited size of the colonial proletariat, Communist parties there needed to enter coalitions with bourgeois nationalists in order to emancipate colonial peoples from imperialist powers. But others, such as Manabendra Nath Roy, from Bengal, insisted that Communists in colonial settings should prepare to seize power themselves. Some delegates thought the first strategy did not preclude a shift to the latter at the opportune moment.148 But Roy refused to attend the Baku congress, dismissing it as “Zinoviev’s circus.”149

Stalin did not attend Baku—the Polish war was still on—but by virtue of being nationalities commissar, he had had more contact with the national minority Communists of Soviet Russia than any other top Bolshevik figure.150 Not that he relished the interminable squabbles among national representatives nursing bottomless grievances and boundless claims. His deputy, Stanisław Pestkowski, recalled of the commissariat that Stalin “would suddenly disappear, doing it with extraordinary skill: ‘just for a moment’ he would disappear from the room and hide in one of the recesses of Smolny, and later the Kremlin. It was impossible to find him. In the beginning we used to wait for him. But finally we would adjourn.”151 Later, during the civil war, Stalin was almost always away at the front.152 Even when he did make an appearance at the commissariat, he tended to undercut staff efforts to regularize a policy-making process (his non-consultative decision making provoked them to complain to the Central Committee).153 The commissariat had no jurisdiction over places like Azerbaijan, Belorussia, or Ukraine, all of which, even when re-Sovietized, were formally independent of Soviet Russia. Nor did the commissariat’s writ extend to the majority of Soviet Russia’s population (the Russians); rather, it was concerned with the 22 percent in the RSFSR who were national minorities. In that connection, however, Stalin had cultivated a coterie of Muslim radicals, jokingly called “Soviet sharia-ites,” in particular the ethnic Bashkir Akhmetzaki Validi (b. 1890) and the ethnic Tatar Mirsayet Soltanğaliev (b. 1892).

Tatars and Bashkirs, who lived north of the Caspian Sea—they were the world’s northernmost Muslims—were both Turkic-speaking peoples, but the Tatars were sedentary, and far more numerous, while the Bashkirs remained seminomadic. They intermingled with each other. The Tatar Soltanğaliev, born in a village near Ufa (Bashkiria), was the son of a teacher at a maktaba, where he studied by the “new method” (Jadid) of the self-styled Muslim modernizer Ismail Gasprinski. In addition to Tatar and Arabic, Soltanğaliev’s father taught him Russian, which allowed him to enter the Pedagogical School in Kazan, an incubator of the Tatar elite, including most of the Tatar Bolsheviks.154 In 1917, responding to fellow Muslims who accused him of betrayal for cooperating with Bolsheviks, Soltanğaliev explained that “they also declared war on English imperialism, which oppresses India, Egypt, Afghanistan, Persia and Arabia. They are also the ones who raised arms against French imperialism, which enslaves Morocco, Algiers, and other Arab states of Africa. How could I not go to them?”155 He helped organize the defense of Kazan against the Whites, and though he was an undisguised Tatar imperialist inside Russia and a pan-Turanian whose ambitions stretched from Kazan to Iran and Afghanistan, Turkey and Arabia, Stalin made him Russia’s highest profile Muslim Communist, appointing Soltanğaliev head of the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East. Informally, he was known as the chairman of the Muslim Communist party, even though no such entity existed. As for the Bashkir Validi, a Turcologist, he was not a Communist but a moderate socialist and Bashkir patriot who took a different path into Stalin’s patronage: during the dark days of the civil war against Kolchak, Validi offered to desist from leading his 6,500 Bashkir troops against the Reds alongside the Whites and instead to turn their weapons against the admiral. Stalin, in connection with the negotiations with Validi in Moscow, published an ingratiating article in Pravda, “Our Tasks in the East” (March 2, 1919), noting that the 30 million Turkic- and Persian-speaking inhabitants of Soviet Russia “present a rich diversity of culturally backward peoples, either stuck in the middle ages or only recently entered into the realm of capitalist development. . . . Their cultural limitations and their backwardness, which cannot be eliminated with one stroke, allowed themselves to be felt (and will continue to let themselves be felt) in the matter of building Soviet power in the East.” This was a challenge to be addressed.156

The Stalin-Bashkir talks coincided with the First Comintern Congress and then the 8th Party Congress, and in Moscow, Validi discovered that compared with the hard-line antinationalist Luxemburgists he met, “Lenin and Stalin really did seem like very positive people.” Validi also met with Trotsky, and noticed that Stalin and Trotsky hated each other (and competed for his favor). He further came to see that Stalin was a provocateur. Validi would recall how, a bit later, in Ukraine, Stalin invited him to his civil war train, a carriage from the tsarist era. “We drank Georgian wine and ate grilled chicken,” Validi wrote. “Stalin was affectionate. Getting close to my soul, he said that he was an Easterner, that he worked exclusively for us eastern people, representatives of small, downtrodden nations. All our misfortunes derived from Trotsky, whom he called a Jewish internationalist. He [Stalin] understood us well, because he was the son of a Georgian writer and himself had grown up in a national milieu. He accused the Russians of chauvinism and cursed them. He, like Lenin, said that I should work on an all-Russia level, and not get too involved in the management of a small nation: all nations will gradually acquire rights.”157 This Asiatic pose was a side of Stalin almost no one saw.158

Validi’s reward for betraying Kolchak on the eve of the Whites’ planned spring offensive was the creation of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), with a treaty signed on March 20, 1919—the third day of the 8th Party Congress (Lenin had been rushing to get the agreement as a showpiece for the congress). The Bashkir military commanders who had been White Guards suddenly were constituted as a Bashkir Revolutionary Committee—a turnabout neither side viewed with trust.159 (Validi would admit that he hid the negotiations with the Soviet authorities from his men.)160 The Bashkirs, under imperial Russia, had never been serfs and had been able to maintain their own army, and numbered perhaps 2 million, spread across the southwestern slopes of the Urals. Validi, who drew the map of their autonomy, maximized not territory but ethnic population, and in such a way that he would minimize inclusion of Russian colonists. The result was a Lesser Bashkiria.161 All the same, Tatar nationalists erupted in fury: their dream of a Greater Tataria enveloping Bashkiria had suffered a mortal blow.162

Stalin’s creation of a Bashkir republic in 1919—just like the earlier failed Tatar-Bashkir expediency—did not derive from a thought-through strategy of national divide and rule; rather, it was an improvisation aimed at dividing anti-Bolshevik forces.163 On the ground, however, disaster ensued. A flood of Russian and other non-ethnic-Bashkir Communists entered the area, and they directly and indirectly sabotaged the autonomy: they were fighting to create a world of Communism, not for some small nation’s “rights.” Local Red Army officers, meanwhile, understood the agreement as a surrender, and proceeded to disarm and imprison the Bashkir fighters, provoking revolt. The Red cavalry horde, moreover, engaged in mass pillage, murder, and rape. Their top commander, none other than the cavalryman Gai, tried to rein in the indiscipline to little avail (later he was blamed as an Armenian likely to have been deliberately anti-Muslim).164 Gai refused Validi’s entreaties to allow the Bashkir units to remain intact, but the result was that the Bashkir First Cavalry regiment managed to reconstitute itself—on the side of Kolchak. Validi desperately telegrammed Stalin about the misunderstandings and atrocities. (Stalin, far away in Moscow, invited him for discussions.)165 Only a White advance put a stop to the Red Army bacchanalia of violence, but after the Whites were driven out again, the Reds enacted “revenge” on the Bashkirs. The bloodshed and bitter recriminations became a matter of national debate, prompting the politburo in April 1920 to appoint a Bashkir commission headed by Stalin. Validi was summoned to Moscow and told he was needed there, evidently to separate him from his base in Bashkiria. Stalin told him that Trotsky was the one who had decided to detain him in Moscow, and that Trotsky and Dzierzynski were worried about Validi’s growing authority in the eastern provinces.166 Validi met with the Bashkir “commission” and Kamenev told him they were expanding Bashkiria to include Ufa and other regions, which happened to have Russian majorities.167 Severe restrictions on Bashkir autonomy were promulgated on May 19, 1920: the Bashkir military, supply, finance, and much more were subordinated directly to the RSFSR.168 The politburo felt constrained to declare that the Bashkir Autonomous Republic “was not a chance, temporary phenomenon . . . but an organic, autonomous part of the RSFSR”—indicative of the doubters, on all sides.169

Bashkiria’s circumscribed “autonomy” became a model. Between 1920 and 1923, the RSFSR would establish seventeen autonomous national republics and provinces on its territory.170 The immediate next one was Tataria. Even without Bashkiria (for now), Soltanğaliev tried once more to get Lenin to accept a grand Turkic state of Tataria, linked to Turkestan and the Qazaq steppe, under Tatar leadership, something resembling Piłsudski’s imagined Polish-led federation over Belorussia and Lithuania. Instead, a small Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was declared on May 27, 1920. It included only 1.5 million of the 4.2 million Tatars in Russia (not only were three quarters of the country’s Tatars left out, but Tatars had been made a majority in Bashkiria).171 Moreover, rather than Soltanğaliev, Stalin made Sahib Garei Said-Galiev (b. 1894) head of the Tatar government, a man with far less of a following among Muslims outside Tataria, less nationalist, more obedient, and a diehard enemy of Soltanğaliev. Said-Galiev soon accused Soltanğaliev of attempted assassination; the latter responded that the alleged assassination was simulated to discredit him; a Moscow investigation proved inconclusive, except to establish that Said-Galiev spent a great deal of time sitting around drinking tea and bickering.172 Soltanğaliev and his supporters remained determined to use all levers at their command to transform Kazan into a Muslim capital for the East.173 By contrast, Validi and his supporters secretly plotted to quit their official posts and oppose the Soviet regime by force. In June 1920, they disappeared underground, joining the “Basmachi” in Turkestan. (The epithet likely derived from the Turkic basmacı and connoted frontier freebooters or brigands, analogous to Cossacks; Russian speakers generally applied it to any Muslims conducting partisan war or other resistance against the Bolshevik regime.) In the Bashkir ASSR, furious Russian Communists—who had let the counterrevolutionaries escape—purged the remaining ethnic Bashkir officials and instituted another anti-Bashkir terror.174 The defections raised a scandal that could potentially damage Stalin politically: after all, Validi was seen as his protégé.

In September 1920, when the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East opened, Mirsayet Soltanğaliev—who had been one of the original proponents and invited to speak—was nowhere to be found; Stalin had blocked him from even attending. But Validi eluded a Cheka manhunt, traveled all the way from Turkestan by rail and other means to Baku and took part in the Congress of the Peoples of the East even though the political police were combing Baku for him.175 On September 12 Validi wrote a letter to Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Rykov, condemning Soviet national minority policy as tantamount to tsarist colonial practice, and complaining that Stalin had tricked him. He deemed the Georgian “an insincere, masked dictator who plays with people.” Stalin tried to lure Validi to Moscow, supposedly getting a message to him that noted how he was “much smarter and more energetic than Soltanğaliev,” how he was “an extraordinary, powerful person, with character, with willpower, a do-er,” who had proven he “could create an army from the Basmachi.” Validi would never be caught.176

A CENTRAL ASIAN ARK

In former tsarist Turkestan, multiple centers of would-be authority had arisen. Bolshevik rule among the Turcomans had been quickly overthrown in 1918, in revulsion, and been replaced by an anti-Bolshevik Transcaspian government, which was largely proletarian, but its desperate need to requisition grain also sparked revolt, and the Transcaspian “government” was reduced to a shadowy presence in the cities. It was swept aside by Red Army troops battling Kolchak’s forces in Siberia who swooped in and conquered Merv and Ashkhabad (July 1919), Kizil Arvat (October 1919), and finally the Turcoman capital of Krasnovodsk (February 1920). Farther inland, a second major center of power, Tashkent, was controlled by the Slavic-dominated local Soviet, which, as we saw, had massacred the Muslim Qoqand Autonomy in February 1918. The Tashkent soviet survived an internal putsch in January 1919 by its own commissar of war, who managed to execute fourteen top local Communists, but then “proceeded to get drunk,” according to a British eyewitness, and was undone by a detachment of lingering Hungarian POWs.177 A showy Red Terror killed an estimated 4,000 victims, on top of deaths from food shortages, even as Stalin instructed the Tashkent soviet on February 12, 1919, “to raise the cultural level of the laboring masses and rear them in a socialist manner, promote a literature in the local languages, appoint local people who are most closely connected with the proletariat to the Soviet organizations and draw them into the work of administering the territory.”178 Red Army troops from without arrived in Tashkent, under the command of Mikhail Frunze, a peasant lad who had a Russian mother and a Moldavian father, an army nurse who had served in tsarist Turkestan, where the boy was born. Frunze possessed no special military training, but in November 1919, he set about strengthening the counterinsurgency against Basmachi resistance.179 Turkestan’s final centers of authority were the two small “emirates” of Khiva and Bukhara, which had enjoyed special status in tsarist Russia and after 1917 had not come under Red control. They resembled jewels sparkling under poorly protected glass in front of well-armed thieves.

Bukhara had iconic status in the Inner Asian Muslim world as a center of traditional Islamic learning and of Sufi masters, and some Bolshevik insiders warned of the consequences of forcible seizure.180 “I think that in the military sense, it would not be difficult to crush their army,” Gersh Broido, the outgoing foreign affairs representative of the Turkestan Commission, wrote to Lenin in spring 1920, “but that would create a situation of prolonged war, in which the Red Army would turn out to be not the liberator but the occupier, and Bukharan partisan warriors will emerge as defenders. . . . Reactionaries will use this situation.” A military takeover, he warned, might even broadly unite Muslim and Turkic peoples against the Soviet regime.181 Frunze, however, would not be deterred. Khiva was seized first, after which, in June 1920, the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic was declared. Then, on July 24, 1920, Frunze wrote to Lenin explaining that in connection with Bukhara, waiting for revolution from within would take forever, and instead urged “revolution from without.”182 Preparations to storm Bukhara were simultaneous with the Red Army’s final advance on Warsaw. Beginning on August 30, 1920, after a small group of Turkic Communists staged an “uprising” and summoned “help,” Red Army forces assaulted the Bukharan emirate with about 15,000 troops. The Bukharans had at least twice that number, including irregulars, but the Reds had superior weapons, including eleven airplanes, and they bombed the old city’s ancient mosques and minarets, caravansaries, shrines, and tombs. On September 2, the Reds seized the emir’s massive Ark fortress, after which large-scale fires and mass looting ensued—silk caftans, jewels, even stones. The fate of the harem is anybody’s guess. On September 4, Frunze issued an order to halt the pillaging, threatening soldiers with execution, but he helped himself to fine swords and other trophies. The greatest haul was said to come from the emir’s vaults, which the dynasty had accumulated over the centuries and were estimated to hold up to 15 million rubles’ worth of gold; the treasure was loaded for “transfer” to Tashkent. The emir, for his part, escaped to Afghanistan, and may have carted away some portion of his treasure.183 He was the last direct descendant of the twelfth-century Mongol Chinggis Khan to rule anywhere in the world.

Frunze was transferred to Crimea, to lead the operations that would soon expel Baron Wrangel’s White army into exile, ending the Whites’ resistance for good, and garnering the Red commander surpassing military honors. But Frunze’s transfer out of Turkestan was shadowed by reports to Moscow of his troops’ shameful looting and gratuitous ruination of Bukhara.184 Word of the pillaging of the gold spread throughout the East, damaging the Soviets’ reputation.185 Jekabs Peterss, the Cheka plenipotentiary in Turkestan, wrote to Dzierzynski and Lenin, behind Frunze’s back, about military misbehavior. All across Eurasia, the Reds were battling among themselves over the spoils of war and prerogatives of unaccountable power—police operatives against army officers, party apparatchiks against the police, central plenipotentiaries against regional potentates. Denunciations swamped Moscow; “inconvenient” people were disgraced or simply shot. But rarely did such score settling reach the level that it did in Turkestan, and rarely did it seem to involve high principle.

Peterss, an ethnic Latvian (b. 1886) from a region on the Baltic Sea in the country’s far northwest, went up against Frunze, an ethnic Moldovan, from a region on the Black Sea in the country’s far southwest, who had been born (1885) in Pishpek in the shadows of the Pamir Mountains, in the deep east. Peterss was no calculating careerist trying to climb the greasy pole: he was already at the absolute top, carrying the prestige of being a founder of the Cheka; he had even briefly replaced Dzierzynski as Cheka chairman (during the Left SR fiasco when Dzierzynski was taken hostage). True, Peterss was not above shaving the truth, claiming in his party autobiography, for example, to be the son of a poor peasant while earlier he had divulged to an American journalist that his father had plenty of land and hired labor, but everyone did that. (Inevitably, the woman found him “an intense, quick, nervous little chap with a shock of curly black hair, an upturned nose that gave his face the suggestion of a question mark, and a pair of blue eyes full of human tenderness.”)186 Nor was Peterss the least squeamish about prosecution of the revolution and class warfare: he had conducted mass executions in 1919 Petrograd of former old regime personages, identifying them via the phone book and sending men to their door. Corruption, though, he would not tolerate: he was old school. After the sack of Bukhara, he arrested the Red field commander, Belov, who turned out to be in possession of a sack of gold, silver, and money.187 This induced Peterss to have his Chekists stop and surround Frunze’s train. “Yesterday evening,” Frunze wrote in a rage to Tashkent on September 21, 1920, “the entire corps, except for myself and [Gleb] Boki, were subject to searches, discrediting me in the eyes of subordinates.”

Frunze insisted that the authorities in Tashkent had a list of all the Bukharan valuables he had confiscated and put on his train, and that Peterss had a copy. It took Moscow party secretary Vyacheslav Molotov’s handiwork to kill the revolutionary tribunal that Peterss had raised by burying the matter in the party’s Central Control Commission. Nonetheless, Dzierzynski would ask one of his most trusted operatives “to put together a list, secretly, not alarming anyone, of where and how (to whom and how much) the Bukharan emir’s gold was distributed.”188 The results remain unknown.

A Turkestan “Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic” was ceremoniously proclaimed on September 24, 1920.189 A Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, paired with Khorezm, followed on October 8. Stalin had played next to no role in these Turkestan events—but soon his actions would be decisive for Central Asia’s fate. In the meantime, an uncanny number of high officials in his future personal dictatorship had launched or furthered their careers in the Turkestan conquests. Valerian Kuibyshev, for example, the future head of the party Control Commission under Stalin, was chairman of the Turkestan commission in spring-summer 1920, working to implant Bolshevik rule more deeply and plan the emirate conquests. Boki, the future head of the key secret cipher department under Stalin, served alongside Frunze. In the Turkestan Army’s political directorate, an unknown young operative headed the registration-information department—Alexander Poskryobyshev, Stalin’s future top aide, who would man the inner workings of the dictatorship for decades. Another young Communist operative, Lazar Kaganovich, was dispatched as a high-level party apparatchik official to Turkestan in September 1920.190 That same month, Grigory Sokolnikov (aka Girsh Briliant) replaced Frunze as the head of the Turkestan front and the Communist party Turkestan bureau. In Tashkent, Sokolnikov went on to introduce a local monetary reform, getting rid of the worthless local currency, presaging a countrywide monetary reform he would oversee as future finance commissar under Stalin in Moscow. In Turkestan, Sokolnikov also repealed requisitioning in favor of a tax in kind—what would be called, in Moscow, the New Economic Policy. Turkestan was a policy laboratory, and an Ark for Bolshevik careers.

NO GLORY

Lost wars always ripple through political systems. With the defeat in the Polish war still raw, Lenin delivered a rambling report on it at the opening of the 9th party conference in Moscow on September 22, 1920, to 241 delegates (116 with voting rights). He averred that because the Reds had defeated the White armies, those stooges of the Entente, “the defensive period of the war with worldwide imperialism was over, and we could, and had an obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war.” The “probe with bayonets” had been intended to reveal if revolution had genuinely ripened in Poland, “the center of the entire current system of international imperialism,” as well as in Germany, but as it happened, “readiness was slight.” Nonetheless, Lenin happily concluded that “we have already undermined the Versailles Treaty, and we will smash it at the first convenient opportunity,” because “despite the complete failure in the first instance, our first defeat, we will keep shifting from a defensive to an offensive policy over and over again until we finish all of them off for good.”191 Lenin’s political report would not even be voted upon (a first at a party gathering since the assumption of power), and he would not even bother to attend the closing session (September 25).192 Pravda’s account of Lenin’s September 22 speech omitted talk of “an offensive war” or of having tried to “Sovietize Poland,” to say nothing of “catastrophic,” “gigantic,” “unheard-of defeat.”193 In the conference discussion, Radek expressly blamed Lenin, prompting others to do so as well. It fell to Stalin to defend the Central Committee’s revolutionism. Suddenly, Trotsky laced into Stalin for having misled the Central Committee—in reporting that the Polish army in retreat had lost all fighting capacity—and for sabotaging the campaign by failing to implement troop transfer orders. Lenin piled on, attacking his Georgian protégé viciously.

On the second day (September 23), Stalin insisted on replying to Trotsky and Lenin, and divulged to the conference that he had voiced doubts about a campaign into Poland.194 In truth, the march on Warsaw had been the work of Tukhachevsky and Sergei Kamenev. But of course Lenin was the prime mover behind the debacle, and now he pulled the rug out from under Stalin, shifting the blame from his own too-optimistic reading of the revolutionary situation to the excessive pace of the military advance.195 In fact, had Tukhachevsky made it to Warsaw just three days earlier, his mad-dash battle plan might have caught the Polish camp in disarray.196 But what would Warsaw’s capture have brought?197 Tukhachevsky faced no greater prospect of holding on to Warsaw than Piłsudski had had of holding on to Kiev. The Red Army had known beforehand that it could not have garrisoned the whole land and had not intended to, but Lenin’s justification for the war—to spark a Polish worker uprising—had failed.198 The Reds had picked up very few deserters from the Polish side; even ethnic Ukrainians and Belorussians did not join the Red side in numbers. As for the Polish Communist party, its membership was minuscule, and it had to compete for worker allegiance—to say nothing of the alliance of the majority peasants—with the Jewish Bund, the Poale Zion, the Social Democrats, and Poland’s large self-standing trade union movement.199 Grassroots Polish Revolutionary Committees were established only in the Białystok/Belostok region, and existed for less than a month.200 Even the head of the central Polish Revolutionary Committee in Białystok/Belostok had warned against hoping to instigate a workers revolution in Poland, given national solidarities.201 Lenin had ignored their warnings.

Privately at least, Lenin could show contrition.202 But Tukhachevsky would remain unrepentant years on.203 “The struggle between capitalist Poland and the Soviet proletarian revolution was developing on a European scale,” he would allege in lectures on the war, one section of which bore the title “Revolution from Abroad [izvne].” “All the verbiage about the awakening of national sentiment in the Polish working class in connection with our offensive is merely due to our defeat. . . . To export revolution was a possibility. Capitalist Europe was shaken to its foundations, and but for our strategic errors and our defeat in the field, the Polish War might have become the link between the October Revolution of 1917 and the revolution in Western Europe.”204 Tukhachevsky would avoid blaming Stalin by name.205 But others, notably Boris Shaposhnikov, a tsarist staff officer who soon became Red chief of staff, would expressly blame the southwestern front—Yegorov and Stalin—for going “against the reciprocity of the two fronts.”206

So there it was: Lenin madly miscalculating; the tsarist aristocrat Tukhachevsky helping blunder Soviet Russia into an offensive war to ignite “revolution from abroad,” then claiming years later it had not been a blunder; and the proletarian Stalin, having warned against such adventurism, scapegoated for insubordination.207

Back on the battlefield, the Soviets got lucky. Polish forces recaptured Wilno, Piłsudski’s hometown, on October 7, 1920, but Tukhachevsky managed to stabilize the Red retreat at the site of Great War trenches (“attacking Warsaw, I retreated to Minsk,” he later noted).208 The exhausted sides agreed to an armistice in Riga on October 12, 1920 (to take effect on the eighteenth), with a border about 125 miles east of the Curzon Line. That same day, Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, was in Halle, Germany, attending the special Congress of the Independent Social Democrat Party, aiming to split them and annex their left wing to the small party of German Communists. At this time there were 103 Independent Social Democrats in the Reichstag, as against 278 Social Democrats and 2 Communists. Zinoviev was vigorously rebutted by Rudolf Hilferding and Lenin’s old Menshevik rival Martov, but in a hall decorated with Soviet emblems, the vote went Moscow’s way.209 “We go forward to the complete elimination of money,” Zinoviev explained. “We pay wages in commodities. We introduce trolleys without fares. We have free public schools, free, if temporarily poor, meals, rent-free apartments, free lighting. We are realizing all this very slowly, under the most difficult conditions. We have to fight ceaselessly, but we have a way out, a plan.”210 The German authorities, incredibly, had granted Zinoviev a visa but now promptly deported him. By December, however, around 300,000 of the 890,000 Independent Social Democrats would join the German Communists, bringing the latter to 350,000.211 Suddenly, there was a mass Communist party in the heart of Europe.212 At the same time, German Social Democracy had been profoundly weakened, with consequences to follow.

With Romania, there were no further immediate military clashes, but on October 28, 1920, in Bucharest, the Entente powers recognized Greater Romania’s annexation of Bessarabia; Soviet Russia rejected the treaty and called for a plebiscite, a demand that was ignored.213

Against the Poles the Reds lost some 25,000 dead and seriously wounded; the Poles, perhaps 4,500 dead, 22,000 wounded, and 10,000 missing.214 Another 146,000 Red Army men fell prisoner in Poland and Germany; how many of them died in Polish captivity remains a matter of dispute, perhaps 16,000 to 18,000 (1,000 refused to return). Of the 60,000 Polish POWs in Soviet Russia, about half returned alive (some 2,000 refused to return).215 Lenin tried to take solace in the claim that “without having gained an international victory, which we consider the only sure victory, we have won the ability to exist side by side with capitalist powers.”216 Of course, nothing like that had been won. As for Piłsudski—who after so many victims, had also ended up in roughly the same place he had been before his invasion of Ukraine—he dismissed the campaign in which tens of thousands of people died and were maimed as “a kind of children’s scuffle.”217

The Red Army, meanwhile, without waiting for spring, transferred large formations from the Polish front southward, to go up against Wrangel. On November 7, 1920, the third anniversary of the revolution, 135,000 troops overseen by Mikhail Frunze attacked the Crimean peninsula in a complex maneuver. “Today, we can celebrate our victory,” Lenin said at the anniversary celebration in the Bolshoi.218 Soon enough, indeed, Wrangel ordered a total evacuation toward the Turkish Straits and Constantinople. Between November 13 and 16, from Sevastopol, Yalta, and other Crimean ports, 126 ships carrying almost 150,000 soldiers, family members, and other civilians departed Russia; Wrangel left aboard the General Kornilov.219 The Cheka rampaged among those who stayed behind, executing thousands, including women.220 And so, not long after “White” Poland’s ambitions to displace Soviet Russia as the great power in Eastern Europe had been checked, the Whites inside Russia had been definitively vanquished. There was no glory for Stalin: he had originally been assigned Wrangel’s destruction, but had resigned his military posts over the Polish campaign.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT (1920-21)

The Whites in many ways served as unwitting Bolshevik handmaidens by alienating the peasants even more, but once the Whites had ceased to be a battlefield threat in 1920, the Bolsheviks were left face to face with the angry majority of the populace. Paradoxically, as one historian observed, “the conclusion of peace with Poland and the elimination of Wrangel were psychologically disadvantageous, from the standpoint of the Communists.”221 These developments removed the immediate threat while exposing the regime’s aggressive incompetence. Thus, whereas the crisis of 1918 had been overcome by mobilization for civil war, and the battlefield crises of 1919–20 had been met largely thanks to White political failures, a new, and in many ways deeper, crisis broke out that fall-winter of 1920–21: Soviet Russia’s people were not only freezing, starving, and disease ridden, but they were also embittered. Like all extreme violence, war, and particularly civil war, transforms individual choices and behavior, such that notions of political “support,” adapted from peacetime circumstances, cannot be applied so easily.222 But the deprivation and to an extent the disillusionment may have been even worse than they had been four years earlier under Nicholas II, on the eve of the February Revolution.

Peasants were invaded from all sides and compelled to choose allegiances, at least until armies moved on. “The Whites would come and go, and the Reds, and many others without any color,” as the writer Viktor Shklovsky poetically recapped.223 Of course, peasants well understood the Whites wanted to restore the old barons and denied national difference, but the peasants also detested Bolshevism’s conscription and forced grain requisitions. Across Eurasia already in mid-1918 peasant resistance to Bolshevik grain seizures had emerged on a wide scale.224 Requisitioning detachments began to use not just rifles but machine guns and, in some cases, bombs. Still, peasants fought back. “Many of the villages are now well armed, and seldom does a grain expedition end without victims,” one newspaper reported. “A band of hungry ‘partisans’ had attacked a food train,” Pravda reported of Ufa in 1918. “They first tore up the tracks and then opened fire on the train guard.”225 The obvious alternative would have been to allow a market-incentive system that encouraged peasants to solve the food supply crisis by paying a fixed tax and keeping the profits from their hard work. But when peasants demanded free trade, Bolshevik agents perceived darkest ignorance.226 Still, the peasants kept reminding everyone that they had made their own revolution.

In August 1920—while Lenin was fantasizing about overturning the entire Versailles Order through conquest of Poland, and Tukhachevsky lost his army in a void north of Warsaw—a peasant rebellion had begun in Tambov, 350 miles southeast of Moscow. It started with just a few rebels who killed some members of a requisition squad, then beat back attempted Bolshevik reprisals; by fall 1920, local rebel forces mushroomed to 8,000. Their leader, Alexander Antonov (b. 1889), had conducted expropriations in prerevolutionary days to fund the Socialist Revolutionary Party (he was caught and got hard labor in Siberia); under Bolshevik tyranny, he reverted to underground terrorism. Many of the peasant rebels had served in the tsarist army or the Red Army, from which they deserted (the troops garrisoned in small towns might as well have been prisoners of war, so meagerly were they provisioned). The rebels formed a cross-village network they called the Union of the Toiling Peasantry, infiltrated the Tambov Cheka, employed guerilla tactics against regime personnel and installations, sometimes wearing Red Army uniforms, and developed an operational headquarters staffed by people chosen in secret ballot, with excellent reconnaissance and a strong agitation department. A congress of Tambov rebels formally abolished Bolshevik authority, calling for the “victory of the genuine socialist revolution,” with unmolested peasant land ownership.227 Perhaps the single most interesting aspect of the Tambov peasants’ demands was for “the political equality of all without regard to class.”228 The regime only faintly understood what was going on. Supreme Commander Sergei Kamenev had reported to the government that thousands of starving peasants in Tambov, as well as Voronezh and Saratov provinces, were pleading with local authorities for seed grain from grain-collecting stations. In some cases, Kamenev reported, “the crowds were being shot with machine guns.”229 Notwithstanding such moments of comprehension as Kamenev displayed, the scope of the rural catastrophe was still clouded in Moscow by class-war idées fixes as the regime reflexively labeled the peasants’ legitimate grievances “an uprising of kulaks, bandits, and deserters.”

A plenipotentiary, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko—who in 1917 led the storming of the Winter Palace—had arrived in February 1921 to overhaul the demoralized local Cheka and intensify efforts to encircle and annihilate the peasant army, but repression alone was not going to rescue the situation. The harvest was turning out to be poor, and political disturbances had already forced the food supply commissariat to “suspend” grain procurements in thirteen provinces.230 On February 9 came reports of yet another immense wave of armed unrest in rural Siberia, cutting off rail links and food shipments.231 Four days later, a Cheka team noted of Tambov that “the current peasant uprisings differ from the previous ones in that they have a political program, organization, and a plan.”232 Vasily Ulrich, a top official of the deadly Revolutionary Tribunal dispatched to Tambov in early 1921, reported to Moscow regarding the hated grain detachments that “there is nothing more they can achieve other than to arouse more animosity and provoke more bursts of rebellion.” No softie, Ulrich nonetheless recommended that peasants who demonstrated loyalty to the Soviet regime be rewarded, in order to “silence those Socialist Revolutionary agitators who claim that Soviet power only takes from the peasant.”233 As a result, that February 1921 in Tambov the policy of obligatory grain quotas to be delivered at fixed prices was replaced by a tax-in-kind that allowed the peasants to retain much of their grain for sale—a very significant concession, so far in one province.234

“SOVIETS WITHOUT PARTIES”

Rural rebellion was paralleled by significant urban strikes.235 In shops there were just one-fifth the consumer goods that had been available in 1913. Workers who had remained in Petrograd were being press-ganged into unremunerated extra “labor duties” [povinnost’]. Then, on February 12, 1921, the authorities announced the temporary closing of 93 factories, including even the famous Putilov Works, for lack of fuel, threatening nearly 30,000 workers with unemployment and the complete loss of rations (however meager).236 When many of the plants reopened ten days later, work collectives walked out on strike, openly demanding an end to Communist dictatorship and the return to soviets with genuinely free elections.237 Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary groups issued their own anti-Bolshevik proclamations; the Cheka wrongly blamed the non-Bolshevik socialists for inciting the strikes, as if the workers themselves were not capable of opposing the regime’s oppressive policies and failures. On February 24, as crowds of several thousand started to appear in the streets, Grigory Zinoviev, Petrograd party boss, and the Petrograd Cheka arrested non-Bolshevik socialists en masse (some 300 Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries), sent young military student cadets to disperse the marches with warning shots fired into the air, and proclaimed martial law—just as tsarist General Khabalov had done under Nicholas II in the same city, four years earlier almost to the day. The striking workers were locked out. At the same time, however, extra rations were suddenly released to the city, and the detachments blocking travel to and from the countryside for food were removed. Still, word of the martial law, on top of rumors of bloodshed, reached the nearby Kronstadt fortress, twenty miles from Petrograd on an island in the Gulf of Finland and the HQ of the Baltic fleet.238

On Kronstadt in 1917, during the Provisional Government, there had never been “dual power,” just soviets as the island fortress became a socialist ministate. In 1921, the island garrison contained 18,000 sailors and soldiers as well as 30,000 civilians, and on March 1 around 15,000 of them gathered on Kronstadt’s Anchor Square and overwhelmingly approved a fifteen-point resolution stipulating freedom of trade as well as “freedom of speech and the press for all workers and peasants, anarchists and left socialist parties”—that is, not for the bourgeoisie or even rightist socialists. The sailors also demanded “All power to the soviets and not to parties.”239 Only two Bolshevik officials present voted against the resolution, while Mikhail Kalinin—the chairman of the All-Russia Soviet (head of state)—who had come to address the sailors, was shouted down, and lost a vote on whether he could resume. A socialist regime was faced with determined socialist rebellion among its armed forces.

Later that night of March 1, the sailors formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee to oversee order on the island and prepare free and fair, multicandidate, secret ballot elections to the Kronstadt soviet. The next day, in the House of Enlightenment (the former Engineers’ School), Stepan Petrichenko (b. 1892), a clerk on the battleship Petropavlovsk, who had been a Communist but in a “reregistration” had lost his party status, opened a gathering of 202 delegates whose presidium consisted solely of non-party people. Communists at the fortress arrived at party HQ requesting 250 grenades, but that evening, most party members and Cheka operatives evacuated across the ice to the mainland—the Revolutionary Committee had come to power without bloodshed. The next day the regime in Moscow issued a statement, signed by Lenin and Trotsky, denouncing the rebellion as a “White Guard Conspiracy” incited by French intelligence and adopting “Socialist Revolutionary-Black Hundred” resolutions.240 Some Cheka operatives accurately reported the sailors’ demands as “freedom of the press, the removal of barring detachments, freedom of trade, reelections to the soviets with a universal and secret ballot.”241 But the Bolshevik political police seized sailors’ wives and children in Petrograd as hostages, cut off all communication in a blockade of the island, and dropped leaflets from an airplane: “You are surrounded on all sides. . . . Kronstadt has no food, no fuel.” “You are being told fairy tales, like how Petrograd stands behind you. . . .”242 The sailors, unlike in 1917, had no means to communicate the truth about their insurrection. The regime used its press monopoly to slander the rebels and rally stalwarts to suppress proletarian sailors and soldiers in the name of a higher proletarian goal of defending the revolution. Moreover, the authorities, unlike in 1917, possessed a reliable instrument of repression—the Cheka.

Inside the Kronstadt republic, heated discussions broke out about whether to go on the attack, seizing Oranienbaum, on the mainland to the south, and Sestroretsk, on the mainland to the north, in order to extend the island’s defense perimeter; the Revolutionary Committee rejected the idea. The sailors behaved transparently, living the ideals they professed, publishing almost all Soviet government notices without shortening in the Kronstadt newspaper (edited by the chairman of the 1917 Kronstadt soviet), and sending delegations to Petrograd to negotiate; the Bolshevik authorities arrested the negotiators (they would be executed), instituted a vicious smear campaign, and issued an ultimatum to surrender—acting just like the repressive tsarist regime, as the sailors pointed out.243 On March 5, 1921, the politburo secretly assigned the task of “liquidating” the uprising to Tukhachevsky, and set the date of attack as March 8, the opening of the 10th Party Congress (which had been postponed from March 6). On the afternoon of March 5, Trotsky arrived on his armored train in Petrograd, where only months before he had vanquished Yudenich; the war commissar was accompanied by Tukhachevsky as well as Sergei Kamenev.244 On the night of March 7 an artillery barrage hit Kronstadt, and in the morning at 5:00 a.m. a multiprong crackdown began as Red Army infantry (many wearing white sheets) crossed the frozen white Gulf of Finland. The heavy assault across several miles of ice was turned back, however. “The sailors’ position is defended and they answer artillery with fire,” Tukhachevsky sheepishly reported to Sergei Kamenev.245 Trotsky telephoned for an explanation.246 The news was shocking: even specially chosen, archreliable Red Army units had vacillated.247

On the same morning of March 8 nearly 900 delegates (694 with voting rights), representing more than 700,000 Communist party members, gathered in Moscow for the 10th Party Congress underneath red banners proclaiming the victory of “the proletariat.”248 The Bolshoi Theater’s expansive parterre and five tiers of boxes were crammed to bursting. The Whites had been scattered—in the ground, prison, or exile—but large-scale industry had fallen 82 percent since 1913, coal output was one quarter of the 1913 level, electricity, one third.249 Combat with Poland had exposed the limits of the Red Army’s economic base, demanding a respite to rebuild, somehow.250 Politically, the non-agricultural labor force had declined since the October coup from 3.6 million to 1.5 million, and more than one third of the latter were artisans, leaving just 950,000 industrial workers in the workers state.251 That contrasted with perhaps 2.4 million functionaries. Workers in Petrograd and elsewhere, as well as sailors of the Baltic fleet, were demanding the same program urged upon them by Bolshevik agitators in 1917—“All Power to the Soviets!”—but now expressly without Bolshevik party members. Peasants, too, had taken up arms in the name of a genuine people’s power. World revolution had failed to materialize; on the contrary, the attempted revolutions surrounding Soviet Russia had been crushed. And to top it all off, Lenin faced organized opposition within party circles. Of course, party opposition to him had been constant: in the underground days, Martov and the Mensheviks opposed Lenin’s vision of the party and tactics; in 1917, Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed the seizure of power; in 1918, Bukharin and the Left Communists opposed Brest-Litovsk; in 1919, the military opposition opposed tsarist officers. But now, a self-styled Workers’ opposition, headed by two stalwart Bolsheviks, Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, were demanding “party democracy” and real trade unions to defend workers’ rights.

Lenin was infuriated at the Workers’ opposition, but after all, he himself had allowed it ample opportunity to air its critique. By Central Committee decision, the party press had been carrying nasty polemics over trade unions since November-December 1920.252 This public debate beyond the halls of party meetings, so uncharacteristic, might actually have been a provocation by Lenin to make Trotsky discredit himself by broadcasting his unpopular turn-up-the-screws approach. Trotsky was demanding that unions become an arm of the state. Lenin seems to have conspired with Zinoviev to bait and then counterattack Trotsky (whom Zinoviev despised); Stalin counterattacked Trotsky, too.253 At the congress, Lenin won the policy battle: unions were neither merged into the state (Trotsky) nor afforded autonomy (Shlyapnikov). And yet, Lenin proved a sore winner.254 “Comrades,” he noted in his opening greetings, “we allowed ourselves the luxury of discussions and debates within our party.”255 The implication was that this “luxury” was going to end. Lenin also flashed his anger, telling Shlyapnikov that the fitting response to his criticism ought to be a gun.256 And although Trotsky, unlike Shlyapnikov, had refused his supporters’ urgings to form a formal faction for the congress, Lenin did not take kindly to his grandstanding. “Comrades, today comrade Trotsky polemicized with me especially politely and reproached or called me hyper-cautious,” Lenin told the delegates on March 14, in one of his milder outbursts. “I ought to thank him for the compliment and express regrets that I lack the opportunity to return it.”257

RELATIONS AMONG SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS

Stalin’s responsibility at the 10th Party Congress, predictably, was the national question. The battle against Denikin and other Whites in 1919–20 had allowed the Red Army to reconquer Ukraine in the name of Soviet power, but the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic felt constrained to sign a so-called union treaty with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the many such treaties with the different Soviet republics, on December 28, 1920.258 Despite the treaty’s name, however, the RSFSR and Ukrainian SSR did not establish an overarching union citizenship or supreme organs of rule above those of the member states, and they both continued to act separately in international relations. Soviet Ukraine, like Soviet Russia, would go on to sign a plethora of state-to-state treaties—with Poland, Austria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia—right through late 1921.259 Ukraine maintained missions abroad in Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, often in the same building as the RSFSR missions; Ukraine also had a representative office in Moscow.260 On the eve of the Party Congress, Stalin published theses on relations among the non-integrated Soviet republics. He argued that the treaty approach, essentially just begun, was already “exhausted,” demanding a new approach. “Not one Soviet republic taken separately can consider itself safe from economic exhaustion and military defeat by world imperialism,” he wrote. “Therefore, the isolated existence of separate Soviet republics has no firm basis in view of the threats to their existence from the capitalist states. . . . The national Soviet republics that have freed themselves from their own and from the foreign bourgeoisie will be able to defend their existence and conquer the united forces of imperialism only by joining in a close political union.”261 Such an integrated state, however, would require significant concessions by the non-Russian republics such as Ukraine.262

Amplifying these theses at the Party Congress in a report on March 10, Stalin called for “a federation of Soviet republics” and held up the RSFSR, a federation, as the model. He criticized Chicherin, the foreign affairs commissar, who was emerging as a rival, and praised “the state-ness in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkestan and other borderlands,” but warned of pan-Islam and pan-Turkism as a “deviation” rooted in national oppression of the past, rather than a forward-looking program to be embraced.263 The impact of Stalin’s speech appears to have been underwhelming. Trotsky and Zinoviev were absent, in Petrograd, taken up with the Kronstadt rebellion. From the rostrum the Georgian spoke slowly, in his characteristically accented and soft voice—there were no microphones yet. After polite applause, Klim Voroshilov, the Stalin loyalist assigned to preside over his session, recommended a break. “If we do not break,” Voroshilov admonished the delegates, “we must forbid here in the strictest way the milling about, reading of newspapers and other acts of impertinence.”

Voroshilov further announced that because of scheduling changes related to the Kronstadt situation, the delegates would have the night off and could go to the Bolshoi Theater. “Today,” he informed them, “the Bolshoi has ‘Boris Godunov,’ only without Chaliapin.”264 Voroshilov could have sung the part himself, but he was soon to depart for Kronstadt.

Forty delegates, apparently of the Turkestan delegation, had signed a petition demanding a coreport on nationalities by Georgy Voldin, known as Safarov (b. 1891). A half Armenian-half Pole born in St. Petersburg who alternated British-style pith helmets with a worker’s cap, he had arrived in Turkestan along with Frunze and was soon named to the Turkestan party bureau. Now he offered a rambling coreport, admitting that “in the [eastern] borderlands we did not have a strong revolutionary movement,” and that “in Turkestan the Communist party arose only after the October Revolution,” his way of explaining why it was full of rogues.265 Safarov demanded “corrections” to Stalin’s theses. In the discussion one of those given the floor, Anastasy Mikoyan, an ethnic Armenian party official in Azerbaijan, also challenged Stalin, objecting that “in the theses of comrade Stalin nothing is said about how we should approach classes in the borderlands, how precisely we should determine the class structure of these nationalities.” Again and again and again, even in cases when people, such as Mikoyan, urged that local conditions had to be accommodated, the Bolsheviks were trying to think and act through the ideology.266

When discussion was abruptly cut off, Mykola Skrypnyk (b. 1872), a Communist from Ukraine six years Stalin’s senior, interjected from the floor, “The national question is important, painful; comrade Stalin in his report did not in the least degree resolve this question.”267 But the Stalin tormentor Skrypnyk was not given the podium. Nor was Safarov allowed a closing statement. Stalin got the last word, and attacked an array of objections. “Here I have a written note to the effect that we, Communists, supposedly artificially forced a Belorussian nation,” he stated. “This is false, because a Belorussian nation exists, which has its own language, different from Russian, and that the culture of the Belorussian nation can be raised only in its own language. Such speeches were made five years ago about Ukraine, concerning the Ukrainian nation. . . Clearly, the Ukrainian nation exists and the development of its culture is a duty of Communists. One cannot go against history.”268

The congress voted to adopt Stalin’s theses in toto as a basis and to form a seventeen-person commission for further action. His fundamental point—that “the national Soviet republics . . . will be able to defend their existence and conquer the united forces of imperialism only by joining in a close political union”—pointed toward resolute action on his part.269 Shortly after the Party Congress, on April 11, 1921, Stalin would have the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic annexed by the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.

“PEASANT BREST-LITOVSK,” PARTY “UNITY”

After trade unions and the national question, the 10th Party Congress turned to the question of the ruined, seething countryside. Siberia’s delegation had set out for Moscow “armed to the teeth,” as one delegate recalled, needing to cross territories overrun by rebellious peasants with primitive weapons.270 On Lenin’s initiative, on the morning of March 15, after the elections to the new Central Committee had taken place, the congress took up a resolution to concede a tax in kind not just in Tambov but across Soviet Russia. The tax was to be lower than the most recent obligatory quotas, and whatever grain the peasants would have left over after paying the tax they would be able sell at market prices—which presupposed the legalization of private trade.271 “There is no need for me to go into great detail on the causes of the reconsideration,” Lenin explained to the congress, adding “there is no doubt that in a country where the immense majority of the population belongs to the petty land-holding producers, a socialist revolution is possible only via a whole host of transition measures, which would be unnecessary in a developed capitalist country.”272

Illegal private trade already accounted for at least 70 percent of grain sales. But opposition to legalization persisted. The relative merits of obligatory quotas versus taxation and private trade had been debated on and off since 1918, nearly always ending with affirmations of the proletariat needing “to lead” the peasantry (signifying grain requisitioning to feed the cities).273 Trotsky, in February 1920, had proposed a tax in kind that would incentivize more planting, meaning that successful farmers (kulaks) would not be penalized, but he did not mention accompanying free trade, instead writing of “goods exchange” (tovaroobmen) and “labor obligations” (povinnost’). His dirigiste theses had been rejected.274 True, as a result of the uprising in Tambov, even the leftist hothead Bukharin had come around to the need for concessions.275 But for the majority in the hall, Lenin’s proposal came as a stunning blow because he admitted, unlike Trotsky in 1920, that introduction of the tax necessitated legal private trade.276

The need for a new policy was obvious, but demoralizing all the same. “How is it possible for a Communist party to recognize freedom of trade and transition to it?” Lenin asked himself in front of the delegates. “Are there not here irreconcilable contradictions?” He did not answer, only calling the questions “extremely difficult.”277 But whatever the theoretical morass, Lenin belatedly insisted that the war-torn country absolutely had to have a breathing spell. His leadership was crucial in breaking what he had helped to create: namely, the militant vicious circle of requisitioning whereby a dearth of grain supplied to cities induced ever more gun-point requisitioning, resulting in ever less grain.278 Lenin caught a break at the evening session that same day (March 15) when David Ryazanov, a respected Marxist theoretician, felicitously dubbed the shift to a tax in kind and free trade a “peasant Brest-Litovsk.”279 The Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany had been widely opposed in the party, of course, but it had quickly proved Lenin right. Lenin again got his way.

Lenin’s peasant Brest-Litovsk went hand in hand with an absolute refusal of concessions to political critics. On March 16, the last day of the 10th Party Congress, a surprise took place that was no less consequential than the shift to legal private trade: Lenin took the floor again, and spoke in support of a resolution “on party unity.” It required immediate dissolution of groups supporting separate platforms on pain of expulsion from the party. (Ironically, the emergence of the Workers’ opposition had resulted from a decision to allow public discussion of the trade union question and elect congress delegates by “platform.”) In other words, the archfactionalist Lenin now wanted an end to all factions (besides his own). “I do not think it will be necessary for me to say much on this subject,” he again disingenuously remarked when introducing the unity resolution, which in effect rendered “opposition” illegal.280 The congress delegates present voted 413 in favor and 25 against, with 2 abstentions.281 Karl Radek, in his characteristic out-of-the-mouths-of-babes fashion, stated that “in voting for this resolution I feel that it can well be turned against us.” Nonetheless, he supported “on party unity,” saying, “Let the Central Committee in a moment of danger take the severest measures against the best party comrades, if it finds this necessary.”282

The 10th Party Congress was of monumental significance across the board, including for its glimpses of Stalin’s aggrandizement. He could not hope to achieve the high profile that Trotsky commanded at the Party Congress, but he grasped the nettle of one of the most consequential issues before the party—the ambiguous relations among the various Soviet republics—and showed himself ready to force those relations toward a more integrated structure. Stalin also hewed closely to Lenin politically on the big issue of trade unions and, overall, bested his rival Trotsky organizationally. When Lenin wrote up the slate for the new Central Committee, he denied several Trotsky supporters nomination for reelection: Ivan Smirnov, Nikolai Krestinsky, Leonid Serebryakov, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky. They were replaced by Molotov, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, Hryhory “Grigory” Petrovsky—all people congenial to Lenin, but also very close to Stalin. Sergei Kirov, Valerian Kuibyshev, and Vlas Chubar, similarly close to Stalin, became candidate members of the Central Committee. When the new Central Committee convened right after the congress, it would elect a politburo of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, with Molotov now listed as “responsible secretary,” a potential linchpin functionary.283 Thanks to Trotsky’s relentless propensity to polemicize and exasperate, Lenin was helping to form an anti-Trotsky faction at the pinnacle of power that would fall into Stalin’s hands. Insiders on the upper rungs of the regime were using the expression “Stalin faction” (stalinisty) as a contrast to the “Trotsky faction” (trotskisty).284

WHITE GUARDS, IMPERIALISTS, SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES

All of this was worlds away from the Kronstadt sailors. By the time the Party Congress was winding down, their non-party “Kronstadt republic” had turned fifteen days old. The regime mobilized and armed around 1,000 armed Communists from several provinces and sent a special train from Moscow with more than 200 Party Congress delegates led by Voroshilov, part of a new counterinsurgency force of 24,000.285 Also, rumors reached the mobilized delegates that hundreds of military-school cadets trying to storm the fortress had died on the ice. There was fear.286 On March 16, the day the “party unity” resolution was being passed, Tukhachevsky launched a second crackdown with an artillery bombardment, followed by a furious infantry assault. After intense street fighting, the town fell to regime forces by the morning of March 18. Several days earlier the sailors’ leadership had requested asylum from the Finnish government, and—despite a warning to Helsinki from Trotsky conveyed by Chicherin—received a quick affirmative response, allowing 8,000 rebel sailors to escape by ship.287 How many Kronstadters perished in the fighting remains unknown.288 The Red Army lost 1,200 dead; two congress delegates were killed and 23 wounded.289 The Finnish and Soviet governments shared responsibility for removal of the corpses from the ice surface of the frozen Gulf of Finland. A revolutionary tribunal on Kronstadt would issue 2,103 death sentences; another 6,459 sailors got terms in labor camps.

On March 18, the Bolsheviks in Moscow celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune—whose suppression had led to perhaps 30,000 immediate executions. Whether anyone remarked upon the irony remains unknown.290

A few days later at a politburo session, Lenin exchanged private notes with Trotsky about abolishing the Baltic fleet, a gluttonous consumer of fuel and food and a likely political nuisance in future; Trotsky defended the need for a navy.291

On the very day Kronstadt’s destruction began (March 16, 1921), after protracted negotiations, Soviet Russia and Britain signed a trade agreement.292 The Soviets had shown some diplomatic muscle. Reza Khan in Persia, who had seized power in Tehran in a putsch on February 21, 1921, with the aid of White Cossack troops and British assistance, promptly denounced the existing Anglo-Persian Treaty and signed a Soviet-Persian Treaty of Friendship, which specified both Soviet and British troop withdrawals. Independent Afghanistan signed a treaty with Soviet Russia, too, as insurance against a renewed British invasion. And Ataturk’s Turkey began talks with the Soviets, which would result in a pact three weeks later.293 All three treaties—Persia (February 26), Afghanistan (February 28), and Turkey (March 16)—conveyed diplomatic recognition on Soviet Russia. British intelligence employed one of the leading cyptanalysts of tsarist Russian and could read Moscow’s codes, so that when Chicherin denied Soviet involvement in Persia, Britain knew he was lying. Lenin was intercepted saying, “That swine Lloyd George has no scruples of shame in the way he deceives. Don’t believe a word he says. . . .”294 Nonetheless, the British cabinet had concluded by mid-March that “despite the events in Russia”—Kronstadt, Tambov—“the position of the Soviet government without any qualification is firm and stable.”295 Moscow took the preliminary trade deal as de facto political recognition by the leading imperialist power. British goods, too, were coveted to help get peasants in Soviet Russia to sell their grain (so there would be something to buy).296

Following the British trade agreement, on March 18, the Soviets finally signed a peace treaty with Poland in Riga, which also entailed diplomatic recognition.297 The Treaty of Riga did not, however, resolve the historic or the more recent Russian-Polish grievances or alter their aspirations regarding Eastern Europe.298

Eight countries now recognized the existence of Soviet Russia in the international state system: Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. The RSFSR also had treaty relations with other Soviet Socialist Republics, such as Ukraine. German diplomatic recognition would come soon, but in the meantime, Zinoviev and Bukharin in the Comintern, egged on by the Hungarian Bela Kun, who was resident in Germany on behalf of the Comintern, had decided to play with fire: On March 21, 1921, German Communists were spurred to undertake a lunatic seizure of power.299 The insurrection was smashed.300 Some 4,000 sentences were handed down in newly established special courts. German Communist party membership fell by almost half to 180,000. The Bolsheviks in Moscow blamed the fiasco on “counterrevolutionaries,” including the German Social Democrat Hilferding, who months before had struggled in vain against Zinoviev’s call for the desertion of the Independent Social Democrats to the German Communists.301 The Comintern Congress would conclude on July 12 in the full subordination of the (for now) crippled German Communist party to the Russian.302

Enemies became even more a Bolshevik obsession. Lenin had told the 10th Party Congress that the Kronstadt revolt was led by White generals and SRs and that “this petit-bourgeois counter-revolution is doubtless more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich, and Kolchak taken together, because we are dealing with a country in which the proletariat is a minority.”303 The centerpiece of counterrevolution charges against the sailors became the one tsarist major general on the island, Alexander Kozlovsky, a distinguished staff officer and artillery specialist serving the Reds, whom Baltic fleet commander Fyodor Raskolnikov had awarded a watch “for courage and feat of arms in the battle against Yudenich.”304 The Cheka had correctly reported that Major General Kozlovsky was not a member of the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee yet still insisted, absurdly, that “he is the main leader of the movement.”305 Kozlovsky escaped to Finland (where he became a Russian-language teacher in Vyborg). Soon Lenin would warn of the presence of 700,000 Russian emigres in Europe and of how “no country in Europe was without some White Guard elements.”306 The Bolsheviks, of course, were the ones who had 75,000 former tsarist officers in their ranks, including hundreds of former tsarist generals, and who had restored capitalist free trade. The Cheka proved unable to stage a large show trial of Socialist Revolutionaries and “Entente spies” over Kronstadt.307 Nonetheless, Dzierzynski concluded in a secret internal assessment that “while Soviet Russia remains an isolated hearth of communist revolution and is in capitalist encirclement, she will need to use the iron hand to put down White-Guard escapades.”308

Menshevik leader Yuly Martov, a cofounder with Lenin of the original Russian Marxist emigre broadsheet Spark, had left Russia in October 1920 to attend the fateful Halle conference of German leftists and had not been permitted to return; he was mortally ill and would soon repair to a Black Forest sanitorium, but he continued his withering criticism in a new emigre newspaper he founded in early 1921, Socialist Herald. Martov underscored how Lenin’s foolhardy attempted sovietization of Poland had resulted in the “surrendering to Polish imperialism of a number of non-Polish territories, against the interests of the Russian laboring classes.”309 He tore into Lenin over Kronstadt as well.310 Above all, he pointed out that the Mensheviks had been right all along—socialist revolution in Russia had been premature, as demonstrated by Lenin’s mistakes, recourse to political repression, and policy shifts over the peasantry.311 And yet, Martov was back in exile, while Lenin sat in the Kremlin. “Anyone who wants to play at parliamentarism, at Constituent Assemblies, at non-party conferences, go abroad to Martov,” Lenin thundered in April 1921 in his pamphlet On the Tax in Kind. “We are going to keep the Mensheviks and SR—both open ones and those disguised as ‘nonparty’—in jail.”312

In Tambov, meanwhile, even after the tax-in-kind concession had been granted, the peasant rebels had not desisted, employing conscription and seeking new adherents by crossing into neighboring provinces (Saratov, Voronezh), while raiding arms depots. They seized grain and livestock, as well as people, and increased their forces to more than 20,000.313 In April 1921, the beefed-up partisans managed to defeat the Red Army in a number of battles. Plenipotentiary Antonov-Ovseyenko, in his reports, beseeched Moscow for more troops. Yefraim Sklyansky advised Lenin on April 26 “to send Tukhachevsky to crush the Tambov uprising”; Lenin concurred.314 Tukhachevsky’s failure to capture Warsaw had not diminished him.315 The politburo gave him a month to “liquidate” the Tambov rebellion.316 He set up HQ at a gunpowder plant just outside Tambov on May 6, and announced preparations for a “shock campaign” of clear-and-hold pacification, employing mobile forces to exterminate the rebels, then infantry to occupy cleared villages so as to deny sanctuary. More than 100,000 mostly urban Red Army troops were deployed, along with special Cheka detachments. After public executions, hostage taking, and conspicuous deportations of entire villages to concentration camps, by the third week of June 1920 only small numbers of rebel stragglers had survived.317 Tukhachevsky was flushing rebel remnants out of the forests with artillery, machine guns, and chlorine gas “to kill all who hide within.”318 At least 11,000 peasants were killed between May and July; the Reds lost 2,000. Many tens of thousands were deported or interred. “The bandits themselves have come to recognize . . . what Soviet power means,” the camp chief noted of his reeducation program.319 Lenin’s deputy Alexei Rykov, alerted to the savage campaign by concerned Communists in Tambov, sought to have Tukhachevsky reined in so as not to alienate the peasantry, but Sergei Kamenev urged perseverance: “On the whole, since the appointment of comrade Tukhachevsky to the command in Tambov, all measures that have been undertaken have proven entirely appropriate and effective.”320

Alexander Antonov, the rebel leader, escaped. The Cheka, knowing that he dreamed of unifying Right and Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Constitutional Democrats, had let out word of a “congress” of all anti-Bolshevik partisan movements, which opened on June 28, 1921, in Moscow. Three “delegates” of the Right SRs, two of them Cheka agents, insisted Antonov should join the congress. He did not show, but the ruse congress enabled mass arrests of Antonovites. (Antonov, hiding in swampy woods for almost a year, would finally be located, as a result of a pharmacist’s tip, and killed in a village shootout in June 1922; he would be buried at local Cheka HQ—a Tambov monastery.)321

ABSORBING GEORGIAN NATIONALISM

Stalin arrived in Baku in November 1920, two months after the Congress of Peoples of the East, and on the eighth telegrammed Lenin: “One thing is not in doubt. It is necessary to move troops rapidly to Armenia’s borders with the necessity of entering with them to Yerevan. Orjonikidze is undertaking preparations in this spirit.” This was before Orjonikidze had received operational authorization from Moscow.322 In fall 1920, Turkish troops had invaded former tsarist Armenia, which nominally was ruled by the Armenian nationalists known as Dashnaks but beset by more than half a million refugees, epidemics, and starvation.323 On November 28, Orjonikidze and Stalin conspired to send troops across Russia’s border with Armenia, stage an “uprising,” and declare an Armenian Soviet Republic (“by the will of the toiling masses of Armenia”). The Dashnaks, like the Musavat in Azerbaijan, surrendered.324 The Soviet conquest of Armenia would nearly provoke war with Turkey, but the most immediate consequences of Armenia’s reconquest were felt in Georgia.

Stalin’s homeland had been ruled since 1918 by Georgian Social Democrats of Menshevik tilt, who governed not via soviets, which they abolished, but a parliament, under the proviso first the democratic (bourgeois) revolution.325 Menshevik Georgia’s prime minister, Noe Jordania, had been the person who, in 1898, had told a then twenty-year-old Stalin eager to join the socialist movement, to return to his studies, and, in 1904, had humiliated Stalin again, forcing him to recant from “Georgian Bundism,” that is, advocacy for a formally separate Georgian Social Democratic Party and an independent Georgian state.326 But then came world war, revolution, and imperial dissolution, and voilà—Georgian Menshevism had morphed into a vehicle for Georgian nationalism.327 Lenin and Chicherin, as part of their pursuit of formal recognition from Britain, had recognized the independent Georgian Menshevik state with a treaty on May 7, 1920, pledging noninterference in its affairs.328 In exchange, however, the Georgian government—in a codicil that remained secret—agreed to legalize Communist party activity on its territory, and Bolshevik agents in the Caucasus, including a young operative named Lavrenti Beria, promptly set about subverting the Menshevik state.329 It was while the Georgians in Moscow were awaiting the final version of the treaty to sign that the Red Army had captured Azerbaijan. After Armenia’s turn, Bolshevik forces had Menshevik Georgia essentially surrounded.

Lenin and other top Bolsheviks regarded Mensheviks with a mixture of contempt and fear. True, Russian Mensheviks were not barred from attending the Eighth Congress of Soviets (the last one they would attend), which was held December 22–29, 1920, and was where, in the unheated, dimly lit Bolshoi Theater, Lenin unveiled a fantastic scheme for the electrification of Russia.330 But Trotsky—who had already consigned Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries to the trash pile of history at the Second Congress of Soviets in October 1917—informed the 2,537 delegates that “now that the civil war is over, the Mensheviks and SRs are especially dangerous and must be fought with particular ruthlessness,” a point echoed by Dzierzynski. Fyodor Dan, a Menshevik leader, pointed out that Lenin, in his speech, had given a long list of countries with which Soviet Russia had signed peace treaties, but omitted one—Georgia.331 In fact, Lenin was secretly urging extra caution in dealing with Georgian national feelings, evidently chastened by the fiasco over Poland. Lenin explicitly ordered Orjonikidze “not to self-determine Georgia.”332

Trotsky and Stalin, however, agreed, just as they had about using Baku as a revolutionary springboard, on the necessity of seizing Georgia militarily.333 Indeed Stalin showed none of the hesitation over Georgia that he had repeatedly voiced over Poland. On top of his grudge against the Georgian Mensheviks, he articulated a strategic rationale for a forward policy. “The importance of the Caucasus for the revolution is determined not only by the fact that it is a source of raw materials, fuel, and food supplies,” he told Pravda (November 30, 1920), “but also by its position between Europe and Asia, and in part between Russia and Turkey, as well as the presence of highly important economic and strategic roads.”334 Above all, Stalin argued, Menshevik Georgia provided “a zone of foreign intervention and occupation”—a stepping zone for aggressors to attack the Soviet heartland, lending apparent urgency to the matter.335

Many Bolsheviks anticipated that the Georgian Menshevik government would collapse under the weight of its own unpopularity and incompetence and therefore advised to wait for a popular uprising. Still, the Communists in Georgia numbered only 15,000, not really an indigenous force to be reckoned with, while the Mensheviks had at least 75,000 and could claim more worker support.336 And as accusations flew about the Menshevik government’s perfidiousness—for example, in supporting anti-Soviet rebels in the North Caucasus—opposition in Moscow to military action softened. On February 14, 1921, Lenin dropped his caution and Orjonikidze finally extracted permission for a takeover. In fact, on February 11–12, Orjonikize, on the spot, with the collusion of Stalin in Moscow as well as Trotsky, had sent units of the Red Army from Armenia into Georgia and staged an “uprising” by Armenian and Russian rebels in the disputed mixed-ethnic Lori district, a pretext for full Red Army invasion.337 On February 15, a full Red incursion was launched from Azerbaijan into Georgia. On February 16, the Georgian Bolshevik Pilipe Makharadze pronounced the formation of a Georgian Soviet Republic, and appealed to Soviet Russia for “aid.” Already, on February 25, the Red Army entered Tiflis (abandoned to spare it from shelling).

Orjonikidze had done in his native Georgia what Frunze had done in his native Turkestan. “Long Live Soviet Georgia!” Orjonikidze exulted in a telegram to Moscow. Stalin, too, was triumphant at the destruction of the handmaidens of the Entente. But Lenin—who had threatened to resign over allowing other socialists in Russia into the revolutionary government in 1917—now instructed Orjonikidze to try to form a coalition with the defeated Georgian Mensheviks.338 Lenin appears to have been motivated by a sense that the political base for Bolshevism in “petit-bourgeois” Georgia was weak. Also, he seemed sensitive to the fact that the Red Army invasion had cast a pall on the Soviets’ international reputation: Georgia emerged as a cause celebre among Social Democrats in Europe. A baffled Orjonikidze, on March 3, 1921, telegrammed Lenin: “Everything possible is being done to promote contact and understanding with the Georgian intelligentsia.”339 But Orjonikidze felt that walking on eggshells was a losing policy.340 In any case, the Georgian Mensheviks refused Lenin’s offer of a coalition.

Georgia was not Poland, certainly not in the military sense, and the three small, unstable republics of the South Caucasus lacked a Poland equivalent on whose coattails they could have ridden to independence, as happened in the case of the three small Baltic republics. The Georgian Mensheviks had been oriented toward London and Paris, but the Entente powers did not come to their aid. France had promised only to turn over rusted carbines and machine guns that had been abandoned by the Whites and were sitting in an Istanbul warehouse. Georgian ministers were in Paris still imploring the French government for military help the very day Tiflis fell.341 The British had had their eyes on Caspian oil, and had sent an expeditionary force to deny the petroleum to Germany, but then hit up against the expense and complexity of a prolonged Caucasus occupation. “I am sitting on a powder-magazine, which thousands of people are trying to blow up,” the British commissioner wrote to his wife from Tiflis.342 Foreign Secretary Curzon was urging his government to retain the costly British military presence in the South Caucasus, as well as in northern Persia, in order to prevent Russian reconquest, but War Secretary Winston Churchill—no less anti-Bolshevik than Curzon—argued that a further partitioned Russia raised the specter of a future German reaggrandizement all across Eastern Europe and maybe the Levant, too.343

The British had evacuated from Baku and Tiflis, making their way west to the port of Batum, then left the Caucasus for good (July 7, 1920). Georgians had celebrated Britain’s departure as a triumph over imperialism, covering Batum with Georgian flags, but British withdrawal, on top of French hesitation, had left Moscow and Ankara to determine the Georgians’ fate.344 Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal prioritized annexation of Armenian-inhabited provinces (Kars, Ardahan) over aiding the brethren Azerbaijani Turks, and he saw an ally in Soviet Russia against Versailles (a parallel to the emerging German-Soviet rapprochement).345 As the Red Army invaded Georgia from the east and north, the Turks had advanced from the south, their eyes set on grabbing the port of Batum, where the Georgian leadership had fled advancing Red Army forces. Already on March 11, 1921, the French ship Ernest Renan carried Georgian gold stocks, church treasures, and archives to Istanbul, for transshipment to France.346 Five days later Turkey pronounced its annexation of Batum. But Menshevik Georgia’s 10,000 troops managed to disarm Batum’s small 2,000-troop Turkish garrison.347 The Red Army, with Menshevik connivance, entered the port on March 22 to hold it from Turkey.348 Three days later, French and Italian ships carried the Menshevik government, military command, and refugees to Istanbul from the same port whence they had waved off the British.349

Stalin, meanwhile, suffered a debilitating illness and was placed on a special diet. On March 15, 1921, Nadya Alliluyeva wrote to Kalinin that “15 chickens (exclusively for Stalin), 15 pounds of potatoes and one wheel of cheese were included in the monthly food packet,” but “10 chickens have already been consumed and there are still 15 days to go. Stalin can only eat chickens in connection with his diet.” She requested that the number of monthly chickens be increased to 20, and the potatoes to 30 pounds.350 On March 25, Stalin underwent an operation to remove his appendix.351 Lenin ordered an assistant to send Stalin “four bottles of the best portwine. It’s necessary to strengthen Stalin before his operation.”352 But Stalin was suffering other maladies, perhaps related to typhus, perhaps to chronic, non-active tuberculosis, which he had contracted before the revolution (Sverdlov, with whom Stalin bunked in a single room in Siberian exile, had tuberculosis; in the era before penicillin there was no cure). In April 1921, the politburo ordered Stalin to a spa, and he spent May through August 1921 at Nalchik in the North Caucasus.353 Lenin sent several telegrams to Orjonikidze inquiring of Stalin’s health and the opinion of the doctors.

Stalin’s medical holiday coincided with continued political upheaval across the mountains, in the South Caucasus. On April 10, 1921, at a meeting of some 3,000 workers’ representatives and workers in the Tiflis Opera House on Rustaveli Avenue, an assembly approved a resolution urging the Bolshevik Revolutionary Committee to defend Georgia’s right to self-determination and independence, and called for legalization of all socialist organizations not dedicated to overthrowing the regime and even for the formation of a separate Georgian Red Army. Such sentiments only deepened. Orjonikidze became desperate for assistance in getting his countrymen to knuckle under their new Bolshevik masters, and he invited Stalin to cross the mountains down to Tiflis. Stalin obliged, and participated in a Caucasus bureau plenum July 2–3, 1921, where Orjonikidze gave a report on the political situation.354 On July 5, at another mass meeting with workers in the Tiflis Opera House, Stalin began by “greeting the Tiflis workers in the name of the Revolution, stressing their leading role,” but the hall greeted him with jeers of “Traitor” and “Murderer.” The main speaker, the Georgian Marxist elder Isidor Ramishvili, accused Stalin and the Bolsheviks of forcible conquest and received an ovation. Alexander Dgebuadze, a leader of the Tiflis workers, said of Stalin, “Who asked you to come here? What happened to our Treaty? At the orders of the Kremlin, blood is shed here and you talk about friendship! Soso, you give us both a laugh!”355 The audience sang Georgian freedom songs.356

That night, after his public humiliation on his home Georgian turf, Stalin had the Cheka arrest more than a hundred local Social Democratic Mensheviks, including Ramishvili and Dgebuadze, filling up the tsarist-era Metekhi Prison as well as the newer lockup below. (When Stalin discovered that his childhood friend Soso Iremashvili, now a Georgian Menshevik, had been arrested, he arranged to have him released and invited him to meet, but Iremashvili refused—deeming Stalin a traitor—and emigrated, taking with him intimate knowledge of the young Stalin from Gori days.)357

On July 6, Stalin made for local Bolshevik party HQ, where he laced into the Georgian leadership (Pilipe Makharadze, Mamiya Orakhelashvili, Budu Mdivani) and addressed a general meeting of the Tiflis Communist party. “I remember the years 1905–17, when only complete brotherly solidarity could be observed among the workers and toiling people of the South Caucasus nationalities, when the bonds of brotherhood bound Armenian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian workers into a single socialist family,” Stalin is recorded as having said. “Now, on my arrival in Tiflis, I am astounded by the absence of the former solidarity among the workers of the South Caucasus. Nationalism has arisen among the workers and peasants, and there is a strong feeling of distrust toward their other-national comrades.” He blamed this “spirit of aggressive nationalism” on the three years of government by Georgian Mensheviks, Azerbaijan Musavat, and Armenia Dashnaks, and summoned the Georgian Bolsheviks to a “merciless struggle with nationalism and the restoration of the old brotherly international bonds.” Stalin also broached the idea of the South Caucasus Federation to contain the three nationalisms, which met strenuous objection.358 Georgian Bolsheviks proved no less nationalistic than the deposed Mensheviks. Indeed, with Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states out, it would be the nationalism of the Georgians, along with that of the Ukrainians, which would prove the most difficult to tame. The political and spiritual conquest of Stalin’s Georgian homeland after 1921 would dramatically shape his personal dictatorship, too.

FIRST SOVIET SATELLITE

When biographers write about Stalin, projecting backward in time an early psychopath and murderer, they are, in effect, describing the Stalin contemporary, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.359 The savage, demented baron had been born in Austria in the 1880s to a German aristocrat mother and a Baltic German father from an ancient noble family, but the boy, like his crusading ancestors, grew up on imperial Russia’s Baltic littoral. He served in the imperial Russian army, including in multiethnic Cossack formations in the eastern Baikal and Amur regions, and won a plethora of decorations for valor in the Great War. He was also disciplined for willfulness. Brave and cruel, he patterned himself partly after the crusading Teutonic knights, but he was also said to have boasted to friends that one day he would become emperor of China and perhaps even restore the grand Mongol empire of Chinggis Khan across Eurasia. The baron married a nineteen-year-old Manchu princess, which afforded him a second, Manchurian, title. He was a staunch monarchist and hater of Bolshevism’s sacrileges, and assembled a so-called Savage Division of east Siberian Cossacks, Tatars, Mongols, and Tibetans, among others, to crusade against the Reds in the civil war, but after Kolchak’s defeat he sought refuge in Manchuria. In October 1920, the baron marched his small Savage Division of 800 men from Manchuria several thousand miles into Outer Mongolia, which had been a province of China until 1911, when it became de facto independent as a result of the fall of the Qing dynasty, but which in 1919 had been reoccupied by Chinese troops who conducted a reign of terror. The Chinese had deposed the Bogd Gegen, a Living Buddha, third after the Dalai Lama (in Lhasa) and the Panchen Lama in the Lamaist Buddhist hierarchy and Mongolia’s temporal ruler, whom the baron aimed to restore. But in late October and early November 1920, Ungern-Sternberg failed to take the Chinese-held Mongol capital of Urga, guarded by up to 12,000 garrison troops. Killing his deserters, he retreated to eastern Mongolia, where he picked up more White Army stragglers from Eastern Siberia, recruited additional Mongol and Tibetan troops to liberate the Buddhist land, plundered caravans to and from China, fed his opium addiction, and burnished his reputation for bravery and butchery. Men whom he whipped until their flesh fell off were taken to hospital, to recuperate, so that they could be whipped again. Sometimes the baron had a bound victim’s hair set on fire; other times, he had water poured through nostrils and turpentine through rectums.360

In early February 1921, Ungern-Sternberg renewed his assault on Urga, with around 1,500 men against at least 7,000 Chinese, but this time, on the auspicious lunar New Year (February 4), he triumphed.361 It took several days to clear the corpses, some 2,500, most with cavalry saber wounds. Looting ensued. Chinese reinforcements from afar were interdicted, yielding hundreds of camels’ worth of weapons, supplies, and silver.362 On February 21—the same day Reza Khan, the future shah, staged a right-wing coup in Tehran, four days before Orjonikidze seized the Georgian capital of Tiflis from the Mensheviks, and seven days before the Kronstadt uprising began—Ungern-Sternberg ceremoniously reinstalled the Bogd Gegen in the Mongol capital.363 Basking in Mongol and Tibetan adulation, the baron embarked on a rampage against Bolshevik commissars, Jews, and anyone with physical defects. A list was compiled of 846 targets, 38 of them Jews, who were summarily executed.364

Russian merchants and adventurers had long penetrated Outer Mongolia as a gateway to China. Now the Bolshevik regime sent Sergei Borisov, an ethnic Altaian (Oirot) and the head of the Comintern’s Mongolian-Tibetan department, to Urga with a small group of “advisers.”365 Borisov, from a shamanistic people whom the Buddhists had once tried to convert (he himself went to a Russian Orthodox school), aimed to forge an alliance with Mongol nationalists, who had already made contact with the Soviets in Buryatia in Eastern Siberia. The Mongol nationalists comprised two groupings. One, the East Urga group, was led by Danzan (b. 1885), a low-ranking customs official and the illegitimate son of a poor woman, and included Sukhbaatar (b. 1893), who at nineteen had become commander of a machine-gun regiment in Bogd Gegen’s army. The other group, known as Consular Hill (the section of Urga occupied primarily by Russians), was the more radical and was led by Bodoo (b. 1895), a Mongolian language teacher at a Russian school, and included Choybalsan (b. 1895), a former lama and the illegitimate son of an impoverished woman who had fled a monastery; in the course of working at menial jobs, he had met the director of a Russian translators’ school, where he enrolled before going on to further education in Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia.366 On June 25, 1920, the two Mongol groups had joined forces in Danzan’s tent to form a Mongolian People’s Party in order “to liquidate the foreign enemy which is hostile to our religion and race; to restore lost rights and truly revive the state and religion; . . . to give total attention to the interests of the poor and lowly masses; and to live neither oppressing nor oppressed.”367 They agreed with Borisov to send a delegation to Moscow to request aid.368 In November 1920, a seven-person Mongol delegation arrived in in the Soviet capital, meeting Lenin and Stalin.369

By this time, the Bogd Gegen had been restored as khan, and Urga had fallen under Ungern-Sternberg occupation. Between March 1 and 3, 1921, a conference of the Mongolian People’s Party took place in Troitskosavsk (Kiakhta), on the Soviet side of the frontier, with perhaps twenty-six delegates by the final day.370 To unseat Ungern-Sternberg, they constituted a Provisional Revolutionary Committee and a People’s Revolutionary Army of around 400 horsemen, which assembled in southeastern Siberia; then, on March 18—the same day the Soviets signed a peace treaty with Poland—they crossed the Soviet-Mongol frontier, trailed by Red Army units.371

There was no “revolutionary situation” in Mongolia, to use the Comintern argot, but Baron Ungern-Sternberg’s occupation proved to be a godsend, providing the pretext for Bolshevik invasion and a revolutionary putsch. By the time of the spring 1921 Mongol-Soviet offensive against the “counterrevolutionary base” in Mongolia, Ungern-Sternberg’s army, which was living off extravagant “requisitioning” of Mongol herders, was itself on the move. On May 21, he issued a proclamation summoning Russians in Siberia to rise up against Bolshevism in the name of “the lawful master of the Russian Land, all-Russia Emperor Mikhail Alexandrovich,” while vowing “to exterminate commissars, communists, and Jews.”372 (Never mind that Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas II’s brother, had been executed in Perm in 1918.) On June 16, the politburo belatedly approved a “revolutionary onslaught.” An official “request” for Soviet military assistance was cooked up. Sukhbaatar and the Red Army forces took Urga on July 5–6, 1921.373

Stalin was away from Moscow on holiday and being shouted down as a Bolshevik imperialist in the Georgian capital of Tiflis. Simultaneously with events in Georgia and Mongolia, the Third Congress of the Comintern happened to be taking place in Moscow, and one of its key themes was national liberation. “I would like to emphasize here the significance of the movement in the colonies,” Lenin told the 605 delegates from more than 50 countries on July 5. “It is quite clear that in the coming decisive battles of the world revolution the movement of the great majority of the population of the globe, which will be directed first at national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and, perhaps, play a much greater role than we expect.” Backward countries suddenly would be revolutionary leaders (“animated approval”). And just as Soviet Russia offered “a strong bulwark for the Eastern peoples in their struggles for their own independence, so the Eastern countries are our allies in our common struggle against world imperialism.”374 On July 11, Mongol independence was declared anew. Ungern-Sternberg’s forces, meanwhile, had conveniently captured or driven out large numbers of Chinese on the way to Siberia, while failing to spark the anticipated anti-Soviet uprising in Siberia itself, and he was on the run; a Comintern report characterized his men as “speculators, morphine addicts, opium-smokers . . . and other dregs of counter-revolutionary elements.”375 According to an eyewitness of his final march, the baron, “with his head dropped to his chest, silently rode in front of his troops. He had lost his hat and most of his clothes. On his naked chest numerous Mongolian talismans and charms were hanging on a bright yellow cord. He looked like a reincarnation of a prehistoric ape man.”376

Ungern-Steinberg survived an assassination conspiracy (his tent was strafed), but he was captured and handed over to the Red Army on August 22, 1921, and revealed his identity to his captors.377 His Mongol counselor evidently absconded with 1,800 kilos of gold, silver, and precious stones that had been hidden in a river bottom. A convoy escorted the baron to Novonikolaevsk, capital of Western Siberia, where interrogations established that he “was by no means psychologically healthy.”378

Lenin, on the Hughes apparatus from Moscow, ordered a public trial, which was supposed to take place in Moscow, but Ivan Smirnov, known as the Siberian Lenin, insisted that the effects would be greater if he were tried locally.379 On September 15, 1921, a trial was staged in front of several thousand in the wooden summer theater of Novonikolaevsk’s main park on the banks of the Ob River. The baron appeared in his yellow Mongol outer caftan, with his imperial Russian St. George’s Cross pinned to his chest. After some six hours, he was pronounced guilty of working in the interests of Japan to create a Central Asian state, trying to restore the Romanovs, torture, anti-Semitism, and atrocities. He denied only the connection with the Japanese.380 He was executed the same evening or in the wee hours after midnight by the local Cheka.381 Others would reap the rewards of his lunacy. The baron had not only chased out the Chinese troops from Mongolia, on behalf of the Mongols, but his marauding and savagery had helped drive out Chinese peasant settlers, who had numbered perhaps 100,000 as of 1911, but had dropped to 8,000 by 1921.382 On September 14, 1921, the Mongolian government issued a statement that it did not recognize Chinese suzerainty.383 Chicherin on behalf of Soviet Russia issued a two-faced statement that did not expressly deny Chinese claims of suzerainty but in effect recognized Mongolia’s independence.384

Von Ungern-Sternberg’s contribution was historic both to Mongol independence and the creation of the first Soviet satellite—long before post‒World War II Eastern Europe—for after his defeat, the Red Army stayed.385 A Mongolian delegation headed by Danzan and including the twenty-six-year-old Sukhbaatar arrived in Moscow in September 1921, surprising the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat (which was in the midst of trying to establish diplomatic relations with China). The Mongols sought assistance with finances, infrastructure, and weapons, and wanted to discuss territorial disputes with Soviet Russia and lingering imperial Russian economic concessions.386, 387 Five sessions were held, beginning October 26, 1921, at the Metropol. Boris Shumyatsky, a Comintern official from Buryatia, explained to Lenin on November 2 that they would be lucky to see a bourgeois revolution, let alone a socialist one, for Mongolia lagged Soviet Russia by two centuries: nearly half the male population was composed of monks in lamaseries, and the only figure of authority was the Bogd Gegen, a Living Buddha. But Shumyatsky added that “Sukhbaatar is the war minister, a plebeian, the offspring of the new arising in Mongol relations. Uncommonly brave, though a young man . . . One of the most active figures in the Mongol People’s Party and the best orator. . . . Fully oriented toward Soviet Russia. Speaks a little Russian.”388 On November 5, the Soviet government, having renounced tsarist Russia’s secret treaties, signed its own unequal treaty with Outer Mongolia.389 Red Army troops were “asked” to stay and the two governments—not the two states, so as not to overly antagonize China—recognized each other. Shumyatsky made a documentary (he would go on to head the film industry under Stalin). With the Bogd Gegen retained as nominal ruler, Mongolia became a constitutional monarchy but also a “people’s democracy of a new type.”390

• • •

NO OTHER CIVIL WAR IN HISTORY took place across such an immense expanse. Compared with the Great War, none of the military battles in Russia’s civil war or wars of territorial reconquest were significant in scale, but nonetheless, 8 to 10 million people would perish here between 1918 and 1923. Probably nine tenths were civilians. Typhus, typhoid, cholera, influenza, and hunger may have killed more than enemy fire. Countless soldiers wounded on the battlefield perished because of an absence of field doctors, medicines, transport, or hospitals. Additionally, up to 200,000 people fell victim to Red Terror, and at least 50,000 to White Terror. Wealth destruction, too, was epic. In 1921, economic output did not even reach one sixth of the pre-1914 level; the 1921 grain harvest came in at one half of the 1913 level.391 Russia would go from world grain exporter (1913) to cannibalism (1923).392 Additionally, doctors, scientists, teachers, artists, and others emigrated en masse, perhaps 1.5 million total, most of whom (unlike France after 1789) would not return—extending the civilization of Russian Eurasia across the globe and shaping Soviet Russia’s foreign policy. Inside the country, not one but two powerful structures had emerged: the peasant revolution, upon which the Whites broke their teeth, and the Bolshevik dictatorship, which was compelled to concede a “peasant Brest-Litovsk.” With the latter, Lenin, an inveterate gambler, had gambled yet again. He would later call the “economic defeat” of spring 1921 “more serious” than the military defeats inflicted by Kolchak, Denikin, or Piłsudski.393 Sadly, however, Lenin’s belated concession of a tax in kind and of legal private trade at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921, over considerable party opposition, had come too late to spare the country mass death from famine (a subject of chapter 10), although not too late to rescue the regime.

The Russian-Eurasian combat was also an economic war, as each battlefield advance brought spoils: grain, moonshine, clothes, boots, kerosene, or in the case of Bukhara, gold. Seized by soldiers or other armed personnel, the trophies would usually show up on newly sprouted black markets. Freelancing banditry flourished as well. All manner of Red Army military contraband (rifles, machine guns, artillery shells) were for sale at the markets on Red-controlled territory. Sometimes the weaponry came not from the battlefield but straight from warehouses or train depots, bribery of officials and guards being merely a cost of doing business. The revolution to stamp out the market turned the whole country, regime included, into practitioners of illegal market exchange. “The New Economic Policy,” observed an official of the state planning commission, “did not fall from heaven, but grew out of the guilty soil and developed out of the ‘sins’ of October against the capitalist system.”394 There was something passing strange about establishing legal markets with an avalanche of decrees, which flowed in April, May, June, and July 1921, granting grudging permission for this or that private activity. (A decree on August 9, 1921, enjoined state agencies to implement the decrees.)395 Legacies of forced dispossession, however, were not quickly surmounted.396 The NEP’s property laws, in many ways, remained entangled in the unresolved ambiguities of market relations under Communist party rule.

National policy proved to be a similarly immense tangle. Stalin showed himself to be the Bolshevik in ruling circles who time and again best demonstrated an appreciation for the panoply of Russian Eurasia. He had strong ideas about nationalities, and was confident enough to instruct Lenin in this area.397 But Lenin ignored Stalin’s warnings about Polish nationalism and forced an ill-fated western military offensive to instigate revolution from abroad.398 Poland’s crushing 1920 defeat of Soviet Russia imparted an overt geopolitical dimension to the “necessary evil” of embracing nationalism: the Ukrainian Soviet Republic as well as the Belorussian Soviet Republic—which Stalin had a hand in creating—now appeared as counterweights to Polish aggrandizement.399 But while Polish nationalism had become an external problem with internal repercussions, Georgian nationalism, also strong, had been ingested, thanks in considerable measure to Stalin’s machinations. Figuring out how to curb such nationalism and use it for Communist aims preoccupied him. He was at heart a class intransigent, but he was also convinced of the need to find a modus vivendi with national minority Communists, even if he was not going to brook separatism when he felt the territory could be used by the Soviet Union’s external enemies to weaken and perhaps invade the Soviet state.400

Lenin developed a very different preoccupation: the condescension and outright discrimination, not to say violence, that prevailed in Great Russian relations with the smaller peoples, which in his view showed Soviet Russia in a bad light. Adolf Joffe sent Lenin a troubled telegram on September 9, 1921, asserting that in Turkestan, policy differences between two Bolshevik officials had ignited animosity between Russians and indigenes. Responding on September 13, Lenin demanded more information (“facts, facts, and facts”), and concluded, “For our entire Weltpolitik it is desperately important to win over the trust of the indigenes; thrice and four-times win over; prove that we are not imperialists, that we will not abide a deviation in that direction. This is a world-level matter, without exaggeration world-level. . . . This affects India, the East, here we cannot joke, here we need to be 1000 times cautious.”401

Around this time Lenin had begun to make asides of monumental theoretical significance. In 1921, he observed that the Bolsheviks had only managed to carry out a bourgeois democratic revolution; they had not yet gotten to socialism.402 The question of when, and especially how, socialism in Russia would actually be built had only become more acute with the surprise failure of the world revolution, and the civil war “voyages of discovery” revelations about the depth of backwardness and despair across now shattered Eurasia.

Stalin continued to puzzle out the larger picture of the revolution’s global prospects, including the relationship of war to revolution. On a copy of a 1920 work by Radek, he wrote, “In Russia the workers and soldiers joined up (because peace had not been achieved), but in Germany they did not because there peace had already been attained.”403 On a 1920 copy of Zinoviev’s War and the Crisis in Socialism, Stalin wrote, “Without this defeat [of Russia by Japan in 1905] there would not have been a Russian revolution either.”404 These sentiments were expressed just before the Red Army managed to serve as an instrument of revolution, reconquering the former imperial borderlands—Ukraine, Turkestan, the South Caucasus—as well as Mongolia. But Stalin as yet offered no comprehensive statements about the relationship of the Red Army to revolution.405 He revealed a certain pessimism in private exchanges he had with Chicherin. “Your objections to my letter about economic policy for Eastern countries, based on extreme pessimism in the question of our own economic condition, supposes that Entente capital will now penetrate into eastern countries and that in connection with this we are powerless,” Chicherin wrote to him (November 22, 1921). “But this is not so. We are talking about a rather prolonged process, during which we will not be standing in place. Even in those countries that are organically connected to western capital, the national bourgeoisie will not capitulate so quickly in the face of an Entente-capital onslaught, and between them there will be a prolonged struggle.” Chicherin named Romania, Turkey, Persia, and Egypt. But Stalin was unpersuaded. “Of course we will crawl out from economic ruin at some point, and when we do, we can talk about economic actions in these states.” In the meantime, however, the ruble’s exchange value was falling, Soviet Russia had nothing to export, its trade balance was not good, and it lacked sufficient gold. Stalin argued that it was better for Soviet Russia to develop the parts of the country that bordered on the East—Turkestan, Siberia, Azerbaijan.406

Stalin publicly revealed his pessimism in late 1921. “Gone on the wing is the ‘fear’ or ‘horror’ of the world bourgeoisie in the face of the proletarian revolution, which had seized [the world bourgeoisie], for example, in the days of the Red Army advance on Warsaw,” he wrote in Pravda (December 17, 1921). “And with it has passed the boundless enthusiasm with which the workers of Europe used to receive almost every piece of news about Soviet Russia.” In geopolitical terms, Russian power in the world was much diminished overall by the civil war. The hard-won trade agreement with Britain was a barbed laurel. “We should not forget that commercial and all other sorts of missions and associations, now flooding Russia to trade with her and to aid her, are at the same time the best spies of the world bourgeoisie, and that now it, the world bourgeoisie, knows Soviet Russia with its weak and strong sides better than ever before—circumstances fraught with extremely serious dangers in the event of new interventionist actions,” Stalin wrote. He singled out Poland, Romania, and Finland, but even Turkey and Afghanistan, as well as Japan, as formidable challenges.407 The victorious Soviet state had emerged surrounded, penetrated. Its tense efforts at a temporary modus vivendi with the capitalist powers went hand in hand with its fraught internal rapprochement with capitalism in the New Economic Policy. Durnovó’s revolutionary war had yielded a paradoxical outcome.