Utopia in Power

The overwhelming majority of officers were mobilized and forced to serve the Soviet regime. Trotsky's policy of using military specialists ran into stubborn resistance from other Bolshevik leaders. He had to confront a coalition led by Lashevich, head of the military section of the Central Committee; Zinoviev, president of the Northern Commune and boss of Petrograd; and Stalin, representative of the Central Committee on the South­ern Front. Trotsky's adversaries did not question the principle of using military specialists; they stressed that they should be employed only as "aides de camp" and, when they were no longer needed, "thrown away like a squeezed lemon."⁹⁹ General Novitsky, who had volunteered to join the Red Army, protested in an open letter to Trotsky. Trotsky replied with assurances that officers "who work conscientiously in the present difficult conditions deserve respect."¹⁰⁰ Lenin was leaning toward Trotsky's adver­saries. In March 1919 he advised the commissar of war to purge the army of old officers and to name Lashevich commander-in-chief. He was ex­tremely surprised to hear that over 30,000 officers were serving in the Red Army and that it would not be able to survive without them.¹⁰¹ A realist, Lenin at once grasped the correctness of Trotsky's policy and publicly expressed his enthusiasm for this original method of building socialism with bricks from the old regime. Even General Denikin praised the clev­erness of the Soviet policy.¹⁰²

Trotsky made massive use of military specialists, placing them under the constant surveillance of political commissars. "For the first time, the commissar came onto the scene in the role of Soviet enforcer."¹⁰³ Every command by an officer had to bear the commissar's signature. The com­missars had the right to demote the unit's "commander" (the officer in charge, in the vocabulary of 1918) or even to arrest him. With his char­acteristic pomposity Trotsky declared that the commissars were the "new Communist order of samurai, in which the members have no caste privi­leges, know how to die, and teach others how to die for the cause of the working class."¹⁰⁴ The commissars might die and teach others to die, but their main task was to act as "the eyes of the proletariat," controlling the military specialists and, in a sense, "conquering the elements," riding the whirlwind of revolution. Like the samurai, however, the commissar must above all be loyal.

The German occupation of the Ukraine enabled the White generals to form major military units. By mid-1918 the most important anti-Bolshevik force was General Krasnov's Army of the Don. The White Cossacks took Novocherkassk and after that abandoned their interest in Moscow and Russia. Their main wish was to subdue the local non-Cossack population. By the summer of 1918 the Volunteer Army had between 8,000 and 9,000 soldiers. The two anti-Bolshevik armies were caught up in constant political and strategic disputes. While Krasnov launched an offensive against Tsar- itsyn, Denikin began a second campaign in the Kuban. In the fall of 1918 Denikin defeated the Eleventh Army of the Northern Caucasus, at the same time that the Red Army was victorious on the eastern front. In January 1919 the Don Cossacks abandoned their siege of Tsaritsyn. Denikin ordered a mobilization of all officers under forty in the territories occupied by the Volunteer Army. The White Army became stronger, but it was no longer a volunteer army, and it lost its homogeneity. On January 8, 1919, after an agreement with the atamans of the Don and Kuban Cossacks, General Denikin became commander-in-chief of all the armed forces in the south of Russia. For the first time an army with a national objective, liberating the country from Bolshevik power, was created.

The metaphor so widely used by Soviet historians (the counterrevolution as a "ring of fire") is not an accurate description of the civil war. The fire that broke out the day after the October revolution blazed everywhere in the country, to one degree or another. The universal dissatisfaction with Lenin's policies developed into major bonfires, however, only in the south­ern, northern, eastern, and western outlands, and these did not merge into one general anti-Bolshevik conflagration because they lacked a single leader and a single unifying idea.

The fact that the main centers of counterrevolutionary strength were on the periphery gave the Soviet government major strategical advantages. "Our central position," wrote Trotsky, "made it possible for us to act along internal operational lines and reduce our strategy to one simple idea: the consecutive liquidation of fronts depending on their relative importance."¹⁰⁵ The course of military operations in 1919 was convincing proof of the advantages the Soviet government derived from its central position, con­trolling the main rail lines and junctions.

In the summer of 1919 several focal points of anti-Bolshevik strength appeared in the eastern part of Russia. In the Volga region a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (the Komuch) established its sway, the SRs being the moving spirit in this formation. After the taking of Ekaterinburg by the Czechs, a Urals Regional Government was formed. Likewise, a so-called Siberian Government made Omsk its capital. Or­enburg Province was under the rule of the Cossack Ataman Dutov, who professed formal loyalty to the Komuch but in fact acted independently. Disputes and conflicts arose between these governments because of their differing, often diametrically opposed views on fundamental questions: what attitude to take toward the revolution and the changes it had made and toward the peasants and the workers, and what kind of structure to advocate for the future Russian state. Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British agent in

Russia, recalled a letter he received from General Alekseev in the summer of 1918. The right-wing general stated that he would rather collaborate with Lenin and Trotsky than with Savinkov and Kerensky.¹⁰⁶ Similar sen­timents were expressed by members of the Siberian Government, who were obliged to collaborate with SRs from the Komuch. In September a confer­ence at Ufa established a directorate whose aim was to provide overall leadership for all anti-Bolshevik forces in the east of Russia. A council of ministers was chosen, with the army and navy portfolios going to Admiral Kolchak. On November 18, 1918, the SR members of the directorate were arrested, and Admiral Kolchak was named "supreme ruler." He proclaimed himself "commander-in-chief of all the land and sea forces of Russia."

In March 1919 Kolchak launched a drive toward the Volga along a broad front. The Red Army, weakened by the transfer of its best units to the south, could not hold its ground. By the end of April, however, the com­mander of the Soviet eastern front, a former colonel of the tsarist General Staff, Sergei S. Kamenev, inflicted a stunning defeat on Kolchak's army, driving it back to the Urals and pursuing it into Siberia. No sooner had Kolchak's army begun to retreat than Denikin launched an offensive from the south. His troops took the Ukraine, then Kursk, Voronezh, and Orel, after which they directly threatened Moscow by way of Tula. At the same time, independently of Denikin, General Yudenich started a drive against Petrograd from the Baltic region. Trotsky was sent to Petrograd to cope with the emergency and in a few days organized a successful defense of the city. At the end of October Yudenich's army retreated in disorder. The commissar of war warned the Baltic republics that the Red Army would march on them if they did not disarm Yudenich. He threatened Finland in similar fashion, vowing to send his Bashkir divisions against Helsinki if necessary. Meanwhile the Red Army defeated Denikin north of Orel and soon drove him south to the Black Sea. At the end of 1919 the victory of the Red Army on all fronts was assured.

General Denikin, in his Sketches of the Russian Turmoil (Ocherki russkoi smuty), spoke with blunt honesty about the causes of the White defeat. He cited the moral decomposition of the army, the looting and pogroms, which corrupted officers and soldiers alike and undermined discipline. But that was not the main problem. Denikin noted with perplexity that after his troops had liberated an immense territory, "we expected all elements hostile to the Soviet government to rise up. But there was no uprising."¹⁰⁷ The commander of the White Army correctly reduced the entire problem of the civil war to what he called "one question": Are the mass of the people sick of Bolshevism and will they rally to our side?¹⁰⁸ These were really two separate questions. To the first the answer was yes; to the second, no.

The main reason for the defeat of the counterrevolution in Russia was that its leaders failed to understand the political essence of a civil war. The revolution was led by people with political experience, but the coun­terrevolution was led by soldiers who had never concerned themselves with political and social questions. In mid-May 1918 Denikin and Alekseev drafted a program entitled 'The Objectives of the Army," which said that the Volunteer Army was fighting to save Russia by (1) forming a strong, disciplined, patriotic army; (2) waging a war to the death against bolshevism; and (3) restoring order and unity to the country. On December 4 the con­stitution of the Volunteer Army was published. It recognized the laws in effect on Russian territory before October 25, 1917; that is, it recognized the February revolution, and it guaranteed freedom of religion, the press, and assembly and the inviolability of private property. On November 18, 1918, Admiral Kolchak declared in his first appeal to the population that his main aim was "the creation of an effective army, the defeat of bolshe­vism, and the establishment of law and order so that the people can freely choose the form of government they desire and put into effect the great ideas of liberty that are now being proclaimed throughout the world."¹⁰⁹

The primary objective of both Denikin and Kolchak was to create an effective fighting force. Their other objectives were vague and ill defined. The lack of a clear-cut program left an opening for the Red propagandists to attribute whatever they wished to the White generals.

The prime objective in a civil war must be to win the support of the population. The Bolsheviks came to power because they promised peace and land. The first promise was not kept, but the blame for that was laid on the counterrevolution. As for the land, it remained in the peasants⁹ hands, although the "surplus food appropriation system" subjected whatever the peasants grew to confiscation. Life became much harder, especially in the cities. Hunger, cold, and terror reigned. Nevertheless the new govern­ment kept one of its promises: the old ruling classes lost all their privileges. Not only did they live worse than before; they lived worse than the pro­letariat. Although the workers did not have any material satisfaction, at least they had a psychological one. The promise voiced in the workers' hymn, the Internationale, "We have been naught; we shall be all," was realized in inverted form: those that had been all became naught. This was a verifiable, undeniable accomplishment of the October revolution.

Popular support for the government at that time depended on two key questions: the future of the nationalities inhabiting the former Russian empire, and the future of the land that the peasants had taken. The Whites openly proclaimed their goal of restoring "Russia one and indivisible." Their Russian nationalism clashed with the irresistible growth of local nationalism in the outlying regions of the Russian state, the same regions in which the anti-Bolshevik forces were concentrated. The Bolshevik party concealed its true centralizing aims beneath the slogan of self-determina- tion. (Thus it came out ahead in the competition for popular support on the national question.)

The programs of the White governments dealt with the land question in an ambiguous way. The clause in the constitution of the Volunteer Army referring to the "inviolability of property" could be interpreted as a repu­diation of the agrarian reform. On territory occupied by the Whites the land was frequently returned to the large landowners. On Soviet territory, peasant discontent was aroused by government requisitions and the for­mation of state farms and communes on former estate land, which the peasants thought should be divided up among themselves. A wave of peasant revolts in the Ukraine in 1919 was the direct result of a decree placing "all the large, cultivated holdings formerly belonging to the big landowners" in government hands so that state farms could be organized.¹¹⁰ Such decrees reflected the government's Utopian goal of creating "grain, meat, milk, and fodder factories that would emancipate the socialist system economically from [dependence on] the small proprietor."¹¹¹ Despite such grievances, when the peasants compared them to the White policy of returning the land to the former landlords, the Bolshevik government came out the lesser evil. The population viewed the White program as a return to the past. The program of the revolution seemed to promise hope. For the majority an unknown future was preferable to the discredited past.

The revolution had a single leader whose authority was recognized by all revolutionaries, and this was one of its greatest assets. The leaders of the Soviet government quarreled among themselves no less than the White leaders and there were no fewer animosities among the members of the Revolutionary Military Council and the Red generals than among the White generals. To the clashes of ambition common to all armies and all wars was added a special rivalry, between the political and the military leaders of the Red Army. "The constant and unending dissension and quarreling among the political leaders about the so-called question of command do us great harm," wrote Commander-in-Chief Vatsetis to Lenin in January 1919. "Some party members, overcome with ambition, seek to occupy high positions of command despite their lack of military training for such duties and their total inability to function successfully as commanders."¹¹² As chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, president of the Council of Labor and Defense, and head of the party, Lenin had unlimited power and unchallenged authority, which allowed him to act as the final arbiter in all disputes. To maintain a balance between hostile groups, Lenin would often support one side against the other for a while, then reverse himself and support the side he had opposed. In July 1919, for example, over Trotsky's objections, Lenin had Vatsetis removed as commander-in-chief, replacing him with Sergei Kamenev. To console Trotsky, Lenin gave him a blank piece of paper with his signature as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars at the bottom, approving in advance any order the commissar of war might issue.¹¹³ The White movement had neither an uncontested leader like Lenin nor an astute strategist who knew how to maneuver, as he did, in the political shoals of civil war without losing sight of the main objective.

Another decisive factor in the Bolshevik victory was terror. Ghastly episodes of White terror are known from many accounts. But terror in the White-occupied areas was always a matter of individual acts by sadistic or fanatical generals, such as Mai-Maevsky or Slashchov. The Red Terror was sponsored by the state. It was not directed against individuals or even political parties but against entire social groups, entire classes, and in some phases of the civil war against the majority of the population. The intimidation that Trotsky viewed as a powerful instrument of policy, both internationally and domestically, was applied on a scale of which the Whites had no idea. It was in the civil war that Stalin first revealed his talents. "Be assured that our hand will not tremble," he wrote to Lenin, who had sent him as a special emissary to Tsaritsyn and telegraphed him to be "ruthless."¹¹⁴ Stalin immediately passed Lenin's message along to Shau- myan in Baku: "We must be especially ruthless toward the bandits in Dagestan and elsewhere who are preventing trains from moving through the Northern Caucasus; a certain number of auls [mountaineers' settlements] must be burned to the ground to teach them not to attack trains in the future."¹¹⁵

On January 24, 1919, the Organizational Bureau (Orgburo) of the Bol­shevik Central Committee stated that, "in view of the experience with the Cossacks in the civil war," the only correct procedure was "to wage the most ruthless possible war against all the Cossack upper elements, exter­minating them to the last man." The Orgburo document called for "total extermination" of the wealthy Cossacks and "ruthless mass terror against all Cossacks who have taken part directly or indirectly in the struggle against the Soviet government."¹¹⁶ The suppression of the Don Cossack revolt of the spring and summer of 1919 took the form of genocide. One historian has estimated that approximately 70 percent of the Don Cossacks were physically eliminated.¹¹⁷

This deliberate and systematic terror, embracing the entire population, was also applied in the army. After destroying the old army and beginning

to build another "on new foundations," the Bolsheviks soon returned to the conception of a regular standing army, but this time with a discipline more rigorous than the tsarist troops had known. "In the Red Army," Vatsetis wrote to Lenin,

discipline is based on harsh punishments, particularly executions.... Through these punishments and executions we have struck terror in the hearts of everyone, soldiers, commanders, and commissars alike. ... The death pen­alty ... is utilized so often at the front, for all possible reasons and on all possible occasions, that the discipline of the Red Army could be called sanguinary in the full sense of the word.¹¹⁸

Vatsetis was wrong in assuming that Lenin did not know what discipline was like in the Red Army. The chairman of the Council of People's Com­missars explicitly discussed Red Army discipline on October 17, 1921: "Strict, stern measures were adopted, including capital punishment, mea­sures that even the former government did not apply. Philistines wrote and howled, The Bolsheviks have introduced capital punishment,' Our reply is, 'Yes, we have introduced it, and have done so deliberately.'"¹¹⁹

Terror and the promise of Utopia."I am a simple man, you know," the chairman of the Cheka in Poltava confessed to the old Russian writer Vladimir Korolenko. "To tell you the truth, I haven't read anything about communism. But I know what it's about—that there shouldn't be any money. And you see, there isn't any money in Russia anymore. ... Every worker gets a card telling how many hours he's worked. ... He needs a coat. He goes to a store and hands in his card. They give him a coat worth so many hours work. ... Nowadays," the Cheka official admitted, "we're obliged to commit many cruelties. But after we triumph.. ."¹²° The conversation took place on July 10, 1919.

This mixture of Utopian promises and ruthless mass terror produced an explosive compound enabling the Bolshevik party to blast its way to victory in the civil war. A crucial factor in this process was the presence of a leader who knew how much of each component to put into the mix, de­pending on the needs of the moment.

FOREIGN INTERVENTION

The intervention of foreign powers in the Russian civil war did not sub­stantially alter the balance of forces in that war. Soviet historians have made much of Winston Churchill's reference to a "campaign by fourteen

nations." Churchill, one of the few Western leaders who advocated inter­vention, mistook his wish for reality.

In the years 1918—1920 there was not one general intervention in Russia but a number of unrelated campaigns, whose objectives varied or, some­times, remained totally unclear. For the intervening powers the interests of Russia were always secondary, and few among them understood what was going on in postrevolutionary Russia.

The first phase of intervention, from the summer of 1918 to November of that year, was for the Allies simply part of the war against Germany. After the February revolution, the countries of the Entente feared a separate peace between Germany and Russia. Their fears were justified; if the Provisional Government had withdrawn from the war, its outcome might have been quite different. The German army, transferred to the western front before the arrival of the Americans, might have won the second Battle of the Marne.

The Allies began to plan an intervention in Russia immediately after the October revolution. They had no doubt that the revolution was the work of the Germans because the benefits to Germany were so obvious. The struggle against bolshevism was seen as an extension of the struggle against Ger­many.

Before making peace with Germany, the Soviet government maintained contact with the Allies. In early 1918, when the port of Murmansk was threatened by a German—Finnish offensive, Trotsky, who had just been named people's commissar of war, ordered the Murmansk Soviet to collab­orate with Allied troops. In March the British landed 2,000 men. After the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty the Germans demanded that the Soviet government order the evacuation of Allied troops from Murmansk. Germany regarded their presence as a casus belli. The Allies' refusal to comply and the landing of additional troops—with the agreement of the Murmansk Soviet—gave the Bolshevik government a pretext to initiate military action against the "interventionists." The fighting began on June 28. This area in the north of Russia remained under Allied control until the fall of 1919, when it was evacuated.

The successful German offensive on the Eastern Front in March 1918 increased the Allies' concern. They were afraid that German troops might quickly extend their control as far as the Urals. In London on March 16, 1918, the Supreme Allied War Council adopted Clemenceau's proposal to land Japanese troops in Russia's Far Eastern region. The first Japanese units reached Vladivostok on April 5. In August American troops arrived. By the end of September 1918 the Allied expeditionary corps in the Far

Eastern region had 44,000 men: 28,000 Japanese, 7,500 American, 1,000 Canadians, 2,000 Italians, 1,500 British, and 1,000 French. The number of Japanese troops was increased to 75,000. They occupied several rail centers along the Amur River and the Sino-Russian border, reaching the shores of Lake Baikal. The other Allied troops remained in Vladivostok.

The Czech Legion, formally under Allied command, was the only foreign military unit that regularly took part in operations against the Red Army. After Kolchak's coup in November 1918, the Czechoslovaks ceased their military activities and concentrated on trying to find a way out of Russia. On January 15, 1920, to improve their bargaining position, they turned Kolchak over to the Political Center, an SR-dominated body which had assumed power in Irkutsk. A week later, the Center transferred power to a Bolshevik revolutionary military committee. On February 7, 1920, Ad­miral Kolchak was shot by a firing squad.

The main arena of British intervention was the Caucasus and Transcau­casia. In August 1918, invited by the Transcaucasian government, the British entered Baku, but they were soon forced to retreat under pressure from Turkish forces, which had also entered the region. Meanwhile, in the Trans-Caspian territory the rail workers of Ashkhabad, enraged by local commissar Frolov's bloody reign of terror, overthrew Bolshevik rule on July 13, 1918. A locomotive engineer named Funtikov became head of the Trans-Caspian Government, the only government in revolutionary Russia actually composed of workers. None of the ministers in this government had more than a high school education except the minister of foreign affairs, a teacher named Zimin. Funtikov's government asked the British for aid. In response, General Malleson sent 2,000 troops from Baluchistan, who helped occupy the rail line from Ashkhabad through Merv to Krasnovodsk on the Caspian.

After the capitulation of Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and Germany in October and November 1918, the Allied forces in Russia openly proclaimed their anti-Bolshevik (not merely anti-German) aims. As before, however, they were unable to develop a unified strategy. Frequently the various Allied powers pursued contradictory policies. France and England, for example, expressed a desire to help General Denikin but at the same time supported nationalist movements in the Ukraine and the Caucasus opposed by De­nikin. In May 1919 the Allied Supreme Council promised aid to Admiral Kolchak on the condition that "the Allied Governments will have proofs that they are really helping the Russian people to achieve freedom, self- government, and peace." The Allies demanded that Kolchak convene a Constituent Assembly, restore a republic rather than a monarchy, and guar­antee independence for Poland and Finland and autonomy for the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and the Trans-Caspian territory. Meanwhile, one of the Allied powers, Japan, refused to aid Kolchak and supported, instead, its own prot6g6s, the Cossack atamans Semenov and Kalmykov.

Churchill, British war minister, strongly supported intervention, while Lloyd George, British premier, repeatedly sought to come to terms with the Soviet government. The British military representatives inside Russia op­posed the policies of both ministers and were, in turn, condemned by British public opinion. French policy was equally hesitant and ambivalent. Besides all this, the Allied powers competed with one another in pursuit of spheres of influence on Russian territory, each placing its own self- interest above the common cause.

The fighting capacity of the Allied troops sent to Russia was extremely low. Having survived the terrible battles of the world war, they did not wish to die in a strange land. Antimilitarist sentiment spread throughout Europe and, especially in the defeated countries, contributed to revolutionary out­breaks—in Germany, Austria, and Hungary in particular. Bolshevik slo­gans fell on fertile ground in France, Britain, and the United States as well.

Fears that the Allied troops in Russia might become demoralized and refuse to fight contributed to their evacuation. On September 27, 1919, the Allies withdrew from Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. The evacuation of Siberia began at about the same time. Only the Japanese remained, hoping to keep their bases in the Russian Far East. In August 1919 the British completed their withdrawal from Central Asia. They left the Caucasus at the same time, except for Batum, which they held until March 1921. (Under the Brest-Litovsk treaty, it was supposed to be returned to Turkey.) From Batum they watched the Red Army invade Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Ar­menia, areas the British had evacuated on the grounds that "the situation in the Caucasian republics had been stabilized." French intervention was equally ineffective. On December 17 and 18, 1918, a French naval squad­ron landed units of the French Eastern Army in Odessa, approximately 45,000 strong. They occupied areas around Tiraspol, Nikolaev, and Kher­son. After four months of idleness they were hastily evacuated on April 5 and 6, 1919.

The nations of the Entente gave the White armies substantial aid in the form of money, arms, and supplies. However, the presence of foreign troops on the territory of the former Russian empire in support of those who advocated a "Russia one and indivisible" gave a formidable weapon to the Soviet propagandists. It allowed the Bolsheviks to pose as defenders of the country's national interests.

In fact, the number of foreigners fighting on the side of the Red Army greatly exceeded the number of foreign "interventionists." Until the fall of 1918, Latvian, Polish, Chinese, Czech, and Finnish "internationalists," who as a rule were experienced soldiers, constituted the main fighting forces of the growing Red Army. In the fall of 1918 their number exceeded 50,000. By the summer of 1920, the international units numbered nearly 250,000.¹²¹ The international units were among the most self-sacrificing of the Red forces; their members were inspired by the concept that their only land was the land of the soviets. The foreigners who served in the Red Army were called internationalists, rather than interventionists, to suggest that they were the incarnation of a progressive idea and conse­quently had the historical right to fight alongside the Bolsheviks. This form of intervention was euphemistically called "fraternal aid in building a new world."

"GIVE US WARSAW"

In a history of the civil war the Polish—Soviet war of 1920 requires separate consideration. Soviet historians nevertheless continue to describe it as "the third campaign of the Entente" against the Soviet Republic.

Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet, told of a prophetic vision in which he saw an independent Poland reborn out of the collapse of the three empires which had partitioned his land. The prophecy came true in 1917—1918: however the resurrected nation soon came into conflict with the hereditary enemy on its eastern border. Clashes between Polish and Soviet troops began in early 1919, in areas of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Lithuania. In August 1919 the Polish army took advantage of the weakness of the Soviet forces engaged on the fronts of the civil war to establish a battle line extending from Vilna through Minsk to Lvov. Secret negotiations then began between the governments of Lenin and Pilsudski.

The first meeting between Moscow's envoy, the Polish Communist Julian Marchlewski, and Warsaw's representatives took place on October 11, the day that Denikin's army reached Orel, its point of farthest advance toward Moscow. The White forces took Orel on October 13. Pilsudski's represen­tative told Marchlewski that the Poles were not interested in helping Denikin and therefore had not attacked Mozyr. Such an attack, coinciding with Denikin's offensive at Orel, could have shattered the entire southern front of the Red Army. As conditions for an armistice, Pilsudski proposed rec­ognition of the existing battle line as the Polish—Soviet border, an end to Communist agitation in the Polish army, and an end to Soviet military operations against Petlyura.¹²² With the exception of the last point, Lenin agreed. But on December 14 Marchlewski returned to Moscow and the talks were broken off. By then Orel had been retaken by the Red Army, Moscow was no longer threatened, and Denikin was in retreat.

Jozef Pilsudski, who assumed the leadership of the Polish state in No­vember 1918, had for many years been a socialist, but as he put it, he got off the socialist train at the stop marked "independence." The leaders of the White armies were strong advocates of a "Russia one and indivisible," and did nothing to calm Polish fears about their future in the event of victory. In June 1919 Kolchak deeply offended the Poles by announcing that, after his victory, a Constituent Assembly would reexamine the question of the border with Poland. Denikin's attitude was the same as Kolchak's. Pilsudski's hope was that a Soviet Russia would be weaker than a republican Russia. His strategic aim was to establish a federation including Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, which would support all break­away tendencies in the former Russian empire, from Finland to the Cau­casus, thus solidifying a buffer region between Poland and Russia.

Lenin believed that the spark of the Russian revolution would ignite the fire of world revolution. In his view, conflict with Poland, a potential "Red bridge" to the West, was inevitable. None of the Bolsheviks doubted the necessity of "forcing the Polish bridge"; the only question was when and how to do it. Trotsky, who had said, 'The road to London and Paris goes through Calcutta," declared at the end of 1919: "When we have finished off Denikin, we will throw all the strength of our reserves against the Polish front."¹²³ Poland interested the Soviet government less for its own sake than as a means of breaking through to Europe, above all to Germany.

Pilsudski decided to strike first. On April 17, 1920, he ordered an offensive against Kiev. On April 21 he signed a treaty with Petlyura, recognizing his directorate as the supreme authority in the Ukrainian Peo­ple's Republic and proclaiming the total independence of the Ukraine.

Kiev fell on May 7. The Soviet troops, aware of their weakness, withdrew without offering any serious resistance. It proved easier to conquer the Ukraine, however, than to govern it. The Poles, who wished to appear as liberators, were regarded as invaders. The Ukrainians did not want the kind of independence that was imposed from abroad. Petlyura proved in­capable of establishing any stable political structures.

On June 12 the Soviet army, strengthened by fresh reserves, reoccupied Kiev. The speed of Poland's initial victory was now matched by the speed of its defeat. Pilsudski's armies withdrew in haste to the boundaries of ethnographic Poland.

The Polish invasion gave rise to a new political phenomenon in the Soviet Republic, a burst of government-sanctioned patriotism. Patriotism, which

Lenin had denounced at the beginning of the world war as a bourgeois concept and which after the revolution was persecuted and ridiculed, sud­denly became part of the Communist party arsenal. On April 29 the party's Central Committee appealed not only to the workers and peasants but to "the respected citizens of Russia" to defend the Soviet Republic. This marked the resurrection of a concept of Russia that had been discredited by the revolution. The Central Committee referred to age-old enmities between Poland and Russia and recalled earlier invasions of Russia, in 1612, 1812, and 1914. It expressed certainty that "the respected citizens" would not allow the Polish "pans" (landlords) to impose their will on the Russian people. The Ukrainian Communists, who for three years had fought ruthlessly against Ukrainian nationalism, called on the Ukrainian people as a whole to rise up in defense of their homeland.

The appeal to Russian patriotic feeling produced immediate results. General Brusilov, former commander of tsarist armies in the world war, published a statement in Pravda calling on his fellow generals and officers to forget their grievances and do their patriotic duty—defend their beloved Russia from the foreign yoke, even at the cost of their lives.

This excess of patriotism disturbed the Soviet leaders, and measures were taken to curb it. The newspapers published a spate of articles em­phasizing the class character of the Polish—Soviet war. Trotsky temporarily closed down the magazine of the General Staff, which had carried an article contrasting "the inherent Jesuitism of the lyakhs" (an insulting term for Poles) to "the honest and open souls of the Great Russians."¹²⁴

Karl Radek discovered a formula which was typical of the way dialectics is used to reconcile the irreconcilable. "Since Russia is the only country where the working class has taken power, from now on the workers of the world must become Russian patriots."¹²⁵

A concrete result of this use of patriotic slogans was a successful mo­bilization of former officers and NCOs. By August 15, 1920, there were 314,180 of them in the Red Army.¹²⁶

After the Polish withdrawal from Kiev, the Soviet Republic concentrated the bulk of its forces on a single front and made ready, for the first time in its history, to invade another country. In command of the offensive was Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a twenty-seven-year-old former tsarist officer. All the army commanders under him—Kork, Lazarevich, Sologub, and Ser- geev—had been colonels in the tsarist army.

The question of whether to cross the Polish border was discussed in the Politburo. The opinions of the Polish Communists, the "experts," were divided. Karl Radek warned of the dangers of such an action, which he said most Poles would perceive above all as an invasion by Russians. The majority of the Polish Communist leaders, however, warmly supported the plan to Communize Poland with the help of the Red Army. Most importantly, Lenin was resolutely in favor of invasion.

On Lenin's insistence the Politburo voted to invade and rejected an armistice proposal from British Foreign Minister Curzon, although Trotsky supported it. For Lenin, the fact that in March 1920 a general strike in Germany had foiled a right-wing attempt to seize power (the Kapp putsch) was irrefutable proof that the German working class was ready for revolution. By crossing Poland the Red Army would be able to lend a fraternal hand to the German proletariat. The miracle of the October revolution would be repeated as the miracle of the world revolution. Tukhachevsky, in his marching orders for the western front signed on July 2, proclaimed: "On our bayonets we will bring peace and happiness to toiling humanity. For­ward, to the West!"

On July 23 a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (the Polrevkom) was organized in Moscow, with Marchlewski as titular head. Its real leader was Dzerzhinsky. The Polrevkom was the first attempt to use foreign Com­munists living in Moscow to staff a Soviet government that would be installed beyond the borders of the Soviet Republic. Experience in this field was still lacking, and the activities of the Polrevkom were improvised following the Moscow model. Stalin, however, foresaw that the Polish experiment could be repeated. On June 16 he wrote Lenin a letter presenting theoretical arguments for a proposed confederation of such future Soviet states as Poland, Germany, and Hungary. These populations, he argued, could not be treated like Bashkirs or Ukrainians and simply included in a federation of Soviet republics.¹²⁷

Bialystok, the first major Polish city to be taken, fell on July 28. The Red Army offensive rolled on, even though negotiations between Polish and Soviet representatives were proceeding in a desultory way and despite the fact that the last of the White armies, the army of Wrangel, had begun military operations aimed at breaking out of confinement on the Crimean peninsula. Lenin swept aside the fears of Central Committee members who suggested a halt in the Polish offensive in order to deal with Wrangel. Lenin knew that the Whites and the Poles would not coordinate their actions. During the negotiations with Marchlewski, Pilsudski's personal represen­tative had stated clearly that it was central to Pilsudski's policy "not to allow the Russian reactionaries to triumph in Russia."¹²⁸ Wrangel by him­self did not pose a serious danger.

On August 6 Tukhachevsky was named commander of the entire Polish front, combining the western and southwestern fronts. On August 14 Trotsky signed an order that ended: "Red armies, forward. Onward, heroes. On to

Warsaw!"¹²⁹ Soviet troops were expected to enter Warsaw on August 16. Along with the war cry, "Give us Warsaw," another now was heard: "Give us Berlin!" By mid-August Gai's cavalry corps was only ten days' march from Berlin. The delegates to the Second Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow July 19 to August 7, could follow the progress of the Red Army on the map hanging at the front of the hall. The world revolution was coming to Europe on the points of swords and bayonets. Lenin was categorical in his conversations with the French delegates: "Yes, Soviet troops are in Warsaw. Soon Germany will be ours. We will reconquer Hungary. The Balkans will rise against capitalism. Italy will tremble. Bourgeois Europe is cracking at all its seams in this storm!"¹³⁰

At the end of the congress, on August 7, small red flags surrounded Warsaw on the map. But the Soviet offensive was stopped on the outskirts of Warsaw. After its stunning defeat on the banks of the Vistula, the Red Army was forced into a rapid retreat.

The two sides in the war, and many military historians since then, have meticulously analyzed the military operations in search of the causes for the Red Army's success and defeat. Trotsky and Tukhachevsky charged that defeat was the result of Stalin's behavior. They said that Stalin, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the southwestern front, had disobeyed orders. Stalin later blamed the "traitors" Trotsky and Tuk­hachevsky.

On a military level, the causes of the Red Army's defeat are evident: insufficient coordination of the two fronts, "underestimation of the enemy's forces, and overestimation of our own troops' successes."¹³¹ On the political level, things are even clearer: Lenin repeated Pilsudski's mistake. Pilsudski had imagined it was possible to bring independence to another nation on the point of a bayonet. Lenin was convinced that communism could be implanted the same way. But as a Soviet historian has put it, 'The Polish bourgeoisie and Catholic clergy succeeded in contaminating the minds of the Polish peasants and small handicraft producers, as well as some of the workers, with the poison of bourgeois nationalism."¹³² The Soviet com- mander-in-chief, Sergei Kamenev, commented that the Red Army had reached out its hand to the Polish proletariat but "did not find that pro­letariat's hand reaching out in response. Undoubtedly, the more powerful hand of the Polish bourgeoisie held that hand down and kept it deeply, deeply hidden."¹³³

Great Britain and France had done their best to stop the initial Polish invasion of Russia. By granting Poland modest assistance in the form of money and arms, they exerted pressure for an armistice.¹³⁴ After January 1920 the Entente's policy in regard to Russia was based mainly on Lloyd

George's views. While rejecting the Soviet system, as all other Allied leaders did, Lloyd George strongly opposed intervention in Russia's affairs, con­sidering it a waste of time and money. On April 16, 1919, he declared he would rather see a Bolshevik Russia than a bankrupt Great Britain.

Lloyd George formulated the principles of a policy that was to become standard for the West vis-&-vis the Soviet Union: to smother bolshevism with generosity. He declared that trade with the Soviet Republic would allow Russia's economy to revive, put an end to its chaotic state, and help surmount the difficulties that had given rise to bolshevism. When Lev Kamenev arrived in London on August 4, 1920, to hold talks with the British, "he was given such a courteous reception by Lloyd George that it would not have been any better had he been sent by the bloodthirsty tsar and not by Russian proletarian democracy."¹³⁵ Lloyd George was hoping to persuade the Soviet representative to accept peace on the basis of the Curzon line (the roughly ethnographic eastern frontier of Poland proposed at the Versailles peace conference in 1919). Unable to obtain any conces­sions from Moscow, which expected Warsaw to fall at any time, he set out to tame the Poles. An inter-Allied mission headed by British diplomat Lord D'Abernon left for Poland. France was represented by Ambassador Jus- serand and General Weygand. British diplomat Maurice Hankey, a member of the mission who left Warsaw after six days of talks, announced in his report that Poland could not be saved. He suggested that "suitable con­ditions" be obtained for Poland through a peace agreement and that Allied efforts be concentrated on trying to improve relations with Germany and, through it, with Russia.¹³⁶ When Lloyd George, seeking to learn the real intentions of the French government, told Marshal Foch that Great Britain was ready to send its troops to Poland if France would do so as well, the marshal answered bluntly: "There aren't any troops."¹³⁷

General Weygand, refuting the legend that he was the "father of the victory" on the Vistula, wrote in his memoirs: 'The victory was Polish, the plan was Polish, the army was Polish."¹³⁸

The Riga peace treaty, signed on March 18, 1921, was satisfactory to both parties. The Poles obtained a border much farther east than the one proposed by Curzon in July. The Soviet government, fearing worse condi­tions, was forced to accept the proposal. The Allies were particularly pleased. With Poland's help and at little cost to themselves the Bolshevik advance into Europe had been stopped.

In his diary Lord D'Abernon quoted Gibbon's historical observation that if Charles Martel had not stopped the Moors at Сгёсу, the Koran would have been taught at Oxford. D'Abernon added: "It is possible that the battle of Warsaw saved Central Europe and part of Western Europe from a more perfidious danger: the fanatical tyranny of the Soviets."¹³⁹ Historians today might modify this remark: the Polish victory on the Vistula postponed the Marxism-Leninism requirement in Eastern European schools for one gen­eration.

The signing of the peace with Poland allowed the Soviet command to concentrate its efforts on Wrangel. By mid-October "a political and mili­tary" agreement had been reached between the Soviet government of the Ukraine and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of Makhno.¹⁴⁰ By then the Soviet army outnumbered Wrangel's by "more than four to one in infantry and almost three to one in cavalry."¹⁴¹ A few military successes by the Whites during the summer of 1920 could not alter the outcome of the struggle, nor did a few political reforms which Wrangel decided to institute. Wrangel, a conservative, found himself obliged to agree to reforms that even the liberal Denikin had rejected, but it was too late. During the first half of November, Soviet troops occupied the Crimea. The remnants of Wrangel's army boarded ships and sailed into exile. For the White movement defeat had come.

THE PEASANT WAR

The war between Reds and Whites, between the regular Red Army and the regular White armies, was only one aspect of the civil war. The other was the peasant war. Peasant wars had figured prominently in Russian history—especially those led by Stepan Razin in the seventeenth century and by Emelyan Pugachev in the eighteenth. The peasant war of the twen­tieth century surpassed both of those in area and numbers involved. The Decree on Land, adopted on October 26, 1917, legalized the peasants' seizure of the great landed estates, which were abolished without compen­sation. The peasants, having gained what they wanted, considered the revolution over. The party of the proletariat, however, having taken power, insisted that the peasants provide grain and soldiers for a revolution the peasants no longer wanted. Conflict was inevitable.

During the summer of 1918 revolts broke out in many cities. Among the rebels were not only supporters of the old regime but also some of the most politically conscious members of the working class—rail workers, printers, and metalworkers. These anti-Bolshevik outbreaks were especially wide­spread in the Urals region, an important industrial center. 'The Left SRs stirred up the backward elements of the working class against us in the factories of Kushva, Rudyansk, Shaitansk, Yugovsk, Setkino, Kaslino, and elsewhere," a Soviet historian acknowledges.¹⁴² In elections to the Izhevsk

Soviet at the end of May 1918, the Bolsheviks won only 22 seats out of 170. As always in such cases, they walked out of the soviet "in protest" and declared it "anti-Soviet." In August a rebellion broke out in Izhevsk. "The immediate pretext for the revolt," writes the historian Spirin, "was the worsening of the food situation in the city and some improper actions of certain individual leaders of party and government bodies" [emphasis added—M. H.]. But the main reason, in Spirin's opinion, was "social." "A large number of workers in Izhevsk, as is well known, were contaminated by a petit bourgeois mentality."¹⁴³ The workers of neighboring Votkinsk joined the insurgent Izhevsk workers. Together they formed the People's Army of Izhevsk, more than 30,000 strong. Defeated after a hundred days of fighting near Izhevsk and Votkinsk, the soldiers of this army retreated eastward with their families and became one of Kolchak's toughest fighting units.

The "petit bourgeois mentality" contaminating these insurgent workers was expressed in their opposition to living in hunger, to petty tyranny by "certain individual leaders," to the loss of rights they had enjoyed before the revolution, and in general to conditions that were worse than before the proletarian party took power.

The "petit bourgeois mentality" of the peasants was expressed in their desire to work the land freely, to dispose of the fruits of their labor as they pleased, and not to go back to war. The bloody conflict between the peasants and the Bolsheviks was not the result of grain requisitioning alone. The peasants believed that the revolution would bring them freedom. The ideal of liberty embodied in the ancient Russian word volya, implying total lack of constraints, stirred the vast peasant mass. The soviets were seen as a form of self-government for the countryside that would free it from the burdensome rule of city people. The countryside wanted to live without the cities. In response the cities declared war on the countryside. A "food army" was organized to requisition grain, and draconian measures were employed to suppress peasant unrest. 'To break the kulak resistance, the dictatorship of the proletariat used extraordinary measures: trials before revolutionary tribunals, imprisonment, confiscation of property, the taking of hostages, and even the shooting of people on the spot in cases of armed resistance."¹⁴⁴

Any opposition to the Soviet government, any expression of discontent with Bolshevik policies among the peasants, was declared the work of "kulaks." But the term kulak had never been clearly defined. The purported number of kulak households in rural Russia at the time of the revolution and civil war varies depending on the date of the source. In 1924 a Soviet historian wrote: "Under existing conditions in our country, only by stretching the figures could one say that kulak households account for 2 or 3 percent, and for even these households it has not yet been demonstrated clearly enough that they function as kulak households."¹⁴⁵ In 1964 a Soviet his­torian asserted, 'The kulaks represented 15 percent of all peasant house­holds."¹⁴⁶ In August 1918 Lenin placed the number of kulak families at 2 million, out of 15 million peasant families.¹⁴⁷ But in April 1920, at the Ninth Party Congress, he spoke of only "1 million" rural families engaged in "exploiting the labor of others."¹⁴⁸ This figure was insignificant in a country whose population in 1920 was 130.5 million, with 110.8 million living in the countryside.

"The kulak is the enemy" was a formula that made little sense, the definition of kulak being so unclear and the officially acknowledged number of kulaks being so insignificant. Therefore the phrase was turned around: "Any enemy must be a kulak." An initial wave of peasant revolts swept the country in 1918. According to the official figures of the Cheka, between July and November 108 "kulak rebellions" broke out in the Soviet Republic. For the entire year there were "245 major anti-Soviet uprisings in the twenty provinces of Central Russia alone."¹⁴⁹

Mikhail Kalinin, president of the Central Executive Committee, who played the role of peasants' representative in the heart of the proletarian party, stated in May 1919: "I believe that unrest among the peasants can only be the result of a misunderstanding, because no better government could be imagined for the peasants than the Soviet government."¹⁵⁰ But the peasants were able to imagine a better one quite easily—one without Communists. The peasant revolts rarely put forward explicit political pro­grams, but there were three common demands: an end to grain requisi­tioning; removal of Communists from the soviets; and an end to Communist terror. One of the most moving documents of the period was a letter of July 31, 1919, to Lenin from Filipp Mironov, commander of a Cossack corps of the Red Army, expressing the grievances primarily of the Cossacks but also of the Russian peasantry as a whole. Mironov objected first of all, in the name of the peasantry, to any immediate leap into communism, the forcing of peasants into communes. "I think," he wrote, "that the Com­munist system is a lengthy process requiring much patience; it must come from the heart and not by force." Mironov sharply protested the monstrous cruelty that accompanied the establishment of Soviet power in the Don region: "Vladimir Ilyich, it is impossible—I don't have enough time and paper—to describe the horrors of 'Communist construction' on the Don. And in other rural areas it is no better." Mironov rejected what he called "the diabolical plan to exterminate the Cossacks, after which of course would come the turn of the middle peasants." He warned Lenin that if the bloodthirsty policy of the Communist party was not changed it would be necessary to stop fighting Krasnov and start fighting the Communists.¹⁵¹ A former lieutenant colonel in the tsarist army, Mironov had sided with the Bolsheviks immediately after the October revolution and became a cele­brated commander of the Red Army. Nevertheless he was executed by the Cheka in Moscow's Butyrki prison in 1921.

The reason for the large number of peasant revolts in Central Russia was that it was within close reach of the urban power centers and was therefore exploited with particular intensity by the requisitioning units. But as the requisitions spread to other regions, the peasants rebelled there, too.

The Cossack regions rose up against the Communists, and so did the Ukraine. A Soviet historian notes, "In the Ukraine by mid-1919 the entire peasantry, all sections of it, were opposed to Soviet power."¹⁵² A party official admitted in 1920: "In the Makhno movement it is hard to tell where the poor peasant leaves off and where the kulak begins. It was a mass peasant movement."¹⁵³

In March 1919 a Red Army brigade that had been sent to Byelorussia rebelled. The insurgents took Gomel and Rechitsa. The brigade consisted mainly of peasant soldiers from Tula, who made common cause with the local insurgent committee of Polesye, which represented the Byelorussian peasantry. In an appeal to the peasants the new commander of this "First Army of the People's Republic," an ensign named Strekopytov, announced the formation of a "new people's power," the abolition of grain requisitioning and emergency taxes, and an end to the war. The slogans of the insurrection were: (1) all power to the Constituent Assembly; (2) a mixture of private and governmental initiative in commerce and industry; (3) strict laws pro­tecting the interests of labor; (4) respect for civil liberties in practice; (5) land to the people; and (6) entry into the League of Nations by the Russian Republic.¹⁵⁴

In early 1919 a peasant revolt broke out in the middle Volga region— the so-called chapan revolt.¹⁵⁵ Intensified grain requisitioning in the Volga region was accompanied by

a series of additional obligations: delivery of carts to the army; provision of firewood for the cities and the railroad; compulsory hauling of goods for the army; and commandeering of horses. ... At the same time the disrupted transport system and the priority given military shipments prevented man­ufactured goods and other supplies from being delivered in return for the grain sent to the cities.¹⁵⁶

The insurgents captured several towns and nearly reached Syzran.

In the Fergana region of Central Asia in the summer of 1919 the Peasant Army, organized to protect the Russian population from armed units of Muslim peasants, reversed itself and reached an agreement with the anti- Bolshevik Muslims. The Peasant Army, under the command of К. I. Monstrov, agreed to joint operations with the Muslim peasants of Madamin- bek.¹⁵⁷ As in other regions, the spark that set off the insurrection was requisitioning and the "grain monopoly," which came to Turkestan that summer.

The entire peasantry of Russia was resisting. Besides the major revolts, countless minor ones broke out. From 1918 to 1920 the reality of the peasant war was concealed beneath the war between Reds and Whites. Yet all along the peasants were fighting on two fronts. A peasant song of the time included these words:

Hey, little apple tree, Color so ripe,

On the left we fight the Reds, On the right the Whites.

By the end of 1920 the civil war was actually over. The Red Army had won. Soviet power had completed its "triumphal march," begun in October 1917 but interrupted by the war. The danger that the large landowners would return was now past. The peasants considered the land theirs for good. Resistance to the requisitions and to the party's policy in the coun­tryside intensified. The Soviet authorities responded more harshly than ever.

From 1920 to 1921 the civil war became a peasant war. Mikhail Pok- rovsky, the first Russian Marxist historian, wrote that in 1921 "the heartland of the Russian Republic was almost completely surrounded by peasant uprisings, from Makhno on the Dnepr to Antonov on the Volga."¹⁵⁸ But the dimensions of the war were far greater than indicated by Pokrovsky. The Red Army was battling the peasantry in Byelorussia, in the southeast of European Russia, in eastern and western Siberia, in Karelia, and in Central Asia.

Just as the peasant revolt spread geographically, it grew numerically, becoming a genuine mass movement. Entire armies appeared. By the end of 1920 Makhno's army in the Ukraine was 40,000-50,000 strong. The peasant army led by Antonov in the Tambov and Voronezh regions numbered 50,000 in January 1921. An informational report from the Bolshevik party's regional committee in the Kuban area spoke of the formation of "full-scale

rebel armies" there in the spring of 1921. In western Siberia, the Ishim District (uezd) alone had 60,000 peasant rebels, and there were peasants fighting throughout the region, in the provinces of Chelyabinsk, Ekater­inburg, Tyumen, Tobolsk, and elsewhere. The "First Army of Justice," led by Sapozhkov, active along the Volga, had 1,800 bayonets, 900 sabers, 10 machine guns, and 4 artillery pieces.¹⁵⁹ By comparison, the White armies in the period of February 1—15, 1919, had 85,000 men on the southern front, 140,000 on the eastern front, 104,000 on the western front, 12,500 in northern Russia, and 7,500 in the Northern Caucasus.¹⁶⁰

The tactics of the peasant fighters varied according to local conditions, their material resources, and the talents of their commanders. Makhno and Antonov favored guerrilla warfare, sudden attacks and speedy retreats. Perfect knowledge of the terrain and, above all, the support of most of the peasants allowed the rebels to "swim like fish in the sea" and assured the success of these tactics. The enemy was furious and denounced the guer­rillas because they would not "engage in open battle, face to face, but resorted instead to sneak attacks, like bandits and thieves."¹⁶¹ In other areas the peasant armies did engage in open combat, laying siege to cities and taking many. In February 1921 peasant units in the lower Volga region took Kamyshin, and in March Khvalynsk.¹⁶² At the same time Siberian peasant armies took Tobolsk and Kokchetav and occupied all seven districts of Tyumen Province, four districts of Omsk Province and Kurgan District in Chelyabinsk Province. They laid siege to Ishim, Yalutorovsk, and Kurgan and reached the approaches of Akmolinsk and Agbasar.¹⁶³

Operational command of the campaigns against the peasants went to the most prominent military leaders of the Red Army, including the commander- in-chief, Sergei Kamenev, two commanders of fronts, Tukhachevsky and Frunze, and such commanders of armies as Budyonny, Yakir, Fedko, Tyu- lenev, and Uborevich. Just as under Catherine the Great the best-known generals were sent in pursuit of Pugachev, in 1921 the Red commanders who had won the greatest fame in battle with the Whites were assigned to hunt down Antonov, Makhno, Sapozhkov, and the other peasant chieftains.

Tukhachevsky, who a moment before had been knocking at the gates of Western Europe, took charge of operations against the Antonov rebellion. In May 1921 he had under his command 35,000 bayonets, 10,000 swords, several hundred machine guns, and 60 cannon. The latest in military technology was available for his use: armored cars and airplanes. Tuk­hachevsky was issued orders that said: 'The task of eradicating these bands must not be thought of as a more or less prolonged operation, but as a serious and urgent military mission, a campaign, even a war."¹⁶⁴

Antonov's comrades did not leave behind a history of their movement written from their own point of view. All the leaders of the movement were killed. All that is known of the rebellion comes from official Soviet sources.

Antonov himself, a Socialist Revolutionary from Tambov, had spent many years in prison before the revolution. He first came out against Bolshevik policies in August 1918. In the spring of 1919 he began a systematic struggle against the local authorities in the Tambov region. In 1920 the Tambov peasants refused to accept the policy of confiscation any longer, a policy enforced by the cruelest methods. Its harshness can be guessed from the following tactful admissions in a circular addressed to all provincial food supply committees by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets: "Requisitions, which are a burdensome obligation to the state, are carried out by persuasion and by force. But there are many cases in which force has been applied in illegal and unacceptable ways." The circular, dated February 23, 1921, added that "violations of revolutionary legality" had by that time become a regular part of "the work of the food supply system."¹⁶⁵ Rebelling against this system, the peasants joined Antonov. "In the Tambov District the following percentages of the population have joined the bandits: in the village of Aleksandrovka, 25 percent; the village of Afanasyevka, 30 percent; Khitrovo and Pavlodarovo, 40 percent. ... In some villages of Kirsanov District more than 80 percent of the male population belong to the outlaw bands."¹⁶⁶

No Soviet historian has yet claimed that the number of kulaks in Tambov Province ever reached 80 percent, or even 25 percent. Antonov's was an army of peasants, not kulaks. The full military might of the Soviet Republic was thrown against this army. A Central Interdepartmental Commission for the Struggle Against Banditry was formed, including representatives from the party's Central Committee, the government's Council of Labor and Defense, the Cheka, even the Commissariat of Posts and Telegraph. The head of the commission was Efraim Sklyansky, deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic.¹⁶⁷

In the war against the peasants not only were regular military units used, the rebel movements were widely infiltrated by agents. A retired Chekist has described how Antonov's command staff was penetrated this way.¹⁶⁸ No less important, however, were the "administrative measures." First of all, hostages were taken—people who would be shot if any rebel units appeared in the given area. Anyone who "harbored bandits" or their families would also be shot.¹⁶⁹ After March 1921 the families of "bandits" began to be deported from Tambov Province. In June the commission to combat banditry found it necessary, "although most of the bands in Tambov Province have been smashed and the kulaks have come to understand the power of the

Soviet government," to deport from the province "all persons who were involved in any way with banditry, including some rail workers." In 1929, Kalinin recalled the Antonov rebellion. It had been necessary, he said, to deport to the north of Russia "the villages most seriously infected with banditism." In other words, entire villages were deported. "Many peasants in Tambov and Voronezh provinces," Kalinin recalled, "took part in that struggle between Soviet power and the old world."¹⁷⁰ It was not by accident, incidentally, that Kalinin was discussing the subject of mass repression against the peasants in 1929. That year a new phase began in "the struggle between Soviet power and the old world"—forced collectivization and "de- kulakization."

Tukhachevsky, commander of the Tambov punitive expedition, summed up the experience of pacification as follows:

The Sovietization of the centers of rebellion in Tambov Province followed a definite progression, district by district. After troops were brought into a given district, we would concentrate maximum force there—the army, the Cheka, and the party and Soviet apparatuses. While the military units were busy wiping out the bands based in the district and establishing revolutionary committees, the Cheka was catching any surviving bandits. After Soviet power was consolidated in one district, all our forces were transferred to the next.¹⁷¹

The most important element in pacification 'Tambov style" was not the destruction of the armed rebel units but the eradication of the "spirit of rebellion" after armed resistance had been overcome. This task was en­trusted to the Cheka, which worked hand in glove with the party committees. On April 4, 1921, the Central Committee sent a letter to the party province committees with the following instructions: "The province committees of the party and the Cheka units in each province must constitute a single whole in the work of preventing or suppressing counterrevolutionary out­breaks in the affected area."¹⁷² It may be assumed that the idea of fusing the Cheka and the party committees into "a single whole" was a development of Lenin's thought that "a good Communist has the qualities of a good member of the Cheka."¹⁷³

The outbreak of peasant war was explained away very simply: it had been instigated by White Guards and Anglo-French imperialists. On Sep­tember 8, 1921, Pravda reported that Antonov had "received his orders from abroad, from the Central Committee of the Cadet party." The Cheka reported to the Council of People's Commissars: "It has now become clear that in Ryazan, Tula, Kaluga, Smolensk, Tambov, and Tver provinces, uprisings were organized according to a general plan with the cooperation of Anglo-French capital."¹⁷⁴ An awareness of the aims and demands of the peasant rebels, however, is sufficient grounds for rejecting this conspiracy theory out of hand. In May 1920 a congress of the working peasants of Tambov Province adopted an insurrectional program calling for: the over­throw of Soviet power and destruction of the Communist party; the convening of a Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal, equal, direct suffrage and a secret ballot; the establishment of a provisional government, com­posed of representatives of the parties and associations that had fought the Bolsheviks, to rule until the Constituent Assembly was held; the land to go to those who work it; both Russian and foreign capital to be allowed to help revive the country's economy.¹⁷⁵

The peasant rebels east of the Volga also called for the replacement of Soviet power by a Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, denational­ization of the land, an end to grain requisitioning, free trade, abolition of collective farms, the transfer of power on the local level to "councils of three" or "councils of five" elected by general assemblies. They demanded recognition for all parties except the monarchist Black Hundreds and the dissolution of all institutions of the Bolshevik party as "harmful to the working people."¹⁷⁶

In western Siberia the peasants demanded the institution of "genuine popular sovereignty"—peasant dictatorship, convening of the Constituent Assembly, denationalization of industry (for "the nationalization of factories and plants at base destroys the country's economic life"), and egalitarian land tenure. An appeal by the Tobolsk Command of March 6, 1921, pro­claimed: 'The Communists say that there can be no Soviet power without Communists. Why? Can't we elect nonparty members to the soviets? Long live popular Soviet power! Down with the Communists! Long live the com­plete freedom of the people!"¹⁷⁷

The best known and most fully worked out program of peasant revolt was that of the Makhno movement. Many of its participants, including Makhno himself, wrote their memoirs, and a history of the movement by one of its members exists.

Kubanin, an authority on the Makhno movement, describes the reasoning of the Ukrainian peasants as follows:

Soviet power gave the land to the peasants and raised the slogan, "Steal back what was stolen." This was the work of the Bolsheviks. But the gov­ernment that carried out grain requisitioning, that refused to give all of the large landholdings to the peasants, and that organized state farms and com­munes—that is the government of "the commune," the government not of the Bolsheviks but of the Communists.

The peasants frequently expressed this attitude with the formula: "We're for the Bolsheviks, but against the Communists."¹⁷⁸

In June 1918 Makhno had a long talk with Lenin and tried to explain to him the attitude of the Ukrainian peasants. The peasant masses, Makhno said, saw the revolution as "a way of freeing themselves from the yoke of the landlord and the wealthy kulak but also from the servants of the rich, the political and administrative functionaries who rule from the top down." In his memoirs Makhno writes: "Lenin asked me the same question three times and was amazed each time at the answer," because the way the peasants understood the slogan "power to the local soviets" was not the way the Bolshevik leader understood it. For the peasants it meant that "the entire government must correspond in all ways directly to the will and consciousness of the working people themselves." Lenin objected: "The peasants of your area are infected with anarchism."¹⁷⁹

The political label Lenin sought to paste over this reality missed the main point: the peasants were willing to follow anyone, be it the SR Antonov, the "anarchocommunist" Makhno, the peasant chiefs who belonged to no party, or the Bolsheviks themselves when they gave the peasants the land and said "Steal back what was stolen." They would follow anyone if they thought it would lead to land and liberty.

The peasants accepted the revolution, interpreting it their own way, but refused to accept the Bolshevik regime.

FROM PEASANT WAR TO KRONSTADT

To Lenin, the innumerable peasant uprisings engulfing the country did not seem reason enough for a change of policy, for abandoning the attempt to build communism immediately. The peasant war did not threaten the urban centers. Its isolated hotbeds could be extinguished one by one. It was not a serious threat to the government. But the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors, as Lenin put it, lit up reality like a flash of lightning.

In late 1920 the workers, whose living conditions were growing constantly worse, began to express their discontent more and more loudly. Strikes broke out in Moscow and other industrial centers, but in Petrograd, the "cradle of the revolution," they assumed especially large dimensions. The strikers were declared not to be workers, since real workers would not go on strike against a "workers' state." "Do you really think these are workers striking?" asked a member of the Petrograd Executive Committee. "There are no real workers left in Petrograd: they are at the front, or in food supply work, and so on. These people are scum, self-seekers, shopkeepers hiding away in the factories while the war is on."¹⁸⁰

A decree of January 22, 1921, reducing the bread ration for workers by one third, was the straw that broke the camel's back.¹⁸¹ The strikes and demonstrations that began involved the workers of the Trubochny Metals Factory, the Patronny and Baltic plants, and giant Putilov Factory, and many other Petrograd factories. The demonstrations were dispersed by Communist officer cadets (kursanty), because regular units were no longer considered reliable. The situation in Petrograd in February 1921 was re­markably similar to that of February 1917. Red Army soldiers were not issued boots for fear that if they left their barracks they would join the protesters. On February 24 the party's Petrograd Committee announced the formation of an emergency Defense Council. The city was placed under martial law, and mass arrests began. At the same time extra rations were distributed to workers and soldiers: one tin of preserved meat and one pound of bread daily.¹⁸²

The disturbances in Petrograd spread to Kronstadt. The most active elements in the movement there were the sailors of the battleships Petro- pavlovsk and Sevastopol, who with the crew of the battleship Respublika had been mainstays of support for the Bolsheviks in 1917. On March 1 a mass meeting of the garrison and civilian population of Kronstadt endorsed a resolution drafted by the Petropavlovsk sailors. Among its demands were: new elections to the soviets by secret ballot, because "the present soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants"; freedom of speech and the press for "workers and peasants, anarchists and left socialist par­ties"; the release of all "political prisoners of socialist parties"; a review of the cases of those being held in prisons and concentration camps; removal of the roadblock detachments (whose purpose was to prevent illegal trading in grain and other foodstuffs between town and country); and "full freedom of action in regard to the land," as well as the right to raise livestock, for peasants who did not employ hired labor.¹⁸³

A delegation from Kronstadt, sent to Petrograd to acquaint the workers with this resolution, was arrested. In reply Kronstadt formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, consisting of sailors and workers. Stepan Petri- chenko, a senior clerk on the Petropavlovsk, was elected chairman. On March 2 Lenin and Trotsky signed an order outlawing the Kronstadt move­ment, charging that it had been organized by "French counterintellegence" and branding the rebels' resolution an "SR—Black Hundred" document. It charged that the movement was led by a former tsarist general, Kozlovsky, and announced that martial law was extended to all of Petrograd Province.¹⁸⁴ Aleksandr N. Kozlovsky, commander of artillery at Kronstadt, was one of tens of thousands of military specialists serving in the Red Army. He played no part in organizing or leading the rebellion (although he and other specialists did give military advice to the rebels). He was singled out by official Soviet propaganda because, as the only former tsarist general at Kronstadt, he was indispensable for the myth of a "White Guard con­spiracy." His family was arrested, as were the families of all the Kronstadt rebels.

On March 5 Trotsky ordered the insurgents to surrender. "Only those who surrender unconditionally," he declared, "can count on the mercy of the Soviet Repubic."¹⁸⁵ Trotsky, who in 1917 had called the Kronstadt sailors the "pride and glory of the revolution," began preparations to take the island fortress by storm.

The Kronstadt rebellion, Lenin told the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, was more dangerous to the Bolshevik government than Denikin, Kolchak, and Yudenich combined. It was so dangerous because of the proximity of Kronstadt to Petrograd and the fact that the rebels were military professionals with a powerful arsenal under their control. But there was a special danger in the anti-Bolshevik but revolutionary slogans of the Kron­stadt sailors: "All power to the soviets but not the parties"; "Down with counterrevolution from the left and from the right"; 'The power of the soviets will free the working peasantry from the Communist yoke." These appeals reflected the moods of the peasants but also of the workers. "Here in Kronstadt," a rebel proclamation said,

has been laid the first stone of the third revolution. ... This new revolution will also rouse the laboring masses of the East and of the West, by serving as an example of the new socialist construction as opposed to the bureaucratic Communist "creativity." The laboring masses abroad will see with their own eyes that everything created here until now by the will of the workers and peasants was not socialism.¹⁸⁶

The slogan of a "third revolution" directed against the "commissarocracy" could not fail to stir Lenin's worst fears. On March 7, artillery bombardment of Kronstadt and its outlying forts began.

To direct operations, Commander-in-Chief Sergei Kamenev and Com­mander of the Western Front Tukhachevsky were brought to Petrograd. Direct command of the forces gathered to suppress the rebellion was placed in Tukhachevsky's hands. Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Soviet leaders, who never stopped denouncing the "White general" Kozlovsky, were not at all troubled by the fact that former tsarist officers, colonels and generals, directed the operations against Kronstadt. An overwhelming force was con­centrated to crush the rebels. Against the 3,000—5,500 sailors who were defending Kronstadt,¹⁸⁷ approximately 50,000 troops attacked across the ice from the coasts north and south of the island fortress. The Red forces broke through the Kronstadt defenses during the night of March 17—18. On March 18 all the Soviet newspapers carried front-page articles com­memorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune and denouncing Thiers and Galliffet, the "bloody butchers" who had suppressed the Com­munards and executed them en masse. In 1919 a bulletin of the Kiev Cheka, Krasny mech (Red sword), had given voice to the kind of thinking that in 1921 allowed bloody butchery against the workers and sailors of Kronstadt: 'To us everything is permitted, because we were the first in the world to take up the sword not for the purpose of enslavement and repression but in the name of universal liberty and emancipation from slavery."¹⁸⁸

The rebel sailors had done no more than arrest local Communists who refused to join them. The Communists, by contrast, took severe reprisals. Immediately after the suppression of the revolt thirteen Kronstadt sailors were shot. Executions continued in the prisons of Petrograd. A large number of Kronstadt sailors were sent to the Pertominsk concentration camp on the White Sea, where many of them died. Petrichenko, who fled to Finland, lived there until 1945, when he was turned over to the Soviet government; he died in a camp.¹⁸⁹ Later Soviet historians, not content with repeating the charges about "the White general Kozlovsky" and "French intelli­gence," added another culprit to share the blame for the uprising—Trotsky and the Trotskyists.¹⁹⁰

The most important thing about Kronstadt was that it made Lenin realize that his policy of building communism posthaste had suffered a defeat.

CHAPTER

THE SEARCH FOR A "GENERAL LINE," 1921-1925

A STEP BACKWARD

In a letter to Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Pokrovsky described a proposed history of the civil war whose chronological framework would stretch from the February revolution to Kronstadt and the Antonov revolt. Thus, for the chief official Soviet historian the suppression in 1921 of the Kronstadt revolt and of the peasant movement in Tambov Province marked the end of the civil war.

Earlier, in 1920, Soviet power had been established in Siberia, Tur­kestan, and the Ukraine. In some areas it was impossible for various reasons to install a Soviet regime directly. There, transitional forms were introduced: the Far Eastern Republic, which lasted from April 1920 until the fall of 1922, when the Japanese left the region once and for all; the People's Republic of Khorezm, founded in February 1920; and the People's Republic of Bukhara, founded in September 1920.

The formation of the People's Republic of Bukhara was preceded by the emergence of a pro-Communist left wing in the Young Bukhara party. That

party then organized an uprising in Chardzhou and asked for help from the Red Army, located nearby. Red Army units under the command of Frunze immediately lent a fraternal hand. Despite stubborn resistance by troops loyal to the emir of Bukhara, the city and its subject territory were taken. The emir fled, and the People's Republic was proclaimed.

The Sovietization of the Caucasus followed a similar scenario. In April 1920 the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party formed a special Cau­casus Bureau, the Kavburo, and placed it under the command staff of the Eleventh Red Army, operating in the Northern Caucasus. The Kavburo did the thinking, and the Eleventh Army carried out the plan. In late January 1920 Chicherin, the commissar of foreign affairs, sent a note to the Azer­baijan government demanding cooperation in the fight against Denikin and promising in return to recognize the independence of Azerbaijan. But as early as April 17 Lenin secretly named his own representative to be director of the future Soviet oil industry in Baku. The Kavburo urged the Baku Communists to launch an uprising on April 27. The Azerbaijan Commu­nists, with whom the Musavatist government was conducting negotiations (despite the fact that the Communists were officially illegal), issued an ultimatum demanding that the government surrender power to the Soviets. Before the twelve-hour ultimatum could expire, on April 28 an armored train carrying Ordzhonikidze and Kirov arrived in Baku. With them Soviet power came to Azerbaijan. Ordzhonikidze, as head of the Kavburo, directed a massive wave of repression, aimed primarily at the leaders of the na­tionalist movement. Soon the Azerbaijan Communist party announced the appearance of a new star on the horizon of the world revolution. The Baku newspaper Kommunist welcomed the arrival of an important visitor in No­vember 1920 with these words: "Arriving on a visit to Baku [today] is Comrade Stalin—a working-class leader of exceptional energy, firmness, and self-denial, the only recognized authority on questions of revolutionary tactics, and leader of the proletarian revolution, in the East and the Cau- casus. ¹

The absence of any Communist organization in Armenia, the result of the pro-Turkish policies of the Russian Communist party, delayed the So­vietization of that republic. An attempt by Armenian Communists living outside Armenia to organize a coup did not succeed. A war with Turkey which broke out in September 1920 ended quickly with the defeat of the Armenian army. On November 27 Stalin, after arriving in Baku, ordered Ordzhonikidze to begin operations against Armenia. On the same day Ord­zhonikidze received instructions from Lenin² to issue an ultimatum to the Armenian government: surrender power to the "Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet Socialist Republic," positioned nearby on Azerbaijan soil.

Without waiting for the deadline to expire, the Eleventh Army entered Armenian territory. On December 6 the Revolutionary Committee arrived in Erevan. A coalition government of Communists and Dashnaks was formed. On December 21, 1920, all laws of the Russian Republic (RSFSR) were made binding for Armenia. The Dashnaks were expelled from the govern­ment and repressed.

Georgia, the largest of the Transcaucasian republics, with a government enjoying popular support and a fairly strong army, was seen by Lenin as a serious opponent. When Ordzhonikidze, intoxicated by his success in Baku, asked for permission to invade Georgia, it was denied. The war with Poland had just begun, and Moscow did not want to fight on two fronts. On May 7, 1920, a treaty was signed in Moscow with the ambassador from Georgia. In the first clause the RSFSR recognized the independence and sovereignty of the Georgian state and renounced all former Russian privileges. In a secret clause Georgia pledged to legalize the Communist party and allow it to carry on its activities openly. Kirov, vice-president of the Kavburo, was appointed Soviet ambassador to Tiflis. "It was no secret to anyone," recalled the Georgian Communist leader Makharadze, "that under the cir­cumstances of the time (1920) the activities of the Communist party con­sisted exclusively of preparing for armed insurrection against the existing government."³ After Soviet power had been established in Azerbaijan and Armenia, Georgia found itself surrounded on three sides. Still Lenin con­sidered the occupation of Georgia premature. Sergei Kamenev, the Red Army commander-in-chief, had reported to Lenin three times that an in­vasion of Georgia could lead to war on a large scale in the Caucasus.⁴ Occupation of Georgia might also cause the collapse of talks then underway with Britain. Although Leonid Krasin, the Soviet representative in London, reported that Lloyd George had made a statement recognizing that the Caucasus was within the Soviet sphere of influence, Lenin's fears were not dispelled.

Sovietization of the Caucasus was considered necessary for economic and strategic reasons by all the Bolshevik leaders, despite differences over tactics. In January 1921 the Politburo passed a resolution to overthrow the Georgian government, but Lenin urged that the action be given the ap­pearance of an insurrection to which the Red Army would offer support. Georgian Communists were instructed to organize an uprising.⁵ On February 16 the Eleventh Army crossed the border to lend a "fraternal hand" to a Military Revolutionary Committee formed in the tiny village of Shulaveri two days earlier. The Georgian army was short of weapons. 'The most essential thing was to obtain rifles and cartridges. We sent telegrams every­where. No one could promise us anything. Only from London came a categorical reply, a refusal."⁶ On March 18 the Georgian government sur­rendered. Lenin, fearing a popular resistance movement if the methods used in Azerbaijan were repeated in Georgia, urged Ordzhonikidze to em­ploy milder tactics. Ordzhonikidze scorned Lenin's suggestion and set about the work of Sovietizing Georgia, using the same methods tested out in the other Caucasian republics (and for the preceding three years in the Russian Republic).

The Kronstadt rebellion had finally forced Lenin to reexamine his policy toward the peasantry. As late as the beginning of 1921 he still rejected all proposals to alleviate or alter the surplus grain appropriation system, the prodrazverstka. Kronstadt convinced him that, with the overwhelming ma­jority of the population opposed to the government's policy, the position of an occupying power in one's own country could no longer be maintained.

Lenin realized that he had made a mistake. In a conversation with Clara Zetkin at the end of 1920, he admitted he had been wrong to believe that the invasion of Poland would set off a revolution. The German Communist Zetkin recalled that as Lenin spoke his face had a look of inexpressible suffering. Lenin's face at that moment reminded the art lover Zetkin of the crucified Christ of Grunewald. Unfortunately no one was present to paint Lenin's face when he admitted his mistake in believing that communism could be built overnight in Russia: "We thought that under the surplus food appropriation system the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution." With less than full sin­cerity he added: "A not very lengthy experience convinced us that that line was wrong."⁷ The experience had lasted four years, from October 25, 1917, to October 17, 1921, when Lenin made this confession of error. It was indeed a lengthy experience, and very costly in human life. But by "admitting his error" Lenin made an important contribution to the art of ruling the Soviet Union: self-criticism by the Leader eliminates the mistake at once, as though it had never existed, and the Leader remains infallible.

On March 15, 1921, at the Tenth Party Congress, Lenin presented the New Economic Policy. The congress approved it. The era of NEP began.

The NEP was first and foremost an agrarian policy. 'The peasantry is dissatisfied with the form of its relations with us," Lenin explained to the Tenth Congress. "It does not want relations of this type and will not continue to live this way. ... The peasantry has expressed its will in this respect definitely enough. It is the will of the vast masses of the working popu­lation."⁸ At his suggestion the congress changed the type of relations "be­tween them and us." The surplus grain appropriation system (prodrazverstka) was replaced by the "tax in kind" (prodnalog).

For the year 1921-22 the tax in kind was set at 240 million poods (2.5 million centners) of grain, approximately one third of the amount previously set for requisitioning during that year. One might conclude that this was a substantial easing of the burden on the peasantry—except for the fact that about 240 million poods had actually been requisitioned during 1920-21. The "easing of the burden" can be judged more precisely if the tax in kind is compared to the direct taxes imposed before 1914: the tax in kind was 399 percent of the 1914 tax.⁹ The significance of the policy change was not that it eased the tax burden but that it limited arbitrary action by the state. On March 8, 1921, the peasants of Panfilov Township (volost), in the Gryazevetsk District of Vologda Province addressed a letter to "our beloved leader and great genius, Comrade Lenin." They informed him:

At the present time practically everything has been taken from the peasants of our township—bread, grain, livestock, hay, raw materials. ... In 1920 because of the drought the yield relative to seed grain was only four to one, but the agents of the food supply committee did their requisitioning on the basis of a six-to-one yield.

The Vologda peasants, begging not to be considered "pernicious ele­ments" but on the contrary "citizens wishing to do fruitful work to strengthen the liberty of the workers and peasants," proposed that requisitioning be replaced by a tax in kind, so that the peasants "would know how much tax was owed and when it was due."¹⁰ The decree on the tax in kind regularized both matters.

The new policy could not be limited to the tax change. It implied that the peasants could increase agricultural production without fear of confis­cation. But it made no sense to allow this surplus unless it could be sold legally. Up to the last Lenin did not wish to abandon his dream of an immediate leap into communism. At the Tenth Party Congress Trotsky recalled that a year earlier, in February 1920, he himself had suggested that a tax in kind be substituted for requisitioning. At the Eighth Congress of Soviets, in December 1920, the Mensheviks and SRs—the last time they were allowed to participate openly in a discussion—urged that grain requisitioning be abandoned. Lenin rejected all these proposals as consti­tuting a return to capitalism. In his conception commerce and capitalism were the same thing; consequently, freedom to trade meant a step back toward capitalism. At the end of 1920 a decree was passed declaring that all food products held by the state would thenceforth be given out free of charge. Actually there was hardly any food, but the Bolshevik leaders still thought that communism was just around the corner.

In abandoning grain requisitioning, Lenin clung compulsively to the hope that he could avoid granting freedom of trade, that he would not have to allow the market to sully the purity of communist relations. Under his plan, exchange between peasant producers would remain strictly a local phenomenon (with products being transported by horsedrawn vehicles only, not over the rails). This trade would be more like barter than buying and selling. Utopianism died hard. But reality proved stronger. In the fall of 1921 the leader of the revolution was forced to admit: "[The] system of commodity exchange has broken down. ... Nothing has come of commodity exchange; the private market has proved too strong for us; and instead of the exchange of commodities we have gotten ordinary buying and selling, trade."¹¹ The New Economic Policy likewise marked a 180-degree turn in industry. Small private businesses were authorized, individuals were al­lowed to rent large enterprises, and foreigners were allowed to lease some factories and mining operations as concessions. Even more important was the change in attitude toward labor. Workers had taken part in all protests against the Communist regime, but their discontent was most vividly ex­pressed in the sharp decline of labor productivity. "In the years 1919- 1920 the average output annually of a worker was only 45 percent of the quantity of products that resulted from his labor before the war."¹² The plan for a "great leap forward" into communism based itself on the need to force the workers to work. Just as Dzerzhinsky had proclaimed the concentration camps to be "schools of labor," Trotsky advocated the "mil­itarization of labor" and the formation of "labor armies."¹³ The people's commissar of war questioned the notion that slave labor was unproductive. "Is it true that compulsory labor is always unproductive? We have to reply that is the most pitiful and worthless liberal prejudice."¹⁴ Human beings do not want to work, Trotsky argued, but social organization forces them to, driving them to it with a whip. If it were true that compulsory labor was unproductive, he argued, "our entire socialist economy would be doomed to failure. For we can have no way to socialism except by the authoritative regulation of the economic forces and resources of the country, and the centralized distribution of labor power in harmony with the general state plan."¹⁵ The NEP constituted an admission that forced labor was unpro­ductive after all. It was an attempt to find "another road to socialism." The principle of concentration, the amalgamation of enterprises into "trusts," was introduced, along with that of khozraschet (the requirement that an enterprise be financially self-sustaining, rather than dependent on central state funds). On January 1, 1922, the principle of self-financing was ex­tended to the forced labor camps. Pravda wrote on August 30, 1922: 'The experience of the first few months during which the compulsory labor camps have operated on the basis of self-financing have produced positive results."

In 1921, after all the horrors of world war, revolution, and civil war, one more calamity befell Russia: a famine of such severity as the country had never known.

The threat of famine became evident early in the summer of 1921. At first the government sought to minimize the extent of the disaster. On August 6, in an appeal to the world proletariat, Lenin announced that "several provinces" of Russia were affected by a famine no less terrible than the famine of 1891. The population of the famine-struck Volga region in 1891 was 964,627. In 1921 the count was in the millions: no less than 20 percent of the country's population and more than 25 percent of the rural population starved.¹⁶ The famine was grisly. The writer Mikhail Osorgin, editor of the newsletter Pomoshch (Relief), the organ of the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, knew the situation in the areas of famine from the hundreds of letters the committee received. He wrote about the cannibalism that became an everyday occurrence: "People mainly ate members of their own families as they died, feeding on the older children, but not sparing newborn infants either, those who had hardly had the chance to live, despite the fact that there wasn't much to them. People ate off to themselves, not sitting together at a table, and no one talked about it."¹⁷ The famine was a test of the capabilities of the new system. For the first time it confronted a task that could not be solved by force. The success of the October revolution and the victory in the civil war had created a mentality of omnipotence among the Bolsheviks, the conviction that everything could be solved by a soldier's rifle or a Chekist's pistol. Ekaterina Kuskova recalled an account by Bonch-Bruevich of a visit to the Kremlin by Maxim Gorky in 1919.

We entered an office and found Lenin bent over some documents in deep concentration. "What are you doing?" Gorky asked. "I'm thinking about the best way to cut the throats of all the kulaks who won't give bread to the people." "Now that's an original occupation!" Gorky exclaimed. "Yes, we are taking them head on in the fight for bread, the most elementary question of human existence."¹⁸

To Lenin the struggle for the existence of some was inseparable from the extermination of others. The best way to obtain bread was to "cut the throats of all the kulaks." But in 1921 throat cutting could accomplish nothing. The peasantry had no grain stocks left. Even seed grain had been confis­cated. All the leaders of the Soviet government blamed the famine on the drought. In 1891 Lenin had had a different kind of explanation: 'The government bore sole responsibility for the famine and 'the general ruin.'"¹⁹ But in 1921 the famine was the result of drought and civil war. At the Tenth Party Congress Trotsky briefly summarized the results of the war: "We have destroyed the country in order to defeat the Whites." The main cause of the famine, however, was the requisitioning policy, the policy of an immediate leap into communism.

The absence of food reserves, the spread of the famine to the cities (unlike in 1891), the ruined transport system, the peasant revolts, and the unrest among the workers—all these created a critical situation. Only the capitalist countries were in a position to provide immediate assistance, more exactly, only the United States, because Western Europe was ex­hausted by the war and was barely able to feed itself. The Soviet govern­ment, however, would not ask the capitalists for help, assuming that they would automatically reject such a request. To Lenin it seemed only natural that the capitalist countries would refuse to help a government whose openly proclaimed goal was world revolution. Nevertheless, the impossible situ­ation finally forced Lenin, after long hesitation, to agree to the formation of a nongovernmental organization, the All-Russia Famine Relief Com­mittee. On July 21, 1921, Mikhail Kalinin signed the decree of the Central Executive Committee authorizing formation of the committee, which in­cluded some of the most prominent Russian scientists, literary and cultural figures, and political personalities of the prerevolutionary era. Many of them hesitated a long time before agreeing to collaborate with the Soviet government.

Lenin set precise limits on this never to be repeated experiment in cooperation on an equal basis between the Soviet government and the Russian intelligentsia:

Today's directive to the Politburo: Kuskova must be rendered strictly harm­less. You are in the "Communist cell" [of the Famine Relief Committee] and will have to be on your toes, keeping a strict watch over everything. We shall get Kuskova to give us her name, her signature, and a couple of carloads [of food] from those who sympathize with her (and others of her stripe). Not a thing more. (Lenin's emphasis—M. H.)²⁰

Ekaterina Kuskova, a journalist who had been prominent in the early Russian Social Democratic movement, later a liberal, was one of the ini­tiators of the committee. She explained to Kamenev: "Help can come only from abroad. It will not come by itself. They will think their aid will go to you and the Red Army rather than to those who are starving. "²¹ A guarantee was necessary. The All-Russia Famine Relief Committee served as that guarantee. Gorky, a member of the committee, appealed to world public opinion to send aid, as did the committee as a whole.

During this period Lenin's prime concern was to assure food supplies to the industrial centers, above all to Moscow and Petrograd. Every day he sent telegrams to the southern and eastern parts of the country calling for bread. "In view of the extremely grave food supply situation at the center," he said in a telegram to Rakovsky, chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars, "I propose: three quarters to be brought here, one quarter to be left for the cities and workers of the Ukraine. ... But bear in mind that the food crisis here is desperate and downright dangerous."²² In a telegram of May 4 he ordered the Siberian Revolutionary Committee to send 3 million poods (1 million centners) of wheat to the center during the month of May. His telegram of July 12, 1921, to Turkestan said: "With the same speed required in urgent military matters, it is of major political importance that you immediately load and send freight cars, express, to Moscow with 250,000 poods [82,000 centners] of wheat."²³ The lessons of the February crisis that produced Kronstadt were still fresh. Grain was confiscated from any possible source to prevent food riots in the working- class centers. A "shameful peace" was made with the intelligentsia, and Lenin bided his time, waiting for the New Economic Policy to produce results. But before these results materialized, who should come to the rescue but the imperialists.

On August 21, 1921, Maxim Litvinov, representing the Soviet Union, signed an agreement in Riga with a representative of the American Relief Administration (ARA), headed by Herbert Hoover. When N. Kutler, a member of the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, heard about this agreement, he said: "Well, it's time for us to go home. ... Our job is done. Now only 35 percent of the population in the areas of the famine will die, instead of 50 or 70 percent."²⁴ Kutler was only partly right. The help from abroad did save millions, but it was not time for the committee members "to go home." Most of them were arrested right after the agreement with the ARA was signed, that is, as soon as they were no longer needed.

The August 31 Pravda reported on a special meeting of the Moscow Soviet at which its president, Lev Kamenev, "noted with satisfaction that an agreement had been reached between the Soviet government and Herbert Hoover's organization, an agreement that has already brought tangible re­sults." Kamenev reported that the first ship "loaded with food for the children" had arrived in Petrograd that day and that regular shipments would be coming from then on.

A man named Eiduk, a veteran agent of the Cheka who was attached to the ARA as the Soviet government's representative, writing in Pravda, May 25, 1922, gave the following summary of the work of the ARA and other relief organizations. As of May 1922, the ARA had fed 7,099,574 persons;

the American Friends Service Committee, 265,000; the International Child Relief Association, 250,751; the Nansen Committee, 138,000; the Swedish Red Cross, 87,000; the German Red Cross, 7,000; the British trade unions, 92,000; and the International Red Aid organization, 78,011. The article on the ARA in the 1926 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia provides further information: The ARA was active in Russia from October 1, 1921, to June 1, 1923; at the height of its activity it fed approximately 10 million people; it spent nearly 137 million gold rubles during its operations, while the Soviet government spent approximately 15 million gold rubles in con­nection with the ARA. By 1930 the official Soviet reference works had changed their tone in regard to the ARA. The Small Soviet Encyclopedia of 1930 stated that "under the pretext of charity" the ARA had "helped to reduce the severity of the economic crisis in America by finding outlets for American goods." In 1950 the second edition of the Great Soviet En­cyclopedia asserted that the ARA "took advantage of the fact that it was allowed to organize its own apparatus on Soviet territory to engage in espionage and subversion and support counterrevolutionary elements. The counterrevolutionary actions of the ARA were energetically protested by the broad masses of the working people." The encyclopedia did not bother to explain why the ARA was allowed to operate on Soviet soil or what work it did other than "espionage and subversion." The first volume of the most recent edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia now admits that the ARA was "of some help in fighting the famine," but it still contends that "the ruling circles of the United States tried to use it to support counterrevo­lutionary elements, espionage, and subversion, to fight the revolutionary movement, and to strengthen the position of American imperialism in Eu­rope."²⁵ According to the figures of the Central Statistical Bureau of the USSR, 5,053,000 lives were lost because of the famine of 1921-1922.²⁶ These losses should be added to the 10,180,000 killed in the civil war of 1918-1920. Altogether, from 1918 to 1922, the country lost more than 14 million people, approximately 10 percent of the population. The Soviet demographer B. Ts. Urlanis gave the following estimates for the percentages of populations lost in other major civil wars: Spain, 1936—1939, 1.8 per­cent; the United States, 1861—1865, 1.6 percent. These figures help to illustrate the monstrous dimensions of the bloodletting in the Russian civil war. If we add to this the nearly 2 million lives Russia lost in World War I and the nearly 1 million persons lost to emigration after the revolution, we can understand how much the population diminished from 1914 to 1922.²⁷ The famine was a major test for the young Soviet government. All the unique features of the system were displayed: cruelty, vengefulness, and obstinacy. Lenin was willing to sacrifice a substantial section of the peasantry as long as the industrial centers were kept in food. Gorky, who was pressured by Lenin into leaving the Soviet Republic late in 1921, expressed his attitude toward the peasantry in a Berlin interview with Western journalists, an attitude that undoubtedly reflected the views of Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. "I assume that most of the 35 million affected by the famine will die."²⁸ The great humanist was optimistic about the future: 'The half-savage, stupid, difficult people of the Russian villages will die out... and their place will be taken by a new tribe of the literate, the intelligent, the vigorous."²⁹ This dream, or at least its first part, was realized ten years later. Those who hindered its immediate realization, especially those active in the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, paid the price. Many of them, including Kuskova, were expelled from the Soviet Republic in 1922; others were arrested and sent into internal exile. The history of the committee and of relations with the ARA set the pattern for the Soviet government's dealing with those who tried to help it while main­taining their own independence: (1) make concessions, if there is no al­ternative; (2) renounce all concessions when the need for them is past; and (3) take revenge.

The famine showed the new government's stability, the determining factor behind which was the party, its ranks hardened by the awareness of their total isolation within the country, by the elitist character of their organi­zation, and by a feeling of total omnipotence. If the party was the skeleton of the state, the Cheka gave it muscle. The party was the source of the Idea: that everything is permitted because the party is doing the work of History. The Cheka provided the hands to put this great, all-permitting Idea into practice. Gorky made the categorical assertion that "the cruelty of the forms taken by the revolution is explained, in my opinion, by the exceptional cruelty of the Russian people."³⁰ He called the charges of brutality against the leaders of the revolution "lies and slander." In this he expressed the naivet6 common to many of his contemporaries, who failed to understand the true nature of the system then coming into existence, a system in which the repressive bodies played a vital role. Their omnipres­ence and omnipotence created a paralyzing atmosphere of fear in Soviet society. Along with fear, the enticements of hope contributed in a very important way to stability. The New Economic Policy embodied a promise of improvement in the situation. Soviet citizens began to assume—as they would many times thereafter—that since things couldn't get worse, they were bound to get better. Finally, the absence of any alternative contributed to stability. The program of the Whites had been defeated, and the socialist opponents of bolshevism were robbed of their arguments by the introduction of the NEP. The people had nothing left but to hope for the future.

Leonid Krasin, invited to London by Lloyd George to discuss the nor­malization of Anglo-Soviet relations, gave an interview to the London Ob­server, which was printed with the headline, "How the Famine Is Helping the Soviet Government." The attitude of the West toward starving Russia seems to have opened Lenin's eyes. He saw that the capitalist world did not understand the goals of the revolution. Ignorant of the danger, the capitalists preferred to make their profits today rather than think about tomorrow.

The lifting of the blockade by the Allies in January 1920 meant the end of their war against Soviet Russia. This action was followed by peace treaties between the Soviet Republic and three neighboring countries, Es­tonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In May 1920 Krasin began negotiations for a trade treaty. In July the Soviet government accepted Britain's three con­ditions: an end to hostilities and to propaganda warfare; repatriation of prisoners of war; and recognition in principle of debts to private individuals. At the height of the Polish—Soviet war the trade treaty was signed. Upon his return home, Krasin told the Communists of Petrograd how he had applied pressure to the British government:

We did everything we could to attract the British business community. When the honest burghers of the commercial establishment declined, we turned to the semi-speculator elements. We signed an agreement with the Armstrong Gun Factory for the repair of 1,500 locomotives. Armstrong put pressure on his workers, who in turn pressured Lloyd George by pointing out that orders from Russia would reduce unemployment. The British bourgeoisie began to have apprehensions about competition from Germany, and the trade agree­ment was signed.

Krasin also announced forthcoming agreements with Norway and Italy. Around the same time Sweden agreed to accept Soviet gold, the first country to do so. "At present," the people's commissar of foreign trade boasted, "we are very close to obtaining a major loan, and this big loan will be given by none other than France."³¹ When Lenin was warned in the summer of 1921 by opponents of his harsh policy toward the Famine Relief Committee that the arrest of its members might affect relations with France, formerly the chief supporter of the White movement, Lenin replied with full self- assurance: "Our policy will not undercut [trade] relations with France; it will speed them up. ... We are on the way to achieving trade talks with France."³² The agreement with the ARA convinced Lenin once and for all that it was possible to establish normal trade and diplomatic relations with the capitalist world by using the industrial and commercial interests against the diplomats and, conversely, using the diplomats against the industrial and commercial interests. Above all, the Soviet leaders concluded that it was possible to have normal relations with the capitalists without aban­doning the goal of world revolution.

A BI-LEVEL FOREIGN POLICY

In the spring of 1919 an unofficial diplomatic mission sent by Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson and headed by the American William Bullitt arrived in Moscow. Bullitt inquired into the Bolsheviks⁹ attitude toward a possible armistice between the Red and White armies, but in his detailed reports from Moscow he failed to mention the First Congress of the Third, or Communist, International (the Comintern). The congress was in session in the Soviet Republic's capital during Bullitt's visit and Pravda wrote about it at length, but the news seemed to have no interest for the Allied rep­resentative.

Of the thirty-four "delegates" to the First Congress of the Comintern, thirty lived in Moscow and worked for the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, two were chance visitors (from Norway and Sweden, where there were no Communist parties), and only two were actually mandated by foreign Communist parties. One of them, Hugo Eberlein, represented the German Communist party (KPD), which had been founded two months earlier. He had come to Moscow to express his party's disagreement with the idea of founding the Comintern. Rosa Luxemburg, the moving spirit behind the KPD, was opposed to the formation of a new international as long as "the relative backwardness of the Western revolutionary parties leaves all the initiative in the hands of the Bolsheviks." Despite Eberlein's objec­tions, Lenin insisted that the birth of the Third International be proclaimed in March 1919.

The new international organization, with its headquarters in Moscow and the expenses of its founding paid for by the Bolshevik party was awash in the glow of victorious revolution. It disdained to conceal its aims. In the first issue of the magazine Kommunisticheskii internatsional (Communist international) Grigory Zinoviev published an article, 'The Prospects for Proletarian Revolution," in which he made this prediction: "Civil war has flared up throughout Europe. The victory of communism in Germany is absolutely inevitable. In a year Europe will have forgotten about the fight for communism, because all of Europe will be Communist. Then the struggle for communism in America will begin, and possibly in Asia and other continents."

The Second Congress of the Comintern, in the summer of 1920, laid the basis for a bi-level foreign policy. The congress adopted the famous "twenty- one conditions" that had to be met by any party wishing to join the Com­intern, to become a section of the Third International. The standard pattern for a Communist party was established. It would be a detachment of an international army engaged in the struggle for power. Among the conditions for admission to the Comintern were the following: the obligation to help the Soviet Republic in its struggle against counterrevolution, employing all legal and illegal means to this end (condition 13); the obligation to combine legal and illegal methods in fighting against the government of one's own country (condition 3); and the obligation to form an underground organi­zation (condition 4).

The classic example of a bi-level foreign policy—aboveboard through the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and secretly through the Comintern— was Soviet policy toward Germany. The certainty of a revolution in Germany was one of the main arguments Lenin had used to justify the October revolution. The events of November 1918, when Germany might have become Communist but failed to do so, discouraged the Bolsheviks, but they did not give up hope. The Soviet government began to cooperate on the official level with the Weimar Republic, but activity aimed at the Sovietization of Germany never ceased. This activity increased sharply after the founding of the Comintern. A number of "specialists" on revolution— Radek, Zinoviev, Bela Kun, Maty as Rakosi—made preparations for the seizure of power by the German Communists. In April 1922 Germany and Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty in the Italian city of Rapallo. It provided for mutual renunciation of demands for war reparations, the establishment of diplomatic relations, and economic collaboration, including joint Soviet- German industrial and commercial firms. The Rapallo treaty broke the unity of the capitalist countries vis-&-vis Soviet Russia and freed both Germany and the Soviet Republic from diplomatic isolation. The obvious advantages of the Soviet—German treaty, the result of the Soviet govern­ment's own initiatives, did not prevent the Soviet leaders from continuing to use the Comintern and the KPD to foment revolution. In the fall of 1923, in fact, it seemed that nothing would stop the mighty forward stride of history.

"At the beginning of September 1923," a former Soviet diplomat wrote,

I passed through Moscow on my way to Warsaw. In Moscow everyone seemed fired up. The revolutionary movement in Germany was growing faster and faster. ... Comintern work was going ahead full steam. The future members of the Soviet government of Germany were being appointed. From among Soviet Russian leaders a solid group was chosen to become the nucleus of the future German Council of People's Commissars. The group included

economic experts... military men... Comintern figures... and several highly placed GPU officials.³³

At that time Pravda published some verses about Germany in flames: "A cry in the wind: It is time! In the swirling snow, a slogan: Fire!" During this time official relations between the Soviet and German governments remained impeccable.

Relations with England provide another example of the Soviet dual policy. England began to seek a rapprochement with Soviet Russia in 1920. Trade talks began. Some trade was already underway "through various neutral countries that had established trade relations with Soviet Russia."³⁴ Karl Radek noted that this situation helped Russia to grow stronger. The same Radek, at the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in September 1920, called on the workers and peasants of Persia, Turkey, and India to rise up against British imperialism, promising in the name of the Soviet government to provide arms "for our common battles and common victories."³⁵ Likewise at the Baku Congress Zinoviev, chairman of the Comintern, called for a jihad, a holy war, against Great Britain. Zinoviev was a member of the Politburo, the top executive body of the Soviet state. "It is no secret to anyone," Lev Kamenev, another member of the Politburo, admitted, "that the Central Committee and the Politburo of our party direct the Comin­tern."³⁶

The foreign policy of the young Soviet state was based on a principle enunciated by Lenin in December 1920: as long as capitalism and socialism exist they cannot live in peace.³⁷ At the height of the debates over the Brest-Litovsk treaty, Lenin presented a resolution to the Seventh Party Congress. It stated that the Congress authorized the Central Committee to break any and all peace treaties and to declare war against any imperialist government or against the entire world if the Central Committee considered the moment ripe.³⁸ The resolution was meant to placate the opponents of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, but it expressed the essence of Lenin's foreign policy. The proletarian state, the embodiment of progress, was always right in its relations with capitalist states, which were the embodiment of reaction. Whatever the Soviet state did was in accordance with the laws of history and therefore was entirely and completely justified.

THE RED TURNS RUSTY

The "step backward" Lenin took in March 1921 with the introduction of the NEP was conceived as a maneuver, a forced retreat. It was carried out on a moment's notice, a complete surprise to the ranks of the Bolshevik

party. Stalin suggested that the maneuver was a little late in coming: "Didn't we wait too long to abolish grain requisitioning? Did we really need such events as Kronstadt and Tambov to make us realize we could not go on living under war communism?"³⁹

The realization that it was impossible to live under war communism forced the government to change its policy, to abandon Utopia temporarily and return to reality. But Utopia was not rejected altogether; hope for the miracle of world revolution was kept alive. It was necessary to arrange a certain coexistence between reality and fantasy, the belief that tomorrow or the day after it would again be possible to take two, three, many more steps toward the final goal of communism. The coexistence of reality and fantasy gave a special quality to Soviet life in the early 1920s. As one Soviet poet described it, 'The color of the times has changed. No longer Red, but rusty."⁴⁰

For the second time in a few years a drastic reevaluation of values took place. Revolutionary ideas, which had reigned unchallenged since October 1917, sweeping aside all compromise or deviation from the ideal, suddenly seemed old-fashioned and out of place. The right to exist was restored to concepts that before March 1921 had been considered extinct or worthy of extinction.

The New Economic Policy removed the tourniquets that had totally cut off the country's blood supply. Denationalization of small businesses and of some medium-sized industries, legalization of private trade, and the beginnings of trade with foreign countries quickly restored circulation. People at the time commented on the miraculous opening of stores and the appearance in them of things people had once known but had forgotten even the look of. The hero of the novel Chevengur returns to his hometown:

At first he thought the Whites had taken [it]. There was a buffet at the train station where gray rolls were sold without a line and without ration cards. Near the station... there was a gray sign whose letters dripped because of the poor quality of the paint. The sign announced primitively and briefly:

Everything on Sale, To All Citizens! Prewar Bread!

Prewar Fish! Fresh Meat! Our Own Preserves!

... In the store the owner explained in a very concise and sensible way, to an old woman who had just come in, the meaning of these changes: "We've lived to see the day. Lenin tooketh away, and now Lenin giveth."⁴¹

The NEP opened the door to certain capitalist economic forms which coexisted with the socialist forms. It was possible to compare and make choices. The result was competition. The 1923 census revealed that 77 percent of wholesale trade was conducted by the state, 8 percent by co­operatives, and 15 percent by private individuals. In contrast, 83 percent of retail trade was in private hands and only 7 percent was state-controlled.⁴² The consumer could choose whether to buy from the government or from a private trader.

Money, which had lost all value during the revolution and civil war, reappeared on the scene. In principle it was supposed to have withered away. Besides, everyone had been issuing currency: the Soviet government, the White generals, municipalities, even factories. A numismatic catalog published in 1927 listed 2,181 types of currency that had circulated during the civil war. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote about "trillionaires," people owning trillions of rubles, in Moscow in late 1921.⁴³ When the possibility arose of using this money actually to buy goods, it suddenly became a serious factor. On February 15, 1924, a series of monetary reforms ended with the intro­duction of a new unit, a ruble with fixed value. It was called the chervonets and was worth ten prewar gold rubles. Backed by government gold, it also had historical tradition behind it. A unit of currency of the same name had existed under Peter the Great.

The times became "rusty" because, alongside the hierarchy of values created by the revolution, old values were restored. For example, a class of capitalists was now sanctioned by the Soviet government, although they were allowed no political power. These were the so-called Nepmen. They lived like people on the slope of a volcano, never knowing what the morrow might bring. But they had money, for the moment, and with it the opportunity to buy anything they wished. In the cities gambling houses and cabarets opened for business; luxury cars and coaches, furs and jewelry made their appearance.

The NEP inevitably provoked discontent within the ruling Communist party. It seemed a complete betrayal of revolutionary ideals. The hurt and angry question, Is this what we fought for? began to be heard. Before and after October 1917 the debates among the party's leaders had been about how to take power and how to hold it. Now a new question arose: What should we do with the power? This immediately led to another: Who in fact was exercising power?

The simplest answer was the proletariat. That was the official answer. Lenin had another answer: the dictatorship of the party, the vanguard of the proletariat. There was a problem, though. Ever since the civil war had ended, the proletariat had expressed its discontent more and more insis­tently. Radek quoted with indignation the words of an independent worker in reply to a Communist agitator: "No, we are not trying to get freedom for the capitalists and landowners. We want freedom for ourselves, the workers and peasants, freedom to buy what we need, freedom to travel from one city to another, to go from the factories to the villages—that's the kind of freedom we need."⁴⁴

The Bolshevik party was the master of the country. The party had been conceived and built as an army of professional revolutionaries. After it had achieved its aim of taking power, it did not wish to limit itself, to surrender part of its power to non-Communist government officials. The party wanted to be the government. Lev Kamenev, speaking at the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923, dotted all the is.

Those who speak against the party, who demand a separation of functions between the party and the government, want to impose on us the same division of powers that exists in other states. ... Let the Soviet government apparatus govern, they say, and let the party occupy itself with propaganda, with raising the level of Communist consciousness, etc. No, comrades, that would be too great an occasion for rejoicing for our enemies.⁴⁵

The party did not wish the Soviet state to be like "other states." It wanted all the power in its own hands.

Certainly the party had all the power. "We have quite enough political power," Lenin said in a speech to the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922. 'The economic power in the hands of the proletarian state is quite adequate to ensure the transition to communism. What then is lacking?" By the time the Eleventh Congress took place, the party had been thoroughly purged as a result of a decision of the Tenth Congress a year earlier; in the intervening year 23.3 percent of the membership had been expelled. Still the party's leader was dissatisfied with the organization, even in its purged form. Lenin scolded the Communists for their lack of sophistication and questioned whether they were actually directing the machinery of state or being directed by it. He cited the lessons of history: "If the conquering nation is more sophisticated than the vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture upon the latter; but if the opposite is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror." Lenin feared that his barbarians, having conquered Russia, were adopting the culture of those they had vanquished. He assailed the Communists for their lack of "so­phistication," by which he meant knowledge of administrative methods for running the state and the economy.⁴⁶

According to Lenin, during the year from the Tenth to the Eleventh Congress, "we showed quite clearly that we cannot run the economy." The reason for poor management, in Lenin's opinion, was "Communist conceit" (,komchvanstvo).⁴⁷ Communist conceit was the arrogance of conquerors who were sure that everything they did was right and that all problems could be solved by force. This kind of arrogance was a sin in Lenin's eyes because it undermined party discipline. The heroes of the civil war wanted their reward; each behaved like a prince in his own domain. Former front-line comrades formed cliques and challenged the authority of the Central Com­mittee. Lenin's tactic was to use one clique against the other, seeking to weaken them all and strengthen the Central Committee.

Aleksei Rykov described the situation to Liberman, a prominent spe­cialist in the prerevolutionary lumber industry, who was invited to take charge of the nationalized Soviet lumber industry:

Here I am in charge of socialist construction at the head of the Supreme Economic Council. Lenin trusts me—yet it's so hard working with him! You can never rely on him 100 percent. I go see him, we talk things over, we come to an agreement, he tells me: 'Take the floor and I'll support you." But the moment he senses that the majority is against your proposal, he will betray you. ... Vladimir Ilyich will betray anyone, abandon anything, but all in the name of the revolution and socialism, remaining loyal only to the fundamental idea—socialism, communism.⁴⁸

For Lenin the fundamental idea was embodied in the party, to which he was always loyal. His struggle against the Workers' Opposition, an intra- party grouping which opposed his policies at the Tenth Party Congress, was carried out under the banner of party unity. The mortal sin of the Workers' Opposition was that it objected to the idea of equating the party with the working class and to the party's claim to dictatorial power in the name of the "proletarian vanguard." The Workers' Opposition complained that the working class was the only class "dragging out a miserable existence doing convict labor. "⁴⁹ It called for the trade unions to defend the interests of the workers and for the management of the economy to be turned over to the unions. This was an infringement on the "fundamental idea," the party's monopoly of power.

The monopoly of power did not mean a monopoly by all the members of the party. Lenin was displeased with the membership. In his speech to the Eleventh Party Congress he said: "It must be admitted, and we must not be afraid to admit, that in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred the re­sponsible Communists are not in the jobs they are now fit for, that they are unable to perform their duties, and that they must settle down to learn."⁵⁰ In 1919 Trotsky had referred to the military commissars as a new order of samurai.⁵¹ In 1921 Stalin, following his usual practice, borrowed this idea from his rival, but made it less grandiloquent, more precise and detailed. Stalin described the Communist party as "an order of Teutonic knights within the Soviet state who direct the bodies of the state and inspire their activities."⁵² Both Trotsky and Stalin saw the party as an elite order inspired by a particular idea (Trotsky's commissars were the party's "best elements"), but each chose his metaphor according to his own taste. The fundamental difference between the samurai and the Teutonic knights was that the "dog knights," as Marx called them, forcibly converted the people of an occupied country to the true faith, whereas the samurai lived in their own country.

Developing the parallel between the Communist party and the Knights of the Sword, Stalin emphasized the "importance of the old guard within this mighty order." But he also noted that the old guard had been reinforced since 1917 by new leaders who had been "steeled in the struggle." Thus we see that a year before he was elected general secretary of the Central Committee, Stalin envisaged the party as a conquering order in an occupied country structured along rigorously hierarchical lines.

Soviet society was a hierarchical pyramid with the ruling party at the top. At the bottom was the peasantry; a bit higher, the useful intelligentsia; higher still, the working class; and at the very top, the party boss. In one of the earliest Soviet novels, The Week, written by the Communist novelist Yuri Libedinsky, a Cheka official named Klimin describes an argument he had had with a certain intellectual "over the question of special dining facilities for responsible officials." The intellectual had argued that such facilities should be closed.

His line was that the revolution requires us to stay within the limits of the average ration, even in the case of qualified personnel. But my reasoning is this: We are the revolution; we, who at our meetings call ourselves the leading vanguard. If each of us, besides the pain and work we have to bear, had to go hungry, it would weaken us and put a strain on us, and in that case our vanguard wouldn't last very long. It's pretty simple after all. For them, for revolutionaries, the revolution is something apart from themselves, an idol demanding sacrifices, but as for me... I can say, the way some king did once, "I am the state."⁵³

The same Cheka philosopher had a discussion with a young Communist woman who suggested that words rather than force be used to explain the party's policies to the peasants. This was his response to her:

Talk with them?... They wouldn't understand. As if these hardworking peasants hadn't killed plenty of our propagandists and political activists for no reason except that they preached communism too openly. They don't read our books; they use our newspapers to roll their cigarettes. No, Anyuta, things are much more complicated. We have to reshape their lives. They are savages; they live alongside us but they're still in the Middle Ages; they believe in sorcerers, and to them we're just some special kind of sorcerer.⁵⁴

This young Communist woman, who had not yet been "steeled in the struggle," needed this kind of ideological working over because she had been to Moscow and had seen a stairway in a railway station there

a big set of stairs, full of people from top to bottom. Men, women, children, lying on the stairs surrounded by their miserable filthy things. ... And down this awful stairway, stepping disgustedly and carefully, mostly disgustedly, came an ever so elegant commissar, and his commissar's star was shining on his chest, and ever so carefully among these filthy, tired bodies he placed the tips of his shiny lacquered boots.⁵⁵

This stairway was realistically described by a proletarian writer. It had not yet dawned on him that he should not and must not write this way. The scene on the stairs could serve as a symbol of the young Soviet state.

The party, an order of knights in a conquered country, of sorcerers among savages, could not carry out its functions as master in the land unless it was solidly united, unless it was a docile instrument in the hands of its leaders. The need for unity seemed especially obvious to Lenin during the transition to the NEP. An army requires discipline more than ever when it is retreating. The Tenth Party Congress passed a resolution against the "anarchist and syndicalist deviation," meaning the Workers' Opposition, and another "On Party Unity," which banned factional activity on pain of expulsion.

The resolution on party unity opened a new chapter in the history of the Bolshevik party. It is significant that this resolution, voted in the absence of approximately 200 delegates, who had left the congress to help suppress the Kronstadt revolt and the Antonov movement, remained secret for several years. The authors of the resolution, and all those who voted for it, felt unconsciously that the character of the party was changing. Only Radek, with a sense of foreboding, warned the delegates that one day they might feel its effects on their own necks; but this did not stop him from voting for it. The resolution eliminated the last remnants of the socialist move­ment's traditional democratic principles. The Bolshevik party became a totalitarian party in which loyalty to ideas became intolerable. The sole requirement of members was loyalty to the top leadership, which made all the decisions. The abrupt turn to the NEP became a test of such loyalty. Those who persisted in believing in ideas, who would not accept the "rusty color of the times," were expelled from the party, left it on their own, or committed suicide. On May 20, 1922, Pravda published an obituary for a seventeen-year-old Young Communist who had committed suicide: "He was often heard to say that first of all one must be a Communist and only after that a human being." The young man apparently had not been able to withstand the conflict. The Communist in his soul had not been able to defeat the human being and so killed him. But for many the victory over human feeling came easily.

Two weeks after the October revolution Maxim Gorky wrote: "Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades have already been affected by the vile poison of power, a fact attested by their shameful attitude toward freedom of speech, individual freedoms, and all those rights for whose triumph democrats have always fought."⁵⁶ Two and a half years later, in early 1921, Aron Solts, a man known as the "conscience of the party," had this to say:

Being in power for a long time in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat has had a corrupting effect on a significant number of veteran party activists. This is the source of their bureaucratism, their extremely haughty attitude toward rank-and-file party members and toward the unaffiliated mass of workers; this is the source of their extraordinary abuse of their privileged position for their own material advancement. A Communist hierarchical caste has been created and entrenched.⁵⁷

To party official Solts this "Communist hierarchical caste"—or, as Stalin put it, "order of knights"—had developed and taken shape as a result of being in power for a long time. Bukharin, the eminent party theoretician, saw deeper causes: "A certain stratum of Communist cadre could degenerate on the basis of their being the sole authority. ... Our form of government is a dictatorship; our party is the party that dominates the country."⁵⁸

Zinoviev, not having the power of clairvoyance, proclaimed with pride at the Eleventh Congress:

We have a monopoly on legality. We have denied political freedom to our opponents. We do not permit legal existence to those who aspire to become our rivals. ... The dictatorship of the proletariat, as Comrade Lenin has said, is a very harsh thing. In order to assure the victory of the proletarian dictatorship there is no other way than to break the back of all opposition to this dictatorship. ... No one can foresee a time when we will be able to revise our opinion on this question.

The party's unlimited dictatorial power was the main cause of its de­generation. It transformed revolutionaries into veritable feudal lords, and it invited an influx of careerists and fortune hunters. In impotent rage Lenin demanded that corrupt Communists be "tried on the spot and shot, un­conditionally." But it was precisely such people—without any ideals or convictions—who did best as members of a dictatorial party with a mo­nopoly on power. Rosa Luxemburg's predictions were realized to the letter. A few months after the October revolution she had written:

[With] the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the Soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. ... A few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously—at bottom, then, a clique af­fair—a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians.⁵⁹

One year after the introduction of the NEP, at the Eleventh Party Con­gress, Lenin made a surprising admission. He said the Soviet state was "like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose. ... The car is not going in the direction the man at the wheel wanted it to go."⁶⁰ These were the tragic words of a man who believed he had discovered the laws governing the motion of the vehicle of state, who thought he knew the direction in which it was going, but who suddenly discovered that the machine was out of his control. His response was to strengthen the hand at the wheel.

On Lenin's suggestion, the Central Committee that convened after the Eleventh Congress elected Joseph Stalin to a newly created position, that of general secretary. Lenin was confident of Stalin's abilities as a "driver." They had been thoroughly tested during the civil war.

In 1920, in his pamphlet Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, Lenin ridiculed the debates then going on about the dictatorial character of the Soviet state. To him it was "ridiculous and childish nonsense" to discuss whether there was a dictatorship of the party or of the working class, a dictatorship of the leaders or of the masses. This, he said, was "like discussing whether a man's left leg or right arm is of greater use to him."⁶¹ But he was dissimulating. He knew perfectly well that the right arm was more important and he said as much: 'To object to the necessity of a strong central power, dictatorship, and unity of will... has become impossible."⁶²

The need for a strong right arm was felt especially after the civil war, when the struggles against the countless enemies of the revolution broke out with renewed force. The liberalization of the economy was accompanied by a new wave of terror. This was another "rusty" aspect of the times. In the Land of the NEP and the Cheka was the title of memoirs written by Boris Cederholm, an inmate of the Solovki labor camp and one of the first to escape to the West and tell about it. The NEP and the Cheka were two sides of the same coin in Soviet Russia in the first half of the 1920s.

One initial result of the NEP was a worsening of the situation for the working class, the class with hegemony, as the propagandists loved to say. The workers went on strike out of prerevolutionary habits which had not yet been broken. They demanded better conditions. On December 2, 1923, in a speech to Moscow Communists, Stalin referred to a "wave of strikes and unrest that spread through several regions of our republic in August of this year."⁶³ But workers had also gone on strike in 1921 and 1922. The Smolensk Archive contains numerous reports by GPU agents on the workers' discontent over their miserable wages, late wage payments, food shortages, and the high cost of living, as well as reports on strikes at factories and workshops and on the railroads.⁶⁴ The Smolensk GPU blamed the strikes on anarchist agitation. In Moscow the Mensheviks were blamed.

At the Eleventh Party Congress Aleksandr Shlyapnikov recalled that strikes by workers in Zlatoust and Bryansk had been denounced as the "work of monarchists." Everyone was blamed for strikes—anarchists, Men­sheviks, monarchists—but worst of all, the workers themselves. At the Eleventh Congress Lenin laid the theoretical basis for blaming the Russian proletariat. He said that since "large-scale capitalist industry had been destroyed and the factories and shops had ceased to function, the proletariat had disappeared." Lenin did not hesitate to revise Marx. It was true that Marx had written that those employed at factories and plants constituted the real proletariat and that this had been true of capitalism as a whole for 500 years, but "for Russia today this is not true." In response to this argument Shlyapnikov taunted Lenin: "Allow me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a nonexistent class."

In June 1953, when the workers of East Berlin went on strike and poured into the streets to protest low wages and high prices, the East German Communist party announced that the people had not justified the confidence placed in them by the party. Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem advising the party to dissolve the people and elect a new one. The Soviet leaders had employed this formula long before Brecht. Having led a revolution in the name of a class that did not exist, they set about creating the kind of class they needed. Contempt for the interests of those who are "not real proletarians" has become a Communist virtue and has been justified "theoretically." Soviet historians have come to the conclusion that the prerevolutionary Russian worker was not a "pure proletarian."⁶⁵

During the discussion of the situation in the party which was permitted for a short time at the end of 1923, many participants complained, "In the eyes of the workers the party cells and many party members always act as defenders of management, of increased production quotas and all kinds of deductions or layoffs. All the Communist party members seem to think it is their duty at all costs to justify every injustice, even the most obvious, to the workers."⁶⁶ If on the other hand certain individual Communists protested against management along with the workers, "our higher party bodies think that such Communists are not reliable."⁶⁷

The most widely used word in official parlance during the NEP was smychka, the "bond" or alliance between the workers and the peasants. The workers supposedly played the leading role in this alliance; they were the embodiment of the dictatorship and of all progress. And yet their conditions deteriorated drastically during this time.

If the workers played the leading role, the peasants played the role of the led. Although they represented the "anarchic petit bourgeois element," their situation began to improve quickly, for agricultural products became the basis of the country's economic revival. Anastas Mikoyan wrote in his memoirs: "1922 was the first year after the revolution when not only the domestic requirement for grain was satisfied but grain began to be exported in substantial quantities."⁶⁸ Mikoyan did not mention that these exports began at a time when the ARA was still feeding millions of starving people, but there is no question that the export of grain (and lumber) in the early 1920s was the only source of foreign currency, which the Soviet republic required in order to engage in foreign trade. The peasantry was the most important economic force in the country, although its political rights were restricted. Posters began to go up appealing to the peasants: 'Turn in your savings for a government loan, backed by gold, and after a while you'll be rich." But the peasants remained second-class citizens, as they were well aware. The Smolensk GPU recorded the moods among the peasantry, for example, a report covering the period May 15—31, 1922:

Among the peasants there are no limits to the grumbling against the Soviet government and the Communists. In the conversation of every middle peasant and poor peasant, not to speak even of the kulak, the following is heard: "They aren't planning freedom for us but serfdom. The time of Boris Godunov has already begun, when the peasants were attached to the landowners. Now we [are attached] to the Jewish bourgeoisie like Modkowski, Aronson, etc."⁶⁹

ASSAULT ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Peasant discontent with the Soviet government and the policies of the Communist party increased as persecution of the church intensified. "Strange as it may seem," the religious historian Nikita Struve wrote, "the church was better prepared for revolution than the state."⁷⁰ The process of preparing the church for reform, underway since 1905, culminated in the Holy Synod of 1917, which on November 5 elected Tikhon, the metropolitan of Moscow, to be the new head, or patriarch, of the Russian Orthodox church.

Conflict between the church and the Soviet state was inevitable because the Communist party, after taking power, undertook not only to transform the country economically, socially, and politically but to create a new kind of human being, the "new man." It sought spiritual power. A decree of January 23, 1918, proclaimed the separation of church and state, the confiscation of church property, and the suppression of its legal rights. In effect the church was outlawed. In reply Patriarch Tikhon pronounced an anathema against the open and secret enemies and persecutors of the church and called on the faithful to defend the church. In March 1918 the patriarch emphatically condemned the Brest-Litovsk treaty as a betrayal of commit­ments given to the Russian people and the Allies. On the first anniversary of the October revolution he sent a letter to the Council of People's Com­missars listing the crimes of the new government and calling for the release of prisoners and an end to violence, bloodshed, and the persecution of the faith.

The difficult position the Soviet government found itself in at the time obliged it to modify its anticlerical policy. A December 1918 memorandum by the people's commissar of justice listed certain things that should not be done, although they were being done everywhere, for example, the arbitrary closing of churches, confiscation of religious objects for revolu­tionary use, police raids during church services, the arrest of priests, and the drafting of priests for compulsory labor. Local soviets were urged not to offend the feelings of religious people.⁷¹ This moderation did not last long. In March 1919 the commissar of justice suggested that local author­ities "launch a war against superstition," invade the sanctuaries, take inventories, and subject all relics to scientific examination.

During the civil war Patriarch Tikhon withheld support from either side. Although he granted autonomy to bishops in areas under White control, he refused to place the authority of the church on the side of the Whites.

The famine of 1921 became the occasion for a harsh blow at the church. In August Patriarch Tikhon appealed to the heads of all Christian churches to aid the victims of the famine. A Church Famine Relief Committee was founded, and collections were taken at all churches. The government denied authorization for the church committee and ordered it dissolved. Kuskova recalled the patriarch's "tremendous energy," which "inspired all the faith­ful in Russia and abroad to come to the rescue." This display of energy greatly alarmed the Bolsheviks, she believed. In their eyes "the efforts of the patriarch and of our committee were nothing but an attempt to organize counterrevolution. "⁷²

On February 19, 1922, the patriarch urged the diocesan councils to turn over all church valuables, with the exception of sacred objects, to a fund for famine relief. On February 26 a government decree confiscated all church valuables, including sacred objects. The faithful tried to oppose this confiscation. In the three months that followed, 1,414 bloody clashes between church people and government troops were recorded.⁷³

Resistance by church people in Shuya resulted in the death of four and the wounding of ten. Lenin used this occasion to send a top secret letter to the Politburo demanding total suppression of any further resistance. "This crowd [publika] must now be taught a lesson so that they won't dare even dream of resisting again for years to come."⁷⁴ Lenin gave orders to arrest as many "representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and reac­tionary clergy" as possible, to hold a public trial, and have "a very large number" shot.⁷⁵ The trial was held in Moscow in April—May 1922; eleven defendants were sentenced to death. Five were actually executed. Patriarch Tikhon was subpoenaed as a witness and later was named a defendant. He was placed under house arrest and prevented from carrying out his church duties. A related trial in Petrograd in July 1922 involved eighty-six de­fendants, ten of whom were sentenced to death and four executed, including Metropolitan Veniamin. During 1922 a total of 8,100 priests, monks, and nuns were executed.

"Antireligious work" continued unabated, in particular the "exposure of superstition." Items such as the following one in Pravda, August 5, 1922, were common: "Petrograd—On August 2 the investigator for important civil cases, in the presence of clergy and experts, including professors from the Petrograd Medical Institute, examined the relics of [Saint] Alexander Nev- sky. Instead of relics the shrine turned out to contain fragments of bone mingled with rubbish."

The campaign against the church was greatly facilitated by a schism within it. A group of Petrograd clergy, headed by Aleksandr Vvedensky, visited the detained patriarch at his home and asked that they be placed in charge of the patriarchal offices, so that the church "would not be left without a directing body." The patriarch delegated his authority to Met­ropolitan Agafangel of Yaroslavl, but entrusted the patriarchal offices to Vvedensky and his supporters until Agafangel arrived. On May 18, 1922, they carried out a coup, announcing the abolition of the patriarchate and the formation of a "supreme" executive body of the church. This marked the birth of the Living Church, "to which the Soviet government gave its moral, material, and especially political support."⁷⁶ Great hopes were placed in the Living Church. Zinoviev told Vvedensky it seemed to him that "your group could be the starting point for a great movement on an international scale."⁷⁷ The head of the Comintern, who in 1921 had helped to found an international trade union organization, the Profintern (or Red Trade Union International), may have had in mind the formation of a religious inter­national under the leadership of the Bolshevik party. While offering support to the Living Church and holding radiant international prospects up to its leaders, the Soviet authorities reminded them of the other side of the coin. The confirmation of death sentences for five of those condemned in the Moscow trial "was meant not only to sober up the hot-headed counter­revolutionary priests but also to give a lesson in the political ABCs to the new 'supreme' executive body of the church."⁷⁸

From the first day of the revolution, Lenin saw the intelligentsia as the main enemy, a force that would not submit "without lengthy discussions" to the "authority of one man" (as he had said in reference to Sverdlov). There was no need to explain action against members of the intelligentsia who opposed the Soviet government. What needed explanation was per­secution of the neutral strata, which were dangerous because of their in­stinctive kindness, their humane impulses, their compassion for all who were persecuted. In reply to a letter from Gorky objecting to mass arrests in Petrograd, Lenin set forth his credo on November 15, 1919: "In general the arrest of the Cadet public (and those sympathetic to them) is correct and necessary. ... You have spoken unjust and angry words to me. About what? About the fact that a few dozen (or maybe a few hundred) Cadet gentlemen and Cadet sympathizers have to sit in prison for a few days in order to head off conspiracies."⁷⁹ Three days after his letter to Gorky, Lenin repeated his argument almost word for word—after all it was such a good argument—in a letter to Maria Andreeva, Gorky's one-time companion: "In order to head off conspiracies it is impossible not to arrest the entire Cadet and Cadet-sympathetic public. This entire crowd is capable of help­ing the conspirators. It would be criminal not to arrest them."⁸⁰ In this case Lenin had recourse to the terminology of the Slavophiles, who distin­guished between the "people" and the "public," that is, the intelligentsia.

Lenin's term Cadet sympathizer made it possible to disregard the party membership of those who were arrested. The entire Russian intelligentsia as such was subject to accusation. The fact that many of the arrested intellectuals had helped the Bolsheviks before the revolution only com­pounded their guilt. If they had been so kind-hearted before, who could guarantee they would not be again—toward the Bolsheviks' enemies? Lenin came up with a very significant innovation: it was necessary to arrest not only conspirators but those "capable of helping" conspirators. In his view, the entire intelligentsia fell into that category.

One more in a series of blows against the intelligentsia fell in August 1922. On August 28 Izvestia simultaneously published a decree of the Central Executive Committee dissolving the All-Russia Famine Relief Com­mittee and several sensational reports about the discovery of a plot by the so-called Petrograd Military Organization (PMO). "More than 200 people" were arrested in this case.⁸¹ The Cheka lumped together a group of Kronstadt sailors, a group of naval officers, and a group of professors. There is every reason to believe that the PMO affair was fabricated from beginning to end. Even Soviet historians have been unable to reach a consensus on the exact "crimes" of the accused.⁸² Lenin personally directed the preparations for the trial and the trial itself. A large number of Russian scientists and cultural figures were arrested, including the geography professor Tagantsev and the poet Nikolai Gumilev. A number of geologists, together with the Russian Physics and Chemistry Society, petitioned for the release of the detainees. Among those shot in the case, in addition to the "leaders of the conspiracy" and "the most dangerous conspirators," were the chemistry professor M. Tikhvinsky and Gumilev. Appeals to Lenin in behalf of these two were especially strong, because Tikhvinsky, a particularly outstanding chemist, had been a Bolshevik before the revolution, and Gumilev was one of Russia's greatest poets.

After the two were executed certain legends grew up about Lenin's alleged attempt to intercede in their behalf, that his orders to spare them arrived too late, that the Cheka agents had acted on their own. Liberman reports that Leonid Krasin was horrified when he learned that Tikhvinsky had been shot: "They killed him in spite of Lenin's promise,' Krasin exclaimed. 'It can't be. Or maybe he knew everything.... Maybe it's that the revolution has its own inalterable laws. But if that is it, where will it all end? Because, you know, Vladimir Ilyich was very fond of Tikhvinsky, was on a first-name basis with him.'"⁸³ Krasin, who knew Lenin very well, suspected him of knowing everything. Lenin's posthumously published letters include his "resolution" on the Tikhvinsky case: 'Tikhvinsky wasn't arrested by ac­cident. Chemistry and counterrevolution are not mutually exclusive."⁸⁴ When someone approached Dzerzhinsky to ask that Gumilev be pardoned ("Were we entitled to shoot one of Russia's two or three poets of the first order?"), the head of the Cheka replied: "Are we entitled to make an exception of a poet and still shoot the others?"⁸⁵ Chemistry and counter­revolution were not mutually exclusive; neither were poetry and counter­revolution. In fact, both chemistry and poetry seemed counterrevolutionary in and of themselves. Science, poetry, the intelligentsia—all added up to counterrevolution.

The trial of the PMO was the last major trial organized by the Cheka. A decree of February 6, 1922, dissolved the Cheka and transferred its functions to the State Political Administration, better known by its Russian initials GPU. This organization was made part of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) of Soviet Russia. After the formation of the Soviet Union, the GPU became the Unified State Political Administration— OGPU. In one of his novels Ilya Ehrenburg described what two Russian letters pronounced "che" and "ka" had meant:

For any citizen who lived during the revolution, these two syllables which children learned before they learned the word "Mama"—because they were used to frighten children even in the cradle, the way the word bogeyman had once been—two syllables that accompanied the unlucky to their death and even after, to the mass grave; two simple little letters that no one could ever forget.⁸⁶

The two letters pronounced "che-ka" were replaced by three pronounced "gay-pay-oo." Soon these three letters would inspire no less fear than the first two. The appointment of the Cheka head Dzerzhinsky to be head of the GPU and later of the OGPU stressed the unchanging nature and role of the "organs" of repression.

The first big show trial organized by the GPU was the trial of the SRs, which began in June 1922. To Gorky, then living in the West, the trial of the SRs was an act of war against the intelligentsia. Gorky, in a letter to Rykov, which Lenin was to call "Gorky's disgusting letter," described the trial as one in a series aimed at "exterminating the intelligentsia in our illiterate country." The SR trial began just at the time when the verdict in the case of the "concealment of church treasures" was upheld. All of the charges against the SRs had to do with their activities before 1919, for which an amnesty had been declared on February 27, 1919. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death, but the sentences were "suspended."

Political trials were only one aspect of the war against the intelligentsia, a battle that was increasing in fury. The Central Committee announced: "In the first months of 1922 a revival of activity has become evident on the part of the former bourgeois intelligentsia. "⁸⁷ The reactivation of "bour­geois ideology" could be seen in the founding of a number of privately owned publishing houses, as permitted by Soviet law, and the reappearance of such magazines as Byloe (The past), Golos minuvshego (Voice of bygone times), Ekonomist, and Pravo i zhizn (Law and life).

"Harmful tendencies" were also evident at a conference of agronomists in March 1922. These professors of agronomy and economics passed a resolution favoring "abstract legality, above classes." People's Commissar of Health Semashko informed Lenin that at a congress of physicians the doctors had "praised the liberal zemstvo tradition in medicine and called for democracy and the right to print a publication of their own." A historian of the Cheka and the GPU states that during this period "anti-Soviet or­ganizations, operating through the intelligentsia (professors, specialists, writers) carried on work among the student youth and among petit bourgeois and philistine elements, establishing bases of support in higher educational institutions, in the press, in literary circles, and in the cooperatives."⁸⁸

In March 1922 Lenin wrote an article "On the Significance of Militant Materialism," in which he said that the "first and foremost duty of a Communist" is to declare "a systematic offensive against bourgeois ideology, philosophical reaction, and all forms of idealism and mysticism." In a letter to GPU head Dzerzhinsky, dated May 19, 1922, Lenin translated these philosophical terms into everyday language. He referred to the intellectuals, the "professors and writers," as "patent counterrevolutionaries, accom­plices of the Entente,... spies and corrupters of the student youth."⁸⁹ Some "professors and writers" were arrested, tried, and shot; others died of hunger. One researcher noted, "In the history of the Russian Academy of Sciences three fatal epidemics seem to have occurred: 1918—1923, 1929- 1931, 1936-1938. A unique feature of the first period was that many prominent Russian scientists and academicians froze or starved to death during that time. The historian cites obituaries published in the newsletter of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The obituary for the historian Lappo- Danilevsky, who died on February 7, 1919, noted: "He is the seventh victim torn from the ranks of full members of the academy since the end of May 1918." That the academy had slightly more than forty members at the time points up the extent of the catastrophe. Prominent scientists and academics continued to die, among them V. A. Zhukovsky, the founder of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, the respected Orientalist B. A. Turaev, the great mathematician A. M. Lyapunov, the linguist A. A. Shakhmatov, and the theologian I. S. Palmov. In 1921 Lenin signed a decree on the "creation of favorable conditions for scientific work." Its aim was to save the life of Academician Ivan Pavlov, Russia's only Nobel laureate. The need for such a decree was eloquent testimony to the tragic situation in which Russian science found itself.

Lenin, in his May 19 letter to Dzerzhinsky, urged "thorough preparation" for a new method of repression aimed at the intelligentsia: the deportation of "the writers and professors helping the counterrevolution."⁹¹

In May 1922 Lenin also read the draft for the first Soviet penal code. He insisted that it was necessary to "put forward publicly a thesis that is correct in principle and politically correct (not just a narrow juridical thesis) that would explain the essence of terror, its necessity and limits, and the justification for it. The courts must not ban terror—to promise that would be deception or self-deception—but must formulate the motives underlying it, legalize it as a principle plainly, without any make-believe."⁹² He urged that "the application of the death sentence be extended... to all forms of activity by the Mensheviks, SRs, and so on."⁹³ But his main contribution to the science of jurisprudence was the way he formulated the clause on "propaganda or agitation":

Propaganda or agitation which objectively assists that section of the in­ternational bourgeoisie which refuses to recognize the rights of the Communist system of ownership that has superseded capitalism, that section which is striving to overthrow the Communist system by violence, either by means of foreign intervention, blockade, or by espionage, financing the press, and similar means, is an offense punishable by death, which, if mitigating cir­cumstances are proved, may be commuted to deprivation of liberty, or de­portation.⁹⁴

Lenin introduced the concept of objectively aiding the international bourgeoisie. In this way, as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski put it, Lenin "laid the foundations for the system of law characteristic of to­talitarianism, as opposed to the laws of a despotic system."⁹⁵ In despotism the characteristic feature is the severity of the law. What is characteristic in a totalitarian system is the fictitious nature of the law. Lenin's contri­bution—the death penalty for views which might "objectively aid" the bourgeoisie—meant that the government could kill anyone it wished, any­one it disliked. Or if there were extenuating circumstances, it could send such persons to prison or labor camps or deport them. In reality, then, the law did not exist, nor did the penal code.

The first experiment in applying the new formula was the deportation of a large group of scientists, writers, doctors, and agronomists. On August 31, 1922, Pravda published an article entitled "A First Warning." Noting that "certain strata of the bourgeois intelligentsia have not accepted Soviet power," the newspaper reported that the "most active counterrevolutionary elements" among these strata had been arrested and sent into internal exile "in the northern provinces and some deported from the country" by a decree of the GPU. The deported professionals represented a very broad spectrum ("160 of the most active bourgeois ideologists").⁹⁶ From the few available documents and memoirs it may be gathered that the Politburo decided to strike this blow at the intelligentsia on Lenin's initiative after singling out the most important centers of independent thought which in their opinion had to be paralyzed. Some names were provided (the list of philosophers was drawn up almost entirely by Lenin himself), but for the rest the initiative was left to the GPU and to influential party leaders and their retainers who might have personal scores to settle. The list of the proscribed was drawn up with one central aim in mind: to give the intelligentsia a warning, expelling the main troublemakers and intimidating the rest. This is why the list included some people against whom no complaint had ever been made and left out others who seemed to be prime candidates for deportation.

CHANGING LANDMARKS

Deportation from the country was a drastic measure, but compared to a death penalty handed down at a show trial, it was benign. The Soviet government could not, in 1922, risk shooting one or two hundred of the best-known Russian intellectuals; that might make too unfavorable an impression abroad. Another obstacle to mass execution was the shortage of skilled scientific and cultural personnel, whom the state needed, despite their unreliability.

In July 1921 there occurred an event which opened up new possibilities for the Communist party "on the ideological front" in relation to such skilled personnel. An anthology entitled Smena vekh (Changing landmarks) was published in Prague, giving distinctive shape to a movement that had first begun in the Soviet Republic, gained the active support of the Communist party—because to its members the party was coming to lose its bolshevist substance and to take on a nationalist character—then spread to the emigr6 community.

After the October revolution more than a million people left Russia. The exact number of emigr6s remains unknown. Lenin spoke of "emigr6s num­bering probably from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000. "⁹⁷ An emigr6 Russian his­torian refers to approximately a million.⁹⁸ A recent Soviet historian gives the figure 860,000." According to statistics published by the League of Nations in 1926, 1,160,000 people left Russia after the revolution. Ap­proximately one fourth were officers and soldiers of the White armies, including about 100,000 in Wrangel's army evacuated from the Crimea to Constantinople. Civilian emigr6s came from all classes and professions, but especially from those the Soviet government considered inimical. A substantial number of the emigres were from the intelligentsia. All political parties were represented, from the extreme right to the extreme left, from the monarchists to the Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists. The varied political complexion of the emigr6 community was convincing proof that political life inside Soviet Russia had been stifled. All political parties other than the Communist party ended up in the anti-Soviet camp, some willingly, others driven to that position by the one-party dictatorship.

The emigres had been dispersed to all parts of the world (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Germany, Latvia, France, China). A great many believed they would soon return to their homeland, that the Bolsheviks were on the verge of collapse. However, defeatist tendencies also arose among the emigr6s and were reinforced from within Soviet Russia. 'The 'changing landmarks⁹ trend [smenovekhovstvo] began to appear among the old intelligentsia inside the Soviet Republic as early as 1918," one Soviet historian has noted.¹⁰⁰ There are many similarities between the policies of the Soviet government toward priests who were willing to risk a schism in order to collaborate with the regime and its policies toward those members of the intelligentsia who were willing to make peace with the conquerors.

In the spring of 1920, after the Polish invasion of the Soviet Republic, patriotism became respectable again and provided the basis for the initial conception of "a change of landmarks" (that is, a reorientation). That summer a certain Professor Gredeskul, a former leader of the Cadet party and a noted legal expert, went on a nationwide speaking tour, with the approval and support of the authorities. He then wrote a series of articles for Izvestia based on his lectures. His main argument was as follows:

It becomes clearer every day that we are not facing a dead end of history or an accidental episode but a broad, smooth, well-lighted road down which the historical process is moving. And this process, which is being guided this time by the conscious efforts of far-sighted leaders, is taking us toward the greatest transformation ever seen in human history.¹⁰¹

The idea of a change of orientation arose spontaneously among the emigres as well as being influenced by Gredeskul and his supporters. It was also in the spring of 1920 that E. A. Efimovsky, the editor of Slavyanskaya zarya (Slavic dawn), an emigre newspaper published in Prague, voiced the opinion that the Bolsheviks were defending the national interest of the Russian state. In one of his articles he spoke of an inevitable conflict between Europe and Soviet Russia. "In this conflict we will be on the side of Soviet Russia. Not because it is Soviet but because it is Russia."¹⁰² In

Paris a dramatist named Klyuchnikov gave a reading of his play Ediny kust (which might be rendered "From a Single Bush"). Among the guests were a number of leading Russian writers: Ivan Bunin, Aleksandr Kuprin, Alek- sei Tolstoy, Mark Aldanov, and Ilya Ehrenburg, who had recently fled from the Crimea.¹⁰³ They all agreed on the play's deficiencies. Kuprin said it was dull as khaki; Tolstoy, that it was mediocre as a rusty nail. But the important thing, said Tolstoy, was the idea behind it. The theme of the play was that "the motherland is all one bush, and its many shoots, including those that grow crooked or off to the side, are fed by the same vital juices." Tolstoy drew a conclusion: "Back there in Russia the harsh wind of rejection is blowing, but here in the West there is nothing but decay, hopeless, narrow-minded materialism, and total demoralization."¹⁰⁴

In the fall of 1920 a collection of articles was published in Harbin, a center of Russian emigration in Manchuria. Its author was Nikolai Ustryalov and it was entitled The Struggle for Russia. This book contained the essence of what was to be the changing landmarks ideology. When the anthology bearing that title actually appeared in Prague in July 1921, it provided a name for the movement but introduced nothing essentially new in com­parison to Ustryalov's contributions of 1920.

Nikolai Ustryalov, a talented writer who emerged as the chief ideologist of the new movement, dedicated The Struggle for Russia "to General Bru- silov, a courageous and loyal servant of Great Russia, both in its hour of glory and in its troubled times of suffering and misfortune." On May 30, 1920, during the Polish invasion, Brusilov had published an appeal in Pravda urging his readers to forget "selfish feelings of class struggle" and to remember instead "their own native Russian people" and their homeland "Mother Russia." To Ustryalov Brusilov's action seemed the model of gen­uine patriotism.

Ustryalov argued in his book that the defeat of the White armies had to be recognized. It was time for the defeated to make their obeisance, to go to Canossa. He called on Wrangel, who was still holding out in the Crimea, to "convert" voluntarily, to accept "the other faith" and hail the example of Brusilov.¹⁰⁵ The Russian intelligentsia, Ustryalov held, fought against bolshevism for many reasons, but its nationalist motives were the main ones.¹⁰⁶ The intelligentsia had opposed the revolution because it was de­stroying the state, causing the army to fall apart and bringing humiliation to the motherland. Without this nationalist inspiration, Ustryalov felt, the struggle against the Bolsheviks would have been senseless and would not have occurred.

The defeat of the White armies, said Ustryalov, had opened his eyes.

He confessed that, along with most of the Russian intelligentsia, he had misjudged bolshevism. Ustryalov's new outlook could be reduced to three points. First, the Russian revolution had in essence been a nationalist one. Its roots went back to the Slavophiles, the pessimism of Chaadaev, Herzen's revolutionary romanticism, and Pisarev's utilitarianism. Among its ances­tors were Chernyshevsky, the Jacobinism of Tkachev, Dostoevsky, the Rus­sian Marxism of the 1890s, "which was led by those whom today we consider the exponents of the authentic Russian idea—Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and Peter Struve,"¹⁰⁷ Maxim Gorky, the followers of Vladimir Soloviev, Andrei Bely, and Alexander Blok. This nationalist revolution had "been fueled by a quintessentially Russian 'blind revolt, senseless and merciless.'" Us- tryalov saw a certain justice in this elemental outbreak but suggested that the revolution had done its job and it was time to stop. Only bolshevism, "despite all its shortcomings, its painful and somber practices," was able to do what the old Russian nationalist theoretician Konstantin Leontiev had advocated: "to freeze the disintegrating power of the revolutionary flood- waters."¹⁰⁸

It was Ustryalov's belief that the Soviet government had now frozen the revolution and was proceeding to carry out the country's national tasks. This was the second point in his new theory. The Bolsheviks had turned out not to be anarchists, as everyone feared, but statists, supporters and builders of a strong state. Only the Bolsheviks, said Ustryalov, as the third point in his program, "are capable of restoring Russia as a great power."¹⁰⁹ By this he meant restoring the Russian empire. Ustryalov was an uncon­ditional supporter of "Russia one and indivisible." He was convinced that "Bolshevik centralism" was tainted only on the surface with the demagogy of "free self-determination for the peoples."¹¹⁰ It was in the interest of this revived Russian state that the struggle against bolshevism cease. In the name of empire Ustryalov condemned the peasant revolts, "the blindly destructive anarchistic wave," which if victorious could transform "great Russia into a hodgepodge of 'liberated nationalities'—an 'independent Si­beria' in the east, a 'self-governing Ukraine' and a 'free Caucasus' in the south, a 'greater Poland' and a dozen 'lesser' nationalities in the west."¹¹¹ The national destiny of the Russian revolution was so evident to Ustryalov that he categorically denied any foreign inspiration:

Even if it were mathematically proven that 90 percent of the Russian rev­olutionaries were foreigners, mainly Jews, that would not in the least disprove the purely Russian character of the movement. Even if alien hands lent themselves to the cause, the soul of the revolution, its inner nature, for better or for worse, remains authentically Russian, proceeding from the ideas of the intelligentsia and refracted through the psyche of the people.¹¹²

Ustryalov displayed great perspicacity. In the Soviet state of Lenin's time he detected many traits that later would become characteristic of the Sta­linist Soviet Union. He saw what many of the Bolshevik leaders did not. The source of his clairvoyance was his certainty of an exact parallel between the Russian and French revolutions. 'The transition from a revolutionary situation to a normal statesmanlike condition will occur not in spite of or in opposition to the revolution but through it."¹¹³ He was convinced that in Russia the evolution from radicalism to empire that had been seen in France would inevitably recur. To him the summer of 1920 was the coming of the Consulate, and the battles with Poland were like Napoleon's victories at Arcole and Marengo. The next step in the process would be the naming of an emperor.

Ustryalov's method of historical analogy enabled him to foresee certain features of the rising Soviet state. At the same time it led him into gross error. He saw the revolution as an invigorating and renewing force (and predicted a rebirth of Russian literary and cultural achievements that never came).¹¹⁴

Vasily Shulgin, in concluding a book on the defeat of the Whites and the White exodus from Russia, expressed a self-consoling thought that in many respects coincided with Ustryalov's views:

Our ideas have crossed the front lines and conquered our enemies' con­sciousness. . . . Let us suppose that the Reds only think they are fighting for the glory of the International... and in fact are shedding their blood, however unconsciously, for nothing other than the restoration of the "Divinely Pro­tected Sovereign State of Russia."... If this is the case, it means that the "White idea," having crossed the battlelines, has conquered their subcon­scious minds. ... We have foreced them to serve the White cause with Red hands. ... We have triumphed. ... the White idea has been victorious.¹¹⁵

The changing landmarks movement arose among the right-wing, con­servative sectors of the Russian intelligentsia. Efimovsky was a monarchist, Ustryalov and Klyuchnikov supporters of Kolchak, Shulgin a monarchist, and Gredeskul a right-wing Cadet. They all "changed their landmarks" when they came to the conclusion that the White cause was being served by Red hands. The ideologists of this movement were adherents of such conservative thinkers as Konstantin Leontiev and Joseph de Maistre. They accepted bolshevism because the idea of liberty, so crucial to the left-wing intelligentsia, was a secondary matter to them.

The turn to the New Economic Policy seemed to be a confirmation of the changing landmarks point of view. In November 1921 Ustryalov wrote: "Before our very eyes the tactical 'degeneration of bolshevism' is occurring as we have consistently predicted for more than a year and a half."¹¹⁶ To Ustryalov and his supporters there was no question that bolshevism was degenerating. In an article entitled 'The Radish" he argued that Soviet Russia was "Red on the outside, White on the inside." Symbols of this "radishness" were the "Red flag waving on top of the Winter Palace and notes of the Internationale being played on the bells of the Kremlin tow­ers."¹¹⁷ The changing landmarks supporters took up the term national bolshevism, which had originated in 1919 in Germany, suggested as an ideology for the Russian intelligentsia after the "elimination of the White movement in its only serious and promising form from the point of view of the state (Kolchak and Denikin)."¹¹⁸ The liberal theorist Peter Struve had polemicized against the advocates of national bolshevism. Struve's funda­mental error, as Ustryalov saw it, was that he confused bolshevism and communism. Bolshevism was a Russian phenomenon; communism was internationalist and therefore alien to Russia. The changing landmarks supporters hoped that the revolution would adapt to the national interests of Russia and accomplish what the weak tsarist regime had been unable to. It seemed to them that events confirmed their hopes.

"The ideology of reconciliation has become a firmly established part of the history of the Russian revolution," Ustryalov asserted.¹¹⁹ In the early 1920s the changing landmarks ideology of reconciliation was sharply crit­icized in emigr6 circles and often indignantly condemned as treason. But it had an effect. According to official data, from 1921 to 1931, 181,432 emigr6s returned to Russia, between 10 and 12 percent of all who had left. In 1921 alone 121,843 returned.¹²⁰ In other words, the overwhelming ma­jority were repatriated during the first year of the NEP, which was also the first year of the openly proclaimed changing landmarks movement. The chief practical significance of that movement for the Soviet government, however, lay elsewhere: it divided the intelligentsia, the greater part of which had either actively opposed the October revolution or passively refused to accept it. The changing landmarks movement was the equivalent among the intelligentsia of the Living Church. In both movements sincere individuals worked alongside direct Soviet government agents, believing that they were acting in Russia's interest, that the Kremlin towers would digest and expel the Red flags waving above them, or, as Ustryalov said, "The Red flag will blossom forth in the national colors."¹²¹

The Soviet press greeted Changing Landmarks enthusiastically. Izvestia discussed it in an article entitled "A Psychological Breakthrough": 'The essence of all the articles in the anthology comes down to the acceptance of the October revolution and the renunciation of all struggle against its results."¹²² Izvestia was surprised at the extent to which "people who just yesterday were fighting against toiling Russia, arms in hand, have now managed to understand its spirit and historic mission." Pravda greeted the anthology with an editorial entitled "A Sign of the Times."¹²³ The anthology was reprinted on Soviet presses. Lenin talked about it. Trotsky at the Second Congress of Political Educators in October 1921 insisted: "Every province must have at least one copy of this book." The topic was also discussed at the Eleventh and Twelfth congresses of the Soviet Communist party.

The changing landmarks tendency was used above all to disrupt the emigration. For many years, the Soviet authorities would consider the mere existence of an organized and hostile emigration a serious danger. The struggle against the emigration would be waged with the help of the GPU and ideology. Having created the provocateur "Trest monarchist organi­zation," the GPU would play a successful game from 1921 to 1927, creating dissension first of all within the monarchist emigr6 organizations and leading foreign intelligence services by the nose. The changing landmarks ideas penetrated broad segments of the emigration; they later became an important component of the ideology of "return to the homeland" and a basic element in the Eurasian movement.

Ustryalov was rather disconcerted by Pravdas compliments and in reply to "A Sign of the Times" wrote that the authors of Changing Landmarks were by no means "five minutes from being Communists."¹²⁴ Nevertheless, the logic of reconciliation forced the changing landmarks supporters, who believed that they could become a loyal opposition, equal partners in a dialog with the Bolsheviks, to do such things as approve the terror, approve the deportation of "thinking people" from the country, and welcome the birth of the GPU. The GPU was welcomed because it was replacing the "notorious Cheka." Terror was welcomed because "it was necessary to freeze hearts with fear in order to paralyze the enemy's will and restore discipline in the army and among the unbridled masses. To this end all means are good and all hands acceptable."¹²⁵ Deportation was justified because "at the present time a purely organic process is underway in Russia, in which the tissues of the state are being reconstituted. The country's 'brain' must not interfere in any way with this process during this period of time (which cannot by necessity last very long)."¹²⁶

Perhaps the most important practical result of the changing landmarks movement was that it provided an ideology for the intelligentsia remaining in the country and for the bureaucratic apparatus, which was growing with spectacular speed. When Lenin returned to work in 1922 after several months' illness he discovered with horror that the Council of People's Commissars in his absence had created 120 committees. In his estimation 16 would have been enough. The nationalization of industry and the system of requisitioning and distributing food had led to a vast increase in the number of officials. Since most of them were totally untrained, it was necessary to staff each post with several persons, swelling the apparatus still further. In 1917 there were nearly 1 million functionaries; in 1925, 2.5 million. The transportation system employed 815,000 people in 1913; in 1921 the number had grown to 1,229,000, although utilization of the system had declined to one fifth of its 1913 volume. In 1913 civil servants were only 6.4 percent of the work force; in 1920 they were 13.5 percent. For the most part people went to work in Soviet government offices out of necessity, in order to receive a ration. The changing landmarks movement provided them with an ideological rationalization.

In September 1922 Pravda published the results of a statistical survey among 230 engineers and staff members of Soviet government offices and industrial "trusts." To the question, "What is your attitude toward the Soviet government?" the answer of 12 was "hostile" and of 46 "indifferent"; 34 gave no answer; 28 said "sympathetic"; and 110 said they were changing landmarks supporters. Their answer to the second question helps to explain the appeal of the changing landmarks ideology. The question had to do with the future prospects of the Soviet Republic: 34 had no definite opinion; another 34 did not answer; 68 answered that the consolidation of state capitalism would lead to the victory of communism; and 94 foresaw the collapse of state capitalism and a return to the previous capitalist system.¹²⁷ That was how the changing landmarks message was understood, that the Bolshevik government would reestablish a strong state and then remove itself from the scene or be transformed.

The changing landmarks movement gave new legitimacy to the Bolsheviks by presenting them as authentic heirs of the Russian historical tradition. This justified the methods used by the new government. In commemoration of the seventh anniversary of the October revolution, Ustryalov commented approvingly: "Across the limitless plains of Russia an idea is spreading far and wide—Konstantin Leontiev's slogan, dormant until now: 'We must rule without shame.'"¹²⁸ Although the changing landmarks ideology legitimized the Bolshevik nationalities policy, it did so too openly, too much "without shame." When Ustryalov wrote, 'The Soviet government will naturally try as quickly as possible to incorporate into the 'proletarian revolution' those petty states which have now erupted like a rash upon the body of the former Russian empire," this was certain to cause indignation among the Com­munist leaders of the national minorities. At the Eleventh Party Congress in 1922 the Ukrainian Communist Nikolai Skrypnik demanded that the changing landmarks supporters within the government apparatus be given a firm official rebuff: "Russia one and indivisible, the past slogan of Denikin and Wrangel, is now the slogan of all these changing landmarks people. Professor Ustryalov is also an advocate of this slogan." At the Twelfth Party Congress Stalin complained that the "great power ideas of the changing landmarks people are filtering all through the party," that the party was falling under the hypnotic spell of "Great Russian chauvinism."¹²⁹

The penetration of these ideas into the government apparatus and into the party was particularly harmful, from Lenin's point of view, for in 1921 and 1922 a debate was on within the party leadership over the future form and structure of the Soviet state.

AN INDISSOLUBLE UNION

After the civil war it became necessary to establish a constitutional basis for normal relations between the various Soviet republics. The Russian Republic, the RSFSR, occupied 92 percent of the territory and was in­habited by 70 percent of the population of the future Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The remaining territory was occupied by the Union republics: the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, the Far Eastern Republic, with its capital at Chita, and the two "people's republics" of Khorezm and Bukhara.

On September 20, 1920, the RSFSR and Azerbaijan signed a treaty which became the prototype for all future treaties between the RSFSR and other Soviet republics. The two sides agreed to a close military, financial, and economic union. The treaty provided for the unification in the shortest possible time of the armed forces and the military commands of both republics, as well as the agencies in charge of foreign trade, the domestic economy, supply, rail and water transport, postal and telegraph services, and finance. Azerbaijan was the weakest and poorest of the Soviet republics. The Ukraine, on the other hand, was the strongest and the most stubborn defender of its sovereign rights. The treaty signed with the Ukraine in December 1920 left substantially greater powers in its hands. The Ukrainian Republic's commissariats of war, foreign trade, finance, labor, and posts and telegraph and its Supreme Economic Council were merged with the central government of the new union, but the Ukraine retained a number of commissariats, in particular a commissariat of foreign affairs, which had the right to enter into diplomatic relations with other countries.

The treaties between the RSFSR and the other Soviet republics created a paradoxical situation. Each republic had the formal right to conduct its own foreign policy but in practice was denied the right to pursue an in­dependent domestic policy. Moscow constantly violated the treaties by intervening unceremoniously in the internal affairs of the republics. The Communists of the Ukraine and Georgia sharply protested these intrusions. Moscow's constant conflicts with Kiev and Tiflis clearly showed the inad­equacies of the system of bilateral treaties among the Soviet republics. Soviet Russia's full emergence upon the international scene (in connection with the Genoa conference in the spring of 1922) made it more necessary than ever that relations between the center and the outlying regions be normalized, and in August 1922 the Central Committee established a com­mission to draft a new Soviet constitution, in part to resolve these issues.

The only anti-Soviet nationalist movement that had not been crushed during the civil war was the Basmachi movement of Central Asia (then called Turkestan). This movement gained new strength in the aftermath of the Red Army takeover of Bukhara in September 1920. After a brief period of collaboration with the Communists, the Young Bukhara movement turned against them. In the fall of 1921 the situation in Turkestan was further complicated by the appearance of Enver Pasha. Formerly a leader of the Young Turks in Turkey, Enver had been minister of war under Sultan Abdul Hamid during World War I. After Kemal Ataturk came to power in Turkey (in 1920), Enver declared himself a supporter of the Communists, as did a number of other Young Turk leaders. He drafted a memorandum for the Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in Baku in September 1920, offering his services in the fight against "Western imperialism."