Was Revolution Inevitable? Turning Points of the Russian Revolution

There is some dispute over Kaplan's activities between the summer of 1917 and her re-emergence into the spotlight of history in August the following year. She was certainly back in Moscow by the spring of 1918 and she was again active in Socialist Revolutionary circles. But it is here that the official Soviet version takes over. Much of the information about Kaplan in the months leading up to the attempt on Lenin's life in August 1918 comes from later writings, Soviet accounts of her political affiliations, references to her interrogation, and - not surprisingly with such a high-profile case - they inevitably embody the party line.

The official story is that Kaplan immediately joined an anti-Bol­shevik conspiracy under the leadership of the SR activist and military commander Grigory Semyonov, and that the group was engaged in planning a series of assassinations of Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Uritsky, Volodarsky and others. Their plots were portrayed as a highly organised armed conspiracy, funded by reactionary groups and foreign powers, dedicated to overthrowing the legitimate power of the Bolshevik state. August 1918 was not a single episode, the line went, but part of a web of violent actions against the regime.

The aim of such allegations was to blacken the reputation of the Socialist Revolutionaries, who were by then regarded by the Bolshe­viks as their sworn enemies. All evidence of SR treachery was grist to the regime's propaganda mill.

It is, nonetheless, completely understandable that Kaplan would have been disenchanted with Lenin and the Bolshevik party. After February 1917 the short-lived Provisional Government had begun to introduce the foundations of parliamentary democracy; and even after he seized control in October, Lenin continued to promise 'All Power to the Soviets', the directly elected local councils ofworkers, peasants and soldiers. To the surprise of his opponents and many of his own sup­porters, Lenin stood by the Provisional Government's promise of free elections to a national Constituent Assembly, a body that was intended to pave the way for a constitution and a parliament based on universal suffrage.

The millions who turned out to vote on 25 November 1917 prob­ably believed that democracy in Russia was finally dawning. After a largely peaceful election, in which two thirds of the population voted, the Constituent Assembly convened in the Tauride Palace in St Peters­burg on the afternoon of 5 January 1918. It was the first freely elected parliament in Russia's history, a historic moment by any standard.

But it was doomed to failure. The Bolsheviks had not done well in the elections and the Socialist Revolutionaries had secured a majority in the Assembly. With more than twice as many seats as the Bolsheviks, the SRs should have been the dominant force in Russia. But Lenin had already installed a government packed with Bolshevik ministers, and he wasn't about to let an election remove them from power.

'To relinquish the Soviet Republic won by the people, for the sake of the bourgeois parliamentary system of the Constituent Assembly, would now be a step backwards and would cause the collapse of the October workers' and peasants' revolution,' Lenin wrote. 'We must not be deceived by the election figures. Elections prove nothing. The Bol­sheviks can and must take state power into our own hands

The Constituent Assembly was allowed to exist for just over twelve hours. The Bolsheviks walked out after the first votes went against them. The other parties carried on until four o'clock in the morning of 6 January and were then evicted by pro-Bolshevik guards fuelled with vodka and brandishing rifles. When the deputies came back the next day they found the Tauride Palace locked and surrounded by soldiers. Lenin's Bolsheviks had hijacked the embryonic institutions of freedom and democracy. Now they were about to impose a centralised dictator­ship even harsher than the tsarist regime they had overthrown.

Given such treachery on the part of the Bolsheviks, Fanny Kaplan and the other disenfranchised SRs would undoubtedly have felt cheated and angry. But did she really pull the trigger that day in August? Would Semyonov really have selected Fanny Kaplan to carry out the attack? A woman who was nearly blind, had never shot a revolver in her life and had little or no experience of terrorist attacks? Her role up to then had seemingly been confined to intelligence gathering - finding out where Lenin would be at a specific time and reporting back to her colleagues.

It was nearly 10 p.m. by the time Lenin emerged from the Mikhel- son factory; sundown in Moscow at that time of year is around 9 p.m. and Fanny could not see in the dark. When Kaplan was arrested, she was not even wearing glasses. Not one of the eighteen witnesses who were interviewed actually saw her firing. And the bullet removed from Lenin's neck, almost four years later, was found not to have come from the Browning pistol alleged to have been held by Kaplan.

In 1922, Semyonov would testify that the official version of events was true in all respects, despite the inconsistencies it contained. But by then he had renounced his Socialist Revolutionary allegiance and was almost certainly collaborating with the Bolsheviks as they prepared for a show trial of SR leaders designed to discredit the party once and for all.

What is undeniable is that Fanny made no attempt to exculpate herself. She was arrested either on the spot or at a tram stop on nearby Serpukhovka Street - the policeman who collared her changed his tes­timony - carrying a suitcase and making no effort to run away. Taken for questioning by the Cheka secret police, she allegedly made the following statement (although there is no way of verifying its authen­ticity, as she would be dead by the time the Cheka released it):

My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will give no details. I resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Siberia for participating in an assassination attempt against a tsarist official in Kiev. I spent eleven years doing hard labour. After the [February] Revolution, I was freed. I supported free elections to the Constituent Assembly and I still support that. In October, the Bolsheviks seized power without the consent of the people. The Bolsheviks are conspirators who carried out a coup.

Another suspect arrested at the same time as Kaplan, a man named Alexander Prototipov, had been shot almost at once, so Fanny knew the fate that awaited her. Yet she refused to argue her innocence or to implicate any accomplices. Her silence has led to suggestions that she was the scapegoat for others, shielding her comrades who had done the deed. She would be presented by Soviet propaganda as a psychotic monster and her reputation has not been completely rehabilitated even now.

Guilty or innocent, Fanny Kaplan would, inevitably, be executed; but she would have one more appearance to make in our story before going to the firing squad.

While Kaplan was being bundled into the police van, Lenin was being rushed back to the Kremlin. Terrified that other assassins might be lying in wait for him, his security men refused to take the Soviet leader out of the safety of his fortified living quarters. They brought in doctors to treat his wounds, but the bullets were lodged in critical areas of his body and they decided not to remove them.

Lenin had come close to death; his injuries were severe, and although fate decreed that he would live, his health was badly undermined. The shooting almost certainly contributed to the series of strokes that would incapacitate and ultimately kill him in January 1924; but his sur­vival - by the narrowest of margins - meant he would have five and a half more years to continue his work. In those five and half years, Lenin would succeed in consolidating a Soviet system that would endure for more than seven decades, bringing to fruition the greatest socialist experiment of all time. His survival would enable epochal changes in political and social thinking, changes that for better or worse would affect the lives of millions across the globe.

Lenin's injuries were grave, and blood from the wound to his neck had spilled into his lungs, making breathing difficult. But the Bolshevik media played down the seriousness of the situation, fearing it might engender public panic or encourage opposition forces plotting a coup against the regime. Official propaganda portrayed Lenin as brush­ing his injuries heroically aside, refusing to heed the warnings of the medical men. Pravda's headline read: 'Lenin, shot twice, refuses help. Next morning, he reads papers, listens; continues to guide the locomo­tive of global revolution.'

The Lenin myth was gathering momentum; the intimations of saintly stoicism and the extravagant personality cult that would attend him in life and in death are already evident in Pravda's words. Lenin was a holy martyr, saved by miraculous forces and insisting on carrying on working, Christ-like, for the good of the people. A party that had destroyed religion in a deeply Christian country needed something to replace it in the people's minds and holy Lenin - dedicated, self- denying and fanatical - was in tune with the times.

While Lenin was being very publicly heroic, Fanny Kaplan was pur­suing her own concept of heroism in a considerably less glamorous setting. The police officer who arrested her reported her as saying, 'I have done my duty without fear, and now I shall die without fear.' But her courage was about to be tested.

Her interrogation, in the bowels of the Lubyanka, was rigorous. The Cheka were determined to make her reveal her fellow conspirators, and their methods were not renowned for subtlety. The sketchy record of her questioning, compiled later by Bolshevik sources, reflects the regime's insistence on creating its own version of what had happened.

Under examination by three investigators, named as Kursky, Skryp- nik and Dyakonov, Kaplan is reported as being in possession of a Browning automatic with the serial number 150489. When the deputy head of the Cheka, Yakov Peters, questions her about this, Kaplan refuses to respond. Yakov Sverdlov, chairman of the Bolshevik Central Committee and de facto head of state, then joins the interrogation and is described as angered and exasperated by Kaplan's stubborn silence.

The Cheka's aim is to vilify Kaplan and establish her as an agent of the hated SRs. Her interrogation continued for three days and three nights, so the fact that they failed to make her talk is remarkable. Kaplan did not name Semyonov, or his fellow SR activist Lidia Kono- plyova. She insisted that she had acted alone and not on the orders of any political party. She said she considered Lenin a traitor to the revo­lution, whose actions had put back the advent of socialism 'by decades'.

On 1 September, two days after the assassination attempt, the Social­ist Revolutionary Party Central Committee denied having ordered the attack. According to Semyonov's 1922 testimony (by which time he had become a collaborator with the regime), this was a lie; the party leader­ship had promised him they would claim responsibility, but reneged in panic when they saw the scale of revulsion the shooting had caused.

Kaplan, it seemed, was of no further use to the Cheka; her firing squad was already being prepared. But there was one final twist still to come.

In August 1918, the Bolsheviks were fighting a vicious civil war against powerful military forces, led by former tsarist generals, whose aim was to topple the Soviet regime and restore the old order. The struggle between the Bolshevik Reds and the opposition Whites was at a critical stage, with the outcome hanging in the balance. Fearing that a Bolshevik victory would lead to world revolution and the spread of communist contagion throughout Europe, the Western powers had sent troops to support the White armies. British, French and American forces were landing in the Russian far north; Czech legions were seizing control of territory and communications in Siberia. With 40,000 troops on the ground, Britain had taken the lead in the campaign and the Kremlin leadership regarded London as the most dangerous of their enemies.

So it was little surprise that the Bolsheviks should suspect - or at least announce that they suspected - British involvement in the plot against Lenin. On the morning after the shooting, Yakov Sverdlov had issued a statement in the name of the Soviet government:

A few hours ago there occurred an evil assassination attempt aimed at comrade Lenin. As he was leaving after a political meeting comrade Lenin was wounded. Two gunmen have been arrested. Their identi­ties are now being established. We have no doubt that the fingerprints of the Right SRs will be discovered in this affair, along with those of the hirelings of the English and the French.

The British diplomat, Robert Bruce Lockhart, who had been acting consul general in Moscow before the 1917 revolution, was now serving as London's envoy to the Bolshevik regime. In his vivid, tendentious memoirs, he describes the backlash against Britain that followed the attack on Lenin:

On the way home we had bought a paper. It was full of bulletins about Lenin's condition. He was still unconscious. There were, too, violent articles against the bourgeoisie and against the Allies ... There had been a terrible tragedy in St Petersburg. A band of Cheka agents had burst into our Embassy there. The gallant Cromie [Captain Francis Cromie, the British naval attache - MS] had resisted the intrusion and, after killing a commissar, had been shot down at the top of the staircase. All British officials in St Petersburg had been arrested...

As well as fulfilling his diplomatic duties, however, Bruce Lockhart was also working for British intelligence - it is no coincidence that his autobiography is entitled Memoirs of a British Agent - and there are grounds to believe that he had a hand in, or at least knew about Kaplan's plans to murder Lenin. For their part, the Bolsheviks were certain of his guilt. Together with his fellow spy Sidney Reilly, Bruce Lockhart was publicly accused of masterminding the plot on behalf of the Western imperialists.

On the Tuesday we read the full tale of our iniquities in the Bolshevik Press, which excelled itself in a fantastic account of a so-called Lock- hart Plot. We were accused of having conspired to murder Lenin and Trotsky, to set up a military dictatorship in Moscow, and by blowing up all the railway bridges to reduce the populations of Moscow and St Petersburg to starvation. The whole plot had been revealed by the loyalty of the Lettish garrison, whom the Allies had sought to suborn by lavish gifts of money ... An equally fantastic story described the events in St Petersburg. Cromie's murder was depicted as a measure of self-defence by the Bolshevik agents, who had been forced to return his fire. Huge headlines denounced the Allied representatives as 'Anglo-French Bandits,' and in their comments the leader-writers shrieked for the application of a wholesale terror and of the severest measures against the conspirators.

Bruce Lockhart was dragged from his bed and arrested. With the net closing in, Sidney Reilly fled north via Petrograd to Finland, finally reaching London on 8 November. Bruce Lockhart was interrogated by the Cheka in the Lubyanka prison. His memoirs are the epitome of British sangfroid under duress, but there is little doubt that his life was hanging by a thread:

My term of imprisonment lasted for exactly one month. It may be divided into two periods: the first, which lasted five days and was marked by discomfort and fear; the second, which lasted for twenty- four days and may be described as a period of comparative comfort accompanied by acute mental strain. My one comfort was the official Bolshevik newspapers, which my gaolers took a propagandist joy in supplying to me. Certainly, as far as my own case was concerned, they were far from reassuring. They were still full of the Lockhart Plot. They contained numerous resolutions, passed by workmen's committees, demanding my trial and execution ... From the first day of my captivity I had made up my mind that, if Lenin died, my own life would not be worth a moment's purchase.

Bruce Lockhart's first five days of 'discomfort and fear' coincided with the continuing interrogation of Fanny Kaplan. After refusing all demands to name her co-conspirators she had been consigned to a basement cell where, according to one of her guards, she spent the night pacing back and forth, then sitting forlornly on a wooden stool. In the morning she refused breakfast. As the sun rose she was taken into Bruce Lockhart's room and confronted with the man the Bolshe­viks believed had sponsored her act of terror. He was careful to give no sign of recognition:

At six in the morning a woman was brought into the room. She was dressed in black. Her hair was black, and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great black rings under them. Her face was colourless. Her features, strongly Jewish, were unattractive. She might have been any age between twenty and thirty-five. We guessed it was Kaplan. Doubtless, the Bolsheviks hoped that she would give us some sign of recognition. Her composure was unnatural. She went to the window and, leaning her chin upon her hand, looked out into the daylight. And there she remained, motionless, speechless, apparently resigned to her fate, until presently the sentries came and took her away. She was shot before she knew if her attempt to alter history had failed or succeeded.

At 4 p.m. on 3 September Fanny Kaplan was taken to an under­ground garage and executed with a single bullet to the back of the head. There had been no trial and no verdict. Pavel Malkov, the Kremlin commandant who did the deed, wrote later that he had no hesitation in despatching a 'traitor' such as Kaplan:

I knew at that moment that there must be no mercy shown to the enemies of the revolution. Retribution was complete; the sentence carried out. I, Pavel Dmitrievich Malkov, Bolshevik party member, sailor of the Baltic Fleet and commander of the Kremlin, carried it out personally. If history were to repeat itself and another piece of work such as she, someone who had lifted her hand against Vladimir Ilych, were to appear before the barrel of my pistol, my hand would not tremble as I pulled the trigger, just as it did not tremble back then.

Malkov says he received orders from Yakov Sverdlov that Kaplan should have no grave; no physical trace should be allowed to remain of a woman who might become a counter-revolutionary martyr. So Malkov soaked Kaplan's corpse in petrol and burned it in a steel barrel in the Alexandrov Gardens beneath the Kremlin wall. The whole grue­some process was witnessed by the Bolshevik regime's poet laureate, the proletarian hack Demyan Bedny, in order 'to fuel his socialist imagination'.

Bruce Lockhart was considerably luckier. After a month in the Lub- yanka, London swapped him for a high-ranking Soviet diplomat. On his return, the British media were quick to portray him and Sidney Reilly as heroic Western agents nobly trying to smash the commu­nist menace. A radio play starring Errol Flynn, and a Warner Brothers movie with Leslie Howard, entitled British Agent, took a resolutely anti-Bolshevik stance, portraying our plucky 'diplomats' as the prime movers in a daring operation sanctioned by London.

Bruce Lockhart's claims that Britain had nothing to do with the attack on Lenin are contradicted by the Cheka's records of the affair. They suggest he confessed to being part of a plot to overthrow the Bolshevik regime and that Sidney Reilly was also involved. Bruce Lockhart's own son, Robin, wrote in 1967, 'Once intervention in Russia had been decided on in 1918, he gave his active support to the counter­revolutionary movement, with which Reilly was actively working. My father has himself made it clear to me that he worked much more closely with Reilly than he had publicly indicated.'

Recently released telegrams between Bruce Lockhart and his Foreign Office bosses lend credence to this. In late summer 1918, shortly before Fanny Kaplan's attack on Lenin, he reported on a meeting he had held with the former leader of the SRs' Fighting

Committee, also known as the Terror Brigade, the anti-Bolshevik plotter Boris Savinkov. One telegram states: 'Savinkov's proposals for counter-revolution. Plan is how Bolshevik barons will be murdered and military dictatorship formed.'

In a handwritten note at the bottom of Bruce Lockhart's message, the foreign secretary Lord Curzon comments, 'Savinkov's methods are drastic, though if successful probably effective.'

The evidence remains inconclusive, but if Britain were indeed behind the assassination attempt, Bruce Lockhart was extremely for­tunate to be released. Before he left the Lubyanka, he caught a chilling glimpse of the consequences that the plot against Lenin would have for those who fell foul of Bolshevik power:

As we were talking, a motor van - a kind of 'Black Maria' - pulled up in the courtyard below, and a squad of men, armed with rifles and bandoliers, got out and took up their places in the yard. Pres­ently, a door opened just below us, and three men with bowed heads walked slowly forward to the van. I recognised them instantly. They were Sheglovitoff, Khvostoff, and Bieletsky, three ex-Ministers of the Tsarist regime, who had been in prison since the revolution. There was a pause, followed by a scream. Then through the door the fat figure of a priest was half-pushed, half-carried, to the 'Black Maria.' His terror was pitiful. Tears rolled down his face. His knees rocked, and he fell like a great ball of fat on the ground. I felt sick and turned away. 'Where are they going?' I asked. 'They are going to another world,' said Peters drily . the first batch of the several hundred victims of the Terror who were shot at that time as a reprisal for the attempted assassination of Lenin.

The day after Fanny Kaplan's execution, Sverdlov announced the opening of a campaign of reprisals that would be known as the Red Terror. It would be uncompromising and brutal, and it was the direct result of the assassination attempt on 30 August:

• FANNY KAPLAN'S ATTEMPT TO KILL LENIN • Moscow Kremlin, 5 September 1918.

The Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. DECREE: 'On Red Terror'

Having considered the report of the Chairman of the Cheka com­mission on the struggle against counterrevolution ... the Council of People's Commissars finds that in the current situation the use of political terror to secure the non-militarised areas of the country is an absolute necessity; ... that it is necessary to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by confining them to concentration camps; that all persons participating in White Guard organisations, conspiracies and rebellions must be executed by shooting, and that the names of those executed and the reason for their execution must be made public.

The decree gave free rein to the bloodthirsty fanatics of the Cheka. From now on they would arrest and eliminate anyone they suspected of harbouring the slightest reservations about the Bolshevik regime, and many others who simply got in their way. The rule of law and judicial oversight were suspended; executions could be ordered by a 'troika' of three secret policemen, sitting in private, and with no right of appeal.

As paranoia became the norm, the Bolsheviks relied more and more on their murderous henchmen. The Cheka's methods, cynically acknowledged by its leader, 'Iron' Felix Dzerzhinsky, were simple: con­fessions extracted by torture, followed by immediate execution. 'We stand for organized terror,' Dzerzhinsky said. 'This should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly ... Do not think that I seek forms of revolutionary justice; we are not in need of justice now - this is war.'

The shooting on 30 August had plunged the Bolsheviks into panic and fear. In the throes of civil war and surrounded by enemies, the fragile regime saw threats everywhere. There was an absolute and immediate assumption that this was an enemy conspiracy. News came in of another attack, this time fatal, on the head of the Petrograd secret police, Moisei Uritsky. Scores of suspects were rounded up, tortured and shot.

Exact figures for the number of deaths are hard to establish. The 'first batch' of victims referred to by Bruce Lockhart seems to have claimed the lives of around 800 Socialist Revolutionaries and other political opponents of the regime, most of whom had been arrested after the October revolution. Since then they had been held as hostages, whose lives would be forfeit in the event of enemy action against Bolshevik interests. Even the officially admitted figures make startling reading. In Petrograd alone, 512 political prisoners - none of them connected in any way with Fanny Kaplan - were murdered. Across the country, an estimated 14,000 executions were carried out.

The immediate effect of the August shootings was a terrible hard­ening in the Bolshevik mentality. In response to the attack on Lenin, so-called class enemies were rounded up and executed for no other crime than their social origin. In operations that foreshadowed the Gestapo, hostages were selected from former tsarist officials, landown­ers, priests, lawyers, bankers and merchants to be used as reprisals. The British journalist Morgan Philips Price recorded his horror at the Bol­sheviks' methods:

I shall never forget one of the Izvestia articles for Saturday, Septem­ber 7th. There was no mistaking its meaning. It was proposed to take hostages from the former officers of the Tsar's army, from the Kadets and from the families of the Moscow and Petrograd middle-classes and to shoot ten for every Communist who fell to the White terror. Shortly after, a decree was issued by the central Soviet Executive ordering all officers of the old army within territories of the Repub­lic to report on a certain day at certain places ... The reason given by the Bolshevik leaders for the Red terror was that conspirators could only be convinced that the Soviet Republic was powerful enough to be respected if it was able to punish its enemies, but nothing would convince these enemies except the fear of death. All civilized restraints had gone...

Lenin himself signed the execution lists. It was he who initiated the Terror and he who pushed it ever further into bloody excess. He acknowledged the ruthlessness that drove him onwards when he con­fessed that he took the fanatical Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky's novel What Is To Be Done? as a model and inspiration: 'I can't listen to music,' Lenin said, 'because it makes me want to say sweet, silly things, and pat people on the head . but you have to beat people's heads, beat them mercilessly!'

That fanaticism, which would result in a lot of 'merciless beating' over the next five years, was undoubtedly intensified by the impact of the bullets he received in August 1918. Lenin's aim now seemed to be the physical annihilation of a whole social class. Being modestly well off made you guilty; soft hands unused to manual labour could get you shot. Martin Latsis, the head of the Cheka in Ukraine, revealed the real purpose of the Terror:

Don't go looking in the evidence to see whether or not the accused fought against the Soviets with arms or words. Just ask him which class he belongs to, what is his background, his education, his pro­fession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and the very essence of the Red Terror.

In the name of Lenin's Utopia, an estimated half a million people were killed in the three years to 1921. The long-term legacy of Kaplan's three bullets in August 1918 would be to make terror a permanent feature of Soviet society. It would reach its apogee in Stalin's murderous purges of the late 1930s, but for the whole seven decades of its existence the USSR consistently relegated the rule of law to a secondary role. Even in the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev was lamenting that the Soviet Union had never been 'a law governed society'. The killings had stopped, but the lawlessness continued, and it continues in Russia today.

Would it all have been different if Fanny Kaplan had succeeded in killing Lenin? Or if she had never embarked on her mission in the first place? Counterfactual history is a thankless task; it leaves too much to the individual imagination, but there is evidence that Lenin's brush with death changed the whole tenor of Soviet politics.

The terror against 'class enemies' prompted an unprecedented flight of the brightest and best in Russian society. Members of the former middle class were denounced as bourzhoui, 'bourgeois parasites', and 'non-persons'. Their homes were confiscated, their furniture seized and their clothes requisitioned for the state. They were placed in the lowest category for food rations, on the border of starvation, and forced to do cruel, often deadly labour.

Of those intellectuals, scientists and artists who had not been mown down by the Cheka, between one and two million fled abroad. It was a brain drain that left the nation bereft. Shortly before he himself starved to death, the philosopher Vasily Rozanov wrote presciently:

With a clank, a squeal and a groan, an iron curtain has descended over Russian history: the show is over, the audience has risen. It's time for people to put on their coats and go home. But when they look around they see there are no coats anymore, and no more homes.

The men and women who had made the country function - doctors, engineers, chemists, architects, inventors - were gone, dead or fled. Their absence hastened the economic collapse, industry stalled and factories closed. With wages losing 90 per cent of their value, even the proletariat began to desert the Bolsheviks. 'Down with Lenin and horsemeat,' scrawled the Petrograd graffiti, 'Give us the Tsar and pork!' When strikes broke out, the government turned its Red Terror on the workers, with mass firings, arrests and executions.

As his hold on power became ever more fragile, Lenin abandoned his promises of freedom, justice and self-determination. The rhetoric of liberation gave way to what came to be known as War Communism

harsh, enslaving and repressive. Lenin had come to power promising 'Peace, Bread, Land and Workers Control'. But after 1918 the Bolsheviks would rescind every one of these promises.

Between 1918 and 1921, forced labour was imposed on the popu­lation, with breaches of discipline punishable by death. The labour camps began to fill up with 'anti-revolutionary elements'. A siege men­tality informed the government's every act. Workers were no longer seen as agents of the revolution but as raw material, an expendable resource to be exploited in the great experiment of building socialism. Instead of peace, Lenin had brought devastation. Instead of bread

starvation. Instead of land - requisitions. Instead of workers repre­sentation - terror. Winston Churchill commented tartly that 'Lenin's aim was to save the world, his method to blow it up'. The British consul in Petrograd, Colonel R. E. Kimens reported:

The only work done by the Soviet authorities is the inciting of class hatred, requisitioning and confiscation of property, and destruction of absolutely everything. All freedom of word and action has been suppressed; the country is being ruled by an autocracy that is infin­itely worse than that of the old regime. Justice does not exist and every act on the part of persons not belonging to the 'proletariat' is interpreted as counter revolutionary and punished by imprison­ment and in many cases execution . The Soviet authorities' one object is to overthrow the existing order of things and capitalism, first in Russia and afterwards in all other countries, and to this end all methods are admissible.

Lenin seemed unmoved. In the years after he was shot by Fanny Kaplan, it is hard to find a word of human sympathy or concern any­where in his collected works. Directives that he signed personally called for ever-greater repressions in the name of Bolshevism.

'If it is necessary for the realization of a specific political goal to perform a series of brutal actions, then it is necessary to perform them in the most energetic manner,' Lenin wrote to Molotov. 'We must ...

put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for decades,' he wrote of those priests who were resisting his campaign to close the churches and confiscate church property. 'The greater the numbers of reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing . the better. Because these people must be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to even think of further resistance for decades to come.'

Russia was slipping into anarchy. Strikes were crippling the towns, the countryside riven by revolt. And Lenin's response was still more terror.

When Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin tried to moderate the powers of the secret police Lenin overruled them. As late as 1921 he was still expanding the Cheka's powers of summary execution.

Even after the Khrushchev revelations of 1956, when Soviet histori­ography began to heap blame on Stalin for the murderous excesses of the century, it continued to exculpate Lenin as if his reputation were inviolable. But it was unequivocally Lenin who initiated and inculcated the reign of terror. It was he who ordered the repressions, the execu­tions and the concentration camps. And he ordered them after he was shot by Fanny Kaplan.

The shooting in August 1918 had a dramatic impact on Lenin. If the Kaplan assassination attempt had never taken place, the intensity of the Red Terror would surely have been less; fewer people would have lost their liberty and their lives.

But if Kaplan hadn't been half blind, if her aim had been less uncer­tain, if Lenin had died that day in August, the impact on history could have been cataclysmic. Chaos theory's 'butterfly effect' - time's ampli­fication of initially minor perturbations, a butterfly flapping or not flapping its wing, into the immense force of hurricanes - could have changed everything. The Bolshevik regime, already assailed by power­ful enemies, could easily have foundered. And even if it had survived the loss of its inspirational leader, its subsequent development would have been dramatically different.

It is likely that Leon Trotsky, the cruel, mercurial minister of war, would have become leader in Lenin's place. His hatred of Stalin would almost certainly have precluded the Georgian monster's rise to ultimate power. But it is equally probable that Trotsky's insistence on exporting communism to the rest of the globe - he was the unbending propon­ent of world revolution - would have done for the USSR well before then. Whatever Stalin's other failings, it was his pragmatic abandon­ment of the pipe dream of world revolution in favour of retrenchment - 'socialism in one country' - that saved the USSR from almost certain annihilation in the crisis years of the 1920s.

As it turned out, the events of 1918 - the escalation of civil war, the ferocity of Bolshevism's opponents, the spiralling feuds within the ranks of the revolution and, not least, Fanny Kaplan's attempted assassi­nation of its leader - hardened the Bolsheviks into a party of autocratic power, uninterested in debate or divergent opinions. Henceforth they would consider themselves a paramilitary fraternity surrounded by an untrustworthy population that must be re-educated to understand the new reality. To achieve their ends, the party's leaders would steel themselves to be austere, disciplined zealots, untroubled by human emotions. It was the end of all hopes for democracy in Russia; the beginning of seventy years of unbending communist autocracy.

wo events in mid November 1918, separated by only a

SEA CHANGE IN THE CIVIL WAR

November 1918 evan mawd sley

week, transformed the course of the Civil War in Russia. The first was the armistice between Germany and the Allies, signed in a railway carriage at Compiegne in France on Monday, 11 November. The second took place 2,900 miles away, at Omsk in central Siberia on the following Sunday night, 17 November. The Provisional All-Russian Government (PA-RG), a body claiming to be the legitimate govern­ment of Russia and led by a 'Directory' of five men, was overthrown in a coup d'etat. The following morning a military dictator, Vice Admiral Alexander Kolchak, took the post of 'supreme ruler' (verkhovnyi pravi- tel) of Russia.

THE ARMISTICE AND RUSSIA

The terms of the Compiegne armistice included the withdrawal of German troops to within their own borders. While such forces in the west would move within fifteen days (Clause II), and most of those in the east should also do so 'immediately' (Clause XII), Russia was for the Allies something of a special case. Clause XII of the Armistice stip­ulated that while German troops 'in territories which before the war formed part of Russia' should also return home, this was to occur only'as soon as the Allies shall think the moment suitable, having regard to the internal situation of these territories'. Also important was Clause XXV which required the Germans to give Allied ships free access to the Baltic.¹

The German military presence on Russian territory had developed over four years. Military defeats suffered under the Imperial Gov­ernment and the 1917 'revolutionary' Provisional Government led to enemy occupation of Poland as well as parts of Belarus, Lithuania and Latvia. In November 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power, with the promise ofbringing an end to the war. But negotiations, followed by an armistice and then renewed fighting, ended with the Treaty of Brest- Litovsk on 3 March 1918. Under this treaty the new Soviet government lost control of large swathes of territory in the west and south, notably in the Baltic and Ukraine, which were occupied by German (and Aus- tro-Hungarian) troops.

The November 1918 armistice undid all this. The troops of the Central Powers in the Russian 'borderlands' were now concerned mainly with effecting their own rapid withdrawal. A temporary power vacuum was created, which could be filled by different forces. Nation­alists among the ethnic minorities of the borderlands hoped to achieve genuine statehood. Ethnic Russians, opposed to both the Bolsheviks and the minority nationalists, wanted to regain control of these ter­ritories and use them as a base to strike against the Soviet zone. The Bolshevik central government prepared to reassert control over the borderlands by using its growing Red Army. At a grander level, the Bolsheviks hoped the borderlands would provide a bridge to central Europe, enabling them to extend socialism to Germany and the lands of Austria-Hungary. From the west the British and French wished to contain this expansion of Russian/Soviet power, by supporting anti- Soviet governments - minority nationalist or Russian anti-Bolshevik. The French, in particular, were eager to establish a cordon sanitaire around Bolshevik Russia. The Allies, like the Leninists, had a maximum programme: by isolating the Soviet zone and supporting local forces they would bring about the total destruction of Bolshevism.

On 23 October, two weeks before the Armistice and based on the already rapidly changing military situation, Premier Georges Clem- enceau had signed a directive launching an active struggle against Soviet Russia. He made much of the danger of growing Bolshevik strength and put forward a policy of economic blockade. Troops would be landed in south Russia to cut the Soviet regime off from the grain and mineral resources of Ukraine and the Don region, and a military nucleus would be created, around which an ti-Soviet forces could rally. Three days after the Armistice, on 14 November, the British War Cabinet met to approve the outlines of a post-war Russia policy. These included pro­vision of military supplies to the anti-Bolshevik General Denikin in south Russia and to the governments of the Baltic States, 'if, and when, they have Governments ready to receive and utilise such material'. The small number of British troops already in north Russia and Siberia would remain there. In Siberia diplomatic support - de facto recogni­tion - was to be offered to the local anti-Bolshevik government.²

In the weeks that immediately followed the 11 November armistice Allied fleets passed into the Baltic and Black seas. After the Mudros armistice with Turkey (signed on 30 October) British and French war­ships were finally able to enter the Dardanelles. On the morning of 13 November a large force anchored off Constantinople. Passing out of the Bosphorus and steaming north across the Black Sea, the main fleet arrived at Sevastopol on 25 November. Individual ships reached Novo- rossiisk in the north Caucasus on the 22nd and Odessa on the 27th. In the Baltic Sea, Allied naval vessels reached Libava (Liepaja) in Latvia on 9 December, and Revel (Tallinn) in Estonia on the 12th.

THE OMSK COUP

Meanwhile, on 5 November 1918 - six days before the Compiegne armistice - Vice Admiral Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak had become the war and navy minister of the Provisional All-Russian Government, now based in Omsk in central Siberia. He had arrived in the city three weeks earlier, on 13 October.

The train carrying the leaders of the 'all-Russian' anti-Bolshevik government had only arrived in Omsk from the west on 9 October. The executive of the Provisional All-Russian Government was mod­elled on that of the French Revolution: supreme power was vested in a Directory of five men. (The French version, the Directoire executif, created by the Constitution of Year III, held office from 1795 to 1799, after the overthrow of the Jacobins.) An attempt had been made to give the Russian Directory (Direktoriia) a balanced membership. N. D. Avksentiev and V. M. Zenzinov were members of the Socialist Revo­lutionary Party (PSR); V. A. Vinogradov belonged to the non-socialist Kadet (Constitutional Democrat) party; P. V. Vologodsky was a Sibe­rian 'regionalist'; and General V. G. Boldyrev commanded the local anti-Bolshevik armed forces.

The events of the coup are a matter of some historical dispute. The most likely sequence of events is that on Saturday afternoon (17 November) a meeting in Omsk of middle-level politicians and mili­tary leaders, all men of the right, made the final decision to take action against the Directory.³ In the early hours of Sunday, a detachment of Cossack troops surrounded a block of flats in Omsk where the Social­ist Revolutionary (SR) E. F. Rogovsky lived. Rogovsky was the deputy minister of internal affairs in the PA-RG. The Directors Avksentiev and Zenzinov, and a number of other SRs, were meeting in his flat. Cossack officers arrested those present and imprisoned them at the Agricultural Institute on the outskirts of Omsk. The barracks where a small pro-SR internal security unit was quartered was also surrounded, and the men there disarmed. There was no bloodshed.

Before dawn the following morning the PA-RG Council of Ministers, including now Admiral Kolchak, met in the former Gov­ernor-General's Palace.⁴ A third Director, the Kadet Vinogradov, now resigned. A fourth man, Vologodsky, the Director most closely associ­ated with Siberian interests, was evidently surprised by the coup, but not prepared to argue for a return to the status quo. General Boldyrev, the fifth and final Director was absent at the front.

The meeting then turned to the need for a replacement executive, and there was no opposition to replacing the Directory with one-man rule; civil and military power was to be concentrated in the hands of one individual as 'supreme ruler' (verkhovnyi pravitel). After some dis­cussion a vote of those present voted nearly unanimously for Admiral Kolchak, who agreed to serve in this post. He issued, as 'Supreme Ruler Admiral Kolchak', the following proclamation:

On 18 November 1918 the Provisional All-Russian Government col­lapsed [raspalos]. The Council of Ministers took all the power and invested it in me, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak of the Russian Navy.

Having assumed the burden [krest, literally 'cross'] of this power in the exceptionally difficult circumstances of the Civil War and the complete disruption of public life, I announce:

I will go neither down the path of reaction, nor along the fatal path of party politics. My chief aims are the organisation of a com­bat-ready army, victory over Bolshevism, and the establishment of law and order, so that the people may be able to choose without hindrance a form of government to which they are suited, and to realise the great ideas of freedom which are now been proclaimed [provozglashennye] throughout the world.

I call you, fellow citizens, to unity, to struggle with Bolshevism, to labour and sacrifice.⁵

To understand the political tensions that led to the Omsk coup, and why and how Kolchak emerged as a military dictator, some key events of the preceding year need to be outlined. While retreating from the Central Powers in western Russia in the winter of 1917-18, the Bolshe­viks in Petrograd had succeeded in establishing their authority in many urban centres in the southern and eastern parts of the Russian Empire. Lenin's party took advantage of the lack of any effective rival authority in Petrograd, and of the revolutionary network of councils (soviets) of workers' and soldiers' deputies created in 1917. Detachments of pro- Bolshevik soldiers and armed workers were sent out along the railways to crush local resistance. In the city of Omsk a Bolshevik-dominated 'soviet' took charge from 30 November 1917.

Bolshevik hold on power was, however, extremely tenuous, espe­cially in distant regions. It was weakened in the winter of 1917-18 by the rapid demobilisation of the radicalised wartime army and plummet­ing economic activity in the towns. The defeated political opponents of the Bolsheviks, both left and right of the political centre, were still active, in some cases in organised - and rival - political undergrounds. Some were agrarian socialists (especially the SRs) who felt that 'their' revolution had been hijacked by the Bolsheviks. Some were members of the former privileged groups; any enthusiasm for revolution that they might have had in the heady days of early 1917 had been dissipated by political anarchy, economic ruin and national humiliation. Some were 'patriotic' survivors of the pre-war and wartime officer corps, who dreamed of restoring Russian honour and international status.

It did not take much to shake the rickety Bolshevik hold on power. The main agent of this overthrow in eastern Russia took the extraor­dinary form of the Czech Corps. Some 50,000 men - eight regiments organised in two divisions - were numerically not a large force, but they were strung out in trains strategically positioned across the railway system. First raised in a spirit of Slav solidarity in 1914, by Czech and Slovak civilians living in Russia, the formation had been expanded rapidly in 1917, through recruitment of Austro-Hungarian POWs. In early 1918 the Soviet government in Petrograd agreed to let the corps depart to fight in France, but in May fighting broke out with local Soviet authorities. In the course ofJune and July the men of the corps took effective command of the 4,000-mile railway line from the Volga River to Vladivostok. So important was this transport artery that the Soviet government in Moscow suddenly lost control of all of Siberia, the southern Urals and part of the Middle Volga region. On 7 June, during this advance, power changed hands again in Omsk; the victors were the Czechoslovaks and the local Russian opposition to the Bolsheviks.

Some 950 miles to the west, the Volga town of Samara was taken by the Czechoslovaks on 8 June, and the first post-revolutionary govern­ment to rival the Bolshevik one in Moscow was formed. This body claimed its authority from the All-Russian Constituent Assembly (Uchreditel noesobranie). The Assembly had been the result of national elections organised in the last days of the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, and held in the first days ofSoviet rule. Some forty- five million voters had taken part, and the result was a clear victory for the Socialist Revolutionaries. They were the peasant party, in a peasant country; they had a strong revolutionary heritage and they advocated policies of popular sovereignty and land reform. The elections gave the SRs 428 deputies out of 767; there were only 180 Bolshevik deputies (and very few from the political right and centre). The Assembly met in Petrograd early in January 1918, but was immediately dispersed by the Bolsheviks. Several SR deputies, however, were present in Samara and others joined them; their organisation named itself the 'Commit­tee of Members of the Constituent Assembly', known in Russian by the abbreviation Komuch.

Komuch evolved, over several months, and through ill-tempered negotiations, into the PA-RG and the Directory. A 'State Conference' of the various local authorities that had sprung up under Czechoslovak protection was held in the town of Ufa in the southern Urals (between Samara and Omsk) in September. The SR leaders of Komuch accepted that they would have to broaden their base and, as we have seen, the Directory included, as well as two SRs, a Kadet and a leader of the former Siberian regional authority, as a well as progressive soldier.

The Samara government had raised a small 'People's Army', which fought alongside the Czech Corps. A few early successes were fol­lowed, however, by a Red Army counter-attack in late September, and the Komuch forces had to fall back from their original Volga base into the southern Urals and western Siberia.

Meanwhile, the European Allied powers, although obsessed with their life or death struggle with Germany on the western front, had maintained their presence on the fringes of Russia. Responding to the successes of the Central Powers before and after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they had kept ships and landing parties in the two peripheral ports that they could reach and the Germans could not: Murmansk and Vladivostok. The 'rescue' of the Czech Corps provided a justification for further operations in Russia. In early August 1918 a small expeditionary force, led by the British, took control of the port of Arkhangelsk, south of Murmansk and 600 miles north of Moscow. Japan, a non-European ally, landed forces in some strength at Vladi­vostok, as did the British and the Americans. A minor British army unit, a reserve battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, was even sent 'up country' to Omsk.

Despite the Ufa State Conference and the involvement of the Allies, by the late summer of 1918 political opinion in the anti-Bolshevik camp, and especially in Omsk, had become more polarised. It was a conflict in multiple dimensions - between left and right, between sol­diers and civilians, between locals (Siberians) and outsiders (refugees from European Russia). An especially important issue was the pres­ence of the two Socialist Revolutionary members in the Directory. The SRs were bitter enemies of both the Bolsheviks and the Germans. Nevertheless, they were regarded by those on the right as little differ­ent from Lenin's party and certainly as part of Russia's humiliation as a great power in 1917; the Director Avksentiev had been minister of the interior in the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. What also aroused ongoing hostility from other parties was the SR's claim to an exclusive and continuing legitimacy, as a result of their landslide success in the elections to the Constituent Assembly.⁶

For their part the SRs, who regarded themselves as the true heirs of the 1917 revolution, not its opponents, were increasing distrustful of their non-socialist political adversaries, and especially of the mili­tary officer corps. Etched in their collective memory was the struggle with the autocracy, especially in the failed revolution of 1905. In August 1917 there had been the attempt by General Kornilov to seize effective power in Petrograd. Most recently, in September 1918, conservative officers had briefly overthrown the government led by the veteran SR N. V. Chaikovsky, which had been created in Arkhangelsk (under

British protection). In Omsk there were violent incidents in which SR activists were killed by right-wing death squads.

These growing tensions prompted the national SR leader Viktor Chernov to draft a manifesto (obrashchenie) that made the struggle with 'counter-revolutionary intrigues' a main priority. The manifesto called on party members to be mobilised, trained and armed to resist such intrigues, and was issued by the PSR Central Committee (based in Ekaterinburg in the Urals) in late October 1918.⁷ This act in turn further inflamed the right, and it was of special importance in motivating the imprisonment of the SR Directors in Omsk on 17-18 November.

The conflict was furthered by the political and institutional weakness of the Directory, which had been grafted on top of an existing non- socialist 'Siberian' government. Many ofthe individuals and institutions in that government continued in power within a 'Council of Ministers' (Sovet ministrov), formed on 4 November. Meanwhile, the prestige of the Directory suffered because the military campaign being conducted in its name was not going well; the anti-Bolshevik forces were having to give up ground to the growing Red Army on the Volga, and then in the southern Urals. The retreat made it seem to conservative soldiers - Rus­sians and foreigners alike - that what was required was 'firm' authority, organised in the form of uncompromising military rule.⁸

Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak was a remarkable - and ultimately tragic - figure.⁹ In August 1916, at the age of only forty-two, he had been promoted to the rank of vice admiral, and made commander-in-chief of the Black Sea Fleet; this force was an important element of Russia's war effort against Turkey. Kolchak was already a much decorated war hero, having led daring offensive destroyer actions in both the Russo- Japanese War and in the Baltic in the First World War. In addition he had earned a reputation as an intrepid polar explorer, and an ocean- ographer. From his service in the Naval General Staff during the early 1910s he had made valuable political contacts. After the 1917 revolution Kolchak furthered his political reputation by opposing revolutionary change in the armed forces. At the Sevastopol naval base in early June

when confronted by radical sailors who demanded that officers surrender their side arms, Kolchak threw his ceremonial sabre over­board and resigned his post.

The Provisional Government despatched the admiral with a naval mission to the United States, and he visited the British Admiralty en route. After his visit to America he departed from San Francisco on 25 October (New Style), aiming to return to Russia via the port of Vladivostok. By the time he reached Yokohama, Kerensky and the Provisional Government had been overthrown; unable and unwilling to return to Russia under the Bolshevik 'anarchy', Kolchak stayed in the Far East in the winter of 1917-18. A man of action, still committed to the defeat of the Central Powers, Kolchak offered his services to the British and was invited to take part in the Mesopotamia campaign. En route to the Persian Gulf, he had reached Singapore from Japan in March

when he was recalled by the Russian (pre-Soviet) ambassador to China, and asked to raise forces for the Russian-owned Chinese- Eastern Railway. Based in Kharbin (Harbin), Kolchak held his post for three months in the spring and early summer of 1918; he achieved little and returned to Japan in late July.

During his summer in Japan Kolchak had talks with General Alfred Knox, the British Army's leading expert on Russia. General Knox was impressed by Kolchak's energy and his no-nonsense preference for military government; he reported to the War Office in late August 1918 that 'there is no doubt that he is the best Russian for our purposes in the Far East'.¹⁰ In early September Kolchak and Knox sailed together across the Sea of Japan to Vladivostok, where they disembarked on the 8th. The two men set off by train into Siberia two weeks later. Of necessity the journey was a slow one, and a further three weeks would pass before Kolchak reached Omsk (on 13 October).

Kolchak's decision to travel deep into Siberia has intrigued histor­ians. When on trial for his life at Irkutsk in January 1920, the admiral maintained that he had hoped to join his family in south Russia.¹¹ It is more likely that he was exploring various options, in the highly uncertain and rapidly developing political and military situation of September and October 1918. One possibility was a role with the anti- Bolshevik forces taking shape in the Urals and western Siberia. Another was making his way further west - if a route opened - to join the forces of General Alexeev and General Denikin; these two leading figures in the old army were reported to be waging an isolated but successful struggle to consolidate their position with their 'Volunteer Army' in the north Caucasus (south Russia) region. There is only circumstan­tial or post factum evidence that Kolchak journeyed with the intention of becoming - or being helped by the British Army to become - a regional military dictator, let alone an all-Russian one. The PA-RG and the Directory did not even exist when he left Vladivostok.¹²

It was not surprising that once he arrived in western Siberia Kolchak became involved with the new anti-Bolshevik authority and its armed forces; a figure of his known abilities, political stature and good relations with Allied benefactors was attractive. The admiral later claimed that he was invited to take part in the PA-RG Council of Ministers by General Boldyrev - the front-line commander ofthe Directory's military forces, and Boldyrev certainly did not want to overthrow the Directory.¹³

Lt General Boldyrev, although in late September 1918 styled as the 'Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all Russia Armed Forces', did not have the status of Kolchak among the Allied governments or their rep­resentatives in Russia. More important, he was genuinely much more sympathetic to the politicians of the centre-left. The son of a peasant, Boldyrev had risen in the tsarist army to become deputy chief of staff of the Northern Army Group, under General Ruzsky, in the winter of 1916-17; in the late autumn of 1917 he was briefly commander-in-chief of the Fifth Army. He had in early 1918 become a member of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia (Soiuz vozrozhdeniia Rossii), an influ­ential underground organisation including activists on the left of the Kadet Party and on the right ofthe Socialist Revolutionaries; its leaders included Avksentiev and Zenzinov. It is highly unlikely that Boldyrev would have been offered the role of the military dictator by the rightist Siberian politicians, and unlikely, too, that he would have accepted it.¹⁴

On being made war and navy minister on 4 November, Admiral Kolchak immediately left Omsk for a twelve-day inspection tour of the forces fighting some 600 miles to the west, in the northern Urals. General Knox, for his part, took a train back towards Vladivostok on the 5th. Some writers accused Kolchak and Knox of absenting themselves from Omsk simply to avoid open complicity with a planned coup; the opposite case can be made - that if either man had contemplated the overthrow of the Directory in these weeks they would have wanted personal oversight. A diary entry for 5 November written by one of the main coup plotters (V N. Pepeliaev) recalled Kolchak saying that he was not prepared, under present circumstances, to seize power. At the same time Knox informed the War Office that he had told Kolchak that it would 'at present be fatal' to follow the urgings of the right-wing officers around him and take supreme power.¹⁵

Kolchak's activities in the days (and hours) immediately before the morning of 18 November are clearly important. Was he actively conspiring to make himself a military dictator? Or was he genuinely surprised by events, and was it only after the fact that he agreed to 'assume the burden of this power'? He arrived back in Omsk just before the coup, on 16 or 17 November.¹⁶ Kolchak claimed that he only learned of the night-time arrest of the SR Directors when he was woken at his apartment at 4 a.m. on the 18th; that is at least possible. Few historians have attempted to make the admiral a direct participant, and one of the best accounts, by the British historian Peter Fleming, rules out such involvement.¹⁷

Different views have also been put forward regarding the role of British military or diplomatic representatives. General Maurice Janin, who arrived in Omsk a few weeks after the coup as the senior French military representative, later maintained that the coup was supported and even organised by British military advisers.¹⁸ There were two Russian-speaking British officers in Omsk at the time of the coup, Lt Colonel Neilson and Captain Steveni, who had some contact with Omsk politicians and officers. Neither of them was in favour of the Directory, and they may have given verbal support or assurances to some of the conspirators.¹⁹ It seems unlikely, however, that they organised anything. Another British factor was the Middlesex bat­talion, which was still stationed in Omsk, and which at least had the potential to oppose a counter-coup. No one has suggested, however, that that battalion had been ordered to the city to carry out a strike against the Directory or that it took any active part in the events of 17-18 November.

The definitive account by Richard Ullman argued that the British government and the Foreign Office certainly played no part. The involvement of Knox, who was subordinate to the War Office, could not be determined, but he - in Ullman's view - was at most 'a warm sympathiser'; Ullman did not preclude the unauthorised encourage­ment (or lack of discouragement) by the junior British officers on the spot. General Knox, who had left Omsk nearly two weeks before the coup subsequently denied any involvement by Britain.²⁰ Above all, the British War Cabinet, in the important meetings on 13-14 November (described earlier), had in fact decided, among other elements of its post-war Russia policy, 'to recognise the Omsk Directorate [sic] as a de facto Government'.²¹ Still, this important development in British policy was not publicly announced, and it was almost certainly not commu­nicated to personnel in Siberia.

We are on less thin ice when considering the activities of the known conspirators, rather than the ultimate beneficiary, Admiral Kolchak.²² The core leaders appear to have been the civilians V. N. Pepeliaev and I. A. Mikhailov, and the deputy chief of staff of the Siberian Army, Col. A. D. Syromiatnikov. What is most likely is that the conspirators acted on their own. Their motives were important. They had long been hostile to the SRs, and after the Chernov Manifesto ill feeling was height­ened. Genrikh Ioffe's Soviet-era account plausibly put emphasis on the intrigues of the Kadet Party and the underground National Centre (Natsionalnyi tsentr) organisation, in both of which Pepeliaev played a major role.²³ They were ambitious 'Young Turks': Pepeliaev was thirty- four, Syromiatnikov thirty-one, and Mikhailov was only twenty-six. They may well have hoped to use Kolchak as a mere figurehead.

Also important was the acceptance of events by more senior (and cautious) members of the political and military leadership in Omsk. On the morning after the arrest of Avksentiev and Zenzinov they agreed to a fait accompli. In a private letter to Mikhailov written in April 1919, Syromiatnikov gave him the credit for making the higher- ups do something they would not have done otherwise.²⁴ There was no pressure from above in Omsk, or from outside (by the foreign govern­ments), to restore the Directory.

As for Admiral Kolchak, he did not have to accept 'the burden of this power'. But, as he declared in his manifesto, he did not want to follow 'the fatal path of party politics'. During his 1920 trial Kolchak recalled one of his conversations with General Knox in Japan, when he (Kolchak) had stressed the importance of the armed forces:

[T]he organization of political power [vlast] at a time like the present was possible only under one condition: this power must rely on [opiratsia na] the armed force which it has at its disposal. This in turn determines the question of power, and it is necessary to solve the question of the creation of the armed force on which such a political power would rely, for without it political power will be a fiction, and anyone else who has such an armed force at his disposal will be able to take political power in his hands.

Kolchak certainly had no time for the SRs, and for the Constitu­ent Assembly on which they based their authority. '[T]he Constituent Assembly which we got ... [he testified] and which when it met broke into singing the "Internationale" under Chernov's leadership, pro­voked an unfriendly attitude on the part of most of the people I met [in Siberia before the coup], it was considered to be artificial and partisan. This was also my opinion. I considered that although the Bolsheviks had few positive features, their dispersal of the Constituent Assembly was a service for which they should be given credit.'²⁵

Finally, there is little to connect the Omsk coup with the Armistice. The penultimate sentence of Kolchak's 18 November announcement mentioned 'the great ideas of freedom which are now been proclaimed throughout the world', and this might be taken to refer to the Allied victory (paradoxically, Kolchak's announcement declared a military dictatorship). The War Cabinet's secret decision of 14 November to recognise de facto the Directory was part of a review of British policy brought about by the Armistice; the British historian and journal­ist Michael Kettle thought it likely that information about this had been secretly communicated to right-wing circles in Omsk and might have motivated a pre-emptive strike by the conspirators on the 17th.²⁶ Given the distances and the wobbly chain of events this seems unlikely (although it is not impossible). It is also improbable that the conspira­tors in Omsk feared or anticipated that the Armistice would mean that once the war ended the Allies would lose interest in Russia - although that was indeed the case.

CONSEQUENCES AND COUNTERFACTUALS

For a time Admiral Kolchak enjoyed military success. In December 1918 White Russian and Czechoslovak troops pushed the Red Army back in the Urals; at the end of the month they took the important industrial town of Perm. In March 1919 Kolchak's army began a general offensive in the southern Urals, which quickly recaptured Ufa. But by the summer the Siberian anti-Bolshevik forces were in retreat. There was some disorder in the rear, and the government made little attempt to rally popular support. Kolchak proved to be neither an effective military commander nor an astute politician. In November 1919 he was forced to abandon Omsk. He had not been able to secure the recognition of his government by the Allies, and he gave up the title of Supreme Ruler (in favour of General Denikin). In January 1920, during the admiral's retreat to the east, his train was stopped at Irkutsk (1,300 miles east of Omsk). Kolchak was arrested, tried and shot, and his body thrown through the ice of the Enisei River. He was the only one of the senior White leaders to be captured and killed during the Russian Civil War.²⁷

We might consider some counterfactuals. The biggest of all would be if the Central Powers had not lost the war in the autumn of 1918. That is indeed a fascinating question but one well beyond the scope of this chapter; the present work is about the situation after the late summer of 1918, by which time the last German offensive had failed.

More narrowly, the Directory could have continued at least into 1919. This might well have happened had there not been a credible 'dic­tator' on hand, or if Admiral Kolchak had refused the post of 'supreme ruler'. He might have done this if the most 'senior' of potential all-Rus­sian military leaders, General M. V Alexeev, had not died unexpectedly in south Russia in October; Alexeev had been chief of staff to the tsar for much of the war, and Supreme Commander-in-Chief in part of 1917.

The Directory might also have survived if the inclination of the British Foreign Office to support the PA-RG had been followed through - and if more time had been available. General Boldyrev was an alternative leader; he might have followed a more sensible political course, and he could not have been any less effective as a military com­mander than Kolchak.

But the tension between left and right in Russia, and the unre­strained power of the reactionary armed gangs, precluded such a happy outcome for the anti-Bolsheviks. The real significance of the Omsk coup, whoever inspired it or carried it out, was that it demonstrated the unbridgeable and fatal gulf between 'party politics' and 'the path of reaction' (to use Kolchak's words) in the anti-Bolshevik movement.²⁸

The Armistice ended the domination by Germany and her partners over the Russian western and southern borderlands and opened fierce civil war fighting there. The Allies, with large and successful forces at their disposal, now had unopposed access to the territory of Russia. Again, thinking counterfactually, could Britain, France, the United States and Japan have decided, in the winter of 1918-19, to intervene in strength in Russia?

That they did not do so had little to do with the character of Kol- chak's government. Much more important was the fact that the overthrow of German military power in November 1918 meant that the Allies lost any serious motive to intervene, certainly on a large scale and with their own forces. Their armies and populations were war-weary and there was little domestic political appetite for action in Russia. The French did commit some military strength to an exped­ition to southern Ukraine in mid December 1918, but there was clear reluctance to fight on the part of their troops (and those of France's Balkan allies). The campaign culminated in a humiliating withdrawal - accompanied by mutinies - from Odessa in March 1919, and from Sevastopol in April. Meanwhile, no Allied ground forces, and few sup­plies, were committed to the Baltic region. The British could and did send surplus arms and other supplies to south Russia, from wartime munitions dumps in the Middle East and elsewhere, but supplies alone were not enough to defeat the Red Army.

Nevertheless, a fundamental problem for the Siberian Whites, although perhaps not the decisive one, was the opening of the Black Sea, which occurred simultaneously with the Omsk coup. The shorter length of the route to south Russia made General Denikin and the Vol­unteer Army a much more attractive recipient of Allied supplies than Kolchak's armies in remote Siberia. Because of this the events in Omsk were in the long run probably not of central importance. Denikin created an authoritarian government in south Russia, and would have done so in any event; there was no 'Directory' stage in the counter­revolutionary politics of the south.

The Provisional All-Russian Government probably could not have competed with the south Russian White generals for Allied military and diplomatic support. Nor, from faraway central Siberia, halfway around the world in terms of the practicalities of travel and commu­nications, could the PA-RG have exercised control over the whole ('All-Russian') anti-Bolshevik movement. And a more democratic PA-RG probably could not have put a first military offensive together as fast as Kolchak did. Might a more democratic Siberian government have won more (or alienated less) popular support in Siberia in 1919? Perhaps, but the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party did not have strong local roots in Siberia (where there was no history of serfdom, and land hunger was not a central issue). In the task of state building, it is hard to believe that the Directory would have had any more success than Kolchak.

Probably the fatal divisions in the anti-Bolshevik movement were unavoidable. Probably, too, it was inevitable that the Allies would not consider serious post-war military intervention in Russia. Neverthe­less the events of mid November 1918 did divide the tragedy of the Russian Civil War into two distinct parts. Foreign involvement was always important, but the collapse of the Central Powers and the ascent of the Allies actually reduced the scale of foreign intervention. The troops of the Central Powers had physically occupied the Baltic region, Belarus, all Ukraine, and much of the Transcaucasus in 1918. The Allies attempted nothing on this scale in 1919 or 1920.

Likewise the triumph of the military elites in the anti-Bolshe­vik camp in November 1918, led by men like Kolchak and Denikin, changed the political nature of the conflict. The 'White' Russian forces, even after most of the Czechoslovaks returned home after 1918, and even without direct involvement of foreign military forces, were now more of a threat to the Red Army; they were superior in their leader­ship, mass and effectiveness to what had existed before November 1918. But on the other hand these armies had only rudimentary political programmes, compared even to Komuch and the PA-RG. A popular dictator (or tsar-substitute) could not gain mass support in Russia, at least not before the 1930s.

THE FATE OF THE SOVIET COUNTRYSIDE

March 1920 erik c. landis

_O

f the many challenges that faced the Soviet government in the Russian Civil War, none was greater than overcoming the breakdown in the supply of food that had started before the February Revolution of 1917, and had itself been a significant factor in the fall of the Russian autocracy. Procuring food from the farmers to feed the Red Army and the civilian population in the Soviet heartland of the urban, industrial centres of northern European Russia forced the ruling party into a number of policy changes and attempted innovations between 1918 and 1921. However, in the conditions of civil conflict, the procure­ment of food from the farming peasantry nearly always boiled down in practice to a reliance upon 'administrative measures' and 'taking grain'.¹ The challenge of securing food to meet the needs of the state generated almost continuous conflict in the Soviet countryside during the Civil War, pitting village farming communities against state procurement squads.

Throughout this period, agricultural production declined. On the eve of the harvest in the autumn of 1920, at a time when the outcome of the Civil War was all but settled, with the main forces of the White armies defeated and the Soviet government seeking a way out of its war with nationalist Poland, another round of grain requisitioning by armed procurement squads sparked a wave of unrest in the Soviet countryside that escalated to an unprecedented scale, with sustained anti-Soviet insurgencies occurring in a number of important regions of the Soviet Republic. Restoring control over the regions consumed by this violence required the deployment of hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops, and frequently this was only after hastily mobilised (and poorly armed) units of local Communist Party members had tried and failed, at great cost, to suppress the resistance in the prov­inces and regions they ostensibly 'controlled'. The Civil War, in effect, was extended by nearly a full year as the struggle for grain became an all-out war.

This 'second civil war', as one historian preferred to describe it,² was ended only after tens of thousands were killed in the course of the rebel­lions. In the language of the regime, the rebellions were the product of the machinations of subversive, counter-revolutionary 'kulaks', or rich peasants who were the inveterate enemies of Soviet power, working with the regime's socialist rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR), and the 'international bourgeoisie'. And it was amid this wave of vio­lence that significant parts of the republic suffered extensive harvest failures, bringing famine to areas such as the Middle Volga and the Urals region of western Siberia, in which several millions lost their lives. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was an avoidable coda to the era of revolution and civil war, and that it was the consequence of decisions taken by the Soviet leadership at the start of 1920.

The present essay concerns the end of the Russian Civil War, and describes the opportunities that were passed up to demobilise the Soviet state machinery that had been hothoused in the conditions of civil conflict over the previous two years. The year typically given for the conclusion of the Russian Civil War is 1921, and while armed clashes continued for several months across the former Russian Empire, the critical moment in this chronology is the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) by the Communist Party leader­ship, initiated with the decision in March 1921 to end the practice of forced grain requisitioning - of 'taking grain' - a measure soon fol­lowed by decrees that, among other measures, partially decriminalised the market. Permitting the peasants to dispense (relatively) freely with their produce after a tax ('in kind', or in the form of foodstuffs) was assessed and collected, was a radical reversal of Soviet policy. It was adopted as a means of defusing the anger and desperation that had given rise to the rural violence of the previous several months, and which had also become the focus of urban protests and mutiny in the armed forces. This was the first, and most important, step taken in the process of reconstruction for the Soviet state, itself desperate to put an end to the years of continuous war-related strife that began in 1914.

In March 1920, a full year before Lenin introduced the reforms that would lay the foundation for the NEP, proposals were advanced by Leon Trotsky to end grain requisitioning and to seek an alternative that appealed to the individual incentives of farmers. In the course of a trip to the Urals in January and February 1920, the Commissar for War emerged of the opinion that the current approach to food procurement was unsustainable, detrimental both to the health of the agricultural economy and to relations with the rural population. In the spirit of post-war reconstruction, which the Soviet leadership was openly dis­cussing at the start of 1920, Trotsky suggested a number of possibilities, including a return of market-driven exchanges between agricultural producers and manufacturers, to help incentivise the farmers to produce more grain and other foodstuffs. In germ form, Trotsky's ideas strongly resembled what would be adopted by the party, but only after several months of further violence and suffering linked with an ill-fated continuation of the wartime food procurement policy. Trotsky's ideas, however, were dismissed by his colleagues in the Soviet government.

The ramifications of this decision extend beyond the human suffer­ing of the final phase of the Civil War. Less than a decade later, another senior Soviet official would make a hastily arranged trip to the Urals region, and in familiarising himself with the situation there, and with a concern for resolving a crisis of grain supply and political control in the countryside, would publicly advocate a return to compulsory surplus grain deliveries and confronting the menace of 'kulak' sabotage once and for all. Joseph Stalin's speech in Novosibirsk in January 1928 would set the USSR on the path towards full-scale collectivisation of agriculture, activating a militant strain within the Communist Party that had never been reconciled with the ignominious 'retreat' of March 1921, when the party was forced to yield to 'kulak' pressure and adopt the New Economic Policy. The speech in Novosibirsk in 1928 was a vital moment in the formation of what became Soviet socialism and in the creation of the Stalin dictatorship, and it is linked in revealing ways with the Civil War and the party's earlier efforts to manage the chal­lenges of building socialism in a peasant country.

In December 1919, even though the armies of the White forces had not yet been completely defeated, the outcome of the Civil War in Russia appeared clear. Russia's former allies in the First World War had withdrawn their troops from the north and far east of the former empire, and with that their financial and material support of the White armies had been significantly scaled back all along the periphery of the future Soviet Union, from Murmansk to Vladivostok. The White forces of Admiral Kolchak in Siberia, whose offensive in the spring of 1919 momentarily appeared to be the greatest threat to the Soviet regime in Moscow, were in the final stage of the longest military retreat in modern history, and Kolchak himself was only weeks away from arrest and execution just east of Lake Baikal. The forces of General Yudenich, which had threatened to take Petrograd in October 1919, were definitively routed by November, and the White armies under General Denikin had seen their 'drive to Moscow' reach its height in the early autumn of 1919, retreating back to the Don and Kuban ter­ritories of southern Russia in the final weeks of that year as rapidly as they had advanced earlier in the summer.

Addressing the Eighth Conference of the Communist Party in early December 1919, Lenin spoke with confidence about the rapid turn of fortunes enjoyed by the Soviet regime:

We see opening before us the road of peaceful construction. Of

course, we need to remember that the enemy will be lying in wait at every turn of the way, and will seek to throw us off course by any means necessary: violence, lies, bribery, conspiracy, and so on. Our task is to utilise all our experience and knowledge from the military front in addressing the challenges of peaceful construction.³

With his words on the immediate future of the republic, Lenin fore­shadowed the controversial discussions that developed in the second half of December over the 'militarisation' of labour, stemming from an article published by Leon Trotsky in Pravda calling for the leadership to embrace the principles of compulsion in work. Trotsky, who was never shy to weigh in on any sphere of public policy, directed attentions to the model for economic construction provided by the successful organi­sation of the Red Army, particularly to the controversial embrace of conscription and hierarchies of command that he had championed in 1918. Seeing the demobilisation of the Red Army as a welcome consequence of victory in the Civil War, Trotsky advocated utilising the machinery of the army to conscript the labour force of the Soviet Republic, such that that force could be deployed strategically and effi­ciently in vital industries and in pursuits to rebuild the economy and expedite the transition to socialism. The obligation to work as a basic component of citizenship had been a part of Communist discourse since the very first days of the revolution. Civilians had been mobilised for trench digging, road maintenance and track clearing in an ad hoc fashion in both the cities and villages throughout the Civil War, much as they had been by the tsarist government before the revolution.⁴ But the principle of labour obligation had never been openly embraced on such an ambitious scale by the regime until this point. Lenin proved enthusiastic about the ideas, championing Trotsky and his vision in the face of aggressive criticism from the trade union representation in the Communist Party. At the turn of the year, Lenin helped oversee the creation of a Commission of Labour Duty, to be chaired by Trotsky, on top of his responsibilities as Commissar for War.⁵

The challenges of economic revival were enormous. Industrial production had largely collapsed in the years that followed the fall of the tsar in February 1917, and the Soviet government's attempts to contain and reverse the decline had proven ineffective. By the start of 1920, the output of large-scale industry was less than a fifth of what it had been on the eve of the First World War. Output for small-scale industry was better, but still significantly less than 50 per cent of its pre-war levels.⁶ Essential pursuits, such as mining and timber produc­tion, vital for both the transport system and industry, were in desperate need of revival, and when the project of mobilising the labour force assumed a more concrete form in 1920, it was to these pursuits that attention turned. The first test case for the creation of a 'labour army' deployed for urgent economic needs came in western Siberia, where the Revolutionary Military Council of the 3rd Red Army, whose soldiers had contributed significantly to reversing the advance of Kol- chak's Siberian Army, placed itself at the disposal of Trotsky and his project. Not required for the further pursuit of Kolchak's dwindling forces, and at the time largely idle owing to the difficulties with the overloaded rail network, the opportunity was thus available to assign the men of the 3rd Red Army to work felling timber, clearing snow, repairing infrastructure, and other tasks in the region. This was not the conscription of civilian labour that had originally been proposed by Trotsky, and which had stirred such controversy among the trade unions, but it was a start that brought together the parallel processes of demobilisation and economic reconstruction.⁷

Setting off for Ekaterinburg on 8 February 1920 to oversee the pro­cessing of the soldiers of the 3rd Red Army and their redeployment to productive tasks, Trotsky's mind was clearly focused on economic challenges and looked towards peacetime. Having travelled through­out the country almost continuously during the previous two years, Trotsky's engagement with economic matters had been largely in connection with military challenges. But as he was among the most prominent of Soviet political leaders and in some respects the most visible to the wider public, Trotsky was regularly in receipt of letters and petitions from average civilians. As his personal train made its way to his destination in the Urals, he took considerable time to pen a reply to one such letter from a peasant named Ivan Sigunov of Penza province, who had written to express grievances over the shortages being endured in the countryside, and the seemingly endless demands placed upon the farmers by the agents of the state.

In his reply of 12 February, Trotsky explained the dilemmas cur­rently facing the Soviet Republic, faithfully sticking to the party line, particularly as regards the razverstka. The razverstka was a policy intro­duced in 1919 that moved away from talk of 'surpluses', and instead defined the needs of the state and collected food from village commu­nities on the basis of strictly defined targets. Whereas the Soviet state had previously requisitioned surpluses with the promise of equivalent exchange of manufactured goods and other items of basic necessity, it eventually had to recognise that such a system of goods exchange was a fiction, and that requisitioned grain would be forfeited by producers as a sort of 'loan' to the state, an investment in the victory of the revo­lution. 'The peasants currently hold many credit notes,' Trotsky wrote, acknowledging that the patience of people such as Sigunov was being tested.

The current situation is not with that, however. What we need are goods, manufactured products, the kinds of things that a person requires both for himself and his household. We need to revive textile and metals production, lumber mills, chemicals, and so on, such that our people no longer suffer shortages ... But currently we produce only little, as our country is all but destroyed, machines are worn out, factories are in disrepair, raw materials are in short supply, there is no fuel, and workers, mindful of their plight, have fled [the cities].

The first step towards resolving this problem, according to Trotsky, was to collect enough food to sustain a viable industrial workforce, which had shrunk considerably in the years of civil war as families went to the countryside to, in essence, be closer to the food:

The workers of Moscow, Petrograd, the Ivanovo-Voznesensk region, the Don Basin and even the Urals have suffered terrible food short­ages, and at times have genuinely been starving. Moscow and Petrograd proletarians have gone hungry for a matter of years, not just for days. The railroad workers are going hungry. Hunger weakens not only the body, but the soul as well. The [worker's] arms drop, as does the will. It is difficult to rouse a hungry worker to perform disciplined, vigorous and organised work. The first job, therefore, is to feed the workers.⁸

Without the grain taken from the peasants, no revival in industry could be expected. (The title given by Trotsky to the letter, when it was published at the time, referred to the current state of ruin in Russia and the 'tasks' of the peasantry.) However, as Trotsky was aware, without non-agricultural goods to offer in exchange, grain would be secured from the peasants begrudgingly, at best.

In fact, the Soviet state's efforts at food procurement had been punc­tuated by violence. In 1918, after a failed attempt to work within a system of fixed prices for grain and the criminalisation of the market, the state sought to implant new institutions at the local level - the committees of the poor - that would empower the poor and landless peasants at the expense of the so-called 'kulaks' in the village. With a hope that class conflict could be fomented and harnessed to expedite grain pro­curement, the Soviet state promised that a portion of hidden 'kulak' surpluses revealed through the work of the committees would be redis­tributed among the poor in the community, as would any additional confiscations of property carried out as punishment for non-compli­ance. The committees proved ineffective in the second half of 1918, and in several provinces they provoked much violence, with village commu­nities either closing ranks against perceived 'outsiders' who assumed prominent positions in the new committees, many of whom perished in a wave of violence that accompanied the procurement campaign, or clashing with state procurement agents with the insistence that there were neither kulaks nor surpluses to be found in their village.

Who was a kulak and who was not was clear to no one, and there were neither customary understandings nor legal definitions that enjoyed authority, either before the revolution or after. When the Soviet government sought to levy an 'Extraordinary Tax' on the rural population in late 1918, to be assessed on the village kulaks, commu­nities that complied tended to distribute the financial burden evenly among the households, or protested to state authorities that there were no kulaks among them. Collection rates were disappointing, and local officials admitted that acceptable rates of collection could only truly be achieved at gunpoint.⁹

Waves ofviolence occurred in early 1919, with entire regions overrun by rural rebels who tried to form organised insurgencies, but these proved to be spectacular but short-lived flares of protest. Denounced by Soviet officials as evidence of the strength of kulak influence, such violent protests struggled to carve a space within the polarised context of revolution and civil war. In the Middle Volga region that encom­passed the provinces of Samara and Simbirsk, a rebellion lasting just over two weeks rapidly dismantled rural state administration and sent Communist Party members into hiding as angry communities tried to exact revenge for what were viewed as unjust requisitions and con­fiscations of grain and livestock, and for the conduct of state agents in the countryside, popularly understood to be brutal and arbitrary.¹⁰ With estimates placing the number of villagers to take up weapons as anywhere between fifty and one hundred and fifty thousand, it was the largest such rebellion in this region of Russia since the time of Emelian Pugachev in the 1770s. In attempting to clarify the situation on the ground near the epicentre of the rebellion, the Communist Party sec­retary for Simbirsk province, I. M. Vareikis, found himself speaking with the chairman of the district soviet in the village of Novodevich'e, a man by the name of Poruchikov. Assuming that Poruchikov was a loyal servant of the regime, Vareikis asked for information about the 'counter-revolutionary uprising', and about the number of 'kulaks and deserters' that were behind it. Unexpectedly, Poruchikov revealed himself to be unapologetically on the side of the rebels:

These are no kulak uprisings, nor have there ever been, and we have no counterrevolutionaries, [the people] are against the improper requisitioning of grain and livestock[;] we welcome the Bolshevik party and are not fighting against them, we are against the com­munists, but in general there are no counterrevolutionaries, we are opposed to the improper requisitioning of grain and livestock, there are no kulak uprisings, all the peasants are honest toilers. The number of rebels taking part - all the villages and hamlets. We would like it if you would come here yourself, and see who is rebelling... You see, comrade Vareikis, we are not saboteurs, we only want to have a chance to talk with you; you will see for yourself that we are right, and that the people here will listen to you.¹¹

If anything, the violent protests against requisitioning only forced state officials to dig in, spurred on by the (valid) reports of hardship in the cities and 'grain-deficit' regions, and by the conviction that sufficient grain was out there, and that the only way to get it was by overcoming 'kulak' resistance.¹²

What was becoming clear, however, to some outside of the food supply bureaucracy of the Soviet state (Narkomprod), and particularly to those who witnessed the collection of grain by armed requisition squads, was that the razverstka was unsustainable. While the razverstka declared that the basic consumption needs of the household would be respected (in accordance with defined 'norms' of consumption), the achievement of collection targets always took priority. As one Narkom- prod official in a central Russian province told his colleagues at the local Congress of Soviets: 'the kulak peasantry has learned to hide its grain much more effectively than we have learned to find it. That is why the razverstka must be pursued without regard for "norms".'¹³ The image of the kulak justified many of the shortcomings of the razverstka system. While possessing a veneer of data-driven credibility, with its projections on harvests and its delineation of consumptions norms, the system was driven in practice by the desperate need to control as much of the available food in the country as was possible.¹⁴

Despite the fact that the logic of the razverstka policy held that produce not required by the state under its targets could be retained by farming households, without any legal means of disposing with this surplus, and precious few products available to exchange for grain, there was no incentive to produce above the basic needs of the house­hold itself.¹⁵ Official statistics and anecdotal reports strongly indicated that farming households were reducing their sown acreage, with yields similarly falling, in some areas by over one third.¹⁶ There were many factors at play in creating this outcome. The number of households had increased since 1917, with the average size of those households going down. This made them less productive, both because of military mobilisation and because the productive capacity of those households was declining, with horses requisitioned for military purposes and agricultural implements falling into disrepair without available replace­ments.¹⁷ For many of the most significant grain-growing regions, the shifting fronts of the Civil War itself was profound enough to signifi­cantly disrupt the agricultural cycle.

These circumstances were significant, but the voluntary factor - the lack of incentives to produce above subsistence - was much more con­troversial within Communist Party circles, unless it was expressed with reference to 'kulak sabotage'. The flourishing black market was obvious for all to see, and later studies would confirm that it was absolutely vital to the survival of the urban population in Soviet Russia, for whom the dwindling state rations could not cover their needs.¹⁸ While the state procurement campaign in 1919 had been a success, close observers rec­ognised that this was not the result ofsome sort oftransformation (what the optimists in the Communist Party frequently called a perelom) in the relations between the farming peasantry and the Soviet regime. It was instead the result of procurement being conducted on an ever-larger scale, in territories 'liberated' by the Red Army (whose own fortunes had experienced a decisive perelom). Yet anxieties among the rural and town populations alike were quick to appear in those newly liberated territories, as the prospect of sweeps by armed requisition squads and by militia policing illegal trade activities acquired greater salience.¹⁹

In the days that followed the production of Trotsky's open letter to Ivan Sigunov, the Commissar for War spent time travelling through parts of the Urals region near Ekaterinburg. Simply put, little is known about Trotsky's movements during this time. (Unlike Stalin's trip later in the decade, Trotsky's journey to the Urals was not the subject of countless official reminiscences, and has not attracted the same level of detailed historical examination.) However, his observations of this region - one of those recently 'liberated', which had yet to feel the full weight of Soviet demands, but which had nevertheless suffered consid­erably under Kolchak - did produce a proposal that Trotsky submitted for consideration by the Communist Party's Central Committee when he returned to Moscow in March. In it, he provided an assessment of the current situation with food collection, in concise terms describ­ing the critical importance of the state's policy to the overall economic prospects of the republic.

The essential problem, Trotsky noted, is that the peasant no longer had a reason 'to cultivate his land more than is required for his family's needs' if the state is determined to requisition everything he produces above that level.²⁰ With food scarce in the cities, increasing numbers of industrial workers were leaving for the countryside, and if they were able to secure land for cultivation, these households were also inclined to produce only for their own subsistence. Thus, the number of small-sized farming households was rising, legitimate 'surpluses' were declining, and the urban labour force was, likewise, dwindling. '[I]n general,' wrote Trotsky, 'the food resources of the country are threatened with exhaustion, and no improvement in the requisition­ing apparatus will be able to remedy this fact.'²¹

What Trotsky proposed was far from identical to what would become the New Economic Policy, introduced over a year later. In his memo, Trotsky listed four basic principles for agricultural policy. First, he proposed replacing the razverstka with a (progressive) tax-in-kind, 'calculated in such a way that it will nevertheless be more profitable for the peasant to increase the acreage sown or to cultivate it better'. Second, he wanted a renewed commitment to the supply of manufactured and other non-agricultural goods to the countryside - not only fertilis­ers and ploughs, but salt and kerosene - which would be purchased in-kind, with grain. He insisted that they should avoid the mistake made in 1918-19, when the decree on goods exchange stipulated that manufactured products be distributed to villages and districts upon fulfilment of grain deliveries, and not to individual households. This earlier disinclination to see individual households - potential 'kulak' households - benefit from such exchanges had to be overcome, wrote Trotsky, for such a system to succeed and provide incentives.

The memo's final two points, which were dropped from later ver­sions of the text published by Trotsky himself, include a commitment to investment and growth of the state and collective farm network, which had by early 1920 become little more than an embarrassing sideshow for party leaders, even though the fundamental principle of state-sector, collectivised agriculture was central to everyone's vision of full socialism in the future. Trotsky also described a basic reorientation in the strategy guiding agricultural policy by concentrating state efforts at the sowing stage of the agricultural calendar (and less on harvest­ing), involving the party and soviets in the preparation and cultivation of the fields as a means of ensuring that a greater area was sown. As such, the Soviet regime would not be depending upon individualised incentives alone to stimulate the expansion of production, but could mobilise additional labour and oversight for agriculture in a way that was consistent with Trotsky's own enthusiasm for labour conscription, and which were already a part of the regime's current direction in eco­nomic policy.²²

In Trotsky's proposal, he explained that he saw potential in the regime treating regions of the republic differently, recognising that in Siberia and parts of Ukraine the first two of his suggestions would be most likely to succeed, while in central Russia and the Volga, where rural population density was higher and communal land tenure remained strong, emphasis on collectivisation and managed tillage would be more appropriate. As could be expected, Trotsky had little to say about the market, not referring to it specifically in the proposal at all. However, in reference to his first two points - about a tax-in-kind and goods exchange - he wrote that it signified 'a certain slackening in the pressure on the kulak; we shall contain him within certain limits but not reduce him to the level of a peasant producing only for subsist­ence'. At the heart of Trotsky's proposal, then, there was a recognition that the obsession with kulaks, and with the food crisis being reduc­ible to matters of class conflict, needed to end in order for economic recovery to achieve any traction. It is the same basic obsession that defenders of the NEP continued to struggle against within the party in the 1920s, after Lenin had died.

Trotsky was by no means the first to be critical of the razverstka. While the socialist rivals of the Communists, the Menshevik Party, had included the idea of a tax to replace the razverstka in their economic platform in the summer of 1919 (something echoed by the Socialist Revolutionaries in their own pronouncements on food policy), the impact of this was exceptionally limited, just as the Mensheviks were struggling to influence political discussions on the whole in the later months of the Civil War.²³ Then, shortly before Trotsky made his trip to Ekaterinburg, the Communist Party specialist on financial affairs, Yuri Larin, advanced proposals to the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets of the People's Economy (institutions known at the time as sovnarkhozy) on 20 January 1920 that similarly called for the end of the razverstka methods of food collection. In its place he proposed a tax- in-kind, which would be introduced alongside a renewed commitment to the exchange of manufactured goods for food, to be overseen by the trade unions, and some measure of price regulation or even fixed prices on grain. Larin's main concern, like that of Trotsky, was for the state to incentivise food production above what was needed for the household

alone.²⁴

Larin was a member of the Soviet regime's highest economic body, the Supreme Council of the People's Economy (VSNKh), and his pro­posals were given serious consideration at the opening session of the Third Congress, although they were not formally adopted by the del­egates, which chose instead to reaffirm the principles of centralisation in food procurement tasks. (Indeed, Larin's proposals, and the ensuing discussions, were not included in the published materials relating to the Congress of Sovnarkhozy at all.) Lenin was informed by the Com­missar for Finance, Nikolai Krestinsky, of Larin's proposals the day after they had been presented to the Congress, adding his own judgement: 'I consider these to be impracticable and to be politically harmful.' Lenin concurred, replying to Krestinsky: 'Forbid Larin from any more such "blue sky" thinking (prozhekterstvovat).' Having intensified his condemnation of concessions to 'free trade' less than two months earlier, Lenin went further than demanding that Larin be rebuked. In fact, Lenin pushed for Larin's removal from his official post as member of the VSNKh presidium, and even sent a word of warning ('rein in Larin, or you might find your own career affected') to the chairman of that body, Alexei Rykov, another official known to be critical of the razverstka and food supply policy, more generally.²⁵

Larin, whether consciously or not, had violated an instruction to all senior officials across a number of state bodies not to make inde­pendent statements on food policy, let alone critiques of the existing practices. Such was the level of dissatisfaction and dispute surrounding food supply at all levels of the system - collection, transport and distri­bution - that on 5 January 1920 the leading Collegium of Narkomprod, somewhat controversially, asked for all speeches and pronouncements on food supply issues to be vetted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.²⁶ Less than a fortnight later, Larin had fallen foul of this principle, and been made to pay a price for confusing 'the young party members and non-party workers, who might regard you as an authority, a leader of the party who occupies a senior post in one of the most important state institutions'. So wrote the Central Committee in the letter to Larin informing him of his removal from the VSNKh.²⁷ Trotsky's proposals, however, were discussed by the Communist Party Central Committee's Politburo in late March 1920. They were rejected by a vote of eleven to four.²⁸ Trotsky wrote before the meeting of the Politburo that the proposals were only a rough draft, and that the language would need to be reconsidered, even if he was satisfied with the core ideas. Still, despite the fact that there had been considerable discontent and discussion surrounding the current food supply policy both within the Communist Party and without, there was clearly no stomach for changing course on this, the most vital and problematic of state pursuits. At the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party, which opened shortly after the vote on Trotsky's proposals, the central tenets of the razverstka were reaffirmed, and Trotsky himself would move on from the subject of food policy and expand upon his project for the militarisation of labour, which was one of the major programmes endorsed by the Congress.²⁹ He would not revisit his proposals on food supply until one year later, in March 1921, when (in typically humble fashion) he chose to remind his colleagues in the party that the propos­als for a tax-in-kind they were then adopting at Lenin's insistence, were fundamentally the same as those he had advanced earlier.

It is clear that there was insufficient political support for a radical reori­entation of the food supply policy at the start of 1920. However, the political situation changed dramatically over the next twelve months, as the material costs of the continuation of the razverstka policy mounted in step with popular anxieties about the future, and gave rise to unprecedented levels of violence in the countryside when prepara­tions were being made for another major grain procurement campaign in the autumn of that year.

When Trotsky was submitting his proposals to the Central Commit­tee, Communist Party officials in the provinces were already engaged in a campaign of their own to try to arrest the degeneration of popular attitudes towards the party and Soviet government in the countryside. In Samara province, which had been the host of repeated outbreaks of violence between village communities and state agents, party activ­ists received briefing papers on the most common anti-government slogans - number one on the list: 'Up with free trade!' - with instruc­tions of how to counter these as they put across the party's message.³⁰ The officials charged with monitoring the correspondence to and from

Red Army soldiers produced numerous excerpts from letters they had opened and examined, which referred to the continuing requisitions that left households with less and less to eat, and diminishing levels of seed to sow the fields for the next harvest.³¹ As the summer of 1920 progressed, anxieties grew as poor rainfall and high winds in certain regions produced early indications of drought and crop damage.³² When the food requisition squads descended on the villages, protests by peasant farmers and local soviet officials were dismissed, taken only as evidence of 'kulak sabotage' and 'parochialism'.³³ Dismissing letters of appeal against the announced targets for grain collection sent by village communities and local (village and district) soviets in the weeks before the harvest was to commence, the county food commis­sar in Lebedian (Tambov province) declared to his colleagues in the county administration that these appeals 'only amount to pitiful kulak whining'. 'Is it not well known by now,' he explained,

that the peasants continue to distil vodka, that they sell their grain on the black market, that they bury it in the ground ? It is about time that you all understood that the requisitions are carried out accord­ing to the official razverstka target, which is established on the basis of government statistics. If the peasants do not have the necessary amount of grain, then that is their fault, and not ours.³⁴

Such was the extent of the breakdown in relations between the central government and the periphery, broadly defined, that armed requisition squads expected resistance from locals and took it as confirmation of sabotage, carrying out the business as agents of the 'Centre', and bypassing local officials. The Cheka organisation in Penza province reported in August 1920 that

[t]he peasants are protesting against the violence and humiliation they suffer at the hand of the requisitioning squads, which in some cases does occur on account of misunderstandings and misinterpre­tations of their orders from the centre. The centre is proposing to extract grain surpluses to an inhuman degree, and some of the req­uisition squads do not spare the whip in trying to fulfil these orders. Amidst all of this there has been outright criminal behaviour by squads that behave as if they have some sort of axe to grind.³⁵

Reports such as this indicate that the atmosphere that surrounded the grain procurement campaign, in which hundreds of armed squads descended upon the countryside to collect designated targets from villages, was one that combined a measure of desperation among the farming peasantry with a strong measure of despondence that char­acterised local administration and even many local Communist Party members.

The importance of this was most spectacularly demonstrated in Tambov, an agricultural province in central Russia that had been one of the main focal points of Soviet food supply efforts, having remained under Soviet control very nearly throughout the Civil War period. Like other provinces in Soviet Russia, Tambov had experienced waves of violent resistance from villagers as the state sought to collect grain and conscript men into the Red Army. When requisitioning began in August 1920 in Tambov, the anticipated clashes with farming house­holds were dealt with firmly by the armed squads, but for the first time this violent defiance proved to be more durable. Making examples of individual villages that fought requisition squads - either by taking hostages, performing public executions, or even burning individual houses and even whole villages - proved ineffective, as it emerged that armed 'bandit' gangs were fighting alongside the villagers, working to sustain the resistance to requisition squads and state officials. Under the wave of violence, Communist Party members in the countryside rapidly took flight, fearing for their lives, and the soviet administration melted away as rebellion spread. Over the course of the next several weeks, the makings of a rebel army formed in the densely populated, agriculturally rich southern part of Tambov, effectively ending the campaign to requisition grain, and complicating the efforts of the Soviet state to secure food in the region, more generally, as important rail lines connecting the cities of the north of Soviet Russia to the trad­itional grain-growing regions passed through the province. By the end of the year, Soviet authority in Tambov was effectively isolated in the provincial capital city, and the administrative centres of the counties, while still holding out against the rebellion, were vulnerable and nearly overcome by fatalism and panic. Over the winter months of 1920-21, the 'Partisan Army' in Tambov took shape, incorporating a number of regiments and keeping some 30,000 men under arms. At the same time, the rebellion worked to implant an alternative government for the territory creating its own civilian network of village-based 'unions of the labouring peasantry', which numbered in the hundreds.³⁶

The rebellion in Tambov at the time was unique in the Soviet Repub­lic in its size and level of organisation. In several other regions, what predominated was termed 'raiding banditry' - rebels who carried out hit-and-run attacks targeting state agents and official institutions, but who did not attempt to cultivate institutions of their own.³⁷ The disrup­tion to the Soviet state, however, was considerable. Grain procurement had virtually come to a halt in Tambov province by October/November 1920, but complications were experienced in several other agricultural provinces, both contiguous to Tambov and further afield, that left the regime facing a renewed crisis just as the formal military fronts of the Civil War had all but disappeared. A survey of the situation produced by the Cheka in mid December 1920 illustrated the manner in which 'banditry', such as that found in Tambov, was an extensive phenom­enon, detailing its manifestation from western Ukraine and Belorussia to the Caucasus and through to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Emphasising the mainsprings of such disorder in each of these regions, the report nevertheless underlined that the violence was a consequence of the economic breakdown that the republic was suffering after so many years of conflict, and as such could be understood as inevitable. In that it threatened to form linkages across regions, however, the Cheka report insisted that a coordinated strategy was required to end the wave of banditry and bring the Civil War to an end.³⁸

Facing great difficulties in central Russia, the Volga region and further south, the Soviet regime turned its attentions to the grain- growing regions of the Urals, the very places that Trotsky had visited at the start of 1920.³⁹ As in Tambov and the agricultural provinces of central Russia, the effort to procure grain in western Siberia was con­ducted like a military campaign, although in the case of the latter this was on account of its relatively recent 'liberation', rather than owing to a fundamental mistrust of 'localist' soviet administration.⁴⁰ Seeing in western Siberia a source of relief from the mounting crisis in food supply, procurement squads were despatched in great numbers (more than 25,000 were mobilised for procurement work in the vast region), with literally 'hungry' workers from the northern cities of European Russia deployed to ensure that the commitment to the task of pro­curement was beyond question.⁴¹ Little had improved, however, in the state of agricultural production since Trotsky's diagnosis of the situa­tion in the region one year earlier, and the demands for grain made at gunpoint inspired much the same resistance and violence as had been seen in regions of European Russia.

The province of Tiumen, which was the principal focus of grain collection efforts in Siberia, became the epicentre of a wider regional rebellion that took in parts of Ekaterinburg and Cheliabinsk prov­inces, as well as northern Kazakhstan. The resistance to the Soviet state there assumed a more organised character, as it had in Tambov. Req­uisition squads and other government agents found themselves under attack by units of the 'People's Insurgent Army', whose most impor­tant actors were former Red partisans who had been instrumental in sustaining grassroots resistance to Kolchak and the Whites in 1919. Now, in 1920-21, they emerged as the prime movers in defending the village population from what were perceived as unjust and threatening demands by state requisition squads. Although unable to create the same coherent organisation of command and administration as had been achieved in the much more compact space of southern Tambov province, the rebels in western Siberia mobilised tens of thousands of local men, occupied significant regional towns (even briefly issuing their own newspaper), and made Soviet state administration and grain requisitioning virtually impossible in the first three months of 1921. With their prominent slogan of 'Soviets without Communists!', the People's Insurgent Army of western Siberia, like its counterpart in Tambov, sought to project its struggle as one of regime change rather than 'merely' protest against the policies and practices of the ruling Communist Party.

Such ambitions aside, and in acknowledgement of the fact that many of these anti-Soviet rebels wanted - sometimes desperately - to believe that they were part of a wider movement that had a strong chance to topple the Soviet government, these rebellions stood little chance of success on those terms. While in the midst of preparations to begin demobilising the Red Army at the end of 1920 - an army that had grown to several million men by the end of the Civil War - the situation in the grain-growing regions of the republic necessitated the redeployment of hundreds of thousands of those soldiers for counter- insurgency operations against, for the most part, Russian peasants. By the summer of 1921, the territory most affected by the rebellion in Tambov would be occupied by more than 100,000 Red Army troops, a force that would stay in place until the end of the year to prevent a renewal of the 'banditry' that had raged in the province over the pre­vious twelve months. In western Siberia, regular Red Army divisions were sent to suppress the insurgency, joined by special armed units of the Cheka and Communist Party.

At these particular fronts, and elsewhere in Soviet Russia, special camps were created to imprison captured rebels, as well as to intern the neighbours and family of suspected rebels, kept as hostages, under threat of execution, to encourage the surrender of anti-Soviet insur­gents. Villages were bombarded with heavy artillery and from aircraft, the Red Army experimented with using poisonous gas to 'smoke out' rebels hiding in the forests, and 'troikas' of state, party and military offi­cials moved from village to village and carried out hasty investigations of the locals' involvement in the resistance, carrying out swift justice to demonstrate the resolve and power of the Soviet state. Through­out this process of mounting state repressions, villagers lived in fear of reprisals, either from state forces or those of the remaining rebel groups, both of which could be merciless in punishing collaboration. It is impossible to know the number of victims of the wave of violence that began in the autumn of 1920, and extended for well over a year in certain parts of Soviet territory, but the count certainly runs into the tens of thousands. As with any civil war, civilians were overwhelmingly the largest group to fall victim in this final phase of the conflict.

The combined effect of the disturbances that infected the grain- growing regions of the Soviet Republic, as well as the desperate attempts by the state to requisition as much as possible of the farmers' harvests over the course of 1920-21, left many of those same regions in an exceptionally vulnerable position. Already subject to the pressures identified by Trotsky and many other critics of the food supply policy of the Soviet government, a harvest failure in the preceding year meant that the seed grain of farmers fell subject to state requisitions, and the ensuing harvest was nothing short of disastrous, leaving the commu­nities of the Volga region, as well as the southern Urals and parts of Ukraine, facing famine. While a massive relief effort was eventually spearheaded by the American government in 1921, the famine claimed the lives of more than five million persons between 1921 and 1923.⁴² The crisis in food supply in the Soviet Republic, then, left victims in the cities and the villages, in the traditionally 'grain-deficit' regions of the north of European Russia, and in the so-called 'grain-rich' provinces of central Russia, Ukraine and western Siberia. 'I'll believe you are starv­ing when I start to see mothers eating their children,' one Soviet official was reported to have told a group of protesting villagers in the province ofVoronezh in early 1921. Such evidence was in abundance in the tradi­tional grain-growing regions of Russia only a short time later.⁴³

The decision to persist with the razverstka in 1920 - that is, with the policy of the armed requisitioning of grain as per the needs of the state - clearly had significant consequences for the Soviet Republic and its people. At a time when the policy's justification as an emergency wartime measure was being legitimately questioned in light of the increasingly favourable political and military situation, and with a growing appreciation within the Communist Party of the policy's political consequences and questionable sustainability, the dismissal of the opportunity to alter the path of official policy on food supply is a moment that effectively extended the Civil War and helped create the famine that claimed the lives of millions of Soviet citizens.

In March 1921, at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party, Lenin spearheaded the move to abandon the razverstka, introducing in its place a progressive tax-in-kind system that would, in principle, be assessed on the basis of actual harvests. While the razverstka had been cancelled in the province of Tambov over one month earlier, the desire at that time had been to limit the knowledge of this conces­sion to the insurgent countryside of that province alone, rather than for it to become policy nationwide. The obvious impossibility of this, however, placed the discontinuation of the razverstka campaign on the national agenda, and Lenin drafted proposals for the introduction of a tax that same month. Then, only days before the party congress was to convene, a mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd added additional urgency to the matter. The sailors taking up arms against the regime protested against the failing food supply policy and the treat­ment of the farmers, in particular. For them, the mutiny was an act of solidarity with the workers, who themselves demonstrated on the streets of Moscow and Petrograd against the shortages and repressions of the Soviet regime, and with the peasants, whose beleaguered vil­lages were home for many of the mutinying sailors themselves. While the Red Army was storming the naval base at Kronstadt, putting down the mutiny at the cost of thousands of lives, the delegates to the Tenth Party Congress voted to approve Lenin's proposed abandonment of the current food supply policy.

Adopted under popular pressure, at a time when, in Lenin's own words, the party faced a challenge far more dangerous than 'all the Deni- kins, Kolchaks and Yudeniches' of the earlier period of the Civil War, the abandonment of the razverstka was now regarded as a necessity.

'Only agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia,' Lenin told the delegates to the Tenth Congress.⁴⁴ Within months, the announcement of the tax-in-kind was reinforced with the decision to begin decriminalising the market, a necessary complement that helped provide agricultural producers with an outlet for the sale of surplus (after-tax) grain and, as Trotsky and others had emphasised, incentives to improve production. Trotsky, as well as other critics of food supply policy before 1921, did not speak openly of the market, nor were they, in truth, 'pro-peasant' in their political outlook. But, Trotsky himself, rather reasonably, pointed out in his autobiography that neither did Lenin consider the possibility of market decriminalisa- tion in March 1921.⁴⁵ What became the New Economic Policy would take shape over a period of several months and even years, as the logic and consequences of the initial concessions at the Tenth Congress were worked out.⁴⁶ There is little reason to assume that this path would not have been similarly trodden had the decision to end the razverstka been taken one year earlier.

While Trotsky and Larin were not shy in reminding others of their advocacy of such measures, either at the time of the Tenth Congress or after, neither were as bold as to speak in terms of the costs that would have been avoided, especially in terms of human life, had their earlier advice been acted upon.⁴⁷ The tax-in-kind, though, was 'sold' to the wider party membership as a concession, as - in the words of the trade union activist, David Riazanov - the 'peasant Brest', a reference to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which had secured Russia's withdrawal from the First World War in 1918 and had, in Lenin's own words at the time, forced Russia to 'the very bottom of that abyss of defeat, dismember­ment, enslavement and humiliation'.⁴⁸ In the eyes of many, the NEP, from its very beginnings, was a perversion in the course of the socialist revolution. Lenin would devote much of his final months and years to rationalising the path upon which his decision in March 1921 had set the Soviet Republic. Even the advocates of the NEP, which had finally secured peace with the peasantry, defended its continuation in refer­ence to the Civil War and the events of 1920-21. Stalin, at the time one such advocate, scolded his rivals at the Thirteenth Communist Party Conference in January 1924 (only days before Lenin's death) for claim­ing that the party had been slow to react to events: 'Were we late in abandoning the razverstka? Wasn't it the case that with such facts as the Tambov rebellion and Kronstadt we recognised that it was impos­sible to live any longer under war communism?'⁴⁹ Stalin's claim was that the party had saved the revolution with this change of course; his concern with the people who had lost their lives over the many months it had taken the party leadership to actually arrive at this decision was less in evidence.

How would the course of Soviet history have been different had the disaster of 1920-21 been avoided? Leaving aside the humanitarian con­siderations already discussed - the political violence and famine that would likely have been lessened, rather than avoided entirely - might there have been longer-term ramifications of the earlier adoption of the reforms and concessions that became the New Economic Policy? The short answer to such a question is no. The NEP, with its denation­alisation and markets, its cultural pluralism and unsavoury 'Nep-men', proved untenable within the context of the Soviet revolution, and it proved unworkable in the hands of Soviet leaders, who had neither the will nor expertise to manage a mixed economy. A significant part of the drama that constitutes the history of the unravelling and aban­donment of the NEP, however, brings us back to the troubled moment of its birth. For many in the wider Communist Party membership, the return of money and markets and the perceived toleration of kulaks and 'bourgeois specialists' under the NEP were inexcusable, and consideration of social and cultural problems, and not just macroeco- nomic ones, almost invariably came back to the 'peasant Brest' as a turning point.⁵⁰

When Stalin himself changed his line on the sustainability of the NEP in 1927, when he demanded a return to 'extraordinary meas­ures' in confronting the menace of the kulaks and the crime of market speculation, he tapped into that current within the Communist Party that had never reconciled itself to the capitulation of the Civil War and the perceived concessions that had been made to the peasantry.⁵¹ While the overall trajectory in the development of Soviet socialism is unsurprising, with the long-term commitments to centralised eco­nomic planning and the creation of large-scale collective farms in the place of private, household farmsteads, it is insightful to consider the manner in which this transformation would have been achieved had the brief experiment of the NEP been initiated in different, more favourable, circumstances. At the very least, consideration of this issue highlights the connections that bridge these seemingly discrete eras in the development of Soviet socialism.

THE 'BOLSHEVIK REFORMATION'

February 1922 catriona kelly

_O

n 16 march 1922, a crowd of more than 10,000 people packed Haymarket Square, at the centre of Dostoevsky's St Petersburg, renamed Petrograd in 1914. The mood was ugly. Shouts and jeers turned into scuffles; a policeman was badly beaten. The protestors were enraged by the attempt to remove from the Church of the Saviour, one of the largest and best loved in the city, items made of precious metals and gemstones that had devotional significance. The unrest was part of a wave of dissatisfaction stirred up by the Decree on the Confiscation of Church Valuables, passed a month earlier¹ - a central episode in what might be termed 'the Bolshevik Reformation'.²

The law passed on 16 February 1922 had represented the removal of church valuables as a measure in extremis, to relieve the suffering caused by the terrible famine in the Volga region after drought and crop failures the previous year. The Soviet press carried articles about the disaster throughout the autumn and winter of 1921-22. On 27 January 1922, for instance, a headline in Petrograd Pravda screamed: THE STARVING ARE DRAGGING CORPSES FROM GRAVEYARDS TO EAT THEM. Reporting the aid work carried out by Russian and foreign organisations, the press made clear that the efforts were totally inadequate.³

On 18 February, Father Alexander Vvedensky, star preacher and intelligentsia salon lion, exhorted the Orthodox faithful to help all they could with the drive to bring aid to the starving. 'In the crazed state caused by hunger, mothers are killing their own children and eating their little corpses,' he wrote. 'We weep over them, far off, dying, for­gotten. Forgotten by whom? By the Christian world.'⁴ An avalanche of Soviet press coverage over the next weeks pressed home the point. The first confiscations were reported in early March, and by the end of March, the propaganda pressure had been increased, with newspapers recording mass votes by factory assemblies demanding the surrender of church valuables.⁵

By this point, the Bolshevik leaders were preparing to use the con­fiscations as an excuse for an all-out assault upon what were officially known as 'religious associations'. An important plan, where the Ortho­dox Church was concerned, was 'to initiate a split in the clergy, seizing the initiative in a decisive way and taking under government protection the clergy who are openly advocating cooperation with the confisca­tions,' as Trotsky put it on 20 March 1922.⁶

The basis for this policy lay in a division about exactly what 'church property' was to be confiscated. The decree passed on 16 February had stated that only objects 'the removal of which cannot impact on the interests of a given cult' were to be confiscated.⁷ The issue was whether communion vessels and other 'sacred objects' (svyatyni), such as reli­quaries, might be removed without bringing about such 'impact'. On 19 and 28 February, Patriarch Tikhon explicitly stated that the removal of these was improper. However, a month later, this policy was openly challenged. A letter signed by twelve reformist priests, including Vve- densky, published in Petrograd Pravda on 25 March, pointed to the justification in Christian practice for surrendering 'even the most sacred vessels', provided that the government would allow the Church to help in the relief effort. This rider was quickly forgotten, and coop­eration with the state became the issue. On 18 May 1922, Vvedensky and other supporters of the confiscations created the Higher Board of Church Management, a body that began to act as a government-sanc­tioned alternative to the official church, promoting a self-declaredly progressive agenda of church reforms. For several years, the so-called 'Renovationist' (Obnovlencheskoe) movement enjoyed official favour, with traditionalists rehabilitated only in 1927, when, two years after Tikhon's death, the Patriarchal locum tenens, Sergii, made a statement of cooperation with the Soviet government. ⁸

In terms of their declared rationale - to raise funds for aid to the starving - the confiscations produced disappointing results. Across Ukraine, only 2.6 metric tonnes of silver had been collected by 4 May 1922.⁹ But the social change they brought about was enormous. The stripping of church valuables fatally weakened the institutional author­ity of Patriarch Tikhon and the official church hierarchy. It caused immense distress to believers and strife among them, leaving wounds - in particular a deep suspicion of attempts to reform Orthodoxy - that lasted into the twenty-first century.

The confiscations also underlined the pariah status of what Bol­shevik terminology labelled 'religious cults'. From now on, religious associations, particularly the Orthodox Church, would be regarded by Soviet officials as bastions of privilege, milked for financial contri­butions (such as local taxes), and denied access to state resources for the repairs to buildings that were legally required by the terms of their contracts of use. Religious associations were under a pall of suspicion, their members pilloried as benighted (at best) and at worst, socially hostile. Over the spring and summer of 1922, a series of show trials, their results predictable from the denunciatory style of the prosecu­tors' orations, ended with the execution of clergy and laymen who had supposedly resisted confiscation, including, among others, Metro­politan Veniamin of Petrograd. Veniamin and his co-defendants were charged under Article 62 of the 1922 Criminal Code, which dealt with counter-revolutionary activity. Court discourse and press reporting alike underlined the political threat posed by church leaders and their links with the ancien regime.¹⁰

The confiscations were more than just an episode in the history of church-state relations. The drive to seize church property was also a pioneering example of all-out mass mobilisation, the harnessing of media and organisational resources to achieve immediate political ends. By participating in it, minor officials and members of the pop­ulation learned (more accurately, invented) the rules of 'campaign justice'.¹¹ 'Vengeance is not the purpose of justice,' Professor Alexander Zhizhilenko remarked in his summing-up for the defence at the trial of Metropolitan Veniamin. But the mockery in the press of the defence team - 'their conclusions are ridiculous' - betrayed the obsolescence of this view.¹² A particularly clear indicator of change was the attribu­tion of seditious character to actions that had been sanctioned by the authorities when they actually happened. Petrograd churchmen who had read aloud a letter from Metropolitan Veniamin about the need to cooperate with the confiscations were retrospectively accused of taking part in a political plot.¹³

The conduct of the confiscations also predicted later social and political campaigns more broadly. The hysterical, authoritarian insist­ence on high-speed achievement of arbitrarily imposed targets (in this case, insistence that ever larger and more impressive quantities of pre­cious metals, jewels and other valuables be located and handed over); the assumption that shortfalls were caused by subterfuge and ill will on the part of opponents (in this case, believers); the vituperative stig- matisation of actual and supposed enemies (in this case, top clergy) - all this established the new paradigms. The later confrontations with 'bourgeois specialists', 'wreckers' and 'kulaks' were rehearsed and per­fected at this point.¹⁴

In the context of attitudes to heritage as well as church-state rela­tions, the effects of the 16 February 1922 law were epoch-making. By 22 August 1922, more than 160 house churches in Petrograd alone had been closed, including 157 Orthodox house churches.¹⁵ On 25 October 1922, a local official in Petrograd expressed ungrammatical bewilder­ment about what to do with the residuum of church property after liquidation had taken place:

We offered icons kiots and iconostases free of charge to Parish Coun­cils of Parish churches that are still open but they refused because

of not having no spare funds for transport and proper packing. On the basis of the above we request you to issue the appropriate order of what we are to do with the icons and kiots. If we take them into storage then they might as well be firewood or should we sell them to private icon shops or destroy them on the spot.¹⁶

In 1918, hundreds of churches in Petrograd had been issued with 'certificates of protection' that guaranteed the inviolability of buildings and their contents. In 1922, most of these were ignored. Preservation officials, racing desperately against time, attempted to salvage paint­ings and applied art, only to find themselves branded as 'not acting in a Soviet way' (a dangerously small step from 'anti-Soviet'). As the 25 October report suggests, much of the property, rather than being decorously disposed of to raise funds, simply ended up as trash. Objects that did make it to museums were often damaged, and almost always arrived without detailed descriptions of provenance. Plans to set up 'church museums' had at best limited results.¹⁷ Damage to the historical heritage was incalculable. A sure sign of the authorities' bad conscience was an article published in May 1922 by Grigory Yat- manov, head of the Petrograd Museums Department, who solemnly listed the sterling work being done under the new government in order to protect historic buildings and objects, concentrating exclu­sively on the former royal palaces.¹⁸ In fact, the boot was on the other foot: the confiscation of church property provided a model for the systematic liquidation, from 1927, of marketable assets held in other state collections, in particular the 'museums of daily life' set up in former aristocratic mansions during the first post-revolutionary years.¹⁹ While much private property had been seized during and immediately after the revolution (so widespread were expropria­tions that Russian children even began playing a game called 'Search and Requisition'), the predation upon already nationalised property opened a new chapter.

All in all, the confiscations were a turning point in political, social and cultural terms simultaneously. But were they 'historically inevitable'?

For many historians and eyewitness observers, such a question would seem not just badly posed, but frivolous and indeed offensive. The church confiscations are almost always regarded as a manifestation of Bolshevism's abiding hostility to organised religion and its purpos­ive, sustained efforts to eradicate alternative belief systems. As the Scottish-Canadian journalist Frederick Arthur Mackenzie observed in 1927, 'The persecution is not occasional, incidental or limited. It is carried out as a carefully planned campaign throughout the land and its aim is to destroy faith, if needs be by force.'²⁰ Similar arguments were made in the earliest historical account of Bolshevik action against religious societies, The Black Book of 1925. As Peter Struve wrote in the Foreword, Soviet power had 'a peculiar historical achievement to its credit - the resurrection of the Inquisition under an atheistic flag'. It aimed not to create a new religion, but a radically anti-religious new order, in which there was no middle ground.²¹

Indeed, the confiscations did not come out of nowhere. A series of decrees that indirectly affected the church - the Decree on Land of 26 October 1917, the Decree on Civil Marriage of 18 December 1917, the decree 'On the Recognition as Counter-Revolutionary ofAll Attempts to Arrogate the Functions of Government' of 3 January 1918 - were followed by the Decree on the Separation of Church and State and Church and School (20 January 1918). An Instruction of 24 August 1918 consequent upon the 20 January 1918 decree required the authorities to remove 'all and any religious images (icons, pictures, statues of a religious character etc.)' from public buildings - a measure already per­ceived as sacrilegious by the adherents of Orthodoxy.²²

The legal changes fostered and sustained enmity at the political grassroots. As early as November 1917, Red Guards on duty at the funeral of Father Ioann Kochurov, a priest at the Catherine Cathedral in Tsarskoe Selo, gestured at the church's golden domes and specu­lated, 'If you chop those down, might god jump out?'²³ Kochurov himself had been summarily executed on 31 October 1917, after he attempted to calm anti-Bolshevik unrest in Tsarskoe. This was one of many cases where church property was removed or destroyed, and clerics assaulted and killed, sometimes after torture and mutilation.²⁴ On 19 January 1918, Patriarch Tikhon consigned to anathema those who engaged in persecutions of clergy and destroyed church property, an indication of how prevalent such events were.²⁵

While this violence took place in areas affected by uprisings and civil war, and so might not be seen as 'purposive', there were also assaults on Orthodox property that had the sanction of central gov­ernment. These included, for example, the dissolution of monasteries, and the drive, from late 1918, to organise the exposure of saints' relics. This latter strategy was held to be especially useful in enlightening ignorant believers who, once the contents of the precious caskets had been revealed as half-rotting corpses, dried-up bones, or indeed waxen dolls, were expected to dismiss religion itself as 'a con'.²⁶ The removal of church valuables, the forcible closure of churches, the stripping of the altars known as 'liquidation' when a church was closed, and the demolition of the building itself, could be understood, from this point of view, as steps on a continuum.

Yet in part this impression of a 'grand plan' comes from what hap­pened from 1922 onwards. It is notable that the compiler of The Black Book, setting out 'the basic views and aims' of the Bolshevik govern­ment with regard to religion, adduced mainly evidence from 1922 and later.²⁷ Certainly, anti-clerical and anti-religious rhetoric had been widespread from the beginning; any self-respecting agitational sketch or celebration of a revolutionary anniversary was bound to include a fat priest alongside an obese banker or two. But only in February 1922 did the Bolshevik leadership openly throw its weight behind a national anti-religious campaign. The exposure of relics, though sanctioned at the top, had been the responsibility of a sub-ministerial agency, the Eighth Section of the Commissariat ofJustice. As a journalist pointed out in 1922, exposure had affected sixty-three sites, rather than the 40,000 affected by requisitioning.²⁸ Now ordinary parish churches were under assault, for all the previously widespread commentary emphasising the lay believer's right to worship.

In the first years after the Bolsheviks took power, pronouncements at the centre suggested the possibility of at least limited conciliation, following Lenin's 1905 article, 'Socialism and Religion', which had sug­gested that direct confrontation with the masses was not advisable. As the lead article in the journal Revolution and the Church had put it in 1919: 'Despite the blatant counter-revolutionary stance of the church in general, the Soviet government considers it appropriate to maintain a defensive position, at least where faith itself is concerned. The full force of political repression is unleashed on the adherents of the church only where they engage in counter-revolutionary activity.' ²⁹

Proclamations of this kind are often, understandably, seen by church historians as mere hypocrisy. Yet Soviet officials did make some effort to ensure freedom of worship in the first months and years after the 20 January 1918 decree was published. The so-called 'house churches', or chapels, in public buildings should have been closed down automatic­ally after the decree was passed, since they clearly maintained an alien religious presence in secular space. But in fact they often remained open, expediently reclassified as 'parish churches'. This arrangement was supported or encouraged by state preservation bodies, since some of the most important architectural constructions of major cities (essentially, all official buildings) contained such 'house churches'. It was not until late 1922 and 1923 that there was a concerted drive to shut them - in other words, this drive followed the 16 February 1922 decree, rather than acting as a prompt to it. The decree also marked a watershed in terms of implementing the strict letter of the law relating to 'cults'. Though on paper, religious groups had not been juridical sub­jects since 20 January 1918, in practice they were often treated as though they were.³⁰ The encrustation of religious practice in pettifogging dirigisme, like the systematic employment of counter-revolutionary legislation, marked the start of a new phase of church-state relations.

All in all, the 16 February 1922 decree heralded important changes in the legal treatment of cults (as opposed to extra-legal impositions of repression upon them).³¹ These changes do not seem to have been part of a carefully premeditated plan. Over the course of late summer to winter 1921, Soviet leaders havered about whether to accept offers of aid to the starving from religious groups in Russia. By the terms of the 20 January 1918 decree, such groups were not allowed to raise funds or to engage in political or philanthropic activity - yet the Soviet government had accepted aid from foreign religious groups.³² The need for cash vied with a fear of allowing the Church too prominent a role. On 8 December 1921, the government and the Church eventually reached agreement on joint action. Yet less than three weeks later, on 27 December, another decree stipulated that property in churches was to be surveyed and assigned to three categories (of museum value, of monetary value and everyday), and this was followed by a third decree, on 2 January 1922, ordering the removal of all objects of 'museum value'. Trotsky, the coordinator of famine relief, was pressing hard for action against the Church, and had moved to expedite confiscation (with the piquant detail that his wife, Natalia Sedova, in charge of government heritage policy, had apparently been able to lobby on her own agen­cy's behalf). Yet the sense that the Church had particular or exclusive responsibility for funding famine relief had not yet taken general hold. Rather, in January and February 1922, the press rammed home the responsibility of all Soviet citizens to surrender valuables, reporting tales of party members who had handed over their own gold objects.³³ Into January, February, and even March, some officials and clerics, in some places at least, were still trying to thrash out a compromise.³⁴ On 14 February 1922, Petrograd Pravda published an article, 'The Contribution of the Orthodox Clergy to Aid for the Starving', which reported Church-led initiatives and used a neutral or even approba­tory tone. Even after the 16 February decree was passed, Metropolitan Veniamin and the Petrograd Soviet engaged in dialogue, holding a meeting on 5 March to review the situation. Efforts were, reportedly, halted by an order from central government. At a second meeting 'a few days later', the officials from the Petrograd Soviet retreated to a hard-line position.³⁵ Within the country's ruling group, there were also divisions, as well as a general sense of uncertainty. The secret police chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, mainly pushed for a hard line against the Church leadership, and mocked a December 1921 proposal by Anatoly

Lunacharsky to attempt cooperation with liberal clergy. Yet even Dzer­zhinsky could waver: in April 1923, he expressed concern that undue use of force against Patriarch Tikhon might threaten international relations. At times, ideological rectitude was less important than prag­matic considerations.³⁶

There was no question of sympathy for believers. Rather, the fear of goading them into outright rebellion (and losing political capital with the working classes generally) was offset by the fear of encour­aging 'reactionary forces'.³⁷ What finally resolved the situation against compromise was a serious riot in the textile town of Shuya, just over 150 miles from Moscow. Both the effects (four deaths, as opposed to minor injuries) and the closeness to the capital rattled the authorities badly. A famous letter by Lenin, penned on 19 March, just after news from Shuya had reached the centre, claimed that 'the clerical black hundreds' were plotting 'a decisive confrontation'. Referring obliquely to Machiavelli's words, 'For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so as being tasted less, they offend less', Lenin called for all-out action to crush religious resistance. Published as an isolated document in a Russian emigre journal in 1970, this letter seemed to bespeak the exist­ence of a master plan.³⁸ But in broader context, preceded as it was by lengthy wrangling in the Politburo, it is clear that the shift to the hard line was a rush decision; Lenin's politics were of a less reflective and methodical kind than those of the thinker he suggested emulating.³⁹

It was, however, this letter that precipitated the marked acceleration of action against religious groups, and surge of anti-clerical rhetoric in the press, that became palpable in the last ten days of March 1922, and lasted until the early summer. If Lenin's letter about Shuya immediately preceded the start of the all-out anti-church campaign, then the scal- ing-down of this campaign in the early summer immediately followed another important event in Lenin's biography - his first fully incapaci­tating stroke, on the night of 26-27 May. Had this stroke, requiring intensive rehabilitation, happened just two or three months earlier, no other member of the Politburo would have had the personal authority to push through the hard line.⁴⁰

Throughout late March and April, the Soviet press was in a con­dition of hysteria. Reports of outrages by 'Black Hundred' groups, supposedly orchestrated by 'the princes of the church', vied with indignant letters from members of the public about the slowness in surrendering valuables. Action by the clergy was now uniformly repre­sented as 'too little, too late', where it was not actually obstructive, and the show trials against them were lovingly detailed.⁴¹ In the wake of the confiscations, Soviet Russia for the first time acquired a properly organised (though still small and limited) atheistic establishment, with the founding of the League of the Militant Godless, whose newspa­per, Bezbozhnik (The Militant Atheist), began publishing in December 1922. The famous Communist rituals - Red Christenings and funerals, celebrations of Communist Christmas and Easter - also date from the post-confiscation period, 1923-24, rather than characterising the post- revolutionary years in a broad sense.⁴²

All-out strife against religious groups in February-June 1922 was not, therefore, the culmination of a well-planned policy. Confrontation with the Church was at some level predetermined, in that the Bolshe­viks were radical atheists, and that attitudes to the status of church buildings and church vessels were irreconcilably different (on the one hand they were material objects best put to some more practical purpose, on the other, earthly symbols of the heavenly kingdom).⁴³ But it did not have to happen at this precise point. So, what if some kind of compromise with a church leader who enjoyed respect both among reformists and among traditionalists, such as Metropolitan Veniamin, had been reached?

There were formidable obstacles to any such compromise, to begin with on the church side. With Patriarch Tikhon set against confisca­tion of communion vessels, there was limited room for manoeuvre by any senior cleric who wished to remain in the patriarchal system, given that action without the 'blessing' of a superior was entirely unac- ceptable.⁴⁴ For their part, many believers, even those sympathetic to Bolshevism, had a profound attachment to church property. While the Soviet press constantly dredged up cases of 'Christians' who wrote in to urge rapid surrender of communion vessels, verbatim records of public meetings sometimes give a different picture. At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet on 20 March, one speaker vehemently opposed the confiscation policy. 'Right before the Sebastopol campaign, Nicholas I forced the Kiev Cave Monasteries to hand over 20 million worth of stuff like that,' he recalled. But given the consequences of the Crimean War, 'it didn't do him any good'. As this speaker concluded: 'I'm the son of a former serf, I'm not going against Soviet power, I wish it well, but I keep saying: don't go against God.'⁴⁵

For many ordinary members ofthe public, the line that church prop­erty was theirs, to do what they liked with because it was made by them, resonated loudly. This kind of attitude underpinned the arguments used by working-class congregations against the closure of churches and seizures of their contents. The faithful of St Pitirim's Church, Kievs- kaia ulitsa, Petrograd, felt able to assert, in summer 1922, 'Our church is little, and was made not by the efforts and capital of the burzhui, but by our calloused hands alone, and we have collected the essential vessels as and when we could.'⁴⁶ Yet there was also sympathy for the plight of the starving and uncertainty about what might properly be surren­dered. The swithering of an ordinary member of the clergy recorded in the reports of the Petrograd trial of churchmen - first he had thought that removing church property was intolerable, later that it might in fact be tolerated - was a natural response, given the way in which religious believers were hectored by advocates within the church itselfwho held polarised views.⁴⁷ After all, in 1918 the Local Council (Pomestnyi Sobor) of the Orthodox Church had concluded that 'the sacred vessels may be quite without decoration, and the vestments of plain cloth', since 'the Orthodox Church treasures its sacred things not for their material worth'.⁴⁸ The fact that there were disturbances at a mere thirteen of the hundreds of churches still open in Petrograd during March and April 1922 suggests the lack of a 'general line'.⁴⁹ A governing desire was to keep out of conflict: in the words ofVeniamin after his election as Metropol­itan in 1918, 'I stand for church freedom. The church should keep clear of politics, since previously politics caused her much suffering.'⁵⁰

As the reaction to the advice, 'don't go against God', from the speaker at the Petrograd Soviet suggested (shouts of 'Enough!' and general uproar), compromise with the clergy would have been extremely unpopular with many members of the Bolshevik rank and file. But as the hesitation over whether to close house churches shows, vehement anti-religious (as opposed to anti-clerical) feeling was by no means universal. The participation of believers in the confiscations might have been swallowed by many officials if a command to allow this had come down from above.

The possibility of an alternative path may be suggested by the after­math of the legislation on which the Bolsheviks based the 20 January 1918 decree - the December 1905 law on the division of church and state passed by a socialist-majority French government under Clem- enceau. This law was divisive in much the same way as the Soviet decree imitating it was to prove. In 1902, an official of the Department of Religious Affairs told the lawyer Louis Mejan, one of the architects of the 1905 law, that 'to separate Church and State would be as foolish an act as to release wild beasts from their cages in the Place de la Con­corde to pounce on pedestrians', since there would no longer be a moral restraint upon governance and social relations.⁵¹ In France too, virulent anti-clericalism in some sections of society - among the urban working class, for instance - was offset by tenacious attachment to reli­gion and to the material fabric of church life, and there was a sturdy tradition of often foul-mouthed anti-clericalism. Congregations in France were far from delighted with the state property grab for 'their' churches, and bitterly resented the interruption to their life rituals.⁵² Conversely, some of the ground on which compromise was enacted in France did exist in Russia - for instance, there too, a substantial pro­portion of churchgoers and clergy saw disestablishment as a chance to concentrate on spiritual matters and to assign more control in the parishes to the laity.⁵³

There were of course significant differences. France had more fully developed property rights (so that cultes given access to historic build­ings had better defined rights of usage) and a much better established history of heritage preservation. There was no question of using con­gregations as a cheap way of paying for the upkeep of historic buildings, as in Soviet Russia, and congregations were not cast into a comparable legal and economic limbo. But the most crucial difference may lie in the fact that the measures in France always anticipated a gradual transi­tion to the new order, permitting an intervention of the unanticipated. With the nation swept by patriotism once the First World War began, hostility to the Church diminished, and much of the impetus behind the new legislation ebbed away.

Soviet history in the first years after the revolution, on the other hand, offered no counterbalancing event of this kind. Rather, the narrowly won civil war of 1918-21 had left a sense that the country was beleaguered by precisely the kind of reactionary forces that the Church was held to represent. With concessions made to other repre­sentatives of the old order, such as industrialists and traders, under the New Economic Policy, it was vital for the Bolshevik leaders to show their supporters that they had not 'sold out' to every kind of 'former person'.⁵⁴ It was only two decades later, during the so-called 'Great Patriotic War', that an alternative and far more life-threatening con­flict brought about a full rehabilitation of nation-state patriotism. With this came a softening in attitude to religious practice, and particularly Orthodoxy, as manifested in the concordat contracted between Stalin and the Church's Moscow leadership in 1943.

Even this concordat offered the Church only limited concessions, mainly to do with property management, greater autonomy for par­ishes, and an approved procedure for the opening of closed churches. Without the stimulus of an external threat (the 1943 concordat was primarily a response to the widespread opening of churches in areas held by the Nazis), any compromise enacted in 1922 would certainly have been still more circumscribed. And it would at most have led to a slowing of pace in the assault on the Church, not to an abandonment of hostilities. In the wildest counterfactual dream, it is impossible to imagine a rehabilitation of the majority faith akin to that which took place under Franco (or, indeed, in post-Soviet Russia), with, say, Stalin watching proudly as his daughter Svetlana and her betrothed stood under the bridal crowns at the Cathedral of Christ Redeemer.

As a non-Soviet organisation, the Church would anyway have been subject to more and more stifling regulation in the mid 1920s, and to intense pressure in the years of cultural centralisation (one can compare the dissolution of independent literary organisations and the formation of the Union of Writers in 1932). In conditions of mass industrialisation and urbanisation, church closures would hardly have been avoidable, both because any useable buildings were pressed into service to house workspace and storage, and because they were alien to the landscape of the 'model socialist city' assiduously propagandised in the planning of the day. The most one can say is that the process of resolving demolition proposals might have worked differently, with congregations induced to believe that they themselves were exercis­ing an important social role, and 'helping' society and the Church by moving from church A to church B. One might compare the way in which the Soviet government reached accommodation, during the early 1930s, with 'bourgeois specialists' in academia and with the lit­erary and artistic establishment, after which a mildly antagonistic, but also mutually advantageous, relationship resulted. Professionals were aware that the receipt of state funding required that govern­ment agendas were honoured; party leaders withdrew backing from militant lobby groups such as Proletkul't and from the 'Red Professor­ate'.⁵⁵ This alternative path is not at all fantastic: in the post-war years, believers proved willing to use official channels to get churches open, and they rapidly acquired a sense of how to operate in the relevant bureaucracies.⁵⁶

In some respects, this was an opportunity missed. A more 'docile' church would also have been - as some Soviet leaders had argued in 1922 - a more manageable one. Part of this lesson seems to have got through: 1922 was the last time that religious believers were sub­jected to show trials, and where the equation of religious belief and counter-revolutionary sympathies was openly made in procuratorial and press disquisitions. Thereafter, local soviet officials and the police, while working assiduously to enforce the laws on secularisation, did all they could to emphasise that clerics who happened to be arrested were guilty of ordinary 'civil' crimes (including political offences such as spying). As a pro-Soviet pamphlet published in London in the early 1930s put it: 'It is in the capitalist countries that religious persecution must be sought.' The followers of the Holy Name movement (Imya- slavtsy) had got into trouble 'because of an unnatural vice too revolting to be mentioned', while the Feodorovskoe Concord of Old Believ­ers was comprised of 'former gendarmes, white guards etc.'. Catholic priests had been arrested solely because they were spies of 'fascist Poland'.⁵⁷ This gambit - to pass off victimisation as legal reprisal - was partly aimed at the outside world. Just as in the 1920s, Soviet politicians were aware that the treatment of religious believers was a major stum­bling block to diplomatic relations with the Western countries whose goodwill was essential for technology transfer and trading relations. But the accusations were meant to have a home audience as well.

The extent to which they had traction in this context may be doubted. While campaigning atheists regularly pilloried believers as political subversives (as well as reactionaries, ignoramuses, etc., etc.), a majority of the pre-war Soviet population self-identified as religious, even in the forbidding context of the official Soviet census of 1937.⁵⁸ Certainly, there was a strong inverse correlation between belief (or readiness to admit this to census officials) and levels of literacy, as well as a weaker positive one with advancing age.⁵⁹ But this did not nec­essarily go with an overall social tendency to regard believers as 'the enemy'.

For their part, though, church congregations themselves were pre­pared to espouse the propaganda images of 'enemies'. However, they employed these for their own ends. In the words of a group of believers from St John Baptist Church on Mokhovaya Street, writing in March 1938: 'We firmly believe it is enemies who are closing the churches, in order to excite dissatisfaction with the Government. The elections to the Supreme Soviet are approaching and the enemy is doing his ghastly work[,] he is playing on people's sacred feelings.'⁶⁰ As this example suggests, a Soviet Union where believers were more fully integrated into society would not necessarily have been a more democratic and tolerant place. More likely, it would have been one in which fear of 'outsiders' was differently configured, resting on a traditionalist, rather than universalist, model of national identity. It would probably have been something like the emigre circles guyed in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin, 'for whom an ideal Russia consisted of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church, and the Hydro-Electric Dam'.⁶¹ The animus of the late 1930s would then have been directed against 'foreign' religions, in particu­lar Lutheranism and Catholicism, seen as the havens of spies and subversives.⁶²

The struggle with religion was about cultural, as well as political, cohesion. 'Soviet values' were supposed to exclude benighted religious belief, which was uniformly presented as a sign of ignorance and lack of 'culturedness', and a key form of social 'backwardness'. This type of perception was far more widespread than the view that all churchmen were spies. For instance, the confiscation of church goods was given a guarded welcome by heritage officials, since it removed them (sup­posedly) from the category of 'cultic objects' to the category of 'art', and made it possible to strip out items that were aesthetically unpleas- ing. The official polarisation of 'science' (more broadly, 'science and scholarship', nauka) and 'religion' as manifestations of 'enlightenment' versus 'backwardness' had plenty of adherents.

But representing science as enlightened to an at best semi-literate population would have been far more effective if objects had been removed from their church settings in a less vandalistic way. Through their actions in 1922, members of the Soviet government obligingly supplied the Orthodox Church, and indeed all the main 'cults' operat­ing on Soviet territory, with an entire cohort of suffering saints, the so-called 'new martyrs' (novomucheniki). Even some non-believers, such as the famous scientist Ivan Pavlov, were thoroughly alien­ated by the hounding of the Orthodox Church.⁶³ In turn, the moral authority leant by social and political stigmatisation (a sign of glory in

Christian tradition) persisted through the late Soviet period - indeed, was enhanced as the history of Soviet oppression became familiar to a wider audience. Thus, while winning a decisive short-term victory in 1922, the Soviet government also stored up long-term defeat. For, had a church-state concordat - the sacrifice of communion vessels as the price of lighter regulation - actually taken place that year, it would have done much to strip the oppositional lustre of Orthodoxy. The faith could, in due course, have been integrated in the 'National Bolshevism' of the late 1930s, which recuperated for modern Soviet culture many artists and cultural forms previously considered 'reactionary'. In actual fact, even once judicial murder ceased, repression continued, and it always remained uncertain how 'Soviet' the Orthodox Church actually was - a fact that could only increase its appeal as a moral alternative among those who were hostile to Soviet power.⁶⁴

At the same time, a failure to confront the Church would have left the Bolshevik government significantly weakened in terms of its central political project as of 1922. The long-term consequences of persecu­tion were hardly of moment compared with the necessity of pushing through policy with 'implacability' (neprimirimost) and dealing with immediate political threats. In turn, this first successful assault on traditional Russia provided a vital lesson for the later campaign to col- lectivise Russian villages. Disaffection among the regime's opponents was a fact of life, but such disaffection was ephemeral, and it could be contained. Would Stalin, without the all-out campaign of 1922, have so confidently approached the question of how to impose his will on the Soviet countryside? The confiscation of church goods, after all, had not just shown how to conduct an effective campaign of mobilisation and use this as an instrument of social solidarity. It had also illustrated that the ruthless suppression of potential subversion and of social differ­ence, a process believed to be essential to the construction of a socialist future, might be a near and achievable objective, rather than one lying on the far horizon.

THE RISE OF LENINISM: THE DEATH OF POLITICAL PLURALISM IN THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY BOLSHEVIK PARTY

1917-1922 richard sakwa

_I

n 1917, even as Vladimir lenin sought to consolidate power after 25 October, a group emerged that warned of the consequences of the premature attempt to build socialism in a relatively backward country. The 'coalitionists' were made up of leading figures in the party, including Lev Kamenev, one of Vladimir Lenin's long-standing associ­ates. Their worries re-emerged in various forms in later years, notably in the arguments of the Democratic Centralists in 1919 and the Ignatov movement and the Workers' Opposition in 1920. The central concern of these groups was the defence of some sort of pluralism within the revolution, although they were only marginally less harsh than main­stream Leninists in repressing opposition to the revolution. The defeat of these early attempts to establish some form of pluralist democracy within the party set the country on a course that was to endure to the very end, and which peaked in the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. Nevertheless, the aspirations of those in favour of intra-party pluralism periodically resurfaced, notably in the attempts to establish 'socialism with a human face' during the Prague Spring in 1968, and Mikhail Gor­bachev's struggle to create what he called a 'humane and democratic socialism' twenty years later.

The centre of this relatively more pluralistic form of Bolshevism was Moscow. The strength of the movement for Bolshevik pluralism, if we may use this term, reflected the city's distinctive social charac­ter, something that had become apparent in the late tsarist period. Moscow provided fertile soil for pluralistic Bolshevism, as opposed to the monist Leninism that provided the framework for the later Stalin­ist consolidation. Here opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power was particularly strong, and a deep undercurrent of resistance per­sisted all the way into the 1920s. For our purposes, it was here also that the inner-party debates were not only pervasive, but also suggested an awareness of the dangers of trying to hold on to power in a society that had not yet 'matured' for socialism. The fundamental argument of the coalitionists and their successors was that although Russian society was backward, the more progressive elements could nevertheless be a partner in the struggle to achieve socialism.

In broader terms, throughout the Soviet period the tension between Moscow and what became Leningrad persisted. Party programmes alternated between a 'Moscow line', somewhat nativist and neo-popu- list, accompanied by stability in the state system (espoused by Nikolai Bukharin, Georgy Malenkov and Alexei Kosygin); and a 'Leningrad line', advocating a harsh revolutionary internationalism (whose advo­cates included Grigory Zinoviev, Andrei Zhdanov, Frol Kozlov and Grigory Romanov).¹ It was the Moscow line that triumphed in Gor­bachev's perestroika between 1985 and 1991. This was not simply the 'reform of communism', which suggests mainly an attempt to make the system work better, but a far more profound attempt to achieve the 'reform communism' that was espoused by some of the party reformers in the Civil War years and by the Prague reformers in 1968. Although the early oppositionists would not have dared to talk about a 'humane and democratic socialism', certainly not within earshot of Lenin, the struggle for pluralism within the revolution was a theme taken up by proponents of 'socialism with a human face' in the 1960s, the Euro- communists in the 1970s and by Gorbachev in the 1980s. Gorbachev appealed for a return to Leninist principles, but in fact, as his critics so vigorously pointed out to him, it was these 'Leningrad' principles that had facilitated the rise of Stalin. If he had been more sophisticated theoretically, he would have talked about a return to the latent plural­ism within the Bolshevik party in the early years of Soviet power.

THE SPECIFICITY OF MOSCOW

In recent years there has been a spate of books describing the diversity of late tsarist society. These in particular focus on the development of liberalism and civil society, and thus reject the traditional idea that the autocracy was monolithic and effectively suppressed the development of a pluralistic public sphere. Indeed, the picture that overwhelmingly emerges is that late tsarist society was developing on 'Western' lines, with a vibrant environment for cultural and intellectual life, all ofwhich was cut short by the Bolsheviks in their first months in power.² A notable example of this is Fedyashin's study of 'Liberals under Autocracy', an examination of the thick journal Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), which gradually gained in stature from its foundation in 1866 until its peak in 1904, and continued to publish until its demise under the Bolshe­viks in 1918. The journal was at the centre ofdebates over the potential of local government, notably in the form of the zemstvo assemblies intro­duced into the thirty-four provinces (guberniya) of old Russia in 1864 as part of the great liberal reforms of Alexander II, to foster participation and citizen development in Russia from the grass roots. In keeping with Alexander Solzhenitsyn's view that Russia needed to develop authentic forms of democracy, the zemstvo movement in this reading was a form of liberal praxis that did not borrow from the West.³

Numerous studies have demonstrated the extensive development of civil society before 1917. Joseph Bradley describes the development of various professional associations and philanthropic organisa- tions.⁴ The ten years from 1905 were marked by astonishing economic progress, with extensions to the railway system and the doubling of its traffic and revenue. Consumption statistics show great improvements in the standard of living, and the production of consumer goods was higher than in Germany. The industrial sector represented not so much an enclave, as is common in developing countries, but was organically linked to the rest of the economy through market and financial ties. By 1914 the vigorous social and economic developments of the past half century had closed the gap between Russia and the more developed countries and had elevated it to fifth place in the league of industrial powers. Above all, hegemonic strategies of rule were being devised that sought to bridge the gulf between state and society, the privileged and the outcast, with developments in the old capital ofMoscow standing in sharp contrast to the polarisation in St Petersburg.⁵ Moscow became a more inclusive city than Petersburg. In contrast to the northern capital, there was extensive development of public transport, social insurance and workers' housing.⁶ However, while socio-economic progress was encouraged the autocracy tried to retain its political pre-eminence, provoking multiple contradictions. These may well have been resolved organically, but the First World War in the end provoked a revolution­ary breakdown.

There are numerous differences between Moscow and Petrograd. Moscow was far more based on native capital, which developed the textile industry, whereas the metallurgical industry in the northern capital relied on foreign capital, above all from France. Moscow was a city of the Old Believers, whereas St Petersburg was a city of the admin­istrative classes and the ruling elite. Moscow was more 'peasant', yet this suggested deeper organic ties with its hinterland and the country as a whole, less receptive to the revolutionary socialism that in the end triumphed in the north. In short, when it came to Moscow, Antonio Gramsci's observation that in Russia civil society was 'primordial and gelatinous' applied with less force. As Gramsci puts it:

In Russia, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and

gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State

and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.⁷

What he called Jacobinism was able to impose itself on society with relative ease in Petrograd, but in Moscow there was spirited resistance from the ramparts of civil society against the imposition of a monist form of revolutionary power.

THE MULTIPLICITY OF RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS

Georgy Plekhanov, the founder of the social democratic movement in Russia, condemned the development of what was to become dem­ocratic centralism in the Bolshevik party, and he denounced Lenin's seizure of power in October 1917. His most famous book, published in 1895, was called The Development of the Monist View of History, and defended the materialist conception of social development.⁸ In prac­tice, although Plekhanov was a committed Marxist, he defended a pluralistic conception of politics, and it this tradition that inspired the opposition to Bolshevik monism.

The October Revolution turned out to be a number of revolutions, all rolled into one. There was the mass social revolution, in which peasants sought land, soldiers (peasants in another guise) struggled for peace, and workers struggled for greater recognition in the labour process. At the same time, there was a democratic revolution, express­ing aspirations for the development of political accountability and popular representation, although not necessarily in classic liberal democratic forms. Above all, the democratic revolution sought a con­stitution, which would both define and constrain political power. This was reinforced by the liberal revolution, in which the nascent bour­geoisie repudiated the absolutist claims of divine rule by the monarchy and fought to apply what they considered to be more enlightened forms of constitutional government and secure property rights. This was accompanied by the national revolution, which confirmed the independence of Poland and Finland, and saw the rapid fragmentation of the Russian Empire. For Marxists, there was also the revolution of internationalism, which suggested that the old-style nation-state was redundant. As capitalism became a global system, so social classes would gradually lose their national characteristics and become part of a single social revolution. Then there was the revolution within the revolution. As the most extreme wing of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks usurped the agenda of the moderate socialists, and mobi­lised workers and revolutionary idealists (such as the anarchists) to establish their own political dictatorship. The Bolsheviks were the most ruthless and effective advocates of the radical emancipation of the people in the name of a new set of social ideals.⁹

Such disparate sources of the revolution were reflected in the Bolshevik struggle to take Moscow.¹⁰ The initial seizure of power in Petrograd was relatively easy, but in Moscow there was both social and political resistance. It took ten days for the Bolsheviks to break the resistance, including heavy fighting in and around the Kremlin, accompanied by significant loss of life. Victory was only achieved when Lenin drafted in the Latvian Riflemen and the Kronstadt sailors. In other words, Moscow entered the Communist era as a defeated city, with revolutionary socialism of the Petrograd type imposed on the city. This was an occupation regime, with all of the consequences that follow from the attempt to impose a political system on a reluctant population.¹¹ Strong resistance among the print workers and some other sections of the working class continued until spring 1918, and indeed a deep current of resistance lasted into the 1920s.¹² The Men- sheviks were particularly deeply rooted in Moscow, and maintained a persistent critique of Bolshevik policy from their footholds in the trade unions and local soviets until they were finally extirpated in the 1920s.¹³ This was rooted in the hostility of the traditional intelligentsia to the coercive radicalism of the Bolshevik administration.

OPPOSITION WITHIN THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

Not surprisingly, the struggle for pluralism within the revolution was reflected in the Bolshevik party itself. The Bolshevik party had grown from a small group of about 25,000 in February 1917 to something around 300,000 in October, and once in power the ranks continued to swell. The problem of managing this mass was achieved through various purges and discipline campaigns. Within the leadership the first major debate was over the organisation of Soviet power. The creation of an exclusively Bolshevik government in the form of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) headed by Lenin on 25 October disappointed those who believed that power would be transferred to the soviets. The creation of Sovnarkom took power away from the Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of the soviets, in whose name the revolution had been made, and was consolidated in a body responsible to no one but the Bolshevik party itself. In other words, the fateful step towards the 'substitution' of the popular power, as represented by the soviets, to unaccountable party committees was taken, as Leon Trotsky had warned earlier. Trotsky by now had joined the radicals, in keeping with his theory of the 'permanent' (uninter­rupted) revolution, but this was countered by the moderates within the Bolshevik party, who in effect endorsed the logic that allowed the new government created after the February Revolution to be called 'provisional'.

They objected to Lenin's coup, arguing that the manner of seizing power meant that the only way the Bolsheviks could remain pre-emi­nent was through violence and civil war. For them, the revolution was indeed to be 'interrupted', if not impermanent. The coalitionists called for the broadening of the government to include all parties represented in the soviets. A group including Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and Alexei Rykov insisted on the formation of a coalition government encompassing anti-war moderate socialists and envisaged a role for some organisations in addition to the soviets in the new system. They felt so strongly over the issue that they resigned from the new govern­ment, warning that Lenin's policies would lead to civil war.¹⁴ Lenin in

November agreed to share power with the Left Socialist Revolutionar­ies (LSRs), which constituted itself as a separate party at that time, an arrangement that lasted to March 1918, but following an alleged attempt at an uprising on 6 July the LSRs were severely persecuted. After a bitter struggle the coalitionists were defeated. This was the first instance of a major debate in a revolutionary party in power. The warnings of the coalitionists turned out to be entirely prescient, with the coercive power of the regime confirmed by the creation of the Cheka (secret police) in December 1917, and the institution of the Red Terror from August 1918. Lev Kamenev at the head of the Moscow Soviet would go on to become the most consistent critic of secret police power.

Lenin refused to accept that Bolshevik authority was in any way 'pro­visional', and instead established the tradition that once a revolutionary socialist group came to power, the change of system was irreversible. From the teleological perspective that underlay Marx's view of history, why allow a reversion to a retrograde form of social organisation once a more advanced model had been established? Obviously, the Bolshevik moderates were not ready to give up power either, but they did defend a more inclusive version of that power. This meant that when it came to the long-awaited Constituent Assembly, they agreed with Lenin that this was a remnant of the 'bourgeois' phase of the revolution, and put up no resistance to its dissolution after only one day on 5 January 1918. Nikolai Bukharin announced that the Bolsheviks 'declare war without mercy against the bourgeois parliamentary republic'. Russia's experi­ment with accountable constitutional governance ended before it had begun. Lenin claimed that soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat was a far higher form of democracy, but the shooting of workers demonstrating in favour of the Assembly, in Petrograd and elsewhere, revealed the fate of those who disagreed.

THE LENINIST CONSOLIDATION

The imposition of a particularly narrow and intolerant version of revo­lutionary socialism elicited a hostile reaction from some of the leading lights of the movement abroad. Rosa Luxemburg, on the international­ist wing of German social democracy, initially welcomed the Bolshevik revolution as having 'put socialism on the agenda', but she soon con­demned the methods of Leninist rule, above all its suppression of democracy. She insisted that socialism should mean the deepening and not the limitation of democracy, although she understood the need for temporary restrictions. In a famous formulation in 1918 she stressed that 'Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for members of one party - however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.'¹⁵ Karl Kautsky, one of the leading figures of the German socialist movement, reaffirmed the commitment of social democracy to parliamentary forms of revolutionary transformation. He insisted that democracy was more than an instrument in the strug­gle but an inherent component of socialism itself. As he put it, 'For us, therefore, socialism without democracy is unthinkable. We understand by modern socialism not merely social organisation of production, but democratic organisation of society as well.'¹⁶ Echoing Gramsci's view of Russia, Kautsky considered the Bolshevik revolution as something alien to the international revolutionary struggle. For him, it was the outcome of specific Russian conditions, notably the strains of war and relative social underdevelopment, a view that provoked Lenin's fury.

Lenin was no less agitated by the emergence of the Left Opposi­tion in early 1918. This movement focused on two crucial issues: the question of war and peace (the Great War was still raging); and the emergence of bureaucratic authoritarianism within the party. As far as they were concerned, the two were connected. They advocated a revolutionary war against Germany that would then link up with the more advanced working class in the West and allow socialist Russia to break out from its isolation. The Left Communists came together as a faction in December 1917, and the peak of their activity was in January and February 1918 as the peace negotiations with Germany dragged on at Brest-Litovsk. They gained the support of some top party leaders, including Bukharin, N. Osinsky, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky and Karl

Radek, as well as the majority of grass roots organisations. Their stance quickly crumbled in the face of the renewed German onslaught from 18 February after the collapse of the peace talks. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March gave up land for peace. At the Seventh Party Congress on 7 March Lenin's hard-headed realism won the vote to accept the draconian terms imposed by Germany. Lenin refused to accept the Left Communist gamble that the Western working class would come to Russia's aid, and in the end Germany's collapse later that year proved him tactically correct.¹⁷ Revolutionary elan was no match for the German war machine.

Equally, the social critique of the revolution advanced by the Left Communists, denouncing the 'petty bourgeois' degeneration of the revolution, warning in particular against the danger represented by the great mass of the peasantry, failed to engage with the fundamental political question of the accountability of the new authorities to the nominal subjects of the revolution, the working class. Their critique of Lenin's model of state capitalism, however, was more on target, with Osinsky calling for the 'construction of proletarian socialism by the class creativity of the workers themselves, not by orders on high issued by the "captains of industry".'¹⁸

The Left Communists, however, were not so keen on the self- expression of the working class as embodied in the 'plenipotentiary' resistance campaign in spring 1918. This was a spontaneous movement to create 'plenipotentiary assemblies' (Sobranie Upolnomochennykh) of workers from the major plants in Petrograd, and the upsurge was also strong in Moscow. The aim was to 'create a broad working class organi­sation that could lead the masses from the dead end into which the policies of the new authorities have driven them'.¹⁹ The word 'soviet' was studiously avoided, having now become tainted, and indeed, by late June the movement had been crushed by the Soviet authorities. Shortly afterwards Russia was embroiled in full-scale domestic conflict.

The Civil War years were accompanied by a series of 'oppositions' within the Bolshevik party, renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (the RKP(b)) in 1918. Four key issues were raised that were at the heart of the new polity: the role of the soviets; the rise of the bureaucracy; the problem of democracy within the party; and relations with workers. The soviets became the foundation stone of the new polity, and in December 1922 lent their name to the new state when it became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but since the soviets contained non-Bolsheviks as well as peasants they were treated with suspicion by the Leninist leadership. Soviet democracy quickly became managed democracy, but the question remained about how the party's 'leading role' could be reconciled with meaningful political functions for the soviets.

It was this question that was taken up by the Democratic Central­ists from late 1918. They were largely based in Moscow, although their arguments did find support elsewhere. Many of the former Left Com­munists now moved on to join the critique of the alleged bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution, arguing against the imposition of one-man management, the use of bourgeois 'specialists' (the despised spetsy, in other words, the old technical intelligentsia) and in general 'to end bureaucratic methods of soviet construction'.²⁰ The Democratic Centralists argued that the relationship should be based on a division of labour: the party would provide ideological leadership, but the soviets should be integrated as institutions representing the working class. The first Soviet constitution of 10 July 1918 was long on declara­tions of principle, but left the institutional arrangements for the actual organisation of power vague. Although Sovnarkom was to 'notify' the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of its deci­sions (Article 39), and the latter had the right to 'revoke or suspend' decisions (Article 40), Sovnarkom was granted a range of emergency powers that in the end voided VTsIK of effective supervisory author­ity, and this was repeated at all levels.²¹

The Democratic Centralists hoped to remedy the situation by revising the constitution to safeguard the rights of lower-level bodies from the encroachments of the centre. The Democratic Centralists demanded the introduction of what could be characterised as a type of 'separation of powers' within the regime itself. They called for greater autonomy for local soviets and lower-level party committees. In other words, in keeping with the original aspirations of the Russian Revolu­tion to bring the polity within the ambit of constitutional constraints, they sought to 'constitutionalise' Soviet power. This would mean that the Soviet system really would have a genuine element of independent soviet power, with substantive powers for the soviets. The Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 agreed that the party should 'guide' the soviets, and not 'replace' them, though this formulation left the details vague and the problem of 'substitution' (podmena) remained to the end of Communist rule. A novel form of dual power was established which retained a revolutionary potential. It was therefore not surprising that when Gorbachev began to reform the system during perestroika in the late 1980s, he immediately returned to this idea by reviving the slogan of 'power to the soviets'.²² Party leaders had to reinvent themselves as state leaders by taking up posts in municipal and regional soviets, while Gorbachev himself ultimately shifted the basis of the legitimacy of his rule from the party to the soviets when he was elected president by the newly created USSR Congress of People's Deputies on 15 March 1990. Both during the Civil War and during perestroika the idea of the 'withering away of the state' was postponed to some indefinite future.