by Riazanovsky
Developments in Ukraine turned out to be perhaps the most complicated of all. There the local government, the Rada or central council, and the General Secretariat, proclaimed a republic of the Ukrainian people after the fall of the Provisional Government in Petrograd. Soviet authorities recognized the new republic, but in February 1918 the Red Army overthrew the Rada. Soviet rule, established in the spring of 1918, was in turn
overthrown by the advancing German army. The Germans at first accepted the Rada, but before long they sponsored instead a Right-wing government under Paul Skoropadsky. After the Germans left, the Directory of the Rada deposed Skoropadsky in December 1918, only to be driven out in short order by Denikin's White forces. Following Denikin's withdrawal in the autumn of 1919, Soviet troops restored Soviet authority in Ukraine. Next the Directory of the Rada made an agreement with the Poles, only to be left out at the peace treaty terminating the Soviet-Polish War, which simply divided Ukraine between Soviet Russia and Poland. Ukrainians supported different movements and fought in different armies as well as in countless anarchic peasant bands. Political divisions survived the collapse of the Ukrainian bid for independence and later divided Ukrainian emigres. Yet it remains an open question to what extent the young Ukrainian nationalism, nurtured especially among the Ukrainian intellectuals in Austrian Galicia, had penetrated the peasant masses of the Russian Ukraine.
Among the peoples living to the south and southeast of European Russia, many of whom had been joined to the Russian Empire as late as the nineteenth century, numerous independence movements arose and independent states were proclaimed. The new states included the Crimean Tartar republic, the Transcaucasian republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, the Bashkir, Kirghiz, and Kokand republics, the emirates of Bokhara and Khiva, and others. Time and again local interests clashed and bitter local civil wars developed. In certain instances foreign powers, such as Turkey, Germany, and Great Britain, played important roles. The Men-shevik government of Georgia distinguished itself by the relative stability and effectiveness of its rale. But - without going into complicated and varied detail - whether new authorities received much or little popular support, they succumbed eventually to Soviet strength allied with local Communists. The fall of the independent Georgian government in 1921 marked essentially the end of the process, although native partisans in Central Asia, the "Basmachi," were not finally suppressed until 1926.
Reasons for the Red Victory
Few observers believed that the Bolsheviks would survive the ordeal of Civil War, national independence movements, war against Poland, and Allied intervention. Lenin himself, apparently, had serious doubts on that score. The first years of the Soviet regime have justly become a legendary Communist epic, its lustre undimmed even by the titanic events of the Second World War. Yet, a closer look puts the picture into a better focus and helps to explain the Bolshevik victory without recourse to magic in
Marxism or superhuman qualities of Red fighters. To begin with, Allied intervention - the emphatic Soviet view to the contrary notwithstanding - represented anything but a determined and co-ordinated effort to strangle the new Communist regime. Kennan, Ullman, and other scholars have shown how much misunderstanding and confusion went into the Allied policies toward Russia, which never amounted to more than a half-hearted support of White movements. Allied soldiers and sailors, it might be added, saw even less reason for intervening than did their commanders. The French navy mutinied in the Black Sea, while the efficiency of American units was impaired by unrest as well as by a fervent desire to return home. The Labor party in Great Britain and various groups elsewhere exercised what pressure they could against intervention. Ill-conceived and poorly executed, the Allied intervention produced in the end little or no result. The Poles, by contrast, knew what they wanted and obtained it by means of a successful war. Their goals, however, did not include the destruction of the Soviet regime in Russian territory proper. National independence movements also had aims limited to their localities, and were, besides, usually quite weak. The Soviet government could, therefore, defeat many of them one by one and at the time of its own choosing, repudiating its earlier promises when convenient, as in the cases of Ukraine and the Trans-caucasian republics.
The White movement did pose a deadly threat to the Reds. Ultimately there could be no compromise between the two sides. The White armies were many, contained an extremely high proportion of officers, and often fought bravely. The Reds, however, had advantages that in the end proved decisive. The Soviet government controlled the heart of Russia, including both Moscow and Petrograd, most of its population, much of its industry, and the great bulk of military supplies intended for the First World War. The White armies constantly found themselves outnumbered and, in spite of Allied help, more poorly equipped. Also, the Red Army enjoyed the inner lines of communication, while its opponents had to shift around on the periphery. Still more important, the Reds possessed a strict unity of command, whereas the Whites fought, in fact, separate and unco-ordinated wars. Politics, as well as geography, contributed to the White disunity. Anti-Bolshevism represented the only generally accepted tenet in the camp, which encompassed everyone from the monarchists to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Few positive programs were proposed or developed. The Whites' inability to come to terms with non-Russian nationalities constituted a particular political weakness. White generals thought naturally in terms of "Russia one and indivisible" and reacted against separatism; or at least, they felt it quite improper to decide on their own such fundamental questions as those of national independence and boundaries. Thus Denikin antagonized the Ukrainians by his measures to suppress the Ukrainian
language and schools, and Iudenich weakened his base in Estonia because he would not promise the Estonians independence.
In the last analysis, the attitude of the population probably determined the outcome of the Civil War in Russia. Whereas the upper and middle classes favored the Whites, and the workers, with some notable exceptions, backed the Reds, the peasants, that is, the great majority of the people, assumed a much more cautious and aloof attitude. Many of them came to hate both sides, for White rule, as well as Red rule, often brought mobilization, requisitions, and terror - as cruel as, if less systematic than, that of the Cheka. In many areas anarchic peasant bands attacked both combatants. Indeed, this so called green resistance proved to be in scope, casualties, and, alas, cruelty quite comparable to the more prominent struggle between the Whites and the Reds, although it was by its very nature local rather than national. Still, on the whole, the peasants apparently preferred the Reds to the Whites. After all, they had obtained the gentry land following the October Revolution, while the Whites were associated in their minds - not entirely unjustly - with some kind of restoration of the old order, a possibility that evoked hatred and fear in the Russian village. Mutatis mutandis, one is reminded of the later circumstances of the Communist victory in the civil war in China.
The R.S.F.S.R. and the U.S.S.R.
The first Soviet constitution was adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets and promulgated on July 10, 1918. It created the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or the R.S.F.S.R. Local Soviets elected delegates to a provincial congress of Soviets, and provincial congresses in turn elected the membership of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The latter elected the Executive Committee, which acted in the intervals between congressional sessions, and the Council of People's Commissars. Elections were open rather than secret, and they were organized on a class basis, with the industrial workers especially heavily represented. By contrast, the "non-toiling classes" received no vote. In effect, the Communist party, particularly its Central Committee and Political Bureau headed by Lenin, from the beginning dominated the government apparatus and ruled the country. Besides, the same leading Communists occupied the top positions in both party and government, with Lenin at the head of both. On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came into being as a federation of
Russia, Ukraine, White Russia, and Transcaucasia. Later in the '20's three Central Asiatic republics received "Union Republic" status. Compared to the empire of the Romanovs, the new state had lost Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Polish territories, all of which had become independent, and had lost western Ukraine and
western White Russia to Poland, Bessarabia to Rumania, and the Kars-Ardakhan area in Transcaucasia to Turkey. Also, as already mentioned, Japan evacuated all of the Siberian mainland of Russia only in 1922, and the Russian half of the island of Sakhalin in 1925. In spite of these reductions in size, the U.S.S.R. emerged as an enormous country.
The Crisis
At the end of the Civil War Soviet Russia was exhausted and ruined. The droughts of 1920 and 1921 and the frightful famine during that last year added the final, gruesome chapter to the disaster. In the years following the originally "bloodless" October Revolution epidemics, starvation, fighting, executions, and the general breakdown of the economy and society had taken something like twenty million lives. Another two million had left Russia - with Wrangel, through the Far East, or in numerous other ways - rather than accept Communist rule, the emigres including a high proportion of educated and skilled people. War Communism might have saved the Soviet government in the course of the Civil War, but it also helped greatly to wreck the national economy. With private industry and trade proscribed and the state unable to perform these functions on a sufficient scale, much of the Russian economy ground to a standstill. It has been estimated that the total output of mines and factories fell in 1921 to 20 per cent of the pre-World War level, with many crucial items experiencing an even more drastic decline; for example, cotton fell to 5 per cent, iron to 2 per cent, of the prewar level. The peasants responded to requisitioning by refusing to till their land. By 1921 cultivated land had shrunk to some 62 per cent of the prewar acreage, and the harvest yield was only about 37 per cent of normal. The number of horses declined from 35 million in 1916 to 24 million in 1920, and cattle from 58 to 37 million during the same span of time. The exchange rate of an American dollar, which had been two rubles in 1914, rose to 1,200 rubles in 1920.
The unbearable situation led to uprisings in the countryside and to strikes and violent unrest in the factories. Finally, in March 1921, the Kronstadt naval base, celebrated by the Communists as one of the sources of the October Revolution, rose in rebellion against Communist rule. It is worth noting that the sailors and other Kronstadt rebels demanded free Soviets and the summoning of a constituent assembly. Although Red Army units ruthlessly suppressed the uprising, the well-nigh general dissatisfaction with Bolshevik rule could not have been more forcefully expressed. And it was against this background of utter devastation and discontent that Lenin, who, besides, had finally to admit that a world revolution was not imminent, proceeded in the spring of 1921 to inaugurate his New Economic Policy in place of War Communism. Once more Lenin
proved to be the realist who had to overcome considerable doctrinaire opposition to have his views prevail in the party and, therefore, in the entire country.
The New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was a compromise, a temporary retreat on the road to socialism, in order to give the country an opportunity to recover; and it was so presented by Lenin. The Communist party, of course, retained full political control; the compromise and relaxation never extended to politics. In economics, the state kept its exclusive hold on the "commanding heights," that is, on finance, on large and medium industry, on modern transportation, on foreign trade, and on all wholesale commerce. Private enterprise, however, was allowed in small industry, which meant plants employing fewer than twenty workers each, and in retail trade. The government's change of policy toward the peasants was perhaps still more important. Instead of requisitioning their produce, as had been done during War Communism, it established a definite tax in kind, particularly in grain, replaced later by a money tax. The peasants could keep and sell on the free market what remained after the payment of the tax, and thus they were given an obvious incentive to produce more. Eventually the authorities even permitted a limited use of hired labor in agriculture and a restricted lease of land. The government also revamped and stabilized the financial system, introducing a new monetary unit, the chervonets; and it put into operation new legal codes to help stabilize a shattered society.
The New Economic Policy proved to be a great economic success. After the frightful starvation years of 1921 and 1922 - years, incidentally, when many more Russians would have perished, but for the help received from the American Relief Administration headed by Herbert Hoover, from the Quakers, and from certain other groups - the Russian economy revived in a remarkable manner. In 1928 the amount of land under cultivation already slightly exceeded the pre-World War area. Industry on the whole also reached the prewar level. It should be added that during the N.E.P. period, in contrast to the time of War Communism, the government demanded that state industries account for costs and pay for themselves. It was highly characteristic of the N.E.P. that 75 per cent of retail trade fell into private hands. In general, the so-called Nepmen, the small businessmen allowed to operate by the new policy, increased in number in towns, while the kulaki - or kulaks, for the term has entered the English language - gained in the villages. Kulak, meaning "fist," came to designate a prosperous peasant, a man who held tightly to his own; the prerevolutionary term, used by Soviet sources, also has connotations of exploitation and greed.
These social results of the New Economic Policy naturally worried the
Communists. The Eleventh Party Congress declared as early as 1922 that no further "retreat" could be tolerated. In 1924 and 1925 the government introduced certain measures to restrict the Nepmen, and in 1927 to limit the kulaks. The Party long debated the correct policy to determine the future development of the country. Ideological arguments came to be closely linked to personalities and to the struggle for power that gained momentum after Lenin's death in January 1924.
The Struggle for Power after Lenin's Death
Three main points of view emerged among the Russian Communists during the twenties. The so-called Left position, best developed by Trotsky, maintained that, without world revolution, socialism in Russia was doomed. Therefore, the Bolsheviks had to support revolutionary movements abroad and at the same time pursue a militant and socialist policy at home. An opponent of the N.E.P., Trotsky also came to criticize Stalin for his cooperation with bourgeois forces abroad and for his destruction of democracy within the Party. Such prominent Communist leaders as Gregory Zinoviev - born Radomyslsky - and Leo Kamenev - born Rosenfeld - essentially shared Trotsky's view. The Right faction, led by a prominent theoretician, Nicholas Bukharin, agreed with the Left that socialism in Russia depended on world revolution. But the members of this group concluded that, because such a revolution was not immediately in prospect, the Soviet government should not quixotically force the pace towards socialism, but rather continue the existing compromise and develop the New Economic Policy. Finally, the third faction, the Center headed by Stalin, came to the conclusion that, in spite of the fact that world revolution failed to materialize, socialism could be built within the one country of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with its huge size, large population, and tremendous resources. The Center therefore called for a great effort to transform the Soviet Union. Putting the Right group aside, it should be realized that Trotsky as well as Stalin wanted to build socialism in Russia - Stalin, in fact, has been accused of simply borrowing the Left program - and that Stalin as well as Trotsky aimed at world revolution. The ideological difference between the two was that of emphasis, not of fundamental belief. Yet emphasis can be very important at certain moments in history. Moreover, Stalin's approach for the first time gave Russia, or rather the Soviet Union, the central position in Communist thought and planning.
As has often been described and analyzed, the struggle for power that followed Lenin's death was decided by Stalin's superior control of the Part
y membership. Acting behind the scenes as the general secretary of the Party, Stalin managed to build up a following strong enough to overcome Trots-
ky's magnificent rhetoric and great prestige, as well as Kamenev's Party organization in Moscow and Zinoviev's in Petrograd - named Leningrad after Lenin's death. Stalin intrigued skillfully, first allying himself with Kamenev and Zinoviev against Trotsky, whom they envied and considered their rival for Party leadership; then with the Right group against the Left; and eventually, when sufficiently strong, suppressing the Right as well. He kept accusing his opponents of factionalism, of disobeying the established Party line and splitting the Party. Final victory came at the Fifteenth All-Union Congress of the Communist party, which on December 27, 1927, condemned all "deviation from the general Party line" as interpreted by Stalin. The general secretary's rivals and opponents recanted or were exiled; in any case, they lost their former importance. Trotsky himself was expelled from the Soviet Union in January 1929 and was eventually murdered in exile in Mexico in 1940, almost certainly on Stalin's orders.
Still, although Stalin's rise to supreme authority can well be considered an impressive, if gruesome, study in power politics, its ideological aspect should not be forgotten. After all, of the three alternate views present in the Party, the general secretary's possessed the greatest attraction by far for Soviet Communists. The Right, in effect, simply admitted defeat: in spite of the tremendous struggle and all the efforts, socialism could not succeed in the Soviet Union until the uncertain coming of world revolution. Trotsky's Left position, while more sanguine, also tied the Soviet future to world revolution and thus made Bolshevik activity of limited importance and effectiveness at best. Only Stalin offered a sweeping program and a majestic goal to be achieved by Soviet efforts alone. Only he proposed to advance Marxism in the Soviet Union without dependence on problematic developments elsewhere. The same Party congress that condemned all deviations from Stalin's line enthusiastically adopted measures that signified the end of the New Economic Policy and the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan.