II
Many myths and misunderstandings persist about Soviet history. As often as not, textbooks state quite inaccurately that the Soviet Union was founded in 1917 by the Bolshevik Revolution. They imply that Lenin’s party had been the principal revolutionary force in the Russian Empire and overthrew the tsar, and that the Soviet Union was just a further stage in the seamless continuum of Russia and the Russians. The so-called ‘Russian Civil War’ is usually presented as a domestic affair, fought out between Russian ‘Whites’ and Russian ‘Reds’. In more recent times, the Russian Federation of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin is frequently presented not as one of the fifteen post-Soviet states, but rather as the product of a mere change of government, as just the latest variant on the unchanging Russian theme. Some may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the Soviet Union was created on 1 January 1924 and dissolved on 31 December 1991.23
In formal terms, the Tsarist Empire of ‘all the Russias’, which reached its end in February 1917, had been created by Peter the Great in 1721. But Peter’s empire prolonged and expanded the political and territorial complex that had been assembled earlier by the grand dukes or ‘tsars’ of Muscovy. ‘The gathering of the lands’, a long process whereby Moscow aimed to take control of all the East Slavs, had been proclaimed in the fifteenth century. Expansion across the Urals into Siberia and Central Asia, the largest demographic vacuum on the globe, was launched at the end of the sixteenth century; the conquest of lands in the west and north-west possessed by Sweden and Poland began in the mid-seventeenth. The pace of expansion was relentless. Between 1683 and 1914 it averaged 53 square miles per day, and may be characterized as a case of bulimia politica. Despite some regurgitations, the result by the early twentieth century was an imperial domain of unparalleled dimensions in which ethnic Russians represented barely half of the population.24
If the Russians constituted the largest of the seventy or so nationalities in the Tsarist Empire, the Estonians were one of the smallest. Like the Finns, they had spent most of modern history within the political sphere of Sweden. Much of their homeland lay within the historic Swedish province of Ingria, or in Livonia; the Russian connection did not impinge until the Russo-Polish and Russo-Swedish wars of relatively recent times. Russia’s imperial capital, St Petersburg, was founded in 1703 in a Swedish-Estonian-Finnish district without the slightest reference either to international law or to the local inhabitants. Russia’s possession of Estonia was confirmed by the Treaty of Nystadt (1721) at the close of the Great Northern War.
After the emancipation of their serfs under Alexander I – earlier than in Russia as a whole – Estonians rapidly acquired a strong sense of their national identity. As Protestants, they were devoted to education in their own language, and resisted the imposition of Russian. Yet demands for an independent Estonian state only found expression at the turn of the twentieth century, and with very meagre chances of realization. In order to succeed, a very diminutive David would somehow have to challenge a super-colossal Goliath.
To compound these problems, Estonian society had its own internal divisions. The Estonian-speaking majority were mainly rural peasants. The administration was controlled by Russians, while commercial and landowning interests were largely in the hands of Baltic Germans and of a small Jewish community. The main port, Reval (Tallinn), was especially lacking in Estonian flavour. The whole country was garrisoned by a large Russian army.
The condition of the Estonians in the early twentieth century was conveyed to the world by the Encyclopaedia Britannica in bilious tones:
The Esths, Ehsts, or Esthonians, who call themselves Tallopoeg and Maamees, are known to the Russians as Chukhni or Chukhontsi, to the Letts as Iggauni, and to the Finns as Virolaiset. They belong to the Finnish family, and consequently to the Ural-Altaic division of the human race. Altogether they number close upon one million, and are thus distributed: 365,959 in Esthonia (in 1897), 518,594 in Livonia, 64,116 in the government of St. Petersburg, 25,458 in that of Pskov, and 12,855 [elsewhere]. As a race they exhibit manifest evidences of their Ural-Altaic or Mongolic descent in their short stature, absence of beard, oblique eyes, broad face, low forehead and small mouth. In addition, they are an under-sized, ill-thriven people, with long arms and thin, short legs. They cling tenaciously to their native language, which is closely allied to the Finnish… Since 1873 the cultivation of their mother tongue has been sedulously promoted by an Esthonian Literary Society (Eesti Korjameeste Selts), which publishes Toimetused, or ‘Instructions’ on all sorts of subjects. They have a decided love of poetry, and exhibit great facility in improvising verses and poems on all occasions, and they sing, everywhere, from morning to night…
One can easily imagine a Victorian empire-builder describing the Welsh or the Irish in similarly dismissive style. Astonishingly, the author goes on to express the opinion that Estonia’s lot had improved through Russification:
Since 1878, however, a vast change for the better has been effected in their economic position… The determining feature of their recent history has been the attempt made by the Russian government (since 1881) and the Orthodox Greek Church (since 1883) to russify and convert the inhabitants of the province… by enforcing the use of Russian in the schools and by harsh and repressive measures aimed at their native language.25
In all probability, these words reflect the views of a Russian contributor, Prince Piotr Kropotkin.
The encyclopedia’s account of Estonia’s capital puts a heavy accent on its Russian and German connections:
REVAL, or REVEL (Russ. Revel, formerly Kolyvañ; Esthonian, Tallina and Tannilin), a fortified seaport town of Russia… situated on… the gulf of Finland, 230 m. W. of St. Petersburg by rail. Pop by nail. (1900) 66,292, of whom half were Esthonians and 30% Germans. The city consists of two parts – the Domberg or Dom, which occupies a hill, and the lower town on the beach. The Dom contains the castle (first built in the 13th century…), where the provincial administration has its seat, and an [Orthodox] cathedral (1894–1900) with five gilded domes… The church of St. Nicholas, built in 1317, contains many antiquities… and old German paintings. The Dom church contains… the graves of the circumnavigator Baron A. J. von Krusenstern (1770–1846), of the Swedish soldiers Pontus de la Gardie (d. 1585) and Carl Horn (d. 1601), and of the Bohemian Protestant leader Count Matthias von Thurn (1580–1640)…
The oldest church is the Esthonian, built in 1219. The public institutions include a good provincial museum of antiquities; an imperial palace, Katharinenthal, built by Peter the Great in 1719; and very valuable archives, preserved in the town hall (14th century). The pleasant situation of the town attracts thousands of people for seabathing. It is the seat of a branch board of the Russian admiralty and of the administration of the Baltic lighthouses. Its port… freezes nearly every winter.26
*
The break-up of the Tsarist Empire began during the First World War, two years before the Russian revolutions of 1917. In the summer of 1915, German forces broke through Russian lines on the Eastern Front, and occupied large swathes of imperial territory, from Poland and Lithuania in the north to Ukraine in the south. Russian counter-offensives failed, arousing much anger. In February 1917 the tsar was overthrown and imprisoned by his own courtiers, and his autocratic regime replaced by constitutionalists who formed a provisional government. But in November 1917* the provisional government, headed by the socialist Alexander Kerensky, was overthrown by Lenin’s Bolsheviks, a smaller but more ruthless socialist faction, in what was effectively a coup d’état. Constitutional socialists were replaced by totalitarian socialists (and to add extra irony, Kerensky’s father had once been Lenin’s headmaster). In their origins, the Bolsheviks had been part of the clandestine Russian Social Democratic Party, but after seizing power they broke with all their former comrades, like the Mensheviks, and treated them with the same absolute disdain that characterized their dealings with all opponents.* In March 1918, at Brest-Litovsk, they were forced to make pea
ce with Germany, and to abandon most of the territory which the Germans had occupied since the outbreak of war. (see p. 378 above).
As self-proclaimed internationalists, Lenin and his circle were not especially interested in frontiers and territory. They believed that all such matters would be sorted out amicably once the international revolution had destroyed all existing regimes and had joined up with fraternal proletarians in foreign countries. Two events, however, intervened. The first was the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, in which the infant power of the Bolshevik ‘Reds’ was contested by a variety of adversaries, usually called ‘Whites’ but made up of conservatives, non-Bolshevik leftists and non-Russian nationalists. The second was the revolt of the many non-Russian nationalities, all of whom chose to break free and to form their own national republics. In 1918–19, therefore, the Bolsheviks’ area of control, which is best called Soviet Russia, covered only a fraction of the former Tsarist Empire.† The tasks of the Red Army were threefold: to secure the Russian heartland; to reconquer the breakaway national republics; and to march into Central Europe to provoke the prophesied international revolution.27
The Bolsheviks’ bid to engineer revolution throughout Europe by force was launched in 1920, but failed miserably. Lenin on this occasion was the enthusiast, and Leon Trotsky, as commissar for war, despite his reputation, the sceptic.28 The Red Army marched westwards in May, naming its destination as Berlin or even Paris. They didn’t get past Warsaw. They were badly beaten in August by the army of the Polish Republic – one of the breakaway national states, which had no desire to return to Russian rule, Red or White.29 From then on, the Bolshevik leaders had to think more seriously about organizing and centralizing power in the lands that they actually controlled.
The overall performance of the Red Army in those years was very erratic. Finland, the Baltic States and Poland were not brought under Soviet control. But Byelorussia, Ukraine and the vast expanses of Siberia, southern Russia and the Far East were reconquered. So, too, was the Caucasus. Many parts of Central Asia were still being contested in the mid-1920s.
In 1922, however, Lenin suffered a series of strokes and Joseph Stalin emerged as general secretary of the ruling Bolshevik Party. He rejected Lenin’s internationalist priorities, and launched the policy of ‘Socialism in One Country’. His purpose was to postpone foreign adventures while building up political, economic and military power. Such was the context for the formation of a Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Party had no intention of relinquishing its dictatorial hold on power, but its doctrine of the ‘Party-State’ permitted the organization of a number of nominally autonomous but dependent republics; answering to the central Party dictatorship, these republics were also to be joined in federal union. The plans were passed by the Supreme Soviet in December 1923 and put into effect on the first day of the following year.30 The name of the new federal state was to be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR in short: in transliterated Russian, ‘Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Republik’, or SSSR. The acronym written in Cyrillic was ‘CCCP’.
Moscow thereupon became the dual capital both of the Soviet Union and of Soviet Russia. The All-Union government and the subsidiary government of the RSFSR were separate bodies, staffed by different officials. Even so, political power continued to be concentrated, as always, not in Soviet state structures but in the parallel organs of the dictatorial Bolshevik Party, which oversaw the work of all other institutions. In 1925, the Bolsheviks changed their name once more to ‘All-union Communist Party’ (Vsesoyuznaya Komunistichestkaya Partiya, or VKP). The VKP’s general secretary, Joseph Stalin, the supreme dictator, saw no need to appoint himself to subordinate positions such as president or prime minister of the USSR. The inner sanctum of power was located in Stalin’s office in the VKP’s headquarters in the Kremlin.
The events that unfolded in Estonia during those same years combined to bring about a result that few would have thought possible, namely, the declaration of Estonia’s independence. During the First World War the German army had in 1915–16 swept into the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire in, fatally weakening tsarist power in ways that the local population could never have achieved on its own. The Germans encouraged the national aspirations of non-Russian peoples, and in some places such as Lithuania and Ukraine, they actively supported moves to create sovereign republics. They occupied Reval and Dorpat (Tartu), but stopped short of Petrograd (as St Petersburg had recently been renamed).
In March 1917 the Russian provisional government proclaimed its intention of continuing the war against Germany and of reuniting the Russian Empire. To counter this policy, the Bolsheviks called for peace, and for the recognition of the national rights of all subject peoples. Estonia, on the doorstep of revolutionary Petrograd, was inevitably excited by the passions of the day. The Baltic Germans were at best unsure. During the civil war which followed, Estonia was the scene of several multi-sided conflicts. It provided the base for one of the ‘White’ armies attacking Bolshevik Petrograd. At the same time, it witnessed a complicated civil war of its own, in which Bolshevik sympathizers, Estonian national patriots and the German Baltikum army struggled to gain supremacy.
Seen from the Estonian perspective, the key events in that turbulent period were the granting of autonomy to Estonia in March 1917, following a mammoth demonstration in Petrograd, and the peace treaty with Soviet Russia in February 1920. Kerensky, the head of the provisional government, was a liberal and favoured self-government of the non-Russian provinces, which he wanted to keep loyal for the continuing war effort. So on 30 March 1917 a decree was passed consolidating all Estonian-inhabited districts into one province, and authorizing the formation of an administrative executive and a parliament, the Maapäev.31
In the summer of 1917, however, the provisional government in Petrograd started to lose control. The Bolsheviks were undermining stability in the country and the Germans were advancing up the Baltic coast. At this juncture, an Estonian radical, Jaan Tõnisson, proposed the creation of a Northern Union of all the Baltic countries, including Finland. The goal, as yet out of reach, was independent statehood. ‘We can’t stand by while our fate is left to the mercy of others,’ he declared. ‘It’s now, or never.’32
When the Bolshevik coup occurred in November 1917, therefore, an Estonian independence movement was already in existence; and on the following 24 February, the country’s future National Day, a declaration of independence was promulgated in Tallinn.33 It had little prospect of general acceptance: it was opposed by local Communists, who among other things had set up a Soviet mini-republic on the island of Naissaar off Tallinn; all was soon overturned by the extension northwards of the area of German occupation, the Ober Ost. The Germans were not welcomed with any enthusiasm, but their presence at least blocked a possible Bolshevik takeover; the Estonian Committee of National Salvation, which had issued the declaration, was forced underground and its emissary to Finland captured by the Germans and shot. Recognition by the Western Allies did not materialize until May. At this stage, however, the Bolsheviks’ stance towards breakaway republics was still ambiguous; in some places, notably in Ukraine and the Caucasus, they were crushing the separatists by force, but in the Baltic region they refrained from outright denunciations of national movements. On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, when the Germans laid down their arms, the National Committee resurfaced in Tallinn and reconfirmed their earlier pronouncements.34
In Estonian eyes, the War of Independence began at that point. Lenin did not recognize Estonia’s freedom; Red Guards overran many districts, and briefly seized Tallinn. The ‘Red Terror’ was unleashed in support both of social revolution and of Russian control. Many atrocities were perpetrated, and for a time it appeared that the ‘Reds’ would prevail. Yet Estonian defences held. A small Estonian army, under General Johan Laidoner, used armoured trains to disrupt Bolshevik communications. Britain’s Royal Navy landed supplies, and Finnish volunteers crossed the Gulf of Finland. No clear verdict had bee
n achieved when a new enemy appeared in the form of German volunteers, the Baltikum Landwehr, marching out of Latvia. Three-sided hostilities persisted until the end of 1919.35
By that time, Trotsky’s main Red Army was winning the Russian Civil War, and a major attack on Estonia was daily awaited. Yet Lenin’s inner circle had other ideas. They had always argued that a proletarian revolution in Russia must necessarily link up with a wider revolution in the major capitalist countries, so now, having secured Russia and set their minds on a strategic offensive through Poland to Germany, they abandoned secondary operations such as the conquest of Estonia. The attack on Narva with 160,000 men had brought no results. It was opportune to sue for peace, and a truce was arranged before Soviet Russian and Estonian negotiators assembled at Tartu.
The Tartu Treaty between Estonia and Soviet Russia was signed on 2 February 1920:
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