Institutionally, the Bolshevik monopoly regime not only formed a state, but with the mass assimilation of former tsarist officers, became a party-state. “The institution of commissars” in the Red Army, Trotsky had explained of the political watchdogs, was “to serve as a scaffolding. . . . Little by little we shall be able to remove this scaffolding.”339 That dismantling never happened, however, no matter how often commissars themselves called for their own removal.340 On the contrary, soon Vyacheslav Molotov, a central apparatchik, bragged in a pamphlet about how the task of governing had rendered the Soviet Communist party distinct from others. Among other innovations, he singled out the implantation of political commissars alongside technical experts—and not solely in the Red Army, but throughout the economic and administrative apparatus as well.341 Nothing like the party-state had existed in tsarist Russia. The Red expert dualism would endure even after the overwhelming majority of state officials, army officers, or schoolteachers were party members, becoming an added sourge of bureaucratic proliferation and waste.
Traditionally, Russia’s civil war, even more than the October coup, has been seen as Trotsky’s time. He was ubiquitous in the public imagination, and his train encapsulated the Red Army and its victory. But the facts do not bear out the long-held notion that Trotsky emerged significantly stronger than Stalin.342 Both Stalin and Trotsky were radicals to the core, but on the issue of former tsarist officers Stalin pushed a “proletarian” line, infuriating Trotsky (Trotsky’s rage was Stalin’s inspiration). To be sure, Stalin did not reject all military specialists, just “class aliens,” which for him included those of noble descent and those who had attained a high rank before 1917, while Trotsky, in turn, also advocated for the training of former non-commissioned officers as well as pure neophytes from the bench.343 In that connection, Trotsky claimed that in 1918 former tsarist officers composed three quarters of the Red commanding and administrative staffs, by civil war’s end they composed, according to him, only one third.344 Whatever the precise totals, however, the engagement of former tsarist officers, and of “bourgeois” specialists in other realms, helped focus the widely gathering negativity about Trotsky, who became a lightning rod, widely disliked inside the regime that he helped bring to victory, much earlier than usually recognized, right in the middle of his civil war exploits. At the same time, Stalin’s role in the civil war—knocking heads—was substantial, as even Trotsky acknowledged.345 And the Tsaritsyn episode of 1918, in what had been a desperate situation for the Reds and for Stalin personally, provided a preview of Stalin’s recourse to publicizing conspiracies by “enemies” and enacting summary executions in order to enforce discipline and rally political support.
Trotsky was Jewish but, like almost all intellectuals and revolutionaries in the Russian empire, wholly assimilated into Russian culture, and to boot, he had striking blue eyes and an unprominent nose, yet he claimed to feel his Jewishness as a political limitation. Peasants certainly knew he was a Jew.346 America’s Red Cross chief in Russia called Trotsky “the greatest Jew since Christ.” White-Guard periodicals roiled with evocations of “Kike-Bolshevik commissars” and the “Kike Red Army” led by Trotsky.347 In 1919, Trotsky received a letter from an ethnic Korean member of the Russian Communist party concerning rumors that “the motherland has been conquered by Yid commissars. All the country’s disasters are being blamed on the Jews. They’re saying the Communist regime is supported by Jewish brains, Latvian rifles, and Russian idiots.”348 The London Times asserted (March 5, 1919) that three quarters (!) of the leading positions in Soviet Russia were held by Jews. Many Soviet Communists themselves could be overheard to say Shmolny for Smolny (Jewish “sh”) or prezhidium (Jew-sidium) for presidium.349 Trotsky kept a copy of a 1921 German book of drawings of all the Jewish Bolsheviks, with a preface to the text by Alfred Rosenberg, in his files.350 Peasants, too, knew he was a Jew.351 Retrospectively, he would cite the perception of him as a Jew to explain why he had declined Lenin’s proposal in 1917 to become commissar for the interior (i.e., regime policeman).352 All the same, he had accepted other high-profile appointments, and the degree to which his Jewishness constituted a genuine handicap remains unclear. At the top, only the Georgian Jughashvili-Stalin was not partly Jewish. The Jewishness of Lenin’s maternal grandmother was then unknown, but other leaders were well known to be Jews and it did not inhibit them: Zinoviev had been born Ovsei-Gershon Radomylsky and used his mother’s surname Apfelbaum; Kamenev, born Lev Rozenfeld, had a Jewish father; both had Jewish wives.353 Trotsky-Bronstein managed to be a lightning rod not just in his Jewishness but in all ways.
Stalin, unlike Trotsky, had not made so bold as to challenge Lenin publicly in high-profile debates, such as Brest-Litovsk, as if he were Lenin’s equal, provoking Lenin’s ire. True, Stalin often engaged in disruptive political mischief.354 But Lenin could not have been put off by Stalin’s use of indiscriminate terror designed to deter enemies and rally the worker base because Lenin was the principle promoter of shoot first, ask questions later as a way to impart political lessons. (Lenin backed Trotsky’s severe measures of shooting deserters, even if they were party members.) Lenin also was not naïve: he saw through Stalin’s self-centered, intrigue-prone personality, but Lenin valued Stalin’s combination of unwavering revolutionary convictions and get-things-done style, a fitting skill set for all-out revolutionary class warfare. Stalin’s role for Lenin was visible in the regime’s internal groupings. “All Bolsheviks who occupied high posts,” recalled Arkady Borman, a deputy trade commissar, “could be divided into two categories: Lenin’s personal protégés and the rest. The former felt firm and secure in the intraagency clashes and always held the upper hand.”355 Stalin was both the highest ranking member of Lenin’s grouping and the belated builder of his own faction, which overlapped Lenin’s. A parallel Trotsky faction did not overlap Lenin’s and instead became a target of the Bolshevik leader. (The ambitious Zinoviev had his own grouping, in Petrograd.) Appealing to Lenin, Stalin managed during the civil war to escape subordination to Trotsky despite the latter’s position as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council. Going forward, as we shall see, the tables would be turned, and Trotsky would find himself appealing to Lenin to try to escape subordination to Stalin in the party. Stalin’s aggrandizement was already well advanced, yet only really beginning.
CHAPTER 9
VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY
I know Russia so little. Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, exile, and that’s about it!
Lenin, Island of Capri, responding to someone talk about the Russian village, c. 1908, in reminiscences of Maxim Gorky1
The isolated existence of separate Soviet republics is unstable and impermanent in view of the threats to their existence posed by the capitalist states. The general interests of defense of the Soviet republics, on the one hand, and, on the other, the necessity of restoring productive forces destroyed by the war, and, as a third consideration, the necessity of the food-producing Soviet republics to supply aid to the grainless ones, all imperatively dictate a state union of the separate Soviet republics as the sole path of salvation from imperialist yoke and national oppression. . . .
10th Party Congress resolution based upon Stalin’s report, March 15, 19212
REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR had broken out in the Russian empire, a startlingly heterogeneous state spanning two continents, Europe and Asia. That said, this realm had not presented an especially difficult governing challenge from the point of view of nationalism. Imperial Russia had had no “republics” of Georgia or Ukraine; officially, Ukrainians did not even exist (they were “Little Russians”). True, imperial Russia had countenanced two so-called protectorates (Bukhara, Khiva), while Finland had enjoyed a measure of self-rule, but the rest of the empire was divided into governorships (gubernii). Then the world war, German military occupation, and civil war midwifed an independent Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, none of which the Red Army managed to reconquer. World war, occupa
tions, and civil war also helped create Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, all of which the Red Army did reconquer, but even after falling to Red forces, those national republics retained important attributes of statehood. Nation was suddenly central.
The Great War irrevocably altered the political landscape, helping dissolve all three major land empires, but unlike Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire, Russia was resurrected, albeit not in toto, and not in the same form. What set Russia apart, and transformed its civil war into a partly successful war to recover territories of the former Russian empire, was a combination of instruments and ideas: the Communist party, Lenin’s leadership (actual and symbolic), the Bolsheviks’ belated discovery of the device of federalism, the vision of world revolution—not just a Russian revolution, which made “self-determination” a flexible concept—and Stalin’s machinations. An extremely broad spectrum of imperial Russian political figures, from tsarist statesman Pyotr Stolypin and others on the right to Stalin and others on the left, with the Constitutional Democrats in between, had alighted upon the necessity of forms of local-national autonomy, but only under the aegis of a strong state (gosudarstvennost’).3 The story of how Stalin arrived at that point is a lesser known aspect of his civil war odyssey; it is also one of the uncanny successes of Bolshevik state building.
“From the very beginning of the October Revolution,” Lenin had remarked in November 1918, “foreign policy and international relations became the main issue before us.”4 Bolshevism was not just a state-building enterprise but an alternative world order. The Bolshevik recourse to federation recognized a formal right to succession of the dependent peoples in Soviet Eurasia, in a clarion call for colonial peoples everywhere.5 State structure, domestic minority policy, colonial policy, and foreign policy became indistinguishable.
Germany, Russia’s former nemesis, had recognized the new Soviet state but then collapsed, while Britain and France, Russia’s former allies, were now antagonists: they recognized the new independent republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, without recognizing Soviet Russia. But Greater Poland and Greater Romania, two big winners at Versailles, emerged as the most immediate Soviet antagonists to the West. On the other flank, the former Russian Far East fell under the occupation of Japanese troops, partly as a result of American president Woodrow Wilson’s request to Japan to supply troops to a planned eleven-country, 25,000-man expedition to rescue the Czechoslovak Legion and safeguard military storehouses in Siberia. Initially, the Japanese had declined to intervene militarily in Russia, but in 1918 sent even more troops than were requested, motivated by a desire to reverse historic territorial losses as well as anti-Communism. Japan’s occupation of the Soviet Far East grew to more than 70,000 troops, entangled against many different enemies, and turned out to be domestically divisive and costly, perhaps 12,000 dead and nearly 1 billion yen. Nonetheless, after the Americans left Vladivostok in 1920, the Japanese stayed.6 The upshot was that Japan, Poland, Romania, and Britain combined to constitute a kind of ring around the Soviet Socialist Republics, although, as we shall see, Soviet revolutions poked through briefly in Iran, thanks to the reconquest of the South Caucasus, and enduringly in Mongolia.
By 1921, with the outcomes of the wars of reconquest more or less clear, the population of the Soviet republics amounted to perhaps 140 million, including about 75 million Russians and, among the 65 million non-Russians, around 30 million Turkic and Persian speakers. Around 112 million of the total Soviet-area population were peasants. The national question was also ipso facto the peasant question: they comprised the vast majority of people in every nation in Russian Eurasia.
Not peasants per se but Communist party members undergirded the Red victory against the Whites.7 During a purge in 1919, nearly half the party’s paper membership was expelled; in 1920, during a renewed purge, more than a fourth was kicked out, but the party had kept growing.8 The party expanded from 340,000 (March 1918) to more than 700,000 by civil war’s end, while party members in the Red Army grew from 45,000 to 300,000. But even if peasants were not decisive, they made up, often reluctantly, three quarters of the Red Army troops at any given time. Peasant soldiers often deserted with their army rifles. They also availed themselves of hunting rifles and homemade weapons. In 1920–21, at least 200,000 peasants in the Ukraine, the Volga, Don, and Kuban valleys, Tambov and Voronezh provinces, and especially Western Siberia took up arms against Bolshevik misrule, a revolt fed by the onset in September 1920 of Red Army demobilization. The regime replied with notable brutality, but also major concessions. In 1921, the peasants forced an end to requisitioning upon Lenin and he, in turn, forced upon the 10th Party Congress a so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed peasants to sell much of what they grew. Confiscations did not cease: a state that was built upon the idea and practices of class warfare took time to adjust to a NEP. But the civil war outcome across much of Eurasia—the creation of the Bolshevik monopoly party-state—went hand in hand with a federation that acknowledged national identity and with legalized markets that acknowledged the parallel peasant revolution.
Kaleidoscopic does not begin to capture the civil war in Eurasia, particularly in the years 1920–21. Eurasia needs to be understood geographically. In Russian, as well as German and English, the term “Eurasia” had arisen in the late nineteenth century to denote Europe plus Asia, but in the early twentieth century its meaning had shifted to something distinct from either, something mystical.9 A tiny group of inventive intellectuals, who had been cast abroad by the revolution, and happened to be Ukrainian-Polish-Lithuanian in heritage, suddenly declared that the geographic and ethnic composition of the dissolved Russian empire had fused eastern Christianity and steppe influences into a transcendent new synthesis. “Russians and those who belong to the peoples of ‘the Russian world’ are neither Europeans nor Asiatics,” the exiles who had fled westward wrote in their manifesto Exodus to the East (1921). “Merging with the native element of culture and life which surrounds us, we are not ashamed to declare ourselves Eurasians.”10 Their Eurasia, ruled from Moscow, economically self-sufficient and politically demotic (of the people but not democratic), was allegedly some sort of symphonic unity.11 Nothing could have been further from the truth, as we shall see, and as Stalin fully recognized, because he was managing the diversity. Despite his admiration for the Great Russian nation and the Russian working class, and his persistent preference for centralized authority and party rule (class) over national interests, he recognized the necessity of fashioning appeals and institutions to accommodate different nations.12 Early on he made linguistic equality and nativization of administration the centerpiece of his views on the national question.13 Of course, the flip side of the Russian Communist party’s attempt to capture natives’ allegiance by embracing national states was that nationally inclined Communists in those states obtained vehicles for their aspirations. Had there really been a “Eurasian” synthesis the way the emigres fantasized, Stalin’s life would have been far simpler.
Russia’s civil war amounted to a kind of “voyages of discovery,” even if, unlike Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, the voyagers did not cross literal oceans. A bewildering cast of characters dance across this stage: the Polish marshal Józef Piłsudski and the Polish Bolshevik Józef Unszlicht; the mustachioed leader of the Red Cossacks Semyon Budyonny and the Armenian horseman Haik Bzhishkyan, known as Gai Dmitrievich Gai, who rode Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s flank; the two Tatar Muslim Communists Sahib Garei Said-Galiev and Mirsayet Soltanğaliev, who wanted to kill each other, and a Bashkir non-Communist, Akhmetzaki Validi, who blocked Soltanğaliev’s Tatar imperialism; Danzan and Sukhbaataar, two Mongol nationalists who cooperated until drawing daggers against each other; Mirza Kuchek Khan, the mild-mannered would-be liberator of Persia from foreign influence, and Reza Khan, the ruthless leader of a rightist putsch in Tehran; the Belorussian Jew Georgy Voldin, known as Safarov, a commissar in Turkestan, and the Latvian Jekabs Peterss, an
old-school Chekist in Turkestan who nearly destroyed the career of the great proletarian commander Mikhail Frunze; the peasant rebels’ leader Alexander Antonov and his Bolshevik nemesis Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, who had stormed the Winter Palace and arrested the Provisional Government but could not subdue Tambov peasant fury; the workerist Bolsheviks Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, who led a Communist party internal opposition; the nationally inclined Ukrainian Communist Mykola Skrypnyk and nationally inclined Georgian Communists Pilipe Makharadze and Budu Mdivani; the forgettable former tsarist major general Alexander Kozlovsky on the Kronstadt island fortress and the unforgettable former tsarist Cossack officer Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic German riding in the footsteps of Chinggis Khan. And yet the principal character, even more than Lenin, turned out to be the Georgian reincarnation of Stolypin in the national sphere. Stalin pursued a statist agenda that sought to combine retention of a grand unitary state with provision for national difference, and an iron fist for separatism, even though Stalin, both in appearance and fact, was a quintessential man of the borderlands.14
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