Stalin, Volume 1

by Stephen Kotkin

  Full speed ahead: On the northern Smolensk-Warsaw axis, on July 30, the Polish Revolutionary Committee set up HQ in a commandeered noble palace overlooking Białystok/Belostok, which happened to be a majority Yiddish-speaking city.100 Here the handful of imported Polish Bolsheviks pronounced themselves a “provisional” government for a socialist Poland.101 Local government and community organizations were dissolved. Factories, landlord property, and forests were declared “nationalized.” Shops and warehouses (mostly Jewish owned) were looted.102 “For your freedom and ours!” proclaimed the Polish Revolutionary Committee’s manifesto.103 On August 1, Tukhachevsky’s armies, slicing through Polish lines, seized Brest-Litovsk, richly symbolic and just 120 miles from Warsaw. His shock attacks, designed to exert psychological as well as military pressure, were encircling the enemy, with Gai bounding ahead on the right flank to annihilate any Polish soldiers in retreat. Gai’s cavalry soon dashed to the vicinity of Torun, northwest of Warsaw, a mere 150 miles from Berlin, but he was under orders not to cross the German border.104 At the same time, the advancing Red Army was forced to live off the land, and its ranks were diminishing. “Some were barefoot, others wore bast leggings, others some kind of rubber confections,” one observer commented of the Red rank-and-file. A parish priest in a Polish town, hardly pro-Soviet, observed of the Red Army invaders that “one’s heart ached at the sight of this famished and tattered mob.”105 Furthermore, once the stubborn Tukhachevsky fully acknowledged how badly his headlong charge had exposed his left flank, he and Sergei Kamenev belatedly sought to cover it by hastily shifting the southwestern front forces under Yegorov and Stalin northward, and transferring them to Tukhachevsky’s command.106 But the shift and transfer from the southwestern front to the western Polish front never took place.

  The Bolsheviks were divided about whether to press on while the battlefield was fast-moving. The British government was threatening military intervention or sanctions against the Bolsheviks and on August 2, the politburo (in Stalin’s absence) discussed the possibility of concluding a peace with “bourgeois Poland.” But for Lenin Poland as well as Crimea were of a piece—two toeholds for world imperialism, at the pinnacle of which he saw London. And so, it was now decided that the fight would continue, but the southwestern front should be divided, with a part diverting to the southern front (against Wrangel) and the rest folding into Tukhachevsky’s western front (against Piłsudski). Stalin and Yegorov resisted, however. On August 3, Lenin wrote to Stalin, “I do not fully understand why you are not satisfied with the division of the fronts. Communicate your reasons.” Lenin concluded by insisting on “the accelerated liquidation of Wrangel.”107 The next day Lenin asked for Stalin’s assessment. “I do not know, frankly, why you need my opinion,” Stalin replied testily (August 4), adding “Poland has been weakened and needs a breathing space,” which should not be afforded by peace talks. The offensive into Poland, though not his idea, was now on.108 A Central Committee plenum met on August 5 and again endorsed the politburo decision to continue the military operations; Sergei Kamenev passed on the orders.109

  But the key forces under Stalin that were ordered northward, Budyonny’s now battle-scarred First Cavalry Army, had been encircled near Lwów/Lviv, far from Warsaw. They broke out on August 6, but were said to be “collapsing from exhaustion, unable to move,” and sought several days’ respite to lick their wounds. Also, Budyonny intended to resume the siege on Lwów/Lviv and complete its capture.110 In addition, Yegorov and Stalin, who were supposed to fight Wrangel, simply did not want to give up their prize cavalry to Tukhachevsky.111 Lenin telegrammed Stalin on August 7 that “your successes against Wrangel will help remove the vacillation inside the Central Committee” about continuing military operations against Poland, but he added that “much depends on Warsaw and its fate.”112 Already on August 10, Tukhachevsky’s forces approached Warsaw’s outskirts.113 The imperative to send Budyonny to link up with Tukhachevsky seemed diminished. The next day, Lenin again telegrammed Stalin: “Our victory is great and will be greater still if we defeat Wrangel. . . . Make every effort to take all of the Crimea with an immediate blow whatever the cost. Everything depends on this.”114 On August 11 and 12, Kamenev repeated his orders to redirect southwestern front units from Lwów/Lviv toward Lublin.115 Stalin ignored both Sergei Kamenev’s orders (about Lublin) and Lenin’s instructions (about Wrangel), in apparently blatant insubordination.116

  What was Stalin thinking? Trotsky would speculate that because Tukhachevsky was going to capture Warsaw, Stalin at least wanted Lwów/Lviv, and therefore “was waging his own war.”117 Whatever Stalin’s vanity, however, not taking Lwów/Lviv, at that moment, seemed idiotic. Soviet reports had the western front march on Warsaw proceeding splendidly on its own, while the transfer orders for the southwestern front were close to pointless, given that it was near impossible for Budyonny or others to fight their way up near Warsaw in time to make a difference (the Reds now envisioned the Polish capital’s capture on or about August 16).118 Moreover, Lenin, had initially approved Stalin’s capture of Lwów/Lviv in order to acquire a revolutionary springboard. Still, on August 13, Sergei Kamenev repeated the transfer order.119 Stalin and Yegorov replied that their units were deep in battle for Lwów/Lviv and that altering their battle tasks was “already impossible.”120 On August 14, Stalin was summoned to Moscow to clear up the dispute face to face. (Budyonny would finally abandon the siege of Lwów/Lviv, reluctantly, on August 20—a strategic blunder—only to be shifted one direction one day, another direction the next.)121

  But here was the most intriguing piece of all: Tukhachevsky was ordered not to attack Warsaw directly, but to circle around to its northwest, partly in order to block the Entente from supplying the Poles from Danzig and the Polish Corridor, but mainly to turn those territories over to Germany. Politically, Germany vacillated between loathing Communism versus looking for international aid against Poland. One Polish official observed that the German government “found it impossible to reconcile its foreign policy, which demanded the annihilation of Poland, with its domestic policy, which was very largely directed by the fear of a Spartacist revolution.”122 In fact, the German government was committed to border revisionism, but only by peaceful means; the Red Army, of all instruments, was voluntarily going to restore Germany’s 1914 borders—in order to strike a death blow at the Versailles Order. Frontline Red commanders even told German observers they were prepared to march with Germany on France.123

  What was Lenin thinking? All during the key decision making regarding operations in Poland, from July 19 through August 7, 1920, Lenin had been exultantly preoccupied with the Second Congress of the Communist International, which had drawn more than 200 attendees, far more than the pitiful founding congress back in March 1919.124 Arriving in Petrograd, site of the first socialist breakthrough, they were treated to a sumptuous meal in Smolny’s Great Hall, participated in a march with workers, then, at the former stock exchange, watched a costume drama performed by a cast of thousands titled Spectacle of the Two Worlds. Lenin in his opening speech prophesied that the Versailles Treaty would meet the same fate as Brest-Litovsk.125 When the delegates traveled to Moscow, to continue, the Bolshevik authorities assembled what they claimed were 250,000 workers in the Red capital to greet them (workers were granted paid time off to appear, followed by minibanquets in canteens).126 The proceedings resumed in the former Vladimir’s Hall, a throne room of the medieval Kremlin. (The delegates were housed at the Delovoi Dvor, a former Moscow merchant hotel emporium.) Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which criticized almost all non-Bolshevik socialists and was written in April 1920, came out in June in Russian and, in July, in German, English, and French; each delegate received a copy. More immediately, the congress sessions transpired under an oversized map of Poland on which Red Army advances were recorded as each news flash arrived. This was the context in which Lenin had enthused to Stalin, in the telegram of July 23 about going beyond P
oland, gushing that “the situation in the Comintern is superb.”127

  The Comintern Congress came on the heels of mass demonstrations against colonialism in Korea and China and although the largest non-Russian delegations were from Germany, Italy, and France, compared with the First Comintern Congress, whose meager Asian representation had included only a few Chinese and Korean emigres, the Second Congress had at least 30 Asian delegates. Lenin stressed that “the whole world is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and a very small number of oppressor nations that are enormously rich and strong in the military sense,” and that Soviet Russia was leading this struggle. What he did not say outright at the Comintern Congress was that Germany—his ally since 1917—was supposed to help smash world imperialism and Versailles.

  Here was the source of Tukhachevsky’s harebrained military maneuver to regain Danzig and the Corridor for Germany. Egged on by Lenin, Tukhachevsky’s troops north of Warsaw entered a void, without reserves, and with a still utterly exposed left flank (the one closest to Warsaw). He had to assume, or hope, that the retreating Piłsudski would not manage to regroup. Piłsudski had pulled back all Polish forces to the very gates of Warsaw, facilitating Tukhachevsky’s heady advance, but also buying time. Still, the Polish marshal enjoyed nothing of his subsequent prestige, having led his pre-1914 political party to division, his legions in the Great War to internment, and his invasion of Ukraine to an invasion of Poland. The Entente had given him up for a political and military corpse—just as Lenin and Tukhachevsky did. But on the very morning of the day the Bolsheviks expected Warsaw to fall (August 16), Piłsudski launched a counteroffensive: five divisions shot through a nearly 100-mile gap on Tukhachevsky’s left wing, advancing 40 miles in twenty-four hours without encountering the Red Army. Piłsudski, beginning to suspect a trap, toured the front in his car in search of the enemy. By nightfall, the Poles, deep in Tukhachevsky’s rear, had seized the heavy Soviet guns that were being moved up to hammer Warsaw.

  Shock! As late as August 17, an oblivious Pravda was still reporting that “Polish white troops flee backward under the strikes of the Worker-Peasant fist.” That same day, Stalin, in Moscow as a result of his recall from Kharkov, requested to be relieved of all his military duties. Tukhachevsky, at HQ in Minsk, belatedly became aware of the Polish breach of his left wing and ordered a retreat. “Years on he would say of that day that he had aged ten years,” one contemporary observed.128 Sergei Kamenev called Minsk just after midnight on August 18–19, demanding to know why the Polish counterattack had come as such a surprise, showing his own profound ignorance.129 On August 19, Lenin desperately begged Radek, who had just been added to the Polish Revolutionary Committee “government” preparing for installation in Warsaw, to “go directly to Dzierzynski and insist that the gentry and the kulaks are destroyed ruthlessly and rather more quickly and energetically,” and “that the peasants are helped effectively to take over estate land and forests.”130 Already the next day, however, Lenin informed Lev Kamenev in London, “It is unlikely that we will soon take Warsaw.”131 Pravda (August 21) lamented: “Just a week ago we had brilliant reports from the Polish front.” Kamenev responded that “the policy of the bayonet, as usual, has broken down ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances’”—an undisguised rebuke of Lenin.132

  Piłsudski scored a spectacular victory, the “miracle on the Vistula.” In the ensuing rout retreat, Tukhachevsky lost three of his five armies, one to annihilation and two to flight; the other two were severely maimed.133 It was a staggering defeat, the likes of which often end military careers. Gai fled with his celebrated cavalry into German East Prussia, where they were disarmed and arrested.134 Finger-pointing was inevitable. Because the total strength of the Red Army in the final assault on Warsaw had been 137,000, and Red operations in Crimea and Lwów/Lvov combined had numbered 148,000, those troops were viewed as the decisive missing factor. And Yegorov and Stalin had failed to transfer them.135 Never mind that the transfer of Budyonny’s cavalry in time was no simple task. An order had been given. On September 1, 1920, the politburo accepted Stalin’s resignation from his military posts.136 The way was open to scapegoat his insubordination. And Piłsudski’s army was still on its eastward march.

  PEOPLES OF THE EAST

  In the South Caucasus (known in Russian as Transcaucasia), following the simultaneous breakup of the Ottoman and Russian empires (and, in the case of Armenia, following military clashes with the Ottomans), eastern Armenia, northern Azerbaijan, and Georgia emerged as independent states. But on April 27, 1920, without a fight, the Bolshevik Red Army captured Baku, capital of the Musavat or nationalist Azerbaijan government, whose flag combined blue for Turkic civilization, green for Islam, and red for European socialism. The Georgian Bolshevik Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze (the main political commissar) and none other than Tukhachevsky (the military commander) had found an opportune moment to attack when the Azerbaijanis decided to send 20,000 units of their 30,000-troop army to respond to communal clashes between Armenians and Azeris in a disputed mountain region known as Karabakh.137 Additionally, Baku—uniquely in Muslim-populated areas—had a substantial population of industrial workers, some of whom belonged to the Bolshevik party and welcomed a Red invasion. Indeed, Baku, in one of the instances when Stalin and Trotsky agreed, became a springboard. At dawn on May 18, 1920, a Soviet naval force of perhaps thirteen gunboats, which amalgamated Soviet sailors, Soviet Azerbaijan infantry and cavalry, and ethnic Iranian longshoremen from Baku, invaded Iran, in pursuit of Russian ships and ammunition formerly controlled by the White military leader Denikin and now in the hands of a British military occupation of Iran.138

  The landing was led by Fyodor Raskolnikov as well as Orjonikidze, who reasoned the British might try to reequip the ships and send them back into action against the Reds. But now the British military handed everything over and retreated inland toward Tehran. “English colonial policy was confronted with the real forces of the Workers’ State at Anzali and experienced a defeat,” wrote the Soviet journalist Larissa Reisner, who was married to Raskolnikov.139 On May 24, Mirza Kuchek Khan (b. 1880), leader of a long-standing anticolonial and constitutionalist movement in northern Iran’s Gilan forest, who opposed both Russian and British involvement, was persuaded to take advantage of the Red incursion and, citing the Bolshevik claim to be anti-imperialist, declared himself head of a Persian Soviet Socialist Republic in Gilan province.140 Lev Karakhan, a foreign affairs official accompanying the invasion force, telegrammed Moscow that “the toilers and the bourgeois democrats should be made to unite in the name of Persia’s liberty and be instigated to rise up against the British and expel them from the country,” though he cautioned against full Sovietization given the underdevelopment.141 But Georgy Chicherin, foreign affairs commissar, complained bitterly to Lenin, dismissing the episode as “Stalin’s Gilan republic.”142

  Kuchek’s coalition—ultraleftists and constitutionalists, anarchists and Kurdish chieftains, anti-imperialists and Russians—was unstable, and he abjured the role of Lenin-style autocrat; in fact, he departed the province’s capital (Resht) back to the forest in July 1920, allowing Soviet operatives and Iranian Communists to take over.143 Bolsheviks in Iran contemplated combining their motley 1,500-person guerilla force of Iranian forest partisans, Azerbaijanis from both sides of the border, Kurds, and Armenians with Red Army reinforcements in a march on Tehran. This never came to pass, owing to Iranian counterforces. But flush with success in northern Iran, Orjonikidze helped suggest and plan, beginning in late July 1920, what would be a weeklong Congress of the Peoples of the East to take place in Baku, now the Caspian showcase for Moscow’s appeal to Muslims.144

  The Congress of the Peoples of the East, the largest ever gathering under the Comintern aegis, opened on September 1, 1920, not long after the Bolshevik debacle in the West against Poland. The Comintern aimed the gathering at the “enslaved masses’” of Turkey, Armenia, and Persia, and as if on cue, the Augu
st 20, 1920, Treaty of Sevres that the Entente imposed on the defeated Ottoman empire showcased the British and French diktat over the Near East: Entente oil and commercial concessions in Ottoman lands were confirmed, German property there was taken by the Entente, and the partitioning of Ottoman lands—one of the Entente’s secret war aims—was begun with the declaration of mandates and protectorates. In Baku, meanwhile, nearly 1,900 delegates massed, about 60 of whom were women; the largest contingents were Turkic and Persian speakers, followed by Armenians and Russians, then Georgians. Delegations also arrived from India (15 attendees) and China (8). A substantial number, perhaps a majority of the attendees, were not Communists but radical nationalists.145 The congress’s manifesto demanded “liberation of all humanity from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery.”146 Russian speeches were translated into Azerbaijani Turkish and Persian instantaneously. Karl Radek, the Hungarian exile Bela Kun, and the American John Reed gave speeches, but the featured orator was Zinoviev, Comintern chairman. “Brothers,” he thundered, “we summon you to a holy war, in the first place against British imperialism!” (Tumultuous applause, prolonged shouts of “Hurrah.” Members of the Congress stand up, brandishing their weapons. The speaker is unable to continue for some time. All the delegates stand up and applaud. Shouts of “We swear it.”)147

  Comintern policy in fact was divided over the colonial world. Lenin had argued that given the limited size of the colonial proletariat, Communist parties there needed to enter coalitions with bourgeois nationalists in order to emancipate colonial peoples from imperialist powers. But others, such as Manabendra Nath Roy, from Bengal, insisted that Communists in colonial settings should prepare to seize power themselves. Some delegates thought the first strategy did not preclude a shift to the latter at the opportune moment.148 But Roy refused to attend the Baku congress, dismissing it as “Zinoviev’s circus.”149