Frunze insisted that the authorities in Tashkent had a list of all the Bukharan valuables he had confiscated and put on his train, and that Peterss had a copy. It took Moscow party secretary Vyacheslav Molotov’s handiwork to kill the revolutionary tribunal that Peterss had raised by burying the matter in the party’s Central Control Commission. Nonetheless, Dzierzynski would ask one of his most trusted operatives “to put together a list, secretly, not alarming anyone, of where and how (to whom and how much) the Bukharan emir’s gold was distributed.”188 The results remain unknown.
A Turkestan “Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic” was ceremoniously proclaimed on September 24, 1920.189 A Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, paired with Khorezm, followed on October 8. Stalin had played next to no role in these Turkestan events—but soon his actions would be decisive for Central Asia’s fate. In the meantime, an uncanny number of high officials in his future personal dictatorship had launched or furthered their careers in the Turkestan conquests. Valerian Kuibyshev, for example, the future head of the party Control Commission under Stalin, was chairman of the Turkestan commission in spring-summer 1920, working to implant Bolshevik rule more deeply and plan the emirate conquests. Boki, the future head of the key secret cipher department under Stalin, served alongside Frunze. In the Turkestan Army’s political directorate, an unknown young operative headed the registration-information department—Alexander Poskryobyshev, Stalin’s future top aide, who would man the inner workings of the dictatorship for decades. Another young Communist operative, Lazar Kaganovich, was dispatched as a high-level party apparatchik official to Turkestan in September 1920.190 That same month, Grigory Sokolnikov (aka Girsh Briliant) replaced Frunze as the head of the Turkestan front and the Communist party Turkestan bureau. In Tashkent, Sokolnikov went on to introduce a local monetary reform, getting rid of the worthless local currency, presaging a countrywide monetary reform he would oversee as future finance commissar under Stalin in Moscow. In Turkestan, Sokolnikov also repealed requisitioning in favor of a tax in kind—what would be called, in Moscow, the New Economic Policy. Turkestan was a policy laboratory, and an Ark for Bolshevik careers.
NO GLORY
Lost wars always ripple through political systems. With the defeat in the Polish war still raw, Lenin delivered a rambling report on it at the opening of the 9th party conference in Moscow on September 22, 1920, to 241 delegates (116 with voting rights). He averred that because the Reds had defeated the White armies, those stooges of the Entente, “the defensive period of the war with worldwide imperialism was over, and we could, and had an obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war.” The “probe with bayonets” had been intended to reveal if revolution had genuinely ripened in Poland, “the center of the entire current system of international imperialism,” as well as in Germany, but as it happened, “readiness was slight.” Nonetheless, Lenin happily concluded that “we have already undermined the Versailles Treaty, and we will smash it at the first convenient opportunity,” because “despite the complete failure in the first instance, our first defeat, we will keep shifting from a defensive to an offensive policy over and over again until we finish all of them off for good.”191 Lenin’s political report would not even be voted upon (a first at a party gathering since the assumption of power), and he would not even bother to attend the closing session (September 25).192 Pravda’s account of Lenin’s September 22 speech omitted talk of “an offensive war” or of having tried to “Sovietize Poland,” to say nothing of “catastrophic,” “gigantic,” “unheard-of defeat.”193 In the conference discussion, Radek expressly blamed Lenin, prompting others to do so as well. It fell to Stalin to defend the Central Committee’s revolutionism. Suddenly, Trotsky laced into Stalin for having misled the Central Committee—in reporting that the Polish army in retreat had lost all fighting capacity—and for sabotaging the campaign by failing to implement troop transfer orders. Lenin piled on, attacking his Georgian protégé viciously.
On the second day (September 23), Stalin insisted on replying to Trotsky and Lenin, and divulged to the conference that he had voiced doubts about a campaign into Poland.194 In truth, the march on Warsaw had been the work of Tukhachevsky and Sergei Kamenev. But of course Lenin was the prime mover behind the debacle, and now he pulled the rug out from under Stalin, shifting the blame from his own too-optimistic reading of the revolutionary situation to the excessive pace of the military advance.195 In fact, had Tukhachevsky made it to Warsaw just three days earlier, his mad-dash battle plan might have caught the Polish camp in disarray.196 But what would Warsaw’s capture have brought?197 Tukhachevsky faced no greater prospect of holding on to Warsaw than Piłsudski had had of holding on to Kiev. The Red Army had known beforehand that it could not have garrisoned the whole land and had not intended to, but Lenin’s justification for the war—to spark a Polish worker uprising—had failed.198 The Reds had picked up very few deserters from the Polish side; even ethnic Ukrainians and Belorussians did not join the Red side in numbers. As for the Polish Communist party, its membership was minuscule, and it had to compete for worker allegiance—to say nothing of the alliance of the majority peasants—with the Jewish Bund, the Poale Zion, the Social Democrats, and Poland’s large self-standing trade union movement.199 Grassroots Polish Revolutionary Committees were established only in the Białystok/Belostok region, and existed for less than a month.200 Even the head of the central Polish Revolutionary Committee in Białystok/Belostok had warned against hoping to instigate a workers revolution in Poland, given national solidarities.201 Lenin had ignored their warnings.
Privately at least, Lenin could show contrition.202 But Tukhachevsky would remain unrepentant years on.203 “The struggle between capitalist Poland and the Soviet proletarian revolution was developing on a European scale,” he would allege in lectures on the war, one section of which bore the title “Revolution from Abroad [izvne].” “All the verbiage about the awakening of national sentiment in the Polish working class in connection with our offensive is merely due to our defeat. . . . To export revolution was a possibility. Capitalist Europe was shaken to its foundations, and but for our strategic errors and our defeat in the field, the Polish War might have become the link between the October Revolution of 1917 and the revolution in Western Europe.”204 Tukhachevsky would avoid blaming Stalin by name.205 But others, notably Boris Shaposhnikov, a tsarist staff officer who soon became Red chief of staff, would expressly blame the southwestern front—Yegorov and Stalin—for going “against the reciprocity of the two fronts.”206
So there it was: Lenin madly miscalculating; the tsarist aristocrat Tukhachevsky helping blunder Soviet Russia into an offensive war to ignite “revolution from abroad,” then claiming years later it had not been a blunder; and the proletarian Stalin, having warned against such adventurism, scapegoated for insubordination.207
Back on the battlefield, the Soviets got lucky. Polish forces recaptured Wilno, Piłsudski’s hometown, on October 7, 1920, but Tukhachevsky managed to stabilize the Red retreat at the site of Great War trenches (“attacking Warsaw, I retreated to Minsk,” he later noted).208 The exhausted sides agreed to an armistice in Riga on October 12, 1920 (to take effect on the eighteenth), with a border about 125 miles east of the Curzon Line. That same day, Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, was in Halle, Germany, attending the special Congress of the Independent Social Democrat Party, aiming to split them and annex their left wing to the small party of German Communists. At this time there were 103 Independent Social Democrats in the Reichstag, as against 278 Social Democrats and 2 Communists. Zinoviev was vigorously rebutted by Rudolf Hilferding and Lenin’s old Menshevik rival Martov, but in a hall decorated with Soviet emblems, the vote went Moscow’s way.209 “We go forward to the complete elimination of money,” Zinoviev explained. “We pay wages in commodities. We introduce trolleys without fares. We have free public schools, free, if temporarily poor, meals, rent-free apartments, free lighting. We are realizing
all this very slowly, under the most difficult conditions. We have to fight ceaselessly, but we have a way out, a plan.”210 The German authorities, incredibly, had granted Zinoviev a visa but now promptly deported him. By December, however, around 300,000 of the 890,000 Independent Social Democrats would join the German Communists, bringing the latter to 350,000.211 Suddenly, there was a mass Communist party in the heart of Europe.212 At the same time, German Social Democracy had been profoundly weakened, with consequences to follow.
With Romania, there were no further immediate military clashes, but on October 28, 1920, in Bucharest, the Entente powers recognized Greater Romania’s annexation of Bessarabia; Soviet Russia rejected the treaty and called for a plebiscite, a demand that was ignored.213
Against the Poles the Reds lost some 25,000 dead and seriously wounded; the Poles, perhaps 4,500 dead, 22,000 wounded, and 10,000 missing.214 Another 146,000 Red Army men fell prisoner in Poland and Germany; how many of them died in Polish captivity remains a matter of dispute, perhaps 16,000 to 18,000 (1,000 refused to return). Of the 60,000 Polish POWs in Soviet Russia, about half returned alive (some 2,000 refused to return).215 Lenin tried to take solace in the claim that “without having gained an international victory, which we consider the only sure victory, we have won the ability to exist side by side with capitalist powers.”216 Of course, nothing like that had been won. As for Piłsudski—who after so many victims, had also ended up in roughly the same place he had been before his invasion of Ukraine—he dismissed the campaign in which tens of thousands of people died and were maimed as “a kind of children’s scuffle.”217
The Red Army, meanwhile, without waiting for spring, transferred large formations from the Polish front southward, to go up against Wrangel. On November 7, 1920, the third anniversary of the revolution, 135,000 troops overseen by Mikhail Frunze attacked the Crimean peninsula in a complex maneuver. “Today, we can celebrate our victory,” Lenin said at the anniversary celebration in the Bolshoi.218 Soon enough, indeed, Wrangel ordered a total evacuation toward the Turkish Straits and Constantinople. Between November 13 and 16, from Sevastopol, Yalta, and other Crimean ports, 126 ships carrying almost 150,000 soldiers, family members, and other civilians departed Russia; Wrangel left aboard the General Kornilov.219 The Cheka rampaged among those who stayed behind, executing thousands, including women.220 And so, not long after “White” Poland’s ambitions to displace Soviet Russia as the great power in Eastern Europe had been checked, the Whites inside Russia had been definitively vanquished. There was no glory for Stalin: he had originally been assigned Wrangel’s destruction, but had resigned his military posts over the Polish campaign.
WINTER OF DISCONTENT (1920-21)
The Whites in many ways served as unwitting Bolshevik handmaidens by alienating the peasants even more, but once the Whites had ceased to be a battlefield threat in 1920, the Bolsheviks were left face to face with the angry majority of the populace. Paradoxically, as one historian observed, “the conclusion of peace with Poland and the elimination of Wrangel were psychologically disadvantageous, from the standpoint of the Communists.”221 These developments removed the immediate threat while exposing the regime’s aggressive incompetence. Thus, whereas the crisis of 1918 had been overcome by mobilization for civil war, and the battlefield crises of 1919–20 had been met largely thanks to White political failures, a new, and in many ways deeper, crisis broke out that fall-winter of 1920–21: Soviet Russia’s people were not only freezing, starving, and disease ridden, but they were also embittered. Like all extreme violence, war, and particularly civil war, transforms individual choices and behavior, such that notions of political “support,” adapted from peacetime circumstances, cannot be applied so easily.222 But the deprivation and to an extent the disillusionment may have been even worse than they had been four years earlier under Nicholas II, on the eve of the February Revolution.
Peasants were invaded from all sides and compelled to choose allegiances, at least until armies moved on. “The Whites would come and go, and the Reds, and many others without any color,” as the writer Viktor Shklovsky poetically recapped.223 Of course, peasants well understood the Whites wanted to restore the old barons and denied national difference, but the peasants also detested Bolshevism’s conscription and forced grain requisitions. Across Eurasia already in mid-1918 peasant resistance to Bolshevik grain seizures had emerged on a wide scale.224 Requisitioning detachments began to use not just rifles but machine guns and, in some cases, bombs. Still, peasants fought back. “Many of the villages are now well armed, and seldom does a grain expedition end without victims,” one newspaper reported. “A band of hungry ‘partisans’ had attacked a food train,” Pravda reported of Ufa in 1918. “They first tore up the tracks and then opened fire on the train guard.”225 The obvious alternative would have been to allow a market-incentive system that encouraged peasants to solve the food supply crisis by paying a fixed tax and keeping the profits from their hard work. But when peasants demanded free trade, Bolshevik agents perceived darkest ignorance.226 Still, the peasants kept reminding everyone that they had made their own revolution.
In August 1920—while Lenin was fantasizing about overturning the entire Versailles Order through conquest of Poland, and Tukhachevsky lost his army in a void north of Warsaw—a peasant rebellion had begun in Tambov, 350 miles southeast of Moscow. It started with just a few rebels who killed some members of a requisition squad, then beat back attempted Bolshevik reprisals; by fall 1920, local rebel forces mushroomed to 8,000. Their leader, Alexander Antonov (b. 1889), had conducted expropriations in prerevolutionary days to fund the Socialist Revolutionary Party (he was caught and got hard labor in Siberia); under Bolshevik tyranny, he reverted to underground terrorism. Many of the peasant rebels had served in the tsarist army or the Red Army, from which they deserted (the troops garrisoned in small towns might as well have been prisoners of war, so meagerly were they provisioned). The rebels formed a cross-village network they called the Union of the Toiling Peasantry, infiltrated the Tambov Cheka, employed guerilla tactics against regime personnel and installations, sometimes wearing Red Army uniforms, and developed an operational headquarters staffed by people chosen in secret ballot, with excellent reconnaissance and a strong agitation department. A congress of Tambov rebels formally abolished Bolshevik authority, calling for the “victory of the genuine socialist revolution,” with unmolested peasant land ownership.227 Perhaps the single most interesting aspect of the Tambov peasants’ demands was for “the political equality of all without regard to class.”228 The regime only faintly understood what was going on. Supreme Commander Sergei Kamenev had reported to the government that thousands of starving peasants in Tambov, as well as Voronezh and Saratov provinces, were pleading with local authorities for seed grain from grain-collecting stations. In some cases, Kamenev reported, “the crowds were being shot with machine guns.”229 Notwithstanding such moments of comprehension as Kamenev displayed, the scope of the rural catastrophe was still clouded in Moscow by class-war idées fixes as the regime reflexively labeled the peasants’ legitimate grievances “an uprising of kulaks, bandits, and deserters.”
A plenipotentiary, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko—who in 1917 led the storming of the Winter Palace—had arrived in February 1921 to overhaul the demoralized local Cheka and intensify efforts to encircle and annihilate the peasant army, but repression alone was not going to rescue the situation. The harvest was turning out to be poor, and political disturbances had already forced the food supply commissariat to “suspend” grain procurements in thirteen provinces.230 On February 9 came reports of yet another immense wave of armed unrest in rural Siberia, cutting off rail links and food shipments.231 Four days later, a Cheka team noted of Tambov that “the current peasant uprisings differ from the previous ones in that they have a political program, organization, and a plan.”232 Vasily Ulrich, a top official of the deadly Revolutionary Tribunal dispatched to Tambov in early 1921, reported to Moscow r
egarding the hated grain detachments that “there is nothing more they can achieve other than to arouse more animosity and provoke more bursts of rebellion.” No softie, Ulrich nonetheless recommended that peasants who demonstrated loyalty to the Soviet regime be rewarded, in order to “silence those Socialist Revolutionary agitators who claim that Soviet power only takes from the peasant.”233 As a result, that February 1921 in Tambov the policy of obligatory grain quotas to be delivered at fixed prices was replaced by a tax-in-kind that allowed the peasants to retain much of their grain for sale—a very significant concession, so far in one province.234
“SOVIETS WITHOUT PARTIES”
Rural rebellion was paralleled by significant urban strikes.235 In shops there were just one-fifth the consumer goods that had been available in 1913. Workers who had remained in Petrograd were being press-ganged into unremunerated extra “labor duties” [povinnost’]. Then, on February 12, 1921, the authorities announced the temporary closing of 93 factories, including even the famous Putilov Works, for lack of fuel, threatening nearly 30,000 workers with unemployment and the complete loss of rations (however meager).236 When many of the plants reopened ten days later, work collectives walked out on strike, openly demanding an end to Communist dictatorship and the return to soviets with genuinely free elections.237 Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary groups issued their own anti-Bolshevik proclamations; the Cheka wrongly blamed the non-Bolshevik socialists for inciting the strikes, as if the workers themselves were not capable of opposing the regime’s oppressive policies and failures. On February 24, as crowds of several thousand started to appear in the streets, Grigory Zinoviev, Petrograd party boss, and the Petrograd Cheka arrested non-Bolshevik socialists en masse (some 300 Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries), sent young military student cadets to disperse the marches with warning shots fired into the air, and proclaimed martial law—just as tsarist General Khabalov had done under Nicholas II in the same city, four years earlier almost to the day. The striking workers were locked out. At the same time, however, extra rations were suddenly released to the city, and the detachments blocking travel to and from the countryside for food were removed. Still, word of the martial law, on top of rumors of bloodshed, reached the nearby Kronstadt fortress, twenty miles from Petrograd on an island in the Gulf of Finland and the HQ of the Baltic fleet.238
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