The 10th Party Congress was of monumental significance across the board, including for its glimpses of Stalin’s aggrandizement. He could not hope to achieve the high profile that Trotsky commanded at the Party Congress, but he grasped the nettle of one of the most consequential issues before the party—the ambiguous relations among the various Soviet republics—and showed himself ready to force those relations toward a more integrated structure. Stalin also hewed closely to Lenin politically on the big issue of trade unions and, overall, bested his rival Trotsky organizationally. When Lenin wrote up the slate for the new Central Committee, he denied several Trotsky supporters nomination for reelection: Ivan Smirnov, Nikolai Krestinsky, Leonid Serebryakov, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky. They were replaced by Molotov, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, Hryhory “Grigory” Petrovsky—all people congenial to Lenin, but also very close to Stalin. Sergei Kirov, Valerian Kuibyshev, and Vlas Chubar, similarly close to Stalin, became candidate members of the Central Committee. When the new Central Committee convened right after the congress, it would elect a politburo of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, with Molotov now listed as “responsible secretary,” a potential linchpin functionary.283 Thanks to Trotsky’s relentless propensity to polemicize and exasperate, Lenin was helping to form an anti-Trotsky faction at the pinnacle of power that would fall into Stalin’s hands. Insiders on the upper rungs of the regime were using the expression “Stalin faction” (stalinisty) as a contrast to the “Trotsky faction” (trotskisty).284
WHITE GUARDS, IMPERIALISTS, SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES
All of this was worlds away from the Kronstadt sailors. By the time the Party Congress was winding down, their non-party “Kronstadt republic” had turned fifteen days old. The regime mobilized and armed around 1,000 armed Communists from several provinces and sent a special train from Moscow with more than 200 Party Congress delegates led by Voroshilov, part of a new counterinsurgency force of 24,000.285 Also, rumors reached the mobilized delegates that hundreds of military-school cadets trying to storm the fortress had died on the ice. There was fear.286 On March 16, the day the “party unity” resolution was being passed, Tukhachevsky launched a second crackdown with an artillery bombardment, followed by a furious infantry assault. After intense street fighting, the town fell to regime forces by the morning of March 18. Several days earlier the sailors’ leadership had requested asylum from the Finnish government, and—despite a warning to Helsinki from Trotsky conveyed by Chicherin—received a quick affirmative response, allowing 8,000 rebel sailors to escape by ship.287 How many Kronstadters perished in the fighting remains unknown.288 The Red Army lost 1,200 dead; two congress delegates were killed and 23 wounded.289 The Finnish and Soviet governments shared responsibility for removal of the corpses from the ice surface of the frozen Gulf of Finland. A revolutionary tribunal on Kronstadt would issue 2,103 death sentences; another 6,459 sailors got terms in labor camps.
On March 18, the Bolsheviks in Moscow celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Commune—whose suppression had led to perhaps 30,000 immediate executions. Whether anyone remarked upon the irony remains unknown.290
A few days later at a politburo session, Lenin exchanged private notes with Trotsky about abolishing the Baltic fleet, a gluttonous consumer of fuel and food and a likely political nuisance in future; Trotsky defended the need for a navy.291
On the very day Kronstadt’s destruction began (March 16, 1921), after protracted negotiations, Soviet Russia and Britain signed a trade agreement.292 The Soviets had shown some diplomatic muscle. Reza Khan in Persia, who had seized power in Tehran in a putsch on February 21, 1921, with the aid of White Cossack troops and British assistance, promptly denounced the existing Anglo-Persian Treaty and signed a Soviet-Persian Treaty of Friendship, which specified both Soviet and British troop withdrawals. Independent Afghanistan signed a treaty with Soviet Russia, too, as insurance against a renewed British invasion. And Ataturk’s Turkey began talks with the Soviets, which would result in a pact three weeks later.293 All three treaties—Persia (February 26), Afghanistan (February 28), and Turkey (March 16)—conveyed diplomatic recognition on Soviet Russia. British intelligence employed one of the leading cyptanalysts of tsarist Russian and could read Moscow’s codes, so that when Chicherin denied Soviet involvement in Persia, Britain knew he was lying. Lenin was intercepted saying, “That swine Lloyd George has no scruples of shame in the way he deceives. Don’t believe a word he says. . . .”294 Nonetheless, the British cabinet had concluded by mid-March that “despite the events in Russia”—Kronstadt, Tambov—“the position of the Soviet government without any qualification is firm and stable.”295 Moscow took the preliminary trade deal as de facto political recognition by the leading imperialist power. British goods, too, were coveted to help get peasants in Soviet Russia to sell their grain (so there would be something to buy).296
Following the British trade agreement, on March 18, the Soviets finally signed a peace treaty with Poland in Riga, which also entailed diplomatic recognition.297 The Treaty of Riga did not, however, resolve the historic or the more recent Russian-Polish grievances or alter their aspirations regarding Eastern Europe.298
Eight countries now recognized the existence of Soviet Russia in the international state system: Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. The RSFSR also had treaty relations with other Soviet Socialist Republics, such as Ukraine. German diplomatic recognition would come soon, but in the meantime, Zinoviev and Bukharin in the Comintern, egged on by the Hungarian Bela Kun, who was resident in Germany on behalf of the Comintern, had decided to play with fire: On March 21, 1921, German Communists were spurred to undertake a lunatic seizure of power.299 The insurrection was smashed.300 Some 4,000 sentences were handed down in newly established special courts. German Communist party membership fell by almost half to 180,000. The Bolsheviks in Moscow blamed the fiasco on “counterrevolutionaries,” including the German Social Democrat Hilferding, who months before had struggled in vain against Zinoviev’s call for the desertion of the Independent Social Democrats to the German Communists.301 The Comintern Congress would conclude on July 12 in the full subordination of the (for now) crippled German Communist party to the Russian.302
Enemies became even more a Bolshevik obsession. Lenin had told the 10th Party Congress that the Kronstadt revolt was led by White generals and SRs and that “this petit-bourgeois counter-revolution is doubtless more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich, and Kolchak taken together, because we are dealing with a country in which the proletariat is a minority.”303 The centerpiece of counterrevolution charges against the sailors became the one tsarist major general on the island, Alexander Kozlovsky, a distinguished staff officer and artillery specialist serving the Reds, whom Baltic fleet commander Fyodor Raskolnikov had awarded a watch “for courage and feat of arms in the battle against Yudenich.”304 The Cheka had correctly reported that Major General Kozlovsky was not a member of the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee yet still insisted, absurdly, that “he is the main leader of the movement.”305 Kozlovsky escaped to Finland (where he became a Russian-language teacher in Vyborg). Soon Lenin would warn of the presence of 700,000 Russian emigres in Europe and of how “no country in Europe was without some White Guard elements.”306 The Bolsheviks, of course, were the ones who had 75,000 former tsarist officers in their ranks, including hundreds of former tsarist generals, and who had restored capitalist free trade. The Cheka proved unable to stage a large show trial of Socialist Revolutionaries and “Entente spies” over Kronstadt.307 Nonetheless, Dzierzynski concluded in a secret internal assessment that “while Soviet Russia remains an isolated hearth of communist revolution and is in capitalist encirclement, she will need to use the iron hand to put down White-Guard escapades.”308
Menshevik leader Yuly Martov, a cofounder with Lenin of the original Russian Marxist emigre broadsheet Spark, had left Russia in October 1920 to attend the fateful Halle confer
ence of German leftists and had not been permitted to return; he was mortally ill and would soon repair to a Black Forest sanitorium, but he continued his withering criticism in a new emigre newspaper he founded in early 1921, Socialist Herald. Martov underscored how Lenin’s foolhardy attempted sovietization of Poland had resulted in the “surrendering to Polish imperialism of a number of non-Polish territories, against the interests of the Russian laboring classes.”309 He tore into Lenin over Kronstadt as well.310 Above all, he pointed out that the Mensheviks had been right all along—socialist revolution in Russia had been premature, as demonstrated by Lenin’s mistakes, recourse to political repression, and policy shifts over the peasantry.311 And yet, Martov was back in exile, while Lenin sat in the Kremlin. “Anyone who wants to play at parliamentarism, at Constituent Assemblies, at non-party conferences, go abroad to Martov,” Lenin thundered in April 1921 in his pamphlet On the Tax in Kind. “We are going to keep the Mensheviks and SR—both open ones and those disguised as ‘nonparty’—in jail.”312
In Tambov, meanwhile, even after the tax-in-kind concession had been granted, the peasant rebels had not desisted, employing conscription and seeking new adherents by crossing into neighboring provinces (Saratov, Voronezh), while raiding arms depots. They seized grain and livestock, as well as people, and increased their forces to more than 20,000.313 In April 1921, the beefed-up partisans managed to defeat the Red Army in a number of battles. Plenipotentiary Antonov-Ovseyenko, in his reports, beseeched Moscow for more troops. Yefraim Sklyansky advised Lenin on April 26 “to send Tukhachevsky to crush the Tambov uprising”; Lenin concurred.314 Tukhachevsky’s failure to capture Warsaw had not diminished him.315 The politburo gave him a month to “liquidate” the Tambov rebellion.316 He set up HQ at a gunpowder plant just outside Tambov on May 6, and announced preparations for a “shock campaign” of clear-and-hold pacification, employing mobile forces to exterminate the rebels, then infantry to occupy cleared villages so as to deny sanctuary. More than 100,000 mostly urban Red Army troops were deployed, along with special Cheka detachments. After public executions, hostage taking, and conspicuous deportations of entire villages to concentration camps, by the third week of June 1920 only small numbers of rebel stragglers had survived.317 Tukhachevsky was flushing rebel remnants out of the forests with artillery, machine guns, and chlorine gas “to kill all who hide within.”318 At least 11,000 peasants were killed between May and July; the Reds lost 2,000. Many tens of thousands were deported or interred. “The bandits themselves have come to recognize . . . what Soviet power means,” the camp chief noted of his reeducation program.319 Lenin’s deputy Alexei Rykov, alerted to the savage campaign by concerned Communists in Tambov, sought to have Tukhachevsky reined in so as not to alienate the peasantry, but Sergei Kamenev urged perseverance: “On the whole, since the appointment of comrade Tukhachevsky to the command in Tambov, all measures that have been undertaken have proven entirely appropriate and effective.”320
Alexander Antonov, the rebel leader, escaped. The Cheka, knowing that he dreamed of unifying Right and Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Constitutional Democrats, had let out word of a “congress” of all anti-Bolshevik partisan movements, which opened on June 28, 1921, in Moscow. Three “delegates” of the Right SRs, two of them Cheka agents, insisted Antonov should join the congress. He did not show, but the ruse congress enabled mass arrests of Antonovites. (Antonov, hiding in swampy woods for almost a year, would finally be located, as a result of a pharmacist’s tip, and killed in a village shootout in June 1922; he would be buried at local Cheka HQ—a Tambov monastery.)321
ABSORBING GEORGIAN NATIONALISM
Stalin arrived in Baku in November 1920, two months after the Congress of Peoples of the East, and on the eighth telegrammed Lenin: “One thing is not in doubt. It is necessary to move troops rapidly to Armenia’s borders with the necessity of entering with them to Yerevan. Orjonikidze is undertaking preparations in this spirit.” This was before Orjonikidze had received operational authorization from Moscow.322 In fall 1920, Turkish troops had invaded former tsarist Armenia, which nominally was ruled by the Armenian nationalists known as Dashnaks but beset by more than half a million refugees, epidemics, and starvation.323 On November 28, Orjonikidze and Stalin conspired to send troops across Russia’s border with Armenia, stage an “uprising,” and declare an Armenian Soviet Republic (“by the will of the toiling masses of Armenia”). The Dashnaks, like the Musavat in Azerbaijan, surrendered.324 The Soviet conquest of Armenia would nearly provoke war with Turkey, but the most immediate consequences of Armenia’s reconquest were felt in Georgia.
Stalin’s homeland had been ruled since 1918 by Georgian Social Democrats of Menshevik tilt, who governed not via soviets, which they abolished, but a parliament, under the proviso first the democratic (bourgeois) revolution.325 Menshevik Georgia’s prime minister, Noe Jordania, had been the person who, in 1898, had told a then twenty-year-old Stalin eager to join the socialist movement, to return to his studies, and, in 1904, had humiliated Stalin again, forcing him to recant from “Georgian Bundism,” that is, advocacy for a formally separate Georgian Social Democratic Party and an independent Georgian state.326 But then came world war, revolution, and imperial dissolution, and voilà—Georgian Menshevism had morphed into a vehicle for Georgian nationalism.327 Lenin and Chicherin, as part of their pursuit of formal recognition from Britain, had recognized the independent Georgian Menshevik state with a treaty on May 7, 1920, pledging noninterference in its affairs.328 In exchange, however, the Georgian government—in a codicil that remained secret—agreed to legalize Communist party activity on its territory, and Bolshevik agents in the Caucasus, including a young operative named Lavrenti Beria, promptly set about subverting the Menshevik state.329 It was while the Georgians in Moscow were awaiting the final version of the treaty to sign that the Red Army had captured Azerbaijan. After Armenia’s turn, Bolshevik forces had Menshevik Georgia essentially surrounded.
Lenin and other top Bolsheviks regarded Mensheviks with a mixture of contempt and fear. True, Russian Mensheviks were not barred from attending the Eighth Congress of Soviets (the last one they would attend), which was held December 22–29, 1920, and was where, in the unheated, dimly lit Bolshoi Theater, Lenin unveiled a fantastic scheme for the electrification of Russia.330 But Trotsky—who had already consigned Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries to the trash pile of history at the Second Congress of Soviets in October 1917—informed the 2,537 delegates that “now that the civil war is over, the Mensheviks and SRs are especially dangerous and must be fought with particular ruthlessness,” a point echoed by Dzierzynski. Fyodor Dan, a Menshevik leader, pointed out that Lenin, in his speech, had given a long list of countries with which Soviet Russia had signed peace treaties, but omitted one—Georgia.331 In fact, Lenin was secretly urging extra caution in dealing with Georgian national feelings, evidently chastened by the fiasco over Poland. Lenin explicitly ordered Orjonikidze “not to self-determine Georgia.”332
Trotsky and Stalin, however, agreed, just as they had about using Baku as a revolutionary springboard, on the necessity of seizing Georgia militarily.333 Indeed Stalin showed none of the hesitation over Georgia that he had repeatedly voiced over Poland. On top of his grudge against the Georgian Mensheviks, he articulated a strategic rationale for a forward policy. “The importance of the Caucasus for the revolution is determined not only by the fact that it is a source of raw materials, fuel, and food supplies,” he told Pravda (November 30, 1920), “but also by its position between Europe and Asia, and in part between Russia and Turkey, as well as the presence of highly important economic and strategic roads.”334 Above all, Stalin argued, Menshevik Georgia provided “a zone of foreign intervention and occupation”—a stepping zone for aggressors to attack the Soviet heartland, lending apparent urgency to the matter.335
Many Bolsheviks anticipated that the Georgian Menshevik government would collapse under the weight of its own unpopularity and
incompetence and therefore advised to wait for a popular uprising. Still, the Communists in Georgia numbered only 15,000, not really an indigenous force to be reckoned with, while the Mensheviks had at least 75,000 and could claim more worker support.336 And as accusations flew about the Menshevik government’s perfidiousness—for example, in supporting anti-Soviet rebels in the North Caucasus—opposition in Moscow to military action softened. On February 14, 1921, Lenin dropped his caution and Orjonikidze finally extracted permission for a takeover. In fact, on February 11–12, Orjonikize, on the spot, with the collusion of Stalin in Moscow as well as Trotsky, had sent units of the Red Army from Armenia into Georgia and staged an “uprising” by Armenian and Russian rebels in the disputed mixed-ethnic Lori district, a pretext for full Red Army invasion.337 On February 15, a full Red incursion was launched from Azerbaijan into Georgia. On February 16, the Georgian Bolshevik Pilipe Makharadze pronounced the formation of a Georgian Soviet Republic, and appealed to Soviet Russia for “aid.” Already, on February 25, the Red Army entered Tiflis (abandoned to spare it from shelling).
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