Orjonikidze had done in his native Georgia what Frunze had done in his native Turkestan. “Long Live Soviet Georgia!” Orjonikidze exulted in a telegram to Moscow. Stalin, too, was triumphant at the destruction of the handmaidens of the Entente. But Lenin—who had threatened to resign over allowing other socialists in Russia into the revolutionary government in 1917—now instructed Orjonikidze to try to form a coalition with the defeated Georgian Mensheviks.338 Lenin appears to have been motivated by a sense that the political base for Bolshevism in “petit-bourgeois” Georgia was weak. Also, he seemed sensitive to the fact that the Red Army invasion had cast a pall on the Soviets’ international reputation: Georgia emerged as a cause celebre among Social Democrats in Europe. A baffled Orjonikidze, on March 3, 1921, telegrammed Lenin: “Everything possible is being done to promote contact and understanding with the Georgian intelligentsia.”339 But Orjonikidze felt that walking on eggshells was a losing policy.340 In any case, the Georgian Mensheviks refused Lenin’s offer of a coalition.
Georgia was not Poland, certainly not in the military sense, and the three small, unstable republics of the South Caucasus lacked a Poland equivalent on whose coattails they could have ridden to independence, as happened in the case of the three small Baltic republics. The Georgian Mensheviks had been oriented toward London and Paris, but the Entente powers did not come to their aid. France had promised only to turn over rusted carbines and machine guns that had been abandoned by the Whites and were sitting in an Istanbul warehouse. Georgian ministers were in Paris still imploring the French government for military help the very day Tiflis fell.341 The British had had their eyes on Caspian oil, and had sent an expeditionary force to deny the petroleum to Germany, but then hit up against the expense and complexity of a prolonged Caucasus occupation. “I am sitting on a powder-magazine, which thousands of people are trying to blow up,” the British commissioner wrote to his wife from Tiflis.342 Foreign Secretary Curzon was urging his government to retain the costly British military presence in the South Caucasus, as well as in northern Persia, in order to prevent Russian reconquest, but War Secretary Winston Churchill—no less anti-Bolshevik than Curzon—argued that a further partitioned Russia raised the specter of a future German reaggrandizement all across Eastern Europe and maybe the Levant, too.343
The British had evacuated from Baku and Tiflis, making their way west to the port of Batum, then left the Caucasus for good (July 7, 1920). Georgians had celebrated Britain’s departure as a triumph over imperialism, covering Batum with Georgian flags, but British withdrawal, on top of French hesitation, had left Moscow and Ankara to determine the Georgians’ fate.344 Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal prioritized annexation of Armenian-inhabited provinces (Kars, Ardahan) over aiding the brethren Azerbaijani Turks, and he saw an ally in Soviet Russia against Versailles (a parallel to the emerging German-Soviet rapprochement).345 As the Red Army invaded Georgia from the east and north, the Turks had advanced from the south, their eyes set on grabbing the port of Batum, where the Georgian leadership had fled advancing Red Army forces. Already on March 11, 1921, the French ship Ernest Renan carried Georgian gold stocks, church treasures, and archives to Istanbul, for transshipment to France.346 Five days later Turkey pronounced its annexation of Batum. But Menshevik Georgia’s 10,000 troops managed to disarm Batum’s small 2,000-troop Turkish garrison.347 The Red Army, with Menshevik connivance, entered the port on March 22 to hold it from Turkey.348 Three days later, French and Italian ships carried the Menshevik government, military command, and refugees to Istanbul from the same port whence they had waved off the British.349
Stalin, meanwhile, suffered a debilitating illness and was placed on a special diet. On March 15, 1921, Nadya Alliluyeva wrote to Kalinin that “15 chickens (exclusively for Stalin), 15 pounds of potatoes and one wheel of cheese were included in the monthly food packet,” but “10 chickens have already been consumed and there are still 15 days to go. Stalin can only eat chickens in connection with his diet.” She requested that the number of monthly chickens be increased to 20, and the potatoes to 30 pounds.350 On March 25, Stalin underwent an operation to remove his appendix.351 Lenin ordered an assistant to send Stalin “four bottles of the best portwine. It’s necessary to strengthen Stalin before his operation.”352 But Stalin was suffering other maladies, perhaps related to typhus, perhaps to chronic, non-active tuberculosis, which he had contracted before the revolution (Sverdlov, with whom Stalin bunked in a single room in Siberian exile, had tuberculosis; in the era before penicillin there was no cure). In April 1921, the politburo ordered Stalin to a spa, and he spent May through August 1921 at Nalchik in the North Caucasus.353 Lenin sent several telegrams to Orjonikidze inquiring of Stalin’s health and the opinion of the doctors.
Stalin’s medical holiday coincided with continued political upheaval across the mountains, in the South Caucasus. On April 10, 1921, at a meeting of some 3,000 workers’ representatives and workers in the Tiflis Opera House on Rustaveli Avenue, an assembly approved a resolution urging the Bolshevik Revolutionary Committee to defend Georgia’s right to self-determination and independence, and called for legalization of all socialist organizations not dedicated to overthrowing the regime and even for the formation of a separate Georgian Red Army. Such sentiments only deepened. Orjonikidze became desperate for assistance in getting his countrymen to knuckle under their new Bolshevik masters, and he invited Stalin to cross the mountains down to Tiflis. Stalin obliged, and participated in a Caucasus bureau plenum July 2–3, 1921, where Orjonikidze gave a report on the political situation.354 On July 5, at another mass meeting with workers in the Tiflis Opera House, Stalin began by “greeting the Tiflis workers in the name of the Revolution, stressing their leading role,” but the hall greeted him with jeers of “Traitor” and “Murderer.” The main speaker, the Georgian Marxist elder Isidor Ramishvili, accused Stalin and the Bolsheviks of forcible conquest and received an ovation. Alexander Dgebuadze, a leader of the Tiflis workers, said of Stalin, “Who asked you to come here? What happened to our Treaty? At the orders of the Kremlin, blood is shed here and you talk about friendship! Soso, you give us both a laugh!”355 The audience sang Georgian freedom songs.356
That night, after his public humiliation on his home Georgian turf, Stalin had the Cheka arrest more than a hundred local Social Democratic Mensheviks, including Ramishvili and Dgebuadze, filling up the tsarist-era Metekhi Prison as well as the newer lockup below. (When Stalin discovered that his childhood friend Soso Iremashvili, now a Georgian Menshevik, had been arrested, he arranged to have him released and invited him to meet, but Iremashvili refused—deeming Stalin a traitor—and emigrated, taking with him intimate knowledge of the young Stalin from Gori days.)357
On July 6, Stalin made for local Bolshevik party HQ, where he laced into the Georgian leadership (Pilipe Makharadze, Mamiya Orakhelashvili, Budu Mdivani) and addressed a general meeting of the Tiflis Communist party. “I remember the years 1905–17, when only complete brotherly solidarity could be observed among the workers and toiling people of the South Caucasus nationalities, when the bonds of brotherhood bound Armenian, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian workers into a single socialist family,” Stalin is recorded as having said. “Now, on my arrival in Tiflis, I am astounded by the absence of the former solidarity among the workers of the South Caucasus. Nationalism has arisen among the workers and peasants, and there is a strong feeling of distrust toward their other-national comrades.” He blamed this “spirit of aggressive nationalism” on the three years of government by Georgian Mensheviks, Azerbaijan Musavat, and Armenia Dashnaks, and summoned the Georgian Bolsheviks to a “merciless struggle with nationalism and the restoration of the old brotherly international bonds.” Stalin also broached the idea of the South Caucasus Federation to contain the three nationalisms, which met strenuous objection.358 Georgian Bolsheviks proved no less nationalistic than the deposed Mensheviks. Indeed, with Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states out, it would be the nationalism of th
e Georgians, along with that of the Ukrainians, which would prove the most difficult to tame. The political and spiritual conquest of Stalin’s Georgian homeland after 1921 would dramatically shape his personal dictatorship, too.
FIRST SOVIET SATELLITE
When biographers write about Stalin, projecting backward in time an early psychopath and murderer, they are, in effect, describing the Stalin contemporary, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg.359 The savage, demented baron had been born in Austria in the 1880s to a German aristocrat mother and a Baltic German father from an ancient noble family, but the boy, like his crusading ancestors, grew up on imperial Russia’s Baltic littoral. He served in the imperial Russian army, including in multiethnic Cossack formations in the eastern Baikal and Amur regions, and won a plethora of decorations for valor in the Great War. He was also disciplined for willfulness. Brave and cruel, he patterned himself partly after the crusading Teutonic knights, but he was also said to have boasted to friends that one day he would become emperor of China and perhaps even restore the grand Mongol empire of Chinggis Khan across Eurasia. The baron married a nineteen-year-old Manchu princess, which afforded him a second, Manchurian, title. He was a staunch monarchist and hater of Bolshevism’s sacrileges, and assembled a so-called Savage Division of east Siberian Cossacks, Tatars, Mongols, and Tibetans, among others, to crusade against the Reds in the civil war, but after Kolchak’s defeat he sought refuge in Manchuria. In October 1920, the baron marched his small Savage Division of 800 men from Manchuria several thousand miles into Outer Mongolia, which had been a province of China until 1911, when it became de facto independent as a result of the fall of the Qing dynasty, but which in 1919 had been reoccupied by Chinese troops who conducted a reign of terror. The Chinese had deposed the Bogd Gegen, a Living Buddha, third after the Dalai Lama (in Lhasa) and the Panchen Lama in the Lamaist Buddhist hierarchy and Mongolia’s temporal ruler, whom the baron aimed to restore. But in late October and early November 1920, Ungern-Sternberg failed to take the Chinese-held Mongol capital of Urga, guarded by up to 12,000 garrison troops. Killing his deserters, he retreated to eastern Mongolia, where he picked up more White Army stragglers from Eastern Siberia, recruited additional Mongol and Tibetan troops to liberate the Buddhist land, plundered caravans to and from China, fed his opium addiction, and burnished his reputation for bravery and butchery. Men whom he whipped until their flesh fell off were taken to hospital, to recuperate, so that they could be whipped again. Sometimes the baron had a bound victim’s hair set on fire; other times, he had water poured through nostrils and turpentine through rectums.360
In early February 1921, Ungern-Sternberg renewed his assault on Urga, with around 1,500 men against at least 7,000 Chinese, but this time, on the auspicious lunar New Year (February 4), he triumphed.361 It took several days to clear the corpses, some 2,500, most with cavalry saber wounds. Looting ensued. Chinese reinforcements from afar were interdicted, yielding hundreds of camels’ worth of weapons, supplies, and silver.362 On February 21—the same day Reza Khan, the future shah, staged a right-wing coup in Tehran, four days before Orjonikidze seized the Georgian capital of Tiflis from the Mensheviks, and seven days before the Kronstadt uprising began—Ungern-Sternberg ceremoniously reinstalled the Bogd Gegen in the Mongol capital.363 Basking in Mongol and Tibetan adulation, the baron embarked on a rampage against Bolshevik commissars, Jews, and anyone with physical defects. A list was compiled of 846 targets, 38 of them Jews, who were summarily executed.364
Russian merchants and adventurers had long penetrated Outer Mongolia as a gateway to China. Now the Bolshevik regime sent Sergei Borisov, an ethnic Altaian (Oirot) and the head of the Comintern’s Mongolian-Tibetan department, to Urga with a small group of “advisers.”365 Borisov, from a shamanistic people whom the Buddhists had once tried to convert (he himself went to a Russian Orthodox school), aimed to forge an alliance with Mongol nationalists, who had already made contact with the Soviets in Buryatia in Eastern Siberia. The Mongol nationalists comprised two groupings. One, the East Urga group, was led by Danzan (b. 1885), a low-ranking customs official and the illegitimate son of a poor woman, and included Sukhbaatar (b. 1893), who at nineteen had become commander of a machine-gun regiment in Bogd Gegen’s army. The other group, known as Consular Hill (the section of Urga occupied primarily by Russians), was the more radical and was led by Bodoo (b. 1895), a Mongolian language teacher at a Russian school, and included Choybalsan (b. 1895), a former lama and the illegitimate son of an impoverished woman who had fled a monastery; in the course of working at menial jobs, he had met the director of a Russian translators’ school, where he enrolled before going on to further education in Irkutsk, the capital of Eastern Siberia.366 On June 25, 1920, the two Mongol groups had joined forces in Danzan’s tent to form a Mongolian People’s Party in order “to liquidate the foreign enemy which is hostile to our religion and race; to restore lost rights and truly revive the state and religion; . . . to give total attention to the interests of the poor and lowly masses; and to live neither oppressing nor oppressed.”367 They agreed with Borisov to send a delegation to Moscow to request aid.368 In November 1920, a seven-person Mongol delegation arrived in in the Soviet capital, meeting Lenin and Stalin.369
By this time, the Bogd Gegen had been restored as khan, and Urga had fallen under Ungern-Sternberg occupation. Between March 1 and 3, 1921, a conference of the Mongolian People’s Party took place in Troitskosavsk (Kiakhta), on the Soviet side of the frontier, with perhaps twenty-six delegates by the final day.370 To unseat Ungern-Sternberg, they constituted a Provisional Revolutionary Committee and a People’s Revolutionary Army of around 400 horsemen, which assembled in southeastern Siberia; then, on March 18—the same day the Soviets signed a peace treaty with Poland—they crossed the Soviet-Mongol frontier, trailed by Red Army units.371
There was no “revolutionary situation” in Mongolia, to use the Comintern argot, but Baron Ungern-Sternberg’s occupation proved to be a godsend, providing the pretext for Bolshevik invasion and a revolutionary putsch. By the time of the spring 1921 Mongol-Soviet offensive against the “counterrevolutionary base” in Mongolia, Ungern-Sternberg’s army, which was living off extravagant “requisitioning” of Mongol herders, was itself on the move. On May 21, he issued a proclamation summoning Russians in Siberia to rise up against Bolshevism in the name of “the lawful master of the Russian Land, all-Russia Emperor Mikhail Alexandrovich,” while vowing “to exterminate commissars, communists, and Jews.”372 (Never mind that Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas II’s brother, had been executed in Perm in 1918.) On June 16, the politburo belatedly approved a “revolutionary onslaught.” An official “request” for Soviet military assistance was cooked up. Sukhbaatar and the Red Army forces took Urga on July 5–6, 1921.373
Stalin was away from Moscow on holiday and being shouted down as a Bolshevik imperialist in the Georgian capital of Tiflis. Simultaneously with events in Georgia and Mongolia, the Third Congress of the Comintern happened to be taking place in Moscow, and one of its key themes was national liberation. “I would like to emphasize here the significance of the movement in the colonies,” Lenin told the 605 delegates from more than 50 countries on July 5. “It is quite clear that in the coming decisive battles of the world revolution the movement of the great majority of the population of the globe, which will be directed first at national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and, perhaps, play a much greater role than we expect.” Backward countries suddenly would be revolutionary leaders (“animated approval”). And just as Soviet Russia offered “a strong bulwark for the Eastern peoples in their struggles for their own independence, so the Eastern countries are our allies in our common struggle against world imperialism.”374 On July 11, Mongol independence was declared anew. Ungern-Sternberg’s forces, meanwhile, had conveniently captured or driven out large numbers of Chinese on the way to Siberia, while failing to spark the anticipated anti-Soviet uprising in Siberia itself, and he was on the run; a
Comintern report characterized his men as “speculators, morphine addicts, opium-smokers . . . and other dregs of counter-revolutionary elements.”375 According to an eyewitness of his final march, the baron, “with his head dropped to his chest, silently rode in front of his troops. He had lost his hat and most of his clothes. On his naked chest numerous Mongolian talismans and charms were hanging on a bright yellow cord. He looked like a reincarnation of a prehistoric ape man.”376
Ungern-Steinberg survived an assassination conspiracy (his tent was strafed), but he was captured and handed over to the Red Army on August 22, 1921, and revealed his identity to his captors.377 His Mongol counselor evidently absconded with 1,800 kilos of gold, silver, and precious stones that had been hidden in a river bottom. A convoy escorted the baron to Novonikolaevsk, capital of Western Siberia, where interrogations established that he “was by no means psychologically healthy.”378
Lenin, on the Hughes apparatus from Moscow, ordered a public trial, which was supposed to take place in Moscow, but Ivan Smirnov, known as the Siberian Lenin, insisted that the effects would be greater if he were tried locally.379 On September 15, 1921, a trial was staged in front of several thousand in the wooden summer theater of Novonikolaevsk’s main park on the banks of the Ob River. The baron appeared in his yellow Mongol outer caftan, with his imperial Russian St. George’s Cross pinned to his chest. After some six hours, he was pronounced guilty of working in the interests of Japan to create a Central Asian state, trying to restore the Romanovs, torture, anti-Semitism, and atrocities. He denied only the connection with the Japanese.380 He was executed the same evening or in the wee hours after midnight by the local Cheka.381 Others would reap the rewards of his lunacy. The baron had not only chased out the Chinese troops from Mongolia, on behalf of the Mongols, but his marauding and savagery had helped drive out Chinese peasant settlers, who had numbered perhaps 100,000 as of 1911, but had dropped to 8,000 by 1921.382 On September 14, 1921, the Mongolian government issued a statement that it did not recognize Chinese suzerainty.383 Chicherin on behalf of Soviet Russia issued a two-faced statement that did not expressly deny Chinese claims of suzerainty but in effect recognized Mongolia’s independence.384
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