Von Ungern-Sternberg’s contribution was historic both to Mongol independence and the creation of the first Soviet satellite—long before post‒World War II Eastern Europe—for after his defeat, the Red Army stayed.385 A Mongolian delegation headed by Danzan and including the twenty-six-year-old Sukhbaatar arrived in Moscow in September 1921, surprising the Soviet foreign affairs commissariat (which was in the midst of trying to establish diplomatic relations with China). The Mongols sought assistance with finances, infrastructure, and weapons, and wanted to discuss territorial disputes with Soviet Russia and lingering imperial Russian economic concessions.386, 387 Five sessions were held, beginning October 26, 1921, at the Metropol. Boris Shumyatsky, a Comintern official from Buryatia, explained to Lenin on November 2 that they would be lucky to see a bourgeois revolution, let alone a socialist one, for Mongolia lagged Soviet Russia by two centuries: nearly half the male population was composed of monks in lamaseries, and the only figure of authority was the Bogd Gegen, a Living Buddha. But Shumyatsky added that “Sukhbaatar is the war minister, a plebeian, the offspring of the new arising in Mongol relations. Uncommonly brave, though a young man . . . One of the most active figures in the Mongol People’s Party and the best orator. . . . Fully oriented toward Soviet Russia. Speaks a little Russian.”388 On November 5, the Soviet government, having renounced tsarist Russia’s secret treaties, signed its own unequal treaty with Outer Mongolia.389 Red Army troops were “asked” to stay and the two governments—not the two states, so as not to overly antagonize China—recognized each other. Shumyatsky made a documentary (he would go on to head the film industry under Stalin). With the Bogd Gegen retained as nominal ruler, Mongolia became a constitutional monarchy but also a “people’s democracy of a new type.”390
• • •
NO OTHER CIVIL WAR IN HISTORY took place across such an immense expanse. Compared with the Great War, none of the military battles in Russia’s civil war or wars of territorial reconquest were significant in scale, but nonetheless, 8 to 10 million people would perish here between 1918 and 1923. Probably nine tenths were civilians. Typhus, typhoid, cholera, influenza, and hunger may have killed more than enemy fire. Countless soldiers wounded on the battlefield perished because of an absence of field doctors, medicines, transport, or hospitals. Additionally, up to 200,000 people fell victim to Red Terror, and at least 50,000 to White Terror. Wealth destruction, too, was epic. In 1921, economic output did not even reach one sixth of the pre-1914 level; the 1921 grain harvest came in at one half of the 1913 level.391 Russia would go from world grain exporter (1913) to cannibalism (1923).392 Additionally, doctors, scientists, teachers, artists, and others emigrated en masse, perhaps 1.5 million total, most of whom (unlike France after 1789) would not return—extending the civilization of Russian Eurasia across the globe and shaping Soviet Russia’s foreign policy. Inside the country, not one but two powerful structures had emerged: the peasant revolution, upon which the Whites broke their teeth, and the Bolshevik dictatorship, which was compelled to concede a “peasant Brest-Litovsk.” With the latter, Lenin, an inveterate gambler, had gambled yet again. He would later call the “economic defeat” of spring 1921 “more serious” than the military defeats inflicted by Kolchak, Denikin, or Piłsudski.393 Sadly, however, Lenin’s belated concession of a tax in kind and of legal private trade at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921, over considerable party opposition, had come too late to spare the country mass death from famine (a subject of chapter 10), although not too late to rescue the regime.
The Russian-Eurasian combat was also an economic war, as each battlefield advance brought spoils: grain, moonshine, clothes, boots, kerosene, or in the case of Bukhara, gold. Seized by soldiers or other armed personnel, the trophies would usually show up on newly sprouted black markets. Freelancing banditry flourished as well. All manner of Red Army military contraband (rifles, machine guns, artillery shells) were for sale at the markets on Red-controlled territory. Sometimes the weaponry came not from the battlefield but straight from warehouses or train depots, bribery of officials and guards being merely a cost of doing business. The revolution to stamp out the market turned the whole country, regime included, into practitioners of illegal market exchange. “The New Economic Policy,” observed an official of the state planning commission, “did not fall from heaven, but grew out of the guilty soil and developed out of the ‘sins’ of October against the capitalist system.”394 There was something passing strange about establishing legal markets with an avalanche of decrees, which flowed in April, May, June, and July 1921, granting grudging permission for this or that private activity. (A decree on August 9, 1921, enjoined state agencies to implement the decrees.)395 Legacies of forced dispossession, however, were not quickly surmounted.396 The NEP’s property laws, in many ways, remained entangled in the unresolved ambiguities of market relations under Communist party rule.
National policy proved to be a similarly immense tangle. Stalin showed himself to be the Bolshevik in ruling circles who time and again best demonstrated an appreciation for the panoply of Russian Eurasia. He had strong ideas about nationalities, and was confident enough to instruct Lenin in this area.397 But Lenin ignored Stalin’s warnings about Polish nationalism and forced an ill-fated western military offensive to instigate revolution from abroad.398 Poland’s crushing 1920 defeat of Soviet Russia imparted an overt geopolitical dimension to the “necessary evil” of embracing nationalism: the Ukrainian Soviet Republic as well as the Belorussian Soviet Republic—which Stalin had a hand in creating—now appeared as counterweights to Polish aggrandizement.399 But while Polish nationalism had become an external problem with internal repercussions, Georgian nationalism, also strong, had been ingested, thanks in considerable measure to Stalin’s machinations. Figuring out how to curb such nationalism and use it for Communist aims preoccupied him. He was at heart a class intransigent, but he was also convinced of the need to find a modus vivendi with national minority Communists, even if he was not going to brook separatism when he felt the territory could be used by the Soviet Union’s external enemies to weaken and perhaps invade the Soviet state.400
Lenin developed a very different preoccupation: the condescension and outright discrimination, not to say violence, that prevailed in Great Russian relations with the smaller peoples, which in his view showed Soviet Russia in a bad light. Adolf Joffe sent Lenin a troubled telegram on September 9, 1921, asserting that in Turkestan, policy differences between two Bolshevik officials had ignited animosity between Russians and indigenes. Responding on September 13, Lenin demanded more information (“facts, facts, and facts”), and concluded, “For our entire Weltpolitik it is desperately important to win over the trust of the indigenes; thrice and four-times win over; prove that we are not imperialists, that we will not abide a deviation in that direction. This is a world-level matter, without exaggeration world-level. . . . This affects India, the East, here we cannot joke, here we need to be 1000 times cautious.”401
Around this time Lenin had begun to make asides of monumental theoretical significance. In 1921, he observed that the Bolsheviks had only managed to carry out a bourgeois democratic revolution; they had not yet gotten to socialism.402 The question of when, and especially how, socialism in Russia would actually be built had only become more acute with the surprise failure of the world revolution, and the civil war “voyages of discovery” revelations about the depth of backwardness and despair across now shattered Eurasia.
Stalin continued to puzzle out the larger picture of the revolution’s global prospects, including the relationship of war to revolution. On a copy of a 1920 work by Radek, he wrote, “In Russia the workers and soldiers joined up (because peace had not been achieved), but in Germany they did not because there peace had already been attained.”403 On a 1920 copy of Zinoviev’s War and the Crisis in Socialism, Stalin wrote, “Without this defeat [of Russia by Japan in 1905] there would not have been a Russian revolution either.”404 These sentiments were ex
pressed just before the Red Army managed to serve as an instrument of revolution, reconquering the former imperial borderlands—Ukraine, Turkestan, the South Caucasus—as well as Mongolia. But Stalin as yet offered no comprehensive statements about the relationship of the Red Army to revolution.405 He revealed a certain pessimism in private exchanges he had with Chicherin. “Your objections to my letter about economic policy for Eastern countries, based on extreme pessimism in the question of our own economic condition, supposes that Entente capital will now penetrate into eastern countries and that in connection with this we are powerless,” Chicherin wrote to him (November 22, 1921). “But this is not so. We are talking about a rather prolonged process, during which we will not be standing in place. Even in those countries that are organically connected to western capital, the national bourgeoisie will not capitulate so quickly in the face of an Entente-capital onslaught, and between them there will be a prolonged struggle.” Chicherin named Romania, Turkey, Persia, and Egypt. But Stalin was unpersuaded. “Of course we will crawl out from economic ruin at some point, and when we do, we can talk about economic actions in these states.” In the meantime, however, the ruble’s exchange value was falling, Soviet Russia had nothing to export, its trade balance was not good, and it lacked sufficient gold. Stalin argued that it was better for Soviet Russia to develop the parts of the country that bordered on the East—Turkestan, Siberia, Azerbaijan.406
Stalin publicly revealed his pessimism in late 1921. “Gone on the wing is the ‘fear’ or ‘horror’ of the world bourgeoisie in the face of the proletarian revolution, which had seized [the world bourgeoisie], for example, in the days of the Red Army advance on Warsaw,” he wrote in Pravda (December 17, 1921). “And with it has passed the boundless enthusiasm with which the workers of Europe used to receive almost every piece of news about Soviet Russia.” In geopolitical terms, Russian power in the world was much diminished overall by the civil war. The hard-won trade agreement with Britain was a barbed laurel. “We should not forget that commercial and all other sorts of missions and associations, now flooding Russia to trade with her and to aid her, are at the same time the best spies of the world bourgeoisie, and that now it, the world bourgeoisie, knows Soviet Russia with its weak and strong sides better than ever before—circumstances fraught with extremely serious dangers in the event of new interventionist actions,” Stalin wrote. He singled out Poland, Romania, and Finland, but even Turkey and Afghanistan, as well as Japan, as formidable challenges.407 The victorious Soviet state had emerged surrounded, penetrated. Its tense efforts at a temporary modus vivendi with the capitalist powers went hand in hand with its fraught internal rapprochement with capitalism in the New Economic Policy. Durnovó’s revolutionary war had yielded a paradoxical outcome.
PART III
COLLISION
“Lenin was born for revolution. He was a genuine genius of revolutionary explosions and the greatest master of revolutionary leadership. Lenin never felt himself freer or happier than in the epoch of revolutionary shocks.”
Stalin, January 19241
“The truth is that the Socialist revolution has ended in pure individualism. . . The great achievement of the Bolshevik class has been the creation of a peasant class intensely conscious of the value of private ownership of land.”
Max Sering, German scholar of Russian agriculture, 19212
ONCE IN A BLUE MOON THE FUTURE can be foreseen—as when former tsarist interior minister Pyotr Durnovó predicted, in the event of a lost war against Germany, mass social revolution and catastrophe—but mostly clairvoyance is impossible. Into the latter category falls the fact and consequences of Vladimir Lenin’s health. He was a singular political figure. The nightmarish Great War and all-encompassing breakdown rendered even more unlikely that a rule-of-law order would replace the intransigent tsarist autocracy, but Lenin’s malign contribution should not be underestimated. In August 1917, even before the Bolshevik coup, he had belligerently observed that “who does not know that the world history of all revolutions shows that class struggle turns not accidentally but inevitably to civil war.”3 Once in power, Lenin elevated political violence to principle.4 Moderate socialists, in his mind, were more dangerous than open counterrevolutionaries, whom the moderates abetted with their “ornate Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik phraseology about a people’s government, a constituent assembly, liberties, and the like. . . . He who has not learned this from the whole history of the 19th century is a hopeless idiot.”5 Behind mundane disagreement he saw not legitimate opinion but malevolent forces. His conception of politics did not even allow for politics.6 Lenin railed against the idea that every society was made up of multiple interests that deserved competitive political representation and balancing as naively inviting in the “wrong” interests (“bourgeois” or “petit bourgeois”).7 He repudiated any separation of powers among executive, legislative, and judicial branches as a bourgeois sham.8 He rejected the rule of law as an instrument of class domination, not a protection against the state.9 He dismissed the self-organization of society to hold the state in check.10 The upshot was a brutal intensification of tsarism’s many debilitating features: emasculation of parliament, metastasizing of parasitic state functionaries, persecution and shakedowns of private citizens and entrepreneurs—in short, unaccountable executive power, which was vastly enhanced in its grim arbitrariness by a radiant ideology of social justice and progress. But then, Lenin fell fatally ill.
Rarely in world history has one man played such an outsized role and, suddenly, been sidelined—an outcome evocative, in very different political ways, of Abraham Lincoln’s civil war victory and emancipation of the slaves, followed by his assassination. Lenin’s early departure was an unintentional revolutionary shock second only to the seizure of power, and it unexpectedly cleared a path for Stalin to supreme power.
Lenin’s poor health had affected him longer than almost anyone knew. He endured a variety of ailments common to the time, including typhoid, influenza, and erysipelas (a skin disorder), but he also suffered blinding headaches, sleeplessness, and blackouts—on a hunt during the civil war, for example, he suddenly slumped down on a tree stump unable to move (“pins and needles,” he said). In winter 1920–21, his insomnia and headaches became still more frequent, which stumped his battery of physicians. “Unfortunately I am very ill,” Lenin wrote to Clara Zetkin in German in February 1921, during the tense days of the Tambov rebellion and Petrograd worker strikes. “My nerves are kaputt.”11 During the 10th Party Congress the next month, he continued to complain about feeling debilitated. His nerves were on edge in July 1921, when his Kremlin apartment was being remodeled: he directed that the walls between rooms be rendered “absolutely soundproof, and the floors absolutely free of squeaks.”12 In summer 1921, the politburo several times decreed, to no avail, that Lenin should take a month-long break; finally, in August, he relented.13 In mid-September 1921, when Lenin sought to resume a full workload, he proved unable to do so. In October he blacked out several times.14 In December 1921, even a severely curtailed workload proved too much; the politburo decreed another six-week holiday, and on December 6 Lenin departed for the countryside, where he was supposed to be restricted to a maximum of just one hour per day for telephone conversations on priority business. He returned to the Kremlin on January 13, 1922, but his condition had not improved, and he returned to the Moscow countryside, resolving to come to the capital only for politburo and government meetings. But even that became less and less the case. On March 1, 1922, Lenin came back to the Kremlin, but the next day his family and staff noted a periodic loss of speech and of feeling on his right side.15 On March 4, Lenin told one of his doctors that “his song had been sung, his role played, and he needed to pass on his cause to someone.”16
Lenin never named a successor. But in a momentous act in March 1922, he created a new post, “general secretary” of the party, expressly for Stalin. Stories would be invented, for understandable reasons, about how L
enin had never really intended to give Stalin so much power. These stories, however, are belied by the facts. Lenin had been taking Stalin into his confidence across a wide range of matters, and already in August-September 1921 he had moved Stalin nearly fulltime to overseeing party affairs; Stalin took to preparing politburo meeting agendas and appointing officials.17 True, there were two other Central Committee secretaries at that time, but Stalin was senior to both. Despite that seniority, Lenin still chose to underscore Stalin’s predominant position in an appointment announced at the 11th Party Congress March 27-April 2, 1922, and formalized at an April 3 Central Committee plenum—both of which Lenin attended.18 Stalin was voted “general secretary” at the congress by 193 votes in favor, 16 against; the rest (273), more than half the voting delegates, effectively abstained.19 This was Lenin’s initiative, and he certainly knew what he was doing. Just before the opening of the 11th Congress in the Kremlin, he had organized a conspiratorial meeting in a side room, gathering his most reliable followers, 27 people, to ensure election to the Central Committee of his preferred candidates against Trotsky’s followers; Stalin’s name was marked on Lenin’s list as “general secretary.”20 At the congress itself, where all 27 names on Lenin’s list were duly elected, one delegate (Preobrazhensky) questioned how Stalin could hold so many concurrent positions, but Lenin stoutly defended his protégé.21
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