Comintern policy compelled the Chinese Communists to become the junior partner in a coalition with the Guomindang, in order to strengthen the latter’s role as a bulwark against “imperialism” (British influence). To that end, beyond creating two parallel, deadly rival parties in forced alliance, Soviet advisers also built a real, disciplined army in China.146 The Soviets had declined the request of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Guomindang, to send Red Army troops to Manchuria as dangerously provocative, possibly summoning “a Japanese intervention.”147 But the Soviets did furnish him with weapons, finances, and military advisers. The Soviets sent perhaps $100,000 annually, a substantial subsidy, to the Chinese Communist party, but more than 10,000,000 rubles annually in military aid to the Guomindang.148 Part of that went into the Whampoa (Huangpu) Military Academy near Canton, opened in 1925, which was led by the Sun Yat-sen protégé and chief of staff, Chiang Kai-shek (b. 1887), who had been trained in Japan.149 After Sun Yat-sen died of liver cancer on March 12, 1925, at age fifty-eight, Chiang won the succession struggle. A Soviet adviser deemed him “conceited, reserved, and ambitious,” but nonetheless thought him useful, provided he was “praised in a delicate manner” and treated “on the basis of equality. And never showing that one wants to usurp even a particle of his power.”150 In truth, Soviet advisers on the ground, while overestimating the value of their own expertise and advice, tended to look down upon Chinese officers, and often usurped the positions of Chinese nominally in charge. Still, the Whampoa Academy helped conjure into being the strongest army in China, which Chiang Kai-shek commanded.151
Ideologically, Leninism conflated anti-imperialism with anticapitalism, but many Chinese intellectuals, including those who had become Marxists, concluded that the depredations China suffered at the hands of foreign powers made anti-imperialism the bedrock task.152 Trotsky, in a note to himself, wrote that “the main criterion for us [in China] is not the constant fact of national oppression but the changing course of the class struggle,” precisely the opposite of the sentiment in China.153 Stalin held that world revolution needed the supposedly “bourgeois” Guomindang to defeat the warlords and their imperialist paymasters, thereby uniting China, and that the Communists were to enter an alliance with the “revolutionary bourgeoisie,” but prepare for eventual independent action at some point.154 For Stalin, therefore, the Chinese Communist alliance with the Guomindang presupposed betrayal: Communists were to win positions at the base of the joint movement, and then apply leverage, as in mechanics, from the bottom up.155 This would enable the Chinese Communists to capture the “revolution” from within. Soviet policy called the Communist alliance with the Guomindang a “bloc within.”
Compared with the debacles in Germany, Bulgaria, and Estonia, China long stood out as the Comintern’s shining success.156 Under the surface, however, the multiple Comintern advisers supported their own protégés, fragmenting the Chinese political scene, and competed to undermine each other. “The other day, in the course of a lengthy conversation with Stalin, it became evident that he believes the Communists have dissolved into the Guomindang, that they lack an independent standing organization, and that the Guomindang is ‘mistreating’ them,” Grigory Zarkhin, known as Voitinsky, complained to Lev Karakhan, the Soviet ambassador to Peking, on April 25, 1925. “Comrade Stalin, expressing his regrets over the Communists’ dependent condition, evidently thought that such a situation was historically unavoidable at the current time. He was extremely surprised when we explained that the Communists have their own organization, more cohesive than the Guomindang, that the Communists have the right of criticism within the Guomindang, and that the work of the Guomindang itself to a great degree is being carried out by our comrades.” Voitinsky attributed Stalin’s misinformed views to the reports of Mikhail Grusenberg, known as Borodin, a Belorussian Jew educated in Latvia who had worked as a school principal in Chicago.157 But Voitinsky, who was supposed to uphold the bloc-within alliance, instead pushed for independence of the Communists. Events also pulled in this direction.
Perhaps the greatest underlying conflict was Chiang Kai-shek’s distrust of the Communists, even as he coveted Soviet military aid. Chiang had headed a mission to Moscow on Sun’s behalf in 1923. “Judging by what I saw, it is not possible to trust the Russian Communist party,” he had written in a private letter. “What they told us in Soviet Russia we can believe only about 30 percent.”158 On March 20, 1926, he forced the arrest of all political commissars attached to military units, who were mostly Communists, placed Soviet advisers under house arrest, and disarmed worker strike committees. Chiang wanted to suppress trade unions and use punitive expeditions to put down peasant unrest (and seize their rice stocks to feed the army). He also had his security forces torture Chinese Communists to extract information about plots. Communists in China again formally sought Moscow’s authorization to withdraw from the bloc within and strike back at Chiang, but Stalin refused. In May 1926, Chiang had the Guomindang Central Executive expel all Communists from senior posts, though he did release the interned Soviet advisers. In Moscow, a politburo commission on May 20 heard a report on Chiang Kai-shek’s “coup.”159 But Stalin upheld the bloc within.160
Trotsky had paid scant attention to China.161 He did chair a committee that proposed preempting a feared British-Japanese alliance by declaring Manchurian “autonomy,” effectively bribing Japan with the offer of a satellite, the same way the Soviets had obtained Outer Mongolia.162 But Trotsky went on medical leave to Berlin and publicly remained silent on China. Zinoviev ignited an uproar, however, which infuriated Stalin. Zinoviev had long been the main Comintern spokesperson for the bloc-within policy and had even called the Guomindang “a workers’ and peasants’ (multiclass) party.” As late as February 1926, Zinoviev had been urging acceptance of a Guomindang request to be admitted to the Comintern.163
In July 1926, Chiang Kai-shek launched the Northern Expedition against the warlords to expand Guomindang rule over all of China with the planning support of Vasily Blyukher, the chief Soviet military adviser attached to the Guodminang government at Nanjing. While pressing the unification offensive between July and December 1926, the Guomindang split: a leftist faction established its own army at a base in the central city of Wuhan, an agglomeration of Hankow and other cities, in the Yangtze basin, west of Shanghai. During the Northern Expedition, Chiang decided to advance eastward on Shanghai, against the urgings of Borodin. As his army stood outside the city, its Communist-influenced trade unions called a general strike and mobilized their pickets in their third bid to seize Shanghai from its warlord ruler. By the end of March 1927, 500,000 workers had walked out, in a city of nearly 3 million. The uprising in Shanghai was outside the “bloc within” policy; some local Chinese Communist leaders aimed to form a governing soviet. But the Comintern ordered the Communists in Shanghai to put away their weapons and not oppose Chiang’s army, which, as a result, entered Shanghai on April 1 unopposed. “Chiang Kai-shek is submitting to discipline,” Stalin told some 3,000 functionaries assembled in Moscow’s Hall of Columns in the House of Trade Unions on April 5. “Why make a coup d’etat? Why drive away the Right when we have the majority and the Right listens to us?” Stalin conceded that “Chiang Kai-shek has perhaps no sympathy for the revolution,” but added that the general was “leading the army and cannot do otherwise against the imperialists.” The right wing of the Guomindang, Stalin underscored, had “connections with the rich merchants and can raise money from them. So they have to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then flung away.”164
Portents of disaster were everywhere, however. On April 6, 1927, at 11:00 a.m., crowds attacked the Soviet embassy in Peking and the metropolitan police, having solicited the consent of the wider foreign diplomatic corps, entered the Soviet compound and hauled off incriminating documents about Soviet-supported subversion in China.165 In Shanghai, meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek’s head of special services was arranging with the leading gangsters to
mount an assault on the Reds. On April 12, irregulars recruited by the gangs as well as Guomindang forces smashed the Shanghai headquarters of the Chinese Communists. Over the next two days, in the pouring rain, they used machine guns and rifles to massacre Communists and labor activists in key Shanghai wards. Several hundred people were killed, perhaps more; thousands of rifles were confiscated from workers; and Communists were rounded up in house-to-house searches.166 The Comintern ordered workers in the city to avoid conflict with Chiang’s forces—who were slaughtering them. The order was not implemented, but it endured in infamy.167 Communist survivors fled to the countryside.
On April 13, a previously scheduled three-day Soviet Central Committee plenum opened in Moscow. Most of the nasty debate concerned the economy. But a Zinoviev ally proposed that a review of policy on the Chinese revolution be added to the agenda; Stalin kept interrupting him, but then promised discussion. Zinoviev then ambushed the plenum with fifty-plus pages of “theses” condemning Stalin’s mistakes on China, arguing that China was ripe for a socialist revolution and the Guomindang under Chiang Kai-shek were fated to become an antisocialist dictatorship such as Ataturk in Turkey, while China’s workers and peasants were being forced to fight the Guomindang with the equivalent of bamboo.168 Trotsky and Stalin, at the April 15 session, exchanged barbs over Chiang’s assault:
TROTSKY: So far, this matter has proceeded with your help.
STALIN (interrupting): With your help! . . .
TROTSKY: We did not advance Chiang, we did not send him our autographed portraits.
STALIN: Ha, ha, ha.
In fact, Chiang Kai-shek was an honorary member of the Comintern executive committee, and only a few days before his April 12 launch of attacks on Chinese Communists, the Bolshevik upper crust had received autographed photographs of him, distributed by the Comintern (soon letters would arrive requesting that the photos be returned).169 Stalin’s faction shouted out to suspend stenography of the plenum, which adjourned without answering the opposition’s charges. Stalin did permit Zinoviev’s theses to be appended to the minutes, but a secret circular from the Central Committee press department warned that the plenum had forbidden open discussion of events in China; at the same time, in several provincial party newspapers, articles appeared attempting to refute the opposition’s arguments about a debacle in China.170
In the terms of the Marxist-Leninist straitjacket, Chiang and the bourgeoisie had “betrayed” the Chinese revolution and thrown in their lot with the feudals and the latter’s imperialist paymasters. In fact, he had not succumbed to money interests: he was just anti-Communist. Chiang did allow Borodin and Blyukher to “escape,” and continued to seek Moscow’s good graces even after his massacre. And truth be told, for Stalin, the strong Guomindang army still seemed the best bet for the unification and stability in China. Chiang continued his drive northward, at great cost, to defeat the warlords and drive out the imperialists. On May Day 1927 Chiang’s portrait was carried through Red Square alongside those of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx. But Stalin was accused of standing by the “reactionary” bourgeois and betraying the Chinese revolution. Trotsky, who had made his first public criticisms of China policy only on March 31, 1927, began to argue, mostly retrospectively, that the USSR should have allowed Chinese Communists to exit from the bloc within and form soviets.171 But it had been only during the Nationalist Northern Expedition to overcome the warlords and unite China that the Chinese Communist party had belatedly become something of a national political force. Still, the opposition critique, even if belated and pie in the sky, highlighted how the bloc within, which had presupposed a Chinese Communist takeover from within, had instead permitted a Guomindang takeover. Thanks to the Soviet Union, the Guomindang had an army; the Chinese Communists did not. No Communist party cells existed in the Guomindang army until very late, and even then they were pathetic.172
Stalin had boasted that an eventual betrayal was built into the bloc within, and he was right—but he was not the one to do the betraying. Chiang Kai-shek had beat him to the punch and, in the meantime, Stalin was still wholly dependent on Chiang as the instrument against British influence (“imperialism”) in China.
Soviet foreign policy appeared trapped in a cul-de-sac of its own making. Chicherin, on extended medical leave on the French Riviera and in Germany, seeking treatment for his ailments, not all of them psychosomatic (diabetes, polyneuritis), wrote to Stalin and Rykov that Bukharin’s idiotic anti-German tirades in the Soviet press had done so much damage that “I am returning to Moscow in order to request that I be relieved of the foreign affairs commissariat position.”173 The more immediate worry, however, was Britain. On May 12, 1927, the British police in London began a massive four-day raid on the premises of the All-Russia Cooperative Society (at 49 Moorgate), which operated under British law; the same building housed the official Soviet trade mission offices. Safes and strongboxes were cracked open with pneumatic drills and documents hauled away.174 Cipher personnel were beaten and codes and cipher books confiscated; Lenin’s portrait was defaced.175 A similar incident several years earlier had severely damaged Soviet-German trade; this time, too, Moscow did not “show weakness.” On May 13, the politburo resolved to launch a belligerent press campaign and public demonstrations to assail Britain for warmongering.176
Around this time Japan declined renewed Soviet feelers for a non-aggression pact.177 As if this were not enough for Stalin to worry about, Chiang Kai-shek’s actions had breathed new life into Trotsky’s rants. “Stalin and Bukharin are betraying Bolshevism at its very core, its proletarian revolutionary internationalism,” Trotsky complained to Krupskaya (May 17, 1927). “The defeat of the German revolution in 1923, the defeats in Bulgaria and Estonia, the defeat of the [1926] general strike in England, and of the Chinese revolution in April have all seriously weakened international Communism.”178 The next day, the extended eighth plenum of the Comintern opened, with Stalin determined to have his line on China reconfirmed.179 In his speech on May 24, he ridiculed Trotsky, asserting that he “resembles an actor rather than a hero, and an actor should not be confused with a hero under any circumstances,” adding, in reference to the British prime minister, “There comes into being something like a united front from [Austen] Chamberlain to Trotsky.”180 Trotsky shot back: “Nothing has facilitated Chamberlain’s work as much as Stalin’s false policy, especially in China.”181
Stalin was on the back foot. The Comintern plenum, unsurprisingly, voted a resolution that “declares the proposals of the opposition (Trotsky, Zinoviev) to be plainly opportunist and capitulationist.”182 But on May 27, the conservative Tory government in Britain stunned the Soviet dictator by breaking off diplomatic relations.183 Stalin was infuriated: The imperialists gave refuge to anti-Soviet emigre organizations, financed anti-Soviet national undergrounds on Soviet soil (in Ukraine and the Caucasus), sent in swarms of agents, then got on their high horse about alleged subversion by the Comintern?! It was a blow, however. Britain had become one of the Soviet Union’s top trading partners.184 And it looked like the British conservatives might be ginning up their working class for a war against the Soviets. The Soviet press filled with warnings of imminent war and mass meetings were held to discuss war preparations, which unwittingly fanned defeatist talk.185 Stalin, knowing Britain was not preparing to invade, nonetheless was convinced the imperialists would incite proxies into fighting. Rykov appears to have believed the same.186 Britain was known to be busily building a broad anti-Soviet bloc out of Romania, Finland, and the Baltic states, while working to reconcile Germany and Poland.187
Under immense pressure, Stalin began an about-face on China, sending a long telegram on June 1, 1927, to the Comintern agents in Wuhan at the left Guomindang base, instructing them to form a revolutionary army of 50,000, to subject “reactionary” officers to military tribunal, to outlaw all contact with Chiang Kai-shek—the commander in chief of the existing army, to which all the soldiers and officers
had sworn an oath—and to curb peasant “excesses.”188 There was no way to carry out such an order. Manabenda Rath Roy, a recipient, showed the telegram to the left Guomindang leader, who was already inclined to seek reconciliation with the right Guomindang at Nanjing, and now saw evidence of Moscow’s own treachery.189
TERRORISM
Notwithstanding the gravity of developments, on June 5, 1927, Stalin began his summer holiday in his beloved Sochi, this time at the grander dacha no. 7, known as Puzanovka, named for the former owner, on a bluff between Sochi and Matsesta. “When we doctors arrived at the dacha, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva greeted us, a very dear and hospitable woman,” recalled Ivan Valedinsky. “That year I examined Stalin three times: before he began the course of Matsesta baths, during, and at the end. Just as in the previous year, Stalin complained of pain in the muscles of his extremities.” Stalin also underwent X-rays and an electrocardiogram. Nothing abnormal emerged. Even his blood pressure measured normal. “This examination generally showed that Stalin’s organism was fully healthy,” Valedinsky recalled. “We noted his jolly disposition and attentive, lively look.” The warm baths were followed by extended lounging naked, except for a wrap, to allow the blood to flow up to the skin, muscles, and extremities. “This therapeutic device brought warmth to Stalin’s hands and feet,” Valedinsky noted. Following the course of medicinal baths, Stalin invited Valedinsky and the other physicians on Saturday for a “brandy,” which lasted until the wee hours on Sunday. Early in the gathering, Vasya and Svetlana appeared on the terrace. “Iosif Vissarionovich was enlivened, began to play soldiers with them, fired at a target, in fact Stalin fired very accurately.”190
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