A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

by Bushkovitch, Paul

  In the fall of 1919 the Reds pushed Kolchak’s forces back into Siberia, the first victories of the later Soviet marshal M. N. Tukhachevskii, an aristocratic guards officer turned revolutionary enthusiast. The Red Army finally defeated Kolchak, capturing and executing him in Siberian Irkutsk. There was another try at a White victory: General Iudenich, the victor of Erzerum in 1916, led an expedition from Estonia toward Petrograd. Zinoviev thought the city defenseless, and Lenin agreed with him. Trotsky and Stalin vehemently objected, and convinced Lenin to let them defend the city. They raced north to Petrograd, Trotsky personally jumping on a horse to rally the troops. In October of 1919, Iudenich began the retreat back to Estonia. In the south, Denikin gave up command early in 1920 and went into exile. The remains of the White Army retreated to the Crimea and set up a new army and government under Baron Peter Wrangel. At that point the new Polish state invaded the Ukraine. The aim of the Poles was to conquer the lands held by Poland before the partitions of the eighteenth century, and to do so they allied with Petliura, who thus further discredited himself with the Ukrainian peasantry for whom the Poles were only noble landlords, and as such, their enemies. The Red Army redeployed west to meet the new threat, mobilizing some half a million soldiers. Lenin was convinced that the Reds should go all the way to Warsaw, an attempt to help the spread of revolution in Europe as well as to defeat the Poles. Trotsky was skeptical. The Red Army, led before Warsaw by the brilliant but erratic Tukhachevskii, moved too far to the west in an attempt to encircle the city. A huge gap opened in the Red lines, but the Red troops farther south under Budennyi, with Stalin as political commander, delayed moving north to help close the gap. The Poles, with French advice and weapons, swept north in a maneuver of brilliant simplicity to encircle Tukhachevskii’s troops. The Reds retreated far to the east, their major defeat in the Civil War, and made peace with Poland. The treaty established a boundary that gave Poland large parts of western Belorussia and the Ukraine, but not the main cities, Kiev, Odessa, and Minsk.

  At the critical moment of the Polish war Baron Wrangel had moved into the Red rear from Crimea. Now his was the only hostile force left in the field against the Bolsheviks. At the end of 1920 the Red Army stormed across the isthmus into Crimea with the help of Makhno’s irregulars, and the White cause was finished. The last refugees, soldiers and civilians evacuated the southern cities under the guns of the British navy, in a chaotic scene that marked the final end of the old Russia.

  The revolution and civil war was largely a Russian event but it had profound effects for the various nationalities that made up the periphery of the Russian Empire. In Poland nationalism trumped class and socialism, and the transition to an independent government was (internally) fairly smooth. In Finland a vicious civil war in 1918 between the local Social Democrats and the Whites led to a White victory after the Kaiser sent an expeditionary force to aid Baron Gustav Mannerheim, a former Imperial Russian general. In the Baltic provinces the collapse of the German occupation led to civil war as well, for Riga especially had a large and very radical working class. Britain, however, saw the Baltic as its sphere of influence and landed Freikorps soldiers, German right-wing nationalist paramilitaries, in 1919 to push out the Reds. The British then set up a nationalist government in their place, evicting the Freikorps as well. The Baltic Reds went into exile in Soviet Russia, providing in particular a major component in the Cheka and Red Army. In the Ukraine the task of the Reds was made easier by the fact that all of the cities were Russian-speaking. The largest urban minority was Jewish, not Ukrainian, and the local nationalist movement was a small layer of intellectuals trying to lead the peasantry. Their armies were totally disorganized, and in addition they were reluctant to be clear on the land question, the crucial issue to the peasants. The Reds easily swept them away.

  In the Caucasus the Reds were also victorious. The Brest-Litovsk treaty had led to the German-Turkish occupation of the Caucasus, and the end of the war meant their withdrawal. The Reds tried to make a revolution in their wake, but local nationalist parties took power with British help. As Britain was busily occupying the nearby Middle East, it had few resources to spare, and the local governments were left to their own devices. In 1920 the Red Army came south under the command of Stalin’s fellow Georgian and close friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze and took Baku. The small Azeri army was largely led by Turkish officers, by now supporters of Kemal Ataturk’s resistance to the western powers in Anatolia, and greeted the Reds as allies. Furthermore, Baku itself was a city in its majority not Azeri but Russian, Georgian, and Armenian, a population drawn by oil to what was largely a European city. The Reds had plenty of allies. The Reds moved on quickly to eject the Armenian nationalists, and a few months later it was the turn of the Georgian Mensheviks. A new Soviet republic, the Transcaucasian Federation, came into existence, combining all of the area under one government. In Central Asia resistance to the Reds ended by 1922, and the Japanese were eventually persuaded to withdraw from eastern Siberia, so that everywhere but in the West the old boundaries were reestablished.

  The new, Soviet, Russia that came into being was devastated by years of war and revolution, with its economy in pieces. Perhaps a million men had died on the many fronts of the Civil War and (estimates vary) five or six million civilians – the greatest number of these from typhus and other epidemic diseases, followed by hunger. Executions and massive reprisals by all sides made up the rest of the death toll. Some million or two Russians, including much of the old upper classes and the intelligentsia, left the country, never to return. Transport and production were at a standstill. For the time being, the Soviets continued the policy of War Communism and mobilized the Labor Armies under Trotsky to rebuild the damage. This was not a viable policy and resistance to the new order grew throughout the country. Lenin realized that some sort of compromise was needed, an economic policy that provided enough room for the population, particularly the peasantry, to work without state direction. This compromise would be named the New Economic Policy and it inaugurated a whole new era in the history of Soviet Russia and the other Soviet states under the rule of the Communist Party.

  17 Compromise and Preparation

  The end of the Civil War presented the Soviet leadership with a whole series of new issues, some immediate and some more long term. If the White armies were defeated, internal discontent was growing rapidly, fueled by the catastrophic economic situation and resentment of the party dictatorship. In 1920 in the Tambov province in central Russia a major revolt of the peasantry broke out, largely unpolitical but no less fervent. It required major army forces under Tukhachevskii to suppress it. As the army moved into Tambov province, the sailors of Kronstadt rose in revolt. The revolt at the naval base in the harbor of Petrograd was much more visible and more political. The sailors had been crucial supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917, and now they were calling for Soviets to be elected without Communists, a direct challenge to the emerging Soviet system. At the end of March, 1921, Trotsky sent troops across the ice to retake the fort with much loss of life, the whole event illustrating the fragility of Soviet power. The revolts and the obvious failure of War Communism led to a sharp turn in economic policy. As the fighting raged in Kronstadt, Lenin and the party abolished the system of compulsory grain deliveries, substituting a tax in kind and permitting the peasantry to trade freely in the products left after the payment of the new tax. This step was the foundation of the New Economic Policy, known as NEP. A return to a money economy soon followed, and with it came permission from the state, even encouragement, for private individuals to trade and set up businesses to supply a population starved of the most basic consumer goods. Socialism was no longer on the immediate agenda. Industrial recovery would eventually provide a basis for further development, and at an indefinite point in the future peasant agriculture would be drawn somehow into the socialist system (a process called “collectivization”).

  The next immediate issue was the famine that appeared in 1922, the result of y
ears of devastation, neglect of equipment and infrastructure, the absence of peasants from the fields while fighting in the various armies during the Civil War, the Soviet grain requisitions that discouraged farming, and general death and destruction. The Soviets took up the offer of the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, fresh from relief operations in Belgium, to provide food to stricken areas in the south and the Volga region. Relief and the return of peace could contain the famine, but longer-term issues remained. The outcome of the revolution and civil war was that the peasantry finally controlled virtually all arable land in Russia. With the urban economy devastated, however, they at first had little incentive to sell their grain to the cities. Yet NEP depended precisely on the peasant sale of grain for consumer goods, and eventually it worked. The peasants now had cloth, industrially manufactured consumer goods, and some farm equipment to buy in return for their grain. At this point, the party did little to advance any sort of socialist agriculture. It abandoned the experiments with the “communes” of the Civil War era, and settled for modest cooperatives among the peasants while trying to build a basic party network among them, especially from younger peasants who had served in the Red Army.

  The result was a certain return to normalcy on the part of urban society, but that was very much a matter of the surface of things. In reality, all had changed. The old state, upper classes, and much of the intelligentsia were gone, dead, marginalized, or abroad. In their place was the new party-state, the core of which was the Communist Party. In the old palaces of the nobility the Party set up museums and kindergartens, party offices and schools, and Cheka headquarters and administrative offices. Interspersed among drab new institutions were the more garish shops and restaurants of the Nepmen (as the new businessmen were called) with their hints of luxury and hedonism. Bright lights reappeared and private restaurants featured jazz bands and European cabaret acts. Advertisements for privately manufactured rubber boots and champagne hung alongside banners calling for world revolution. Prostitutes and smugglers rubbed shoulders with German Comintern agents and Latvian Cheka officers. Workers were enrolled in instant higher education projects (the “Workers’ Faculties”) and peasants came to the cities looking for unskilled work as before.

  The Soviet Union of the 1920s was a colorful place, but there was more than an easier daily life in the cities. The economy revived from the catastrophic situation of 1920; indeed it revived much faster than the party leadership expected. Instead of decades of rebuilding, production in almost all areas had rebounded by 1926 to pre-war levels, in some areas exceeding them. Of course this was merely a revival, and in the years since 1914 the world had not stood still. Especially in the United States and Germany, new technologies were changing the landscape, and the Soviet Union had merely rebuilt the pre-war world. Automobiles, new chemical industries, aircraft, and radio technology were all new and growing rapidly in the West. The USSR would have to move very fast just to catch up. Unfortunately one crucial area lagged behind: agriculture. The problem was not total production, for the country produced almost exactly the same amount of grain – the crucial commodity – as in 1914, but now much less came to market. On average the peasants marketed only a bit more than half of the amount of grain marketed before the war. Explanations for this phenomenon vary, but it seems that it was the result of land seizures in the summer of 1917. Large estates, which had been market-oriented, disappeared, and the distribution of land among the peasants was radically equalized. Well-off peasants (the kulaks) did remain in the villages, but most land went to middling producers who consumed more of their harvest than before the war. Soviet pricing policies increased the problem, as the peasants thought the state purchase prices were too low. Here was the dilemma: if the country was to continue to industrialize, and to keep up with the West, it would need vast new industries and new cities, and their workers would need food. How to get it? Agriculture would have to become more productive, but how and how fast? Thus the rather technical questions of balancing industrial growth rates and modernizing agriculture became the object of increasingly acrimonious debate and vicious internal struggles inside the leadership of the Communist Party. The outcome of these debates and struggle was the supreme power of Joseph Stalin.

  The Civil War had further centralized an already centralized party and also imbued it with a civil war mentality. All disagreements became necessarily matters of life and death – all opponents were covert enemies of the entire revolutionary idea. Lenin and Trotsky defended and practiced terror against the Whites and other enemies. The remaining moderate socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Left SRs as well as the anarchists were suppressed. Not surprisingly, the end of the Civil War had no effect on the Bolshevik mentality, and the demands for ideological unity, if anything, became sharper. Personality clashes and differences in strategy, however, militated against unity. Lenin, in his last writings, was critical of all of the major figures – Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and others – but offered no clear choice among the leadership. The first major dispute broke out in 1923, as Lenin’s health deteriorated after several strokes. Trotsky and a number of his allies from the Civil War began to criticize the “bureaucratic tendencies” in the party. Then in January 1924, Lenin died. The mantle of leadership was not passed on to any one man: Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were the dominant figures. In 1922 the Party Congress had appointed Stalin General Secretary of the party, a position he held until his death. It gave him control or at least knowledge of all appointments in the party to any positions of significance. Bukharin, as editor of Pravda, the party newspaper, was their most important ally. Trotsky still possessed great power and prestige but the others did not trust him. As the Commissar of War for many years, he seemed the most likely to become the Bonaparte of the Russian Revolution. If not as well educated as Bukharin, he was sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and arrogant – too aloof to form powerful allies. Trotsky’s Menshevik past continued to haunt him. He also seriously underestimated Stalin, thinking him a provincial boor who was only good at bureaucratic maneuvers. Stalin, as a Georgian with a heavy accent, was in some ways even more of an outsider than Trotsky, but he had to his credit long years of faithful service to the party and an unflinching loyalty to Bolshevism. He had not spent long years abroad before 1917, and in that sense was more part of the Russian scene and more familiar to the party rank and file than the other leaders. Unlike Trotsky, he did not read French novels when bored at party meetings.

  These biographical details would be only curiosities of the time if they did not come into play when real and basic issues arose in the party leadership over the future of the country. The most important of these was the controversy over “socialism in one country,” both for its own sake and for the implications it had for decisions in so many areas.

  The struggle began in the last years of Lenin’s life, the first major one being Trotsky’s 1923 opposition platform. Trotsky’s main point was that the party was becoming less democratic and more bureaucratic through the practice of appointing its officials through Stalin’s secretariat rather than by election. His letter to the party leadership on this issue sparked an intense discussion that eventually came out into the open just on the eve of Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924. His opponents were Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev on this issue, the three forming a triumvirate that ruled the party and the country after Lenin’s death. Trotsky’s opposition for the moment produced some concessions, but the triumvirate remained in control. In any case the dispute was not as radical as it might seem, as Trotsky was a principled supporter of a centralized and authoritarian party. All he wanted was a little room for maneuver. More basic disagreements quickly emerged. Trotsky believed that the revolution could not survive, and socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union unless there were revolutions in the advanced countries of the West. Only fraternal socialist aid could overcome Russia’s backwardness. In the meantime, the USSR needed to pursue a policy of super-accelerated industrialization. The econom
ist Evgenii Preobrazhenskii supported Trotsky on the issue of party structure, but also propounded a more detailed economic platform. His idea was simply to strip resources from the countryside by confiscations and other methods reminiscent of War Communism and use them for extremely rapid industrialization. The dilemma, as Preobrazhenskii saw it, was that the existence of private, small-scale peasant farming would lead to the strengthening of capitalism within the Soviet Union. He shared with Trotsky the idea that the Soviet Union could never survive as a socialist society encircled by capitalism: revolution in the advanced countries was essential to the building of socialism in the USSR, but in the short run extreme measures were necessary to ensure that the country would still be around when the revolution came in the West. This was the platform of the Left Opposition, as it came to be known.

  This perspective met furious rejection from Bukharin, whose position as editor of Pravda meant that his views would receive wide circulation. Bukharin’s platform was a strident defense of NEP. He ridiculed the super-industrialization schemes of the opposition and explained that the crucial issue was the recovery of agriculture and the gradual enrichment of the peasants. As long as the party controlled the state and industry remained in state hands, there was nothing to fear from the peasants and the country would move rapidly toward a socialist industrial society. Stalin allied with Bukharin and himself began to formulate the notion of “socialism in one country,” the idea that the USSR alone could totally transform its society, including its agriculture, before the ultimate triumph of socialism in the West. For Stalin did not reject the prospect of world revolution, as he was convinced that the capitalist powers would eventually unleash a new world war and that revolution would come out of it if not earlier. Where he differed from Trotsky was in the belief that the Soviet Union could manage to build a socialist society on its own while waiting for revolution abroad.