Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The ruthless application of terror, the treachery to allies and the total disregard for truth that characterised the Bolshevik regime sprang from the ideology that Marx and Lenin had evolved under which the ends justified any means. They were all attributes totally incompatible with the ideologies prevalent in the west, but all were mere shadows of what was to come under Lenin’s successor. There were limits to Lenin’s fanaticism: for example, however rancorous the internal party struggles no Communist party member was ever executed under Lenin. That soon changed. Under Stalin the Bolsheviks turned terror on themselves.

  Significantly the first communist to be sentenced to death was not one of Stalin’s rivals but the Tartar leader, Mir Said Sultan-Galiev, who was charged with the classic imperial crime of demanding an autonomous Tartar republic in the Urals. In supporting Stalin in this case the rest of the politburo seemed not to see that they were creating a precedent that would soon be used against them. (As a footnote, when Soviet archives were opened up under Gorbachev it was discovered that Sultan-Galiev had not in fact been executed in 1928 but imprisoned and then quietly released, only to rounded up in a later purge and shot in 1940.)

  Stalin achieved what the tsarist secret police had only dreamed of: he annihilated a whole generation of Russian revolutionaries, men and a few women, who had been part of an international, intellectual, revolutionary ferment, replacing them with men, and even fewer women, who had joined the cause after the revolution, who had no interest in theory or debate, who had virtually no experience of the wider world (and indeed whose contact with that wider world was limited to the foreign forces who had tried to stop their revolution) and whose whole mindset was conditioned by their experience of the chaos of civil war. Unsurprisingly, just as they had after the Time of Troubles, the Russian people, and especially the new communist establishment, responded to a form of government they believed would save them from a repetition of such chaos: autocracy.

  It is almost impossible to convey the depth of horror that Joseph Stalin embodied. However many similarities there are between Russian and American histories, there is nothing to compare for sheer scale with the evils of Stalinism; he probably killed in a few decades more human beings than died in centuries of trans-Atlantic slave trading. Parallels with Ivan the Terrible, and in the twentieth century with Hitler, are obvious but recent research shows that Stalin exceeded both in the sheer number of human beings sent to their deaths. In addition to all those executed or consigned to the camps millions died in famines that Stalin quite deliberately inflicted. According to Rayfield, ‘The number of excess deaths between 1930 and 1933 attributable to collectivisation lies between a conservative 7.2 and a plausible 10.8 million.’The statistics are too horrendous to comprehend.

  Stalin is said to have personally signed 383 printed lists containing around 230,000 names of those to be executed, with the names carefully divided into four categories: military, secret police, general and ‘wives of enemies of the people’. And these were just the most senior victims. The terror reached into every corner of Soviet life. An NKVD circular in 1938 detailed how ‘socially dangerous children exhibiting anti-Soviet attitudes’ were to be sent to the Gulags. Petya Yakir was arrested and tortured for forming an ‘anarchist mounted band’: he was just fourteen.

  Half the membership of the Communist party was arrested and a million party members were executed or died in the camps. The Great Terror unleashed in the mid-1930s was, according to Robert Conquest, the ‘defining event’ in Stalin’s reign. In it Stalin ‘finally crushed not merely opposition but any trace of overt independent thought’. Seventy per cent of the Communist party central committee was killed. The great majority of the Union of Writers was executed or sent to the gulags. Quotas were given to death squads throughout the country, and closer at hand Stalin turned on those closest to him, even on those who had carried out his executions. In a series of show trials men who had once been among the most powerful in Russia confessed to the most absurd ‘crimes’ like ‘oppositionism’ and ‘Social Democratic Deviation’ in return for promises that their lives would be saved; promises that were almost never honoured. Torture was meted out to high and low alike. Leading politicians like Kalinin, the Soviet head of state, and Molotov, one time foreign minister, were made to continue as normal while their wives languished in the gulags (remarkably Polina Molotov, a Jew who had made the mistake of suggesting the creation of a Jewish homeland in the Crimea, outlived Stalin and returned from six years in the camps to remarry her husband).

  Between 1929 and Stalin’s death in 1953, 18 million people were sent to the gulags. There were thousands of prison camps organised into nearly five hundred distinct complexes and producing a third of the country’s gold, vast amounts of coal and timber and manufactured goods as varied as artillery shells and office furniture. Men and women were arrested simply because the prison industries needed people with particular types of expertise. Not only were the conditions in the camps unimaginable but many died before even getting there. One report showed that for every eight prisoners dispatched on the three-month train and boat trip to camps in the goldfields of Kolyma in the far north-east of Russia only five reached the port of Magadan alive. After enduring backbreaking labour in temperatures more than 45°C below freezing even fewer returned.

  On top of the millions of prisoners dispatched to the gulags 6 million people were exiled to the wastes of Siberia and the Kazakh deserts, and all this with utmost cruelty. During the Second World War Stalin deported more than 2 million ethnic minority men, women and children to Siberia, supposedly for their collaboration with the Nazi invaders. Germans, Crimean Tartars, Chechens, Ingushi, Kalmyks, Karachai and Balkars were loaded into thousands of trucks supplied by the United States government, carted to railway depots and then shipped east. At least a third died en route or soon after arrival. Like so much else in Russian history the deportations mirrored what had happened in America, but did so on a scale whose horror dwarfed the ethnic cleansing of the American natives. Scale is also the main difference between Stalin’s actions and those of earlier Russian leaders. During the First World War the tsarist regime deported 250,000 Germans, Gypsies, Hungarians, Jews and Turks from the Russian empire’s western provinces for fear they would collaborate with the enemy. Yet again Stalin showed himself to be an old-style autocrat rather than a new-style communist.

  In other areas too Stalin acted like the most reactionary of his tsarist predecessors. Genuine scientific enquiry that produced the ‘wrong’ answer was suppressed; lunatic ideas that provided the ‘right’ ideas were glorified. Trofim Lysenko promised Stalin that he would produce vast amounts of food by a succession of mad schemes such as freezing wheat seeds to shock them into super growth and making all offices and factories keep rabbits. Lysenko became the most powerful scientist in Russia and sent thousands of his critics to the gulags. The nearest American equivalent operated on a far, far smaller scale. Ewen Cameron, one time president of the American Psychiatric Association, expounded mad theories about ‘depatterning’ the human mind by giving his victims massive electrical shocks and cocktails of hallucinogenic drugs in order to reorder their ‘psychic driving’. His grotesque experiments at McGill University in Canada were funded by the CIA in the hope that he could help improve their interrogation techniques. Cameron’s experiments eventually became public, and following a class-action lawsuit the CIA paid massive compensation to his victims (albeit not until 1988, nearly thirty years later). The victims of Lysenko were never compensated.

  Like Ivan the Terrible by the end of his reign Stalin was clearly mad. He began to believe his own paranoid fantasies. During the Second World War he spent hours carefully annotating reports on suspects, like the Russian journalist purportedly recruited into French Intelligence by the novelist André Malraux, despite the fact that any sane person could see that the reports were entirely fictitious.

  Stalin was a monster with few parallels in human history, who spouted a radically new ideology, a
nd yet what stands out above all is the continuity of the Stalinist period with the preceding centuries of tsarist autocracy. Stalin, like Lenin before him, was a tsar in all but name. On one occasion in 1920 Lenin calmly ordered the execution of the wife and four young daughters of a man who refused to join the Red Army; such callous and casual terror sprang not from intellectual theorising about the inevitability of the proletarian revolution but from the Russian tradition of the unfettered use and abuse of power. Stalin merely carried that tradition to extremes – extremes seen already in the days of rulers like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

  Lenin and Stalin may have started out along a radically new path but they arrived at the same destination as their tsarist predecessors. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the evolution of the Russian empire.

  The Bolshevik Empire

  When they seized power in October 1917 the Bolsheviks proclaimed the end of empire. They needed as much support as they could get, and exploiting unrest among the minority groups within the Russian empire was one way of getting it. One of their very first decrees was entitled ‘The Rights of the Peoples of Russia to Self-Determination’. This decree, signed by both Lenin and Stalin, guaranteed, among other things, ‘the free development of national minorities and ethnic groups’ – including their right to secede. Stalin, who had been given the least important of the fifteen ministries that made up Lenin’s government, the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, travelled to Helsinki within weeks of the revolution to promise Finnish independence.

  Lenin modified Marxism by stressing the importance of imperialism as the highest form of capitalism. History may yet show him to have been right. The Bolsheviks’ anti-imperial declarations were not just cynical tactical ploys but reflected their conviction that the proletariat everywhere would – eventually – choose to follow the communist vanguard. There was no need to forcibly replace a tsarist empire with a Bolshevik empire: the unstoppable forces of Marxist dialectic would propel the workers of the world into a commonwealth of proletarian communist utopias.

  Whatever the motivation of the Bolsheviks’ espousal of self-determination for Russia’s minorities, the policy became academic when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk dismantled the Russian empire. The Ukraine, the Baltic states and the Caucasus were all stripped away not by the Bolsheviks but by the German and Austro-Hungarian armies. In consolidating its hold on power the new Russian regime soon determined to restore the old frontiers of the Russian empire. A Ukrainian republic had been established for the first time following the German collapse, but the Bolsheviks soon crushed any aspirations for independence. Ancient enmities then surfaced yet again on the Polish frontier. Sensing weakness in their old enemy, Polish troops surged across the border into Ukraine in May 1920 and captured Kiev, birthplace of the Rus. Not for the first time they discovered they had underestimated their foe. Trotsky counterattacked with such vigour that the Red Army was soon on the outskirts of Warsaw. Contrary to Bolshevik theory the Polish working class did not rise up to welcome them. Supported by French troops the Poles successfully counterattacked in one of the most argued-about battles of the twentieth century.

  To some the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ was one of the most important events in world history, in which the Red Army was stopped from rampaging across Europe and creating Soviet republics in Poland, Germany and beyond. It was the Châlons of the twentieth century. To others the battle of Warsaw was one more minor skirmish in the civil war raging across the former Russian empire – no more significant that the battles going on at the same time in the Baltic states, in Persia (where Britain was supporting anti-Bolshevik Cossacks) and the far east (where the Japanese were clinging on to Vladivostok).

  Whatever its true significance, the Russo-Polish War of 1920 throws an interesting light on western perceptions of right and wrong. The avowed aim of the Polish invaders was to make Russia return to the frontier that had existed before Catherine the Great engineered the First Partition of Poland in 1772. Western opinion was overwhelmingly on the side of the Poles, and yet anyone who might have suggested that America should similarly return to its 1772 pre-Independence frontier would have been considered mad. Of course there were enormous differences – not least the absence of any realistic alternative claimant in North America – but through Russian eyes double standards could be clearly discerned.

  Double standards were far more obvious in the case of the Bolsheviks themselves who, despite their protestations to the contrary, remained instinctive imperialists. When a Muslim revolt broke out in central Asia in 1916 Lenin reacted in the same oppressive way as Nicholas II: hundreds of thousands of rebels are said to have perished before the insurrection finally crumbled in the mid-1920s. Just as many Americans were claiming that their occupation of Hawaii and the Philippines was not imperialism, so the Red Army’s occupation of non-Russian territories was proclaimed to be totally unlike the tsarist occupation that had gone before. Rayfield quotes the Bolshevik leader Zinoviev proclaiming in 1919, ‘We cannot do without Azerbaijan’s oil or Turkestan’s cotton. We take these things which we need, but not in the way the old exploiters took them, but as elder brothers who are carrying the torch of civilisation.’ Samuel Dole could have spoken virtually the same words when he deposed the native regime in Hawaii.

  Events in the Caucasus soon showed that new ‘anti-imperialists’ in Moscow had not given up Russia’s imperial dreams. Once the White Armies had been defeated the Red Army was free to turn on the three independent republics that had appeared in the region. Azerbaijan and Armenia were quickly over-run but Georgia was more difficult. Georgia was controlled by the Mensheviks, but politics in the Caucasus had always been more ethnic than ideological. Thousands of minority Ossetians were accused of Bolshevism by the Mensheviks and killed, or died of hunger or disease, leaving a legacy of bitterness that would spill over into war again in the twenty-first century.

  In May 1920 Lenin signed a treaty with the Menshevik regime that unambiguously renounced all Russian sovereign rights and recognised the independence of the Georgian state. Nine months later the Red Army invaded, and after ten days of bitter fighting the Georgians capitulated. Stalin returned to the country for the first time in nine years and, despite his title of commissar of nationalities, launched a vitriolic attack on the ‘hydra of nationalism’. In a comment that should have served as a warning of what would lay in store if he succeeded to the communist throne, Stalin urged that his opponents be destroyed in the manner of Shah Abbas. Shah Abbas, who ruled Persia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, is remembered in Iran for his fairness and wisdom but in Georgia for the orgy of death and destruction that his army inflicted on their country (a reputation perhaps with its basis in the training the Persian army received from British mercenaries, just a few decades before another British mercenary wreaked similar destruction on the natives of Mystic, Connecticut).

  In 1922, with Ukraine, Belarus and the three states of the Caucasus back under Russian control, the Bolsheviks debated how the empire should be run. Lenin wanted a union of soviet republics of which Russia would be just one. Stalin attacked this as ‘national liberalism’ – whatever that might mean – and demanded that the reconquered territories be simply merged into a unitary Greater Russia. Lenin, of course, had his way. When Stalin took power he maintained the form of Lenin’s USSR while making it operate as he had wanted. From then on the legal structures of the empire bore very little resemblance to political reality. Stalin was Georgian, not Russian, and throughout his life purists commented on his tussles with the Russian language. But like his foreign-born predecessor Catherine the Great he cloaked himself in the imperial mantle and pushed the boundaries of the Russian empire beyond anything achieved before.

  Early efforts to expand the Soviet empire were clumsy and half-hearted, as Stalin was primarily concerned with his enemies at home. The one new conquest achieved by the Bolsheviks happened more by accident than through the application of a grand imperial st
rategy. In 1920 a gang of anti-Bolshevik Russian renegades known as the Asiatic Cavalry Division rode into Mongolia. Their leader, Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, was a cross between the murderous Yermak Timofeyevich and American filibusters. The Austrian-born Estonian aristocrat, who claimed to be a descendant of Attila the Hun, set about creating his own kingdom in what had been Chinese Mongolia. His brutality was such that even his Mongolian bodyguards were sickened, and eventually they tied him up and left him on the steppe where a Red Army patrol found him. After a cursory appearance before a Siberian court the baron was shot. Recognising the power vacuum this left, the Red Army then marched in to create the first and longest-lasting Soviet colony: Outer Mongolia.

  Attempts to foment a communist revolution in China failed when the Chinese communists were routed in April 1927, and this, along with earlier failures in Hungary and Germany, showed that the prospects for global communism were gloomy. This was a major problem for communist theorists, as a key element of Lenin’s interpretation of Marx was the notion that the survival of the Russian Revolution depended on the competing capitalist empires being overthrown.

  The core of Marxism, as explained earlier, is the belief that history consists of a series of ruling classes replacing each other as the economic organisation of society changes. Eventually capitalism drives out other forms of economic life and the capitalist bourgeoisie takes power. This in turn leads to the creation of an industrial working class, the proletariat, which will in the final struggle of human history overthrow the bourgeoisie in a socialist revolution leading to the creation of a truly classless society – communism. The problem, as Lenin saw it, was that Russia was still a pre-capitalist society; the industrial proletariat needed to maintain the Bolshevik revolution was simply too small to resist the might of global capitalism. Therefore his revolution could only succeed if it was quickly followed by proletarian revolution in countries that had already reached capitalism. As a consequence it was a fundamental tenet of Lenin’s version of Marxism that the Bolshevik government in Russia had to use every means at its disposal to spread the revolution. Like many American leaders, Lenin was convinced of the imperative need to export his way of life. The imperial adventures of the communist Russian state would always have the ethical imprimatur of Marxist ideology.