Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

‘The policy and practice of the Russian government has always been to push forward its encroachments as fast and as far as the apathy and want of firmness of other governments would allow it to go, but always to stop and retire when it met with decided resistance and then to wait for the next favourable opportunity to make another spring on its intended victim.’

  Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865)

  ‘No nation that enslaves another nation can be free.’

  Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1917

  In November 1920, a month after Inessa’s funeral, the grande dame of German socialism Clara Zetkin, a good friend of Nadya’s, visited Moscow and had a long interview with Lenin. ‘As we spoke, his face shrank before my eyes,’ she told a Berlin comrade. ‘Furrows great and small engraved themselves deeply on it. And every furrow was drawn by a grave trouble or a gnawing pain. An expression of unspoken and unspeakable suffering was on his face.’ Zetkin thought his appearance had something to do with Inessa Armand’s death – but he had a more pressing immediate concern, she pointed out. The Soviet regime was losing a war against Poland and Russia was being humiliated.

  The newly independent Poles started the war. With England and France’s backing, they invaded Ukraine in spring 1920.*1 The Poles and Ukrainians had had complicated territorial and religious conflicts over many centuries; but now a brash and confident Polish leader, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, renewed historic claims to lands that had formed the Polish empire of the seventeenth century. Piłsudski had been involved with Lenin’s brother in the plot to murder Tsar Alexander III – he spent five years in exile in Siberia – but he was a Polish nationalist, not a socialist, and he had no sympathy with Lenin or the Bolsheviks.

  By early 1920 the Civil War in Russia was won by the Reds, though there were still some mopping-up operations to complete. Within eighteen months of Poland’s new independence, Piłsudski took his opportunity. He led an army of 70,000 Poles eastwards, and seized much of Byelorussia and Lithuania. He captured Kiev on 7 May, promising ‘to liberate Ukraine from Russia’.

  Lenin, the great Marxist internationalist, appealed to patriotism and the Right: ‘We shall teach the Poles a lesson they will never forget,’ he said. Thousands of former soldiers from the Tsarist army volunteered in a force to counter-attack the Poles and beat them back in a defensive war to recapture Ukraine. It was led by a new young war hero, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, aged just twenty-seven. The glamorous new poster boy of the Revolution could not claim unimpeachable proletarian roots: he was from an aristocratic house that could trace its ancestry back to a twelfth-century noble clan of the Holy Roman Empire which had served the rulers of Kievan Rus’. But his mother had been a servant girl. He was hugely popular with the men in the Red Army, and when he pledged fealty to the Communist Party the magnates in the Kremlin came to rely on him as a military saviour. His army rolled back the Poles, who appealed to the West for help to reach a peace settlement.1

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  Lenin always believed that world revolution was just around the corner. There had been short-lived socialist coups in Berlin and Munich in 1919, suppressed by the German army and a militia of anti-Communists, the Freikorps. For five months in Hungary a Soviet government under Béla Kun had modelled itself on Lenin’s regime, until it was defeated in August 1919 by an authoritarian figure on the Right, Admiral Miklós Horthy.

  Lenin’s faith was undimmed: the worldwide revolution was taking rather longer than he thought, but it was coming. The uprisings in Germany failed, yet ‘only a blind man can fail to see the ferment in Germany’ he said in June 1919, a week or so after Rosa Luxemburg, inspiration for the Berlin rising, had been buried. In March 1920 he believed that ‘the day is not far off when we shall march hand in hand with a German Soviet government’. He told the British journalist Arthur Ransome at around the same time, ‘You would have to be a fool not to realise that socialist revolution is looming in Britain.’ Ransome shook his head and suggested that perhaps the British were not a revolutionary people. Lenin told him severely that he wasn’t looking at things in a ‘broad and objective’ way.

  For the first two years after his coup Lenin was convinced that his regime could not survive unless there was revolution elsewhere in the West. The Soviet government would ‘be encircled and we will be snuffed out’, he told Trotsky. He had helped the Hungarian Communists with money and through endless messages to Kun offering advice, though there was little he could do directly to aid other revolutionaries.

  But he took the establishment of the Comintern (Communist International) seriously. This was to be the group of socialist parties throughout Western Europe and the US that would spark the revolutions – as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. The idea was based on his version of a Marxist principle: ‘The interests of socialism, of world socialism, are superior to national interests, the interests of the State.’ But, as so often, Lenin’s need to control organisations, centralise them and dominate them turned the principle on its head. The Comintern was run from Moscow and soon became a branch of Soviet foreign policy. Its founding rules stated that if members wanted to be considered Communist Parties, if they wanted any help or support from Russia, all had to be Leninist-type organisations run like the Bolsheviks. They must expel from their ranks ‘moderates and centrists’; they had to try to take over trade unions; and they had to toe the Moscow line on almost everything. In the long term this did immense harm to the idea of world revolution and set back Lenin and his successors’ dreams of spreading socialism. Portraying the far-Left parties elsewhere as stooges of the Russians played into the hands of the Right.2

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  With the Poles back behind their own border, most of the other Kremlin chieftains assumed that would be the end of the war and they could exact a good price from Piłsudski. The British Foreign Secretary had tried to negotiate a peace deal and drew a new border between Russia and Poland: the Curzon Line.*2 The Poles felt forced to accept it – for now. But Lenin was determined to press on and turn the defensive war into an aggressive one and capture Warsaw. Trotsky was against the idea: ‘this is the worst mistake you will ever make’, he told Lenin. Stalin opposed it to begin with (though he would soon change his mind and support the leader). Dzerzhinsky, who had been at the same school as Piłsudski, warned that Poles would fight hard, and the Russians could never seize Warsaw. ‘Poland is not ripe for a revolutionary war.’ Karl Radek, another Pole, looked at Lenin and said simply, ‘You will be beaten…and badly.’ But Lenin would not listen. On 22 July he ordered Tukhachevsky to cross into Poland ‘and take Warsaw within a month’. It was a foolish gamble – ‘a flight of fancy’, as one of his Sovnarkom critics put it.

  At first the invasion went well and it was a popular war. Lenin might have had an aim of exporting revolution, but the newspapers, the Communist press, were full of nationalist venom against ‘the Jesuitical Poles’ and the ‘wicked betrayal’ that had to be avenged. Symbolically, Brest-Litovsk was captured within days. Tukhachevsky’s army of 140,000 was advancing at twenty kilometres a day. Another war hero emerged, a swashbuckling, bewhiskered, thirty-seven-year-old cavalry officer, Semyon Budyonny, who took all before him for two weeks as he swept through Western Ukraine and into Poland. But the army’s supplies ran low, ammunition was scarce, and when the Polish forces regrouped outside Warsaw the Russian army was routed. Forced into retreat over the late summer and autumn of 1920, the Russians lost 30,000 dead and 20,000 seriously wounded. Lenin had not thought the Red Army could invade Germany or Hungary, or even hold on to a Sovietised Poland. But he wanted to change the post-Versailles European balance and pierce the cordon sanitaire the West had established around Russia. If Lenin had made a deal in July 1920, he could have held all of Ukraine, Lithuania, Byelorussia and parts of eastern Poland. When he signed the Riga Treaty in March 1921 he had lost them all.

  He admitted his mistakes privately, to Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and Radek. But he used weasel words in public, either t
o fool himself or his Party. ‘Without having gained an international victory…a sure victory, we have won the ability to exist side by side with the capitalist powers.’ When he met Zetkin, he told her that he was surprised that ‘the Poles thought and acted, not in a social, revolutionary manner, but as nationalists and imperialists. In the Red Army, they saw an enemy and not brothers, liberators. Budyonny and the other army leaders were brilliant…but they could not make up for our political mistakes.’3

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  After the Polish War, Lenin abandoned thoughts of sending troops to fight on foreign soil: ‘we can’t make revolution abroad at the point of a bayonet’, he told Kamenev. But he did not give up spreading revolutionary ideas in an attempt to destroy the capitalist powers. It had always been his intention to spark uprisings elsewhere. Now he could justify doing so on the grounds that the Allies had helped the Whites against his regime; it was legitimate for the Soviets to interfere in the West. It may have been a weak, hypocritical argument, but it was one he used regularly.

  He spared no expense on propaganda in Western Europe and in the US and on subsidies for Communist Parties and trade unions. He helped to establish leftist parties in colonies ruled by Western powers as a way to destabilise their empires, for example in British India. In China he gave large sums of money to the Chinese Communists – and, to begin with, hedging his bets, to the more moderate socialists.

  Lenin installed Angelica Balabanova as the first Secretary of the Comintern in 1919 and sent her to Stockholm to establish links with leftist groups in the West. ‘Ships arrived from Russia every Saturday,’ she recalled. ‘They brought me…huge amounts of money, which I deposited in a bank. My office didn’t need such large sums and the purpose of these transfers was incomprehensible to me. I felt ill at ease about the money and I took every opportunity to ask Lenin for explanations and instructions. I received the following letter from Lenin. “Dear Comrade Balabanova. Excellent. Excellent [underlined]…you are our most capable and deserving collaborator. But I beg you, don’t economise. Spend millions. Many many, millions.” And that is what the Comintern did.’

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  Lenin was intimately involved with the selection of Comintern agents and interfered in minute details. As they were matters that had potential diplomatic consequences, he made the decisions himself – on broad policy, budgets, tactics. During one fortnight at the end of 1919 he was asked whether it was time to form a new Communist Party in Afghanistan (the answer was yes), whether an Indian branch of the Party should be established in Soviet Turkestan (maybe) and how much money should be given to the Communists in Bengal (a lot, up to five million rubles).*3 He received a request from the senior Finnish Communist Eino Rakhia, who had been his guide and bodyguard in 1917, for ten million rubles, to aid the Party in Helsingfors. It was granted. He supported a subsidy of US$1 million for John Reed, the American journalist, to spend on propaganda in the US. He approved a proposal of 200,000 rubles to pay ‘agitators and propagandists in Asian labour organisations…the cost of each one, plus bonuses when he returns, would be…Korea 10,000 rubles, South China 20,000…similar missions are envisaged for Persia and India’. He would handle Comintern issues personally in close detail every day.

  Lenin’s ability pragmatically to change direction when it seemed tactically sensible shocked true believers abroad, as it had his own Bolsheviks in exile before 1917. He told British Communists at the end of 1919 that they should enter the Labour Party and work for the cause that way rather than remain an irrelevant sect. The idea bewildered CP members, who had hitherto been instructed to do the exact opposite. Now Lenin said, ‘You must support Labour, like the noose supports a hanged man.’ The suffragette leader Sylvia Pankhurst, in Moscow at the time at a Comintern conference, was outraged. It took a brave woman to lecture Lenin on how to be a revolutionary, but she tried. ‘On the contrary…we should be more “Left” than we have been. In England especially, there are not enough courageous people. Though I am a socialist, I participated a long time in the struggle of the Suffragettes and I could see the importance of radicalism and personal bravery in the defence of our ideas.’ Lenin despised Pankhurst as ‘boring and bourgeois’ and expected the British Communist Party to obey his instructions if they wanted any recognition and support from Moscow.*4

  Lenin gave the subsidies from the Soviet regime to dozens of Communist Parties abroad which were to continue under his successors well into the 1980s. In the first full year after the Comintern was formed, according to the accounts presented at a budget meeting he attended, Lenin approved: ‘1. Budget to the German CP a grant…of 446,592 gold rubles [forty-two million German marks]. 2. Budget for French CP, a unanimous vote for 100,000 gold rubles. 3. For Italian CP, 360,842 gold rubles. 4. Budget for Czechoslovak Party, 250,000. For English CP, a unanimous vote for 200,000 gold rubles.’ Money was sent to the US, Austria, Holland, Greece and many more countries – altogether more than five million rubles, an immense sum at a time of starvation in Russia, and more than Lenin awarded for famine relief programmes.4

  *1 Though not all the Allied leaders supported the Poles. The former British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith wondered why one of the first things a desperately poor country – dependent on food aid from America – should do is to provoke a war. He said in August 1920: ‘There…[Poland] was six months ago, a population stricken with disease and famine, and it is no exaggeration to say on the verge of national bankruptcy, and it was under these circumstances, that she started the campaign…it was a purely aggressive adventure, a wanton enterprise.’

  *2 Actually, it was very similar to an old border established in the 1780s. Neither side liked it, and the Curzon Line would be a major issue of conflict from 1920 until the end of the Second World War, when Stalin – together with the Yalta and Potsdam agreements – carved up Poland again.

  *3 Lenin took great interest in attempts to weaken the British empire. As Bruce Lockhart said, ‘this didn’t seem so dissimilar to the Great Game of the Victorian/Edwardian era, only the ideological language was different’.

  *4 As so often, the most famous revolutionary leader in the world could spend inordinate time on trivial matters. For example, in August 1921 he wrote a long letter to Thomas Bell, who was about to launch a leftist journal for miners in South Wales: ‘You should at first be very careful. In the beginning the paper should not be too revolutionary. If you have three editors, two should not be Communists…they should be real workers.’

  49

  Rebels at Sea and on Land

  ‘The Kronstadt sailors…the pride and joy of the Revolution.’

  Leon Trotsky, 26 October 1917

  ‘Believe me. There can only be two kinds of government in Russia. Tsarism or the Soviets.’

  Lenin, 3 March 1921

  For many older, idealistic socialists in Russia and abroad, the event that did most to shatter hopes and dreams for freedom under the Revolution was the brutal suppression of the sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt. They had played a major role in Bolshevik propaganda as the vanguard of the vanguard which had won power for Lenin. Sailors from Kronstadt formed the crew of the cruiser Aurora, which shelled the Winter Palace. Scores of them had become Red Guards during the Civil War. They were considered the radical hard men of the Bolshevik Party, totally loyal to the cause and to the leadership. Trotsky called them ‘the pride and joy of the Revolution’. Lenin said that when the Revolution was in danger, ‘we can’t fail because we have the sailors with us’.

  When these sailors showed dissent, it is obvious why they had to be forced to submit. And after the savagery of the treatment they received, few people would be under any illusions that Lenin would brook serious opposition.

  Inside the Communist Party, even into the winter of 1920 when he was dictator in all but name, he would listen to some criticism about internal Party issues. The old Bolshevik Timofei Sapronov was heard politely when at a large Party meeting he accused Lenin of turning members into ‘recording machines wh
o repeat one line…if you insist on blind obedience the Revolution will be lost’. As was Nikolai Osinsky: ‘There was a time when the important decisions in the Party were taken by elected bodies…now it is in the hands of a small clique. Or an individual.’ But criticism was rare; the older Lenin became, the more intolerant and the more furious were his rages. Senior Party critics weren’t purged, tried and executed – yet. That began later under Stalin. But usually they were sent well away out of Lenin’s sight. After a series of clashes over workers’ rights, Alexandra Kollontai was demoted from the Sovnarkom, sidelined and later made Ambassador to Norway.*1 After the defeat of the Whites, the ‘class enemies’, all opposition was suppressed, including former heroes of the Revolution like the men from Kronstadt.

  Their complaints began with economic demands for higher rations and action on relieving food shortages for their families in the villages and in working-class areas of the cities. Nothing happened to them at that point: this was just about acceptable criticism. It was when they began to make political demands that they clashed with the regime.

  On 28 February 1921 a mass meeting of sailors on two battleships, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, drew up a resolution demanding free elections to a new parliament, free trade unions independent of the Communist Party, a free press, the abolition of the Cheka – and a range of other broadly democratic reforms. The next day there was a demonstration of 16,000 sailors in the centre of the Kronstadt barracks town, where the demands were read out again by the young man who became the sailors’ leader, a young petty officer on the Sevastopol, Stepan Petrichenko.

  A small group of ratings seized the printing plant, peacefully, and started publishing a newspaper, the Kronstadt Izvestia. At no stage did they threaten violence or move in any way against Petrograd, which they could have shelled from their gun batteries or blockaded if they had chosen to. They had planned no uprising; theirs was a spontaneous expression of disappointment and anger. Immediately Lenin saw them as a threat and demanded they climb down ‘or face destruction’. The sailors continued to publish their paper and Lenin put Trotsky in charge of smashing them. ‘This is a rebellion and they must be shown no mercy. They must be destroyed. There will be no compromise,’ Lenin told him. Trotsky replied that if the sailors didn’t climb down ‘they will be shot like partridges’.1