A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  There is no doubt at all that our Red Army constitutes an incomparably more powerful force in the Asian terrain of world politics than in the European terrain. Here there opens up before us an undoubted possibility not merely of a lengthy wait to see how events develop in Europe, but of conducting activity in the Asian field. The road to India may prove at the given moment to be more readily passable and shorter for us than the road to Soviet Hungary... The road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal.

  By the summer of 1920 a dual policy had taken shape: revolutionary agitation in the East combined with support for national liberation movements, even of a 'bourgeois' nature, against Western imperialism. Whilst making peace with the British in the West, the Bolsheviks pursued an undeclared war against them in the East. They backed the Afghan rebels and subverted the British protectorate in northern Persia. There is even evidence that Lenin tried to form an army of Central Asian tribes to invade India through Afghanistan.83

  The Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in Baku in September 1920, was the first attempt to spread Communism into Asia. It was also the last. No doubt the chaos of the Congress floor had much to do with this. With

  * By which he meant workers and peasants not yet advanced enough for Bolshevism.

  1,900 delegates from dozens of countries as far afield as Turkey and Japan, it took ages and a great deal of general babble to translate the speeches into all the languages. Some delegates had dubious credentials: there were various khans and beks who turned out to be traders and who spent the duration of the Congress selling carpets in the markets of Baku. Apart from the delegates, the Congress received hundreds of messages of support from towns and villages across Asia. One of these announced the sacrificial slaughter of a hundred sheep and cattle in honour of the people's liberation, and requested help from the Congress to transport them to Baku. This, in short, was a colourful pageant, 'a Beano', as H. G. Wells, a witness, put it, but 'as a meeting of Asiatic proletarians it was preposterous'. The delegates dressed up in their national costumes and marched in procession through Baku. Effigies of Lloyd George, Millerand and Wilson, got up in court dress, were burned. Speakers declared their undying hatred of British imperialism; while Zinoviev, brushing aside Poland, claimed that 'the real revolution will flare up only when we are joined by the 800 million people who live in Asia.'84 But in terms of its influence on Asia, the Congress had almost no effect.

  * * * The Bolsheviks' support for national-liberation movements in the British Empire contrasted starkly with their opposition to them in former Russian colonies. Lenin had always planned to reconstruct the basic geographic framework of the Russian Empire. His concessions to national self-determination in the programme of 1911 were no more than tactical. He argued that nationalism could be used to destroy the tsarist state and that, after a suitable interlude of 'bourgeois' national rule, the non-Russians would rejoin Russia as a socialist federation. What he meant by this is a different question. Was Lenin genuine in his public professions of support for a free federation of sovereign republics, each by implication with the right of secession, or was he planning, by force if necessary, to make the borderlands rejoin a unitary Russian state? Certainly, in his private letters Lenin was cynical about the idea of a loose confederation. In 1913, for example, he wrote to Gorky that 'the Austrian type of abomination' would not be allowed to happen in Russia. 'We will not permit it. There are more Great Russians here. With the workers on our side we won't allow any of the "Austrian spirit".'85

  During the civil war this question became lost in the exigencies of military struggle. The Reds conquered the borderlands as they drove the Whites out, and imposed the same forms of centralized control as in the rest of Russia through the party and the Red Army. This could be seen as a conscious strategy to rebuild the Empire under Communist control; there were certainly enough Russian chauvinists among the conquering institutions to support this plan. But in many ways the conquest of the borderlands was much more dependent

  upon local conditions than this would suggest. Under pressure from the native Communists, Lenin came to realize by 1920 that conquest in itself was not enough to control the non-Russian territories — at least not without the constant resistance of the native population. The effective exercise of power necessitated the recruitment of leaders who could speak the native language and give the regime a national veneer. Since the native population was based mainly in the villages, and the regime in the cities, it also demanded a softer approach towards the peasants. In this sense the New Economic Policy was closely linked with the process of state-building in the non-Russian lands. The Tenth Party Congress of March 1921, which introduced the NEP, also passed a resolution calling on the party to foster national cultures. Korenizatsiia (indigenization) was the thrust of Bolshevik policy in the 1920s. The domain of the native language was extended into education, publishing and administration. Schools and colleges were rapidly established to train up a native elite. Peasant boys from the native population became clerks in the towns, hitherto dominated by the Russians. In the cultural sphere, at least, the Soviet regime was in many ways continuing the work of nation-building and modernization begun by the nationalists before 1917. Granting cultural and economic freedom largely pacified the native peasantry, leaving what remained of the nationalist intelligentsia without a popular base.

  In the Ukraine the nationalist movement had already collapsed by the time the Bolsheviks launched their third and final invasion during the autumn of 1919. The military vicissitudes of 1917—20, when the Ukraine had ten different regimes, were hardly conducive to national unity. Two brief spells of nationalist rule in Kiev — the Rada of March 1917 to February 1918, and the Directory of the following December to February 1919 — were not enough to inculcate a national consciousness into the Ukrainian peasantry, who were largely cut off from and hostile to the towns. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of an independent Ukrainian state had existed mainly in Shevchenko's poetry and Cossack myth. With the exception of the western Ukraine, where the landowners were mainly Poles, the mass of the peasants remained untouched by the intelligentsia's nationalism. The strength of the peasantry's attachment to the idea of the independent village made them hostile to a national state. During 1917, however, the socialist parties in the Rada had built up a mass base of rural electoral support by linking the idea of national independence with the autonomy of the village and a land reform in the interests of the peasants. They succeeded in translating the abstract concept of the nation into social terms which were real to the peasantry. But the promised land reforms were never carried out. The Rada and the Directory were politically paralysed by the growing internal division between nationalists like Petliura, who subordinated social reforms to the national struggle, and those like Vinnichenko, who subordinated

  nationalism to social change. Without land reform, the peasants had little incentive to fight for an independent Ukraine. Neither the Rada nor the Directory was able to mobilize a truly national force against the invading armies of the Reds or the Whites. Even Petliura was forced to raise his so-called National Army on Polish soil.

  The urban head of the Ukrainian national movement was thus cut off from its rural body. What remained was a local peasant nationalism, focused on the idea of the autonomous village, which continued to dominate the Ukraine, making it virtually impossible to rule from the cities, until the early 1920s. This smallholders' nationalism was seen in the atamanshchina, the local peasant bands of Makhno, Grigoriev and countless other warlords, who claimed to defend the free Ukrainian village from both Whites and Reds; in the rural economic war against the towns, which the peasants saw as 'foreign' and as the centres of a hostile state; and in the pogroms against Jews as the outward symbols of that alien nature. It was also seen in the mass appeal of the Borotbist Party, formed from the Ukrainian Left SRs, which stressed cultural nationalism as a form of village autonomy, a means of uniting and empowering the peasants
in the revolutionary struggle against the Russified urban bourgeoisie.

  It was this peasant nationalism which made life so hard for the Bolsheviks in their first two attempts to conquer the Ukraine (during the first three months of 1918 and the first six of 1919). With only the workers and the army on their side, they were reduced to ruling it by terror. The second of these two Red regimes was especially violent. Bulgakov captured its terrible power in his image of the huge Red armoured train in the forest outside Kiev at the end of The White Guard. It is a good example of the way that sometimes only a novelist can describe the essence of civil war:

  The locomotive rose up like a black, multi-faceted mass of metal, red-hot cinders dropping out of its belly on to the rails, so that from the side it looked as if the womb of the locomotive was stuffed with glowing coals. As it hissed gently and malevolently, something was oozing through a chink in its side armour, while its blunt snout glowered silently toward the forest that lay between it and the Dnieper. On the last flat-car the bluish-black muzzle of a heavy calibre gun, gagged with a muzzle-cover, pointed straight towards the City eight miles away.

  This second invasion of the Ukraine was almost certainly carried out on Stalin's personal authorization but without the knowledge or approval of Lenin. It was led by a group of Bolsheviks who were determined to bring the Ukraine back under Moscow's rule. Many of them were Russians from the Ukraine who had taken up Bolshevism partly as a form of identification with Russia itself. Georgii

  Piatakov, who instigated the invasion and became the head of the Bolshevik regime in the Ukraine, was typical of this conquering Soviet elite. His father had been a Russian industrialist in the Ukraine, so it could be said that a certain urban-Russian arrogance towards the native peasants was inbred in him. Like many leading Bolsheviks on the Southern Front — Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Ordzhonikidze also come to mind — Piatakov had close ties with Stalin. The extreme centralism which he imposed on the Ukraine was a thin disguise for his own Great Russian chauvinism. The Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsia were imprisoned in their hundreds during the Red Terror of 1919. 'Bourgeois property' was sent off by the train-load to Moscow. Nearly all the Bolshevik posts in the Ukraine were filled by Russians, who ruled the country like colonial masters. The Ukrainian peasants were subjected to the worst excesses of the Bolshevik requisitioning campaigns. The kombeiy and the collective farms, both of which had clearly failed in Russia itself, were forcibly imposed on the Ukrainian peasants — and this despite the fact that the traditions of private and inheritable property were much more deeply rooted among the Ukrainian peasants than among the Russian ones.86

  The result was a wave of peasant revolts against the Bolshevik regime throughout the Ukraine, of which Makhno's was merely the largest. Lenin was furious: the insensitivity of Piatakov's regime had undermined the Reds' control of the Ukraine and opened the door to its conquest by the Whites. During the autumn of 1919, as the Reds once again swept south across the Ukraine, Lenin insisted that this time his comrades should be more sensitive to national sentiment. The 'Federalists' among the Ukrainian Bolsheviks had been calling for this for some time, and their views were now being echoed by senior Bolsheviks such as Ordzhonikidze. 'We must find a common language with the Ukrainian peasant,' he wrote to Lenin on 19 November. These themes were taken up by Lenin in December. At the Eighth Party Conference he spoke out for the first time against the 'primitive Russian chauvinism' displayed by certain Bolsheviks. The resolution on the Ukrainian question recognized the strength of national sentiment, albeit among the 'backward' masses. It called for the use of the Ukrainian language in all Soviet institutions and for a rapprochement with the Ukrainian villages.87

  In March 1920, as the first step towards this, the Borotbists were finally admitted to the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party. Like the earlier alliance with the Russian Left SRs, this was a great political victory for the Bolsheviks: it split the main rival party in the Ukraine and gave them access to the villages. The Borotbists were the only Ukrainian party with a mass peasant following. During the campaigns against the Hetmanate, Petliura and Denikin, the Reds had relied upon them to organize the peasant partisans. The Borotbists espoused a synthesis of cultural nationalism and peasant socialism within a decentralized Soviet federal

  structure. They were the true heirs of the peasant nationalism which had driven the revolution in the Ukraine during 1917 and 1918. When the Ukrainian Directory abandoned its commitment to a socialist programme, most of the Borotbists (about 4,000 out of 5,000) joined the Bolsheviks. They hoped to moderate the Bolsheviks' Communism and to make them more aware of the national culture of the Ukrainian peasants.88 Once again, it was nationalism that turned these opponents of the Bolsheviks Red.

  Although, in the long run, the Borotbists failed, they did succeed in gaining a decade of relative cultural autonomy for the Ukraine during the 1920s. National sentiments, defeated in the form of the Ukrainian national movement, reappeared within the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party and state apparatus. Both were increasingly taken over by Ukrainians determined to defend the autonomous rights of their republic. Here, then, was another sort of 'national Bolshevik'. In some ways it was a precursor to Tito's nationalist movement in Yugoslavia against Stalinist supercentralism. As in Russia, most of the new Ukrainian elite was recruited from literate peasant sons mobilized by the war and revolution and eager for progress and social advancement. The result was the rapid Ukraini-anization of the Ukraine's towns, which before the revolution had been dominated by the Russians. Between 1923 and 1926 the proportion of Kiev's population which was Ukrainian increased from 27 per cent to 42 per cent. Closely connected with this was the flourishing of Ukrainian culture during the 1920s, especially after 1924, when Olexander Shumsky, the ex-Borotbist leader, was placed in charge of the republic's cultural affairs. The Ukrainian language, which the tsarist rulers had dismissed as a farmyard dialect, was now recognized as an essential tool for effective propaganda in the countryside and the recruitment of a native elite. During the 1920s it spread its domain into schools and offices, street names and shop signs, Soviet documents and ensignia, party congresses, newspapers and journals. More Ukrainian children learned to read their native language in the 1920s than in the whole of the nineteenth century.89 The nationalist ideal of an independent Ukraine may have been crushed by the new Empire-State, but at least the Ukrainian nation had been given a cultural base.

  In the Muslim lands this same pattern — of military conquest by the Reds followed by the fostering of national cultures — was even more marked. In fact here the Bolsheviks did not so much foster existing national cultures as create new nations where only tribal entities had existed before 1917.

  In the Bashkir and Tatar regions of the Volga-Urals new republics were created as the Red Army moved across the region pursing Kolchak. Moscow opposed the plans of the pan-Muslim intelligentsia for a Bashkir-Tatar state and ruthlessly exploited the ethnic divisions between the two regions. The Red Army, in alliance with Validov, the military leader of the Bashkir pastoralists, set up the Bashkir Autonomous Republic in March 1919. Most of its population was

  Tatar. Validov and his troops had defected from the Whites at the height of the fighting on the Eastern Front. He believed that the Reds, unlike Kolchak, would give the Bashkirs independence and the right to expel Russian settlers. But once the conquest of the Urals was completed, the Reds handed power in the region to the Ufa Soviet, which was dominated by Russian workers. Moscow was not prepared to let the vital industries of the Urals region fall into the hands of Bashkir nationalists. In May 1920 it issued a decree abolishing the political autonomy promised to the Bashkirs only fourteen months before: the key institutions of the republic were henceforth to be subordinated to the Moscow authorities. The Bashkir Communists resigned from the government en masse and fled into the Urals, where they joined the other Bashkir rebels against Soviet rule. The new republican government had no Bashkirs in it but was made up of Tatars and Russians. Meanwhile,
a separate Tatar Autonomous Republic was also established in May 1920 — although, like the Bashkir one, it was autonomous only in name and not even properly Tatar. Three-quarters of the ethnic Tatars in the region were left outside the republic's borders; and even inside them they made up only half the population, compared to the 40 per cent which were Russian.90Divide et impera.

  Moscow's Tatar strategy was supported, however, by an influential group of Muslim intellectuals, who saw in Bolshevism a chance to advance their own ideal of a secular Islamic nationalism. These were the radical jadids, the bourgeois modernizers of the nineteenth century who opposed the feudal-clerical elites, the qadymists and mullahs. They dominated not only the Tatar professions but also the officer corps of the national units. Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev was their most important theoretician and the leader of the Tatar Republic. In his youth he had been a teacher, a journalist and a jadid. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and rose quickly within Stalin's Commissariat of Nationalities. During the civil war on the Eastern Front, when the Reds badly needed Muslim troops, Sultan-Galiev was allowed to pursue a largely independent line. He established an independent Muslim Communist Party and separate Muslim army units with a special badge in gold and green of the Islamic crescent moon and star. But once Kolchak had been defeated, Moscow began to roll back his powers in an effort to centralize control. This prompted the Tatar to revise his Marxism in the light of what he now saw as a persistent problem of colonialism. The Asians, he argued in a series of articles published in 1919 and 1920, would not be liberated by the socialist revolution in the West, since it was in the interests of the new proletarian rulers to perpetuate the empires they had inherited rather than abolish them. The solution was to unite all the colonial peoples, who were 'proletarians' by virtue of their oppression alone, in a worldwide revolution. This of course echoed the Bolshevik strategy towards Asia, as expressed at the Baku Congress. But Sultan-Galiev did not stop there. He argued that for all the Asian