In a democracy, there are no votes in defence. The aim of every politician is to get into office and, once in power, to stay there. With a restricted franchise, there will be some hope of voters occasionally putting the national interest first, but with universal suffrage, as Britain had from 1918, a greedy and ignorant electorate, which seeks instant gratification and views each issue in the light of how it affects them personally, is one which has to be pandered to. Governments do this by bribery: providing or improving things that directly impinge upon the majority of voters, and this has to be financed. In a time of economic downturn, the money can come from seizing or selling off national assets (Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries), squeezing the rich (Charles II and distraint of knighthood), taxation (William Pitt inventing income tax to pay for the French Revolutionary Wars) or taking money from something else and hoping that no one will notice, or, if they do notice, will not care. After the war Lloyd George said that, while the government could afford to take chances with defence, it could not afford to take chances with social welfare. Navy, army and air force estimates were regularly cut and the nation’s defence posture was based on the Ten-Year Rule, which said that there would be no major war for ten years, there was no need for an expeditionary force and all defence planning was to be based upon those assumptions. The rule was particularly pernicious by its being made a rolling assumption, so that the risk of war was always ten years in the future. The British Admiralty (albeit opposed by military dinosaurs like Churchill) had concluded that the all-big-gun battleship should be superseded by the aircraft carrier as the capital ship, but, instead of the planned seven carriers to be built, there was money for only two, and in any case, as has been noted, Britain had surrendered her naval supremacy at the Washington Naval Conference in 1922.*
The Wall Street Crash happened just as the British economy was beginning to recover, and it hit the United Kingdom earlier and more severely than the rest of the developed world outside America. Unemployment doubled, social services were reduced, taxes were raised and a National Government took Britain off the gold standard, thus devaluing the currency.† Britain was still a world power with an empire, but underneath – and sometimes on the surface too – all was not well.
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There would have been a Russian Revolution without the first war. The Tsar was not likely to moderate his autocratic style and the nods that had been made in the direction of liberalization prior to 1914 were bound to stimulate demand for more. As it was, the perceived failure of the Protector of the Slavs to intervene during the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 had not gone unnoticed, while in the wider war a variety of factors – the breakdown of the transport network, the social and economic dislocation inevitable upon rapid industrialization and the provision of food and essential supplies as a matter of priority to the armed forces while civilians, or at least poor civilians, queued for bread – left the Tsar with little room for manoeuvre.
Russia mobilized 12 million men between 1914 and 1917, more than France, or the UK or Germany. While estimates of Russian casualties vary greatly, there may have been as many as 2 million military deaths, which as a proportion of the population was a lot less than the equivalent French figure, but the civilian death toll due entirely or partially to the war may have been as much as another 2 million, a far greater figure than those suffered by any ally or enemy. With mounting casualties, no victory in sight and increasing agitation against the Tsar, the army high command made it clear that they would neither accept a transfer of power to the sickly Tsarevitch nor intervene to preserve the monarchy. The Tsar found he had no alternative but to abdicate, which he did on 2 March 1917. The Provisional Government that assumed power was a reasonable coalition, and seemed to be well able to restrain its extremists. What scuppered it was its declared intention of remaining in the war, coupled with the arrival of the exiled Lenin, inserted into Russia by the Germans and unprepared to compromise his communist principles in any way. The publication of the supposedly secret treaties with Britain and France that granted the Dardanelles – hitherto international waters – to Russia brought massive disillusionment as the liberals, socialists and intellectuals realized that they were fighting not for Mother Russia but for the government’s expansionist ambitions. After a failed summer campaign – the Brusilov Offensive – desertion and mutiny began to shake the army apart. The October* Revolution followed, the communists seized power and Russia sued for peace.
Russia’s chief negotiator, Leon Trotsky, attempted to buy time in the hope that Lenin’s prediction of socialist revolutions in Western Europe, including Germany, would come true, and, when he refused German demands for autonomy for Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and the Ukraine (in all of which territories there were already anti-communist uprisings or resistance), the German army called his bluff and carried on advancing eastwards against no opposition. Persuaded largely by Lenin, Russia returned to the negotiations and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on 3 March 1918. Half of the main grain-, iron- and coal-producing areas and almost half the population of the former Russian Empire were lost and German troops occupied the Ukraine with the intention of using its grain supplies to feed a German population reduced to near starvation by the Royal Navy’s blockade. It was Foch, the French coordinator of Allied military effort, and Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, who saved Lenin – had Germany won the war, the communist regime could not have survived. As it was, the communists were not convinced that even the humiliating peace they had signed would hold, and in March 1918 they shifted the capital from St Petersburg–Petrograd to Moscow. Moscow had been a Russian capital in the past – but that was two centuries ago. Versailles cancelled Brest-Litovsk, but the Bolsheviks were by no means in control of the whole country.
The Don Cossacks rebelled against confiscation of their land in 1917;in 1918 Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan declared independence and from December 1918 until April 1919 the French occupied the port of Odessa, intending it to be used as a base for supplying the anti-communist forces. In May 1919 an allied force of British, French and American troops, under British command, landed in Murmansk and Archangel and attempted to support the White Russians,* before withdrawing in the autumn, and from December 1917 until 1922 the Japanese occupied Vladivostok. In June 1918, 100,000 Czechs, a mixture of deserters and prisoners of war, made common cause with the Czech Legion, a band of turncoats who were originally to be employed against the Germans alongside the Russians, and finding the situation changed considerably as a result of Brest-Litovsk, they seized control of the Trans-Siberian railway. Providing themselves with weapons by disarming ramshackle communist militias, they marched on Ekaterinburg, getting there just too late to prevent the execution of the Tsar and his family † They announced that they wished to be transferred to the Western Front, received the backing of the French, and entered into negotiations with the Soviets, before being eventually rescued by the Americans, who intervened to guard the railway and organized the evacuation of the Czechs from Vladivostok. The Soviets were prevented from establishing control of the Caspian Sea by the Royal Navy, which also evacuated cornered White Russian troops. As well as the Russian Civil War, the fledgling Soviet state fought wars against Estonia in 1918, Finland from 1918 to 1920, and Poland from 1920 to 1921 (when the Polish Army was supported and advised by French officers including Marshal Franchet d’Espèrey and General Weygand), all of which she lost.
Within the USSR, the anti-communist forces were eventually defeated: incompetent leadership, over-ambitious plans, an inability to coordinate the activities of the various armies, logistic difficulties, the reluctance of the Allies to become embroiled in a full-scale military campaign and a failure to realize that, apart from some of those who were not ethnic Russians, most people in what had been the Russian Empire wanted peace at almost any price. The Civil War and the wars on the boundaries of the USSR allowed Trotsky, the People’s Commissar for Defence, to weld a disparate c
ollection of workers’ and peasants’ militias, bits of the old Imperial Army and politically motivated bearers of whatever arms they could find into what would become the Red Army. It also convinced most of Lenin’s colleagues that rather than a workers’ militia, which had been seriously suggested as the future armed force of the state, there was a need for a professional, conventionally organized army.
Not only had the major grain-producing regions been lost to Russia until Versailles restored them in 1919, but the harvest in 1917–18 was bad and there was a serious shortage of food, compounded by peasant growers refusing to sell to the state grain monopoly. Furthermore, it was all very well for Lenin to speak grandly of workers and peasants’ control, but the factories had been run by either the derided bourgeoisie or – heaven forfend – bloodsucking capitalists and Tsarist sympathizers. Their removal meant that there was no one capable of running the plants, and medium- and small-sized enterprises collapsed. Factory output in the early years of the USSR fell to a third of what it had been before the war. Wages fell, not returning to their pre-war level until the late 1920s, and strikes by disgruntled workers were rife. The only apparent solution was a state takeover of factories – the banks had already been taken over in December 1918 – which accorded with the communist principle of common ownership of the means of production. Lenin, the instigator and the inspiration of the communist revolution, died in January 1924.As the effective head of state,he was succeeded by Joseph Stalin.
Joseph Stalin, born Dzhughashvili, was born around 1878 in Georgia, one of the most backward parts of a backward empire, where serfdom had only finally been abolished in 1871, ten years after emancipation in the rest of Russia. Joseph came from humble origins, spoke Russian as a second language, had an interrupted education and became an incipient revolutionary at a very early age. ‘Stalin’ or ‘man of steel’ was only one of many cover names that he used during his early life, which was marked by regular detention, imprisonment, escapes and exile since he was constantly on the run and agitating against the monarchy and the capitalist system. He was a Bolshevik almost from the start and, while he revered Lenin, he did not agree with all his idol’s policies. In essence, Stalin may have been an uneducated terrorist, but, while he organized bank robberies and assassinations, he was none the less a highly intelligent and politically aware terrorist, and he was completely amoral. As editor of the underground party newspaper Pravda, he initially supported the 1917 Provisional Government’s policy of refusing to negotiate with the Germans. Lenin, the pragmatist, said that anyone who took this line was betraying socialism. Stalin, after gauging grass roots opinion, decided that, while the wind might not be blowing in Lenin’s direction just yet, it would do so eventually, and changed his stance.
With the overthrow of the Provisional Government, Lenin appointed Stalin as Commissar (minister) for Nationalities. As he was himself a member of a minority ethnic group, this was an obvious post for him to hold. The trouble was that many of the nationalities had no wish to be communist, and even those who were prepared to tolerate communism had no wish to be organized in the way that Stalin wished. The Bolsheviks’ original policy was to grant each nationality self-determination, assuming, somewhat naively, that the new states would be communist and would cleave to Mother Russia. This did not happen and Lenin and Stalin were forced to change the policy from devolution of power to centralization. Much the same happened with the economy, but in reverse: an entirely controlled economy did not work, partly because the people who might have been able to run the factories and the utilities had at worst been shot or exiled and at best were under suspicion of just waiting for the revolution to fail. Lenin, supported by Stalin, forced through the New Economic Policy, which allowed a certain amount of leeway to local entrepreneurs and producers, despite the opposition of diehards who wanted no going back to old ways. In December 1921 the Terror, during which recalcitrant officials or political opponents were subjected to show trials and then executed, imprisoned or exiled, was relaxed somewhat, and the number of secret policemen reduced from 143,000 in December 1921 to 105,000 in May 1922.* Stalin’s support for Lenin got him ‘elected’ – appointed – to the two controlling bodies of the party, and hence government, the Politburo and the Orgburo. The Politburo was the inner circle of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and made policy for, initially, the Russian Federal Republic and, later, for the whole of the USSR. The Orgburo was responsible for the civil service and government organizations and also for personnel matters. A Secretariat maintained liaison between the two bodies. In April 1922, in an attempt to lighten the workload on Lenin, whose health had been failing since an assassination attempt in August 1918,* Stalin was appointed to the newly created post of general secretary to the Secretariat. Most thought that the new general secretary would be a mere dogsbody and Lenin’s poodle. How wrong they were would soon be apparent; the general secretary was responsible for appointments, and was able to pack the organs of state with his own supporters, while still professing total loyalty to Lenin – and, to be fair, almost certainly being totally loyal. But Stalin’s support for Lenin did not extend to blind, unthinking concurrence in everything. Lenin, despite his pragmatism in ending the war and relaxing the economy, firmly believed that socialist revolutions would follow in Western Europe, and that the USSR would become a loose federation including Hungary, Germany and, perhaps, even France. Stalin, ever the realist, knew that no such revolutions were remotely likely and thought that the Party should concentrate on establishing the communist system in the USSR without wasting time in wishful thinking about what went on abroad. It was Stalin, too, who realized that Lenin’s idea of linking the Russian Republic (which included a number of so-called ‘autonomous’ republics within it) to Belorussia, the Ukraine and the Transcaucasian Federation (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) with nothing more than bilateral treaties was not going to promote communism in those areas, and that they must be brought under the direct control of Moscow.
With his health deteriorating in the last year of his life, Lenin took no part in the governing of the country and, by the time he died on 21 January 1924, the USSR was governed by a collective which was drawn from the Central Committee and included Stalin. During his time as general secretary, Stalin had been able to advance the careers of his supporters and slow down or halt altogether those of his opponents. Once Lenin was safely embalmed, his mausoleum built by the Kremlin wall and Petrograd given yet another name change, to Leningrad, the triumvirate of Stalin, Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev* emerged as his inheritors. The other leading candidate for Lenin’s mantle, Trotsky (née Bronstein), was not only associated with the Mensheviks, the relatively liberal revolutionary wing which had split from the communists in 1914, but, like Zinoviev and Kamenev, was Jewish, and anti-Semitism had not disappeared with the revolution, whatever the Bolsheviks might claim. Despite Trotsky’s great service in creating the Red Army (and, in the opinion of many, saving the revolution thereby), he was dismissed from his offices, sent into exile and eventually assassinated in Mexico in 1940. It took Stalin a little longer to neutralize Zinoviev and Kamenev,† but by 1927 they were out of favour and out of the Central Committee and Stalin was the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union.
The modest success of the New Economic Policy, the end of starvation and Stalin’s caution in regard to world revolution made him genuinely popular with party members, quite apart from the fact that as head of personnel he had been able to pack party and government offices with his own men. Once firmly in the saddle, however, Stalin replaced the New Economic Policy with centralization. This involved the forced collectivization of agriculture, with cereal growers forced to sell to the state and Kulaks (yeoman farmers who owned their land) persecuted, and a Five-Year Plan which took all factories into state ownership and gave them production quotas and targets.
From outside, this forced and central direction of the national economy gained some respectability after the Wall Street Crash. All over the developed
world, unfettered capitalism seemed to be failing while in Russia the proletariat appeared to be protected from its effects. Stalin knew that, if the USSR were to be dragged kicking and squealing into the modern industrialized world, then he would need finance, machinery and expertise from the West to do it, and the Western powers would only cooperate if they were sure that the USSR was not about to instigate world revolution by force of arms – hence Stalin’s insistence on the slogan ‘Socialism in One Country’. The USSR may in fact be the only nation of note that actually profited from the crash and the Depression that followed. With the slowdown in industrial output, unemployment and lack of investment everywhere else, banks and industrialists saw Stalin’s Five-Year Plan as an opportunity not to be missed. Loans and credit agreements were arranged, tenders submitted and contracts signed as the great leap forward out of backwardness and into modernization began. Even the Ford Motor Company, that epitome of rampant capitalism, signed an agreement to build a car-manufacturing plant.* There were limits, though, to this commercial largesse. The Red Army much admired the American Christie tank suspension, even if it had been rejected by the US Army, but selling Ford cars was one thing, bits of tanks quite another. The Russians smuggled it out nevertheless and it became the basis for the BT series of Russian tanks that duly led to the highly successful T-34.†
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