24. DEFEAT IN THE WEST
1920
Lenin was acquiring the reputation of a politician whose main aim was to rule Russia rather than make the ‘European socialist Revolution’. Perhaps, it was thought, he was just a modern sort of Russian nationalist leader and his commitment to internationalist socialism had lapsed. This was a profound misperception and it is surprising that it is still widely shared to this day.1
For the newer evidence from archives bolsters the old argument that Lenin’s zeal for spreading the October Revolution was undiminished. Only the vastly superior power of Germany had stopped him in 1918 and the Civil War had prevented him from sending the Red Army abroad when the Germans withdrew at the end of the Great War. Yet it remained Lenin’s fundamental belief that Europe was in need of a revolutionary transformation. He was ready to gamble on offending the victor powers in the Great War – the Allies – by stirring up trouble to the west of Russia. His reasoning had been given in years past and he repeated it in 1920: ‘We’ve always emphasised that a thing such as a socialist revolution in a single country can’t be completed.’2 Lenin, like practically every Bolshevik leader, assumed that fraternal socialist states needed to be established elsewhere in Europe in order that Soviet Russia could bring its socialism to maturity. The prospects for an isolated Russia were pathetic. Territorial integrity and post-war economic enhancement would remain insecure until such time as Europe as a whole joined the side of the Revolution.
Lenin did not mind how this was achieved. As in 1917, he hoped that revolutions would occur without the need for Russian assistance; but he was willing to supply finance, propaganda and political instruction to hasten and strengthen the process. He was still expecting, too, to commit the forces of the Red Army. In confidential discussions he let himself go. ‘As soon as we’re strong enough to cut capitalism down as a whole, we’ll quickly seize it by the throat.’3 Europe remained the key to Lenin’s strategic calculations.
The opportunity for action came unexpectedly. Clashes between Russian and Polish military forces had taken place since the end of the Great War. As the Civil War ended in Russia, the question arose whether the Red Army would be able to control the Russian Imperial borderlands. The Poles had no intention of losing their statehood. Their Commander-in-Chief Josef Piłsudski made an incursion into Ukraine with a plan to annex Ukrainian territory to a federal state based in Warsaw, and he took Kiev on 7 May 1920. Piłsudski was not unknown to Lenin. In 1887 the Okhrana had arrested and exiled him in the course of suppressing revolutionaries after the attempted assassination of the Emperor Alexander III by the terrorist group to which Lenin’s brother Alexander had belonged. Piłsudski indeed had links with the friends of Alexander Ulyanov. After five years in Siberia, Piłsudski returned to lead the Polish Socialist Party. Like Lenin, he announced support for Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Like Lenin, too, he had sanctioned armed robbery in order to acquire a treasury for his party (and Piłsudski, a real man of action, led his team in person). Piłsudski and Lenin had lived in the same region of Austrian Poland before 1914. They took coffee in the same café, and Lenin’s Bolshevik faction received help from Piłsudski’s Union of Riflemen in strengthening its security against the Okhrana.
Lenin and Piłsudski had believed that one’s enemy’s enemy could be one’s friend. Both had hated the Romanov dynasty while disagreeing about practically everything else. They surely recognised that they shared a temperamental hardness; they were leaders incarnate. But after assuming power they ignored each other. For Lenin, Piłsudski had become a pawn of Anglo-French imperialism. For Piłsudski, Lenin was no different from the tsars of old. Poland had to be defended, and Piłsudski believed that the federal amalgamation of Poland and Ukraine was the key to Polish security.
In Moscow there was panic. Imperial Army officers who had lain low during the Russian Civil War were summoned by former General Alexei Brusilov to enlist in the Red Army and assist in the liberation of the ‘Motherland’. Steadily the Red Army regrouped itself. Trotski and Stalin were dispatched to the western front to bolster the Bolshevik party’s control, and Piłsudski was forced back into the Polish lands. By then the Polish–Soviet War had become a focus of international diplomatic attention. Negotiations were under way to establish a permanent territorial demarcation and peace. The British Foreign Secretary was involved in drawing up a map satisfactory to both sides.
But then Lenin had a change of mind and decided that the time had come, as Piłsudski retreated, to launch the ‘revolutionary war’ that the Left Communists had demanded of him in 1918. Quite what had convinced him of the attainability of victory is not known. But he had always believed in the ‘ripeness’ of Europe for Revolution and in the efficacy of military means to achieve that result. His immediate scheme was breathtaking in its scope. Poland was meant to be just the first revolutionary prize of war. Then moves should be made to ‘sovietise’ nearby countries, perhaps Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. As if by afterthought, he suggested that Lithuania might be sovietised in the same campaign. He dreamed, too, that Italian far-left socialists might organise their own revolution in the northern cities of the country.4 The great prize, Germany, should be grasped in the same campaign. Once Warsaw had fallen, the Red Army should burst through into East Prussia and race for Berlin. Lenin anticipated that the Polish and German ‘proletariats’ would welcome the Reds from Russia and rise against their national ‘bourgeois’ governments. As the delegates assembled in Petrograd’s Smolny Institute from all over the world for the Second Congress of the Communist International in summer 1920, Lenin hoped that he would soon be seeing them again as the people’s commissars in their own Soviet-style governments.
Lenin’s colleagues shared his vision, but not his judgement. Unlike him, they had direct experience of the difficulties faced by the Red Army: the overstretched lines of communication and supply, the shoddy equipment, the inadequate rations and the absence of a popular will to prolong the war. Not even Trotski, who had caused him trouble over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was in favour of invading Poland; and Bolsheviks of Polish origin warned Lenin that he underestimated the distrust felt by Poles for Russian armies, even armies sent into their country with professed internationalist objectives. But Lenin insisted. The fact that most other leading members of the central party leadership were outside Moscow gave him his chance. No formal session of Sovnarkom, the Central Committee or the Politburo discussed the question of war or peace. There was no repetition of the laborious, disputatious deliberations over Brest-Litovsk in early 1918. Lenin was helped by the fact that there was at least a consensus that Piłsudski had to be taught a lesson. The Red Army was already committed to the pursuit of the Polish armed forces. The borders of Soviet Russia and Poland were as yet unfixed. The reaction of foreign governments remained unclear and Lenin wanted to make the most of the confusion. He prodded his comrades into letting him have his way. Poland ought to be sovietised.
And once the decision was taken, it was given full support by his fellow Bolshevik leaders. There was no repetition of the kind of disputes about ‘revolutionary war’ that had divided the party in 1918. Trotski and Stalin were in the armed forces as they pressed into Poland.
The Second Comintern Congress went ahead while all this was going on. Proceedings began on 19 July 1920 in the Smolny Institute, where Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee had been based during the October Revolution. It was the first time Lenin had returned to the city since March 1919 (and it was the last occasion when he visited a Russian city outside Moscow). Lenin’s delegation had travelled there from Moscow’s Nicholas Station on 18 July 1920. The proceedings were heavy with symbolism. The Congress was taking place in the birthplace of the October Revolution. Foreign delegates were shown around the revolutionary sights: the Finland Station, the Kseshinskaya mansion, the Winter Palace and the corridors and hall of the Smolny Institute itself. Naturally it was not beyond the wit of Lenin to think that, if he based the Comint
ern Congress in Petrograd, he would find it easier to impose Bolshevik party policies on the Communist International. Awed by the surroundings of revolutionary history, the foreign communists would accede to the demands of the only communists who had yet undertaken a successful seizure of state power.
Lenin gave several major speeches and thoroughly enjoyed himself. Strutting up and down on the platform, he repeated his belief that the October Revolution offered a model to the rest of the world’s socialists. Between speeches he squatted on the stairs underneath the aspidistras, drafting his contributions to the Congress. He was fêted whenever he appeared, but he also tried to meet delegates privately. The Congress, he convinced himself, would be the last such assembly to be held in Russia. During the Congress a map of Europe was hung to enable delegates to follow the advance of the Red Army from Ukraine into Poland. Little red flags were pinned to it. There was about to be a ‘European socialist revolution’. The Politburo reinforced the morale of everyone as the Red Army raced towards Warsaw. Lenin suggested that the Italian comrades should return to Milan and Turin and organise revolution.
The Congress was a watershed in communist history. Nearly all the debates were inaugurated by leaders of the Russian Communist Party, and on no point were they blown off course by the foreigners. Lenin and his associates wanted to make Soviet Russia into the model for far-left socialist movements abroad. Communist parties should be formed. Their organisational principles should be centralism, hierarchy, membership selectivity, activism and discipline. The best chance for ‘European socialist revolution’ was for Germans, French and British to copy the methods of Bolshevism. Lenin and his associates had evidently calculated that the establishment of highly centralised parties elsewhere would enable the Politburo, through the Executive Committee of the Comintern, to dominate the new communist parties throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
The proceedings occurred at a hectic pace and in an atmosphere of intense expectancy, and for several days they had to be suspended because of military developments in the Polish–Soviet War. But when the Congress was resumed Lenin stepped forward to offer a trenchant defence of his version of socialism with its reliance on dictatorship and terror. In other ways, however, he suggested that communists had to rethink how socialism might be achieved. In the past he had argued, like all Marxists since the 1890s, that socialism could not be constructed except on the foundations of an existing capitalist society. For Lenin, the Russian economy was already predominantly capitalist before the turn of the twentieth century. In 1920 he quietly dropped this tenet and stated that non-capitalist countries, despite their ‘backwardness’, might be able to bypass capitalism altogether and proceed towards socialism. He introduced these novel ideas in order to encourage communists in colonial countries around the world to throw off the chains of European imperialism. He attempted no detailed justification of his intellectual somersault and did not deign to explain why he had always opposed the Russian narodniki, who had argued that capitalism could be bypassed.
Why should this matter? The main significance lies in the casual fashion in which Lenin treated his Marxism whenever a goal of practical politics was in his sights. Although he thought seriously about social and economic theory and liked to stick by his basic ideas, his adherence was not absolute. In mid-1920 the priority for him was the global release of revolutionary energy. Ideas about the unavoidable stages of social development faded for him. Better to make Revolution, however roughly, than to fashion a sophisticated but unrealised theory. If intellectual sleight of hand was sometimes necessary, then so be it. Even when he stayed close to his previously declared policies, Lenin was mercurially difficult to comprehend. Parties belonging to the Comintern, he declared, should break with ‘opportunistic’ kinds of socialism which rejected the need for the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’; but simultaneously he demanded that British communists should affiliate themselves to the British Labour Party: Lenin’s argument was that communism in the United Kingdom was as yet too frail to set up an independent party.
He got his way at the expense of mystifying the Comintern Congress and irritating the British delegate Sylvia Pankhurst, communist and feminist. Pankhurst might have raised a fuss if all eyes had not been on the map of the war front. Everyone at the Congress concentrated upon the question of how to aid the process of Revolution presently being advanced on the bayonet tips of the Red Army. A Polish Revolutionary Committee was selected by the Politburo from Polish communists known to be implicitly loyal to directives from Moscow. The same was not done with German communists, but this was essentially only a matter of time. The Red Army was the advancing front-line of the Comintern. Socialist governments were expected to dominate the map of the European mainland very soon, and world imperialism supposedly could hardly be much longer in collapsing. Back to Moscow travelled Lenin and his fellow commissars, eager to receive news of further Red successes when they disembarked from the train. He felt that he was on the brink of achieving a lifetime’s ambition. Russia had fallen to him in 1917–18. Europe, country after country, was surely about to succumb to a multinational communist assault, by the Red Army and by ‘local’ communist parties, upon the bastions of continental capitalism.
If Lenin dreamed of heading a European socialist federal regime, he refrained from giving vent to the notion. In general he was very reticent. But among his associates he could not contain himself. All the time he wanted action on the front, action in the rear and even action beyond the lines. His intemperance was extraordinary, as was obvious in a note he scribbled to Trotski’s deputy E. M. Sklyanski: ‘A beautiful plan. Finish it off together with Dzierżyński. Disguised as “Greens” (we’ll heap the blame on them afterwards) we’ll advance 10–20 versts and hang the kulaks, priests, landed gentry. 100,000 rubles prize for each one of them that is hanged.’5 Here was Lenin the class warrior as well as Lenin the excited political schemer: he had listened to the generals long enough, and wanted to add his own ideas. And yet these ideas were not only extremely nasty; they were also not very practical. The Red Army, if it was going to win the war, would conquer Poland by moving its great regiments forward and crushing Piłsudski – and surreptitious viciousness of the kind proposed by Lenin would not make a difference in practice. If anything, the hanging of priests would have turned most Polish citizens against the Reds.
Meanwhile Piłsudski had retreated to Warsaw with the intention of reorganising Polish defences. Trotski, Stalin and the high command had split the Red Army into two great prongs, and Piłsudski had a chance to tackle the invaders outside the Polish capital. Trotski had grave difficulties in co-ordinating his forces, and certainly he could not count on the southern prong – whose commissar was Stalin – being as co-operative as it might have been. In mid-August 1920, Piłsudski offered battle by the river Vistula outside Warsaw. Quite against Lenin’s prediction, the worst happened. The Red Army was severely defeated. As the Poles exploited their advantage, the Soviet forces retreated headlong along the Smolensk road towards Moscow. Lenin had no choice but to sue for peace. One summer day’s battle had ruined everything. No more grandiose predictions about the federal Union of Europe. No more advice on unholy political alliances of far right and far left. No more expression of pride in the invincibility of the Red Army. All that came forth from Moscow was a recognition of the military disaster and the dire necessity of signing a peace on whatever terms were made available.
Lenin had been forcing the pace. He had urged his Politburo colleagues to start thinking how Europe would be organised. If ‘European socialist Revolution’ was about to become a reality, they had to have serious plans. Lenin and Stalin had an exchange of opinions about this, and Stalin never forgot the vehemence with which Lenin argued his case. For Lenin, this would be a simple process. He wanted to form a federal Union of Russia and the various Soviet republics of the former Russian Empire. Whenever a state in central and western Europe acquired a Soviet-style government, it could be admitted to this great,
expanding Union. In such a Union there was no scheme for Russian political preeminence and Stalin objected to this as being unrealistic. For him, it was self-evident that neither a Soviet Poland nor a Soviet Germany would enter into a Union founded by Russia. Old national pride would not quickly be erased. And so Stalin proposed that the RSFSR should constitute the core of one great federation while Germany formed another federation. Lenin was shocked by Stalin’s position and accused him of chauvinism.6 The October Revolution had been undertaken with the purpose of ending the division of Europe into separate state blocs. Stalin appeared to wish to maintain the blocs – and Lenin could scarcely believe what he heard from him.
Stalin did not even accept that Russia and Ukraine should enter their own Union on equal terms. Now that the Civil War was nearly over, he wished to scrap the various bilateral treaties and simply incorporate the other Soviet republics into the RSFSR. Of course, not even Lenin wished to provide Ukraine with freedom from control by Moscow; but he felt it politic to preserve the outward trappings of such freedom. Thus the planning for Revolution in Europe became enmeshed in a discussion of the future constitutional arrangements in Russia. Lenin and Stalin wanted to get things straight in advance of the anticipated European socialist Revolution. Their anger with each other in June 1920 only seems comic now because the Red Army was halted outside Warsaw and the socialist revolutions elsewhere either did not happen or soon petered out. But at the time they were in deadly earnest. They saw themselves as not only social engineers in Russia but also master planners for the entire continent. Their acquaintance with foreign leaders in the Communist International inclined them to think that no one could discharge the task as competently.
Lenin: A Biography Page 54