by Adam Tooze
Lloyd George’s withdrawal had a devastating impact on the morale of the White forces, but it did not mean an end of the threats to the Soviet regime.10 Over the winter of 1919–20 the Polish Ministry of War began preparing for the definitive settlement of the Russian question. The largest nationalist party in Poland, the National Democrats, were opposed to an offensive, preferring to defend a more compact, ethnically homogeneous territory. But Marshal Joseph Pilsudski, the dominant figure in the fragile Polish state, did not share their limited vision. Pilsudski dreamed of resurrecting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which until the ravages of the Thirty Years War had blocked Muscovite expansion to the west. In alliance with an autonomous Ukraine, a new Polish super-state would anchor a cordon stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.11 Pilsudski assumed this would appeal to London. But Lloyd George’s government declined to give its backing to Polish aggression. The Poles had to make do with the anaemic support from the French and an alliance with the Ukrainian nationalists, who, following the German retreat from the Brest-Litovsk Treaty lines, had taken shelter in Galicia.12 In exchange for the promise of eastern Galicia for Poland, Pilsudski threw Poland’s weight behind Simon Petlura’s bid to establish an independent Ukraine as a permanent part of the new order. It was a high-risk strategy, but Warsaw was convinced that the Red Army was preparing for a push west. Pilsudski would beat them to the punch.13
On 25 April 1920 the Polish-Ukrainian army attacked. On 7 May they took Kiev, enabling the surviving White Russian forces under General Pyotr Wrangel to stabilize a new base in the Crimea. Once more the Bolshevik regime seemed to confront an existential threat from the south. But the past three years had taken their toll on Ukraine. The arrival of Petlura and Pilsudski heralded the fifteenth change of regime in Kiev since January 1917. Hundreds of thousands of people had died at the hands of Germans, Austrians, White and Red Russian occupiers, amongst them 90,000 Jews who had been slaughtered in the worst series of pogroms since the Cossack uprising of the seventeenth century. The survivors were in no mood to raise a popular insurrection. In Russia, by contrast, the idea of Polish Lancers cantering through Kiev unleashed a storm of patriotic fury. With war hero Aleksei Brusilov in the lead, former Tsarist officers flooded into Trotsky’s Red Army.14
The result was one of the climactic moments in modern European history. On 5 June 1920 the massed horde of General Semen Budennyi’s Red Cavalry, 18,000-strong, smashed through the Polish lines, forcing a precipitate evacuation of Kiev. Only a month later, on 2 July, the brilliant Bolshevik commander and military theoretician Mikhail Tukhachevsky issued the order for the general advance. ‘Over the corpse of White Poland lies the path to world conflagration . . . On to Vilno, Minsk, Warsaw! Forward!’ Egged on by their front commanders, Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership now believed that they ‘stood at the turning point of the entire policy of the Soviet government’.15 It was time to ‘test with bayonets whether the socialist revolution of the proletariat had not ripened in Poland . . .’. The fact that the French were scrambling to prop up the Polish defences and that Britain was trying to mediate revealed that ‘somewhere near Warsaw’ lay ‘the center of the whole contemporary system of international imperialism . . .’.16 Through the conquest of Poland they would ‘shake’ the entire structure to its foundations. The Red Army would bring to life a ‘completely new zone of proletarian revolution against global imperialism’.
After Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks had moved their capital to the relative safety of Moscow. Even in the summer of 1920 Lenin was forced to travel incognito and at night, for fear of assassination. But, as a show of defiance, the Second Congress of the Comintern held its opening session on 19 July 1920 in Petrograd before retreating to Moscow. There, 217 delegates from 36 countries gathered under a large map of Poland on which the latest advances of the Soviet armies were posted hour by hour as news came in from the front.17 In a mood approaching ‘revolutionary delirium’, Lenin cabled Stalin that ‘the situation in the Comintern was superb’. Together with Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin he was looking forward to a revolutionary upsurge across Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania.18 Meanwhile German comrades hoped that next year they would be able to host the Comintern in Berlin.19
II
It was against this backdrop of euphoric revolutionary expansion that the Comintern underwent a first change. The unorganized, decentralized revolutionary upsurge of 1919 had led to defeat in Hungary and Germany. With the Red Army driving westwards, it was time for the Russian revolution to assert command. Compared to the ineffectual efforts of the western European socialists, Leninism had proven its worth as a revolutionary doctrine. The Comintern would set new and strict criteria for all its members. They must proclaim the dictatorship of the proletariat as their immediate goal. There could be no compromise with democratic politics, now dubbed ‘social-pacificism’, or with ‘bourgeois legality’. Whether in western Europe or America, Communists must recognize that they were ‘entering the phase of civil war’.20 As a test of their revolutionary mettle they must commit to creating a ‘parallel illegal organization’ and prepare to mount a direct challenge to the state by beginning mutinous subversion within the armed forces. If this meant repression at the hands of the political police, so be it. The Wilsonian nostrums so beloved of liberals and social democrats in 1918–19 were contemptuously swept aside. ‘Without the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism no international court of arbitration, no agreement to limit armaments, no “democratic” reorganization of the League of Nations, will be able to prevent new imperialist wars.’ In international affairs there was only one guiding principle: ‘unconditional support to any Soviet republic in its struggle against counter-revolutionary forces’. Given that the moment of revolutionary truth was coming closer with every charge of the revolutionary Red cavalry, there was no time to lose. Within four months, all current members and aspirant members of the Communist International must decide: either for or against.21
Of the Comintern’s 10 sessions at the 1920 Conference, eight were devoted to the difficult business of purifying the revolutionary forces of Europe. But befitting the radical mood, the second meeting of the Comintern also provided the forum for the first major debate of global strategy.22 Given the frustration of revolutionary ambition in western Europe, the slogan of ‘Asia first’ found an articulate and eye-catching spokesman in the peripatetic Indian Marxist M. N. Roy. Roy had recently made his way to Russia by way of the United States and attended the Comintern conference as the representative of Mexico rather than India.23 But it was to Asia, Roy argued, that the Comintern ought to direct its energies. It should work there to create its own base of revolutionary activism amongst the emerging working class in cities such as Bombay and the desperately poor stratum of peasants that constituted the huge mass of the Asian population. It was essential, Roy argued, for Communism to offer an alternative to the likes of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, whom he regarded as bourgeois reactionaries. Despite its militant vigour, Roy’s Third Worldism was too much for many of the older school. Giacinto Menotti Serrati, one of the most dogmatic Italian Marxists, answered with a classic assertion of Eurocentric orthodoxy. Revolution in Asia was impossible because there was no industrial working class. Asia must follow the European vanguard.
But Serrati was behind the times. Prominent Russians now felt that it was time to do more than merely recite the old religion of the Communist Manifesto, which, as Lenin pointed out, had been written ‘under completely different circumstances’. Marxism was entering its fourth generation.24 As the Bolsheviks had triumphantly demonstrated, twentieth-century revolutionaries needed to think for themselves, if necessary against Marx and Engels. Not that Lenin could entirely concur with Roy. ‘Asia-first’ was one-sided. The Comintern should not divert resources from Europe, the heartland of imperial power, at the very moment when the struggle appeared to be reaching its climax. But as Lenin had argued since 1916, the national liberation move
ments of the colonized world could make vigorous recruits to the revolutionary cause in the form of ‘united anti-imperialist fronts’. Roy was unabashed as he pilloried any thought of alliances with ‘bourgeois democracy’. So Lenin beat a tactical retreat that found the approval of the vast majority of the Comintern. United fronts would be adopted only in those cases where Communist parties could ally themselves with truly ‘revolutionary’ nationalist groupings. As the following years were to demonstrate, it was a distinction that was lethally difficult to draw in practice.
If the tactics of global revolution were contentious, on the main target the Comintern could easily agree. Great Britain had been the driving force behind anti-Bolshevik intervention since 1918. It was the dominant global empire. In 1920 it seemed that the ‘Great Game’ of imperial rivalry played out between Imperial Russia and Victorian Britain would give way to a new era of struggle in Central Asia. In April 1920 Commissar Stalin drove the Red Army into Azerbaijan. Based on Baku and its oil wells, the Communists launched a short-lived campaign to radicalize the Muslim population of Asia. In May, Soviet marines leapfrogged down the Caspian coastline and expelled the British from the Persian harbour town of Enzeli. Before they withdrew, the Soviet forces helped to found the Soviet Republic of Gilan in northern Persia as a challenge to the crumbling Teheran regime.25 Composed of local warlords, Kurdish chieftains, anarchists and a smattering of radical intellectuals, the Gilan Republic’s ideological inspiration came from Sultan Zade who outdid Roy in proclaiming a full-blown Asian revolution.
On 8 September 1920 at Baku, the Congress of Peoples of the East convened 1,900 delegates representing 29 nationalities and ethnic groups from across Persia, Armenia and Turkey.26 At the opening ceremony they were treated to a protracted oration by Lenin’s devoted follower and enthusiastic third-worldist, Zinoviev, who heralded an event ‘previously unknown in the history of mankind’ – the first gathering of representatives of hundreds of millions of oppressed peasants of the East, the men and women whom Zinoviev was delighted to hail as the ‘mighty mass of our reserves’, the ‘foot soldiers’ of the worldwide revolution.27 To provide the necessary strategic base for their ‘holy war . . . against imperialist Britain’, Moscow agreed a treaty of recognition with Afghanistan under which Kabul, in exchange for a substantial subsidy, promised not to enter into any agreement with Britain.28 Meanwhile Comintern strategists imagined an anti-British combination consisting of Afghanistan, a pan-Turkic force led by Enver Pasha and a revolutionary ‘Army of God’, to be headed by Roy. Having redeployed to Tashkent, Roy set himself to raising a Muslim army that would add an extra dimension to the Khilafat movement challenging British rule in India.29
Despite the enthusiasm generated in 1920, the track record of the Comintern was not to be one of revolutionary success. For decades to come, recriminations over the Comintern’s failure were to be the subject of bitter dispute between the different branches of the worldwide socialist movement. But such arguments beg the question. Certainly the period 1917–23 was one of convulsive disorder. But whether there was ever any realistic prospect of a general revolutionary overthrow is more than questionable. Accusations of failure deflect us from appreciating the more remarkable thing, which is the vision of global politics that the Comintern pursued. In terms of the sheer scale of its ambition it marked a high-water mark. For a generation before the war, the Socialist International had developed a regular pattern of joint meetings and collective decision-making by parties from across Europe and increasingly from around the world. Woodrow Wilson set the precedent for a politician seeking to appeal to a public on a global scale. Versailles and the League of Nations gathered the governments of the world. Britain was attempting to forge its empire into a world-spanning Commonwealth. At the Washington Conference a global structure of naval power had been settled by inter-governmental treaty.
But the Comintern attempted something far more radical. It tried to forge a worldwide political movement, with a common model of organization, a clear commitment to a list of doctrinal points, centrally controlled and directed toward a global action plan, which was itself based on a strategic, interconnected analysis of the class struggle at every major site on the globe. In secular politics no one had ever attempted anything like it before. Its only true precursor was the Catholic Church. It is hardly surprising that the concepts of the Comintern were crude and Eurocentric or that its tactical judgements went frequently and disastrously awry. The failures and frustrations of this project were over-determined. As it turned out, in 1920, it was not issues of conceptual subtlety or tactical finesse that were decisive, but a military misadventure.
As the Red Army advanced towards the West, Tukhachevsky threw an encircling right-hook along the Baltic coastline. By the second week of August his advanced guard was within 150 miles of Berlin.30 With the Weimar Republic looking to resume diplomatic relations with the advancing Soviets, many East Prussian communities welcomed the Russian forces as a harbinger of the end of the hated Polish rule.31 Cut off from resupply in the first weeks of August on the Vistula River line, Pilsudski made his stand. Exploiting the gaps that opened up between the northernmost pincer of the encirclement and the Soviet forces driving towards the outskirts of Warsaw, on 16 August 1920 he counter-attacked, driving north and then eastwards, deep into the rear of the Red Army. The result was a staggering reversal. By 21 August Tukhachevsky’s entire front was disintegrating. To the south, after a futile siege of Lwow on 31 August, the Red Army units under the supervision of Political Commissar Stalin were defeated at Zamosc. In what was to be the last great cavalry battle of European history, General Budenny’s 1st Red Cavalry Army was driven to flight by a brigade of Polish Uhlans, the descendants of the men who had ridden with Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812.
On 12 October 1920 Moscow agreed to an armistice and on 18 March 1921 it concluded the Treaty of Riga. The Baltic boundary with Russia drawn by the Germans in 1918 remained in place. The White Russian and Ukrainian states envisioned by Brest-Litovsk were partitioned between the Soviet regime and a hugely expanded Poland. It was, Lenin admitted, a crushing setback to the expansive hopes of the revolution. But it allowed the Soviet regime to consolidate its position and clarify its relations, notably with the British Empire. In March, London and Moscow concluded a trade treaty.32 Meanwhile the last major White emplacement in the Crimea was driven to flight and the flames of anarchist rebellion in Ukraine were stamped out. The Soviet conquest of the Transcaucasus was completed by the end of February 1921 when the Georgian Republic was occupied by the Red Army.33 On 28 December the Socialist Republics of Russia, Ukraine, Belorusse and Transcaucasus signed the treaty that created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A continental revolutionary movement froze in the shape of a new kind of state.
As the Soviet regime consolidated its grip on most of the former territory of the Tsar, the Comintern’s 21 Points were forced down the throat of the international socialist movement. In Germany this split the Independent Social Democratic Party, with the majority joining the ranks of the Communist Party, the rest returning to the ranks of the Social Democratic Party. In France likewise a Communist Party split away from the Socialist Party. The Italian Communist Party formed in January 1921. The newly hatched western European Communist movement committed itself to Lenin’s uncompromising doctrine of class war precisely at the moment when in Europe the tradition of armed insurrection was definitely coming to an end. On 21 March 1921 Communists in the heavy industrial regions of central Germany launched a coup. Within days it ended in a humiliating fiasco. The same was to happen in 1923 in the abortive revolutionary mobilizations in Hamburg, Saxony and Thuringia. In Britain, France and Italy in 1920 and 1921 calls for general strikes all ended in disappointment. From November 1918 down to the present day, no frontal challenge to state power has ever succeeded in any Western state. In Central Asia too, the revolutionary elan of 1920 proved fleeting. The pan-Turkic hero Enver Pasha proved an unreliable ally. Rather t
han directing his energies toward an invasion of British India, he became the figurehead of a Central Asian rebellion against Soviet rule.34 With Afghanistan likewise uncooperative, Roy’s Islamic Army was disbanded.
The vision of revolution had gone through four phases since November 1918. As the war ended, Lenin had been on the defensive anxiously looking for ways to continue the balancing of Brest-Litovsk. In the spring of 1919 that had given way to the prospect of revolutions exploding like wildfires across Eurasia. When that was disappointed, the Comintern in 1920 took upon itself the task of orchestrating a global revolutionary campaign. Finally, after the renewed defeat of revolutionary hopes in Germany and Italy in 1921, Moscow came to see itself as pursuing a strategy of revolutionary defence. Rather than socialism being the animating force of a global uprising, or the strategic centre of a global campaign, it became the ideology of one state amongst others in a heterogeneous world system.35
For Communist activists across the world, the implications were drastic. In 1919 they had been agents of revolution in their own right. In 1920 they had submitted to the Comintern’s discipline, but with the promise of imminent revolutionary success. Now they were required to subordinate themselves to the interests of the USSR in a brutal strategic clinch of indefinite duration. At the Third Meeting of the Comintern in June and July 1921, the subordination of all Communist parties to Soviet strategy was the sole substantive matter of discussion. With the major capitalist powers, notably Britain and its immediate neighbours, the Soviet state would seek coexistence. Outside Europe, the Communists would seek to collaborate with nationalist forces against imperialism. But as the bloody example of Turkey and Iran were soon to demonstrate, this involved huge risks for the Communist foot soldiers. Moscow insisted on maintaining good relations with Ataturk, regardless of the fact that he turned against the Turkish Communists as soon as he had disposed of the Greeks and the British.36 Similarly the Iranian Communist Party was sacrificed to uphold relations with strongman General Reza Khan. The adventure of the revolutionary dialectic had entered its grimmest phase. Iron discipline and self-denial would establish themselves as the hallmarks of Communist revolutionary ethos.