The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  III

  It was this narrowing of revolutionary horizons that made China seem ever more crucial as an arena of revolutionary contest. At the Washington Conference, Chinese nationalists saw themselves as having been victimized not by one power singly but by a coalition of imperialists headed by the United States. The abstraction of imperialism ‘in general’ had taken on concrete form in the international banking consortium. The one state excluded from that oppressive combination was the Soviet Union. In 1919 and 1920 Chinese diplomacy had taken advantage of Russian weakness to roll back the privileges of the Tsarist regime. Now the tables were turned. With the Western Powers having affirmed their unwillingness to make substantial concessions, and with the Red Army re-establishing Moscow’s grip over Siberia and Mongolia, the Soviets dispatched a delegation to Beijing for a new round of hard bargaining. By 1924 this was to result in a substantial reassertion of Russian rights over the Manchurian railway system.37 But the far bigger prize was the prospect of socialist revolution in China. Like the Japanese before them, Soviet policy toward China oscillated between two poles. They could limit themselves to establishing and defending a sphere of interest, potentially in alliance with other foreign powers. Or, more ambitiously, they could seek to hegemonize the entirety of China. The latter project required ideological justification. The best the Japanese had to offer was the weak and transparently self-serving brew of pan-Asianism. The Soviets were in a position to offer a rather more engaging set of formulae.

  At the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in September 1920, Zinoviev had been frustrated by the poor showing of the Chinese. In January 1922, in reaction to the Washington Conference, the Soviets called a new Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, attended by militants from Japan, India, Indonesia, Mongolia and Korea, as well as, for the first time, a large contingent of Communists from China.38 There were disagreements over tactics, but concord at least on the need to distance the national revolution in China from any connection with the Western Powers. Nothing more was to be expected from the United States. The Chinese Communist Party in its first year was a tiny clique of intellectuals. But in the wake of high-profile strikes in Hong Kong and Canton, instructions were issued to begin engagement with workers’ organizations.

  In November 1922 at its Fourth Congress, the Communist International returned to the question of organizing the peasantry in ‘oriental countries’, formulating its ‘general theses on the oriental question’. The central point of the new Comintern line was the need to draw the great mass of the rural population into national liberation struggles. The role of the Communist Party was to pressure the bourgeois-nationalist parties into adopting a revolutionary agrarian programme to appeal to the landless rural population.39 Crucially, on 12 January 1923 the Comintern directed the Chinese Communist Party that ‘The only serious national revolutionary group in China at present is the Kuomintang.’40 With these words the Comintern for better or worse made the choice that none of the other foreign powers had been willing to make. It opted not just to acknowledge the significance of the Kuomintang, but to assist it in making a full-scale national revolution. This was affirmed by official Soviet diplomacy only a few weeks later when the Soviet ambassador to China, Adolphe Joffe, abandoned Beijing to meet with Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai, from where they issued a manifesto on future collaboration. In May this was followed by specific instructions designating the peasant problem as the central issue of the Chinese revolution. Along with their role in the cities, the Chinese comrades were enjoined to foment an agrarian revolt. This strategy was not to the taste of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party, who were urban intellectuals fixated on the modern, industrial working class. But it brought to the fore a new cohort of organizers, including the young Mao Zedong, himself a son of the peasantry.

  Nor was this new peasant-line confined to China. In October 1923 the Throne Room of the Kremlin played host to the First International Peasant Conference, attended by 158 delegates from 40 countries. Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary, as well as Mexico and the United States, were all represented. From Asia came Sen Katayama from Japan and Ho Chi Minh from Indochina. As Lenin hovered close to death over the winter of 1923–4, with Stalin lurking menacingly in the shadows, Trotsky, the hero of the Red Army, Zinoviev, the chief of the Comintern, and Bukharin, the theoretician and former Left Communist, vied for the limelight. Bukharin, who after Brest-Litovsk had counted on a peasant war to turn back the Germans, now reminded anyone who would listen that ‘as long as the huge majority of the population of this world is peasants, the question of the struggle of the peasantry stands as one of the central questions of policy’.41 Zinoviev for his part abandoned any talk of an exclusive proletarian dictatorship. He declared that the imperative to combine workers’ revolution with peasant war was ‘the most fundamental feature of Leninism’, the ‘most important discovery that Lenin made’. Zinoviev’s latest revolutionary vision was to unhinge the European order by way of a Balkan uprising that would sweep westwards from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

  But there was always another note that pervaded the talk of the peasantry and peasantism. Back in April 1923, at the 12th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, Zinoviev had defended the new line. In answer to those who accused him of deviating toward populism and agrarian interests, he responded. ‘Yes we not only must deviate towards the peasantry, but we must bow and, if necessary, kneel before the economic needs of the peasants, who will follow us and give us complete victory.’42 Along with Third Worldist revolutionary elan went a sense of realism, bordering on resignation, an acceptance that the ‘true revolution’, the proletarian revolution, as promised by the great prophets of the nineteenth century, was out of reach. Nor was this painful insight owed to the far-flung operations of the Comintern in China or in Poland. It was a bitter lesson taught by Russian reality.

  IV

  By early 1921, Trotsky and the Red Army had triumphed in the civil war. But victory had come at a heavy price. To avoid alienating the rural population, the Reds had abandoned any talk of collective farming, or the socialization of the land. The villagers were allowed to keep whatever land they had seized in 1917. This kept the peasants out of the clutches of counter-revolution. But it created a profound dilemma. Under the system of so-called ‘war communism’, the workers were paid almost entirely in ration entitlements. Already by 1918 the Russian currency had become virtually worthless. With the peasants in control of the land, as food supplies in the cities dwindled, the regime had no option but to resort to requisitioning, if necessary by force. The result was a terrifying downward spiral, in which peasant cultivation collapsed and the urban population, threatened with starvation, fled back to the countryside. The Soviet regime had won the civil war, but as a movement of proletarian revolution it had forfeited its raison d’être. Its international campaign of revolution had failed. And what was left of Russia was a far cry from what Marxism had promised. By the end of 1920 the population of Petrograd had plunged by 75 per cent and that of Moscow by almost half.

  For Lenin himself there was one pre-eminent benchmark for the success of his regime: the Paris Commune of 1871, the originator of modern Communism. In early March 1921, as the Bolshevik regime prepared to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that revolutionary landmark at the 10th Party Congress, it was shaken by an event unprecedented in its own history. On 1 March the soldiers and sailors of the Kronstadt naval base outside Petrograd, one of the legendary sites of the 1917 revolution, rose up in rebellion against the Soviet regime. They issued a manifesto calling for free and fair elections to the Soviets, freedom of speech, the right of assembly for non-party members, the formation of free labour unions, the release of all socialist political prisoners and the independent investigation of the charges against all those incarcerated by the regime, the separation of party and state, the equalization of rations, and the granting of full freedom for production for small independent producers. Against this libertarian challeng
e the Bolsheviks responded as they had done consistently since November 1917, with massive force. With Tukhachevsky taking command, 50,000 Red Guards were hurled against Kronstadt. Perhaps as many as two thousand rebels were executed. Thousands more were jailed. By the time the 10th Party Congress had concluded, the tidy-up had begun.

  On politics there could be no compromise. But on economic policy Lenin was willing to be flexible. The strategy of forced contributions had led to a disaster. Inflation was rampant. In the factories there was a veritable epidemic of absenteeism. On 21 March the sensation of the Communist Party conference was Lenin’s proclamation of the so-called New Economic Policy. In towns and cities the strategy of total collectivization was reversed. Private property was permitted for businesses employing fewer than 20 workers. The coercive requisitioning of food was replaced by a regular tax that from 1924 was levied in cash. To restore confidence, a new gold-backed currency would be introduced.

  By 1921, having abandoned its revolutionary invasion of Poland and its global campaign against the British Empire, and having retreated publicly, both at home and abroad, toward a compromise with capitalism, the Soviet regime appeared to the Western Powers less like a revolutionary threat than a failed state. As harvest season approached and a drought struck the weakened farmers of the Volga region, it became apparent that the New Economic Policy had come too late. The civil war had already cost well over a million dead. Now, in what had once been the bread basket of Europe, tens of millions were at risk of starvation. On 13 July, Lenin licensed the non-conformist writer Maxim Gorky to issue an international appeal for charity, not on behalf of worldwide revolution, but in the language of humanism, on behalf of ‘the country of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mendeleyev . . . Mussorgsky’ and ‘Glinka’. ‘All honest people’ across the world were to rally to his country’s aid. This was no longer revolutionary internationalism. Without ‘bread and medicine’ Russia itself would die.43

  23

  Genoa: The Failure of British Hegemony

  On 16 August 1921 Lloyd George addressed the House of Commons on the alarming news coming from Russia. The famine on the Volga was ‘so appalling a disaster’, Lloyd George declaimed, ‘that it ought to sweep every prejudice out of one’s mind and only appeal to one sentiment – pity and human sympathy’. The lives of 18 million people were immediately at risk. But to avoid politics in dealing with the Soviet regime was easier said than done. Combined with Lenin’s announcement of the New Economic Policy in March 1921 and the retreat from a confrontational foreign policy, the famine was widely seen in the West as evidence that the Bolshevik regime might be nearing its end. Was it not significant that the appeal for assistance had been delivered by a committee of notable Russians, some of whom, like Maxim Gorky, were well-known critics of Lenin’s regime? Might the Russian famine committee perhaps constitute the basis for a new provisional government?1 In the autumn of 1921 the possibility seemed to come into view of a truly comprehensive European peace based on a taming of the Soviet regime and a reintegration of Russia. It was this vision that would tempt Lloyd George to undertake the boldest peace-making effort of the post-war period. It would prove a striking demonstration both of the self-confidence of British power and of its real limits.

  I

  Since the end of the Polish-Soviet War in the autumn of 1920, London had been seeking a modus vivendi that would restore trade with Russia and secure the borders of the British Empire. But this policy of détente had its limits. In return for aid and at least tacit recognition, the Soviet state must recognize its basic international obligations.2 Above all it must come to terms over the billions of dollars owing to France and Britain on which it had defaulted at the time of Brest-Litovsk. A quarter of total French foreign investment was at stake. More than $4 billion was owed to upward of 1.6 million investors, many of them private stakeholders in Russian industry and railways. Britain’s somewhat smaller share totalled $3.5 billion, which were overwhelmingly claims on the Russian government.3 In October 1921 an international conference convened in Brussels to discuss a comprehensive Western response to the Soviet famine. With British leadership, the conference adopted a resolution under which aid to the Soviet Union was made conditional on acknowledgement of outstanding debts and the creation of ‘conditions’ within the Soviet territory that would allow trade to revive. International credit, the Brussels Conference insisted, ‘must rest on confidence’.4

  On 28 October the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, replied to the Brussels resolution that if the Western Powers were finally ready to include the Soviets as a legitimate member of a general peace settlement, the Soviet regime would be prepared to discuss honouring at least Russia’s pre-war obligations. By that time, however, the Soviets had already found an alternative source of assistance. In Washington the news of the famine broke just as Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes issued the invitations to the naval disarmament conference. This no doubt reinforced the State Department in its determination not to recognize the Soviet regime. But since the days of the Belgian relief operation, bringing succour to starving Europeans had become something of an American speciality. With world food markets in free fall, there were huge surpluses of grain to dispose of. Already in July 1921, Herbert Hoover, the master of emergencies, began to mobilize his well-proven Relief Administration. From Moscow’s point of view, precisely because Washington was so squeamish about official contacts, American aid had definite attractions.5 So long as Hoover was free to operate as he saw fit, there were minimal conditions attached. The scale of this American relief organization meant that Hoover could operate in Russia with no need for collaboration with the Soviet authorities.6 On 18 August 1921, only two days after Lloyd George had issued his appeal for a common front, the Soviets accepted Hoover’s offer of aid.7 For the next 12 months, 10 million Russians were fed by America.

  The Russian famine, however, was not the only crisis in the offing in the autumn of 1921. Two years after Versailles, the full bitterness of the peace was again souring Franco-German relations. In March 1921 the plebiscite in Silesia had delivered a predictably ambiguous result and triggered a Polish uprising. Combined with the continuing struggle over reparations, it made for an inflammable cocktail. Whilst the costs of reconstruction were ruining France’s finances, the temporary monetary stabilization that had prevailed in Germany since 1920 was slipping dangerously.8 Joseph Wirth’s government professed itself ready to pay reparations, but to do so it was throwing printed money onto the exchanges. Though the Freikorps had been disbanded after their final fight with the Poles, the menace from the right continued. On 4 June 1921 whilst walking with one of his daughters, Philipp Scheidemann, the first Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, was attacked with cyanide gas. Scheidemann survived, but on 24 August the right-wing death squads struck again. This time they claimed the life of Matthias Erzberger. The nationalist right was settling a score that went back to the summer of 1917 when Erzberger and Scheidemann had led the Reichstag’s first call for peace. The parties that backed the Republic understood the menace, but when the League in October 1921 awarded most of Upper Silesia and its heavy industry to Poland, they could not dissociate themselves from the patriotic groundswell. Chancellor Wirth’s government, which in May 1921 had taken responsibility for fulfilling the London reparations ultimatum, resigned in protest. Wirth had no option but to form a new cabinet.

  But the deadlock over reparations was now more severe than ever. German heavy industry exploited the indignation over Silesia to destroy an agreement brokered by Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau to pay France in kind with deliveries of coal. They also vetoed any increase in taxation on profits. Instead, the Reich was forced to enter into humiliating negotiations over the terms of a private international mortgage secured on the collective wealth of German business and large landowners. At a general meeting of German business leaders on 12 November 1921, led by Hugo Stinnes, the greatest baron of the Ruhr, the nationalist right wi
ng demanded in return that the social promises of the revolutionary era, including the eight-hour day, should be repealed, and all the productive assets of the German state, including the Reichsbahn, the largest business organization in the world, should be privatized. No government could rule by democratic means on such a platform. But splintered as it was between the SPD, USPD and KPD, the left lacked the votes necessary to push through its own preferred solution, to pay for reparations by levying a steeply progressive tax on private wealth.

  With the fiscal foundation of the German state in doubt, in the autumn of 1921 the markets signalled their mounting disbelief in the viability of fulfilment. From a previous low of 99.11 marks to the dollar, by the end of November the exchange rate had plunged to 262.96 marks. In Berlin the police had to be deployed to contain mobs of frantic shoppers desperate to stockpile imported food. As State Secretary Julius Hirsh of the Reich’s Ministry for Economic Affairs put it: ‘We do not stand before the question: an exchange rate with the dollar of 300 or 500? . . . we stand before the question of whether we can remain independent at all with our existing monetary conditions, whether we want to remain independent at all’.9