A People's Tragedy (146 page)

But in fact the patriotic motives that had driven Brusilov to join the Reds were shared by many people from the Old Russia. National Bolshevism, as their creed was later called, urged the patriotic intelligentsia to rally behind the Soviet state, now that it had won the civil war, for the resurrection of a Great Russia. It was an echo of the call by
Vekhi
to give up opposition to the

* Apart from Brusilov the conference included his two closest friends from the tsarist army, Generals Klembovsky and Zaionchkovsky, as well as his old ally Polivanov, the former Minister of War.

tsarist regime after the 1905 Revolution — and this was reflected in the title of its journal,
Smena vekh
(Change of Landmarks), whose first issue, in November 1921, paid homage to Brusilov. Nikolai Ustrialov, the best-known exponent of National Bolshevism, was a right-wing Kadet who had been a propagandist for Kolchak's regime before defecting to the Reds in 1920 on the grounds that they had won the civil war through the support of the Russian people and their revolution could be redirected towards national goals. 'The interests of the Soviet system will inevitably coincide with Russia's national interests,' he wrote in 1920. 'The Bolsheviks, by the logic of events, will progress from Jacobinism to Napoleonism.' If enough patriots joined the Reds, Ustrialov argued, the Soviet regime would be Russified. It would be turned White from the inside. Ustrialov glorified the Bolsheviks for two main reasons: for what he (and many other intellectuals such as Blok and the Scythians) saw as their Asiatic Slavophilism, uniting the East against the West; and for their restoration of a strong Russian state. He defended the Bolshevik dictatorship as a necessary remedy for the anarchy which had engulfed the country since 1917. He urged the Bolsheviks to recreate the Russian Empire (crushing all those pygmy states') and to reassert its power in the world. Such sentiments were widely shared by the intelligentsia. In a sense National Bolshevism was the true victor of the civil war. 'We lost but we won,' the Rightist Shulgin wrote in
1920.
'The Bolsheviks beat us but they raised the banner of a united Russia.' It was not just a question of the Right, although the old imperialists were among the first to rally round the Red flag of a Great Russia. For the Left, too, it was a short step from the worship of 'the people' and its powers of destruction to the acceptance of the Bolshevik regime as the outcome of that 'national revolution' and the only means of Russia's resurrection. This was the logic that drove many socialists to join the Bolsheviks after the civil war. Even Gorky was swept along by the patriotic tide.

Writing to H. G. Wells in May 1920, he was angry with a London
Times
reporter for claiming he had found a human finger in his soup at a restaurant in Petrograd. 'Believe me,' he fumed with national pride, 'I am not unaware of the negative aspects created by the war and revolution, but I also see that in the Russian masses there is awakening a great creative will.'78

This groundswell of patriotism no doubt partly influenced the Bolshevik decision to turn the defensive war against Poland into an offensive one. Having driven the Poles back from Kiev, in mid-July the Reds crossed the Curzon Line — where the Allies drew the Polish-Russian border — and continued to advance towards Warsaw. Since this would not be the last time the Red Army would move across the Russian border into Europe — it did so again in 1945 — it is important, not least for our understanding of the Cold War, to work out the Bolsheviks' motives in this counter-offensive against Poland. Some historians, such as Norman Davies and Richard Pipes, have staked their scholarly reputations on the argument

that, if Warsaw had fallen to the Red Army, Lenin would have ordered it to push on to Berlin in preparation for a general assault on Western Europe.79

It is true, as Pipes and Davies have both argued, that the Bolsheviks viewed the invasion of Poland as a likely catalyst to the revolution not just in Poland but throughout Europe.

Following the Red Army to Warsaw was a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee led by Dzerzhinsky, which would hand over power to the Communists once it arrived in the Polish capital. This was the height of the Bolsheviks' optimism in the exportability of Communism. Their expectations had been raised by the Spartacist Revolt in Berlin and the short-lived Soviet Republics in Hungary and Bavaria during 1919. In that spring, when the Comintern was formed, Zinoviev had predicted that 'in a year the whole of Europe will be Communist'. There was a time, he later admitted, when 'we had thought that only a few days or even hours remained before the inevitable revolutionary uprising'. By the summer of 1920 the Comintern had spread its influence throughout the capitals of Europe. Hardly a month went by without some delegation of Western socialists arriving in Russia to inspect and report back on the Great Experiment.

Moscow was turned into one vast Potemkin village, with happy groups of workers and lavish banquets laid on for these naive foreign dignitaries, so that they went home full of praise. The Second Congress of the Comintern, which met in Moscow at the height of the advance towards Warsaw, aimed to create a single European Communist Party under Moscow's guidance. The mood of the Congress was expectant. Every day the delegates followed the movement of the Red Army on a great map which was hung on the wall of the Congress hall. Lenin, who had insisted on the invasion of Poland against the advice of both Trotsky and Stalin, was convinced that the European revolution was just around the corner. It was inevitable, in his dogmatic Marxist
view,
that every other country should reach its October. The Kapp Putsch of March 1920 was a 'German Kornilov affair'; Estonia was 'passing through its Kerensky period'; while Britain, with its Councils of Action, was in 'its period of Dual Power'.80

There is no doubt that Lenin's insistence that every other country should follow Russia's road was symptomatic of a general Bolshevik imperiousness. It was that mixture of Russian nationalism and Communist internationalism which later came to characterize the whole dogmatic tone of Soviet foreign policy. The Bolsheviks boasted that Russia led the world when it came to making revolutions and assumed that all foreign Communists should be made to toe the Moscow line. That was certainly the essence of the Comintern Congress and its '21 Conditions' for admission to the new International.

The Comintern was a Bolshevik Empire.

But it is a long way from this to argue that Lenin was planning to impose his revolution on Western countries by the bayonet. It was not a question of volition — had it been possible for the Red Army to take Berlin or even Budapest Lenin might well have ordered it do so — but rather one of practicalities. The Bolsheviks were painfully aware that their own peasant army, and even more so their exhausted economy, could not sustain a winter offensive, especially one in a foreign field. That was why they were so quick to make peace with Poland during the autumn of 1920, even though it cost them a territorial foothold in Galicia which, in Lenin's own words, could have 'opened up a straight road of revolution ... to Czechoslovakia and Hungary'. Why then did they bother to invade Poland at all? A newly published speech by Lenin to the Ninth Party Conference in September 1920 provides the most convincing evidence so far. It suggests that the offensive against Warsaw was not supposed to be the start of an invasion of the West — as Richard Pipes has misleadingly suggested — but on the contrary a deterrent to the West against invading Russia. Lenin believed that Pilsudski's Poland had been built up by the Western powers as a weapon against Soviet Russia. As he saw it, a well-armed Poland fitted in with the general Allied plan to encircle Russia with hostile powers: Warsaw, Washington and Wrangel were connected. By invading Poland, the central pillar of the Versailles Treaty, Lenin aimed to 'shake' the Western system. With Poland Sovietized there would be an increased threat of the revolution spreading to the West, or so at least he believed. This was a form of national self-assertion, a way of warning the capitalist powers that Russia would no longer allow itself to be 'carved up' by them and would fight back when attacked. It was a political offensive against the Western capitals, a declaration of the

'international civil war', but not the start of the invasion of Europe. Naturally, it must be borne in mind that Lenin's speech was given in the immediate aftermath of the Red Army's defeat at Warsaw: there was thus a powerful motive to put on a brave face and boost the party's morale by claiming that in any case the offensive's political aims had been achieved. But, until new evidence proves to the contrary, it remains the most convincing explanation of the Bolsheviks' motives in Poland.81 The lessons of the Red defeat in Poland were extremely painful for the Bolsheviks to learn. There had certainly been military errors. Tukhachevsky's Western Army had rushed ahead towards Warsaw, underestimating the determination of the Poles to defend their capital and cutting off his own troops from their supplies. The South-Western Army had failed to support them, continuing to advance in the opposite direction towards Lvov, which Stalin seemed determined to take at all costs. The result was that Tukhachevsky's southern flank became exposed, allowing Pilsudski to launch a counter-offensive and drive the Reds back into Russia, where, with the first snows falling in October, the Front stabilized.

But the root of the defeat was political: the Polish workers had failed to rise in support of the invading Red Army but, on the contrary, had rallied to Pilsudski. Nationalism proved a more potent force than international

Communism. Lenin soon admitted his mistake. 'Poland was not ready for a social revolution,' he told the Party Conference in September. 'We encountered a nationalist upsurge from the petty bourgeois elements* as our advance towards Warsaw made them fear for their national survival.' Lenin realized that the same would also hold true for the rest of Europe. Trying to impose Communism from the outside would merely have the effect of turning its potential supporters into nationalists.82

Defeat in Poland finally made the Bolsheviks give up their fantasies of a European revolution. The Treaty of Riga, signed with Poland in March 1921, marked the start of a new era of peaceful co-existence between Russia and the West. Moscow recognized an enlarged Poland — and thus by implication the Versailles Treaty — by ceding to it much of Belorussia. Trading was resumed with Britain the same month. No one in the West took the threat of a Soviet invasion seriously any more. The Polish disaster had clearly shown that Russia's peasant army was not strong enough to sustain an offensive against even the smaller Western powers. The lesson for the Bolsheviks was clear: their best chances of exporting Communism lay to the East.

The Asiatic strategy had first been proposed by Trotsky in a secret memorandum written as early as August 1919:

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