A People's Tragedy (149 page)

Only the ethnic minorities, the Ossetians and Abkhazians, with their demands for self-government, caused serious difficulties. Their high-handed treatment by the government in Tiflis, which was not immune to petty chauvinism, gave the Bolsheviks a real base of support. It was here, among the poor tribes of the northern Caucasus, that they built up their military organization for the subversion of independent Georgia. The Ossetian rebels were trained by the Bolsheviks in Vladikavkaz, just across the border in Russia, and sent across the mountains into Georgia. Within Georgia itself, the Bolsheviks had almost no support. The tiny Georgian police force had no difficulty in suppressing the Bolshevik leadership. In May 1920, when the Tiflis Bolsheviks tried to stage a coup to persuade the Eleventh Red Army (then in Baku) to launch an invasion, it was easily put down. Lenin ordered the Reds to pull back from Georgia: troops were needed on the Polish Front and, at least as Lenin later claimed, Georgia was not yet ripe for Sovietization. On 7 May, the Soviet Government signed a treaty with Georgia recognizing its independence and pledging not to interfere in its internal affairs.96

Here the Georgian Mensheviks made a fatal mistake. In a secret clause they agreed to legalize the Bolshevik Party in Georgia. Hundreds of activists were released from jail.

No doubt the Mensheviks rationalized this as the price of guaranteeing Georgia's independence. But, as their oldest foes, they should

have known better than to trust the Bolsheviks. The Georgian Bolsheviks now became a fifth column of the Red Army based in Baku. Strikes and revolts against the government were planned from the Soviet Embassy in Tiflis with the aim of sparking an invasion.

Lenin remained opposed to the military option, favouring a more gradual process of revolutionary subversion. Like Trotsky, he was concerned by the possible reaction of the British and the Germans, with whom the Bolsheviks were hoping to trade, not to mention the reaction of Turkey. The Western Socialist leaders had hailed Georgia as the only truly socialist country in the world. Karl Kautsky and Ramsay MacDonald had made a pilgrimage to Tiflis during 1920 and returned to Europe full of praise. There were also a practical problem. Kamenev, the head of the Red Army, warned that the troops of the Eleventh Red Army were too exhausted for a new offensive. But Ordzhonikidze was impatient for the liberation' of his native Georgia and, without Moscow's knowledge, began to build up troops on the Armenian and Azerbaijani borders. Together with Kirov, the Soviet Ambassador in Tiflis, he pleaded with Lenin for immediate intervention. 'One cannot hope for an internal explosion. Without our help Georgia cannot be Sovietized,' the two men wrote on 2 January. Stalin supported them in another letter two days later. Lenin finally agreed. 'Do not postpone,' he wrote on Stalin's letter.97

On 14 February 1921 the Politburo ordered the invasion to begin. Neither Kamenev nor Trotsky was informed. Against the 100,000 invaders Georgia's tiny army, which had always been more of a symbol than a shield for the nation, stood no chance. It fought bravely for over a week before surrendering Tiflis on the 25th. Taking advantage of Georgia's collapse, Turkey now invaded it from the south-west with the aim of capturing the port of Batum. This prevented the Menshevik leaders from making a last stand in their old rural stronghold of Guria, as they had intended. On 18 March they finally surrendered to the Reds and boarded an Italian ship bound for Europe. The rest of their organization went underground. It remained a dominant presence in the countryside, where it led the uprising that shook the Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1924.

Lenin was aware of the depth of the Mensheviks' popularity in the countryside and was worried that the 'Great Russian chauvinism' displayed by some Bolsheviks during the invasion might turn Georgia into a bed of nails. On 2 March he had written to Ordzhonikidze urging him to pursue 'a special policy of concessions with regard to the Georgian intelligentsia and small merchants'. This was the time when the NEP was introduced. Lenin saw its concessions to peasant agriculture, the free market and foreign trade as essential for the regime in Georgia. But he worried that the Bolsheviks in Ordzhonikidze's Caucasian Bureau were dangerously caught in the old mentalities of War Communism and Russian centralism. The Caucasus, he explained in a letter to the local Bolsheviks

on 14 April, was 'even more peasant than Russia' and this required 'more softness, caution and conciliation' in the transition to socialism than in the rest of Russia.

Makharadze's wing of the Georgian Party championed the cause of National Bolshevism and, thanks in part to them, some gains were made by the policy of
korenizatsiia
during the early 1920s. More Georgians entered Soviet office, many of them former Mensheviks. There was a boom of publications in the Georgian language, which began to replace Russian in the public sphere. All this showed that Georgia's subjugation did not have to mean a cultural defeat. In the words of the Georgian poet, Leo Kiacheli, 'the Georgian soul should rule in Georgia'.98

Yet there were still some Bolsheviks who were not even prepared to concede this. It was ironic that the foremost among these were two Georgians, Ordzhonikidze and Stalin, whose own Bolshevism had become mixed in a complex way with a sort of Great Russian chauvinism. The conflict rumbled on beneath the surface until 1922, when it suddenly erupted on to the Moscow scene. But that is the story of Lenin's last struggle.

* * * Brusilov rejoiced in the reformation of the Russian Empire, albeit under the Red Star rather than the Cross. It reconciled him to his own decision to join the Reds and ensured his continued support for them after the war with Poland, when they turned their attention to the Whites in the Crimea. Brusilov was furious with Wrangel for attacking Russia during the war against Poland. It showed, in his view, that the Whites were prepared to betray Russia for their own narrow political ends. Patriotism was Brusilov's main motive for siding with the Reds against these last guardians of the Old Russia. It must have aroused curious emotions; for Brusilov was helping to destroy his own class.

It was fitting that the Whites should make their last stand on the picturesque Crimean peninsula. This Russian riviera, with its palms and cypresses, its vineyards and mountains, had been the playground of the aristocracy, whose summer palaces lined its southern coast. In their noble minds the Crimea was a place of childhood summers, a symbol of the good life in Old Russia, where it was thought the sun would never set.

Now, in the summer of 1920, it was the last bit of Russian soil that had not been taken by the Reds. It was the last resort of fallen dukes and generals, of provincial governors and bishops, of landowners without estates, of industrialists without factories, of state officials without appointments, of lawyers without jobs and of actresses without a stage.

The bourgeoisie had nowhere else to run to.

At the head of this forlorn cause stood Baron Peter Wrangel, a six-foot scion of the old military aristocracy, who had risen through the elite Imperial Guards. Unlike the 'army man' Denikin, Wrangel was well aware of the need to fight the civil war by political as well as military means. 'It is not by a

triumphal march from the Crimea to Moscow that Russia can be freed,' he told his first press conference in April, 'but by the creation — on no matter how small a fragment of Russian soil — of such a Government with such conditions of life that the Russian people now groaning under the Red yoke will inevitably submit to its attractions.' The Whites, Wrangel realized, could never come to power as long as they were seen to be fighting for the restoration of the old regime. They had to pledge their support for radical reforms capable of winning the support of the peasantry, the workers and the national minorities. Wrangel called it 'making leftist policies with rightist hands'."

This was not just an opportunistic response to the weak military position which Wrangel had inherited. It stemmed from a genuine realization that the defeat of Denikin's regime had been brought about as much by its own outdated bureaucratic methods and failure to adapt to the new revolutionary situation as by its military difficulties. But the aim was contradictory: the rightist hands in Wrangel's regime would never make genuine leftist policies and pretending that they would was, in Miliukov's phrase, 'a clumsy attempt to cheat the world with liberal catchwords'. The government and military circles in Sevastopol were filled with figures from the old regime. Krivoshein, the last tsarist Minister of Agriculture, was placed in charge of the interior. His police carried out a massive witch-hunt against suspected 'Bolsheviks', which meant anyone who opposed the regime. Hundreds of liberal journalists and politicians were arrested, while the zemstvo organs were harassed as 'hotbeds of Bolshevik activity'. One zemstvo official complained to Krivoshein — only to be told that 'all the leftists were the same', whether they were Bolsheviks or liberals. Krivo-shein's police force was filled with officials from the old regime who used their positions to reap a savage revenge against the peasantry for 1917, or else make themselves rich through bribes and requisitions. The proximity of the Front, which meant that most of the Crimea was placed under the jurisdiction of military field courts, served as a pretext for this White Terror. Thousands of ordinary peasants and workers were imprisoned, and hundreds shot, as suspected

'spies'. Terror by the soldiers — mainly in the form of looting and pogroms — was a major problem, souring relations with the local population, not least because the White officers tolerated and sometimes even encouraged such actions in order to secure the loyalty of their men. After three years of fighting in the field, the White, or Russian Army, as it was now called, had developed a strong caste spirit. Many of the officers saw themselves as an occupying army in a foreign land, and acted with impunity towards the Crimean population. Rather than acting as a model government to promote the White cause in the rest of Russia, Wrangel's 'rightist hands' did more to advance the Red cause in the Crimea.100

As with Denikin, the land issue was crucial here. Wrangel recognized the need to pass a land reform capable of winning peasant support. 'The question had to be settled for an important psychological reason: we had to tear the enemy's principal weapon of propaganda from him,' the Baron recalled in his memoirs. 'We had to allay the peasants' suspicion that our object in fighting the Reds was no other than to restore the rights of the great landed proprietors and to take reprisals against those who had infringed these rights.' But the committee which Wrangel appointed to draw up the land reform was dominated by such landed interests. The result was a Land Law, passed on 25 May, that still fell far short of the peasant demands. Its basic aim was to create a class of peasant proprietors by giving them a small plot of land as private property. It was another 'wager on the strong'. Like Stolypin's land reforms, it was to be linked to the establishment of a volost-level zemstvo in which the peasants would be dominant.

But the law was full of complex regulations which would have taken years to implement; and there were far too many bureaucratic loopholes which allowed the squires to hold on to their land. The district zemstvos, for example, which set the amount of land to be transferred to the peasants, would still be dominated by them.

There was also the problem of compensation: the peasants were to pay for the gentry's land by giving them one-fifth of its harvest (in the three-field system this was equivalent to 30 per cent of the annual harvest). After the revolution and the civil war, when the peasant farms had been severely weakened, this would have been a heavy burden, and would have kept the peasant farmers economically dependent on the squires for perhaps a generation — and that had probably been its aim.101

Wrangel's Land Law was a paternalist solution to the peasant question, not a revolutionary one. In the nineteenth century it would have been considered progressive; but after 1917 it was reactionary. It proved that Wrangel's regime was just as caught up as Denikin's in the bureaucratic methods of the past. Nothing better symbolized this than the decision to sell the Land Law for 100 roubles in booklet form (it was assumed that if the peasants had to pay for it, they would value the law more). Compared with the Bolsheviks' simple land decree, which they publicized in millions of leaflets and gave away free to the peasantry, it betrayed a dismal failure to comprehend the propaganda purpose of such laws. Wrangel's regime, like Denikin's, failed to understand that to win the civil war it had to adopt revolutionary methods.102

The price the Whites paid was widespread peasant indifference to their cause and, in the districts nearest the Front, where the burden of food and transport requisitioning was at its heaviest, even outright hostility. It meant they could never recruit enough troops to break out from their Crimean base. Even the wealthy farmers of the Tauride region, the first area the Whites would have to cross on entering the mainland, looked upon us', in the words of one of their officers, 'as an army of old Olympians, titled generals and their cronies,

puffed up with pride and arrogance'. The problem was made all the more acute by the fact that the Cossacks, the mainstay of the Whites, were showing growing signs of disaffection, looting the villages and demanding to return to their homelands. According to one officer, the Don Army had become no more than 'a mob of people, who thought only of their own salvation and material welfare, but certainly not of a struggle with the Reds'. The left wing of the Don Krug, now dominated by younger Cossacks from the front-line units, was actively campaigning for a break with the 'reactionary' Wrangel and for peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks, in the naive hope of securing from them a promise of autonomy for the Don.103

To begin with, Wrangel had rejected the idea of an offensive. The British refused to support one and he himself preferred to build up his base on the peninsula. But with the Polish attack on Russia, Wrangel saw his chance. On 6 June he landed troops by boat on the coast of the Azov Sea and during the next few days pushed more land troops north into the Tauride region. This established a bridgehead on the mainland, doubling the size of Wrangel's territory, and gaining in the Tauride a much-needed source of agricultural produce for the swollen population of the Crimea. During August and September Wrangel tried to push north, into the Don and the Kuban. But his forces, hastily conscripted from the Tauride peasants, soon fell apart (it was harvest time) and the Cossacks had to spend most of their energies chasing deserters. By October, with the Polish war completed, the Reds were ready to concentrate on Wrangel. On the 20th they launched their counter-offensive: it took six days for the 130,000 Reds to force the 35,000 Whites back into the Crimea. Makhno's partisans did most of the fighting and took the brunt of the heavy losses on the Red side — for which Trotsky then rewarded them with an order for their capture and execution.104