Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (15 page)

For equal and opposite reasons the Allies were anxious to oust Lenin and get Russia back into the war. But Lenin was clearly right to settle with the Germans, whose threat to him was near and immediate,
rather than the Allies, who were distant and divided in their aims. As early as 14 December 1917 the British War Cabinet decided to pay money to anti-Bolsheviks ‘for the purpose of maintaining alive in South East Russia the resistance to the Central Powers’. On 26 December Britain and France divided up Russia into spheres of influence for this end, the French taking the south, the British the north.
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In March 1918 the first British troops went to Archangel and Murmansk, initially to protect British war stores there. After the German armistice the Allies continued with their intervention, for Lenin had signed a separate peace with the enemy and at one time Winston Churchill hoped to persuade the Council of Ten in Paris to declare war formally on the Bolshevik regime.
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By the end of 1918, there were 180,000 Allied troops on Russian territory – British, French, American, Japanese, Italian and Greek, as well as Serb and Czech contingents – plus 300,000 men of various anti-Bolshevik Russian forces supported by Allied money, arms and technical advisers. It may be asked: granted the slender, almost non-existent popular support Lenin enjoyed in Russia, how did his regime manage to survive?

The short answer is that it was very nearly extinguished in the late summer and early autumn of 1919. There was absolutely nothing inevitable about its endurance. A number of quite different factors worked in its favour. In the first place, with one exception none of the Allied statesmen involved even began to grasp the enormous significance of the establishment of this new type of totalitarian dictatorship, or the long-term effect of its implantation in the heart of the greatest land power on earth. The exception was Winston Churchill. With his strong sense of history, he realized some kind of fatal watershed was being reached. What seems to have brought the truth home to him was not only the murder of the entire Russian royal family on 16 July 1918, without any kind of trial or justification, but Lenin’s audacity, on 31 August, in getting his men to break into the British Embassy and murder the naval attaché, Captain Crombie. To Churchill it seemed that a new kind of barbarism had arisen, indifferent to any standards of law, custom, diplomacy or honour which had hitherto been observed by civilized states. He told the cabinet that Lenin and Trotsky should be captured and hanged, ‘as the object upon whom justice will be executed, however long it takes, and to make them feel that their punishment will become an important object of British policy’.
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He told his Dundee electors on 26 November 1918 that the Bolsheviks were reducing Russia ‘to an animal form of barbarism’, maintaining themselves by ‘bloody and wholesale butcheries and murders carried out to a large extent by Chinese executions and armoured cars …. Civilization is being
completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and corpses of their victims.’ ‘Of all the tyrannies in history’, he remarked on 11 April 1919, ‘the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading.’ Lenin’s atrocities were ‘incomparably more hideous, on a larger scale and more numerous than any for which the Kaiser is responsible’. His private remarks to colleagues were equally vehement. Thus, to Lloyd George: ‘You might as well legalize sodomy as recognize the Bolsheviks.’ To H.A.L.Fisher: ‘After conquering all the Huns – the tigers of the world – I will not submit to be beaten by the baboons.’ Once the regime consolidated itself it would become far more expansionist than Tsarist Russia and, he warned Field Marshal Wilson, ‘highly militaristic’.
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Churchill never wavered in his view that it ought to be a prime object of the policy of the peaceful, democratic great powers to crush this new kind of menace while they still could.

But even Churchill was confused about means. He resented suggestions his colleagues fed the press that he had some kind of master-plan to suppress Bolshevism throughout the world. He wrote to Lloyd George (21 February 1919): ‘I have no Russian policy. I know of no Russian policy. I went to Paris to look for a Russian policy! I deplore the lack of a Russian policy.’ He admitted it was not the job of the West to overthrow Lenin: ‘Russia must be saved by Russian exertions.’
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All the other Western leaders, in varying degrees, were lukewarm about the business. On 14 February 1919 Wilson said he was for withdrawal: ‘Our troops were doing no sort of good in Russia. They did not know for whom or for what they were fighting.’ The French were more interested in building up their new ally, Poland, into a big state. Lloyd George was thinking in terms of public opinion at home: ‘The one thing to spread Bolshevism was to attempt to suppress it. To send our soldiers to shoot down the Bolsheviks would be to create Bolshevism here.’ Sir David Shackleton, head official at the Ministry of Labour, warned the cabinet in June 1919 that British intervention was the main cause of industrial unrest. The War Office warned of ‘revolutionary talk in the Brigade of Guards’ and General Ironside, in charge at Archangel, cabled home news of ‘very persistent and obstinate’ mutinies among his own troops.
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None of this might have mattered if Lloyd George, in particular, had regarded Leninism as the ultimate evil. But he did not. Leninism subscribed to self-determination. It was prepared to let go, had indeed already let go, all the small nations on its fringes: Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, possibly the Ukraine, the Crimean and the Georgian republics. Marshal Foch, for the French, spoke in terms of
welding these new democratic states into a
cordon sanitaire
to seal off Bolshevism from civilized Europe. Unlike Churchill, most western opinion saw the Bolsheviks as non-expansionist, prepared to settle for a weak Russia, internationally minded. To them, it was the anti-Bolshevik commanders, Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin, who stood for Tsarist imperialism, the old fear-images of ‘the Bear’, the ‘Russian Steamroller’ and so forth. This view was by no means unfounded. Kolchak persistently refused to give the Allies the assurances they wanted about confirming the independence of Finland and the Baltic states after he had overthrown Lenin. He would not even promise to permit democratic elections in Russia itself. Denikin showed himself strongly anti-Polish and hotly opposed to liberty for the Ukrainians, the Caucasus and other small nations. He appeared to want to re-establish the Tsarist empire in all its plenitude and, worse, with all its traditional ferocity. What damaged the image of the White Russians in the West more than anything else, not least with Churchill himself, was Denikin’s identification of Bolshevism with Jewry and the anti-Semitic atrocities of his troops: during 1919 over 100,000 Jews appear to have been murdered in south Russia, by no means all of them in peasant pogroms.
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The anti-Bolshevik commanders, in fact, never accommodated themselves either to the Allies or to the oppressed nationalities. Hence, when Denikin took Kiev on 31 August 1919 and advanced towards Moscow, Allied forces were already being evacuated in the north, releasing masses of Lenin’s troops to move south. Again, on 16 October 1919, General Yudenich’s troops were only twenty-five miles from Petrograd and Denikin was near Tula west of Moscow: within a week his Cossacks had deserted, there were nationalist risings in the Ukraine and a general rebellion in the Caucasus. From that moment the White Russian tide began to recede and by the end of the year their cause was finished.

Lenin’s biggest single asset was his willingness to hand out post-dated cheques not only to the nationalists but above all to the peasants. No one was then to know that none of the cheques would be honoured. The White leaders felt they could not match these promises. General Sir Henry Rawlinson, Britain’s last commander on the spot, thought the victory was due to the character and determination of the Bolshevik leaders: ‘They know what they want and are working hard to get it.’
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There were only a few thousand Bolshevik cadres, but Lenin had filled them with his will to power and given them a clear vision to strive for. They had not yet begun to murder each other. They were absolutely ruthless – far more so than their opponents – in shooting failed commanders, deserters, faint-hearts,
saboteurs and anyone who argued or caused trouble. Such ferocity, it is sad to record, has nearly always paid among the Great Russians; and of course it was the Great Russians who constituted the bulk of the people behind Lenin’s lines. The real intransigent elements, the minorities and racial nationalities, were all behind the lines of the Whites, who felt unable to make them any concessions. The conjunction was fatal.

Lenin, however, was not without secret friends abroad. The links of self-interest established between his regime and the German military in November 1917 seem to have been maintained, albeit sometimes in tenuous form, even after the Armistice. German military assistance to the Bolsheviks is frequently referred to by British officers advising Denikin and other White commanders.
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The help took the immediate form of
Freikorps
officers, munitions and in due course industrial expertise in building new war factories. The last point was vital to the Germans, who under the Versailles Treaty had to dismantle their armaments industry. By secretly coaching the Bolsheviks in arms technology and developing new weapons in Russia they were maintaining a continuity of skills which, when the time was ripe, could once more be openly exploited back at home. Thus a strange, covert alliance was formed, which occasionally broke surface, as at the Rapallo Conference in 1922 and, still more sensationally, in August 1939, but which for most of the time was carefully hidden: a working relationship of generals, arms experts, later of secret police, which was to continue in one form or another until 22 June 1941. It is one of the ironies of history that German specialists first taught Soviet Communism how to make excellent tanks, a weapon used to overwhelm Germany in 1943–5. The deeper irony is that this was a marriage of class enemies: what could be further apart than Prussian generals and Bolsheviks? Yet in the final crisis and aftermath of the war, both groups saw themselves, and certainly were seen, as outlaws. There was a spirit of gangster fraternization in their arrangements, the first of many such Europe was to experience over the next twenty years.

The earliest of Lenin’s post-dated cheques to be dishonoured was the one he issued to the nationalities. Here, the methodology was Lenin’s but the agent he used was the former seminarist, Josef Djugashvili, or Stalin, whom he made People’s Commissar of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities (Narkomnats). Throughout his career, Lenin showed a brilliant if sinister genius for investing words and expressions with special meanings which suited his political purposes – a skill with which the twentieth century was to become depressingly familiar, in many different forms. Just as, to Lenin, a parliament, which he could not control, was ‘bourgeois
democracy’, whereas a Soviet, which he could, was ‘proletarian democracy’, so self-determination took on class distinctions. Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, were lost to Russia. These countries were, accordingly, termed ‘bourgeois republics’, the reservation being that, at some convenient future time, when Soviet power was greater, they could be transformed into ‘proletarian republics’ and brought into a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. The Ukraine, whose grain supplies were essential to the regime’s survival, was not permitted to opt for ‘bourgeois self-determination’ and in 1921–2, after fearful struggles, was obliged to accept ‘proletarian self-determination’, that is, membership of the Soviet Union.
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Stalin applied this technique to the Caucasus and Russian Asia wherever Bolshevik military power made it possible. If self-determination raised its head it was branded ‘bourgeois’ and stamped upon. Such breakaway movements, as he put it, were simply attempts ‘to disguise in a national costume the struggle with the power of the working masses’. Self-determination was a right ‘not of the bourgeoisie but of the working masses’ and must be used solely as an instrument in ‘the struggle for Socialism’.
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True, that is proletarian, self-determination could not manifest itself until Soviets or other authentic proletarian bodies had been formed. Then each nationality could exercise its ‘right’. Using Narkomnats, Stalin created a system to implant in each nationality officials whose party loyalties were stronger than their local affiliations, a method which his deputy Pestkovsky later described as ‘supporting the old tradition of Russification’.
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When, after the defeat of Denikin, a new Council of Nationalities was formed, it was merely the mouthpiece of Narkomnats policies, and it served to guide local Soviets and representative bodies into renouncing ‘the right to separate’ in favour of ‘the right to unite’, another example of Lenin’s verbal sleight.
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By the end of 1920, the crucial year, all the nationalities which had not already escaped had been safely locked into the Soviet state. The Ukraine followed as soon as the Red Army had finally established its control there. The key was Lenin’s concept of the ‘voluntary union’, the local party supplying the needful element of ‘volition’ on orders from Party headquarters in Moscow. Thanks, then, to the principle of ‘democratic centralism’ within the party, Lenin and later Stalin were able to rebuild the Tsarist empire, and Stalin to expand it. A propagandist outer structure was provided by the so-called Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was and still remains a mask for Great Russian imperialism. For the constitution of the USSR, the first All-Union Congress of Soviets, on 10 January 1923, appointed a commission of twenty-five, including three each from the Transcaucasian and White Russian republics, five from the Ukraine and five
from the autonomous republics. But as each one of them was a party official under strict orders from above, the constitution was actually drawn up in Moscow right at the top (in fact by Stalin himself). It was a federal constitution only in superficial nomenclature; it merely gave an external legal form to a highly centralized autocracy, where all real power was in the hands of a tiny ruling group.
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