Empires Apart (50 page)

When Russia stumbled into the First World War Nicholas II was still the master of an enormous empire, while scattered across the world were a few fanatical misfits of interest to nobody other than the secret police – men like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

The Russian army marched into Prussia, defeating the German army at the battle of Gumbinnen and forcing the Germans to withdraw troops from the western front at a time when a quick victory there seemed to be within their grasp. From then on, however, Russia was on the defensive, and as the war muddled on Russian casualties mounted alarmingly; they may have exceeded 5 million before the war ended. Disillusion with the war combined with severe food shortages in urban areas came to a head in St Petersburg – recently renamed Petrograd to sound less German (just as German shepherds were renamed alsatians in Britain and the royal family became Windsors). In February 1917 a mutiny in the very guards regiments that had inflicted Bloody Sunday on the workers just a few years earlier signalled the end of the Romanov regime. Nicholas found himself completely isolated as his ministers were arrested by the Duma. In March 1917 he abdicated and was arrested the next day. Little more than a year later he was dead.

When the sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov had been given the throne 304 years earlier hardly anyone had expected him to keep it for long, let alone pass it on to generation after generation, but by the time Nicholas II abdicated in favour of his brother the Grand Duke
Michael the credibility of the Romanov autocracy had completely gone. Michael declined the honour thrust upon him. A provisional government under Prince Lvov took over, and as it promised to fight the war more vigorously it was welcomed by the western allies who prepared to carry on as if nothing had changed. But the end of the Romanovs had in reality changed everything, because they were the state; they personified the ideology of autocracy, and there was no substitute ideology ready to take its place.

The problem that now became apparent was that centuries of autocracy had left a nation with no means of changing to anything else. The result was turmoil. Aristocratic and what might be called ‘bourgeois' factions scrambled for parliamentary or extra-parliamentary power, while on the streets and in the factories workers' soviets seized control more or less spontaneously. In some parts of the country peasants turned on their landlords, and in others they continued as if nothing had changed; while the army and navy were racked with intrigue, both in the upper echelons and among the conscripts at the bottom.

Nobody was more surprised by the speed with which events unravelled than the Bolsheviks. As late as January 1917 Lenin was publicly admitting that his generation might not ‘see the decisive battles of the coming revolution'. Just a month later the tsar was overthrown. Most of the Bolshevik leaders were in exile – Lenin in Geneva, Trotsky in New York, Stalin and many others in Siberia. Although they all wanted to return immediately the general confusion often made this difficult. The Okhrana had been monitoring Trotsky's activities in New York, and persuaded the British authorities to detain him for a month when his ship stopped off in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The degree of confusion was illustrated when, on their way back from Siberia, Stalin's comrades stopped to send a telegram of congratulations to the man they thought had become the new tsar, the Grand Duke Michael. Heaven knows what the grand duke would have thought on receiving such a message from an obscure bunch of revolutionaries who were supposedly dedicated to the complete destruction of everything he had ever stood for.

Stalin arrived in Petrograd before many of the other Bolshevik leaders. He was soon busy making alliances among the many jostling left-wing factions, trying to find ways of exercising influence on and within the new constitutional institutions. Stalin was conscious that the Bolsheviks had only limited support among the numerous socialist and anarchist groups. The Social Revolutionaries were already edging their way into the corridors of power, and Stalin wanted to get in on the act. When Lenin arrived (courtesy of transport arranged by the German Kaiser, who was anxious to sow further discord), he soon put a stop to any suggestion of the Bolsheviks engaging in constitutional politics.

The chaos continued through the spring and summer of 1917. Peasant uprisings and industrial strikes disrupted production. The provisional government tried to appease the left by appointing a former Social Revolutionary leader, Alexander Kerensky, as prime minister in Lvov's place. (Lvov, in a move that exemplified the massive differences that still existed between political life in Russia and the west, was moved sideways to become the head or procurator of the Russian Orthodox Church.) Another Social Revolutionary was appointed minister of agriculture in an ineffective attempt to stop the increasingly bloody peasant unrest. The Bolsheviks tried to organise a coup and failed, Lenin escaping back into exile; then the right under General Kornilov tried to do the same, and also failed. Finally, after suffering further defeats in the war against Germany, the army turned against the provisional government, and when in October Trotsky stormed the Winter Palace, supported by sailors from the Kronstadt naval base, the government's only support was a regiment of women soldiers. In a sign of how the twentieth century would develop Kerensky was spirited away by American government agents: he spent the rest of his life lecturing in America on what might have been.

The October Revolution gave Lenin power but, like Michael Romanov three centuries earlier, it was by no means clear that he could keep it, let alone pass it on to his successors. In December elections were held in which the Bolsheviks gained just one in seven of the Constitutional Assembly seats. Lenin's response was in the grand tradition of Russian
autocracy: he closed down the assembly and made sure there would be no more free elections. He justified his actions by reference to the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat', which was fundamental to Bolshevik thinking. The Bolsheviks were convinced that the ‘science' of history, as revealed by Marx, put their cause beyond debate. To oppose them was akin to blasphemy; indeed the self-righteousness certainty of men like Lenin and Trotsky was remarkably similar to that of the early American puritans, albeit deriving from a different gospel.

According to Lenin, ‘The scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing else but this: power without limit, resting directly upon force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules.' The tsars could have said just the same about autocracy. For the Bolsheviks the dictatorship belonged not to a single autocrat but, at least in theory, to a class; in practice the dictatorship of the proletariat meant the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, Lenin's communism was simply tsarist autocracy turned upside down. Trotsky insisted on the right of the party to overrule the decisions of elected representatives because the mission that history had given the party could not be subject to ‘the passing moods of worker democracy'. The population at large simply could not be trusted to make the right decisions. It was exactly the same argument that Senator Beveridge was making about the inhabitants of the Philippines at the same time.

In August of the next year the Social Revolutionary Dora Kaplan tried to assassinate Lenin, and the Red Terror was launched; thousands were arrested, some were released or, like the former prime minister Prince Lvov, escaped into exile, but hundreds simply ‘disappeared' as the Bolsheviks strengthened their hold.

The most significant internal threats to the new regime were the various armies put together by the supporters of the old regime. The White Armies (so named to distinguish them from Trotsky's Red Army) fought a vicious civil war, and managed to outdo the Reds in terms of sheer terror. Slowly the Bolshevik forces gained the upper hand, helped by the errors of their enemies, by the unpopularity of the
ancien régime
among the peasants, industrial workers and conscript soldiers, and by the Whites' insistence that Russia's old imperial frontiers had to be re-established, which alienated many of the subject peoples of the empire who were starting to dream of freedom.

The Bolsheviks also faced important external threats. France moved its navy to the Black Sea (where it was joined by ships of the US navy) and pumped in cash subsidies to the White Army leaders. Japan invaded in the east, hoping to grab territory in Siberia. British troops landed in Murmansk and Archangel with Canadian and Italian support. The two biggest threats came from America and Germany; by far the most immediate was Germany, with whom Russia was still theoretically at war.

The new regime had a novel approach to international relations. Trotsky, as commissar of foreign affairs, published all the secret correspondence of the tsarist regime, made a few proclamations and then announced he was shutting up shop and everyone else should just leave Russia alone. Life was not that easy, however. The Germans had a massive army on Russia's western frontier, which the Red Army had no hope of defeating. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks were forced to give up a vast amount of territory that contained around a third of the empire's people and of its industrial capacity.

American intervention was of less immediate impact than German but in the long term was more important. What distinguished the US position from that of most other governments was its motivation. Germany and Japan wanted territory. France wanted its money back: the French had invested heavily in Russia under Nicholas II. Britain did not really know what it wanted but as the premier imperial power of the day knew it ought to want something. The American secretary of state, Robert Lansing, knew exactly what he wanted: Russia under the Bolsheviks was a cesspit of anarchy and revolution from which America was determined to save not just the rest of the world but the Russian people themselves. The American response to the October Revolution was overwhelmingly ideological, more so than that of many other nations, and reflected the bitter ideological battles that had been and were being fought within the United States.

The Russian Revolution is often portrayed as the event that determined the ideological battle lines for the twentieth century. In reality the roots of the cold war can be found much earlier – in the period of soul-searching and ideological turmoil that ran from the American Civil War to the First World War. No single event made it inevitable that the world would divide into ‘capitalist' and ‘communist' spheres. That it did divide was as much owing to developments in America as to those in Russia.

Through much of the world labour unrest and socialist agitation accompanied industrialisation. With hindsight it may seem obvious that revolution was most likely in an autocracy like Russia, where there were no representative institutions to channel protests, rather than in countries where socialist groups could enter the electoral process and disgruntled workers could join legitimate trade unions. At the time, however, it was thought that revolution was far more likely in the advanced industrial nations, which lacked the conservative peasant masses and police state apparatus of tsarist Russia. In particular it seemed to many Americans that their country was ripe for revolution.

There were Marxists in America but the labour movement was never as ideological as Russia's – as evidenced by one of the first trade unions, an Irish secret society with the distinctly un-Marxist name of the Molly Maguires. The Molly Maguires organised a series of strikes in the Pennsylvania coalfields that turned violent, and in 1877 nineteen members were hanged for the murder of a mine owner. The next year twenty-five people were killed in the same state by troops trying to crush a national railway strike. Railway workers continued to be in the vanguard of the workers' struggles, and the quaintly named Knights of Labor organised a series of strikes against the railroad interests of Jay Gould.

As the power of the robber barons in America grew so did protests against them by their workers. Strikes at Carnegie's steelworks and Gould's Missouri-Pacific railroad erupted into violence, leaving many dead and suggesting parallels with the later events in St Petersburg. But again with hindsight it is clear that there was never any real prospect of the oligarchs
being overthrown in a Bolshevik-style revolution. Economic, political and social conditions were all very different, and the American left threw up no leaders as unscrupulous in their pursuit of power as Lenin.

In 1883 an event occurred in America that created ripples of anger similar to Bloody Sunday in Russia. Police shot dead four striking workers in Chicago and the next day, when police tried to break up an anarchist meeting in the city, a bomb exploded in the Haymarket killing six policemen. The police opened fire in return. The Haymarket Affair became notorious not just for the deaths on both sides but for the subsequent court case. A number of anarchists were convicted and hanged for the bombing, despite the prosecution conceding that some had been nowhere near the protest. The judge made plain that their real crime was ideological; they were tried for being anarchists.

The Haymarket Affair grabbed the headlines and entered into the demonology of both left and right – as evidence of the vicious anti-worker prejudice of the ruling class and as evidence of the murderous fanaticism of anarchists and socialists. It was just one example of the violence of the period. Another took place in 1891, when Henry Frick, boss of the Carnegie Steel Company, broke a Pennsylvania strike of coke oven workers who were demanding an eight-hour day. Buoyed by his success, the next year he ordered pay cuts ranging from 18 to 26 per cent, and the subsequent strike developed into full-scale gun battles between workers and 300 armed Pinkerton detectives hired by the employers and supported by the state militia. Seven strikers and three strike-breakers were killed, but it was not the dead strikers who hit the headlines – rather the failed attempt by anarchists to assassinate Frick. In the wake of the adverse press coverage the strike rapidly collapsed.