Russia (39 page)

There can be no doubt that the war will require expenditures that exceed Russia’s limited financial resources. We shall have to turn to allied and neutral countries for credit, but this will not be advanced for nothing. The financial and economic consequences of defeat … will unquestionably involve the total disintegration of our economy. But even victory promises us extremely unfavourable financial prospects.

The social and political consequences of war (and here the expert on subversion spoke) would be ‘mortally dangerous for Russia … no matter who wins’. A social revolution would break out in the defeated country, which would ‘spread to the country of the victor’, and ‘any revolutionary movement will inevitably degenerate into a socialist movement’. The liberal democrats in the Duma had no support among the people, who ‘do not seek political rights, which they neither need nor comprehend. The peasant dreams of obtaining a free share of somebody else’s land; the worker of taking over all the capital and profits of the manufacturer. Beyond this, they have no aspirations.’ Defeats and disasters would be blamed on the government; the army would be too demoralized to maintain law and order. In brief, Russia would probably be defeated, and defeat would bring anarchy. But so too would victory, albeit by another route.
⁴¹

Events were to follow his first alternative scenario, and it proved accurate in every particular.

When war was declared in August 1914 a surge of patriotism swept over the Empire. Vast crowds turned out to cheer, and virtually everyone called to the colours responded promptly. Representatives of the most disaffected of the Tsar’s subjects, the Poles, declared their readiness to fight for the Empire, and when the fighting began many Poles showed a readiness to speak Russian which they had not done before. The war against Germany started badly with the rout of an invading Russian army at Tannenberg, though Russian arms were more successful against the Austrians. Yet the outcome was to depend on capacity to withstand attrition and, as Durnovo
had foreseen, Russia’s stamina would prove limited. Over 6.5 million men were mobilized by the end of the year, but nearly 2 million of them lacked rifles
⁴²
and, though this shortfall was eventually made up, logistical problems were to persist.

From the beginning, the main burden of fighting the war fell on Russia, as Durnovo had foretold. The first ill-fated Russian offensive had been launched to relieve the French. In terms of grand strategy it succeeded, drawing sufficient German forces to allow a Franco-British victory on the Marne. But the costs of answering subsequent calls, notably in 1916 to take pressure off the French armies at Verdun — at a time when Russia, in addition to maintaining its war efforts on two fronts, had to cope with a serious Kazakh uprising against conscription and requisitions - were not easy to sustain, even though the Allies were to return the compliment: the terrible British assault on Passchendaele in 1917 was mounted partly to help Russia. It won a diplomatic victory when the Allies agreed to Russia’s controlling the Straits after the war, but meanwhile the Turks continued to block the route to much needed shipments from the West. Since the Baltic was also blocked, supplies of strategic materials had to go by the hazardous northern route to Archangel or, even less conveniently, to Vladivostok. The industrial sector was energized by the participation of civil agencies in the war effort, but, as in other countries at war, this led to calls for political participation, which the Tsar was not prepared to concede. Instead, he took to replacing ministers. The changes were not usually for the better, and were both disruptive and demoralizing.

Defeats in the spring of 1915 led to xenophobic riots in Russian cities and raucous calls for a change in the army command. Despite a chorus of advice from ministers and advisers, Nicholas responded by assuming the command himself, and departing for headquarters at the front. It was a disastrous decision. By his own admission he was not equipped for the job (in effect a general deputized as Chief of Staff). It would associate him personally with future defeats, and leave ministers without access to him at a time when conflicting demands of the military and civilian authorities needed to be resolved — for instance over the army’s control of the railway system. Officers had the power to commandeer trains to meet the needs of their commands but this led to the disruption of production and food supplies. In 1916 General Brusilov’s offensive broke the Austrian front, and this brought Romania into the war on the Allied side. But the success only delayed the reckoning.

By the end of 1916 Russia had lost well over a million war dead and over 3 million wounded. Calls for a government that would command
public confidence continued to grow; inflation was soaring, making life almost impossible for the mass of city-dwellers, and, though food production was adequate, its distribution to the cities had become uncertain and working-class families were becoming increasingly angry and distressed. Afraid of diluting the autocratic powers he retained under the constitution, the Tsar stood obstinately against concession. Only the murder of the Tsarina’s ill-chosen favourite Rasputin in December 1916 prompted him to return to St Petersburg at last. But, rather than addressing the political crisis, he simply dismissed the premier, Trepov, who had held office for barely a month, and gave the post to someone even less qualified. The new government commanded no credence.

Insisting on powers which he did not know how to use sensibly, Nicholas allowed the monarchy’s legitimacy to waste away. Foreign observers expected revolution, and when the British ambassador was received by Nicholas he suggested that, in order to avoid disaster, the Tsar should appoint a credible premier who commanded public confidence and allow him to choose his ministerial colleagues. At this Nicholas stiffened: ‘Do you mean that
I
am to regain the confidence of my people or that they are to regain
my
confidence?’
⁴³
There was no functional fault with the governmental system. Nor was there any shortage of ministerial talent and experience. Only the Tsar fell short.

The reckoning came a few weeks later. Soldiers in the capital began to refuse to obey orders. Even Cossacks, hitherto the most loyal of servicemen, began to side with the St Petersburg crowd against the police. The Tsar procrastinated, so the Duma formed a provisional government with the support of the self-proclaimed St Petersburg Council (in Russian,
Soviet)
of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Power had slipped entirely from the Tsar’s hands, and he abdicated in favour of his brother Mikhail. However, Mikhail refused to accept the crown unless it were to be offered by popular decision.

The Provisional Government announced a general amnesty, abolished distinctions based on class, religion and nationality, and proclaimed freedom of speech, assembly and the press. It also began preparing for elections to a Constituent Assembly which was to decide the Empire’s future. But the Provisional Government itself had not been elected, and felt that its chief claim to legitimacy was the recognition of other states, notably Russia’s allies, the Western democracies. Pending elections and the establishment of a popular legitimacy, therefore, it continued the war.

Now people began to whisper that there was to be a distribution of land to peasants, and soldiers began to desert their stations and drift home to
make sure they got a share. The rate of desertion grew steadily in the months that followed. Meanwhile, disruptions and dislocations behind the lines continued to sap morale and increase worker militancy. The Provisional Government reconstituted itself more than once in order to reflect what it sensed to be the increasingly radical popular mood; and then the state administration began to crumble. The ministers in St Petersburg became increasingly isolated and ineffectual. Such were the circumstances in which Lenin’s small group of Bolsheviks
⁴⁴
took over power with the help of elements in the St Petersburg garrison and railway and telegraph workers, who prevented troops from the front arriving to establish a military dictatorship.

Hostilities with Germany, Austria and Turkey were ended by an armistice signed in December 1917 — but too late to save the Empire. Nicholas II had been the last, flawed, keystone of the autocratic system, and without it the edifice collapsed. Elections to the Constituent Assembly held soon afterwards showed that the liberal and democratic elements in the political spectrum had lost popular credibility and that the Bolsheviks — thanks to Lenin’s promises of bread for the cities, land for the peasants, and an end to the war — were fast gaining popularity. However, the hands-down electoral victors were the Social Revolutionaries, another Marxism-influenced party oriented towards the peasants. In any case the Constituent Assembly was not to decide the Empire’s future. Soon after it assembled, Lenin closed it down. By then, however, it was not a question of who would govern Russia, but whether there would be anything to govern.

T
HE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
has become a traditional dividing line for historians, but its use in this way can be misleading, because it divorces the history of the new regime from its context in war. It was the war, and the costs and dislocations the war created, which allowed Lenin to take over and which helped to mould the culture of the new Soviet state with its coercive, military methods. Too rigid a distinction between the old regime and the new also leads to important continuities being glossed over or ignored. Though it tried to shrug them off, the new Soviet Russia was forced to carry many of the burdens that had weighed its predecessor down, and despite desperate attempts to make over everything as new — abolishing the imperial army and the police, the courts and much of the bureaucracy - it was soon cannibalizing what remained of the old imperial machine to build a new one. It employed thousands of officers and officials who had served the tsars to help run the new army and the new bureaucracy. Experts on trade, banking and other capitalist arts, and even police officials, were also engaged — for even revolutionary regimes need such skills. Historical inertia sometimes exerts more influence than the power of revolution.

There was no clean dividing line between war and peace. Hostilities between the new Russia and Germany, Austria and Turkey were formally ended in December 1917 by the armistice of Brest-Litovsk and that of Erzincan, but German forces stayed on to occupy Ukraine. Then, when Germany and its allies themselves capitulated late in 1918, Allied troops occupied Murmansk in the far north, and set up camps in southern Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East, where a large Japanese force operated until 1922. A bitter, chaotic civil war between Bolshevik ‘Reds’ and anti-Bolshevik ‘Whites’ had been waged since 1918 and was to continue into 1920, while, in a desperate attempt to link up with Marxist insurgents in Germany, the new regime also fought a losing war with the reconstituted state of Poland. Russia was engaged in total war for six years, not three, and when hostilities eventually petered out the country was
bankrupt and ravaged, its people exhausted. No other power in modern times except, perhaps, for Germany in 1945 has presented so many scenes of desolation.

When Lenin and his supporters replaced the Provisional Government in the old imperial capital and occupied governmental posts, they found them to be only the shell of an imperial system in an advanced state of decomposition. These circumstances, as well as his innate distrust - a characteristic of conspirators - persuaded the new leader to use his small but disciplined Bolshevik Party to monitor government agencies at every level and to undertake executive tasks. The Party also enforced his ideas of the politically correct, for Lenin set the highest value on ideology. Lenin had never imagined that his Bolsheviks could survive in power except as part of an international Marxist revolution, or at least without a revolution in Germany which would then come to his aid. Events were eventually to show that even this hope was futile. Not until December 1924 was the doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’ to be proclaimed and the Empire reconstituted in the guise of a free association of socialist states, though by then Lenin was dead.

Hard experience and practical necessity slowly eroded parts of the theoretical Marxist model with which the Bolsheviks had set out. Indeed, in some respects the new regime came to bear a startling resemblance to its tsarist predecessor. As the American correspondent of the
Christian Science Monitor
in Russia was to observe in the 1930s, though ‘the masks are new … the technique of government’ was strikingly similar to that of the Empress Anna two centuries before, when ‘espionage became the most encouraged state service; everyone who seemed dangerous or inconvenient was eliminated from society [and] masses were banished.’
¹
However, the empress had been primarily concerned to supervise the morals of her courtiers. The call now was for security which was comprehensive and severe.

The process had begun with the need for the new regime to secure itself against its competitors, as any regime must do. Recognizing this, Lenin created a new security agency to guard the Revolution, appointing a Pole, Felix Dzerzhinskii, to run it. Known as the Cheka, this was the forerunner of the KGB. It maintained a surveillance system which kept every foreigner and suspected ‘class enemy’ in its sights and set up detention camps, interrogation centres and all the other apparatus needed by an efficient secret police service. Given the war conditions that prevailed when it was established and
the regime’s vulnerability in its early years, the Cheka’s zeal and cruelties were hardly surprising, but the characteristics became ingrained.

In March 1921 a serious armed rising was mounted by sailors at the naval base of Kronstadt, who were more radical even than the Bolsheviks. As under the old regime, there were recurring peasant disturbances, in particular a huge one in the province of Tambov, a regular scene of large-scale rural protests in tsarist times. It was in suppressing these efficiently that a former lieutenant in the imperial army, Mikhail Tukhachevskii, commended himself to the new regime. A massive emigration of the old elite was still in progress; most of the officer corps gravitated to the anti-Bolshevik Whites, but a surprising number of them stayed on to serve the Reds. In fact the new Red Army employed no fewer than 75,000 former tsarist officers, including 800 of general rank.

Inertia was the principal reason. Many opted to keep their jobs rather than concern themselves too much with the regime. Others felt that any firm government, even a Bolshevik one, was preferable to anarchy; and straightforward patriotism was a factor too. As the celebrated General Brusilov, hero of the successful offensive against Austria-Hungary in 1916, confessed:

I thought it the duty of every citizen to stand by the country and live in it whatever the cost. At one moment under the stress of family troubles … I was tempted to retire to the Ukraine, and then to leave Russia. But my doubts did not last, and I returned to my heartfelt convictions. It is not every nation that has had to pass through so vast and so distressing an upheaval as the agony of Russia. The path may be hard, but I can choose no other, even if it should cost me my life.
²

But once enrolled in the Red Army many officers stayed on out of fear, for the Bolsheviks were terrified of subversion and — especially in times of danger, as when the White commander General Yudenich moved his troops on St Petersburg in 1919 - they would shoot their ex-imperial officers on mere suspicion of betrayal.

The transition was distressing, the suffering widespread. In the countryside, food requisitioning became a scourge of the peasantry. Used as an emergency wartime measure to ensure food supplies to the cities, it was adopted by the Bolshevik regime, which sent teams of young Party men into the countryside to requisition grain, confiscate hidden stores of it, or simply steal it. The practice caused anger and distress, and it had been an issue in both the Kronstadt and the Tambov rebellions. But the root cause
of the food shortage lay in a shattered economy. Cities faced starvation because peasants did not market enough grain, and the peasants did not market enough grain because there was nothing to buy with the proceeds. Industry could not be rebuilt without capital, and Russia was devoid
of
capital. Nor could capital be raised abroad as it had been before the war.

The first three years of war had cost the Empire 16.5 billion gold rubles -four times the internal debt of 1914 — not counting the massive issues of paper money which had fed inflation. On the eve of the World War, thanks largely to railway-building, the Russian economy had already been dependent on foreign credits, but by 1918 its foreign debt had grown from under 4 billion to nearly 14 billion gold rubles. About half this enormous sum consisted of war loans. The major creditors were Britain and France, its erstwhile allies and new-found enemies. Russia was in no position to repay, and Lenin had no intention of doing so. In January 1918 he annulled ‘all foreign debts without any exception or condition’. Four years later, in 1922, an international conference held in Genoa tried to resolve the problem. Russia’s creditors recognized that loans were needed for reconstruction, but insisted that the debt, which the country could not repay, be recognized. However, Moscow (the capital again from March 1918) was obdurate, and so Soviet Russia was isolated by the international community — until in March 1922 at Rapallo Russia made common cause with the other outcast European state, debt-ridden Germany.
³

The country’s economic rebuilding had to proceed without benefit of foreign investment. Foreign trade surpluses might have contributed, but as late as 1926—7 they were only a third of what they had been before the war. World demand for grain had slumped in the aftermath of war. Somehow the economy had to be lifted, but it was clear that the Bolsheviks’ original ideas would not work. They had started out by nationalizing the banks and business. They had even abolished money. With industrial production in 1920 down to a fifth of what it had been in 1913,
⁴
theory was soon sacrificed to necessity. In the spring of 1921 an attempt was made to stimulate activity by means of a ‘New Economic Policy’. This permitted small-scale private enterprise, including private shops, and commercial middlemen. Farmers were now allowed to rent land and hire labour; state subsidies for raw materials and wages were abolished, and taxation reduced somewhat,
⁵
though large enterprises remained firmly under central control and subjected to strict central planning and discipline. In October 1921 a state bank was set up, run by a Constitutional Democrat who had served as a minister before the war. It proceeded to issue paper banknotes, of apologetically tiny dimensions, and even a gold coin.

These concessions to reality eased the situation. Enough food and consumer goods appeared to avert immediate catastrophe. Nevertheless, the country’s economic problems were so great that only central direction could get the country moving. In the judgement of the historian best acquainted with the early Soviet period, planning was a product of national emergency rather than doctrine.
⁶
Even so, serious economic problems were to recur. Meanwhile the Party was alternately mounting campaigns to recruit enough members to enforce its line in every outpost factory and farm and being ‘cleansed’ or ‘purged’ of ‘opportunists’ and ‘adventurers’ who rushed in when the ranks were opened.

And despite all these pressing concerns, the new regime set about building an empire — albeit an empire of a different kind to that of the tsars.

In November 1917 Lenin and Stalin, his commissioner for nationalities, published a
Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia.
It proclaimed them to be equal and sovereign, and asserted their ‘right to free self-determination, up to the point of secession and the formation of independent states’. It also pledged the ‘free development of national minorities and national groups inhabiting the territory of Russia’.
⁷
On 24 January 1918 the situation was clarified by a
Declaration of the Rights of Oppressed Nationalities.
This transformed Russia, and by implication the Empire - or what could be salvaged of it - into ‘The Republic of the Soviets [Councils] of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’Deputies. The Soviet Republic’, it continued, ‘is constituted on the basis of a free union of free nationalities as a Federation of Soviet National Republics.’ The declared aim was to create a genuinely ‘free and voluntary union of the working classes of all the nationalities of Russia’.
⁸
The fact that the term ‘Russia’ itself denoted both a nationality and an empire was not addressed. The policy, based on the idea that nationalities could realize themselves while happily coexisting with one another, could be traced back to the earliest followers of Herder. Yet, as we now know, nations will compete and even fight unless restrained by some higher authority or greater force. How the new regime would be able to square the circle of nationalism remained to be seen, but the declaration conveyed the message that nationalism was consistent with socialism.

In the short term the policy enjoyed some success, but it was military power rather than political ideology that often decided outcomes on the ground. Indeed, the policy was founded on interest as well as principle. The new regime wanted to win over the non-Russian nationalities in its struggle against the anti-Communist White forces. That was why, in the
words of one historian, ‘the Russian Communist Party bent over backwards to appease non-Russians’, even to the extent of ejecting Terek Cossacks from their farms and handing the land over to Chechens, with whose Sufi leader, Ali Mitaev, it was in momentary alliance.
⁹
It was therefore thanks to the Soviet regime that Chechens were able to claim a moment of sovereignty in 1921, though Mitaev was to meet his death at Soviet hands only a few years later.

In the wake of the German withdrawal from the Baltic provinces in 1918, Bolshevik forces moved into Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to help establish Soviet republics. There was some indigenous support for these regimes, but in the end they could not hold out against opposing forces, and the three Baltic entities became independent states. Lenin had already launched Finland into independent statehood and abrogated any claim to Poland, but he was not prepared to write off the idea of a zone of nations around the Russian Republic which would cohere with it.

The first success was Ukraine, which fell into the throes of civil war and chaos following the departure of the Germans. Local Bolsheviks fought supporters of Ukrainian independence. Polish forces occupied a substantial part, including all Galicia; anti-revolutionary White Russian forces under General Denikin also entered the fray, while independent gangs of robbers, ‘Cossacks’ and anarchists caused mayhem in many districts. Serious famine added to Ukraine’s woes, as did outbreaks of black typhus, massacres and pogroms. Humanitarian aid sent in from the West, as it was into Russia, barely touched the problem, and the proximity
of
French troops did not help. At last, with the help of Ukrainian groups which decided to throw their lot in with the Bolsheviks, but mainly thanks to the disintegration of the White forces, most of the country emerged as the ‘Ukrainian Soviet Republic’. Since a Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic had come into existence at the beginning of 1919, the new Soviet Russia could be said to have achieved a second ‘ingathering of the Russian lands’, first achieved by Ivan III (see Chapter 4).