A Peace to End all Peace (60 page)

The principal danger, as
The Times
pictured it, lay in British overcommitment. The principal challenge to the country, in its view, was at home and was economic. Britain needed to invest her money in renewing herself economically and socially, and was threatened in her very existence by a governmental disposition to squander money instead on Middle Eastern adventures. In an editorial published on 18 July 1921
The Times
denounced the government for this, saying that “while they have spent nearly £150,000,000 since the Armistice upon semi-nomads in Mesopotamia they can find only £200,000 a year for the regeneration of our slums, and have had to forbid all expenditure under the Education Act of 1918.”

But while
The Times
argued that the danger to Britain came from British officialdom, much of British officialdom continued to focus on the Soviet threat to the Middle East, and on the question of how to respond to that threat.

The heads of the three great departments of the British government charged with dealing with the Russian question in the Middle East—the Foreign Office, the War Office, and the India Office—disagreed among themselves about the nature of the Soviet challenge and about how to respond to it.

Lord Curzon, guardian of the flame of the Great Game who became Foreign Secretary in 1919, argued for a forward British military position in the Middle East to guard against Russia. He urged the British army to take up positions defending Transcaucasia (which had broken away from Russia) and northern Persia. He and the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Lord Hardinge—both of them former viceroys of India—claimed that the loss of any one area in the Middle East to Russian aggression would, in turn, lead to the loss of the area behind it, in a domino reaction that might lead eventually to the loss of India.
¹

The Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, and the Viceroy of India, Frederic John Napier Thesiger, 3rd Baron Chelmsford, disagreed. Montagu and Chelmsford believed that Bolshevik Russia posed a political rather than a military threat to Britain’s position in the Middle East. They argued that Britain ought to be competing against Russia to win the support of nationalist forces throughout Islamic Asia. Instead, as they saw it, Britain was pursuing politics that might have been expressly designed to drive these forces into the arms of Moscow; and the presence of British armies might be expected to alienate these forces still further.

Montagu wrote to Curzon at the beginning of 1920 that “The danger of the Bolsheviks to Persia and to India” was largely the result of the British government’s own policies, which he characterized as anti-Mohammedan. “We could have made Pan-Islamism friendly to Great Britain,” he wrote, but instead “We are making it hostile.”
²
India, of course, had opposed London’s Middle Eastern policy ever since Lord Kitchener took charge of it in 1914; and what Montagu wrote in 1920 was consistent with the criticisms he had levelled all along against his government’s pro-Arab and pro-Zionist policies and against the school of Kitchener view that Islam was a force managed and directed by Britain’s enemies.

Chelmsford, in telegrams to Montagu at the beginning of 1921, put the matter in historical perspective by pointing out that until 1914 the British had been the “champions of Islam against the Russian Ogre.”
³
Now, however, the harsh Treaty of Sèvres that Lloyd George had imposed on the helpless Ottoman Empire and the one-sided treaty that Curzon had imposed on the prostrate Persian Empire appeared to Indian Moslems as examples of “Britain’s crushing of Islam.”
⁴
In Russia, on the other hand, the war had brought into power a new regime that—at least in the Middle East—spoke the language of national independence. In the long run, according to the Viceroy, the “real defence” against Russian Bolshevik expansion in the Middle East lay not in installing forward military positions but in supporting a “nationalist spirit” among the Moslem peoples of the region whose basic religious tenets were hostile to Bolshevism and whose nationalism would lead them to oppose Russian advances.
⁵
It would be a mistake for Britain to maintain a military presence in the Middle East, he continued, or even a merely economic one, for it might lead native leaders to conclude that the real threat to their independence came from London.

Major-General Sir Edmund Ironside, during the time he served as commander of the British troops remaining in northern Persia, strongly believed that his troops should not be there. As he saw it, the rugged terrain on the Indian northwest frontier provided so effective a defensive line that a forward defense of India was unnecessary, while the long line of communications required in order to conduct a forward defense of India from Persia rendered such a strategy impractical.
⁶

In the end the argument between the Foreign Office and the India Office was settled by the War Office. Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, decisively ruled against the Foreign Office on the grounds that he did not have the troops to carry out the forward policy in the Middle East that Lord Curzon advocated. In 1920 he submitted a paper to the Cabinet reporting that Britain had no reserves whatsoever with which to reinforce garrisons anywhere in the world should the need arise.
⁷
The only feasible policy, in his view, was to husband resources and to concentrate Britain’s military forces in those areas of greatest importance and concern—and neither Persia nor the Caucasus frontier was among them.

Winston Churchill, the War Minister and Secretary for Air, argued in early 1920 that if troops
were
available for Persia and the Caucasus frontier, they should be used instead in Russia—to support the Czarist generals in their bid to unseat the Bolshevik government.
⁸
Churchill took the new rulers of the Kremlin at their word: he pictured them as internationalists and revolutionaries. He believed that most of them were not Russian at all—that they were Jews. Churchill therefore did not believe that they pursued Russian goals, whether nationalist or imperialist. He failed to explain why their objectives in the Middle East were so uncannily similar to those of the czars.

Minutes of a 1920 conference of Cabinet ministers underlined the particular menace Churchill and some of his colleagues felt the Bolsheviks posed in Moslem Asia. “Every day they were making great strides towards the East, in the direction of Bokhara and Afghanistan. They were carrying out a regular, scientific, and comprehensive scheme of propaganda in Central Asia against the British.”
⁹
The Chief of the Imperial General Staff warned the ministers that “the Caspian would fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks who could…create disturbance in North Persia. The unrest would spread to Afghanistan, which was already very unsettled, and also to India which was reported to be in a more dangerous state to-day than it had been for the last thirty years.”
¹⁰
Echoing these fears, Winston Churchill wrote to the Prime Minister asking “what are we to do if the Bolsheviks overrun Caucasia and join with the Turkish Nationalists; if they obtain the command of the Caspian and invade Northern Persia; if they dominate Turkestan and join with Afghanistan in menacing India from without and endeavouring to raise up a revolution within?”
¹¹

The British-subsidized White Russian campaign in the Russian Civil War that broke out between the Bolsheviks and their adversaries was seen by the public as Churchill’s private war, and when the White armies faltered in late 1919, and then fell apart early in 1920, it was seen as yet another of his costly failures. The Prime Minister wrote to him that “I have found your mind so obsessed by Russia that I felt I had good ground for the apprehension that your abilities, energy, and courage were not devoted to the reduction of expenditure.”
¹²
Speaking about Churchill and Russia a few months later, the Prime Minister was less restrained; the Chief of the Imperial General Staff noted in his diary that “He thinks Winston has gone mad…”
¹³

As a Liberal Prime Minister dependent on a right-wing Conservative majority in the House of Commons, Lloyd George nonetheless felt obliged to allow his War Minister to support the White Russians until it was plain that they had failed. But when the Whites collapsed, the Prime Minister felt free to seek an agreement with the Reds. He did not fear their imperial ambitions in the Middle East. For that matter he had not feared those of the czars.

In believing that an accommodation with Russia could be reached, the Prime Minister carried on the traditions of the Liberal Party to which he belonged. His former colleagues, Asquith and Grey, had believed the Russians to have legitimate grievances in the Middle East, such as lack of access to a warm water port, which, if satisfied, would leave them content not to advance any further. In the same vein, Lloyd George argued that the alleged Russian threat to India was a fantasy. Bolshevik Russia lacked the resources to pose such a threat, he believed, and even “When Russia was well equipped, the Russians could not cross the mountains.”
¹⁴
He agreed that Bolshevik propaganda in India might be a danger, but observed that “you can’t keep ideas out of a country by a military cordon.”
¹⁵

During 1920 and early 1921 Lloyd George engaged in the negotiation of a trade agreement with Moscow that was to give the Bolshevik regime
de facto
recognition and bring Russia back into the family of nations. He told Riddell that as a condition preliminary to negotiation he would insist that all Bolshevik propaganda abroad in Persia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the East should cease; and Riddell noted in his diary that “L.G. thinks Lenin will agree.”
¹⁶
Quite the contrary proved to be true. The Soviet government, in a cable of instructions to its representative, indicated that “We can only agree to concrete concessions in the East at a political conference with England and on condition that we receive similar concessions from England also in the East. What these concessions are to consist of will be discussed when the time comes.”
¹⁷
This hinted at continuing Russian imperial ambitions in the Middle East that were considerably more far-reaching than Lloyd George had supposed.

I

While Britain’s leaders were disagreeing with one another about the relationship between Bolshevik communism and Russian imperialism, the Bolshevik leaders themselves were debating the nature of that relationship, with all of its implications for their postwar policy in the Middle East.

Until the decade before the First World War, the Russian Empire had been expanding at the expense of its neighbors at a prodigious rate and for a long time. It has been calculated that, at the time, the Russian Empire had been conquering the territory of its neighbors at an average rate of 50 square miles a day for 400 years.
¹
With the acquisition of foreign territories came foreign peoples. At the time of the first scientific census in 1897, most of the Russian Empire’s subjects were not Russians. The Turkish-speaking peoples alone were more than 10 percent of the population, and Moslems were at least 14 percent.

Now, Lenin’s Russia had to decide whether to try to reconquer the Moslem and other non-Russian peoples whom the czars had subjected to their rule. Lenin, for years, had argued that the non-Russian peoples should enjoy the right of self-determination. In theory he was a firm opponent of what he called Great Russian chauvinism. In 1915 he wrote that “We Great Russian workers must demand that our government should get out of Mongolia, Turkestan, and Persia…”
²

In 1917 he overcame the resistance of his colleagues at the Seventh Social Democratic Congress and pushed through a resolution declaring that the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire should be free to secede.

The colleague whom he placed in charge of the nationalities issue was, however, of a different frame of mind. He was the Transcaucasian Bolshevik Joseph Dzhugashvili, who, after calling himself by many other aliases, had given himself the Russian name of Stalin. Although for a time he outwardly deferred to Lenin’s views on the nationalities question, Stalin did not share them; indeed he was fiercely at odds with Lenin over the nationalities issue and the constitution of the Soviet Union. Lenin’s proposal was for each of the Soviet countries—Russia, the Ukraine, Georgia, and the various others—to be independent; they were to cooperate with one another as allies do, on the basis of treaties between them. Stalin’s plan, on the other hand, was for the Ukraine, Georgia, and all the others to adhere to the Russian state—and Stalin prevailed. On 30 December 1922, the First Congress of Soviets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics approved the formation of a Soviet Union dominated by Russia.

II

How significant in practice were the differences between Lenin and Stalin?

Lenin argued that the European nations within the Russian Empire should be allowed independence—and, in that, he certainly disagreed with Stalin. There is some evidence, however, that he privately believed that the Middle Eastern nationalities should not be allowed independence until a much later date
^*
—which was different from Stalin’s belief that they should never be independent, but in the short run came to the same thing.

Although he was opposed to compelling non-Russians to submit to Russian rule, Lenin, like Stalin, had no qualms about compelling non-Bolsheviks to submit to Bolshevik rule—and here, too, Lenin’s policy in practice did not appear as widely different from Stalin’s as it did in theory. Under Lenin’s leadership, Soviet Russia conquered non-Russian portions of the former Russian Empire and imposed local Bolshevik Soviet regimes upon them by force of arms. In each case a political police force, acting as a branch of Soviet Russia’s secret police, was established by Lenin’s government to help maintain the local Soviet regime. This was entirely in line with what Lenin had done in Russia: his was a minority regime that had seized power by force and that held on to power by employing as many as a quarter of a million secret policemen.

But in Russian Central Asia, the Bolshevik minority consisted of Russians, while the non-Bolshevik majority consisted of natives; for Bolsheviks to rule non-Bolsheviks (which was Lenin’s policy) was, in practice, for Russians to rule non-Russians (which was Stalin’s policy).

III

In the beginning, the Bolshevik government promised the native populations of Central Asia their freedom. At the end of 1917, after seizing power in Petrograd, the Soviets issued an appeal for support, under the signatures of Lenin and Stalin, recognizing the Moslem population’s right to “Organize your national life in complete freedom.”
⁴

Would the Bolshevik leaders nonetheless try to reconquer the Czar’s Middle Eastern colonies? Their policy in this regard would offer London an important clue as to whether they were communist revolutionaries or Russian imperialists.

The Russian Middle East—Russian Turkestan
^*
—was a colonial empire that the czars had carved out of the previously independent Moslem world. Like Algeria, Morocco, the Sudan, or a score of other tribal areas in Africa and Asia, it had been subdued by force of modern European arms. Like other such colonies, it found that its economy was exploited for the benefit of its European masters. Like them, too, it resented being settled by colonists from Europe; there was nobody that a Turkish-speaking Moslem hated more than a Russian who came to take possession of his soil.

Located deep in the heart of Eurasia, Turkestan is an area that remains little known to the outside world. The Russian-ruled part of it is about half the size of the continental United States: about one and a half million square miles. Vast mountain ranges on its eastern frontier block the moisture-laden clouds from the Pacific, so that most of its territory is an arid, largely unforested, plain. At the time of the First World War, about 20 to 25 percent of its population could be classified as nomads or semi-nomads, while the rest of its nearly ten million, largely Turkish-speaking, people lived in clusters around the fertile oasis towns.

The 1914 war and the revolutions of 1917 brought confusion and anarchy to Central Asia. In part this was due to the extent and topography of the country and to its mixed population. It was a frontier country, and, even in the best of times, tribal conflicts, as well as the opposition of the indigenous peoples to Russian colonization, kept the area in disorder. While Turkestan was remote from the war, it had been the scene of a tribal revolt against wartime measures; and it had suffered a breakdown in government as a result of the two revolutions in Petrograd. Social conflicts emerged, as a small urban middle class resisted an attempt by feudal leaders to reassert authority. Too many leaders and too many causes raised their banners and took to the field. Armies, armed bands, and raiding parties swept across the deserts and vast empty plains, appearing out of nowhere and as suddenly disappearing.

War and revolution had thrown up their human wreckage: refugees seeking a way out and adventurers seeking a way in. From the disbanded prisoner-of-war camps, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, and soldiers of a dozen other nationalities streamed out in search of one goal or another. In the caravans and in the rickety railroad carriages that lurched across the treeless landscape of Central Asia were to be found an assortment of human types whose identities, missions, and motives were difficult to fathom; and the Soviet regime believed—or affected to believe—that foreign-inspired conspiracies were flourishing and ripening everywhere in the semi-tropical sunshine.

During the years of post-revolutionary chaos, new indigenous regimes proclaimed their existence throughout the region; and Moscow treated them as challenges to be overcome. At the end of 1917 Moslems in Central Asia set up a regime in Khokand, seat of what had once been a khanate in the western Fergana valley, in opposition to the Tashkent Soviet (which was composed of Russian settlers and did not include a single Moslem among its members). Lacking money and arms Khokand looked for allies but found none. Stalin curtly dismissed its claims to function as a regime. On 18 February 1918 the Red Army captured and sacked Khokand, destroying most of the city and massacring its inhabitants. From its ruins, however, arose a loosely organized movement of marauding guerrilla bands called Basmachis who plagued the Russians for years afterward.

During the next few years Soviet Russia destroyed one center of resistance after another. As the people of the Kazakh country learned in 1918, no support was to be obtained from the White Russians, for they, too, were opposed to native aspirations. The Kazakhs of the Central Asian plains had proclaimed their autonomy and asked the aid of the Czarist commander, Admiral Kolchak, in defending themselves against the Bolsheviks—only to find that he, too, was their enemy.

The most serious threat to Soviet ambitions was posed by the “Native States” of Khiva and Bukhara, two former Czarist protectorates in Central Asia. As frontier states neighboring on Persia, Afghanistan, and China, they enjoyed contact with the outside world and could serve as a focus of anti-Soviet alliances.

Moscow took advantage of internal strife in Khiva; the Red Army captured it on 13 September 1920, and installed a regime that allied itself with the Soviets. Thereafter Moscow ordered a series of liquidations of the Khivan leadership that paved the way for Khiva’s eventual incorporation into the Soviet Union.

That left only Bukhara; and in dealing with the last bastion of native Turkish resistance, it occurred to the Soviets to make use of the Young Turkey leader Enver Pasha—whom British Intelligence had pictured as a member of the conspiracy directing the Bolshevik movement all along.