A Peace to End all Peace (61 page)

I

According to British Intelligence, the Young Turkey leaders were members of the German and Jewish conspiracy that controlled the Bolshevik regime. Yet from 1918 to 1922, as Britain’s leaders tried to fathom the intentions of the Bolshevik leaders, so did the fugitive leaders of the Young Turks—who did not control the Bolsheviks or even know very much about them.

In November 1918, Enver Pasha, Djemal Pasha, and Talaat Bey escaped from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire with the aid of the retreating Germans and fled across the Black Sea toward Odessa. Eventually Enver and Talaat found their way to Berlin and there, in the late summer of 1919, they visited the Bolshevik representative Karl Radek in his jail cell. Radek had been one of the intermediaries between the German General Staff and Lenin in the Helphand-inspired funding of the Bolshevik Party. In 1919 he was imprisoned by the new German government in connection with the suppression of the communist uprising in Germany; but he was treated as a person of consequence and transacted political business from his cell.

The startling political proposal that Radek made to the Young Turk leaders was that Enver should proceed to Moscow to negotiate a pact between Russian Bolshevism and Turkish nationalism directed against Britain. Enver was a lifelong foe of Russia and no friend to Bolshevism; but Radek assured him that “in Soviet Russia everyone was welcome who would support the offensive against English imperialism.”
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A close friend of Enver’s in Berlin was General Hans von Seeckt, the brilliant creator and head of the new German army—the much-reduced and limited military force that the Allies permitted Germany to maintain pursuant to restrictions contained in the Treaty of Versailles. With his monocle and his rigid features, the 53-year-old von Seeckt was the prototype of the professional German officer to whom the Young Turks finally had turned for guidance during the war; and indeed during the final months of the war, von Seeckt had served as chief of staff of the Turkish army.

Von Seeckt now agreed to help Enver make the difficult and dangerous trip to Moscow across chaotic eastern Europe, where nationalist forces in Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Hungary battled against communist revolutionaries or Russian Bolsheviks, as the Russian Civil War continued to rage. Enver gave von Seeckt a new appreciation of the possibilities afforded by the Bolsheviks for striking at the Allies. Karl Radek later wrote that Enver “was the first to explain to German military men that Soviet Russia is a new and growing world Power on which they must count if they really want to fight against the Entente.”
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These ideas, passed on by Enver to von Seeckt, bore fruit when von Seeckt, several years later, moved toward an alliance between the German military machine and Soviet Russia.

An officer on von Seeckt’s staff arranged for Enver to be flown to Moscow in October 1919 in the company airplane of an aircraft manufacturer. But the arrangements miscarried; there was engine trouble, and the plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Lithuania. Enver carried false papers, and his true identity was not discovered; nonetheless, he was kept prisoner for two months in Lithuania—which, along with Latvia and Estonia, was at war with Soviet Russia—as a suspected spy. Once released, he returned to Berlin, and started out on a second effort to reach Moscow, this time being arrested and imprisoned in Latvia. According to his later account, he was questioned repeatedly by intelligence officers but succeeded in persuading them that his name was Altman and that he was “a Jewish German Communist of no importance.”
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By the summer of 1920 Enver finally reached Moscow, almost a year after first leaving Berlin.

His political odyssey away from anti-communism and anti-Russianism seemed to have been complete. Enver wrote from Moscow to von Seeckt on 26 August 1920 urging him to help the Soviets. He claimed that

At the same time Enver reported to von Seeckt that “The day before yesterday we concluded a Turkish-Russian treaty of friendship: under this the Russians will support us with gold and by all means.”
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(If the Bolshevik leaders really intended at the time to support Enver’s bid to assume the leadership of the Turkish rebellion, however, they later changed their minds when they were made aware of the complexity of the Turkish political situation.)

II

On 1 September 1920 the Bolsheviks convened the “first congress of peoples of the east” in Baku, the capital of recently captured Moslem Azerbaijan. The congress brought together 1,891 delegates of various Asian peoples, of whom 235 delegates were Turks. The congress was sponsored by the Third (or Communist) International—the Comintern, as it was called—but a significant percentage of the delegates were not communists. Enver attended the congress as a guest of the Comintern, whose representatives at the congress were Karl Radek, Grigori Zinoviev, and the Hungarian Bela Kun. Zinoviev, the leader of the Communist International, acted as president of the congress.

Although Enver claimed to have been received by Lenin and was sponsored at the congress by Zinoviev, he was best known as the partner of imperial Germany and the killer of the Armenians; there was substantial opposition among the delegates to his being allowed to participate. A compromise was reached according to which a statement by Enver was read to the congress rather than delivered in person; even so it was punctuated by boos and protests. In his statement Enver claimed to represent a “union of the revolutionary organizations of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Egypt, Arabia, and Hindustan.”
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More to the point, he aspired to resume the leadership of Turkey; but Turkish delegates who supported Kemal made it plain to the Soviets that Moscow would antagonize them if it backed Enver.

Although the invitation to the congress had been phrased in the communist language of world revolution, Zinoviev, once at the congress, seemed to be calling on the assembled delegates for aid in a national struggle between Russia and Britain. In his opening address he cried out “Brothers, we summon you to a holy war, in the first place against English imperialism!”
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Since many of those who were called upon to join in the crusade were non-communist or even anti-communist, the Comintern felt obliged to defend itself against the accusation that it was cynically using them as instruments of Soviet foreign policy. Karl Radek told the congress that “The eastern policy of the Soviet Government is thus no diplomatic manoeuvre, no pushing forward of the peoples of the east into the firing-line in order, by betraying them, to win advantages for the Soviet republic…We are bound to you by a common destiny…”
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Enver’s presence as the Comintern’s guest belied this; that, at least, is what was said in European socialist circles within the next few weeks. The Comintern, according to a former colleague of Lenin’s, had succumbed to a temptation “to regard the peoples of the east as pieces on the chessboard of the diplomatic war with the Entente.”
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A Social Democrat argued that at Baku the Bolsheviks had given up socialism in favor of power politics.
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A month after the Baku congress, Enver returned to Berlin. He began to purchase arms—perhaps on his own behalf, for he hoped to return to Anatolia to push Kemal aside and assume command of the forces resisting the Allies. He still retained support among former C.U.P. militants, and he also controlled an organization on the Transcaucasian frontier; his hopes of returning to power within Turkey were not entirely unrealistic.

Throwing its support behind Enver was an alternative with which Moscow could eventually threaten Mustapha Kemal, if and when it became necessary to do so; but for the moment the Bolsheviks had nothing for Enver to do.
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As will be seen presently, it was to be a year before the Soviets found a mission on which to send him—a mission to Bukhara in turbulent Turkestan.

Awaiting an assignment, Enver settled in Moscow in 1921 as a guest of the Soviet government. A picturesque figure in the streets of the Russian capital, he attracted attention by wearing an enormous tarboosh that offset his tiny stature. He became the social lion of Moscow, according to the American writer Louise Bryant, who lived next door to him for half a year and saw him every day. She wrote that he “certainly has charm, in spite of his very obvious opportunism,…cruelty…and lack of conscience.”
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She sensed that, despite all the lionizing, he was bored.
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Enver’s star was on the wane in Moscow, because that of his rival—Mustapha Kemal—was on the rise. The working arrangement that the Kremlin arrived at with Mustapha Kemal’s Turkish Nationalist government allowed Soviet Russia to crush Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Kemal’s overt anti-communism—on 28 January 1921 Kemalists killed seventeen Turkish communist leaders by drowning them in the Black Sea—was not allowed by Lenin or Stalin to stand in the way of agreement. In entering into a series of interlocking pacts with the anti-communist nationalist Moslem leaders of Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, Moscow seemed to be traveling along the path marked out at the Baku congress: abandoning revolutionary goals in favor of pursuing traditional Russian objectives in the Great Game. The Soviets encouraged revolutionary Kemalist Turkey to enter into a pact of her own, in Moscow, with traditionalist Afghanistan, the purpose of which (as indicated in Article Two) was to join hands in opposing aggression and exploitation by the British Empire.

In the summer of 1921 Mustapha Kemal won the first in a series of stunning successes against the British-backed Greek army. The tide was running with him and, in the autumn, the Soviets moved further toward alliance with him. Enver saw himself losing out to Kemal.

In the summer of 1921, the Soviets, at Enver’s request, provided him with transportation to the Caucasus. Enver assured the Soviet Foreign Minister that he was not going there to work against Kemal, but broke his word. On arrival in Transcaucasia, he established himself in Batum, in Georgia, on the Turkish frontier. There he held a congress of supporters, and tried to cross into Turkey; but the Soviet authorities forcibly detained him. Enver’s continued presence on the Turkish frontier became an embarrassment to the Soviet leaders, who sent Enver away; either at their request or his, he was entrusted with a mission to Central Asia.

In Central Asia, Moscow was attempting to complete its reconquest of the native Turkish-speaking Moslem populations, and asked Enver to help.

Enver’s mission was contrary to everything for which he had stood in politics: his goal had been to liberate the Turkish-speaking peoples from Russian rule. The mission also ran contrary to what the Bolsheviks had preached before coming to power: they had claimed that they were in favor of allowing the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire freely to go their own way. Coming after the Russian reconquest of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and after the unveiling of Moscow’s alliance with anti-communist leaders of Islam, the Soviet instructions to Enver raised the question of whether the Bolsheviks had subordinated, postponed, or even abandoned altogether the revolutionary ideals they had once espoused. Enver undoubtedly had his own views about this, but he hid them from his Bolshevik hosts as he set out for Bukhara in Central Asia.

III

By the summer of 1920—a year before Enver was sent there—Bukhara was the last remaining bastion of Turkic independence in Central Asia. Occupying about 85,000 square miles on the right bank of the Oxus river, in the southeast corner of Russian Turkestan, back against the mountainous southern and eastern frontiers that run with Afghanistan and China, its population of roughly two and a half to three million raised it above the level of its sparsely populated Turkish neighbors. The structure of its Russian protectorate had melted away during the revolutions of 1917, and its emir, Abdul Said Mir Alim Khan, last of the Mangit line, reasserted the independence of Bukhara and the autocratic powers that had been exercised by his ancestors. The Soviets heard rumors of British complicity in the Emir’s defiance of their authority; and in fact British India did send a hundred camel loads of supplies to aid the emirate. Bolshevik Russia attacked Bukhara in 1918, but the Emir’s tiny army, officially numbered at 11,000 men, was able to win the brief war.

At the time of the Bolshevik attack, Bukhara was still wealthy and well supplied. The emirate had always been known for the fertility of its oases, and its capital city—also called Bukhara—remained the most important trading town in Central Asia. In the city’s seven-mile honeycomb of covered bazaars, business (according to at least one traveler’s report) went on as usual.
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There was a lively traffic in the products of craftsmen, in precious metals, jewels, rugs, leather, silks, currencies, and all manner of food-stuffs. A center of the commerce in rare manuscripts and libraries in many oriental languages, Bukhara continued to be the principal book market in Central Asia.

But after his victory over the Bolsheviks in 1918, the Emir brought this commercial prosperity to an end by cutting off all trade with Russia. At the same time he allowed irrigation projects to be discontinued. By the summer of 1920 Bukhara’s economic situation was grave and the country was unable to feed itself.
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Popular discontent and social strife erupted as a Young Bukhara movement (which was opposed to Soviet intervention) and a smaller Communist Party (which welcomed it) protested against the unenlightened policies and medieval ways of the ruler. The Emir, in some ways, had indeed brought back the Middle Ages. The twelfth-century Kalyan Minaret, or Tower of Death, from the top of which condemned criminals were thrown, was back in use. From his palaces, among his boy and girl harems, the Emir ruled in as arbitrary a way as had any of his ancestors.