Empires Apart (57 page)

Lenin and Stalin may have started out along a radically new path but they arrived at the same destination as their tsarist predecessors. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the evolution of the Russian empire.

When they seized power in October 1917 the Bolsheviks proclaimed the end of empire. They needed as much support as they could get, and exploiting unrest among the minority groups within the Russian empire was one way of getting it. One of their very first decrees was entitled ‘The Rights of the Peoples of Russia to Self-Determination'. This decree, signed by both Lenin and Stalin, guaranteed, among other things, ‘the free development of national minorities and ethnic groups' – including their right to secede. Stalin, who had been given the least important of the fifteen ministries that made up Lenin's government, the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, travelled to Helsinki within weeks of the revolution to promise Finnish independence.

Lenin modified Marxism by stressing the importance of imperialism as the highest form of capitalism. History may yet show him to have been right. The Bolsheviks' anti-imperial declarations were not just cynical tactical ploys but reflected their conviction that the proletariat everywhere would – eventually – choose to follow the communist vanguard. There was no need to forcibly replace a tsarist empire with a Bolshevik empire: the unstoppable forces of Marxist dialectic would propel the workers of the world into a commonwealth of proletarian communist utopias.

Whatever the motivation of the Bolsheviks' espousal of self-determination for Russia's minorities, the policy became academic when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk dismantled the Russian empire. The Ukraine, the Baltic states and the Caucasus were all stripped away not by the Bolsheviks but by the German and Austro-Hungarian armies. In consolidating its hold on power the new Russian regime soon determined to restore the old frontiers of the Russian empire. A Ukrainian republic had been established for the first time following the German collapse, but the Bolsheviks soon crushed any aspirations for independence. Ancient enmities then surfaced yet again on the Polish frontier. Sensing weakness in their old enemy, Polish troops surged across the border into Ukraine in May 1920 and captured Kiev, birthplace of the Rus. Not for the first time they discovered they had underestimated their foe. Trotsky counterattacked with such vigour
that the Red Army was soon on the outskirts of Warsaw. Contrary to Bolshevik theory the Polish working class did not rise up to welcome them. Supported by French troops the Poles successfully counterattacked in one of the most argued-about battles of the twentieth century.

To some the ‘Miracle on the Vistula' was one of the most important events in world history, in which the Red Army was stopped from rampaging across Europe and creating Soviet republics in Poland, Germany and beyond. It was the Châlons of the twentieth century. To others the battle of Warsaw was one more minor skirmish in the civil war raging across the former Russian empire – no more significant that the battles going on at the same time in the Baltic states, in Persia (where Britain was supporting anti-Bolshevik Cossacks) and the far east (where the Japanese were clinging on to Vladivostok).

Whatever its true significance, the Russo-Polish War of 1920 throws an interesting light on western perceptions of right and wrong. The avowed aim of the Polish invaders was to make Russia return to the frontier that had existed before Catherine the Great engineered the First Partition of Poland in 1772. Western opinion was overwhelmingly on the side of the Poles, and yet anyone who might have suggested that America should similarly return to its 1772 pre-Independence frontier would have been considered mad. Of course there were enormous differences – not least the absence of any realistic alternative claimant in North America – but through Russian eyes double standards could be clearly discerned.

Double standards were far more obvious in the case of the Bolsheviks themselves who, despite their protestations to the contrary, remained instinctive imperialists. When a Muslim revolt broke out in central Asia in 1916 Lenin reacted in the same oppressive way as Nicholas II: hundreds of thousands of rebels are said to have perished before the insurrection finally crumbled in the mid-1920s. Just as many Americans were claiming that their occupation of Hawaii and the Philippines was not imperialism, so the Red Army's occupation of non-Russian territories was proclaimed to be totally unlike the tsarist occupation that had gone before. Rayfield quotes the Bolshevik leader Zinoviev proclaiming in 1919, ‘We cannot do without
Azerbaijan's oil or Turkestan's cotton. We take these things which we need, but not in the way the old exploiters took them, but as elder brothers who are carrying the torch of civilisation.' Samuel Dole could have spoken virtually the same words when he deposed the native regime in Hawaii.

Events in the Caucasus soon showed that new ‘anti-imperialists' in Moscow had not given up Russia's imperial dreams. Once the White Armies had been defeated the Red Army was free to turn on the three independent republics that had appeared in the region. Azerbaijan and Armenia were quickly over-run but Georgia was more difficult. Georgia was controlled by the Mensheviks, but politics in the Caucasus had always been more ethnic than ideological. Thousands of minority Ossetians were accused of Bolshevism by the Mensheviks and killed, or died of hunger or disease, leaving a legacy of bitterness that would spill over into war again in the twenty-first century.

In May 1920 Lenin signed a treaty with the Menshevik regime that unambiguously renounced all Russian sovereign rights and recognised the independence of the Georgian state. Nine months later the Red Army invaded, and after ten days of bitter fighting the Georgians capitulated. Stalin returned to the country for the first time in nine years and, despite his title of commissar of nationalities, launched a vitriolic attack on the ‘hydra of nationalism'. In a comment that should have served as a warning of what would lay in store if he succeeded to the communist throne, Stalin urged that his opponents be destroyed in the manner of Shah Abbas. Shah Abbas, who ruled Persia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, is remembered in Iran for his fairness and wisdom but in Georgia for the orgy of death and destruction that his army inflicted on their country (a reputation perhaps with its basis in the training the Persian army received from British mercenaries, just a few decades before another British mercenary wreaked similar destruction on the natives of Mystic, Connecticut).

In 1922, with Ukraine, Belarus and the three states of the Caucasus back under Russian control, the Bolsheviks debated how the empire should be run. Lenin wanted a union of soviet republics of which Russia would be just one. Stalin attacked this as ‘national liberalism' – whatever
that might mean – and demanded that the reconquered territories be simply merged into a unitary Greater Russia. Lenin, of course, had his way. When Stalin took power he maintained the form of Lenin's USSR while making it operate as he had wanted. From then on the legal structures of the empire bore very little resemblance to political reality. Stalin was Georgian, not Russian, and throughout his life purists commented on his tussles with the Russian language. But like his foreign-born predecessor Catherine the Great he cloaked himself in the imperial mantle and pushed the boundaries of the Russian empire beyond anything achieved before.

Early efforts to expand the Soviet empire were clumsy and half-hearted, as Stalin was primarily concerned with his enemies at home. The one new conquest achieved by the Bolsheviks happened more by accident than through the application of a grand imperial strategy. In 1920 a gang of anti-Bolshevik Russian renegades known as the Asiatic Cavalry Division rode into Mongolia. Their leader, Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, was a cross between the murderous Yermak Timofeyevich and American filibusters. The Austrian-born Estonian aristocrat, who claimed to be a descendant of Attila the Hun, set about creating his own kingdom in what had been Chinese Mongolia. His brutality was such that even his Mongolian bodyguards were sickened, and eventually they tied him up and left him on the steppe where a Red Army patrol found him. After a cursory appearance before a Siberian court the baron was shot. Recognising the power vacuum this left, the Red Army then marched in to create the first and longest-lasting Soviet colony: Outer Mongolia.

Attempts to foment a communist revolution in China failed when the Chinese communists were routed in April 1927, and this, along with earlier failures in Hungary and Germany, showed that the prospects for global communism were gloomy. This was a major problem for communist theorists, as a key element of Lenin's interpretation of Marx was the notion that the survival of the Russian Revolution depended on the competing capitalist empires being overthrown.

The core of Marxism, as explained earlier, is the belief that history consists of a series of ruling classes replacing each other as the economic
organisation of society changes. Eventually capitalism drives out other forms of economic life and the capitalist bourgeoisie takes power. This in turn leads to the creation of an industrial working class, the proletariat, which will in the final struggle of human history overthrow the bourgeoisie in a socialist revolution leading to the creation of a truly classless society – communism. The problem, as Lenin saw it, was that Russia was still a pre-capitalist society; the industrial proletariat needed to maintain the Bolshevik revolution was simply too small to resist the might of global capitalism. Therefore his revolution could only succeed if it was quickly followed by proletarian revolution in countries that had already reached capitalism. As a consequence it was a fundamental tenet of Lenin's version of Marxism that the Bolshevik government in Russia had to use every means at its disposal to spread the revolution. Like many American leaders, Lenin was convinced of the imperative need to export his way of life. The imperial adventures of the communist Russian state would always have the ethical imprimatur of Marxist ideology.

Stalin's only genuinely original contribution to revolutionary theory was to overturn this dogma. Stalin's concept of ‘socialism in one country' refuted what virtually all Russian Marxists before him considered fundamental: the imperative need for universal revolution. Stalin argued that socialism could be achieved in Russia even when surrounded by the forces of global capitalism. This novel theory not only enraged Trotsky and his purist supporters; it also involved Stalin removing chunks of his own book
The Foundations of Leninism
, which contradicted his new line. (
The Foundations of Leninism
, a justification of communist autocracy published shortly after Lenin's death, was Stalin's attempt to prove that he was a genuine theoretician. It is now clear that, like Henry Ford's
Encyclopaedia Britannica
article, Stalin's work was ghost-written for him; unlike Ford, Stalin was able to protect his secret by later having his ghost-writer shot.) Of course Stalin interpreted his new position as being fully compatible with Marxism-Leninism, quoting odd bits of Lenin in its support just as the proponents of slavery quoted chunks of the Bill of Rights to support their case.

The new line did not stop Stalin trying to export revolution but it did mean that when the time came to ally himself with Hitler or Churchill there was no ideological barrier stopping him. It also meant that Stalin had no difficulty with the idea of imposing communism on other countries. Lenin and most of his contemporaries had believed that the industrial proletariat would be the engine of revolution wherever it occurred; there was something counter-intuitive about the very idea of using imperial military might to impose a form of government that was supposed to represent the ultimate manifestation of popular will. Stalin simply did not recognise this as an issue, any more than American presidents saw any conflict in using their imperial military might to impose democracy.

Although the ideological contortion of ‘socialism in one country' represented Stalin's recognition that spreading communist revolution across the globe was not an immediately realistic objective, it did not stop him trying; more importantly it did not stop many in the west believing that they were in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by the Red Peril. This fear was particularly prevalent in America, and it was not as ludicrous as hindsight makes it appear – as the citizens of Seattle were to discover when a workers' soviet tried to take over their milk deliveries.

After Woodrow Wilson presidential politics in the United States relapsed into the slough of sleaze in which many of the nation's major cities had long wallowed. When Wilson's successor died unexpectedly in 1923 a stream of scandals suddenly surfaced: the secretary of the interior had accepted loans from a man trying to gain control of government-owned oilfields at Teapot Dome, Wyoming; the head of the Veterans' Administration was embroiled in all sorts of corrupt activities; and even the attorney general had been selling his political services for hard cash. One of the few honest men in government turned out to be the vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, an old fashioned Massachusetts Puritan who set about restoring integrity to political life. He had a hard task as, in the wake of the First World War, America was yet again experiencing Russian history writ small.

The country was racked by social and political turmoil. In 1919, the year after the war ended, more Americans went on strike than in any year in American history other than 1946, the year after the Second World War. Race riots flared up and a revived Ku Klux Klan rampaged in the south. There were a series of anarchist bombings, including an attack on Wall Street. Widespread industrial unrest spread to those supposed to suppress it when the Boston police went on strike. Two anarchists – Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – were convicted of murder and executed in Massachusetts on the thinnest of evidence in America's own miniature show trial. Most traumatic of all for the average American, the Chicago White Sox baseball team were discovered to have accepted bribes to lose the world series.