Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (125 page)

As self-proclaimed internationalists, Lenin and his circle were not especially interested in frontiers and territory. They believed that all such matters would be sorted out amicably once the international revolution had destroyed all existing regimes and had joined up with fraternal proletarians in foreign countries. Two events, however, intervened. The first was the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, in which the infant power of the Bolshevik ‘Reds’ was contested by a variety of adversaries, usually called ‘Whites’ but made up of conservatives, non-Bolshevik leftists and non-Russian nationalists. The second was the revolt of the many non-Russian nationalities, all of whom chose to break free and to form their own national republics. In 1918–19, therefore, the Bolsheviks’ area of control, which is best called Soviet Russia, covered only a fraction of the former Tsarist Empire.
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The tasks of the Red Army were threefold: to secure the Russian heartland; to reconquer the breakaway national republics; and to march into Central Europe to provoke the prophesied international revolution.
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The Bolsheviks’ bid to engineer revolution throughout Europe by force was launched in 1920, but failed miserably. Lenin on this occasion was the enthusiast, and Leon Trotsky, as commissar for war, despite his reputation, the sceptic.
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The Red Army marched westwards in May, naming its destination as Berlin or even Paris. They didn’t get past Warsaw. They were badly beaten in August by the army of the Polish Republic – one of the breakaway national states, which had no desire to return to Russian rule, Red or White.
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From then on, the Bolshevik leaders had to think more seriously about organizing and centralizing power in the lands that they actually controlled.

The overall performance of the Red Army in those years was very erratic. Finland, the Baltic States and Poland were not brought under Soviet control. But Byelorussia, Ukraine and the vast expanses of Siberia, southern Russia and the Far East were reconquered. So, too, was the Caucasus. Many parts of Central Asia were still being contested in the mid-1920s.

In 1922, however, Lenin suffered a series of strokes and Joseph Stalin emerged as general secretary of the ruling Bolshevik Party. He rejected Lenin’s internationalist priorities, and launched the policy of ‘Socialism in One Country’. His purpose was to postpone foreign adventures while building up political, economic and military power. Such was the context for the formation of a Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Party had no intention of relinquishing its dictatorial hold on power, but its doctrine of the ‘Party-State’ permitted the organization of a number of nominally autonomous but dependent republics; answering to the central Party dictatorship, these republics were also to be joined in federal union. The plans were passed by the Supreme Soviet in December 1923 and put into effect on the first day of the following year.
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The name of the new federal state was to be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR in short: in transliterated Russian, ‘
Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Republik
’, or
SSSR
. The acronym written in Cyrillic was ‘CCCP’.

Moscow thereupon became the dual capital both of the Soviet Union and of Soviet Russia. The All-Union government and the subsidiary government of the RSFSR were separate bodies, staffed by different officials. Even so, political power continued to be concentrated, as always, not in Soviet state structures but in the parallel organs of the dictatorial Bolshevik Party, which oversaw the work of all other institutions. In 1925, the Bolsheviks changed their name once more to ‘All-union Communist Party’ (
Vsesoyuznaya Komunistichestkaya Partiya
, or VKP). The VKP’s general secretary, Joseph Stalin, the supreme dictator, saw no need to appoint himself to subordinate positions such as president or prime minister of the USSR. The inner sanctum of power was located in Stalin’s office in the VKP’s headquarters in the Kremlin.

The events that unfolded in Estonia during those same years combined to bring about a result that few would have thought possible, namely, the declaration of Estonia’s independence. During the First World War the German army had in 1915–16 swept into the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire in, fatally weakening tsarist power in ways that the local population could never have achieved on its own. The Germans encouraged the national aspirations of non-Russian peoples, and in some places such as Lithuania and Ukraine, they actively supported moves to create sovereign republics. They occupied Reval and Dorpat (Tartu), but stopped short of Petrograd (as St Petersburg had recently been renamed).

In March 1917 the Russian provisional government proclaimed its intention of continuing the war against Germany and of reuniting the Russian Empire. To counter this policy, the Bolsheviks called for peace, and for the recognition of the national rights of all subject peoples. Estonia, on the doorstep of revolutionary Petrograd, was inevitably excited by the passions of the day. The Baltic Germans were at best unsure. During the civil war which followed, Estonia was the scene of several multi-sided conflicts. It provided the base for one of the ‘White’ armies attacking Bolshevik Petrograd. At the same time, it witnessed a complicated civil war of its own, in which Bolshevik sympathizers, Estonian national patriots and the German
Baltikum
army struggled to gain supremacy.

Seen from the Estonian perspective, the key events in that turbulent period were the granting of autonomy to Estonia in March 1917, following a mammoth demonstration in Petrograd, and the peace treaty with Soviet Russia in February 1920. Kerensky, the head of the provisional government, was a liberal and favoured self-government of the non-Russian provinces, which he wanted to keep loyal for the continuing war effort. So on 30 March 1917 a decree was passed consolidating all Estonian-inhabited districts into one province, and authorizing the formation of an administrative executive and a parliament, the
Maapäev
.
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In the summer of 1917, however, the provisional government in Petrograd started to lose control. The Bolsheviks were undermining stability in the country and the Germans were advancing up the Baltic coast. At this juncture, an Estonian radical, Jaan Tõnisson, proposed the creation of a Northern Union of all the Baltic countries, including Finland. The goal, as yet out of reach, was independent statehood. ‘We can’t stand by while our fate is left to the mercy of others,’ he declared. ‘It’s now, or never.’
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When the Bolshevik coup occurred in November 1917, therefore, an Estonian independence movement was already in existence; and on the following 24 February, the country’s future National Day, a declaration of independence was promulgated in Tallinn.
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It had little prospect of general acceptance: it was opposed by local Communists, who among other things had set up a Soviet mini-republic on the island of Naissaar off Tallinn; all was soon overturned by the extension northwards of the area of German occupation, the
Ober Ost
. The Germans were not welcomed with any enthusiasm, but their presence at least blocked a possible Bolshevik takeover; the Estonian Committee of National Salvation, which had issued the declaration, was forced underground and its emissary to Finland captured by the Germans and shot. Recognition by the Western Allies did not materialize until May. At this stage, however, the Bolsheviks’ stance towards breakaway republics was still ambiguous; in some places, notably in Ukraine and the Caucasus, they were crushing the separatists by force, but in the Baltic region they refrained from outright denunciations of national movements. On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, when the Germans laid down their arms, the National Committee resurfaced in Tallinn and reconfirmed their earlier pronouncements.
³⁴

In Estonian eyes, the War of Independence began at that point. Lenin did not recognize Estonia’s freedom; Red Guards overran many districts, and briefly seized Tallinn. The ‘Red Terror’ was unleashed in support both of social revolution and of Russian control. Many atrocities were perpetrated, and for a time it appeared that the ‘Reds’ would prevail. Yet Estonian defences held. A small Estonian army, under General Johan Laidoner, used armoured trains to disrupt Bolshevik communications. Britain’s Royal Navy landed supplies, and Finnish volunteers crossed the Gulf of Finland. No clear verdict had been achieved when a new enemy appeared in the form of German volunteers, the
Baltikum Landwehr,
marching out of Latvia. Three-sided hostilities persisted until the end of 1919.
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By that time, Trotsky’s main Red Army was winning the Russian Civil War, and a major attack on Estonia was daily awaited. Yet Lenin’s inner circle had other ideas. They had always argued that a proletarian revolution in Russia must necessarily link up with a wider revolution in the major capitalist countries, so now, having secured Russia and set their minds on a strategic offensive through Poland to Germany, they abandoned secondary operations such as the conquest of Estonia. The attack on Narva with 160,000 men had brought no results. It was opportune to sue for peace, and a truce was arranged before Soviet Russian and Estonian negotiators assembled at Tartu.

The Tartu Treaty between Estonia and Soviet Russia was signed on 2 February 1920:

Russia recognised Estonia’s independence, ‘giving up of free will and for ever all the sovereign rights that Russia had over the Estonian people and country.’ Soviet Russia paid Estonia 15 million gold roubles from the tsarist gold reserves. Under the peace treaty Estonia agreed to disarm the White Russian army on its territory, for which [the] Whites later bitterly reproached [her]. Larger countries were also not enthusiastic… According to the western countries Estonia should have fought Russia until the fall of communism and the restoration of the White government, after which it should have peacefully reunited with Russia. It is understandable that Estonia was not interested in such a future…
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The dissonance between the interests of small nations and the ideas of Westerners, who pursued stability at anyone’s cost but their own, was manifest.

Estonia’s independence, therefore, was achieved almost exclusively by Estonian efforts. It had little to do with the Western Powers or their Versailles settlement. What is more, it came about well before the creation of the Soviet Union and the stabilization of Soviet affairs by Joseph Stalin. ‘Today Estonia commands its future for the first time,’ declared the chief Estonian representative at Tartu, Jaan Poska. But he added: ‘The threat has not yet passed.’
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Under Stalin’s direction, the USSR was transformed in less than two decades from a backward, largely peasant country into a modern power of considerable industrial and military potential. Stalin was driven partly by Communist ideology and partly by memories of the humiliating defeat of the Great War. When he launched his accelerated programme of Five Year Plans and collectivized agriculture in 1929, he said: ‘If we don’t transform this country in ten years, our enemies will destroy us.’

This socio-economic transformation, however, was achieved through the most appalling cruelty, violence, terror and mass murder. The USSR built the world’s first major concentration camp system: the Gulag.
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Millions died during forced collectivization and during the artificial famine produced in Ukraine.
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The Communist Party itself was subjected to violent purges and disgraceful show trials, and in the ‘Great Terror’ of 1937–9 vast numbers of ordinary men and women were simply shot at random to create the ultimate totalitarian climate where no one felt safe. The Soviet economy, which many foreign observers imagined to be a fascinating experiment, was made to work by suppressing all normal human incentives and spontaneous initiatives: ‘Stalin built this Brobdingnagian economy on the bones of kulaks and prisoners… It was not designed to generate the stream of information necessary for self-regulation, but to respond to orders from the regime. It was an economy planned for total control. But control in the absence of terror cannot be total.’
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Westerners, distracted by the rise of fascism, were notoriously slow to recognize the true nature of the USSR. Anyone living in the countries bordering the USSR was likely to be better informed.
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