Soviet Power Forever
The Consolidation of Bolshevik Rule, 1919-1921
In the Treaty of Riga, the new Soviet state formally acknowledged its weakness and international isolation, and resolved to convert itself into an appendage of the German war machine as a protective measure. Those who sought to take up arms and continue the fight had already been sidelined, and with a Central Powers victory in the west looking increasingly likely, it was decided that concessions must be secured before they achieved their final victory. Ludendorff proved surprisingly amenable. The Ukrainian territories had been a nightmare to administer, and the Bolsheviks promised that the critical trade in raw materials would be expanded under their government. Most of Belarus and Ukraine was returned to the Soviets, a major diplomatic victory for the Bolsheviks.
Perhaps the most critical condition of the Treaty of Riga, however, was the requirement that Russia export millions of bushels of grain to Germany and Austria at heavily discounted rates. They would at least receive some marks for their trouble, which could be used to import heavy machinery and other capital goods, but this made little difference to the peasants and their representatives. The left-sr's, who were ousted from Sovnarkom a few months before the treaty was signed, continued to act as a mostly loyal opposition, and their support was particularly vital to the government in the agricultural provinces of Western Siberia, the Urals, Central Russia, and the Volga, where Bolshevik power was weaker. But their erstwhile communist allies knew they would be sickened at the terms of the treaty, and engaged in preemptive repression of numerous organs left-sr power before it was signed.
Over the final months of 1918, organized white resistance was eliminated by the armies of Budyonny, Trotsky, Frunze, and Brusilov. They were assisted by the dismal perception of the aristocratic whites amongst peasants and townsfolk alike, who associated them with the old, discredited Tsarist regime. The centrist socialist-revolutionaries and Mensheviks continued to call for the Provisional Assembly to be reconstituted, but these protests fell, at least for the time being, on deaf ears.
In 1919, the second phase of the Civil War began as the Bolsheviks, struggling to meet the German grain requirements, resorted to increasingly harsh requisitioning. Matters were made far more difficult by the recalcitrance of the highly autonomous Ukrainian government, a coalition of Ukrainian Social-Democrats, Borotbysts, and Bolsheviks. They insisted on carrying out their own grain procurement and did not meet the quotas set by the central government until September. With administration still being established in the eastern provinces, the majority of the reparations burden fell on peasants from Central Russia and the Volga region. Unfortunately, the seizure of the large estates and the socialization of the remaining medium-sized farms created under the Stolypin reforms reduced agricultural productivity, leading to lower farm marketings from the peasants. The absence of left-sr's from the government meant that there was no real countervailing force to the Bolshevik drive to implement more coercive measures to make up for inevitable shortages. Martov's internationalists, though frustrated by the turn toward repression, had few connections to the peasantry and no desire to expend their scant political capital on them.
At great cost to their legitimacy amongst the rural folk, the Bolsheviks met the German deadlines in the first three months of 1919. To do so, they resorted to increasing use of political as well as economic repression, including the disbanding of previously autonomous peasant organizations or their outright incorporation into the Bolshevik Party. A warning sign came when Maria Spiridinova, the loyalist left-sr, left the executive committee of soviets in protest. Next came mass peasant revolts in Tambov and Samara which were bloodily suppressed by the Red Army. Then, a "democratic counter-revolution" swept across Central Siberia in mid-April, as centrist SR's finally took up arms against the Bolsheviks. A significant portion of the Red Army's peasant conscripts revolted and seized the railways running from Perm to Yekaterinburg, which became the seat of a new government led by Victor Chernov and some sympathetic left-sr's. A second round of peasant uprisings now swept across Central Russia, imperiling the Red Army's ability to quickly march east to confront the rival government. Alienated by the authoritarian measures of the Bolsheviks, a number of outlying Soviet Republics, including those of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, declared their neutrality in the coming conflict.
Chernov's Siberian government was fueled primarily by peasant discontent with the Bolsheviks. It was plagued early on by accusations that it intended to shut down the worker's soviets, a claim levied against it with particular force by left-mensheviks and other non-bolshevik workers still loyal to Moscow. Chernov insisted that calling the provisional assembly would not mean ending Soviet power, but few of the more radicalized workers believed this. Many also speculated that he intended to institute a "peasant dictatorship", even though townfolk received generous provisions of food (however, this is owed mostly to the comparatively small population of the Siberian cities). His new government was thus eroded from the very beginning by internal labor unrest.
He nonetheless managed to raise a large peasant army in the next few months which posed a real threat to Bolshevik power. Chernov also made promises to the traditionalist Turkic peoples of Central Asia, who had chafed under the modernizing impetus of the Soviet-allied Jadidist intelligentsia and Russian settler-colonialism only thinly cloaked by emancipatory communism. In July, an army under the command of the SR general Vasily Boldyrev marched to Samara and Tambov, where it linked up with peasant partisans under the command of A.N. Antonov, who had previously fought against the whites. For the time being, the "green" peasant-armies in Central Russia remained out of their reach. The Germans were forced to accept "delays" on the reparations payments, made somewhat less bitter by the conquest of Romania and its sizable grain reserves.
The Red Army, which had begun demobilizing at the beginning of 1919, was called back into action. After crushing several peasant armies in Central Russia, they moved on the cities of Tambov and Perm. The disorganization and isolation of Chernov's forces made the work of the Red Army significantly easier. Landlocked and unable to procure aid from foreign governments, they were forced to rely on the inferior, secondary military industries of the Urals and Siberia, which were frequently staffed by disloyal workers. While the "green army" fought the reds to a standstill over July, their ammunition situation grew ever-more desparate, made worse by a lightning offensive of Brusilov and Trotsky which retook Samara and Ufa in August. Stocks of artillery shells were depleted by the end of the summer, and the morale among soldiers collapsed; Chernov and his ministers began a headlong retreat into Central Asia, but their Alash Orda allies in Kazakhstan detained them and came to an understanding with the Bolshevik Government.
The capture of the political and military elite of the socialist revolutionaries eliminated a potent source of opposition to the Bolsheviks. A sizable fraction of the left-SR's had been tarnished by their alliance with the revolting government, while the left-communists, who had once allied themselves to the left-wing of the socialist-revolutionaries, redeemed themselves through their loyal service. Many had worked their way up the Moscow party administration, and others played an important role in remobilizing the army.
Throughout the seven-month "SR Rebellion", the left-mensheviks began distancing themselves from Lenin. Martov penned increasingly critical articles denouncing the deterioration of the justice system, the centralization of economic power, and the spread of bureaucratization across the state-apparatus. The upshot was improved Menshevik performance in most Soviet elections in mid-1919 amidst a general dip in Bolshevik support among the urban working-class, as well as a rapprochement between Martov and the centrist Mensheviks, who were more hostile to Bolshevik rule but had maintained their credibility as a loyal opposition by refusing to cooperate with Chernov. Heightened tensions between the two parties finally led to the expulsion of the Mensheviks from the Council of People's Commissars in September of 1920. Thereafter, the Bolshevik-dominated Sovnarkom gerrymandered the soviet elections, ensuring that their majority would not be imperiled by the political campaigns of their former allies.
The November Revolutions and Internal Reform
The insurrectionary wave which toppled the old empires of Europe was both an astounding fulfillment of the predictions of the left-communists and a validation of Lenin's general revolutionary strategy. Lenin argued for a seizure of power in Russia to set an example for the workers in the rest of Europe, and now, though a year or two later than expected, they had conformed to expectations. Even the purged opposition of left-mensheviks and left-sr's could not help but to congratulate the government on its success.
Lenin's erstwhile governing partners on the party's right, who had opposed the initial seizure of Soviet power, were not so lucky and soon found their position untenable. While Lenin's towering reputation was sufficient to shield him from the charge of being a lackey of German imperialists, no such protective aura shielded the persons of Rykov, Kamenev, and Stalin, who were now accused of rank opportunism in the revitalized left-wing press. The right had clearly underestimated the revolutionary energy of the European proletariat, and were all-too-eager to cooperate with the arch-reactionary Ludendorff dictatorship. And for what purpose? Lenin, of course, was quite pleased that these polemics were directed at the right flank of the party rather than himself.
Russia soon experienced its own November Revolution. A rapidly crystallizing worker's opposition led by the metalworker Alexander Shliapnikov found the courage and boldness to openly defy the Soviet government in a series of political strikes. The working-class had long strained under the wartime measures of the government, and there was particular bitterness at soaring food costs and the hegemony of the bourgeois "specialists" who many believed were little better than the old managers of the Tsarist era. Workers demanded curtailment of the privileges of these specialists, free elections to Soviets, the resurrection of the long-defunct factory committees, and the end of the crackdown on proletarian speech. The left-communist circle in Moscow, against the advice of Trotsky (who was skeptical of the presence of right-wing, Menshevik elements in the strike movement), soon backed the worker protests. Sensing where the wind was blowing, the People's Commissars Yakov Sverdlov, Alexandra Kollantai, and Adolph Joffe led a campaign to expel the right-wing people's commissars and negotiate with the strikers. The cause of the right became hopeless when Lenin endorsed the efforts of the left-wing troika, leading to the voluntary resignation of the besieged commissars. In their place, Nikolai Bukharin was made the minister of Internal Affairs; Leon Trotsky, of the Army; Vladimir Smirnov, of Labor; and Georgy Pyatakov, of Finance. The centre of power on Sovnarkom now drifted away from Lenin and toward Sverdlov, who sat midway between the Bolshevik center and the left. Sverdlov met most of the demands of the worker protests, including the curtailment of many privileges enjoyed by the specialists, but he maintained the system of gerrymandering which ensured Bolshevik control of Soviet elections.
The new government, the most left-wing yet, waged campaigns against both internal bureaucratization and the white governments to the west. Rather than demobilize the victorious red army, it was directed to Finland, which was militarily weakened by the withdrawal of several German garrisons. Several "international contingents" entered Germany to assist the Luxemburg government. Others fought to support fledgling baltic soviet republics in their battle against the whites. The new Polish state, which occupied the entirety of Galicia and a substantial portion of Western Ukraine and Belarus, was not targeted by the Soviet government, at first because it believed that the "united front" of Radek and Pilsudski would remain in power, and then because it feared the costs of engaging in a direct battle against the modernized, German-trained Polish Army.
1920-1921 were years of dramatic reform. Moribund factory committees were revived and integrated into the national council of the economy, returning a degree of worker's control to the major industries. The ultra-left urged for an immediate effort at centrally planned industrialization, but found itself evenly matched by the Leninist centre at the Bolshevik Party Congress, which instead advocated an "opening up" of medium-sized industries to limited market pressures. It was Sverdlov and his allies Georgy Pyatakov and Nikolai Bukharin that successfully won the day by splitting the difference between the two programs and urging a "straight and steady path to socialism".
The new plan envisioned a gradual industrialization of the Soviet economy through a process of "consensual socialist capital accumulation". Grain requisitions would first be rationalized, and then faded out entirely with an in-kind 20% tax. The state would employ and expand the existing cooperative network to make purchases of grain for the cities, while the taxed foodstuffs would be exported to the industrialized socialist states of the west in return for agricultural machinery and other capital goods. These would be offered at heavily discounted prices to peasants willing to combine their holdings into cooperatives and collectives. Peasants would also be incentivized to form larger, more efficient farms through targeted subsidies and limited tax exemptions. The increased productivity of these large-scale agricultural enterprises would provide the capital and the labor necessary to embark on more ambitious programs of industrialization.
Some on the left assaulted the incrementalism of this approach, but they found themselves undercut by their own internationalism: the majority of socialist states were net food importers, and without Soviet assistance, they would be forced to rely on capitalist Argentina and Australia for their grain needs, making them vulnerable to a renewed British blockade. Proletarian internationalism compelled the adoption of the new plan just as much as the need to come to a detente with the peasants after a ruinous two-year civil war. Trotsky reluctantly gave his assent at the end of the Party Congress. To appease the ultra-left faction, the Sverdlov-Bukharin bloc proposed only a minor expansion of the private sector. Some small and medium enterprises would be leased on a purely conditional basis to entrepreneurs and cooperatives, but they would still fall under the jurisdiction of the Council for the National Economy. The state would give up the monopoly on trade that it acquired during the civil war, but it would still exercise considerable power through its network of nationalized cooperatives. In a concession to the center, it was agreed that grain requisitions would cease entirely by the end of the year.
As a limited private sector emerged, the Soviet Union underwent a deeply contradictory process of political liberalization. Wartime restrictions on expression and assembly were gradually lifted, and the right to strike and form independent labor unions was returned to workers. While bourgeois papers were still the subject of frequent lawsuits, a wider range of "proletarian opinion" was permitted. Soviet elections began to be conducted through secret ballot, and votes were no longer weighted by type of worker. Simultaneously, the Bolshevik party-state entrenched itself further in all aspects of civil society. The Menshevik opposition was perpetually hounded by Komsomol and other organs of the Bolshevik Party, and most of the leadership eventually left Russia for Germany and Scandinavia. Some Left-SR's received amnesty, but few were allowed entrance into the upper levels of the bureaucracy. Civil Administration was extended throughout Siberian Russia and eventually Central Asia.
Such liberalization was able to occur because of the quite genuine enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks amongst wide segments of the urban working class. After teetering in their loyalty to the new government amidst the privation of the Civil War years, the return of worker control and the slow improvement in living conditions during the early 1920s brought the laboring class decisively back into the communist fold. By all accounts, the peasants maintained a healthy dose of skepticism, but incidences of revolt fell dramatically after the end of grain requisitioning. With proletarian power on more secure footing, it was possible to release the population from the more onerous restrictions of the civil war era.
Conflicts in the West
Over 1920-1921, the prestige of the Bolshevik Government was bolstered by military victories in the west. The revolutionary wave ended German control of the Baltics and German protection of Finland. Right-wing occupying soldiers left and made their way to Bavaria to fight for Ludendorff, while others joined white partisans in East Prussia. Governments of the national-bourgeois emerged in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In rural Lithuania, there was little real resistance to the nationalist government from the nation's small socialist worker's movement, but red insurgencies plagued the two northern Baltic states, forcing them to rely upon remaining German freikorps soldiers and the Riga Landswehr.
The intimidated proletariat of Finland, which had been brutalized during the Finnish civil war, only engaged in sporadic protest during the first few weeks of the revolutionary era. However, the violent response of the Finnish police was enough to provide a
casus belli for the Soviet Union. The new sovnarkom of Leninists and left-communists was eager to use military force to export the revolution, and toppling the weak Finnish government was seen as key to ensuring that the Baltic was safe from British machinations.
The invasion began in the last week of November, with the main axis advancing out of Petrograd and toward the southern industrial cities of Vilpuri and Helsinki. Only a little over a third of the red army participated in the initial invasion; a similar fraction moved through Poland with the tacit permission of the United Front Government to aid their German allies, while the rest was dedicated to garrison duty. Carl Mannerheim instituted a national draft, but in practice was forced to rely upon the same northern farmers and landowners which were his base of support during the Civil War. Outnumbered and outgunned, Mannerheim settled upon a defensive strategy and depended upon partisans to harry the rear of the Red Army.
Mannerheim was assisted by freezing winter temperatures and the manifestly aggressive character of the war, both of which weakened the morale of the Red Army and necessitated frequent troop rotations. Nonetheless, he was not able to prevent the fall of Vyborg in January or the steady Soviet advance to the north. In March, the lines of battle appeared to temporarily stabilize, and some members of the Soviet government were tempted to accept a generous peace offer from Mannerheim. This was preempted by a proletarian revolt in early June across the entire southern seaboard of Finland. Buoyed by the tales of the heroic Finnish workers, the Red Army broke through Mannerheim's defenses and reached Helsinki, where they united with their partisan allies. Additional revolts soon broke out in Tampere, Lahti, and Turku, imperiling the resupply of the white forces in the south and easing the advance of the red army north. By the end of the summer, the white government had evacuated to Norway.
In its place, the Finnish Communist Party led by the exiled radical Kullerco Manner assumed power. The existing social-democratic party within Finland, the subject of fierce repression by the Mannerheim government, voluntarily subsumed themselves into the communists. Manner successfully resisted Soviet demands for incorporation as a Soviet Republic, hoping to avoid being tarnished as an agent of Moscow. Despite this, he was forced to rely on the Russians for military assistance in repressing an ongoing partisan insurgency in the north.
In late 1920, the Soviets also intervened in the Baltics. Latvian and Lithuanian white governments were plagued by food shortages and labor unrest. Proletarian neighborhoods in the big cities were controlled by paramilitary red guard formations, and the peasantry, which came under pressure to market its food, was generally ambivalent about the new governments. It took only moderate Soviet assistance to provide the rebels with the military support necessary to oust the bourgeois from rule, which they did at the end of 1920. Shortly afterwards, the Estonian and Latvian Soviet Republics were incorporated as autonomous regional units of the USSR.
Victory in the Soviet-Finnish War (also known as the Winter War and 2nd Finnish Civil War) and the subsequent conflicts in the Baltics brought several additional highly industrialized regions under the Soviet umbrella. As the first revolutionary state and a vital supplier of foodstuffs for the entire socialist bloc, Russia accumulated tremendous prestige; many initially believed that the new International would be headquartered in Moscow, and suspected that the decision for it to be built in Berlin owed more to Leninist magnanimity than anything else.
Conflicts in Central Asia
The contribution of Red Army soldiers to the first battles on the Central European plain was overshadowed by their German counterparts. This must be attributed at least in part to their involvement in an ongoing quagmire in Central Asia, which was a continuing hotbed of unrest and a sore on the new Soviet government. Repeated revolts and insurgencies sapped the Bolsheviks ability to project additional power westward, even as trade with Germany and Scandinavia and an improving food situation in the big cities ameliorated domestic discontent.
The largest bastion of Soviet power in the area was the city of Tashkent. A soviet was proclaimed here shortly after the revolution, though it was composed of Russian settlers and its loyalty to the government was likely more ethnic than ideological. They collaborated with elements of the reforming Jadidist movement, which saw the Bolsheviks as natural allies in the fight against the conservative mullahs.
The defeat of the whites in 1918 prompted the first sustained attempt to assert sovereignty over Central Asia. By this point, a Muslim Kokand Autonomy had already been proclaimed in the Fergana Valley, and a small Bolshevik force entered the area in January of 1919, where it violently suppressed the separatist movement, killing over 20,000 civilians in the process. Sufficient effort was not made to reconstruct civilian authority, however, and shortly after the establishment of the Chernov government in Yekaterinburg, most of Central Asia fell to enemy forces. The Kokand Autonomy was proclaimed once again, the wavering Alash Orda government of Kazakhs agreed to cooperate with Chernov, and in the vital transport hub of Askhabad, Socialist-Revolutionaries launched a successful coup. In the final military operation of white forces, Tashkent was seized by a garrison sympathetic to Kolchak, who knew little of the action, having taken up exile in distant Constantinople. Mutual weakness and mutual interest in containing both Bolshevik and Islamic forces led to uneasy cooperation between the Ashkhabad and Tashkent municipalities; this was one of the only known instances of sustained alliance between white and green forces.
The end of Chernov's rival government once again changed the balance of power in Central Asia. Bolshevik troops streamed back into the region, deposing separatist leaders and forcing the Emirs and Khans of Central Asia to flee south to Afghanistan. Governments led by Jadidist intellectuals were imposed on the conservative Muslim peasantry, and the Alash Orda resubmitted to Soviet rule.
Motivated by a sense of proletarian internationalism, Bolshevik leaders withdrew most of the occupying Russian soldiers from Central Asia in the beginning of 1920, redirecting them to the Baltics, Finland, and the Netherlands. This was a grave mistake. The new Soviet Republics led by reforming jadidist intellectuals had only a thin base of popular support, and without Red Army troops to call upon to police local insurgencies, they were forced to rely upon bands of Russian settlers. Their often abhorrent behavior greatly embittered the local population, which joined the guerilla Basmachi movement in droves.
The absence of the Red Army and stable government authorities created a void of power, and the quasi-islamist Basmachi bandit insurgency surged to occupy it, in the process taking on many of the functions of civilian government. They were supported by the exiled emirs and khans in Afghanistan, some of whom returned when it became clear that the Soviets had once again lost control over Central Asia south of Kazakhstan. Perhaps most critical to the longevity of the Basmachi movement, however, was the assistance provided by the British military mission in Persia. A skeptical British Indian ministry at first resisted the requests of Wilfred Malleson for increased arms, artillery, and ammunition, but they were overruled by Churchill himself, who was impressed by the "martial spirit" of the Muslim rebels and brigands. Whatever the central government's reasoning, the growing Basmachi army created a nightmare situation for the Soviet Army in Central Asia, and forced troops from the west to be withdrawn to police the wayward province.
The Soviets decided to place Enver Pasha, a former leader of Turkey, in charge of an expedition of Red Tatars tasked with reasserting Soviet control over the area. Pasha had succeeded in convincing the Soviet government that he still had sway in Ankara, an assertion belied by the fact that he was no longer permitted to enter his native country. Still, the Soviets had grown quite desparate in their search for Islamic allies, and chose to ignore some of his more inflated claims. His expedition into the Ferghana Valley predictably ended in disaster when he defected to the Basmachi movement; though he later claimed this was out of solidarity with the traditionalist Muslims of Central Asia, it was later revealed that he received a substantial bribe from the British intelligence services.
It would take much of 1921 for the Soviets to fully pacify Central Asia and defeat the British-supplied Basmachi army, which was now led by Enver Pasha. They were forced to give up on some of the more ambitious elements of their reform agenda; the
waqf (clerical property) and Islamic schooling were enshrined in the new constitutions of the four new non-kazakh soviet republics in Central Asia, and Jadidist intellectuals were forced to implement clerical and education reform in a slower, more incremental manner. These concessions helped in winning the loyalty of the local Muslim population and stripping the insurgency of its social base.
Having secured Central Asia, the Soviets could at last take revenge on the British for their support of the Basmachi movement. Supply routes into Northern India were solidified and new roads laid down; Afghanistan hardly had the capacity to repulse Soviet convoys from using the thin Wakhan corridor
en route to India, though they did protest vigorously at the violation of their sovereignty. The steady supply of Soviet arms, ammunition, and medicine to the INC government were crucial in keeping it in the fight, especially given the parlous state of the Indian Army, which found itself increasingly outgunned by the swelling British Army. In new garb and with new players, the great game went on.
