For a while, Lenin remains bullish about the prospects for international revolution, long assumed to be the only context in which the Russian revolution might survive.
Even as Lenin recovers from a failed assassination attempt in August 1918, even after the dreadful murder of the Marxists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany and the collapse of their Spartacist rebellion, Bolshevik optimism is not, at first, much dampened. In the aftermath of the war, Germany is in the throes of a dramatic social polarisation, that will flare up repeatedly between 1918 and 1923. A soviet government arises in Hungary; class struggle erupts in Austria in 1918 and 1919; Italy sees the upheaval of the ‘two red years’ of 1919 and 1920. Even England is rocked by strikes.
But over the course of 1919 and beyond, instance by instance this wave is quelled, and reaction sets in. The Bolsheviks wake up to the extent of their isolation, as the situation within their borders, too, becomes desperate.
In May 1918, 50,000 soldiers of the Czechoslovakian Legion revolt. This, after the false start of Gatchina, kicks off the Civil War.
From 1918 to 1921, the Bolsheviks must fight several counter-revolutionary or ‘White’ forces, backed, assisted and armed by foreign powers. As the Whites encroach on the revolution’s territories, animated by violent nostalgia, ‘Green’ peasant revolts – most famously that of the legendary anarchist Makhno in the Ukraine – stagger the Bolshevik regime. By 1919, Russian territory is occupied by American, French, British, Japanese, German, Serbian and Polish troops. Socialism, the red bacillus, is more irksome to the Americans, British and French than are their wartime foes. David Francis, the American ambassador to Russia, writes of his concern that ‘if these damned Bolsheviks are permitted to remain in control of the country it will not only be lost to its devoted people but Bolshevik rule will undermine all governments and be a menace to society itself’.
Churchill is particularly obsessed with the ‘nameless beast’, the ‘foul baboonery of Bolshevism’, and perfectly explicit that it is his greatest enemy. ‘Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading,’ he declares in 1919. ‘It is sheer humbug to pretend that it is not far worse than German militarism.’ As the war ends, he publicises his intention to ‘Kill the Bolshie, Kiss the Hun’.
The Allies pour troops into Russia, screwing down an embargo, stopping food from reaching the starving population of Soviet Russia. And they funnel funds to the Whites, no matter how unsavoury – supporting a dictatorship under Alexander Kolchak, and regarding Grigory Semenov, whose Cossack forces unleash a reign of terror in Siberia, as, in the words of one American observer, ‘tolerably severe’.
The fractious, squabbling Whites, however, for all their funding, for all the Allies’ support, are unable to win militarily or to gain popular backing, due to their opposition to any concessions for the Russian peasantry or restive national minorities – and to their barbarism. Their troops engage in indiscriminate butchery, burning villages and killing some 150,000 Jews in enthusiastic pogroms, performing exemplary torture – mass flogging, burial alive, mutilation, dragging prisoners behind horses – and summary execution. Their instructions to take no prisoners are often graphically explicit.
Such terror is in the service of their dream of new authoritarianism. If Bolshevism falls to the Whites, the eyewitness Chamberlin writes, its replacement will be ‘a military dictator … riding into Moscow on a white horse’. Not the Italian language but the Russian would have given the world the word for fascism, as Trotsky later puts it.
Under such unrelenting pressures, these are months and years of unspeakable barbarity and suffering, starvation, mass death, the near-total collapse of industry and culture, of banditry, pogroms, torture and cannibalism. The beleaguered regime unleashes its own Red Terror.
And there is no doubt that its reach and depth expand beyond control; that some agents of the Cheka, the political police, seduced by personal power, sadism or the degradation of the moment, are thugs and murderers unconstrained by political conviction and wielding new authority. There are no shortage of testimonials as to their dreadful acts.
Other agents carry out their work with anguish. One may feel sceptical, even disgusted, at the notion of an attempt, under desperate necessity, at an ‘ethical’ terror, a terror as limited as possible, but the testimonials of agents tormented at what they believed they had no choice but to do are powerful. ‘I have spilt so much blood I no longer have any right to live,’ says a drunken and distraught Dzherzhinsky at the end of 1918. ‘You must shoot me now,’ he begs.
One unlikely source, Major General William Graves, who commanded US forces in Siberia, considers himself ‘well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks’. Many of the Soviet regime’s leaders struggle to restrain the degrading tendencies of their own Terror, of which they are horribly aware. In 1918, a Cheka newspaper notoriously calls for torture: the CC excoriates the editors and closes it down, and the Soviet renews its condemnation of any such practice. But without question a political and moral rot is setting in.
Faced with the wholesale collapse, and a continuing and devastating famine, in 1921 the regime rolls back the emergency measures of militarised requisitioning and control known as ‘War Communism’, replacing them with the New Economic Policy, or NEP. From 1921 to 1927, the regime encourages a degree of private initiative, allowing smaller-scale enterprises to make a profit. Wage policies are liberalised, foreign experts and technical advisors authorised. Though the government creates various large collective farms, much land is turned over to the wealthier peasants. The ‘NEPmen’, spivs and wheeler-dealers, start to make good on speculation and burgeoning black markets.
The country labours through a catastrophic aftermath, a rubble of industry, agriculture, and the working class itself. War Communism was a desperate exigency, and NEP is a necessary retreat, allowing a degree of stability, the boosting of production. An expression of weakness, it comes at a cost. The bureaucratic apparatus is suspended now above the broken remnants of the class for which it claims to speak.
Among the Bolsheviks are dissenting grouplets, official and unofficial. Kollontai and Shlyapnikov lead the ‘Workers’ Opposition’, hankering to hand power to a working class that barely exists any more. Old-Bolshevik intellectuals, ‘Democratic Centralists’, oppose the centralisation. The Tenth Congress of 1921 prohibits factions. Advocates of the move, including Lenin, present it as a temporary exigency to unite the party. Those factions that, inevitably, come later – the Left Opposition, the United Opposition – will not be official.