that this requires the Sovietization of Hungary as well as perhaps Czechia [Czechoslovakia] and Romania.’32 On 10 August the Politburo approved Trotsky’s proposal for Comintern Congress delegates to go home and prepare for revolution. Confident of success, he asked for a hundred German communists to be assigned to the front line to conduct propaganda — he assumed that they would soon be talking to Germans in Germany.33
Lenin appreciated that the French and British would not sit on their hands while Berlin ripped up the Versailles treaty. He devised a scheme for a coalition of the far left and the far right in Germany. Although the Freikorps and their sympathizers detested communism and had bloodily crushed the Spartacists, they agreed with Comintern that the Western Allies had reduced their country to slavery. Lenin urged German communist leaders to line up with them to reclaim freedom for their country.34 The alliance would be strictly provisional. He expected that, once Germany regained its full independence, there would be civil war while the communists and the right-wing paramilitaries fought it out for supremacy.35 He predicted that a proletarian dictatorship on the Soviet model would emerge from this. He said nothing in public, but Radek referred to the basic idea in
Soviet leaders anyway accepted the likelihood of a second Great War when the Western Allies crossed the German border in full strength to suppress any government that refused to recognize the treaty of Versailles. But Lenin and his comrades felt they simply had to force a breach in Russia’s international quarantine. As the Red Army advanced into Poland there was already a great deal of political unrest in Germany and the government was worried about more than just the German communists. Ministers feared that the Independent Social-Democratic Party might collude in a
Lenin had already discussed with Stalin how best to organize a system of Soviet-style states stretching from the Rhineland to the Pacific. Trotsky stayed out of the debate, having talked throughout the Great War about the achievability of a United States of Europe. But Lenin now wanted a single federation of communist republics linking Europe and Asia. In this way, Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine would join up with Soviet Germany and Soviet Poland. Stalin was sceptical, telling Lenin that the German people were unlikely to want membership of a communist federation founded and led by Russians. Lenin had omitted to take the national factor into consideration. Stalin’s counter-proposal was to establish not one but two federations, the first being based in Moscow and the other in Berlin. Such federations would of course be headed by parties united under the Communist International, and Stalin implicitly proposed that this was a sufficient safeguard against disunity and strife. He offered the idea in good faith only to receive a furious rebuke from Lenin, who accused him of succumbing to nationalism. Stalin was affronted; he wrote back exclaiming that Soviet leaders had to be intelligent about the challenges that they had to surmount if they were to communize central Europe.37
The dispute soon blew over as Lenin focused his attention on the campaign for Warsaw. He and the Politburo turned down Sergo Ordjonikidze’s plan for ‘a military force to be sent into Persia’ in mid-August.38 Nor did they see any need to recall the Soviet delegation they had sent to London, which from the beginning of August was reinforced by the arrival of Politburo member Kamenev. The idea was that Krasin would continue to lead the talks on trade while Kamenev handled the diplomacy about war and peace in whatever way the changing situation demanded.39 Lenin and Trotsky were keeping their options open; and Trotsky, while directing the Red Army to break through to Germany, asked the Politburo to use diplomatic means to secure a rail route across Poland for the shipment of arms from German businesses — Central Committee member Alexei Rykov was then given the task of buying the weaponry. The Politburo agreed.40 The fight was on for supremacy in central Europe. As the Reds hurtled towards Warsaw, Soviet leaders felt no inhibition about simultaneously planning to crush the German capitalist elites and do big business with them.
The British sought to prevent any such outcome by announcing a diplomatic initiative for peace between Russia and Poland. Kamenev and Krasin called at 10 Downing Street for talks with Lloyd George and the Conservative Party leader Andrew Bonar Law on 4 August;41 but the results were inconclusive, and the next day Kamenev set out Soviet objections in a letter to Lloyd George.42 A further meeting lasting five hours was held on 6 August. This time Churchill was in attendance for a while as Lloyd George and Bonar Law debated with Kamenev and Krasin, and an agreement was reached which was to be relayed to Moscow. Lloyd George hoped to have Lenin’s reply before he met the French Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand in Kent the following day.43 The British government wanted an immediate armistice. To the French, though, this seemed intolerable as it would lend respectability to a bandit regime, and Lloyd George felt compelled to back down; he also felt that the Poles had to some degree brought the Soviet invasion on themselves by their Ukrainian campaign.44 He tried to demonstrate his open-mindedness in foreign policy by receiving a Labour Party delegation and listening to their demands for non-interference in Russia. He replied that he could not forget that the Bolsheviks were undemocratic and adduced the latest statements of Bertrand Russell, who had opposed the Great War but then turned against the Soviet leadership. Trade union leader and Labour Party militant Ernie Bevin urged the Prime Minister to ignore French pressure and threatened trouble if military force or supplies were sent to Pilsudski.45 Lloyd George replied that he had broken with Soviet Russia because Lenin had abandoned the Allies, although he insisted that if Lenin now wanted peace he could have it.46
The political temperature in the United Kingdom rose still higher when an influential group in the Independent Labour Party called for Churchill’s impeachment as Secretary of State for War.47 Churchill issued a quick rebuttal:
It is not the British who are making war, but the Russian Bolshevists. They are at this moment invading Poland and trampling down its freedom. They are doing their best to light the flames of war in Persia, Afghanistan, and, if possible, in India. Their avowed intention is to procure by violence a revolution in every country… My sole object has been, and will be, to keep such hateful foreign oppression far from our native land.48
While denying he had any wish for a Western crusade against Soviet Russia, he urged that the talks on any commercial treaty be suspended immediately.49
Not even Lloyd George was willing to see Poland defeated, and he had already stated that the British would go to war again if the Red Army occupied Warsaw.50 As a result he was relieved when reports indicated that Pilsudski’s headlong retreat had stopped in the Polish capital. Pilsudski declared that Warsaw would be defended to the last man, and he had grounds for confidence. The Reds were exhausted by their hot pursuit of the Polish army; their supply lines were frail and over-stretched and their equipment inadequate. Their commander in the northern sector, Mikhail Tukhachevski, found it hard to co-ordinate his advance as Warsaw came within range. Exposing the naivety and wrong-headedness of Lenin’s rationale for the war, Poles of all classes saw the Reds as Russian invaders rather than internationalist liberators. They waited for the enemy on the eastern side of the River Vistula where Pilsudski had time to organize them. He also had the advantage that Stalin, the leading commissar in the southern sector of the Red advance, ignored orders to divert his armies from outside Lwow and reinforce the strategic thrust at the Polish capital. It would probably have made little difference if Stalin had shown greater compliance since Tukhachevski’s forces were rapidly torn apart by the resurgent Polish army. By 19 August the Reds were conducting a general retreat from the Vistula. Central Europe was saved from Sovietization.51
The scale of the defeat outdid anything suffered by the Reds in the Civil War after Kolchak’s initial success at the end of 1918. There was nothing they could do but fall back and sue for a truce. The Politburo convened on 1 September. Trotsky, the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, gave a gloomy account of the campaign and recommended agreeing to a ‘compromise peace’ — a quaint formulation for acceptance of defeat. Peace talks would be requested with the Poles in Riga.52 At the next Politburo meeting, five days later, Chicherin pressed for peace to be signed fast with Latvia and Lithuania.53 It was plain to the leadership that Moscow had to content itself with the territory won in the Civil War or else risk losing everything. Kamenev left for Russia on 11 September.54 He had had a last meeting with Lloyd George a day earlier and, together with Krasin, had become acquainted with the latest British terms for a trade treaty. On peace, there was no longer
