in Berlin would be the first step towards a continental bloodbath. Bolshevik leaders thought this a price worth paying in the Marxist revolutionary cause. Small wonder that the peoples of eastern and east-central Europe refused to take a casual approach to the possibility that communism might soon be on the march again. Owners of businesses worried for their property; priests and their congregations fretted that spiritual freedom might be crushed. Millions of people yearned simply for peace. The Bolsheviks had no intention of giving them rest.
So a first Cold War took place between the USSR and the Allies even before 1945. Obviously the Iron Curtain that Ethel Snowden had in mind in 1920 was not the same as the one that stretched down the middle of Europe after 1945. What she mainly meant was Russia’s isolation from the world rather than a political, ideological and military stand-off between two global military and political coalitions. Yet the potential for the first Cold War to turn into an even bigger and more dangerous one was already present — and it became a reality when the Soviet Union became a great power by dint of the country’s industrialization in the 1930s and its victory on the eastern front against the Third Reich in 1944–5.
The October Revolution had lasted longer than most observers had thought possible back in 1917. After breaking the spine of the Wehrmacht in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, the Red Army was the first armed force into Berlin in 1945. The spread of communism that had been the dream of Lenin and Trotsky was fulfilled as Stalin communized the entire eastern half of Europe. Immediately he directed the USSR’s new industrial might at achieving military parity with the US. The two great military coalitions of NATO and the Warsaw Pact avoided all-out war with each other. Instead there was a second Cold War involving intensified political, economic and ideological competition — and by the 1970s a quarter of the globe’s land area was governed by communist states. The tensions between the USSR and the US frequently came close to military clashes, but mercifully the two sides held themselves back from the brink. When deep structural reforms were undertaken in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Cold War began to fade in ferocity, and on the very last day of 1991, seventy years after Lenin and Trotsky had seized power in Petrograd, the USSR collapsed under the pressures of its own internal transformation.
From 1917 through to 1991 the West had dealt with Soviet Russia in a confused fashion. There was endless controversy. Some foreigners became communists and worked for revolutionary change in their countries; others aimed at a peaceful coexistence with Russia and hoped that trade and cultural contacts would steadily erode Bolshevik extremism. Another trend of thought regretted that any such compromise was made. There were few advocates of an anti-Soviet crusade in the 1920s, but many argued for the reimposition of an economic quarantine.
The history of the USSR proceeded by sharp twists and turns that nobody could predict in the early years of the Soviet communist dictatorship, and the temptation must be avoided to judge the naivety of contemporaries with the privilege of hindsight. They faced a difficult situation. The war between the Allies and the Central Powers demanded the full attention of the combatant countries. No Allied government was willing to recognize the Soviet revolutionary state, and normal diplomatic relations were suspended. The obvious weaknesses of Bolshevik rule, however, made it sensible for foreign powers to query the capacity of the Bolsheviks to survive. Nor was it easy to adopt genuinely effective methods to bring down the Soviet government or counteract its external menace. All Western leaders wanting a tougher line to be taken on Bolshevism had to cope with obstruction by their labour movements and with pressures from political and commercial lobbies. In any case, their military expeditions were constantly too small to overturn communism. The Whites, even with Allied assistance, were ultimately no match for the Reds; and Western attempts at outright subversion failed. But this does not mean that the Soviet victory was preordained. Not at all: the Bolsheviks came close to being overturned by their own peasants, sailors and workers in early 1921; and Russian and Western critics of Lloyd George had some justification in complaining that he chose that precise moment to sign a trade treaty, helping to bail out the Soviet economy.
After all the excuses are made for them, however, Western political leaders undeniably had abundant information about the purposes and potential of Soviet communism — and if Winston Churchill could always see Soviet Russia for what it was, other politicians could have done the same. The West’s diplomats and intelligence officers served them well. And when the diplomats left Russian soil, the spies and telegraphists as well as the journalists filled most of the gaps in international reportage: communism was never obscured from view for the leaders who took the big decisions. It is true that the information was often patchy and even contradictory, but it was good enough for judgements to be made. Yet the politicians acted on reports only when the content suited them. They behaved largely on the basis of instinct and preconception. Policy was quickly decided and intellectual self-doubt was suppressed.
Soviet leaders, too, trusted their intuition and accepted only such counsel as fitted their prejudices. There was still heavier pressure on them than on Western leaders to act quickly and decisively. The Revolution was ceaselessly threatened. Every Bolshevik knew that inactivity in foreign and security matters was not a safe option. Even a treaty with one or more of the Western Allies could bring only temporary relief. Soviet Russia, they thought, would remain vulnerable until such time as a Soviet Germany existed. Communists interpreted everything that happened to them after 1917 through the prism of their long-held suppositions. They saw the maleficent hand of the West in every setback for the October Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin agreed at least about this. Victory in the Great War placed the Allies in dominion over the world, and it was their Allied businessmen who reaped the advantage. Soviet Russia had to be on its guard against a crusade to bring down the communist order. The Kremlin was alert to any opportunity to manoeuvre among the victor powers; but at a time when the world seemed to spin on a revolutionary axis, the ideological core of communist thinking remained a fixed one.
Looking out on the world in the early 1920s, the communist leaders breathed more easily than they had done a few months earlier. Western leaders for a while turned their faces away from the Russian question. They had failed to supplant communism in 1917–21 and now they had many other dilemmas of their own to resolve. They hoped that Russia’s tumult would stay within Russian borders. For many years it did. But when the Red Army crossed Poland into Germany in 1945, it came with even greater menace to its neighbours and the rest of the world.
POSTSCRIPT
Many of the men and women who have populated this history of early Soviet Russia continued to influence public affairs long after the extraordinary events of 1917–21. There were also some who settled down to lives of quiet seclusion. The October Revolution of 1917 had briefly brought them all together — either in solidarity or else in collision. It was an intense experience; indeed it was the most intense that most of them ever had. But soon after the revolutionary whirlwind had swept them into its vortex, it forcefully scattered them to every point of the compass where they encountered a variety of fates. Although some survived into old age, others came to an abrupt, untimely end.
Lenin could never have imagined what awaited him in death. The body of this militant atheist was embalmed and laid out for worshipful display under a glass canopy in a mausoleum specially erected on Red Square, where it remains to this day. Communists in the USSR and other countries saluted his memory as he was turned into the object of quasi-religious devotion. After the Second World War, ‘Marxism-Leninism’ became the official ideology of states in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. Even today, decades after the dissolution of the USSR, Lenin is treated with reverence in Russia. The same is not true of Trotsky. In 1929, after losing his struggle with Stalin for political supremacy, Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union and then sentenced to death
Felix Dzerzhinski, who became disenchanted with the official leadership after Lenin’s death, succumbed to chronic ill health and died in 1926. Adolf Ioffe joined Trotsky in political opposition but in 1927 fell into despair and committed suicide, leaving Trotsky a note in which he urged him to keep up the fight against Stalin. Georgi Chicherin retired in 1930, worn down by illness and by Stalin’s growing disregard for his advice on policy; his funeral in 1934 was a quiet one. Lev Karakhan and Karl Radek disappeared in the Great Terror of the late 1930s. That
