was also prestige for the prominent leaders of the October 1917 seizure of power: Lenin, Trotski and Sverdlov were examples. Since the Bolsheviks were led by doctrinaires, prestige also accrued to those who wrote fluently and often. Lenin, Trotski, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin continued to publish books in the Civil War. Stalin could not compete in these arenas. He was always on the move. He was a poor orator in any formal sense and had little opportunity to write.
His merits tended to be overlooked even though he was an integral part of the ascendant political group. The trouble was that he had yet to realise his importance in the eyes of the group, the party or society at large. Just occasionally he allowed his resentment to show. In November 1919 he tried to resign his job as Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Southern Front. Lenin, alarmed, rushed to get a Politburo decision to implore him to reconsider. Stalin was too useful to be discarded. Yet what was attractive to Lenin was horrific to the enemies of Bolshevism. Stalin in the Civil War was an early version of the despot who instigated the Great Terror of 1937–8. It was only because all the other communist leaders applied the politics of violence after the October Revolution that his maladjusted personality did not fully stand out. But this is no excuse. No one acquainted with Stalin in 1918–19 should have been surprised by his later ‘development’.
16. THE POLISH CORRIDOR
The Civil War in Russia between the Reds and the Whites was over by the end of 1919. Once the Red Army had conquered the Russian lands it was a matter of time before the outlying regions of the former empire were overrun. Reds drove the last White army, under General Anton Denikin, into the Crimean peninsula. Denikin handed his command to Petr Wrangel, who instantly changed policies towards civilian society. Among these was a promise to the peasants that land would not be restored to the gentry after the Civil War. Realpolitik was overdue if the Whites were to improve their military prospects. Nevertheless the material and logistical position of the forces under Wrangel was hopeless unless the Red political and military command made a fundamental mistake. Wrangel’s men were preparing for their escape abroad.
Victory in the Civil War encouraged communist leaders to seek opportunities to expand ‘Soviet power’ to the West. They itched to spread revolution. In March 1918 Lenin — with help from Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Sverdlov — had adjured the party to be patient at a time when most Bolsheviks had wanted a ‘revolutionary war’. But even before the German military collapse in November 1918 Lenin had given orders to assemble massive supplies of conscripts and grain so that the Red Army might intervene in strength in Germany.1 Expansionist ideas did not disappear with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Communist International (known as the Comintern) had been formed on Lenin’s initiative in Petrograd in March 1919 to inaugurate, expand and coordinate the activities of communist parties in Europe and around the world. The Bolshevik party leadership in the Kremlin sent advisers and finance to the governments briefly established in Munich and Budapest, and the Red Army would have been made available if the fighting in the Civil War in Russia had permitted.2 In summer 1920 Lenin wet his lips as he contemplated the situation in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and northern Italy. It seemed that the chain of Western capitalism in Europe would at last be broken. A military campaign to ‘sovietise’ such countries was anticipated.3
Did Bolshevik leaders genuinely have the resources to instigate the creation of fraternal socialist states? Their answer should have been no: the former Russian Empire was in an economic and administrative mess. But triumph in the Civil War had bred overconfidence among Bolsheviks. They had seen off the Whites, and the British and French expeditionary forces had been withdrawn. Who could now resist them? There was also a second consideration in their minds. The Soviet state was isolated. The expansion of the October Revolution was not just an aim: it was a basic need deriving not only from ideology but also from a practical dilemma. The Politburo — and even the cautious Stalin agreed on this — recognised that the Revolution would remain imperilled until it acquired allied states in the West.
During the early campaigns of the Civil War the operational assumption was that foreign territory began at the borders of the former Russian Empire. For this reason the Politburo acted as if it expected the Red Army to reconquer the borderlands as soon as the fighting in Russia was brought to completion. Progress seemed very satisfactory in 1920. Azerbaijan and Armenia were brought to heel — and Stalin and his friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze were regularly involved in strategic and political discussions at the highest level.4 But the Baltic region remained a problem. Attempts had been made to establish Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; but in each case there were counter-coups, and these countries regained their independence in 1918– 19.5 Estonia inaugurated full diplomatic relations with the RSFSR in February 1920. The international situation was unstable. The Bolsheviks did not perceive the western borderlands, any more than those to the south, as foreign places, and Stalin held to this viewpoint with noticeable tenacity.6 But what happened to such countries would depend on what occurred in the broader framework of war and peace in Europe. Bolshevik leaders had to decide on a permanent policy.
Things were brought to a head by armed conflict between Poland and the RSFSR. Clashes had taken place while the Civil War was in spate, and the Polish commander-in-chief Josef Pilsudski had long aspired to form a federal union with Ukraine. In spring 1920 Pilsudski struck deep into Ukrainian territory. On 7 May his forces occupied Kiev, surprising Red Army officers as they waited at bus stops. Sovnarkom appealed for a patriotic war of defence. Sergei Kamenev took supreme military command and his main front commander was the twenty-five- year-old Mikhail Tukhachevski. Volunteers rallied to the Red Army’s banners. Kiev was retaken on 10 June and, after an agreement with the Lithuanian government, a joint offensive seized Vilnius and transferred it to Lithuania. The advance of the Reds was practically unopposed. The British government warned the Soviet leadership to halt its troops, but the Party Central Committee on 16 July took the strategic decision to take the war on to Polish territory, and Lenin informed Stalin and others on the same day.7 (Stalin, based in Kharkov in eastern Ukraine, had been unable to attend.)8 The military command of the Western Front prepared to cross the River Bug and move on Warsaw. European socialist revolution beckoned, and on 23 July the Politburo set up a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee under Julian Marchlewski.9
The British government tried to prevent the spead of communism by calling for peace negotiations and suggesting a new border between the Soviet state and Poland. This was the Curzon Line, named after the British Foreign Secretary in 1920. The advance of the Red Army into central Europe had to be halted. The Politburo had taken such overtures more seriously earlier in the war when Pilsudski looked like winning. But the rapid march of the Reds across Ukraine changed Lenin’s stance and he started to advocate an invasion of Poland.
Stalin was unenthusiastic. He had been warning all summer about the resurgence of White military capacity in the Crimea, and he questioned the wisdom of taking on the Poles while Wrangel remained a threat.10 Even Trotski and Radek, who had opposed Lenin over Brest-Litovsk, were disconcerted by Lenin’s position.11 Stalin’s objections were not confined to his chronic scepticism about European socialist revolution and his concern about Wrangel. He doubted that the Red Army was adequately co-ordinated and organised. He worried about the length and strength of the lines of supply.12 From his base with Red forces in Ukraine he had reason to think he knew what he was writing about. The Soviet state was insecure from attack by the Whites. Plans for a military breakthrough to Poland and Germany were unrealistic. Stalin repeatedly mentioned the danger posed by Wrangel from the Crimea.13 He also reminded Lenin not to underestimate the strength of nationalism among the Polish working class. Stalin was surprised that Lenin, usually his ally on the national question, failed to sense the danger awaiting the Red Army in this respect. He wanted the care used at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 to be applied to the decision on war or peace with Poland.
Lenin would not be thwarted. He had never envisaged revolutionary war as a crude war of conquest. It was rather his assumption that workers across Europe were expected to rise up in support of the Red Army. The leftist elements in the European socialist parties, he anticipated, would rally to the communist cause and the obstacles to the establishment of revolutionary governments would be removed. The Red Army had only thirty-five divisions. The Imperial Army had assembled nearly a hundred divisions against Germany and Austria– Hungary at the outbreak of the First World War. Lenin brushed this aside. Class conflict in Europe would more than make up for the inadequacies of the Red Army. The die was cast by the Politburo. Warsaw would be taken and the way cleared for an advance on Berlin where, as Lenin believed, the Reds would find political disarray they could exploit. The German communists should make an alliance with the German far right to sweep away the Treaty of Versailles of 1919
