The Penguin History of Modern Russia

better facilitate economic reconstruction than the pursuit of ‘European socialist revolution’. If Lenin needed proof, it was supplied by the German communists. In the last fortnight of March 1921, encouraged by Zinoviev and Bukharin, they tried to seize power in Berlin. The German government easily suppressed this botched ‘March Action’; and Lenin roundly upbraided his comrades for their adventurism.

By then Lenin was no longer looking only to foreign concessionaires for help with economic recovery. In April he argued in favour of expanding the NEP beyond its original limits; and he achieved his ends when the Tenth Party Conference in May 1921 agreed to re-legalize private small-scale manufacturing. Soon afterwards peasants obtained permission to trade not only locally but anywhere in the country. Commercial middlemen, too, were allowed to operate again. Private retail shops were reopened. Rationing was abolished in November 1921, and everyone was expected to buy food from personal income. In August 1921, state enterprises had been reorganized into large ‘trusts’ responsible for each great manufacturing and mining subsector; they were instructed that raw materials had to be bought and workers to be paid without subsidy from the central state budget. In March 1922, moreover, Lenin persuaded the Eleventh Party Congress to allow peasant households to hire labour and rent land.

Thus a reintroduction of capitalist practices took place and ‘War Communism’, as the pre-1921 economic measures were designated, was ended. A lot of Bolsheviks felt that the October Revolution was being betrayed. Tempers became so frayed that the Tenth Conference proceedings were kept secret.⁵ Not since the Brest-Litovsk controversy had Lenin had to endure such invective. But he fought back, purportedly shouting at his critics: ‘Please don’t try teaching me what to include and what to leave out of Marxism: eggs don’t teach their hens how to lay!’⁶

He might not have succeeded at the Conference if his critics had not appreciated the party’s need for unity until the rebellions in the country had been suppressed; and Lenin sternly warned about the adverse effects of factionalism. Throughout 1921–2 there persisted an armed threat to the regime. The Kronstadt mutiny was put down; its organizers were shot and thousands of ordinary sailors, most of whom had supported the Bolsheviks in 1917, were dispatched to the Ukhta labour camp in the Russian north.⁷ The rural revolts, too, were crushed. Red Army commander Tukhachevski, after defeating the Kronstadters, was sent to quell the Tambov peasant uprising in mid-1921.⁸ Insurrections in the rest of the Volga region, in Ukraine, Siberia and the North Caucasus were treated similarly. The Politburo also smashed the industrial strikes. The message went forth from the Kremlin that the economic reforms were not a sign of weakened political resolve.

Not only real but also potential trouble-makers were dealt with severely. Those members of the Socialist- Revolutionary Party’s Central Committee who were still at liberty were rounded up. In summer 1922 they were paraded in Soviet Russia’s first great show-trial and given lengthy prison sentences. There was a proposal by Lenin to do the same to the Menshevik Organizational Committee, and he was annoyed at being overruled by the Politburo.⁹ But the lesson was administered that the Bolshevik party, having won the Civil War, would share its power with no other party.

Nor were there to be illusions about national self-determination. It is true that Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had gained independence and that provinces had been lost to Poland, Romania and Turkey. Yet by March 1921, when Georgia was re-conquered, the Red Army had largely restored the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Russian nationalists applauded this. It would not be long, they surmised, before the Bolsheviks accommodated themselves to Russia’s geo-political interests and abandoned their communist ideas. Red Army commanders, some of whom had served as officers in the Imperial Army, were delighted that Russian military, political and economic power had risen again over two continents. In the People’s Commissariats, too, many long-serving bureaucrats felt a similar pride. The emigre liberal Professor Nikolai Trubetskoi founded a ‘Change of Landmarks’ group that celebrated the NEP as the beginning of the end of the Bolshevik revolutionary project.

The Bolsheviks responded that they had made the October Revolution expressly to establish a multinational state wherein each national or ethnic group would be free from oppression by any other. They refused to accept that they were imperialists even though many nations were held involuntarily under their rule. They were able to delude themselves in this fashion for two main reasons. The first was that they undoubtedly wanted to abolish the old empires around the world. In this sense they really were anti-imperialists. Secondly, the central Bolshevik leadership had no conscious desire to give privileges to the Russian nation. Most of them were appalled by the evidence that Russian nationalist sentiment existed at the lower levels of the Soviet state and even the communist party. And so by being anti-nationalist, Lenin and his colleagues assumed that they were automatically anti- imperialist.

But how, then, were they going to resolve their very complex problems of multi-national governance in peacetime? Probably most leading Bolsheviks saw the plurality of independent Soviet republics as having been useful to gain popularity during the Civil War but as being likely to reinforce nationalist tendencies in the future.¹⁰ There was consensus in the party that a centralized state order was vital; no one was proposing that any of the republican governments or communist parties should have the right to disobey the Bolshevik leadership in the Kremlin. But how to achieve this? Stalin, who headed the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, wished to deprive the Soviet republics of even their formal independence by turning them into autonomous republics within the RSFSR on the Bashkirian model. His so-called federalism would therefore involve the simple expedient of incorporating Ukraine, Belorussia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia into an enlarged RSFSR, and he had been working along these lines since mid-1920.¹¹

Lenin thought Stalin’s project smacked of Russian imperial dominance; and his counter-proposal was to federate the RSFSR on equal terms with the other Soviet republics in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.¹² In summer 1922 their disagreements became acrimonious. Yet it must be noted that the ground separating Lenin and Stalin was narrow. Neither aimed to disband the system of authoritarian rule through a highly centralized, unitary communist party run from Moscow. While castigating the United Kingdom’s retention of India with her empire, the Politburo had no scruples about annexing states which had gained their independence from Russia between 1917 and 1921.

In any case Lenin and Stalin themselves faced common opposition in the localities. Their adversaries fell into two main groups. The first group demanded a slackening of the Kremlin’s grip on republican political bodies.¹³ Even so, none of these persons demanded a complete release. They wished to remain part of a common Soviet state and understood that they depended upon the Red Army for their survival in government. The other group of adversaries felt that official policy was not too strict but too indulgent towards the non-Russian republics. Both Lenin and Stalin wished to keep the promises made since the October Revolution that native- language schools, theatres and printing presses would be fostered. Stalin in 1921 was accused of ‘artificially implanting’ national consciousness; the charge was that, if the Belorussians had not been told they were Belorussians, nobody would have been any the wiser.¹⁴

This debate was of great importance (and the reason why it remains little noticed is that Stalin suppressed discussion of it in the 1930s when he did not wish to appear indulgent to the non-Russians). Stalin’s self-defence was that his priority was to disseminate not nationalist but socialist ideas. His argument was primarily pragmatic. He pointed out that all verbal communication had to occur in a comprehensible language and that most of the people inhabiting the Soviet-held lands bordering Russia did not speak Russian. A campaign of compulsory Russification would therefore cause more political harm than good.

Nor did Stalin fail to mention that the vast majority of the population was constituted by peasants, who had a traditional culture which had yet to be permeated by urban ideas.¹⁵ If Marxism was to succeed in the Soviet Union, the peasantry had to be incorporated into a culture that was not restricted to a particular village. Whatever else they were, peasants inhabiting the Belorussian region were not Russians. It behoved the communist party to enhance their awareness of their own national culture — or at least such aspects of their national culture that did not clash blatantly with Bolshevik ideology. Thus would more and more people be brought into the ambit of the Soviet political system. Bolshevism affirmed that society had to be activated, mobilized, indoctrinated. For this reason, in contrast with other modern multinational states which had discouraged national consciousness, Politburo members fostered it. They did so because they worried lest there should be further national revolts against Bolshevism; but they also calculated that, by avoiding being seen as imperial oppressors, they would eventually win over all their national and ethnic groups to principles of international fraternity. The central party leaders had not ceased being militant internationalists.

A few leading Bolsheviks resented this as being a cynical approach. Practically all these critics were post- 1917 recruits to the party, and prominent among them was a young Tatar named Mirza Said Sultan-Galiev. As a functionary in the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, he had impugned any action that seemed to favour