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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.95: Russian Empire, Soviet Empire

March of 1921 is quite the pivot point to the Russian Revolution. Maybe not quite at the same level as October 1793 is to the French Revolution, but as with October 1793, you can dang near tell the whole story of the Russian Revolution just by focusing on the events of this one single month. Now it doesn’t quite get you everything the way October 1793 does, but there is a lot packed in here.

On the domestic front, we’ve got the Kronstadt Rebellion that we talked about two weeks ago — a story about competing visions of the meaning of the revolution which pitted against each other not implacable enemies but former close friends and allies from the heady days of 1917.

Then last week, we talked about the 10th Congress of the Communist Party, which politically cleared the way for the uppermost ruling clique of the party to build a walled off internal dictatorship to match the walled off external dictatorship they were building throughout Russia.

Economically, we have the unveiling of the New Economic Policy, which was a huge shift that can only be understood by explaining the whys and hows of war communism, the crisis of massive peasant revolt sweeping the Russian countryside, and the failure of the international proletarian revolution to materialize after World War I.

And all of that is just on the domestic side of the ledger. Today, we will turn to the international scene, and find that just as March 1921 is an epicenter for really important internal affairs, it was also an epicenter for really important external affairs. On almost every front, Soviet Russia’s place in the world solidifies here with a series of treaties and diplomatic agreements with historical rivals like Poland and Turkey, ideological rivals like the arch-capitalist British, as well as new nominally independent entities that wind up serving as little more than puppet states controlled by Moscow.

The 10th Party Congress also set the tone for a debate inside the Communist Party about how to deal with non-Russian nationalities in their sphere of orbit. This debate pitted those who believed in a great centralized communist zone as the only way to survive in a world still run by capitalist imperialism and those who believed that ignoring national identity and the powerful aspirations for national self-respect and self-determination was probably a recipe for disaster.

So what I want to do today is go around the horn of the old Russian Empire, to lay out explicitly where everyone stands in relation to everyone else as the reality of the post-revolution, post-World War I, post-Civil War international scene are fully revealed and solidified here in the spring of 1921.

Geographically, we’ll start up in the northwest with some of the territories of the old Russian Empire that the Russian Communists would not be bringing into their fold. The Republic of Finland, for example, had declared its independence in 1917, a declaration loudly and repeatedly recognized by the Bolsheviks. Now, though, the White faction, that won the Finnish Civil War was of course no great friend of the Russian Reds, they had stuck to neutrality during the Russian Civil War, and in October 1920, Finland and the Soviet Union signed a treaty formally recognizing one another and defining their mutually recognized borders.

This was also true of the three Baltic states. During the war with Poland, Soviet Russia had signed treaties recognizing the independence of Estonia in February 1920, lithuania in July 1920, and Latvia in August 1920; recognition that would be undisturbed by the ambiguous end of the Polish-Soviet War. So Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — all constituent parts of the former Russian Empire — are now out on their own, recognized as independent sovereign entities. We’re not yet even at the stage where the du jour independence of the Baltic states was merely a legal fiction, and everyone knew that in point of fact, they were merely puppets of the Russians; that doesn’t happen for another 20 years. For now, they well and truly were independent.

Now moving south from the Baltic, we get to one of the big March 1921 pivot points: the Peace of Riga, which was signed on March 18th, 1921, between the Second Polish Republic and Soviet Russia. This was the treaty that not only ended the Polish Soviet War, but it defined the western extremities of Soviet influence, and solidified the political geography of eastern and central Europe during the interwar period. And just to drive home the point of precisely how much everything is coming together at the same time, Poland and Russia signed the Peace of Riga on March 18th, three days after Lenin unveiled the NEP, two days after the Communist Party issued its Ban on Factions, and just one day after the Red Army launched its final assault on the Kronstadt rebels.

The hot phase of the Polish-Soviet War had of course ended with the ceasefire back in October 1920, but now diplomats for the two combatants signd, their names to a treaty that left the grander ambitions of both sides totally dissatisfied. The Polish Republic had gone into the war envisioning the rebirth of the great Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Soviet Russia had gone in believing they would drive the communist revolution all the way to Warsaw as a mere prelude to launching themselves into Western europe. Now because neither side had really won the war, neither side got what they really wanted. Poland and Russia signed a treaty that left both well short of their respective territorial ambitions. Both recognized the independence of the Baltic states, and they drew a line through Belarus and Ukraine giving the Poles the western bits and recognizing the eastern parts as independent sovereign states.

In the big picture, this means that the boundaries of Soviet Russia are not going to be anywhere near the boundaries of the old Russian Empire, which in addition to encompassing the old Baltic states had extended all the way to Warsaw. So at the end of the day, most of what the Russians had renounced during the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk remained renounced, at least for the time being.

Now this brings us, though, to the status of Ukraine and Belarus and the new order of things, a question that was debated at the 10th Party Congress — although that debate got lost in the shuffle a bit, because they were much bigger things going on.

The leadership of the Communist Party had decided not to annex these territories directly, but instead to recognize them as independent national republics; specifically as Soviet Socialist Republics, or SSRs. This was a bow to political reality, as Commissar of Nationalities Joseph Stalin said to critics who claimed there was no such thing as a Belarusian or Ukrainian national identity to recognize. Stalin said, “Here I have a written note to the effect that we communists, supposedly artificially forced a Belarusian nation. This is false because a Belarusian nation exists, which has its own language different from Russian, and that the culture of the Belarusian nation can be raised only in its own language. Such speeches were made five years ago about Ukraine concerning the Ukrainian nation. Clearly the Ukrainian nation exists and the development of its culture is a duty of Communists. One cannot go against history.”

Lenin in particular was very concerned about Russian chauvinism creeping into the Communist Party. Russian chauvinism then often presented in the language of doctrinaire left wing ideology, but which in practice seemed little different from the attitudes of tsarist colonial officials. Now, as with all things Lenin, his opinions were driven by strategic and tactical concerns — that is, how do we grow the influence of Soviet communism throughout the world. But for example, he had been very critical of the Communist officials who had failed to establish any kind of popular base in Ukraine during the civil war period. The quote-unquote “Ukrainian Communist Party” had not been founded in Kiev, but Moscow, and it was composed almost entirely of ethnic Russians. They had come into Ukraine as Russians speaking and acting as Russians and effectively denying Ukrainian language and culture existed. Now they dress this up in the language of class conflict and international solidarity and rejecting bourgeois nationalism, but to the local Ukrainians, these Russian Communists looked very different from the old tsarist officials. So twice, the Ukrainian Communist Party had followed the red Army into Ukraine and twice gotten themselves kicked right back out again. The third time they came into Ukraine, after the Red Army rolled back Denikin for the last time by the end of 1919, Lenin issued explicit instructions to recruit ethnic Ukrainians, speak the Ukrainian language, foster and promote Ukrainian culture. Failure to do this would simply mean facing a war of national liberation led by formidable partisans like Nestor Makhno.

Now, this policy may have been cynical and tactical, but it was practical. And this time the Communists managed to stay. The same held true up in Belarus, and so by March 1921, we have these recognized entities — the Belarusian SSR, and the Ukrainian SSR. Clearly they were allied with the Communists in Moscow, but as a matter of legality, they were independent sovereign nations.

Now, if we stay here with our western facing orientation there to say another critical event that drops here in the middle of March 1921, simultaneous with all the other critical events dropping in March 1921, because on March 16th, the two most apparently implacable ideological opponents that you could possibly think of — British capitalists and Russian Communists — signed an economic trade agreement that turned out to be the first step towards normalized diplomatic relations between the two countries. As we saw when we were discussing the Russian Civil War, British Prime Minister David Lloyd, George had soured on a policy of regime change in Russia by the fall of 1919. He cut off military and economic aid to the Russian Whites, he pushed for withdrawing Allied troops from Russian soil, and lifting the naval blockades on Russian ports. Once it had become clear that the Russian communist. Government was not on the brink of being overthrown, the British reassessed their policies, and concluded that it was in their interest to normalize economic and political relations with them.

Now the Polish Soviet war complicated Lloyd George’s plans a little bit, but after the Russians lost the battle of Warsaw and the threat of communism spreading into western Europe evaporated, he returned to his policy of signing a trade deal with Russia. Months of negotiations over issues like tsarist era Russian debts to British creditors and ongoing Communist propaganda in Western countries, the two sides finally found enough common ground that they could sign off on a deal in March 1921. The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was just that — it was a trade agreement that regulated economic commerce between the two countries. And in no time, British investments and exports were flooding into the devastated Russian economy, and in fact, these investments and exports were a vital part of making the NEP work. But it was not yet an official political agreement. The British still withheld official political recognition from the Soviet regime. But it amounted to de facto recognition, and it signalled to the rest of the world that the post World War I diplomatic tables were going to have to have a seat for Soviet Russia.

So leaving our western facing orientation, I now want to turn our attention south, specifically to a former part of the Russian Empire I have long neglected: the Caucasus. Now there are good reasons that I neglected the Caucasus. Set well behind the frontlines of the Russian Civil War off to the north, and with only the collapsing Ottoman Empire to their south, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia all enjoyed autonomous independence through the spring of 1920. But with the Red Army having defeated both Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin by early 1920, and with the foundation of Ataturk’s post-Ottoman Empire Grand National Assembly of Turkey in April 1920, the people of the Caucasus once again found themselves squeezed between larger neighbors who had political, economic, and territorial designs on that autonomous independence.

Azerbaijan was the first to fall. In the spring of 1920, the Russian’s 70,000 man 11th Army started moving south towards the Caucasus. With the much smaller Azerbaijani army caught up with flare ups on their border with Armenia, the Red Army simply marched across the border and captured the critical Baku oil fields in late April 1920. They pulled this off pretty much without a fight, partly because the British and nationalist Turks were currently embroiled in the Turkish War of Independence, so Russia’s two great geopolitical rivals in the region were currently focused on the allied occupation of Constantinople, which commenced in March of 1920.

Now the British had demonstrated some interest in taking the Baku oil fields for themselves as the victorious Allies of World War I divvied up the world’s colonized resources, but ultimately they would conclude it wasn’t worth the risk or the hassle. They obviously made no effort to stop the advancing Red Army, and they withdrew their last lingering forces from the area completely by July of 1920. The Turks, meanwhile, saw the Russians as potential allies in their anti colonial war against the British, and hoped the Caucasus could serve as a conduit for supplies and guns coming down from Russia. So when the Red Army rolled into Azerbaijan, the local Turkish population rose up to support their invasion and occupation. As would happen with Belarus and Ukraine, Azerbaijan would soon be reconstituted as an SSR: the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic.

The move south into Azerbaijan was followed quickly by the stalling out of the Russian advance west into Poland. Following the battle of Warsaw, many high ranking Communists really started coming around on the idea that a frontal assault on western Europe was impossible. But instead of just giving up, they saw huge opportunities to destabilize the western capitalists not by staging insurrections in Berlin or Paris, but by going after their colonial possessions in central, southern, and east Asia. As early as August 1919, Trotsky had said:

There is no doubt at all that our Red Army constitutes an incomparably more powerful force in the Asian terrain of world politics than in the European terrain. Here, there opens up before us an undoubted possibility, not merely of a lengthy wait to see how events develop in Europe, but of conducting activity in the Asian field. The road to India may prove at this given moment to be more readily passable and shorter for us. The road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal.

The idea of reorienting international communist revolution around anti-colonial campaigns of liberation became a real possibility now that the western landbridge through Poland to Germany was closed, and now that the defeat of the Russian Whites left the Reds in a commanding position on the Eurasian continent. So in September of 1920, the Soviets used their position in Azerbaijan to host the first of what they called the Congress of the Peoples of the East, formally held under the auspices of the Comintern.

As many as 1900 delegates congregated in Baku for this Congress. Most of them came from the northern and eastern Mediterranean territories that had been under the auspices of the Ottoman Empire, but many came from as far afield as India and China. They gathered in a somewhat chaotic assembly of different languages and nationalities, where speeches had to be immediately translated into a few common languages, most especially Turkic and Persian. Few of the delegates were communists in any meaningful sense, but Zinoviev and the other Comintern leaders hoped to pitch Soviet Communism as a friend, ally, and supporter of the anti-colonial struggles that all of them had in common. In Zinoviev’s keynote speech, he said:

Comrades! Brothers! The time has come now when you can set about organizing a true people’s holy war against the robbers and oppressors. The Communist International turns today to the peoples of the east and says to them: “Brothers, we summon you to a holy war, in the first place against British imperialism!

Now, an avowed atheist communist invoking the language of holy wars to a mostly Muslim audience is not exactly orthodox Marxism, but they did share a common enemy in western European colonial oppression. And so for now, it hardly mattered if you waged war against western imperialism on behalf of Marx or Mohammed, what mattered was waging war on western imperialism.

Now ultimately, this Congress of the Peoples of the East turned out to be a one-off event that the Russians struggled to build much of a movement from, but it did set the tone for a more explicitly anti-colonial liberation Marxism that would spread throughout the colonized world in east Asia, India, Africa, the Caribbean and South America, a brand of Marxism that would become more sharply pronounced as many local groups concluded that the Russians were as unable to quit their European colonial mentality as any of the Western capitalists.

Now shortly after the Congress, the Red Army made their next move in the Caucasus to ensure that that vital region stayed in the Russian orbit. Not really quitting the European colonial mentality, in November 1920, Stalin told Pravda:

The importance of the Caucasus for the revolution is determined not only by the fact that it is a source of raw materials, fuel, and food supplies, but also by its position between Europe and Asia, and in part between Russia and Turkey, as well as the presence of highly important economic and strategic roads.

So, though the ideologies and justifications changed, the mentality didn’t change very much at all. Now the Soviets saw an opportunity as Armenia had become embroiled in a border war with Turkey that was founded on generations of mutual ethnic hatred, most grossly expressed by the Armenian genocide, where between 1915 and 1917, the Turks brutally drove somewhere between 600,000 and one million Armenians to death. With the Armenians on the brink of defeat to the Turks, the Red Army marched over from Azerbaijan and issued a blunt ultimatum to the Armenian government in late November: surrender to us or surrender to the Turks. Viewing the Soviets as the lesser of two evils, the government surrendered, and the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in its place.

With Red Army backed SSRs proclaimed in Azerbaijan and Armenia, this meant that Georgia, the last of the independent Caucasian states, was now surrounded. Now Georgia was a harder nut to crack for the Russian Communists, because if you’ll remember from way back when we introduced young Stalin, Georgia was one of the only places where the Mensheviks had a real, strong, popular base of support. Georgia was not now, nor had it ever been, friendly to the Bolshevik party. Shortly after the Red Army moved into Baku, Georgian Communists had attempted a coup in Tbilisi, but it had been easily deflected by the Menshevik government. Moscow considered Georgia to be a resilient enough opponent that on May 7th, 1920, they signed a treaty recognizing Georgia’s sovereign independence.

But it’s very clear the Russian Communists signed this treaty only as a delaying tactic, to lull the Georgian Mensheviks into complacency. One of the few demands they put into the treaty was that the Mensheviks agree to not outlaw the Georgian Communist Party, that they would be allowed to freely organize, assemble and publish. After the Mensheviks agreed, the Georgian Communist Party set about doing everything it could to overthrow the Menshevik government. And they were aided by the diplomatic corp sent by Moscow. Subversive activities were regularly concocted right inside the Russian embassy in Tbilisi.

But Georgia was a tough nut to crack, and the local Communist subversion wasn’t really getting them anywhere. So by January 1921, local leaders convinced two key members of the Politburo, Stalin and Trotsky, that taking over Georgia was going to require external force. And in fact, local Communists in the region actually sent Red Army units over the border into Georgia a few days before they received official permission to do. They sent the Red Army units in there to stage a phony local uprising that would then call for Red Army assistance. So on February 14th, Lenin and the Politburo gave their final permission for the invasion that had kind of already started, and the Red Army proceeded to roll across the border into Georgia from the north and from the east. By the end of February, the Menshevik leaders evacuated Tbilisi, and allowed the Red Army to occupy the capital city to avoid it being shelled. Once the capital was taken, a Georgian SSR was proclaimed, and it would now sit alongside the Armenian SSR and the Azerbaijani SSR.

So that brings us back to our pivotal month of March 1921, when the Communists completed their takeover of the Caucasus. The Menshevik government and their armed forces had retreated to Batum, a port on the Black Sea in the extreme southwest of the country. Here, they planned to base their resistance campaign to the Communists, but by now, they found themselves back into their old historical position: stuck between two much larger regional powers. On March 16th, the Turks announced that they plan to annex Batum for themselves, and they sent up a garrison to occupy the city. But for all their resistant hostility to Bolshevism, the Mensheviks concluded it would be better for the city to fall to the Communists than to the Turkish nationalists, so the 10,000 men Menshevik army disarmed the would-be Turkish garrison, and opened the doors instead to the Red Army. Then Menshevik government ministers, officials, military commanders and refugees, boarded French and Italian ships that carry them west across the Black Sea to Constantinople, which was by now positively overflowing with Russian refugees of every shape, size and ideology.

Now from Moscow’s perspective, a Communist takeover of Georgia may have been preferable to the alternative, which is leaving the Menshevik government in place. Before the invasion, western socialists who were opposed to communism had called Menshevik Georgia ‘the only true socialist government in the world,’ a deliberate snub of Soviet Russia. Now, they would use the invasion as proof of insatiable Communist aggression. Moscow had after all signed a treaty not even one year earlier, pledging to respect the independence of Georgia. The invasion was clear proof of the value of such Communist promises. Inside Georgia, this invasion had done very little to curry favor with a local population that wasn’t inclined towards Bolshevism in the first place. In July 1921, Stalin returned to his old hometown stomping ground in Tbilisi, and was greeted with undisguised hostility. When he tried to address a mass meeting, they heckled him shouting “murderer” and “traitor.” One got up and said, “Who asked you to come here? What happened to our treaty? At the order of the Kremlin, blood is shed here and you talk of friendship?

“Soso,” he said, referring to Stalin by the name Stalin had used when he was down here in Georgia operating Bolshevik bank robberies, “you give us a good laugh.”

Humiliated, Stalin ordered Chekha agents to arrest about a hundred Social Democrats and Mensheviks, because while the Mensheviks may have made the mistake of allowing political freedom to the Communists, the Communists were not about to return the favor. As you may have noticed, it’s not exactly Communist Party policy to allow people to get in their way. And with that in mind, they completely ignored local opinion and form the three Caucasian republics into a single entity, called the Federative Union of Socialist Soviet Republics of Transcaucasia, a union none of the three member groups were particularly happy about, but about which there was very little they could do.

With the conversion of the Caucasian states into SSRs, and then their merger into this single thing that we call the Transcaucasian SFSR, means that we now have our four initial signatories of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in place. When the time comes in December 1922, Russia will sign a treaty of union with the ostensibly independent Belarusian SSR, Ukrainian SSR, and Transcaucasian SFSR.

So, where I want to end today is by answering the question, okay, we understand these other three units, but what do we mean when we talk about Russia now? What is the Russian component of the coming USSR? Because believe me, it was not then, and is not now, a simple thing.

Now, when we speak of Russia, or Soviet Russia, what we are talking about is a thing called the Russian Soviet federated Socialist Republic, or RSFSR. But it’s not simply a Russian SSR, because the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic was itself technically a federal union of many different recognized sub-units. At this point, fully 22% of the population of this thing we call the RSFSR was not ethnically or culturally Russian. As a matter of practical administration and sound politics, the Communist leaders in Moscow were willing to recognize the autonomy of various minority nationality groups, even if they were not willing to grant them the kind of full independent status that they granted the Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Transcaucasians, which is to say, the Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijani.

As Moscow’s reach extended beyond central Russia proper following Red Army victories in the Civil War, they created zones of ethnic autonomy, mostly as a means of inducing the local population to accept Moscow’s ultimate authority and not rise up and revolt against them. Larger regions would be called Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republics with smaller carve-outs called autonomous oblasts. So for example, some of the most important of these ethnic enclaves were the Muslim population of the Ural Steppes north of the Caspian Sea, specifically the Bashkirs and Tatars.

The Bashkirs were awarded the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1919 as a reward for abandoning Admiral Kolchak at a key moment in the Russian Civil War, and the following year the Tatars were given the same status; they were granted the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. A similar process was carried out in what was then collectively referred to as Turkistan, an area encompassing, a huge population of Turkic peoples who had been relative latecomers to the Russian Empire. For several years, they were organized into a single large Turkistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, a constituent part of the RSFSR, but whose single umbrella covered a multiplicity of nationalities, so the Turkistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic would soon be divided into now recognizable states, like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. By the early 1920s, some 30 of these autonomous ethnic subdivisions had been created. So at least on paper, the Russian Soviet Federated socialist Republic was a union of all these autonomous zones and republics, with Russia proper simply being the largest sub-division, merely the first among equals, if you catch my drift.

Because despite many lofty promises from Moscow about autonomy, that autonomy was severely curtailed. And for example, the boundary of the Autonomous Tatar Republic was drawn specifically to exclude 75% of the Tatar population, but include a large population of Russians to make sure that autonomy from Moscow was never taken too seriously.

So coming back around now to March 1921, we get a real sense of where Soviet Russia sits in the world. They had by now signed formal treaties of mutual recognition with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Ukraine, and Belarus, and the three Transcaucasian republics. And then in February, 1921, they added a couple more: a pact with the government in Afghanistan, and a treaty of friendship with a short-lived revolutionary government in Iran. Then, on March 16th, 1921, we get another big deal, kind of, in the history of diplomacy: a treaty of friendship between Russia and Turkey.

A treaty of friendship between Russia and Turkey!

This is something that is absolutely unprecedented, right? The Turks and Russians haven’t been on the same side of anything except that one time Napoleon tried to take over Egypt. But now here they were, once again friends. At least, on paper.

Soviet Russia also now enjoys de facto recognition from Britain, de facto recognition that would pave the way for normalized relations with the other Great Powers. Germany would follow with formal diplomatic recognition in 1922, and then France and Britain would both come along with formal recognition in 1924.

The United States would be the hold out here, doing that thing where we stubbornly close our eyes tight to avoid the face of obvious reality. The United States will not formerly recognize the existence of Soviet Russia until November 1933.

The point, though, is that as we head beyond 1921, we can see that the most perilous days of revolution and civil war are receding into the rear view mirror. And there are still great crises to face, but Soviet Russia is looking pretty stable. It’s in fact looking like the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 may have been kind of a big deal, world historically speaking, after all.

There will be no episode next week, as I am off to Milwaukee to do the premiere performance of this live monologue I’ve written, but when we come back in two weeks, we will wrap up the Russian Revolution. I got to tell ya, when we come back, we are entering the final set of episodes, because following today’s episode, there will be just eight more new episodes left, which means that we will be walking away from this at episode… 10.103.

So, y’know. I hope you don’t feel too cheated on this final season, even though it is all about to end.