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Episode 10.99: The Testament

As he approached his 52nd birthday in the spring of 1922, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was breaking down. The decades of stress, exertion, rage, passion, resentment, despair, fear, doubt, exaltation, and responsibility had finally caught up with him. These decades passed in a succession of days and nights of obsessive single-minded focus and relentless work, with the ever-present threat of arrest, execution and assassination hanging over his head. Lenin was plagued through all these years by headaches and insomnia, exacerbated by a bitterly caustic disposition and frequent bouts of rage. His temper flaring beyond control at longtime enemies, supposed friends, this turn of events, that constant irritation. This was not a healthy lifestyle. Now, unlike many of his comrades — Zinoviev in particular — Lenin’s unhealthy lifestyle was not defined by hedonistic vice. He wasn’t a glutton. He exercised, rarely drank, and forbid people to smoke around him. It was instead defined by the monomaniacal drive of a man who treated both his mind and his body as mere conduits for work, and of the mega maniacal drive of a man who believed that if you wanted something done right you had to do it yourself. 20 years of life and the revolutionary underground, followed by five years as de facto dictator over a revolutionary state in constant violent turmoil, had taken its collective toll. In the spring of 1921, Lenin emerged from all those potentially cataclysmic stresses we talked about worn down to the breaking point. At which point he broke.

In the summer of 1921, the inner circle of the Communist Party had to reckon with the fact that the boss could no longer maintain a full workload. Aware that more than anyone Lenin was the indispensable man of the revolution, his closest comrades in the Politburo — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, and Stalin — demanded that he take a vacation. Ever the workaholic, Lenin tried to put them off, but finally relented in August of 1921. He took a holiday out to the Gorki Estate, a neoclassical country mansion about ten kilometers south of Moscow. The estate had been expropriated after the Soviet government moved to Moscow and set it aside for Lenin. He had first used it to recuperate from Fanny Kaplan’s assassination attempt in 1919. After that, he visited the mansion sparingly, spending most of his days and nights in the Kremlin, working, working, always working. But unbeknownst to Lenin as he arrived for the extended holiday in the summer of 1921, Gorki would more and more be his primary residence during the final two and a half years of his life.

Because this holiday didn’t really help much. He returned to Moscow in October still unable to work full days, still plagued by headaches, insomnia, numbness in his extremities and bouts of forgetfulness. In February, 1922, he wrote to Clara Zetkin, “Unfortunately I am very ill. My nerves are kaput.”

Among all the other things that needed to be dealt with in early 1922 — the ongoing famine, the negotiations with the Germans that would lead to the Treaty of Rapallo, the conference of the Three Internationals, the upcoming trial of the SRs, and just generally trying to rebuild Russian society — Lenin also turned his attention to the state of the Communist Party. It was very clear he would not be around to manage things forever, and the Party must be put on firm footing if the revolution was to survive his death.

He was well aware of the fact that at present the Communist Party was not a gigantic popular force drawing strength, power, and authority from some huge proletarian working class. In March 1922, Lenin wrote to Vyacheslav Molotov, a future Soviet foreign minister, but at this moment, a younger Communist recently elevated to the Central Committee and made a non-voting member of the Politburo, “If one does not wish to shut one’s eyes to reality, one ought to admit that at present the proletarian character of the Party’s policy is determined not by the class composition of the membership, but by the enormous and undivided authority of that very thin stratum of members who might be described as the Party’s Old Guards.”

This thin stratum Lenin described was composed of Bolshevik true believers, who, with a few notable exceptions like Trotsky, had joined the party long before 1917. They were a small group of professional revolutionaries turned state officials who were now responsible for the success or failure of their vision of the revolution.

Lenin’s great concern was that with few truly reliable party leaders in charge of everything, that personality, conflicts, petty grudges, or personal beefs between just a small handful of those leaders would cascade into total political apocalypse. As Lenin said to Molotov, “Even the slightest dissension in this strata may be enough to weaken its authority to such an extent that they should forfeit their power of decision and become unable to control events. At all costs, therefore, it was necessary to maintain the solidarity of the Old Guard.” Occupying a position not unlike George Washington, Lenin was the one guy in the Party that every faction, clique, and member listened to and respected. The danger of a fatal rift to the party after the bony hands of death remove the unifying linchpin of Lenin was all too apparent.

But though the pitfalls of having too few reliable leaders was obvious, the problem was not easily solved by throwing the doors open and inviting new blood into the ranks. As we’ve noted several times, when the Communist Party became the ruling party after 1917, membership in the Party brought perks and privileges and a measure of security. Better food, better lodgings, better pay; all at a time of acute deprivation, scarcity, and chaos. Naturally, this led to people joining the Party who weren’t even close to ideological true believers. They just wanted a steady job as a clerk somewhere and access to the Party commissary. And of course pure self-interest could extend to shadier motives: the opportunity for graft, corruption, and abuse of power.

To combat this and maintain the ideological purity of the Party, they carried out periodic purges, internal reviews of members that culled out those who failed to meet some basic standards. That quote I used from episode 10.86, about old Bolsheviks being terrified at being kicked out mainly because they would lose their right to reside in the National Hotel and other privileges connected with this, was in response to a 1919 purge that kicked out fully half the members of the Party. In 1921, they conducted another review and expelled 200,000 people, about a third of the total Party membership, for various infractions like indolence, malfeasance, or corruption, but now including past associations with the Mensheviks, SRs, and other rival parties as meriting expulsion.

So, this was a struggle to strike a balance between keeping the Party open enough so that minute differences between a handful of leaders couldn’t wreck everything, but not so open that the Communist vision was sacrificed to petty careerism. In an effort to bring some centralized regularity to the practical logistics of the Party, lenin initiated the creation of a new post called General Secretary of the Party. This was meant to be an administrative job, accepting or rejecting members, hiring and firing staff, organizing meetings, planning congresses, dealing with the mountains and mountains of paper reports and communications. The Politburo and the Central Committee would still decide all matters of policy; the job of the general secretary would be to ensure that policy was properly carried out.

The post of general secretary was specifically created for Stalin, who had proved his loyalty, determination, and administrative abilities to Lenin several times over, as both head of the Orgburo and also head of a Party branch called the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate, which was tasked with overseeing the State Civil Service to prevent endemic sloth and corruption, which was reflecting badly on the Soviet state. At the 11th Party Congress in the spring of 1922, Stalin was appointed to this new position of general secretary of the Communist Party. Nobody realized what a massive point of political leverage Stalin now controlled.

Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor anyone else took this appointment to be an anointment of Stalin as heir apparent. There was no heir apparent. And if there was one, the betting money was still on Trotsky. Trotsky was by far the most famous Party leader. Ever sent his explosive entrance onto the world stage during the October Revolution, when he, even more than Lenin, was the face of the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky had been the most visible Communist leader. He was the head of the Red Army during the civil war, he engaged in international diplomacy, he traveled extensively making speeches, writing articles, delivering radio addresses, reviewing military installations and economic development. Most people outside the inner circle of the Communist Party likely took it for granted that Trotsky was Lenin’s successor. But inside the inner circle, it was a different matter. To the real Old Guard Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin, Trotsky was still a newcomer, a latecomer, who had joined them only after fifteen years of trading insults and mutual denunciations. Their attacks on one another were a matter of public record. Now, ultimately Trotsky had seen the light and Lenin repeatedly impressed upon his comrades Trotsky’s indispensability, but that only added to the personal grudges growing up amongst them, precisely the grudges Lenin worried about.

Meanwhile in the spring of 1922, the Lenin himself was growing sicker by the day. Eventually doctors imported from Germany surmised he may be suffering some kind of lead poisoning from the bullet still lodged in his neck from the assassination attempt by Fanny Kaplan. So on April 23rd, 1922 — the day after his 52nd birthday — Lenin underwent surgery to remove this bullet. The surgery itself was a success, but while he recovered from the procedure, the underlying condition it was meant to fix remained. Because as we now know, he wasn’t suffering from lead poisoning, but instead from a disease that was absolutely wrecking his brain cells. Just about a month after the surgery, the first great hammer fell. While out at Gorki recovering from surgery, Lenin suffered a major stroke on the night of May 26th, 1922. The result was partial paralysis on his right side, temporary loss of speech and motor functions, and severe lapses in memory and cognitive ability. In the days that followed, he retained self-aware consciousness, but was no longer able to do simple physical and mental tasks. When he found himself unable to perform basic arithmetic, Lenin issued his first of many requests that in the event of total paralysis, incapacitation, or mental degeneration, they administer cyanide.

So while Russian media was consumed with the sensational trial of the SRs in the summer of 1922, the chairman of the people’s commissars was out at Gorki, recovering from an undisclosed stroke. After the first uncertain days when death did seem imminent, Lenin started to recover over the summer. By July, he was allowed to have visitors and read newspapers again, although his closest comrades and the Politburo forbid him from doing any serious work in case it disrupted his recovery. They put newly minted General Secretary Stalin in charge of enforcing Lenin’s isolation, tasked with keeping papers, callers, petitioners, and questions away, and preventing the workaholic Lenin from trying to do an end run around these precautions and resume an active schedule too soon. This latest assignment made Stalin one of Lenin’s most frequent contacts during these final years — and by design, one of his only contacts during these final years, allowing Stalin to build an image of quite literally being Lenin’s right-hand man with no one else even in the picture. Trotsky, meanwhile, stayed away and not even once did he visit Lenin at the Gorki Estate, a mistake he would not be able to later undo when it came time for his final showdown with Stalin.

Lenin, meanwhile, sought to balance the authority granted to Stalin by pressing Trotsky to become deputy chairman of the people’s commissars. Now there were a few deputy chairman already, but given Trotsky’s stature, if he took the title deputy chairman, it would be a clear public nod that Lenin believed Trotsky was a viable successor. But rather than take this job, Trotsky refused it. After being pressed to take it several times in 1922, Lenin finally offered it one last time in September, and Trotsky adamantly turned it down. Now this somewhat inexplicably refusal to become deputy chairman of the people’s commissars may have stemmed from Trotsky’s unwillingness to take what he considered an inferior title, and it may also have been driven by the keen awareness that if he took the job, his personnel would be controlled by general Secretary Stalin, Trotsky’s most persistent personal rival. But whatever the reason, it left Lenin disappointed, and Trotsky without a clear institutional claim to being Lenin’s anointed heir. It was another mistake he would not be able to later undo.

By the fall of 1922, Lenin had recovered more than anyone could have reasonably hoped back in May, but was far from recovered back to his old strength. He would in fact, never recover his old strength, and when the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution came round in November 1922, Lenin was unable to attend the celebrations. But he was able to make a few other public appearances, including a speech at the Bolshoi Theater at the end of the month, lending hope that he was back to his old self. But one French Communist in attendance said, “Those who were seeing him for the first time said, this is still the same Lenin. But for the others, no such illusion was possible. Instead of the alert Lenin they had known, the man before them now was strongly affected by paralysis. His features remained immobile. His usual simple. rapid, confident speech was replaced by a hesitant jerky delivery.”

Indeed, instead of marking his return, the speech of the Bolshoi Theater would be among Lenin’s final appearances in public.

While residing in the Kremlin in mid-December 1922, Lenin suffered what was probably a series of small strokes that permanently ruined his ability to write. He could now only dictate to a small circle of secretaries headed by Krupskaya and Lenin’s sister Maria, who oversaw his daily routine and took down his words in the limited time allotted to him by the doctors. After a series of small medical incidents, the second major hammer fell: on the night of December 22nd, Lenin suffered his second major stroke, leaving him totally paralyzed on his right side and severely limiting his ability to think and speak.

But despite this second major medical catastrophe, Lenin was not done yet. Though confined to a bed, he was alert enough to want to keep grappling with the political affairs of the day — specifically, the political affairs of the day involved a highly complicated intraparty squabble over policy and personnel down in Georgia. I do not want to get bogged down in the details of the Georgian affair as it is a very messy can of worms, but both sides in the controversy wanted Lenin’s support, and Stalin — who definitely was on one of the two sides — was outraged to find Lenin secretaries asking for a dossier compiled by rivals on the other side. In late January 1923, he and Krupskaya got into an argument over the phone where Stalin apparently berated her for breaching the health protocols that were supposed to keep these kinds of controversies away from Comrade Lenin, though one suspects that was only partly why Lenin was so irritated, as he was definitely not a disinterested party in the Georgian affair.

It is worth noting, however, that while controlling Lenin’s access to information was obviously advantageous to Stalin, he also requested to be relieved of these duties on February 1st, because more than anything, it was turning out to be an annoying hassle. The Politburo however rejected his request, and instructed Stalin to maintain his vigil over the chief.

Still not fully recovered from the second stroke, the third hammer fell on the night of March 9th, 1923. A third major stroke laid upon Lenin the familiar litany of results: total paralysis on the right side, complete loss of speech, mental confusion, and an inability to communicate. The inner circle of the Party went into an acute state of emergency as they were justifiably afraid that this was it. Lenin is about to die, and we’re going to have to grapple with the fallout. And we’ve known going back to the early days of the history of Rome, just how critical these moments of political succession are, especially when no heir has been named — and at the moment, no heir has been named.

Lenin tried to hasten his own demise by once again demanding cyanide, but Stalin refused to carry out the instruction, and his comrades in the Politburo concurred that they should simply wait and see.

So in March of 1923, Lenin was knocked totally out of commission on the eve of the 12th Party Congress. For one of the only times in his long tenure as leader of the Party, Lenin would not be in attendance. But even in his absence, Lenin was the dominant personality. His oldest Bolshevik comrades, Zinoviev and Kamenev, both paid almost embarrassing honor to the great leader, setting the groundwork for what would become the cult of Lenin where he was an embalmed relic representing heroic, revolutionary infallibility. Even absent the third stroke though, Lenin was not going to be at the 12th Party Congress, and the other members of the Politburo agreed that it was vital to show the delegates to the Congress, nothing but iron clad solidarity from the leadership, preventing any of the various opposition factions from prying open an opportunity. This public solidarity would cover over widening personality conflicts among them, most especially surrounding Trotsky, who was increasingly critical of his comrades, and as a result, increasingly isolated. Trotsky had only a few true allies left in the Central Committee, and none at all in the inner circle of the Politburo. And with Stalin now serving as general secretary of the Party, this was not going to change anytime soon.

But for the moment, none of them saw a public rift for or against Trotsky as being in any of their interests. So they did indeed present a united front to the 12th Party Congress. Trotsky agreed to mute his criticisms, and to give no hint to opposition elements in the Party that he might lead them against the Old Guard. Rising to speak on behalf of a motion confirming their unified solidarity, he said, “I shall not be the last in our midst to defend this motion, to put it into effect and to fight ruthlessly against all who may try to infringe it. If in the present mood the Party warns you emphatically about things which seem dangerous to it, the Party is right, even if it exaggerates. Because what might not be dangerous in other circumstances must appear doubly and trebly suspect at present.”

Still inside the inner circle, Trotsky, zealously defended the leadership’s ability to be right no matter what, including the facts. This was a position Trotsky would support right up until the moment he realized he had been pushed out of the inner circle, whereupon he would begin to champion those calling for more democratic openness inside the Party.

But he was not there yet.

In exchange for not criticizing his fellow members of the Politburo at the 12th Party Congress, Trotsky was allowed to present his pet economic theories as the official party line. This appears now to be quite literally academic, but Trotsky apparently considered it a far more weighty proposition at the time. Most famously, he presented the new economic crisis facing Russia, which he dubbed the Scissors Crisis. The Scissors Crisis was not a shortage of scissors — although there probably was one — but rather an alarming divergence of prices for industrial goods and prices for agricultural goods. Basically, with the industrial sector only partially rebuilt, the cost of producing goods and their resulting scarcity drove prices up, while a recent bountiful harvest — partly thanks to grain provided by the American Relief Administration — meant food prices were falling. Plotted on a graph, the diverging lines looked like a pair of open scissors. What it meant in practice was that even if the peasants sold all their surplus, they would not have enough to buy any of the things they needed to buy. This might once again, lead them to conclude that there was no point in producing surpluses, which was a major cause of the recent famine. Plus, it would prevent the industrial sector from generating enough revenue to drive further expansion.

Trotsky’s answer to this was to push for more rational planning inside the industrial sector while still operating inside the NEP framework. Not wanting to inflame the peasantry after several years of antagonism and famine, though, Trotsky called upon the working classes to bear the sacrificial brunt of policies that would reduce the price of industrial goods — up to and including slashing their wages. He said, “There may be moments when the government pays you no wages, or when it pays you only half your wage, and when you, the worker, have to lend the other half to the state.”

So what we have here is Trotsky telling the industrial proletariat — whom the Communist Party is meant above all to represent, and who have spent the last several years getting absolutely hammered by scarcity, unemployment and mistreatment — yeah, we need you to suffer some more for the good of the revolution. This was justified by noting that such imposed hardships were different from those imposed by bourgeois states, because the Communist Party was after all the party of the workers, not the party of the bourgeoisie, and so really, this was the proletariat voluntarily imposing hardships upon itself. This was no doubt a great comfort to the working classes of Russia, especially since the leaders of the Communist Party had recently worked so hard to destroy the Workers’ Opposition Movement inside the Party, which was specifically organized to look after the interests of the proletariat.

During the period immediately before and immediately after the 12th Party Congress, where Lenin’s absence was so strongly felt, those closest to him suddenly began producing new pronouncements from the incapacitated leader. These pronouncements took the form of notes allegedly dictated back in late December 1922 and early January 1923. The first set was produced on April the 16th, while the 12th Party Congress was going on, and it was a soul searching denunciation of great Russian chauvinism, coupled with a demand to treat minority nationalities with dignity, respect, and autonomy, which set him against centralizers in the party. Lenin openly worried that the terms of the newly created USSR would serve Russian interests at the expense of those nationalities.

“It is quite natural,” the notes read, “that in such circumstances ‘the freedom to secede from the union’ by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.”

These notes on the nationalities also read, “Were we careful enough to take measures to provide the non-Russians with a real safeguard against the truly Russian bully? I do not think we took such measures although we could and should have done so.

Then, Lenin took a direct shot at Stalin: “I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious ‘nationalist-socialism’ played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.”

And just to be clear, by nationalist-socialism, we here mean those socialists who wanted to incorporate autonomy of nationalities into the system, as opposed to pure centralizers who wanted to overthrow such national differentiations. So, we are not talking about the national socialism that you might be thinking of.

Now in everything I’m about to say next, I have to say that I’m heavily influenced by the case Stephen Kotkin makes in his biographies of Stalin, that the providence of all of this miraculous dictation from Lenin is dubious at best. Unlike all the other dictation produced around the same time, the typed up notes, suddenly produced in the spring of 1923, do not have matching handwritten originals in the archives, nor do they bear Lenin’s initials, which he typically use to mark that, yes, this was in fact coming from him. Other dictation from the same period has both of these markers of authenticity, but not these later documents that we are here talking about. They were simply typed up and asserted to be Lenin’s words. There is another curious example of this back in March, just before Lenin’s third stroke, where he apparently demanded Stalin apologize to Krupskaya for berating her over the phone that one time. This document too lacks Lenin’s initials and a handwritten original.

Now far more explosively than comments on the nationalities, in mid-May, Krupskaya produced Lenin’s remarks on the advisability of expanding the ranks of the Central Committee to fifty or a hundred members. This document too was allegedly dictated back in December 1922 just after Lenin’s second stroke. The notes have no official title, but they later became known as Lenin’s Testament, because in addition to his comments about the advisability of expanding the ranks of the Central Committee, he also made observations about several senior members of the Party. The notes read, quote:

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability, he is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with a purely administrative side of the work.

Of his oldest comrades. Lenin said only:

… the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non Bolshevism can be upon Trotsky.

As Kotkin notes, this is an extremely backhanded absolution of Zinoviev and Kamenev’s opposition to the October Revolution — because though they were the oldest of the Old guard, when that great test of October came, they both failed at miserably

he also mentioned two younger leaders, Nikolai Bukharin, and Georgy Pyatakov. He said:

Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party, he is also rightly considered the favorite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve for there something scholastic about him [ he has never made a study of the dialectics and I think never fully understood it.]

… Pyatakov is unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but shows too much zeal for administrating and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political matter.

Both of these remarks, of course, are made only for the present, on the assumption that both these outstanding and devoted Party workers fail to find an occasion to enhance their knowledge and amend their one-sidedness.

None of this is exactly a ringing endorsement of any of the principal claimants to Lenin’s mantle. And while. Trotsky perhaps comes off the best, as the most capable man in the present Central Committee, and Bukharin gets noted as the favorite of the whole Party, neither is without their major faults. Lenin’s former deviant Menshevism was plainly noted, as was Bukharin’s apparent immaturity. Then, to make sure there was no mistake, a further short addendum to this text, allegedly dictated in the first week of January 1923, took dead aim at Stalin:

Stalin is too rude [the addendum said] and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead, who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail, but I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky is not a minor detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.

Now these explosive remarks were not like printed in Pravda or anything like that, but they landed like a bombshell inside the close knit ranks of the inner party. With his practically dying breath, Comrade Lenin was saying, get rid of Stalin.

But the thing is — and here’s where I’m following Kotkin — it’s very likely Lenin didn’t say any of this, and that the little clique of secretaries around him cooked these remarks up themselves, with Krupskaya as the most likely mastermind. She herself was staring down life without Lenin, and her own antagonistic relationship with Stalin may have led her to want to knock him down a peg or two; perhaps in favor of Trotsky, perhaps Zinoviev, perhaps Bukharin, anyone but Stalin.

But to be clear, this is all conjecture, based on the notable lack of evidence confirming that these notes were dictated when and where and by whom they were alleged to have been dictated. But whether they were actually Lenin’s words or not, they were taken at the time and afterwards to be Lenin’s words, and they caused an enormous amount of turmoil inside the inner party, inside that upper stratum that Lenin himself was so concerned might be destroyed by personality conflicts that would, in turn, destroy the entire revolution.

Next week, we will reach the final chapter of Lenin’s life and the final chapter of our highly detailed accounting of the Russian Revolution, because I’m going to use that chapter to mark the end of the revolutionary age, and the beginning of simply the early history of the USSR. Now the revolutionary work was of course not over, and there will be three more additional episodes that take us through the great purges in the 1930s. But the revolution would now be directed from above rather than from below. It would be a political, economic, and cultural revolution waged by a government instead of against a government.

Lenin had managed to live long enough to see his revolution come to pass, and after many decades of relentless work, it is time to extinguish his revolutionary torch.

 

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.98: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Today, we are going to talk about Russia’s place in the world now that we are transitioning out of the Schrodinger’s revolution phase, where it wasn’t clear who or what was going to step out of the box. Now that we know the answer to that question, we have further questions. How would the Communist government in Moscow relate to the former constituent parts of the Russian Empire? How would they relate to the other factions, branches and parties of the international socialist movement, which the victorious Russian Communists, by virtue of their victory, fully expected to lead. How would they relate to the other great European powers? Despite major ideological divides, both sides now had to reckon with the reality that the other was here to stay. In terms of foreign affairs, the minimum program for Soviet Russia was, as always, to simply survive in a world they viewed as implacably and permanently hostile. But, they also gave as good as they got in terms of implacable and permanent hostility to ideological enemies, and so the maximum program for Soviet Russia remained the same program that had been on the table since our very first episode of this series, where the first International gathered in London in 1864: global socialist revolution.

So we’ll start today with the question of how Russia proper would relate to the former constituent parts of the old Russian Empire. We know that places like Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and western chunks of both Belarus and Ukraine are, for the moment, truly independent entities, recognized as such by Moscow, and not yet simply puppet regimes. But as we discussed a few episodes back, the Red victory in the Russian Civil War meant that the rest of the old Russian Empire was left pretty much intact. The Communists reorganized these territories as a mixed bag of SSRs, SFSRs, and ASSRs. Some were officially subordinate to Moscow; others, technically sovereign and independent.

For Lenin and the other members of the inner circle of the Russian Communist Party, making permanent sense of all this seemed to point them in one of two directions: either take all these territories and truly unite them in a single integrated and centralized sovereign entity, or merely band them together in a loose confederation of independent republics, joined by treaties of alliance, but who otherwise could not and would not tell each other what to do. It was, not for nothing, a very similar question the leaders of the newborn United States faced in the 1780s, after they emerged victorious from their revolution. There were good arguments to be made on both sides, and as you can imagine, there was tension between the hard-line Russian Communists, who habitually favored the Bolshevik virtues of centralized decision-making and unified discipline, and, say, leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party or the Georgian communist Party, who wanted the right to act freely inside their own territories. The years of civil war. And the experience of gaining, losing, and then regaining control of these various territories, had taught Lenin in the inner circle of the Party to be wary of both heavy handed centralization, which had so often backfired, but also just hands-off independence to leave people to do what they wanted to do. That would leave everyone too divided and vulnerable to the enemies of the revolution.

At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, the same one that had kicked off the NEP and introduce the ban on factions, the Party created a commission to study how best to integrate the huge geographic area inside the Soviet orbit along with its vast regional linguistic, religious, cultural, and ethnic differences.

Now just before the Tenth party Congress, Comrade Stalin, in his capacity as commissar of nationalities, made it clear that in his view the party must push for integration and unification of all these territories. Stalin argued, “Not one Soviet republic taken separately can consider itself safe from economic exhaustion and military defeat by world imperialism. Therefore, the isolated existence of separate Soviet republics has no firm basis in view of the threats to their existence from the capitalist states…. The national Soviet republics that have freed themselves from their own and from the foreign bourgeoisie will be able to defend their existence and conquer the United forces of imperialism only by joining in a close political union.”

In other words, Stalin is here channeling his inner Ben Franklin and saying to everyone, join or die. And not unlike Franklin’s vision for the United States, Stalin expected the integrated political, economic, and military systems of a hypothetical union of Soviets to involve a great deal of regional autonomy for local leaders in the union’s constituent parts, a federalized balance of central power and local controls.

By the end of 1921, though, the arguments over whether to integrate, federalize, or have everybody declare independence from everybody else, were entirely confined to the members of the Communist Party. Political alternatives to the party could not be tolerated, and so as a matter of deliberate policy, all the other parties out there, be they socialists, anarchists, nationalists liberal, or conservative, were broken, repressed, persecuted, imprisoned, or exiled. We saw this last week with the trial of the SRs, but I want to take a moment now to talk about Ukraine, and close the book on Nestor Makhno. Because when the leaders of Ukraine and Russia get to arguing about how and when and where to integrate with each other, the Ukrainian anarchist movement was as exhausted and broken as Nestor Makhno himself.

As we’ve seen, the Reds and the Blacks in Ukraine had been formal allies off and on throughout the civil war, up through the final battles against General Wrangel in Crimea in late 1920. Makhno’s forces had fought on the front lines of that campaign, but even before it was over, both the Reds and the Blacks positioned themselves to knife each other in the back as soon as they combined to defeat the Whites. Orders had been issued from Moscow to Red Army officers in the area that as soon as Wrangel was beat that they liquidate the Black Army. The Cheka had already tried and failed to assassinate Makhno, so when orders said liquidate, they meant liquidate. They didn’t mean send him home and give him a nice pension. Makhno himself never had any intention of laying down his arms and letting the Russian Communists take over Ukraine. So, after Wrangel was defeated, the Reds and the Blacks turned on each other almost immediately.

Red Cossack divisions chased Makhno all over Ukraine during the winter of 1920-1921, but he successfully evaded their pursuit. When the Kronstadt Rebellion hit in March 1921, Makhno tried to fan the flame of a general anticommunist uprising in Ukraine, but by now, the old insurrectionary energy was exhausted from years of constant civil war and rebellion. Still leading a couple thousand loyal partisans, Makhno found his supplies and ammunition depleted, most of his most dedicated fighters dead and buried, and potential new recruits far less enthusiastic about taking up arms… especially as Lenin had demanded Communists that were consolidating their hold in Ukraine to check their Russian chauvinism at the door this time. With steam running out of the Black movement, Makhno also had to reckon with his own body. Always leading from the front lines, he had been badly wounded several times, most recently in the stomach. By the summer of 1921, the man who had personally led so many charges on horseback was a wounded invalid who had to be carried around by his bodyguards. Unable to risk going to a proper hospital, and with the prospects for immediate victory against the entrenching Communists now dim, Makhno, his wife, and about a hundred loyalists decided to break for the relative safety of Poland, where they would seek temporary asylum and, most importantly, access to real doctors. But as Makhno and his comrades booked it west, the Red Army caught their scent. In a fierce firefight in late August, most of Makhno’s entourage were killed, and he himself took a somehow non-fatal bullet to the neck. Unable to reach Poland, he had to turn and head for Romania. In early September, 1921, he and the last of his followers took down a Red Army checkpoint and crossed the border. The intention was always to come back to Ukraine, but he would never come back. And when he departed, the Makhnovus dream of a Black Ukraine quietly died.

Nestor Makhno spent the rest of his life in exile. First in Romania for a year before he snuck over into Poland, where he was apprehended and placed in an internment camp in April 1922. Allowed to stay, he got caught up in what appears to have been a Soviet operation to deliberately lure him into a position that compromised his standing with the Polish government, and so they threw him in prison for a year. In prison, his health continued to deteriorate, and the tuberculosis he had long ago contracted was exacerbated. Despairing of everything, Makhno drafted some memoirs in prison and then attempted suicide in April 1924. But he didn’t die, and instead he recovered and was allowed to move to Danzig, where he dodged a Russian attempt to kidnap him, then got arrested by local authorities again, and escaped from a German prison. By 1925, he had made his way to Paris, where he spent the final nine years of his life. This final decade was pretty miserable for Makhno. He struggled to work, he was hobbled by a half dozen physical disabilities from his years of hard fighting. His mood soured. He separated from his wife. He was alienated from and bickered with former close friends who dropped out of his life one by one. Sinking into terminal poverty, Makhno continued to write articles, defend his revolutionary career, and argue with anyone who was still left to argue with. In the early 1930s, a group of Spanish anarchists who idolized him as an almost mythical figure did their best to support him with a meager pension, but it was never enough, and in July, 1934, Nestor Makhno died in Paris of complications from tuberculosis, malnutrition, and that greatest of social diseases, poverty.

As I said, when we embarked on the Russian Revolution, the story of what happened during these years is not so neat and tidy as, the tsar falls in February, the liberals make a hash of things, and the socialists triumph in October. Because the Bolsheviks were just one revolutionary socialist party among many, and it was only after they won the civil war that they were able to portray themselves as the true embodiment of socialist revolution while all these other types — Mensheviks and the various flavors of SR — left and right, populist and terrorist — were sinister or delusional deviationists from the true path. It’s hard to even remember that the October Revolution was just one group of socialists attacking another group of socialists. And that Kerensky was an SR, not a Kadet. Now, it is time for Nestor Makhno and the Ukrainian anarchists to follow the well-trodden path of the other left wing rivals to Bolshevism: left to memory and history, but leaving a revolutionary spirit of resistance that obviously lives on to this day.

But just because the Communist Party was making itself synonymous with socialism inside Russia, out in the wider world, they remained just one socialist faction among many. Prior to World War I, all these factions — not counting the anarchists, of course — had been nominally united under the very broad umbrella of the second International. In 1919, the Russian Communists had founded a Third International, a Communist International, to redefine and reorient worldwide socialism after the obvious abject failures of the Second International. But though the Second International had failed the test of World War I, that did not mean its leading lights were prepared to simply give up their hopes, dreams, and beliefs and convert to Bolshevism. So just before the Comintern’s First World Congress in March 1919, a group of old Social Democrats met in Bern, Switzerland. The leading German Marxists like Karl Kautsky and Edward Bernstein, who disagreed about so much, both urged their comrades to condemn Bolshevism as an unwelcome deviation. This group tried to fully restore the Second International, but by now that brand was way too tarnished. Nearly all the most radical left-wing elements of European socialism had already enthusiastically joined the Comintern, while another group led by Austrian Marxists like Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer tried to find a middle path between the reformist parliamentary socialists and the radical Bolsheviks. In February 1921, they convened in Vienna and founded something called the International Working Union of Socialist Parties, which I should mention included Russian Mensheviks like Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod. In recognition of their attempt to find common unifying ground between the old Second Internationalists and the new Third Internationalists, this group is colloquially referred to as either the Two and a Half International or the Second and a Half International.

Now, as I briefly mentioned last week, these three socialist groups came together in Berlin in April 1922 for the Conference of the Three Internationals. This was sort of the one good faith effort on all their parts to see if there remained enough similarities and agreements to overcome their differences and disagreements. Now, finding this was always going to be tough, as the Comintern was always going to insist groups entering its ranks sign pledges of discipline that the Social Democratic parties were never going to sign. And the Social Democratic parties were always going to insist on strategies, tactics, and policies the Communists believed long since discredited — and frankly, they suspected the Social Democrats were now working not for socialist revolution, but seducing the workers and the peasants to embrace a kindler, gentler, imperialist capitalism. The conference convened on the eve of the trial of the SRs, an obviously controversial development that took up a lot of attention at the Conference of the Three Internationals and which soured relations among them all — especially after Social Democratic observers returned with tales of absurd and tyrannical show trials not against kings and capitalists, but against fellow comrades. Some left wing elements outside the Communist orbit tried to maintain the hope of a unified international socialist movement, but the bridges between them all were now burning. At the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern in November 1922, they rejected a call to join a decentralized and broadly inclusive international socialist group, leaving it to the last rump of the Second International and the leaders of the Two and a Half International to merge with one another, but not with the Communists. In May 1923, these more conservative and moderate socialists convened in Homburg, and recognizing that the second international was dead and buried, formed a new group called the Labor and Socialist International, or LSI. In contrast to the Comintern there were very few hard rules for membership, and member parties joined as independent organizations, not as disciplined subsets recognizing a centralized authority. And so international socialism would go marching into the interwar period divided between Communists and Social Democrats, a divide that would have disastrous consequences for them all as a new movement called fascism stepped into the breach to make their own bid for world power.

Beyond the frontiers of the old Russian Empire and away from the internecine fights of international socialism, the early 1920s also marked a period of tense conciliation between the great powers of Europe, who now represented wildly different ideological worldviews. Immediately after World War I, the western capitalist powers had obviously tried to overthrow the Communist regime, and in turn the Communists had tried to overthrow all the western capitalists. But after all that shook out, they now found themselves in the mutually awkward position of cohabitating a game board that neither could win total control of. At the moment, neither side officially recognized the other, leading to one of those recurring absurdities of international diplomacy where governments just shut their eyes real tight and pretend like the other government simply doesn’t exist.

British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was not thrilled about the state of European diplomacy, and so as we’ve seen in March 1921, he navigated his way to a British-Soviet trade deal that normalized relationships between the two countries without yet breaking off the magical seal of official recognition. By late 1921, Lloyd George was further troubled by the state of post-World War I Europe and the ongoing ramifications of the incredibly punitive Treaty of Versailles. He lobbied the other Great Powers to meet in a conference in Genoa in the spring of 1922 for a great reassessment of where they were three years into the Treaty of Versailles era. Controversially, this invitation was extended to both Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, both of whom had been diplomatically isolated by the victorious Allies. Lloyd George hoped this conference would blunt some of the harsher aspects of Versailles, but new French Prime Minister Raymond Poincare virtually defined his career with hostility to the Germans. In his role as foreign minister during the July Crisis he had been one of the unwitting architects of World War I.

Poincare himself did not attend the Genoa Conference, but the French delegation arrived with a brief to allow no let up on German reparations — and in fact they were to try to convince the Russians to pursue their own reparations claims against Germany, under Article 116 of the Treaty of Versailles. Poincare’s grand vision was to then press French claims to Russian debt contracted by the tsar that would be paid by these German reparations to Russia. Thus far, the Soviets had refused to recognize or pay those old debts, but if the money came from Germany, maybe they’d be willing to just turn around and funnel it to France. All these maneuvers really accomplished though was short-circuiting the less punitive peace Lloyd George hoped for, and instead once again unwittingly trigger a nightmare scenario: a Soviet-German treaty of friendship.

After the Genoa Conference convened on April the 10th, 1922, the German and Russian delegations met secretly in the nearby resort town of Rapallo, and after several days of negotiations suddenly emerged with a treaty in hand, much to the shock and horror of the other delegations, especially Britain and France. There was a lot to recommend a German-Soviet agreement at the time. In the new world of the NEP, Russia needed technology, manpower, imports, and industrial expertise that the Germans could provide. And the Germans needed consumer markets and raw materials that the Russians could provide. Germany agreed to abandon all claims to debts taken out by the tsar, and Russia renounced all reparations claims against Germany under article 116. And although both sides denied it vehemently, they also signed a secret military treaty whereby the Russians would house German finance factories that would supply both countries with munitions as well as established training basis for German soldiers, forbidden to exist in Germany under the terms of the Versailles treaty. The Russians for their part gained access to military academies for their young officers to train them properly, as well as all those munitions coming out of the factories. But one of the biggest things to come out of the Treaty of Rapallo was simply that Germany became the first great power to officially recognize Soviet Russia, paving the way for the other powers to give up and follow suit.

Soviet Russia was a thing. The revolution was over. The Russian Communists were the last ones still standing, and no one was on the verge of knocking them over. There was no sense in denying it anymore. Soviet Russia was a thing.

But I want to end today by advancing beyond merely Soviet Russia, which was now a thing, but it was not the official entity that would be the thing interacting with the other great powers on the world stage in the years and decades to come. For that, we need to turn our attention to the Soviet Union.

What is the Soviet union? What is this entity that emerged from a decade of world war, civil war, and revolution? It was often casually treated in the west is merely synonymous with Russia or the Russians, but the USSR was more complicated than that, and it represented a compromise between the two big available options we talked about at the beginning of today’s episode: complete consolidation and centralization, or separation, divorce, and mutual independence.

In January, 1922, Georgy Chicherin, the people’s commissar for foreign affairs, was about to go off and negotiate the treaty of Rapallo with his German counterparts. He sent an official inquiry around questioning whether the other SSRs should consider themselves represented on the world stage by him and his team. Effectively, could he represent those other SSRs in his capacity as commissar of foreign affairs for only the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic? And though there was no legal mechanism allowing for this, people like Comrade Stalin said that Russia should represent the other SSRs and foreign affairs. Now this led to discussions and arguments with leaders of the various other SSRs about the feasibility and desirability of creating an official legal union that would formalize all of this, specifically a Union of the Ukrainian SSR, the Belorussian SSR, and a brand new thing called the Transcaucasian SSR that was formed in March 1922 from Georgia Armenia and Azerbaijan.

But though the Russian Communist Party leaders were moving decisively towards formal integration of all these SSRs, Lenin in particular continued to be wary of perceived Russian chauvinism. When Stalin came around to discuss all this, Lenin said that the language of having the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic absorb Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasian states was not going to work, it was unacceptable. They instead must enter into a federal agreement where they would each join as equal members, without anyone absorbing anyone else. Lenin said, “It is important not to give grist to the mill of the independence lobby. Not to destroy their independence, but to create a new level of a federation of equal republics.” Stalin made the point that there was a complicating hypocrisy involved here, because, for example, the Bashkir and the Tatars and other nationalities would be left in their subordinated ASSR units, not elevated to being full co-equal members of Lenin’s proposed union. The difference was justified by nothing but the political and military realities that some of them were well and truly under Russia’s thumb and others were not.

Lenin and Stalin also discussed how far this union was expected to go. In Lenin’s mind, he envisioned eventually the entire world joining the Soviet Union — SSR states in Poland, Germany, France, and throughout the globe joining together in a single union of soviet socialist republics. Stalin was far more skeptical that this was possible or even desirable. They couldn’t even get Finland in the Baltic states on board. Poland would never join them. And dreaming of a French SSR joining in union with Russia was just a fantasy. And as Russia moved forward, Stalin’s opinion was going to count for a lot more than Lenin’s, because though Lenin’s influence and authority would never be questioned, he was already ailing, and his powers waning. As we will discuss in great detail next week, the future course of Russia, the Soviet Union, and global socialist revolution would not be guided by Lenin, but by Stalin and Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev.

The principal opponent of Stalin’s model of the RSFSR-but-for-everybody was a guy called Christian Rakovski, an ethnically Bulgarian communist, a close ally of Trotsky, and presently head of government for the Ukrainian SSR. Rakovski wanted the loosest possible federation as the surest possible survival for the revolution. No amount of legalese in his opinion could cover the obvious reality that Russia was re-donning its imperial mantle. That was not going to go over well here in Ukraine. But Stalin and his allies waited until Rakovski was literally off on a holiday to have the commission created by the Communist Party to recommend an integration plan, approve the model of a single unitary state, with of course mechanisms for internal autonomy.

In December 1922, representatives of the four SSRs in question came together to unify politically. And though the other nationalities of the old Russian Empire were not afforded the elevated status of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasus, the treaty those four nominally independent republics were about to sign fully anticipated more soviet socialist republics joining after this initial core came together — and indeed it would soon grow to encompass fifteen such republics by the beginning of World War II.

The treaty creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was approved on December 30th, 1922. And it created a whole new federal government whose primary functions were indeed centralized in Moscow and in practice very little changed in terms of personnel or policy. Most of the governmental positions to the new Soviet Union were assigned by doling out new titles to the leaders of Soviet Russia. So Lenin ceased to be chairman of the RSFSR’s Council of People’s Commissars, and instead became chairman of the Union’s Council of People’s Commissars. The only thing that changed is how much more authority he had and how much of a larger area it extended over.

Meanwhile, the Russian Communist Party became the All Union Communist Party, with again virtually no changes for anyone inside the inner circle of power. So while Lenin and the Russian Communists took great pains to make this all legally a union of co-equals, the Russians would always be, like Augustus, the first among equals.

In declaring their new union to the world, the treaty creating the Soviet Union began with a short preamble, which read:

Since the foundation of the Soviet Republics, the states of the world have been divided into two camps: the camp of Capitalism and the camp of Socialism.

There, in the camp of Capitalism: national hate and inequality, colonial slavery and chauvinism, national oppression and massacres, brutalities and imperialistic wars.

Here, in the camp of Socialism: reciprocal confidence and peace, national liberty and equality, the pacific co-existence and fraternal collaboration of peoples.

Which all sounds very nice. If it were, y’know, true. But it doesn’t exactly read like an honest depiction of the material that I’ve had to cover for the last twenty or twenty-five episodes of this series. They said, though, that they expected the Soviet Union to be a model for harmony among the nations of the world.

The preamble said:

The bourgeoisie has proven itself incapable of realizing a harmonious collaboration of the peoples.

It is only in the camp of the Soviets; only under the conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat that has grouped around itself the majority of the people, that it has been possible to eliminate the oppression of nationalities, to create an atmosphere of mutual confidence and to establish the basis of a fraternal collaboration of peoples. It has only thanks to these circumstances that the Soviet Republics have succeeded in repulsing the imperialist attacks both internally and externally.

They also announced that the Union would provide a firm basis for economic reconstruction:

The years of war have not passed without leaving their trace. [it read] The devastated fields, the close factories, the forces of production destroyed and the economic resources exhausted, this heritage of the war renders insufficient the isolated economic efforts of the several Republics. National economic reestablishment is impossible as long as the Republics remained separated.

I mean, how else was Russia going to rebuild itself if it wasn’t fed by Ukrainian wheat?

The preamble ended by saying:

All these considerations insistently demand the union of the Soviet Republics into one federated State capable of guaranteeing external security, economic prosperity internally, and the free national development of peoples.

The will of the peoples of the Soviet Republics recently assembled in Congress, where they decided unanimously to form the “Union of socialist Soviet Republics ,” is a sure guarantee that this union is a free federation of people equal in rights, that the right to freely withdraw from the Union is assured to each Republic, that access to the Union is open to all Republics already existing, as well as those who may be born in the future.

That the new federal state will be the worthy crowning of the principles laid down as early as October 1917 of the pacific co-existence and fraternal collaboration of peoples, that it will serve as a bulwark against the capitalist world and mark a new decisive step towards the union of workers of all countries in one World Wide Socialist Soviet Republic.

So we’re really approaching the end of the line here. It’s been five years since the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, and from the remnants of that collapsed heap, we now have the Soviet Union being born here in December 1922, a union that would be the political manifestation of revolutionary communism in Eastern Europe for the next 70 odd years, until the member states finally took the text up on this declared right to withdraw from the union at any time.

But as the Soviet Union was born, the leader, who more than any other single person had brought it into existence, was dying. By the time this treaty was signed in late 1922, Lenin had already suffered the first of several strokes that would first incapacitate him and then kill him.

So next week, Lenin’s long history of stormy agitation and hyper rigid workaholic revolutionary activity will finally catch up with him. But I promise I won’t let him just disappear without allowing him to trash talk everyone who might possibly succeed.

 

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Episode 10.33: Bloody Sunday

The last time we talked about how the shocking disappointments of the Russo-Japanese War led to a sudden awakening of liberal and reformist opposition to the tsar in the summer of 1904 that culminated with the Zemstvo Congress, which demanded an end to tsarist absolutism. Today, we are going to talk about another major tide that was rising alongside that liberal opposition: the worker’s movement, and how that movement, itself building up steam amidst bad news from the far east and the liberal demands for political reform, would wind up blowing the lid off the whole thing in January 1905.

Now you may have noticed that as we talked about the people allegedly speaking on behalf of the working classes, the Social Democrats, be they Bolshevik or Mensheviks, or the SRs, or the Legal Marxist or revisionist economists, the workers themselves never really entered into it. That’s because for all their talk none of these parties, by their own frank admission, had done a great job actually connecting with actual workers. Though the method of agitation was now accepted, the track record after nearly a decade was not great. The best of the lot by far was the Bundists, who really had forged an alliance between workers and intelligentsia socialists, but they were of course operational only among Jewish workers, and they had just gotten the boot from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The radical socialists were not the leaders, nor hardly even the friends of the workers. One Menshevik reported as late as December 1904 in the middle of a great labor upheaval that we’re going to be talking about today, he called a meeting of workers directly affiliated with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and only ten people showed up. SRs agents, similarly, reported to their central committee that attempts to organize inside the working classes had produced meager results.

But there was a working class movement developing. It existed. It was growing. So where did it come from, and who was leading it?

Well, we know that since the introduction of the Witte system, the working classes of Russia had nearly doubled in size. But that still only made them at most 5% of the total population. But though small in the grand scheme of things, inside the various major cities of the empire, their growth was immense and noticeable. St Petersburg alone added 250,000 workers to its population over the 1890s, and they now accounted for nearly 30% of the total population. The existing infrastructure of the city was not equipped to handle this influx, and suddenly the lodging houses, tenements, and meager dwellings of the industrialized periphery were overflowing with poor families. Conditions here were deplorable by any objective measure. And if you’ll recall, one of the hallmarks of early Russian industrialization was that the workforce was often transient. People moved back and forth between their home villages and jobs in the cities. And this flux meant that the places people lived and where they ate and bathed and got medical attention were only ever temporary expedience. It was a bit like you were going off to some particularly crappy summer camp. It was only meant to be temporarily endured, not lived in full time. And so conditions just never got better. People were not just renting rooms, they were renting corners of rooms. You could rent not just a bed, but part of a bed. Sanitation was, of course, practically nonexistent, and the food was disgusting.

The work itself, meanwhile, was long and grueling. There were no safety standards in the factories, there were hardly any rights for anybody at all. And pay was literally inadequate. The Ministry of Finance itself surveyed conditions and concluded that a family of four needed about fifty rubles a month to purchase basic necessities — that is food and shelter and heat — and then they found that 75% of the workers were making less than thirty rubles a month. The economic and moral math was just not adding up.

After the turn of the century, people were still moving back and forth between villages and factories, just trying to stay alive. But the industrial way of life was becoming increasingly permanent, and there was already a group of more skilled workers who now lived full-time in the cities, and who were making maybe sixty rubles a month. And this group sometimes earns the label the labor aristocracy. They could survive living year-round in the city, they were better educated and could boast more irreplaceable skills. But as the days and months and years went by and conditions remained horribly exploitive, this group became more radicalized. And when and where we find our socialist radicals managing to meet and educate and propagandize a potential working-class recruit, chances are they came from this cohort of the quote unquote labor aristocracy, and they were well on their way to becoming the working class leaders of the industrial proletariat. Actually of the workers, not just for the workers.

In contrast to this radicalizing cohort, the lower skilled, less educated, and still mentally peasant workers tended to remain culturally conservative. They were Orthodox Christian and believed strongly in the divine benevolence of the tsar. And indeed, one of the things reported by both Social Democrats and SRs back to their respective central committees was that they struggled to recruit among these workers, because they were out there pitching overthrowing the tsar, and everyone was like, what? We, we love the tsar. And he loves us too. To them, the tsar was not a villain, but a hero. Not the devil, but their savior. It understandably made recruiting for a political revolution to overthrow their hero and savior very difficult.

But even these culturally and politically conservative workers did not like the conditions under which they lived. And though tangible party building had been slow going, the ideas and demands espoused in radical pamphlets and broadsheets over the past decade had had an impact. And there were also now working class leaders who continued to share these ideas and demands directly with their coworkers. They were talking about shorter work days, a minimum wage, medical attention, safety standards — the kinds of demands that Lenin and Martov often denounced as mere economism, but which to the workers was the difference between, like, their kids living and dying. And this was another thing that hindered any connection between the socialist intelligentsia and the workers. The intelligentsia socialists were always trying to pivot from economic demands for the workers to grand political schemes, but the workers didn’t want their grievances to be made abstract and used as political leverage. They wanted their demands met. This was not abstract to them. It was a matter of immediate life and death. And this reality is actually part of what led many revisionist socialists to turn to quote unquote economism in the first place, they were responding to the workers themselves.

As the 1890s advanced, demands for workplace reform gained traction, as did the number of work stoppages and strikes. Now, we talked about the first big one of this new industrial era, with the rowing textile workers strike that unfolded over two months in the spring of 1896. After that, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior, both tracked with alarm the growth of the number of workers strikes. They counted 118 in 1896, then 145 in 1897, then 215 in 1898, and then it dipped a little to 189 in 1899. Plenty of these records that make up the strikes that are known to us are police records, because they indicated when and where the police had to come in to break them up. Now, there was a slack period around 1900 and 1901, as the Witte system started to slow down and it made the workers more reticent, but things picked up again in 1903 — over 500 work stoppages and strikes were recorded in that year alone.

The authorities were vexed, and divided over what to do. Do we just keep cracking down? Do we just ride it out? Do we actually mandate the reforms these people are demanding? The regime’s various ministers remained divided, but by 1898, one guy was proposing a novel solution, which was later dubbed police socialism. The originator of this idea was the head of the Moscow Okhrana, Sergei Zubatov. Zubatov had himself started as a teenage revolutionary, but quickly grew disillusioned and switched sides, first becoming a police informant, and then, once his cover got blown, joining the Okhrana full-time as an officer. Zubatov was a skilled and talented agent, and by 1896, he was head of the Moscow section.

And thanks to his own background, Zubatov was well aware that workers had legitimate grievances. Their lives were miserable, and if their miserable lives were simply ignored by the authorities, the workers would inevitably be organized into a formidable army by the agents of revolution. Zubatov’s big idea was to beat the revolutionaries to the punch, to organize worker groups that will be funded by, and under the auspices of, the Okhrana. That way they could control the workers movement rather than just fight against it. And if these police unions actually delivered material benefits, then not only were you sapping the revolutionary potential of the working classes, you were making them downright loyalists to the regime. These unions would be steeped in tsarist propaganda: your lives are being improved thanks to our little father. He is your friend, not the sinister revolutionaries.

Zubatov received cautious permission to pursue this plan after the turn of the century. Now, of course Zubatov’s organizations didn’t come right out and say, oh, we’re a union run by the police; instead he hired workers and agents, sometimes right out of the ranks of Social Democrats and SRs who had bills to pay, and who rationalized that delivering real material change might be possible inside an organization that was not being shut down by the police, but supported by it. The pilot program in Moscow was successful enough that when Plehve took over as minister of the interior in the spring of 1902, he promoted Zubatov to chief of Okhrana, and let him keep expanding his police unions. Zubatov moved to St. Petersburg, but struggled to make inroads with the workforce of the capital. He did not have the same kind of long-standing trusted connections he had in Moscow..

But then in the fall of 1902, he was alerted to a particular priest who was doing amazing business among the impoverished workers, who was gaining a large following thanks to his charismatic oratory, genuine humanity, and evident sincerity. And this priest was Father Georgy Gapon. If Zubatov could get Gapon onboard, then it seemed like he might be able to bring the whole St Petersburg working class under the umbrella of police socialism.

Georgy Gapon was born in 1870, and unlike practically every other person we’ve talked about so far in this series, he did not get into radical student politics. He was a bright kid, who got a scholarship to study at a seminary, and was noted by his superiors as a potential star in the making. But young Gapon had his own ideas about religion and spiritual service, and was frankly grossed out by what he saw as the corrupt and stagnant hierarchy of the existing Orthodox Church.

One of his teachers then slipped him some Tolstoy, who’s anarcho-Christian broadsides further blasted Gapon’s faith, not in god, but in the church. Gapon wanted to minister to the poor and the impoverished and the suffering like a true Christian, and he saw in the official hierarchy only corruption, hypocrisy and decay. So he gave up on the idea of being a priest and quit the church. He then spent a few years bouncing around trying different things to make money, and while tutoring a well-to-do family, he fell in love with one of their daughters, Vera, and the couple decided to get married. But her parents were not keen on the match until Gapon agreed to apologize to the church for his previous behavior and go back to trying to be a priest. He was talented and intelligent enough that he was welcomed back into the fold, as long as he behaved himself.

So, Gapon settled in. But this new life was quickly upended. After having two children, Vera suddenly got sick and died in 1898, which precipitated another crisis of faith for Gapon, and a move to St. Petersburg. But ultimately, he decided to stick with the church. He studied more and became a priest, and found his true calling working and ministering to the growing working classes of the capital. And as I said, his mixture of genuine sincerity, his charismatic oratory and his simple, constant presence amongst them earned upon a large following among the workers. His evident concern for their material as well as their spiritual wellbeing made him a potentially potent leader of the worker’s movement. Gapon himself was already entertaining such thoughts. And that is how Gapon came across Zubatov’s radar.

In the fall of 1902, Zubatov reached out to this priest, who was so trusted by the workers, and proposed a deal. Now Gapon was understandably standoffish to Zubatov’s overtures. Gapon had his own ideas on his own plans, and he wasn’t looking to become just a paid police stooge. But by the spring of 1903, Gapon concluded that it was better to organize and grow without the police cracking down on him. So he entered into a mutually satisfactory agreement with Zubatov and the Okhrana, that Gapon would keep his organization apolitical and focused on religion and self-improvement, most especially Gapon’s group would promote loyalty to the tsar. This was no problem for Gapon; he seems to have genuinely believed in the Orthodox Christian belief that the tsar had been put on earth by god to protect his people. So it was no compromise for Gapon to promote the tsar to the workers as their generous benefactor.

Now while he was getting started, Gapon did take money from Zubatov, and it is a persistent historical rumor that he subsequently received a personal hundred ruble a month stipend from the Okhrana. But so far as I can tell, that particular rumor doesn’t have firm historical evidence backing it up. So while it is indisputably true that Gapon worked in cooperation with the authorities, and took their money from time to time, the deal he struck with Zubatov left Gapon’s group outside the more explicit police union scheme. Which is all to say that, given Gapon’s larger ambitions and his desire to work free of political interference, here in 1903, it’s not really clear who is using who.

It was probably best for Gapon that he managed to keep his group outside of Zubatov’s police union network in the summer of 1903, one of Zubatov’s groups down at Odessa went rogue and participated in a strike, which was all the ammunition that skeptics inside the regime needed. In August 1903, Zubatov was dismissed from his post has head of Okhrana, and his groups were subsequently dismantled. The police socialism experiment was over. But this was good news for Gapon, who continued his own independent relationship with the officials who replaced Zubatov, and Gapon’s religious approach was now seen as a much safer way to control the working classes. Gapon was savvy enough to lean heavily on what officials wanted to hear, and he played up the great themes of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, that he would do things through the lens of the Christian faith, that his love for the tsar was real and heartfelt, and this was all about improving the moral and spiritual condition of the community. As for the nationality part, Gapon promised that membership and his groups would be open only to good Russians of Orthodox faith, and here he exploited antisemitic tropes about foreign agitators — that is, Jews — leading good Russians away from God and the tsar.

In the spring of 1904, Gapon finally received permission to form a new organization that he wanted to officially charter called the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg. The Assembly, as it was called for short, started opening branches all over the working class periphery of the capital, hosting social events, dances, concerts, and lectures on self-improvement and spiritual uplift.

But while he was saying one thing to various officials, he was saying another thing to his top lieutenants. By the time the charter of the Assembly was approved in the spring of 1904, Gapon had purged from his inner circle most of those who had been paid agents of Zubatov. Now working with a newer group of leaders directly loyal to him, Gapon presented them with a document in March 1904 that he said was the real plan. This document was quite a bit more ambitious than what Gapon had been telling the authorities. It listed some pretty major economic demands: labor laws to protect workers, freedom to form unions, an eight hour workday and the minimum wage. But it also included a raft of political demands: freedom of speech and the press and assembly and religion, equality before the law, worker participation in lawmaking, a direct progressive income tax, universal education, canceling those redemption payments the peasants still labored under, and transferring land to the people. This was a blueprint for the wholesale reform of the Russian state and economy. But Gapon told his lieutenants, nobody is yet ready for this real plan, and he swore them to secrecy.

Historians continue to debate whether Gapon floated this document to his lieutenants as secret bait, to keep them loyal while he pursued a much more conservative agenda aimed at working class docility, or whether he was lying to his state handlers, and this really was the real plan. For my part, Gapon seems to have had great ambitions and a sense of personal destiny. And when he marched on Bloody Sunday in January 1905, the petition he bore was almost word for word the text of the program he had shown his lieutenants.

Gapon could not have founded the Assembly at a more fortuitous moment, because the spring of 1904 was right when bad news from the far east started swirling, and political opposition started rising. Then in the summer of 1904, Plehve was assassinated and replaced by the more liberal Mirsky. In this new liberal atmosphere, Gapon started pushing beyond the limits of his agreement with the authorities, the biggest of which was to confine his activities to St. Petersburg. Instead, he undertook a mission to form branches in other cities, and by the fall, he had opened nine branches and counted 5,000 members, numbers that only increased into the winter.

The police authorities, now operating under a more tolerant administration, actually seemed fine with letting Gapon run around. Their main problem was now seditious and potentially revolutionary liberals who were denouncing the tsar; Gapon, meanwhile, was running around telling everybody the tsar is great, he loves you and you should love him back. If anything, Gapon’s assembly was counted as an asset, not a liability. And indeed if Nicholas and his ministers had not been so blunderously blunderful, Gapon might have proven to be a powerful ally, rather than the regime’s undoing.

So this is roughly where we left off last week. It’s December 1904, with the Zemstvo Congress and the banquet campaigns and all the public demonstrations, and then the tsar’s underwhelming concessions, which were coupled with threats for everyone to sit back down and shut up. The tsar was able to hope that that would be the end of it for, oh, just about two weeks, before devastating news hit St. Petersburg.

Just as the tsar was issuing his supremely watered down concessions, the Japanese army completed their envelopment of the hills around Port Arthur. They then proceeded to mount their own artillery and shell what was left of the Russian fleet in the Harbor. Completely helpless, these ships were sunk one by one. With the Russian fleet now sitting at the bottom of the harbor, the Russian garrison commander of Port Arthur unilaterally concluded that further resistance was pointless, and he surrendered the base. Port Arthur had fallen. It was lost. When the news reached St. Petersburg, public opinion, still furious about the tsar’s weak response to the Zemstvo Congress, roared with righteous indignation. It was amidst all this hostile public energy and just general angry disbelief at the fall of Port Arthur, that a small incident at the Putilov Ironworks became the spark that brought the revolution of 1905 out of the liberal salons and to the streets.

The Putilov Ironworks was the single largest factory in Russia, employing about 12,000 workers. It also happened to have the single largest contingent of Assembly members, there were about 500 assembly members who worked there. Now though, the police tolerated the Assembly, the boss of the Putilov Ironworks had a very different attitude: he hated them. He complained to his own friends inside the Ministry of Finance that the Ministry of the Interior was out here undermining his ability to perform necessary work for the war. On December the fourth, one of these assembly workers had his pay docked, and when he complained, he was fired on the spot. This was a firing which was accompanied by a public diatribe by one of the managers against the Assembly. Over the next few weeks, three more Assembly members were fired on flimsy pretexts. Now initially, even Gapon assumed that this was not that big of a deal and some kind of arrangement could be made. But the workers inside the factory were furious, and the rumor was now that anyone connected to the Assembly was going to be fired. With his own followers begging for him to intervene, Gapon decided he could either lead, or be left behind. And so he led.

On December the 27th, there was a large meeting where Gapon openly threatened to strike if the workers were not reinstated. A week of fruitless negotiations between Gapon, management, and the government produced nothing. And with the deadline for action passed, on January the third, the workers of the Putilov Ironworks went on strike. Then, sympathetic Assembly members in other factories stirred their own coworkers. Two days later, 10,000 more workers had walked off the jobs, and this wave kept spreading over the next week, soon impacting 382 different factories with somewhere between a 100 and 150,000 workers walking off the job. St. Petersburg was now effectively under a general strike.

To return briefly to our friends in the revolutionary underground, the Social Democrats, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike, were taken completely by surprise. Lenin and Krupskaya did not hear about the strike from their own agents; instead, they read about it in foreign newspapers. One Bolshevik confessed to Lenin he had not even heard of Gapon until a few weeks earlier. So Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs alike all ordered their agents to get in there, infiltrate the strike and take it over, I mean, this is a really big deal, we need to lead it. In the first few days, they confidently believed that this could be done. But taking over the strike meant sidelining Gapon, denouncing him as a police stooge or as an agent of the tsar, but whenever they stood up in a worker’s meeting and so much as hinted about Gapon’s credibility, they were mercilessly booed and shouted down. By January the seventh, they were writing back to say, we’ve been able to keep our place in the ranks by openly conforming to Gapon’s leadership, but there is no way we’re taking this thing over. When Iskra attempted to take credit for turning Gapon in a political direction, the SR’s paper Revolutionary Russia complimented Iskra on their successful turn to creative writing.

But things were now taking a political turn. This was moving from an economic strike to a political confrontation. For his part, Gapon was happy to take the advice of these revolutionary agents, be the Bolshevik, Menshevik, SR or people out of the Union of Liberation. But Gapon was clear that while they could participate, they could not lead.

The idea Gapon now settled on was to draft a petition to the tsar and carry it to him in a great peaceful procession, to alert him to the conditions under which the workers lived, and beg him to intercede on behalf of his people. A draft of this petition then circulated around over the next few days, which, as I said, a mounted to an almost verbatim list of the items that had been included on the secret real plan that he had shown his lieutenants back in March of 1904. The only real change is that it appears that someone in the Union of Liberation got him to add an explicit demand for a national representative assembly.

But because this real plan had always been secret, and because it’s not entirely clear Gapon thought it was ever going to become public, this looked like a sudden change in direction. It was certainly far more overtly political than anything Gapon had previously endorsed in public. When the draft petition was complete, Gapon sent it to Mirsky in the Ministry of the Interior, and said, here is a copy of a petition. We are going to march in a peaceful procession to the Winter Palace this Sunday, January the ninth. Please be prepared to meet us.

The regime’s response was as usual inadequate, contradictory, and detached from reality. They would neither meet Gapon’s demands, nor did they want to explicitly reject them, and make the situation worse. Some suggested arresting Gapon, but that seemed sure to rile up the workers even more, so they drifted into loosely hoping this would all just kind of blow over. The tsar was not even at the Winter Palace at the moment, he was out at the imperial residence in the suburb of Tsarskoye Selo, about a ninety minute train ride away. Rather than bring the tsar back, his ministers decided to use his absence to their advantage. The authorities posted notices starting on January the seventh forbidding any demonstrations, and saying the tsar is not at the Winter Palace and he is not going to be at the Winter Palace on Sunday. Along with this, they arranged for some additional troops to be brought into reinforce the garrisons. Their objective would be to prevent any workers who defied the ban on demonstrations from entering the old central city, and especially from entering the grounds of the Winter Palace.

The government hoped that the tsar’s absence, coupled with the presence of all of these troops, would deflate the workers, and Sunday would pass without any problems. Now a few isolated voices suggested maybe the tsar should meet his people, maybe he should take their petition, if nothing else, then to diffuse the general strike we’re dealing with? But those lonely voices were ignored. On Saturday night, Mirsky took the train out to Tsarskoye Selo and briefed Nicholas, who wrote in his diary that some socialist priest was causing trouble, but it was all well in hand, no big deal.

Back among the workers, a few lonely voices were likewise trying to stop Gapon from going ahead with the march. The tsar isn’t there. The army is massing. Do you think we should rethink this? But Gapon insisted that the army would not dare shoot on an unarmed procession of peaceful supplicants. And besides, he was now staked to this thing, all or nothing. He had spent the last few days in full blown revivalist preacher mode, building up excitement, energy, and most of all expectations. The tsar will see us. He must see us. The Bible commands it. He was whipping people up to promise to die for the cause if need be. “Are you ready to die,” he would shout, and they would all shout back, “Yes! We are with you.” So for Gapon, there was already no going back.

Before dawn, on Sunday, January the ninth, 1905, workers started gathering at six pre-arranged locations around the periphery of the city, with orders to congregate on the Winter Palace at two in the afternoon. The day was bitterly cold, but spirits were high. When they converged, they said prayers, sang hymns, carried icons and portraits of the tsar. Gapon had explicitly banned the red flags of socialism to avoid accusations that they were dangerous revolutionaries. They all dressed in their Sunday best. They brought their wives and children. Many workers emptied their pockets to show that they were not armed.

As they departed, it appears to have been generally known that the tsar was not actually home, at least a lot of people seem to understand this. But they also understood that he was only a 90 minute train ride away, and that once they planted themselves that the Winter Palace, he would have to come back.

But they also marched out with a kind of grim determination in the ranks that they were marching toward soldiers, and things might get very ugly, very fast. At the head of the largest procession, Gapon had convinced himself that there was no way the tsar could refuse them. There was no way the army was going to fire on them. There was no way this wasn’t going to work.

But he did have one kind of, sort of backup plan. Assuming that he would at least be invited into the Winter Palace to parlay with… someone, Gapon carried in his pocket a red and a white handkerchief. If he waved the white handkerchief when he emerged, that meant the petition had been received and all was well. But if he waved the red handkerchief, that meant they had been rejected and that meant it was time for a general insurrection. He had made the socialists and the revolutionaries promise to play it cool during the procession. But if they saw that red handkerchief, all bets were off, and they could do whatever they wanted.

None of them ever got that far.

And there was not, as you might have in your imagination, thanks to later fanciful depictions of Bloody Sunday, a single dramatic confrontation at the Winter Palace. The 9,000 infantry and about 3,000 cavalry who were now inside St. Petersburg had been posted at various bridges, gates, and main roads to prevent the six different precessions from advancing into the central city. Nor, I should say, was the violence that’s about to happen the result of one big premeditated plan to violently crush the people. As with so much of late tsarist Russia, Bloody Sunday was the result of confusion, lack of direction, poor leadership, and vague orders. The police working for the Ministry of the Interior, for example, seemed to passively acquiesce to the march. Policemen were present as the marchers embarked, and they did nothing. Some even doffed their caps is the procession went by, which led many workers to conclude that they had official permission to be doing what they were doing.

But the regular army, working under the Ministry of War, was told under no circumstances are you to allow these people to enter the city center. Now when these orders were issued, I think the assumption was that the mere presence of all of the soldiers would be enough to turn the crowd back. But if you order a bunch of soldiers to not let people get by them, soldiers have ways of following that order.

The largest procession, as I said, was led by Gapon. They reached the Narva Gate in the southwest of the city somewhere around 10 or 11:00 AM. Gapon was out in front, surrounded by supporters and bodyguards, and as they approached the gate, a line of soldiers barred the way. Orders to disperse went unheeded. Gapon was convinced he could win this staring contest. Even a cavalry charge only moved the workers back a little bit, but did not break them up. Those in the back of the procession likely had little clear idea what was happening in the front anyway. The soldiers were then ordered to fire two volleys of warning shots over the heads of the crowd. But again, unless you’re right up in front, you don’t know where that crackling is coming from, nor do you know why that crackling is happening. So the marchers did not disperse and they did not turn around.

Then a bugle sounded, and the soldiers leveled their rifles and fired directly into the people.

Forty were immediately killed or wounded, including those closest to Gapon. And now the procession did break up and panic. Gapon himself was spirited away over a fence, and then he moved through a series of apartments, ultimately winding up in the apartment of Maxim Gorky, who I have not introduced yet, but who I’ll get around to one of these days.

The stunning realization that those are was capable of murdering his own people devastated Gapon, and his now wounded and angry mantra was, “There is no god any longer. There is no tsar.”

Similar violent clashes followed in other parts of the city as the various processions approached reinforced gates and bridges, all with the same result. Orders to disperse were ignored. That was followed by firing directly into the massive unarmed demonstrators. The largest clash was at Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main grand boulevard. Here, families not even involved in the demonstration, who were simply out for a Sunday walk, were overtaken by a worker’s procession that filled the street. These numbers were then swelled further by workers who had been driven away by violent clashes elsewhere, but who were still trying to finish the march to the Winter Palace. And according to at least one account I’ve read, there were about 50,000 people bunched up in Nevsky Prospect by mid-afternoon. At the north end of the street, protecting the approach to the Winter Palace, there stood a phalanx of troops. When they could not get the people in front of them to turn around nor disperse, they lowered their guns and started firing. Ultimately, four total volleys, plus some artillery, scattered the shocked crowd backwards, leaving dead bodies strewn everywhere. The demonstrators never did reach the Winter Palace. None of them did. They never saw the tsar, they never presented their petition. Instead, they left their dead in the street and fled for home, full of shock, disbelief, resentment, anger, and hate. For the crime of trying to tell the tsar how wretched their lives were, he had murdered them.

The final casualty numbers of Bloody Sunday are hard to pin down. The official report says 96 killed with 333 wounded; stories from the political opposition put the numbers as high as 4,000 killed, which is clearly an exaggeration; in contemporary histories as I have read, I’ve seen quoted 130 dead, 299 wounded, as well as 200 dead and 800 wounded. But the numbers themselves hardly matter. The psychological impact of what was immediately dubbed Bloody Sunday was going to be the same no matter what the final body count.

The reason that final body count doesn’t matter is because no matter what, it always includes one very specific, very important death: that was the death of the myth of the good tsar.

The belief that, yeah, the tsar was good, benevolent, and generous, and that the main problem is that he was surrounded by evil ministers, corrupt bureaucrats, and self-interested officials had deeper roots in Russian history. This belief was strong enough that it had inoculated both rank and file workers and rural peasants against more radical revolutionary agitators. But this wasn’t just about the lower classes. Within the liberal intelligentsia that we talked about last week, a distinction was usually drawn between the tsar, who they were loyal to, and the bureaucracy that surrounded him, which they blamed for creating an unnatural barrier between the tsar and his people.

This week, we saw how Gapon’s assembly had always pointed to the tsar as their ally, not their enemy. So it’s hard to imagine a worst mishandling of this situation by the regime. The workers who had marched out on Bloody Sunday believed the tsar was a good man who would protect and save them. And he could have secured their love and shorn up popular support for his faltering regime with even the barest of gestures. Outside the morality of the thing, a basic political calculation suggests maybe cementing the loyalty of the workers to act as a counterbalance against the seditious liberal and socialist opposition might not be the worst idea in the world. But no. Not only had the tsar refused to hear his people’s anguished cries for help, but his army had murdered them in the streets. The survivors were left shocked and horrified. They felt betrayed. And their faith in the tsar was shattered. And to the revolutionaries they had once rebuffed, they now listen to with open ears and angry hearts.

In our final assessment, we know that Bloody Sunday was not the result of Nicholas’s personal cruelty. He had not ordered the army to mow people down in the streets. He was just catastrophically out of touch. After being briefed on events in St. Petersburg, Nicholas wrote in his diary that night simply that it was all “painful and sad.” Like it was a depressing story on the news about something that was happening on the other side of the world. Nicholas just did not grasp the severity of the situation, the grief stricken rage it had produced, nor his own culpability in remaining so sleepily aloof. Now, were his advisors and ministers also to blame for not alerting him to alternative answers to the St. Petersburg general strike, for downplaying how serious it was, for creating a situation where the army wound up murdering a bunch of peaceful, unarmed, and loyal subjects of the tsar? Of course. But if you’re claiming to be an absolute autocrat whose unquestioned, all-encompassing authority comes directly from god, and nothing can stand between you and your people, that you are their protector, and they love you as much as you love them? Well, then buddy, this policy of sad eyed obliviousness is not going to cut it.

Back in St. Petersburg, Father Gapon escaped detection by shaving his beard, and then getting dressed in another set of clothes that had been provided by theatre friends of Maxim Gorky. Now sought by the police who had tolerated him for so many years, Gapon probably should have skipped town directly. Instead, he snuck into a packed meeting of the Free Economic Society, where leaders of the liberal intelligentsia were meeting to discuss the day’s dramatic events. In the midst of this meeting, this man who no one had ever seen before stood up and started railing against the tsar, saying the time for half-measures were over. In the midst of this fiery speech, the room suddenly realized that it was Father Gapon.

The meeting descended into chaos, and Gapon had to hustle out the door. He then departed St. Petersburg, eventually making his way to the relative safety of Finland. But before he left, he penned an open letter that said amongst other things, “Tear up portraits of the bloodsucking tsar […] be thou damned with all thine august reptilian progeny!”

Bloody Sunday took a fire that was burning in St. Petersburg and spread it across the whole empire. The liberal opposition was more emboldened than ever. They used the combination of the fall of Port Arthur and Bloody Sunday to expect and demand political reform. Tsarist absolutism was a moral, political, economic, and military disaster. Meanwhile, the working class joined their brothers and sisters in the capital, and the general strike spread across Russia, ultimately including some 500,000 workers.

On Saturday, January the eighth, the tsar’s ministers had gone to bed hoping this would all blow over. By the time they went to bed on Sunday, July the ninth, it had all blown up in their faces.

 

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Episode 10.32: The Union of Liberation

So now we actually come to the revolution of 1905. Really, seriously, I’m not kidding. An honest to god revolution in this 10th and final series of the Revolutions podcast. Now if you know anything at all about the Russian Revolution of 1905, you know that its beginning is traditionally marked by Bloody Sunday in January 1905. But though Bloody Sunday is the dramatic jolt of revolutionary energy, where that which was rising up met that which was falling down, in retrospect, revolutionary energy had already been humming well beyond normal capacity all through the latter half of 1904. And this energy was not generated by Socialist Revolutionaries or Social Democrats or anarchists or narodists, but the liberals. Liberals who seem to be fulfilling their assigned historical destiny as ushering in that first revolution, the democratic revolution.

Russian liberals were as shocked as anyone to be leading the revolutionary charge in 1904, given how much they seem fated to a life of disappointed frustration. The heyday of the era of great reform back in the 1860s and 1870s was long since passed, even further away psychologically than an objective counting of years gone by. The 1880s had been as dismally repressive for liberals as it was for narodists and socialists and anarchists. Most of the progressive judicial reforms had been watered down over the years, leaving the same old unaccountable police state bureaucracy able to do what it wanted, when it wanted, to who it wanted. Newspapers and books could be legally published, but the censors made it nearly impossible to speak openly about political topics. And everyone went through the motions of life well aware that the Okhrana had spies and informants everywhere, that it wasn’t enough to watch what you said publicly, you had to watch what you said privately.

Meanwhile, the locals zemstvos, the most significant new political institution to emerge from that era of great reform, had seen their power and jurisdiction curtailed and fenced off, and then curtailed and fenced off some more. The local zemstvos still existed, and there were now thirty-four of them scattered across the empire, but instead of growing and spreading and making the state more democratic, they were aggressively pruned back. There was that brief flicker of hope upon the ascension of Nicholas the Second that things might get better, that things might change, but Nicholas told them all to give up their senseless dreams.

And so it went. Between the senseless dream speech of 1895, and the revolution of 1905, Russian liberalism continued to exist in a state of resigned dormancy, confined to private conversations among trusted friends and colleagues. By the turn of the century, liberalism came in three basic types: first were conservative liberals, who simply wanted the tsar to recognize the benefits of allowing his people, at a minimum, to have a consultative voice in how the empire was run; to their left were liberal constitutionalists, who genuinely wanted what most of their social and intellectual peers in the west had: a written constitution, a representative parliament with real legislative power, civil and political rights that were respected. These first two types of liberal were well-represented inside the zemstvos, though conservatives tended to outnumber constitutionalists. And then further to the left of the both of them, was a third group who came mostly from the ranks of the intelligentsia. They were more radically democratic. Not necessarily republican, but definitely believing that the people, not the tsar, should govern the empire, that Russia could not truly flourish until the Russian people had been set free.

What these three groups had in common was a hatred of the unaccountable police state bureaucracy under which they lived. Whatever stripe of liberal you were, you were sure to agree that the arbitrary and repressive bureaucracy was equal parts humiliating, degrading, and incompetent. It was this unaccountable alien thing that had inserted itself between the tsar and his people, and despite its own blindingly obvious ineptitude, it was able to maintain its power through intimidation, threats, and force. All of this was plain as day, but you could not say anything about it. You just had to sit silently while the imperial bureaucracy clunked along making a hash of everything and lashing out at even the most constructive criticism.

Thanks to that bureaucracy’s reactionary sense of self-preservation, democrats and liberals were not treated much differently than the most radical revolutionary communist; it was all the same to the police. And because of this attitude, more radical liberal voices tended to gain influence, because asking the tsar nicely for liberal reform clearly wasn’t ever going to work. And among those more radical voices we find Pavel Milyukov, who we talked about at the end of episode 10.20. Milyukov was a proponent of universal suffrage and representative constitutional democracy, and for his outspokenness on these issues, he had spent time in prison, in administrative exile, and ultimately working as a professor in Bulgaria in self-imposed exile. But he also earned a lot of admirers across the political spectrum for his principled resiliency on these issues. Also in this camp of radical democrats, we now also find Pyotr Struve completing his ideological journey from Social Democrat to Legal Marxist to radical liberal. Struve, remember, had been an active part of the social democratic underground in the 1890s, and when the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party officially formed in 1898, Struve was the one who had written their founding manifesto. But Struve was also among those embracing the possibilities offered by revisionist Marxism, and by the time his erstwhile comrades — Lenin and Martov, more stubbornly doctrinaire orthodox Marxists — came home from exile in 1900, their brief attempt to bridge their widening ideological divide ended in failure. They were simply too far apart on too many issues.

And so after simultaneously leaving, and being left by, the Social Democrats, Struve found himself briefly homeless politically. But he soon found the basis for common cause with the radical liberals and constitutionalists. Struve had always been passionate about the democracy part of Social Democracy, and so he fell in with frustrated constitutionalists who wanted to do more than just grumble and frustration for the rest of their lives. As a gifted writer with a radical bent, Struve was able to secure financing for a newspaper that would express liberal hopes and dreams for Russia. And just to condense a few further twists and turns, in 1902, Struve emigrated to Germany and became the publisher and editor and chief of a new newspaper called Liberation.

Liberation was not a legally sanctioned paper. It was as underground as Iskra and the SR’s paper, Revolutionary Russia. It had to be smuggled into the country and when it arrived, it competed with those more revolutionary journals for the hearts and minds of the politically minded intelligentsia. Under Struve’s editorial direction, Liberation took a different approach than the other two big underground papers. In Its first issue. Liberation announced that its primary purpose would be to join together all the forces that wanted to end tsarist absolutism. Liberation did not want to speak for the working class or the peasants or the bourgeoisie, it wanted to speak for the whole nation collectively, everyone from conservative liberals, the bomb throwing SRs. Thus, the liberation editorial line was simple: down with absolutist autocracy. Whether you want to do achieve this through reform or insurrection, evolution or revolution, the first and foremost goal must be to destroy the current bureaucratic police state that kept them all in chains. This left the door open for Social Democrats who believed in a two-stage theory of revolution, SRs who believed that the principle goal of their political revolution was to overthrow the tsar, and liberals who simply wanted the tsar’s powers legally constrained by a constitution.

Now, this editorial line could be frustrating for those liberal constitutionalists, like Milyukov, who wanted the paper to be more forthrightly, well, liberal constitutionalist. But Struve was adamant on the need to form a big tent anti-tsarist coalition to advance that cause. So the paper itself was a mix of news, editorials, and submitted correspondence, and plenty of contributors were anonymous dissenters from inside the state apparatus, who were able to provide juicy stories of sinister policies or routine incompetence that they witnessed every day. Including, for example, a leaked memo from Sergei Witte recommending that the tsar shutter the zemstvos once and for all. All of it made for very popular reading to a suitably outraged public. The arrival of Liberation in 1902 also happened to coincide with the arrival of the arch reactionary Plehve as the new minister of the interior, and his hardline attacks on anything the left of, like, divine right absolutism, helped Liberation gain a large following. Running, it seems to me, just behind Iskra in terms of total number of copies printed and distributed.

While Struve and his allies developed this strategic editorial line of a nationwide popular front combined in opposition to the tsar, they also formed their own underground organization to make this dream a reality. And this organization was dubbed: the Union of Liberation. But even here, the focus was entirely on the negative goal of destroying absolutism, rather than trying to promote any particular vision of what should replace it. Because once you started talking about what came next, any potential national coalition the Union of Liberation hoped to link together would instantly fracture apart.

So if you think back to Lenin’s argument about party membership and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party needing to be narrow and restrictive, while the Union of Liberation defined its membership as broadly as possible. Are you opposed to absolutest autocracy, yes or no? If yes, then you’re in. So the Union of Liberation included a wide spectrum of beliefs: it included zemstvo constitutionalists, liberal academics and professional types, revisionist socialists, Legal Marxists, even more orthodox Social Democrats and SRs, who saw the utility of a political popular front at this stage and the revolutionary game. And thanks to the regime treating everything from tepid constitutionalism to radical anarchism as equally illegal, all of these people, who had all of these wildly divergent beliefs, actually did share a common cause.

But just as the Union of Liberation was formally coalescing in January 1904, the potential anti-tsarist coalition faced a major problem: the Russo-Japanese War. As we saw last week, the beginning of the war triggered a wave of patriotic flag-waving, and many liberals set aside domestic politics to embrace the war as a matter of national interest. Liberal leaders of the zemstvos now wanted to join together, not to attack the tsar, but to help him win the war. In particular, the zemstvo leaders believed that their decades of experience employing doctors and setting up hospitals would be of great service to the empire, and the zemstvo leaders approached the tsar and received his personal blessing to form an all zemstvo organization to coordinate a national effort to recruit doctors and provide health services for the army in the far east. But though this all zemstvo organization was not meant to be a hotbed of political opposition and liberal reform, it was still the first time the zemstvo had received permission to coordinate their activities beyond their own local jurisdictions.

So the patriotic mood that prevailed through the spring of 1904 confused the budding liberal opposition, and stymied their efforts to get united. Struve himself tried to distinguish between supporting the national war effort and supporting the regime that waged the war, but this was a muddled and unsatisfying position. But then, suddenly, all the Union of Liberation’s problems were solved when the news from the front lines was all bad, bad, bad.

Now, last week I probably oversold the one sidedness of the actual course of the Russo-Japanese War; that when it’s analyzed objectively and outside the domestic political context, the war was not quite so lopsided. But if I got carried away, it was just because I was thinking about it in its domestic political context. And so even if this is one of those cases where the final score didn’t exactly reflect how close the game was at times, the political reality back home was that all the news from the front lines was bad. And the consistency of the bad news was shocking and absolutely destabilizing to the regime. And the political climate back in Russia shifted as quickly as a blizzard following a heat wave. If the Union of Liberation took the patriotic beginning of the war to be one step back, then the bad news in the spring and summer of 1904 was like ten steps forward. Briefly knocked back on their heels, they now had to sprint just to keep up.

For years, the liberal argument had been that the regime is bureaucracy was hopelessly incompetent and held together by little more than paranoid cruelty. The fact that they were now getting hopelessly whipped in the far east was proof positive that they were right all along. And then when Plehve was assassinated in July of 1904 to exactly zero public expressions of regret, the liberals were further emboldened to press their case even harder. And it was this pressure that forced the tsar to go against his instincts and elevate the liberalish Prince Mirsky to be his new minister of the interior in late August. Mirsky, remember, carried with him the confidence of the zemstvo leadership, and he immediately promised less draconian policies, and more trust in the people.

As I said last week, Mirsky was genuinely worried that things were moving in a revolutionary direction and he wanted to head all that off. But this wasn’t just about avoiding revolution for him. He genuinely believed that the state would work better if it worked in harmony with the people, instead of simply imposing its will on the people.

As the center of acceptable political discourse moved left, more radical elements were then able to move in… a more radical direction. So Struve warned readers of Liberation not to be seduced by the mere whiff of reform that Mirsky’s promotion represented. The shifting times also led the Union of Liberation to joint even more radical parts of the political underground for even greater, and potentially revolutionary, coordination. Now, before the assassination of Plehve, a national anti-tsarist movement had been more theoretical than real, and the liberal constitutionalist had never really had to face the prospect of accepting or rejecting partnership with more radical organizations. But after Plehve’s death, this prospect now presented itself, and they answered an invitation from Finnish nationalists to attend a meeting in Paris of all anti-tsarist groups. The SRs also accepted this invitation, and sent among their delegates the unimpeachably dependable Yevno Azef, which is how the Okhrana learned all the details of who attended, and what was discussed. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party also voted to attend this conference, but when they realized the SRs would probably dominate, they pulled out at the last minute. But everyone else convened in Paris in mid September for what was officially called the Conference of Oppositional and Revolutionary Organizations of the Russian State, but later called simply the Paris Bloc.

They agreed to a common program of aggressive anti-tsarist agitation. And while the liberals at the conference, led by Pavel Milyukov, wanted to stick to demonstrations and petitions and trying to organize some kind of national assembly, the revolutionaries were talking about stockpiling weapons and who to assassinate. And while they differed on tactics, they all left this Paris meeting agreeing not to get in each other’s way, nor publicly denounce each other. They all really did share the same goal of toppling tsarist absolutism.

Now the Union of Liberation also had members inside most of the locals zemstvos, and after this Paris Bloc meeting, they started vocally pushing for an all zemstvo congress to address the need for political reform. The regime was clearly weak; it was staggering, it was disoriented. And to the happy surprise of the Union of Liberation, even more conservative zemstvo leaders supported this call for an all zemstvo congress. By October 1904, even the usually docile legal press was making the case for greater zemstvo participation in government. What’s wrong with Russians of talent, good will, and intelligence playing a role in public administration?

The zemstvo leaders then asked Mirsky for permission to hold such a congress, and caught between these emboldened liberals who he sympathized with, and his conservative boss, who was being very stubborn, Mirsky worked out a compromise whereby the congress would not receive official sanction, but they would be allowed to meet privately for, quote, a cup of tea. Mirsky would instruct the police not to interfere.

On November the sixth, 1904, 103 delegates representing all the local zemstvos convened in St. Petersburg. Now, one of the stipulations Mirsky had insisted upon in exchange for looking at the other way while they had this cup of tea, was that there would be a strict media blackout on the congress. They could meet, but who was there, and what they discussed was not supposed to be talked about out in the open. They were just supposed to tell Mirsky what ethey had talked about, and he would take it to the tsar for a response. But this news blackout induced something of a Streisand effect, because not only was the fact of the congress common knowledge, but the ministry of the interior insisting that nobody could speak about what happened in the congress only heightened public interest.

So as delegates departed for St. Petersburg, they were often escorted to the train station by happy cheering crowds who believed they were sending these guys off to participate in a great momentous affair, and hopes were high that it would be a historic moment in Russian political history, the beginning of a new era of great reform.

I have often seen the Zemstvo Congress of November 1904, compared to the convening of the Estates-General in 1789. And because this is the Revolutions podcast and we know a little bit about this stuff, I’d like to dwell on this comparison for a second, just for fun.

Now like the Estates-General, this was the first time in living memory that representative delegates from across the empire had been allowed to convene at the national level to discuss political matters. But unlike the Estates-General, it was still a private and officially unsanctioned affair. The Estates-General, meanwhile was the King officially calling his subjects together under his official auspices. So what I see here in the Zemstvo Congress of 1904 is something more akin to an alt history of the French Revolution, where Louis the 16th resisted calling the Estates-General, and instead, Jacques Necker made a nod wink agreement with the liberal nobles and Third Estate leaders to hold unofficial meetings, probably in the Palais Royale, or like, Lafayette’s house, which could then backchannel its considered opinion to the royal ministry.

And the fact that Nicholas did not follow Louis’s example speaks to one of the important differences in the crises that they faced. Louis was forced to officially convene the Estates-General because the monarchy was bankrupt, and the Paris banking community made convening the Estates-General a necessary precondition of granting the monarchy further bridge loans. And while Nicholas was facing a sudden popular backlash over an unpopular and badly managed foreign war, he wasn’t yet stony broke. Ironically, the same Paris banking community that had forced Louis over the barrel in 1788 was now keeping the tsar afloat in 1904. French loans were critical to the financial health of the tsarist regime, and the French were at this point far more worried that the collapse of the tsar would strengthen Germany than they were about using their financial leverage to insist on democratic reform.

So in 1904, the tsar was unpopular, facing a very real political crisis, and this elected assembly was meeting to discuss political reform, but it’s not quite the Estates-General who was 1789. But that said, I do think that this moment is important enough that I don’t think the Zemstvo Congress was a precursor to the revolution of 1905. I think the revolution is happening right now. Nobody knew it, but the Revolution of 1905 had already begun.

Over three days, and in meetings that were held at different private residences, the Zemstvo Congress debated reforms they wanted the tsar to adopt. And of the 103 delegates who convened, it’s reckoned that about two thirds were liberal constitutionalists, while only about one third were conservatives, who merely wanted the tsar to accept the principle of a consultative place for popular voices. The Union of Liberation had successfully gotten some of their men selected for the congress, and they were there to make sure that the reforms they demanded were as forthrightly constitutional as possible.

The final 10 point plan the congress came up with reflected this dynamic, and it included all the greatest liberal constitutionalist hits: equality before the law, freedom of religion and conscience, freedom of speech and the press, freedom of association, elected regional assemblies and an elected national assembly, and that these assemblies should participate in both lawmaking and budget oversight. In the midst of these recommendations, they also editorialized that above all they wanted an end to abnormal and arbitrary government. They wanted to free the tsar’s subjects from the whims of an unaccountable police and an arbitrary bureaucracy.

Now to appease the conservatives, this 10 point plan avoided using trigger words like constitution and parliament, but it was still plain that they were asking for a constitution and a parliament. And after three days they finished their work and they voted on this 10 point plan, and then transmitted it to Mirsky, who promised to take it to the tsar. No one was under any illusion that the tsar would accept the whole package, but it was meant to signal how far he was going to have to move to appease them.

So, as I just said, it was impossible to keep this out of the press. The people of the Russian Empire knew that it was taking place, and something like five thousand telegrams flooded into St. Petersburg declaring support or best wishes for the delegates. And all around the empire, municipal councils, social organizations, and business groups wrote and published their own supportive public calls for reform. Mirsky was obviously frustrated he couldn’t keep a lid on things, but he also believed that if he cracked down too hard that it would only make things worse.

After the conclusion of the congress, the Union of Liberation then took direct action to keep up the public drum beat in support of reform. Specifically modeling their efforts on the liberal opposition in France in 1847 and 1848, which they all knew from their history books, the Union of Liberation organized a private campaign of banquets that would skirt legal prohibitions on political meetings by billing themselves as merely private dinners. But even the cover story for these banquets sent a message, as they were allegedly convened to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the great judicial reforms of 1864.

The first of these banquets was held on November the 20th in St. Petersburg, and hosted 600 attendees, many of whom ranked amongst the most prominent members of the intelligentsia, the liberal nobility, and the reform minded officer corps of the military. The quote unquote toasts they offered were little more than political speeches supporting a constitution and civil rights and participatory government. And this kicked off a wave of such banquets. Over the next few weeks, 38 dinners were held in 26 different cities, all sounding the same call. And you had doctors, lawyers, engineers, landowners, journalists, military officers, and even reform minded bureaucrats from all over the empire repeating the call from the necessity of political reform.

Meanwhile, the press dutifully covered all these events as news stories that quoted from the speeches that were given — I mean, the toasts that were given — spreading reformist ideas far and wide. And it was noted that opinions that would have gotten you sent to Siberia six months earlier were now boldly spoken out in the open.

So that brings us to what could have been a satisfactory conclusion to all of this. Events had been moving very rapidly since the summer of 1904, and by December, expectations were high that the tsar was going to have to bend to public opinion. Mirsky was certainly working hard on him to acknowledge this political reality. I mean, the least you could do is put some elected people on the state council. And at this point, Mirsky is literally saying, sir, we either do this, or it’s gonna be a revolution, but to Mirsky’s dismay the tsar did not agree. He took his council not from the liberal Mirsky, but from conservatives in his family and his ministry, who said, we can’t agree to this, the principle of absolutism is simply too important. And so Nicholas went back to Mirsky reiterating the same position he had held since the senseless dream speech: I will never agree to the representative form of government.

But he did acknowledge that he would have to take some notice of events. So on December the 12th, the tsar issued a decree. It was the decree everyone had been waiting for, the tsar’s official response to this great national stirring for political reform, and it was… spectacularly underwhelming. It included a vague promise to strengthen the rule of law, to slightly ease up on press censorship, to expand the scope of the zemstvos, but only at the local level. People had been expecting a feast, and instead they were thrown a few peanuts. The severe mildness of the tsar’s “concessions” struck even conservatives out there in Russian society as not being nearly enough for the moment.

And then two days later, the tsar followed this up with a provocative counterbalance to his concessions. He condemned the press for irresponsibly inflaming national passions. He demanded the zemstvos take no more part in national affairs. Anyone who continued to participate in public calls for reform, especially those on a state salary, could expect to be punished in the future. This sent ripples of frustrated anger through the empire, and was greeted with downright ridicule from the population: who does the tsar think he is? Mirsky was devastated, and he said, “Everything has failed, let us build jails.”

Next week, Nicholas’s myopic misreading of the national mood would run headlong into events well beyond anyone’s control, as further disastrous news from the far east would combine with even greater public protests, as the liberal push for reform was now joined by mass worker demonstrations that would produce one of the most famous revolutionary moments in history: Bloody Sunday.

 

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Episode 10.97: The Trial of the SRs

Last week, we talked about the Russian famine of 1921 to 1922, a famine that represented a true nadir of Russian fortunes, following a long list of nadirs of their fortunes since 1914. Now had the tsar been in power, the famine was exactly the kind of thing socialists would have blamed on the bad old system that needed to be overthrown by revolution. I mean, look, tens of millions of people are starving to death, what are we supposed to do, not overthrow the regime that was allowing it to happen?

But, the revolution had already come and gone. The Communist Party has been in charge of things since 1917, and you can’t very well blame Nikki and Alexandra for this one, especially as the Soviet government’s own policies played such a huge causal role in the disaster. So as I mentioned last week, the social and economic crisis came with huge political dangers for the Communist Party. And if you go back a few episodes before that, to when we were talking about the 10th Party Congress, we know that the liberalizing economic reforms of the NEP were not going to be matched by liberalizing political reforms, quite the opposite. More economic freedom had to be paired with less political freedom, otherwise people might get it into their heads to overthrow the Communist Party and give someone else a chance. And there were potential alternatives out there: not just reactionary monarchists or liberal bourgeois types who could be easily dismissed at this point, but other socialist parties. Other revolutionary socialist parties. Like the Party of the Socialist Revolutionaries. The SRs.

Now as everyone knows, the SRs had been the most popular political party in Russia back in 1917. They ascended rapidly after the February Revolution, occupied key positions in the Soviet and the provisional government, and in terms of raw numbers, they were by far the largest political organization in Russia. The leaders of the SRs initially treated the October Revolution as an annoying setback that would be easily overcome when the democratic elections were held for the Constituent Assembly. But then the Bolsheviks had simply dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 after the SRs won the most seats, which flummoxed the leadership of the SRs, as no one rose to defend them or the sanctity of the assembly. But we must remember that this is largely because Lenin and the boys simply copied and pasted the SR land redistribution program and issued it as their Decree on Land. So, there seemed a little reason to rise up and overthrow them in early 1918. They were promising what everybody wanted.

In the years since the October Revolution, the SRs had fought a steadily losing battle for relevance, influence, and power. When the civil war got going in earnest, the party split between those willing to take up arms against the Bolsheviks, and those who refused on the assumption that conflict between socialists would only wind up helping the White forces of reaction. Those who did take up arms in 1918 found themselves mostly marginalized by the end of the year. On the one hand, the Bolshevik land decree made it nearly impossible to convince Russian peasants that the Bolsheviks needed to be fought to the death, and on the other hand, the admirals and generals of the White armies and their Allied backers in the west had no interest in letting revolutionary socialists have any power inside thier anti-communist coalition.

By 1919, the civil war had become a true either or choice between Reds and Whites, and most SRs simply could not justify supporting the Whites. The Communists made their choice easier by offering amnesty to SRs who renounced armed opposition to the Soviet government. Those who did not switch their party allegiance outright either dropped out of politics or went into exile abroad.

This general political amnesty was incredibly conditional though, and during the decisive death matches of the civil war in late 1919 and early 1920, the Cheka actively hunted down known senior SRs. Among the most prominent was Abram Gotz, former member of the SR Combat Organization during the revolution of 1905, who had only emerged from Siberian exile in 1917, whereupon he became chairman of the All-Russian Soviet Executive Committee, one of the inner circle members against whom the Bolshevik staged the October Revolution. Gotz was in the room for all the showdowns at the Smolny Institute, and was a leader of the Committee of Salvation of the Homeland and the Revolution, which attempted to resist the Bolshevik takeover of the Soviets.

Despite all this, when faced with the choice of Reds or Whites, Gotz renounced military opposition to the Communists, as it would only help counter-revolutionary reactionaries. But even though he had at least temporarily reconciled himself to the Soviet regime, Gotz and other members of the SR Central Committee were swept up in late 1919 and early 1920 by the police. Some of their comrades, most notably Victor Chernov, managed to avoid the sweep and flee into exile, but by mid 1921, every prominent SR leader was either in jail or in exile, and the party organization was totally shattered.

After allowing them all to languish in prison for the better part of two years, in December 1921, the leaders of the Communist Party decided it was high time to put the SRs on public trial. This decision is a bit surprising for two reasons: first, the SRs as a party did not pose any kind of immediate threat to the Soviet regime. In October 1920, members of a much diminished reconstituted SR Central Committee voted against armed resistance to the Communists, as they simply did not have the means, manpower, or weaponry. Even though veteran SRs like Alexander Antonov in Tambov were involved in various peasant uprisings, the official party line condemned the uprisings, and told anyone still loyal to the party not to participate.

And then second, the Communists had plans for several big public revolutionary trials over the years. That was originally the plan for both Tsar Nicholas and then later Admiral Kolchak, which, y’know, makes a certain amount of sense — the revolution putting the old regime on trial. Those plans never went anywhere, so as it turns out, the first big public revolutionary trial the Communists elected to stage was against other revolutionary socialists. It’s like if the Jacobins had skipped right over the trial of the king to the trial of the Girondins.

In his book, A Show Trial Under Lenin, a book which I’m getting a ton of details for today’s episode from, Marc Jansen makes the case for understanding the trial in the immediate context of the ongoing Russian famine, and the larger context of what post-revolutionary political life was supposed to look like. The Communist Party wanted to short circuit any revival of SR fortunes, given the ongoing social and economic conditions, and prevent Russians from believing any other party could possibly represent a legitimate alternative to the Communist version of revolutionary socialism, whatever bumps, hiccups, and y’know, famines might occur along the way. In modern parlance, the Communist Party hoped to destroy the brand of the SRs, so that even people dissatisfied with conditions in Russia would see the SRs not as a legitimate alternative, but a discredited group that nobody wanted to associate with. The clever way they planned to go about doing this was by narrowly targeting the leadership, painting them as perfidious Judases of the revolution, while simultaneously making a big show of forgiveness, understanding, and sympathy for rank and file SRs — if they were ready to put their unfortunate mistakes of the past behind them. In this way, leaders would be cleaved from followers, and the SRs as a party would be dealt a final, fatal blow from which they would never recover.

When word started leaking out in early 1922 that the Communists were planning to prosecute senior SRs, their comrades in exile rallied to their defense. Though the Russian Communist Party was triumphant inside Russia, in the wider world of revolutionary socialism, they were still just one faction among many. The big rift between Social Democrats and Communists was widening, and many leading members of the international socialist movement opposed Bolshevism, and were appalled at the intended persecution of SRs, who were still considered perfectly legitimate revolutionary socialists outside of Russia. They were still full comrades in the wider, greater movement. This was fratricide of the worst kind.

Now we’re going to talk much more about this next week, but after World War I, there were two rival organizations [to?] the ComIntern’s claim to being the international. The Second International was trying to get the old band back together and reconstitute themselves after the disasters of World War I. Then there was another group sometimes called The Two and a Half International or the Vienna International, composed of more radical socialists who broke with the discredited Second International, but were not themselves full-blown Communists.

Now, like I said, we’ll talk more about this next week, but at this moment, all three organizations were presently in negotiations about the viability of a united front against imperialism and capitalism. SRs in exile appealed to leaders of the other two international groups, who in turn put pressure on the Communists to explain why they were about to put good Russian socialists on trial. Sensitive to their image during these negotiations, the ComIntern leaders said they had nothing to hide, and would allow representatives of the other Internationals to come to Moscow, to not only observe the trial, but even serve as members of the legal defense team if they wanted; the attitude being that evidence proving the SR defendants had betrayed the revolution would be so overwhelming that everyone would be not just allowed to watch, but encouraged to watch.

Meanwhile, in Russia, though the decision to prosecute had been made in December, the public announcement was not made until the end of March 1922, and the official investigation did not begin until April 1st. Investigators then spent the next seven weeks gathering up all the alleged overwhelming evidence they had now promised the world. They looked for anything that showed the SR leadership working against the revolution: communications and alliances with the Whites or the Allies; their destruction of bridges, roads, and buildings; terrorist activities against either the Soviet government or the Red Army; any orders to destroy crops or tools or other essential of life; anything that painted them as being little more than a front for the reactionary Whites and the western allies who backed them. Accumulating this evidence meant canvassing party members or former party members in a position to have heard or seen things from the inside. This involved police sweeps, interrogations, and interviews with prisoners already in custody. Some of these people were coaxed into providing testimony with various rewards or promises to let them go on with their lives in peace and freedom. Others had to be threatened with prison, exile, or execution if they did not provide the kind of evidence the prosecution needed. Either way, the message was pretty clear: life will be much better for you if you testify than if you don’t.

Concurrently with this investigation, former SRs who had already reconciled with the Communists wrote pieces in the newspaper admitting their former errors, denouncing their former leaders, and generally encouraging their former comrades to abandon the old party.

“The forthcoming trial of the SRs,” one of them wrote, “will open the eyes of the workers of the world to the miserable part which it had played during the revolution, and will thus ease the shift to the revolutionary camp of all those among its present or former members, who for one reason or another, still hesitate.”

And that, right there, is the point of all this. On May 23rd, 1922, the seven week investigation concluded with a 117 page indictment called The Affair of the Central Committee and of Certain Members of Other Organizations of the Socialist Revolutionary. This indictment read far more like a political polemic than a legal document. The indictment started with a survey of the history of the SRs since the October Revolution, and peppered this story with allegations of their counter-revolutionary activities at every step of the way. The SRs had taken the side of the bourgeois against the workers and the peasants. They engaged in clandestine attempts to overthrow the Soviet regime. They conducted open civil war against that regime, during which they cooperated with the whites, the bourgeoisie, and the western powers from whom they had taken money and supplies. In league with the Czechoslovak Legion, they had let a chunk of Russia fall out of Soviet hands. More recently, the indictment laid on the SRs full responsibility for the run of peasant uprisings which had manifested in 1920 and1921 and accused them of supporting the Kronstadt Rebellion.

In the end, the indictment named 34 total defendants — 30 men and four women — with Abram Gotz as the most widely recognizable name on the list thanks to the prominent part he had played in 1917. But not all these defendants were the same. They were divided into two groups. The first group were the real defendants, 24 senior SR leaders, including all the members of the Central Committee in custody. The other ten in the second group were not actually targets of the trial at all, despite being included in the indictment. They were there to take the stand and openly confess their crimes. They would paint a miserable picture of the real defendants in the first group, and in return be forgiven for their own crimes. This was meant to reinforce the idea that the Communists were sincere in their claim that confession and repentance would lead to forgiveness and reconciliation. There was no reason for anyone to cling to the SR party anymore, especially not after the duplicitous crimes of the leadership had been publicly revealed, and so the defendants in that second group — lower ranking members who would confess their crimes and then be forgiven — would be living proof of the forward-looking decency of the Communist Party.

The trial began in Moscow on June 8th, 1922. It was held in the Pillar Hall of the House of Unions in Moscow. It was a ballroom that had been used by the nobility during the old regime. The trial was purposely meant to be a public event, and 1500 spectators were allowed to cram inside under heavy guard by armed soldiers. Three judges of the court sat on an elevated platform at one end of the hall under a huge banner that read “workers of the world unite.” This was meant to be the revolution putting its enemies on trial. The court would meet six days a week, with an early session running from noon until 5:00 PM, and an evening session convening at seven o’clock and running to midnight. Now because this was meant to be a real trial and not just drumhead justice, the accused all had lawyers and would be allowed to mount a defense. A delegation representing the other western Internationals were indeed allowed to come and participate, and they met daily with their clients to review evidence and work out a defense.

Once things got going, though, they all concluded the trial was so heavily stacked against them that it was hardly an exercise in impartiality. All three of the judges were members of the Communist Party, and the audience was packed with raucously vocal partisans. Whenever defense councils or defendants attempted to speak, the spectators subjected them to jeering and catcalls. They were correct in their assessment. The trial was not in fact, an exercise in impartial justice, but instead the centerpiece of a sweeping propaganda campaign. Lenin and other senior Communists repeatedly referred to the trial was an opportunity for mass public education, that is, to educate the people on how terrible the SRs had been during the revolution. The SRs would be portrayed not as sincere socialists, but as dupes, patsies, and collaborators with the enemies of the revolution. They were allies not of the workers and the peasants, but of Kadets and Mensheviks and monarchists, who despite their wildly different ideologies, were now all lumped into a single amorphous counterrevolutionary blob.

In this depiction, the SRs were quote, “a paid military espionage agency of the Entente.” They were quote, “an agency of foreign governments.” According to Trotsky, they were a division of the quote, “French Czechoslovakian intelligence service,” that the French general staff was the real leader of the politics of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the source of their finance. Beyond painting a broad picture that the SRs were simply a front for the enemies of the revolution during the civil war, they were also blamed for ongoing troubles, particularly they were blamed for the famine. According to a declaration of one Communist aligned workers group, “The hunger is also the fault of the socialist revolutionaries.” Another resolution said, “Our chaotic conditions and hunger are the result of the criminal adventurism of the socialist revolutionaries. They have set fire to the foodstuffs and grain in the Russian storage depots.”

So in all of this, the SRs are spies, saboteurs, and turncoats, who attempted to derail the revolution at every turn.

This propaganda campaign of public education, driven by daily revelations from the trial, used a variety of media. Written pamphlets, articles, and newspaper stories were often written by former SRs admitting the error of their ways and denouncing their former leaders. There were also mass meetings and demonstrations and public gatherings where similar messages were disseminated. The SRs on trial were denounced as tools of the bourgeoisie and western capitalism. Workers often heard from former SRs who said, I have seen the error of my ways. I hope all my former comrades do too.

The Communists also set up public exhibitions for people to come and see for themselves all the horrors the SRs had wrought. Most famously, a public exhibition was set up right next door to the courtroom in Moscow called The Crimes of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries against The Workers of Soviet Russia in Photos and Documents. Inside, a visitor would find a collection of enlarged photographs showing destroyed buildings and bridges, corpses, graves, all the victims of the SRs. There were individual portraits of murdered Bolsheviks. It even included the gun Fanny Kaplan had used to try to kill Lenin. This being the early days of cinema, the party also commissioned a newsreel called The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries to be shown in movie houses.

Now more than anything, this flood of media and press and public events was meant to produce a trial of the century atmosphere that would dominate shop talk, gossip, and everyday conversation. Just days into the trial, one SR noted how successful this campaign was. He said:

The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries has pushed aside all other life in Russia. Apart from this trial, the Bolsheviks appeared to have no needs, no cares at all. Such matters as the famine, industry, transport, the sowing of fields, et cetera, et cetera, have all been relegated to the background or are given no attention at all. Tens of thousands of newspapers in the center and in the provinces carry out the orders of the Bolshevik provincial committees, executive committees, and all other party branches, and from the first to the last page are filled with “facts” about the traitorous and villainous activities of the Socialist Revolutionary ‘bandits’…. In short, the Leviathan has thrown itself into the fight against the ‘handful of Socialist Revolutionary bandits’ with all its impressive penal and coercive apparatus, with technical means such as the post, the telegraph, the telephone, the railways, the aeroplane, the printing press, the newspapers, and the journals….

The combined atmosphere of all this, both inside the courtroom and outside it, convinced the western socialist observers who had been let in that this was a parody of justice. Despite what they had been told before the trial, this was not a regular legal proceeding in the sense of trying to prove guilt or innocence. It was a spectacle, with an almost certainly preordained outcome deployed in the service of political propaganda. On June 14th, the western socialist delegation met with the defendants, and agreed to boycott all further proceedings to deny the trial any further legitimacy. They then made a plan to leave Russia, to return to their homes in the west and report what they had seen in scathing detail. For a moment, the Communist leadership attempted to prevent them from leaving the country, and it was only after they went on a 24 hour hunger strike that the government issued an exit visa, and allowed them to leave Russia on June 19th.

The very next day, the propaganda machine reached its fever pitch. On June 20th, 1922, somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 people marched through Red Square in a mass anti-SR demonstration. Now, though this is a huge crowd, there is some evidence that hints went out to the workers of Moscow that if they did not show up for this march, they needn’t bother showing up for work in the morning, if you catch our drift. The marchers carried ominous banners that read “death to the traitors of the revolution” and “death to the Social Democrats” in what appeared to be a spontaneous grassroots call for the death penalty, but in terms of general atmosphere, the march was generally light and buoyant. Men, women, and children were just out enjoying a nice June day. After the march, the crowd gathered outside the House of the Trade Unions, where a bunch of government officials addressed them, and this included most of the officials involved in the trial. The courtroom session that day was cut short so that officers of the court, members of the prosecution, the judges themselves, and even some of the Russian members of the legal defense team could give a rousing speeches to the crowd promising to deliver revolutionary justice. Following this demonstration, the court held an evening session where the judges allowed two delegations representing the proletariat of Moscow in Petrograd to appear. This was way outside of any regular rules of order, and these delegations were allowed to simply spend two and a half hours denouncing the accused as killers and enemies of the working class, and urging the death penalty as a justified response.

Now, after this demonstration — a kind of prolonged Two Minutes Hate of the SRs — the legal defense team for the first group of defendants, the real defendants, concluded that they too could not go on participating in this charade. They stopped attending sessions on June 23rd. Now this ground proceedings to a halt for a few days, but then the trial recommenced, and remained ongoing for another full month.

In total, the prosecution called 58 witnesses. These witnesses included not only those defendants in group two, who were technically on trial, but were really there just to present evidence against group one, but also another group of 19 former party members who had been arrested prior to the trial and threatened with prosecutions unless they presented evidence useful to the prosecution’s case. The most important of the witnesses were a man called Grigory Semyonov and a woman called Lidia Konopleva, both of whom were former SR terrorists, and both of whom had published denunciations of their former comrades the previous winter as part of the initial groundwork laid for the trial. They testified that the Central Committee of the SRs coordinated in armed struggle against the Soviet state and ordered the assassination of Lenin in 1918.

And if you remember, when we talked about the attempted assassination of Lenin by Fanny Kaplan, I hinted that there are some conspiracy theory surrounding all of this. And part of that is because most of the direct statements of evidence against Fanny Kaplan we have — which are simply taken as fact — come from Semyonov’s testimony at the trial of the SRs. We have no idea how reliable these statements actually are.

When the defense attempted to call counter witnesses, most of them were rejected by the judges for a variety of pretexts, and they were ultimately able to summon only nine. The final phase of the trial began on July 27th, with various summations and closing arguments on each side. The defendants all gave their own speeches since their lawyers had been boycotting the proceedings for a month. They hammered the note that this was an illegitimate farce. One of them, a woman called Yevgeniya Ratner said, “The spiritual rape which you are exercising here under the label of the educative role of the trial is your greatest crime.”

Abram Gotz said, “The Bolsheviks considered themselves entitled to judge the SRs only because they had won the civil war.” He said that he would face his sentence with a clear conscience, because the victors are often later judged by history’s court. He said he couldn’t go on with this mockery of justice, and instead was ready to martyr himself to their cruelty. Unable to enter what he called an agreement with the victors, they now had to enter an agreement with death. But they remain courageous revolutionaries and they knew how to look death in the eyes.

On August 7th, 1922, the long since foreordained verdict was handed down. The tribunal delivered death sentences to twelve of the accused in the first group, eight members of the Central Committee plus four others. The other ten got long prison sentences. Then, for that second group, they too received a mix of death sentences and imprisonment. But the tribunal pointedly asked the Presidium of the All-Russian Soviet Congress to pardon all the accused of the second group, because they acknowledged and repented their activities and had broken completely with their past.

The next day, August 8th, the Presidium of the Soviet issued their own final statement. The SRs represented, “… an embittered enemy, which, not withstanding the insignificance of its political influence in the country, can imply a great danger even in the future as a tool in the hands of the still powerful world capitalism.” Any opposition to the trial represented nothing but “… a new crusade by imperialism with its social democratic support against the Soviet republic and its friends all over the world.” They said, “In the name of justice, humanity, and mercy, the lackeys of the bourgeoisie want to defend the right of its agents to organize revolts, to murder the leaders of the Soviet republic, to blow up bridges and warehouses, to poison and to disorganize the Red Army and the Red fleet, and to carry out military espionage on the instructions of the staffs of imperialism.” They then confirmed the judgment of death that had been handed out to everyone.

But then there was a twist. Not only would they take the tribunal’s recommendation to pardon the convicted of the second group, they also announced that in the name of true justice, true humanity, and true mercy, they would suspend enforcement of the death sentences even against the first group. Nobody was going to be executed.

At least, y’know, not yet.

So what can we make of the trial of the SRs? Well, first it’s obviously a harbinger of things to come. Political show trials are going to be a hallmark of Stalin’s personal consolidation of power in the 1930s. It’s not going to be enough for him to just get rid of his enemies in a basement in the middle of the night. The public needed to see, hear and feel their guilt. And this would require not mere accusation or denunciation or declaration, but as with the trial of the SRs, the appearance of objective justice, usually arranged to culminate with the accused confessing all their crimes, no matter how absurd or false the charges. So here we basically have the prototype of a show trial. And in this show trial of the SRs, the case laid out by the prosecution failed basic tests of legal ethics, right? The entire trial was purposely bent towards finding the accused guilty. The prosecution almost certainly suborned perjury — to say they tampered with witnesses would be the understatement of the century — and the prosecution judges audience, and many of the defendants were simply there to play parts in a theatrical performance, not engage in an adversarial criminal trial where the defendants had a right to truly defend themselves.

And the thing that was going on in the trial of the SRs is that the prosecution had witnesses making direct connections between the individual defendants and various events that were a matter of public record without really allowing the defense to meaningfully crossexamine the witnesses or present counter testimony that challenged the narratives built by the prosecution. That is why it was a parody of justice and not actual justice.

But all that said, it is worth pointing out that the prosecution was not just making stuff up out of thin air. All the stuff laid out in the initial indictment was mostly true. Since 1918, the SRs had engaged in various forms of sedition and terrorism. They had raised an army to fight a civil war against the Bolsheviks. They had been in contact with foreign powers who supplied them with money and weapons and supplies. In March 1921, they had contacted the Kronstadt sailors in the hopes of sparking an anti-communist uprising. All those things had happened. What makes this a parody of justice is the connections made between the individual defendants themselves and these events that were a matter of public record. Witnesses accused the defendants of secretly orchestrating all of this, but those witnesses had been heavily coerced by the prosecution to say those things. The reality is that most of the defendants had nothing specifically to do with the incidents under direct consideration. Were they the leaders of a political party who had many members who had spilled Communist blood? Yes. But as often as not, their own posture, especially after 1918, is we need to cool that stuff off because the worst thing that could possibly happen is the Whites winning the civil war. And as a reward for their cautious circumspection in those decisive days which had helped the Communists win is to now be held responsible for activities that they themselves had renounced.

Now finally, the last thing I’ll say is that all of the things the SRs were accused of were only crimes against the revolution because the Communists had won. And frankly, with a little light editing, the indictment against the SRs would have read like a history of the Bolsheviks since 1917: armed rebellion against the government? Check. Murder, assassination, and torture? Check, check, check. Even the business about being in league with foreign powers — we’re talking about a party who had returned to Russia thanks to train tickets provided by the Kaiser, and who had taken German cash all through 1917 to fund their activities, this during a time when Russia was at war with Germany. Then when everything flipped in 1918, Lenin is on record pushing for his comrades to accept money in aid and support from the French and the British.

So, as Abram Gotz hinted in his final summation, the real crime the SRs committed was losing. Had they won, everything listed in the indictment would have been glorified as the heroic deeds of the men and women who had saved the revolution from the dastardly Bolsheviks. They didn’t win. They lost. And so, they wound up going down as villains instead of heroes.

So it goes.

The next week, we’ll pick up with the International thread, to talk about how the increasingly cemented Soviet regime was going to make its way in the world. The show trial had not earned them any favors in the international socialist community, and their relations with the other socialist parties after World War I were increasingly strained. The victorious Russian Communists took it for granted that they would be the new leaders of international socialism, but they found many international socialists not particularly interested in being led by Communist Russia.

Closer to home, their permanent ascendancy did make them the dominant regional force in eastern Europe, and here their power and authority matched their ambitions as they embarked on a plan to create a tighter union of Soviet socialist republics….

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.31: A Big Mistake

This will be our last setup episode before we get going with an eight-episode long toboggan ride through the revolution of 1905 that will round out part one of the Russian Revolution open parentheses s close parentheses series. This week, we pick up the narrative thread from the end of Episode 10.26: The Far East, which was the episode that required us to go all the way to Manchuria and Korea to somehow understand why there will be revolutionary uprisings in St. Petersburg and Moscow. History works in such ways. And today, we will start to understand why.

Now where we left off in the far east was that Russian imperial ambitions had carried them into Manchuria, and then further down the Liaodong Peninsula, where they established a naval base at Port Arthur, giving the Russians that permanent warm water Pacific port they so coveted. Russia’s settlement on the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula was infuriating to the rising empire of Japan, because remember, they had claimed that very same spot during the first Sino-Japanese War and had then been forced to relinquish it by the Russians, who then turned right around and occupied it themselves. This was both diplomatically insulting and militarily provocative.

Then in 1903, we see two further Russian provocations that set off alarm bells inside the Japanese government. During the Boxer Rebellion, which had seen both Russia and Japan as members of the same eight-nation alliance, Russia had flooded Manchuria with an additional hundred thousand soldiers. According to agreements the Russian signed after the rebellion was suppressed, they were supposed to withdraw most of these troops from Manchuria by a specified date in April 1903, but the deadline came and went without the Russians moving anyone anywhere. And they clearly did not feel any pressure at all to actually leave. Who was going to make them?

So that was alarm bell number one. The second alarm bell was the arrival of a private Russian corporation called the Yalu Timber Company. The Yalu Timber Company was a private enterprise run by a brash and charismatic former Russian cavalry officer who had visions of leading the Russian Empire beyond Manchuria and into Korea. The Korean government had granted this Yalu Timber Company the right to harvest trees in the Yalu River Valley, which stood as the border between Manchuria and Korea. This put Russian interests inside the Kingdom of Korea, and back in St. Petersburg, this adventurous former cavalry officer used his contacts in the ministry to propose a plan whereby Russian soldiers would be dressed up as, and do the work of, regular loggers, allowing the Russians to insert a sizeable force into Korea that could advance the dream of annexing the Korean peninsula. The Russian ministry thought this was all a grand idea. If it worked, it worked, and Russia would get Korea. If it didn’t work, if it blew up in their faces, the government could assert it was all a misguided private project and they would publicly disavow it. Tsar Nicholas was himself carried away by enthusiasm for the project and gave his approval.

The only one of the tsar’s ministers who objected was Sergei Witte, who had, remember, been the point man for Russian diplomacy in the far east, and he said, this is crackpot, it’s going to ruin everything and probably start a war. But by now, the luster of Witte’s standing as the only minister who knows what he he’s doing had worn off. He and the other ministers around the tsar had very different worldviews. His advice always seemed to run counter to what everyone else instinctively wanted to do, and he had been kept around mostly because the tsar’s dying father had all but commanded it from his deathbed. So the disagreement about what to do in the far east was one of the issues that isolated Witte from everyone else, led to a loss of favor with the tsar, and his removal as finance minister in August of 1903. So at this critical juncture, the guy who knew the most about international politics in east Asia was removed from the loop.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had to address the clear advance of Russian ambitions into territory the Japanese now viewed as vital to their own national interest. There was disagreement inside the Japanese government about whether Japan could, right now, do anything militarily to expel the Russians. Some said, we can take them, others said, no, we can’t. But they had at least ensured that they would likely only face the Russians if, and when, a shooting war began. They had ensured this by signing a treaty with the British in 1902 that said each party would remain neutral if the other party got into a war with a single other belligerent, but would join the conflict if another belligerent joined on the opposite side. In practical terms, what this meant is that if France or Germany decided to join Russia against Japan, that the British would enter the war on Japan’s side, which meant that in Paris and Berlin calculating support for Russia in the far east now necessarily carried the risk of war with the British, which is not what anyone wanted. France had already announced that their defensive pact with Russia covered Europe only. So the Japanese calculated, correctly, that if Russia fought a war with Japan, that they would be fighting alone.

So Japan embarked on a two-pronged strategy to deal with the Russians. On the one side, they would approach Russia, diplomatically and attempt to come to a peaceful and mutually agreeable compact. But on the other side, the generals and admirals of the Japanese Army and Navy tirelessly planned war scenarios, campaigns, and strategies, which I can assure you, their counterparts in Russia were not doing.

So on the diplomatic front, in August 1903, Japan’s Emissary in St. Petersburg delivered the basis of an understanding. There were two issues here: Manchuria and Korea. The Russians already had Manchuria, but were clearly eyeing a move into Korea. So Japan said, what we can do, is both officially maintain the territorial integrity and independence sovereignty of Korea and China, while saying to each other, that you, Russia, have a special position in Manchuria, and that we, Japan, have a special position in Korea. That way, there won’t be any conflict between us. Much to Japanese chagrin, it took the Russians two full months to get around to replying to this proposal. But in October 1903, the Russians came back and said, first of all, Manchuria, isn’t even a question for us to resolve. It’s ours and you have no claim to it. You can’t even use it as a piece of some larger hegemonic swap. We don’t need your permission or understanding to do whatever the hell we want in Manchuria. And while we are willing to discuss your interest in Korea, we will stipulate certain conditions if we allow you to claim this special right to the peninsula, because we have interests there too.

And so negotiations began.

Now, Tsar Nicholas was not eager for war. He did not want a war. He found the idea terribly loathsome. His ministers were also mostly opposed to the idea of war, citing the problems that such a war would pose. I mean, financially, they were still relying on French loans to cover huge annual budget deficits; then there were supply and manpower issues with maintaining a frontline literally 6,000 miles away from home. And besides, the issues at stake here were, like, logging concessions, and theoretical advancement into Korea. Russia already had most of what it wanted it in the far east, specifically that warm water port on the Pacific. So the consensus among the tsar and his ministers was that war was not ideal, nor were the issues big enough to start a war. So let’s just talk our way through this at our leisure.

As a result of this understanding, the Russian negotiators gave ground on various points, and the Japanese believed, rightly, that they were getting the better end of it at the bargaining table. But they were deeply troubled by the manner in which the Russians negotiated. When the Russians sent the Japanese something to consider, the Japanese replied promptly. The Russians on the other hand would then sit on that reply for weeks and even months without responding at all. This was not just annoying, this was not just insulting, this was suspicious. And the Japanese came to believe that the stalling was part of a deliberate Russian strategy to buy time while they built up their military forces in east Asia.

But so far as I can tell, from everything I have read, this is not what the Russians were up to. Instead, they were just kind of being arrogantly blithe and flippant about the whole thing. A blithe arrogance that was coming from the very top. Remember, Tsar Nicholas believed that being an absolute autocrat meant involving himself in minute details of state, and that matters of high foreign policy were especially in need of his personal micromanaging. And Nicholas even fancied himself a special expert on the Japanese, because he visited Japan once, and emerged from that trip with a thoroughly racist disdain for them.

So, because everything was running across Nicholas’s desk, there were delays getting formal replies back to the Japanese, because though the tsar had his own proclivities and peaceful desires, he was also being relentlessly lobbied by trusted voices who wanted him to not give in to those peaceful desires. So he stalled and stalled, and decisions were put off. Besides, who cares? It’s only the Japanese we’re talking about.

Among those counseling firm resolution and not giving away Russian interests in the far east was the Empress Alexandra, who implored her husband to be strong and not back down. But more than anywhere else, Tsar Nicholas was hearing it from Kaiser Wilheim. All through 1903 and 1904, Willy was writing a steady stream of letters to Nikki saying, this isn’t just about timber concessions and access to markets, it’s about the fate of Christendom itself. That the half savage Japanese represent the great Yellow Peril that might rise up and sweep west like a new Mongol horde and destroy Western civilization itself, that Nikki’s destiny was to be the savior of the white race. So anytime Nicholas would confess as desire for peaceful compromise, Willie would come back: don’t back down, concede nothing, push back, take the fight to them for God’s sakes, be a man. It was all incredibly racist and incredibly manipulative. Because remember, the Kaiser’s real interest here is in making sure Russia gets tied down on the other side of the world so they pose less of a threat to German interests in Europe. And though he constantly promised that the Germans would have Russian backs in the event of a war, he just meant, watch your back in Europe, not actually join the war in the far East, which is never how Nicholas understood it. To the bitter end of the coming disaster that was the Russo-Japanese War, Nikki believed that Willy would come. But Willie was never going to come.

Because of this conflicting advice, Nicholas was… conflicted. And he did the perfectly human thing to do when you’re conflicted about making a decision: he avoided making a decision. And this was the main cause of the delays that the Japanese took to be nefarious, calculated strategy. And Nicholas didn’t even think there would be any great harm to delay, because he — along with all of other Russians — assumed Japan would never unilaterally declare war on Russia. That they had to know how inferior they were, they were just this tiny Island of half civilized savages, while Russia was a vast and mighty ancient empire. So, if a war did come, it was obviously going to be a cakewalk for Russia, and the Japanese surely had to know that it would be a big mistake to start a war with the Russians. So in Nicholas’s mind, this was all entirely his call about whether or not there would be a war, and he did not believe there would be a war, because and I’m quoting him now, “I do not wish it.”

But folks, I must tell you, this was not a decision that was in the tsar’s hands. And the Japanese were in fact making very different calculations, because they had kept up that second prong of their approach. They were meticulously planning for war. And when the Japanese diplomats concluded that negotiating delays were not caused by racist arrogance or diplomatic incompetence, but an intentional strategy of delay, the Japanese government voted in December 1903 to go to war. As Nikki sat around believing that there couldn’t be a war because he didn’t wish it, the Japanese had already decided there was going to be a war, whether the tsar wished it or not.

On January the 26th of 1904, according to the old style Russian calendar, the tsar was returning home from the theater when he received an urgent telegram. Not only have the Japanese done the unthinkable and unilaterally declared war on Russia, before that declaration was even received, they had attacked Port Arthur in the middle of the night, severely damaging two capital vessels. By dawn, the Japanese navy was flooding into the Yellow Sea. The tsar was shocked, not just that the Japanese had declared war, but that they had launched this war with a surprise attack that was against recently signed international conventions of war that said you couldn’t do that. The tsar was incredulous and offended, but it was done now. Punishing the Japanese for breaking international law would have to wait until after Russia stomped them in to the ground. Though he had not wished it, the Russo-Japanese War had begun.

The shocking news of war swept Russia over the next few days. The story, of course, was that the dishonorable Japanese had launched a sneak attack on our brave troops, and patriotic fervor swelled. On January the 30th, something like 75,000 people congregated at the Winter Palace to show their support, cheer the tsar, and sing hymns. Nicholas came out to the balcony and waved to the happy, massive crowd. Indeed, commencement of the Russo-Japanese War was quite a boon to the flagging popularity of the tsar. The still vaguely defined but increasingly important thing called public opinion rallied to support the war effort. The intelligentsia was almost uniformly supportive of war as a matter of national honor, and many of them embraced the yellow peril theory that Russia had a special destiny to defend Western civilization from the savage eastern hordes. Propaganda started being plastered everywhere portraying the Japanese as inferior little monkeys being captured or smashed by a big white fist. Even commentators as far out on the political spectrum as Pyotr Struve and the Legal Marxists supported the national war effort even as they tried to keep that national effort separate from the tsarist regime they still wanted to criticize. So all over Russia in the story was, we are the victims, we must now go fight a war, but we will easily when the war. That was the message. And so everyone is simultaneously embracing two contradictory thoughts: one, the Yellow Peril poses an existential threat to western civilization that must be defeated, or it literally means the end of western civilization; but also two, that the Japanese are a weak and pathetic enemy that can be stomped like so many ants. So in other words: we are vastly superior to you, yet also believe you pose an apocalyptic threat. This is the classic one-two punch of racist paranoia.

So had the Russians gone out and easily won the Russo-Japanese War, as everyone seemed to suspect was going to happen, it might’ve been just the shot of confidence and popularity that the stagnating and unpopular tsarist regime needed to pick up its spirits and remind everyone that they were not in fact incompetent, backwards, out of touch, inefficient, corrupt, stupid, and on the brink of collapse. Instead, the Russo-Japanese War proved all of those things were truer even than the harshest critics have the tsar dared to think. Because as it turns out, Russians everywhere had badly underestimated the Japanese and overestimated themselves.

And just to note a few things in a non-exhaustive list:

• First, while it was true that Japan had only begun modernizing in the 1860s, they had actually done a really good job at it, and they were ready to wage a modern industrial war.
• Second, they had imported European instructors to train their officer corps, who emerged from this training creative, talented, and ready to deploy the latest advances in military theory and practice.
• Third, their supply lines were compact, and reinforcements readily at hand. So while Russia had a three million man army compared to Japan’s 600,000, only about 130,000 Russian soldiers were actually in the far east. The rest were going to have to be transported across the Trans-Siberian Railway, which though nearly finished, still had a critical hundred-mile gap at Lake Baikal, which required transferring everyone and everything to slow moving ferries in the summer, and literal horse-drawn sleigh in the winter.
• Fourth, though their navies were of roughly equal size, the Japanese boats carried heavy long range guns while the Russians were more equipped for traditional close quarters broadsides.
• And then finally: the Japanese had probably spent two years planning their campaigns, while the Russians had assumed the Japanese would never attack, but that even if they did, we’ll just, you know, fight back and win.

Now at first, there didn’t seem to be that much to worry about on the Russian side. Nothing to seriously challenge the triumphant expectations back home. The sneak attack on Port Arthur had damaged some ships, but further attacks had been repelled, and after the first furious skirmishes at the end of January and beginning of February of 1904, both sides settled into a stalemate. The Russian navy would not leave its harbor, nor would the Japanese navy venture into range of Russian shore batteries. And this went on right up through the spring of 1904.

But with all this attention on Port Arthur, the Japanese landed an expeditionary force at Incheon and in short order had enveloped and occupied the entire Korean Peninsula. They now sat on the Yalu River right across from Russian held Manchuria. Then the Japanese started ferrying forces over to the northeast coast of the Liaodong Peninsula, and pushing those forces down to Port Arthur to begin a siege on the land side, aimed at dislodging the Russians from the critical hilltops that commanded the harbor. Now surrounded, Russian Vice Admiral Makarov, by far the most talented Russian officer at Port Arthur, led an attempted breakout of the navy through the Japanese blockade in mid-April, but these ships ran into mines, and not only were they badly damaged, but Makarov was killed, which was probably the bigger blow to Russian fortunes. While the Russians were reeling from these blows at Port Arthur, the Japanese advanced across the Yalu River and successfully pushed the Russian army backward, paving the way for a more thorough envelopment of the Liaodong Peninsula, as well as further advances into Manchuria while the Russians just fell back. Meanwhile, Russian supplies and reinforcements were still months away from showing up. This was not going to be a quick war and it was not going to be an easy war. Somebody had made a big mistake, and it wasn’t the Japanese.

Reports of these frustrations, setbacks, and retreats filtered back to the homefront, and a dreadful picture emerged. The slow witted and incompetent military high command had been caught flat-footed and they were losing the war. These reports were especially explosive because of all that racist double-thinking that had been going on. The Japanese are supposed to be pushovers, but if they win, it’s the end of civilization as we know it, and now they’re winning. People literally couldn’t believe it. And just as suddenly as the patriotic fervor had led everyone to support the tsar, it now led them to criticize the tsar relentlessly and passionately. The fate of Russia was in the tsar’s hand and he was blowing it. So the crescendo of support for the regime in January, February, March, and April now gave way to disillusioned anger. Far from proving they were strong, hard, and capable stewards of the national interest, the tsar, his ministers, and the military high command revealed themselves to be incompetent, slow, backwards, and irresponsible. Old generals and admirals who had their jobs thanks to favors and connections rather than intelligence or skill were leading Russia to catastrophic defeat. And with all this bad news coming in, the dormant liberal opposition started to revive in a major way, because it’s safe to say that there’s nothing liberal nationalists hate more than a badly run war. It offends both their sense of national honor and their belief in the superiority of meritocracy. Business leaders were expressing concern that the regime was ruining the economy, respectable members of the intelligentsia were concluding that the only way forward was for the regime to reform itself and fast. Almost overnight, talk of national assemblies, and political participation in civil rights, and constitutions was suddenly everywhere. All the senseless dreams came rushing back. And that is what next week’s episode is going to be all about.

Then came a really important turning point. Remember, last week that the SR Combat Organization had succeeded in killing the minister of the interior in early 1902. Well, to replace him, the tsar had appointed the archest of arch hardline conservatives, a guy named Vyacheslav von Plehve. Plehve had made his bones back in the early 1880s, running the gendarme operations that crushed People’s Will, and he got a lot of credit for destroying their organization after the assassination of the tsar. Well, after becoming minister of the interior in 1902, he not only cracked down hard on revolutionaries like the Social Democrats and the SRs, but also on liberal reform types. He tightened censorship and absolutely stifled any attempt by the zemstvos to revive their hope of greater political participation. He also earned international enmity by doing nothing to stop a wave of attack on Jews in 1903, all but giving official approval to a destructive pogrom that left 50 dead.

So naturally the SRs targeted Plehve for assassination, and after missing a few times, they finally got him in July 1904 when a member of the SR Combat Organization tossed a bomb into his carriage and blew him to bits. It is noted particularly that Plehve’s violent death was met with an incredibly muted response. He was hardly mourned or lamented even inside the government. And in fact, many breathed a sigh of relief that his provocative reactionary tactics had now come to an end. But most of all, it spoke to how little support there was for the tsar continuing his hard line conservative tactics. A different approach was needed.

Then the summer of 1904 brought even more bad news from the far east. In August, the Russians and Japanese squared off in a battle that might pave the way for the Russian relief of Port Arthur, but instead of the Russians were again forced into retreat. This was yet another humiliating defeat that meant Port Arthur would not be relieved until the reinforcements from the west arrived, and those reinforcements had still not arrived. In response to this, the navy at Port Arthur attempted another breakout, this one featuring nearly the whole squadron, but they were blasted back into their harbor by the superior range and targeting of the Japanese navy, who were just able to sit back and lob artillery well out of range of most of the Russian guns. Meanwhile, heavy fighting in the hills above the port made it ominously possible that the Russian position in Port Arthur was hopeless.

It was in the midst of all this bad news that the tsar was deciding who to appoint to be his new new minister of the interior. He was inclined to appoint another hard line conservative, those were Nicholas’s instincts, but he was now facing public opinion that was enraged by the disappointed expectations in the Russo-Japanese War. So his inner circle concluded that whatever his mandate from God might be, that this new fangled and very troublesome thing called public opinion was going to have to be sated.

So at the end of August 1904, the tsar tapped a 47-year-old career bureaucrat named Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky to be his new minister of the interior. Mirsky was an enlightened liberal-ish reformer who had the same support and confidence of the zemstvo constitutionalist types. And he believed he was there to negotiate an understanding between angry reformers and liberals and educated observers in the nobility, and the intelligentsia and the conservative tsarist regime. The hope was to form an anti-revolutionary bulwark in defense of the existing order, to strengthen the monarchy was some liberal reforms. But as we will see next week, Mirsky found himself in an impossible position. The dashed expectations of an easy military triumph had now been replaced by expectations of political reform. Meanwhile, the tsar was adamantly opposed to any such reform, and was only indulging in such talk to buy himself some time until he won the war. But there was no denying that at the moment the war was going very badly, and he did need to buy himself some time.

So in October 1904, the tsar took dramatic action. The Russian Baltic fleet was ordered to embark on a 20,000 mile long voyage from the Baltic Sea, around Europe, down the African coast, around the Cape of Good Horn, through the Indian Ocean, and then up into the Yellow Sea, where they would finally relief Port Arthur and pound the Japanese in to the ground once and for all. It might take them nine months to get there, but when the Baltic fleet did arrive, all this trouble at home and abroad would be resolved once and for all the promise of victory may have been delayed, but it was not broken.

But as the world watched and waited as the Russian Baltic fleet embarked on its famous voyage, angry Russian liberals continued to take advantage of the tsar’s failures and demand reform. They wanted a national assembly of some kind, they wanted freedom of the press, less arbitrary government, more respect for civil rights. Power-sharing with the people and by the people, they meant, themselves. It was all coming out now. The liberals smelled blood in the water. And wouldn’t you know, it, as they pressed for these reforms, they used a method that was explicitly copied from the French liberal opposition in 1847 and 1848, because they were caught in the same legal predicament of wanting to openly talk about politics without being able to hold overtly rallies.

So next week, we will open the Russian Revolution of 1905 as we opened the French Revolution of 1848: with the Banquet Campaign.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.86: Starving to Death

As you know, we are now commencing the final eight episodes of the Russian Revolution series, fully three calendar years after we started this thing. Okay. Uh, now that we’ve reached the spring of 1921, the plan for the next five episodes is to continue pulling up and away from the day by day, week by week narrative of the Russian Revolution to give a slightly broader perspective on the next few years. That’ll take us right up to the death of Lenin, at which point I’ll cap the whole series off like I did with the final French Revolution episodes on the Consulate and the Napoleonic Empire. So the final three episodes will give much larger beats to wrap up the story with the great Purge of 1937, at which point the revolution was well and truly over.

Now, I think even right now, you could make the case that the Russian Revolution as such is over. The Commies won. They will remain in power, and thus, we are clearly moving into what could reasonably be classified as early Soviet history, as opposed to the revolutionary and civil war period. But it’s not quite as cut and dry as that, and I’ve always been aiming at the death of Lenin as the final destination.

But though this tenth and final and longest series on the Russian revolution is ending in a few weeks, the Revolutions podcast still has one big epilogue left to go. From the moment I first conceived of the show, the plan has always been to end it with a collection of final thoughts, reflecting on everything we’ve covered, from Cromwell and the Long Parliament through Lenin and the Soviet socialist republics. Is there a structured pattern to how revolutions start, unfold, and resolve? Who and what are the common archetypical figures? Are revolutions necessary? What the heck is a revolutionary, anyway? In the very first introductory episode, I sidestep that question and just say, look, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a revolution. Well, now it’s probably time to come back around and take a stab at classifying all the different species of duck. So when we finish Russia, I’ll take the summer off completely to work on this final project, and then we’ll come back around in the fall. So even though story time is almost over, there’s still lots of good stuff up ahead.

But getting back to story time, the spring of 1921 really is a major hinge point in Russian history. And as I just said, you could plausibly argue the revolution is, at this point, over. Up until now, the fate of the revolution had hung in the balance. The question of who would rule Russia after the fall of Tsar Nicholas and the February Revolution was wide open for four solid years. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, no sane person would have bet on them lasting for long. People barely knew who they were. There weren’t that many of them to begin with, and their rank and file were confined to a few large cities in an incredibly rural and agrarian country. The Bolsheviks had no links to the peasantry who formed the mass majority of Russians. So their adventurous storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 seemed destined to go down as reckless folly that led directly to their mass arrest and almost certain execution.

But that didn’t happen.

Then, after defying the odds and holding on through the first tumultuous months, Russia was consumed by three more years of a multi-front civil war, foreign invasions, border conflicts, peasant insurrections, worker strikes, and military mutinies, like most recently the Kronstadt Rebellion in March 1921. Instead of being thrown by any of this — and any one of the things I just rattled off could have spelled the end of Communist rule — the Communists had hung on. As things started warming up in 1921, the most obvious and direct threats to their rule had been overcome, driven back, and beaten down. Their roster of political enemies were almost all dead, exiled, imprisoned, converted, or terminally demoralized, and had just given up the game entirely.

But a big part of the reason we’re not totally wrapping up the story of the Russian Revolution is that it’s not over yet. The Communists hold on power was not yet totally solidified, and in fact, beginning in the spring of 1921, the Soviet government faced exactly the kind of social catastrophe that had destabilized and destroyed regimes far deeper entrenched than they were. Indeed, exactly the sort of social catastrophe that had taken down the tsars, and paved the way for the Bolsheviks to come to power in the first place.

So today we are going to talk about one of the great humanitarian disasters of the 20th century, a disaster which is especially notable for managing to produce, if you can believe it, mass death on a scale that dwarfed all the insurrections, rebellions, and civil wars that we’ve been talking about for the past 9,000 episodes. Today, we’re going to talk about the Russian famine of 1921-1922. By the time the famine was over, it had probably killed upwards of 10 million people in just a little over a single year, dwarfing even the Russian casualty numbers from World War I. For all the deadly machines of violence humans have created since we started sharpening sticks and rocks, there’s nothing quite like the fatal devastation wrought when millions of people have literally nothing to eat.

Now, the story of any famine is obviously going to begin with some kind of natural or environmental catastrophe, and so it was for Russia in 1921. This catastrophe was centered on the region around the Volga River and the steppes by the Ural Mountains, but it was not confined there entirely. There was a crop failure in 1920, followed by a particularly heavy frost over the winter that killed off a ton of seed. Into these inauspicious conditions would follow an extreme summer drought that turned fertile acres into a dustbowl. Dry thin topsoil was just blown away by the wind. So, 1921 delivered a second consecutive crop failure, and two failures in a row is where famine comes from. One crop failure is terrible, but endurable with sacrifice. Two in a row and you’re dealing with a humanitarian crisis.

But it’s not as if the peasants weren’t familiar with the phenomenon of crop failures. They were a recurring feature of Russian life, and the peasants knew how to insure themselves against the random vicissitudes of God and nature. As a matter of course, they kept reserves of grain, seed banks, food, and fodder stored in case of emergency. They had done this for centuries. And this is when we turn from the natural causes of the famine to the human causes. Years of civil war over these contested areas like the Volga meant constant forced requisitions from both the Red and the White armies. When the Reds gained the decisive upper hand, areas under their control were subject to the policies of war communism. As we’ve discussed, the practice of seizing food, grain, and fodder by force without compensation led the peasants to simply stop producing surpluses. Anything they produce was just going to be seized, so why bother producing it? The result was that the amount of land under cultivation dropped dramatically, and the amount that peasantry saved and stored also dropped dramatically. After years of this, the peasants were out on the thin ice of bare subsistence. And in 1921, they fell through the ice.

When the second crop failure hit, there was nothing to eat. There’s just nothing to eat. In huge chunks of the former Russian Empire — not just around the Volga, which was the area hardest hit, but also western Siberia, the steppelands around the Ural Mountains, the area around the Don River, Southern Ukraine — all of them places, I might point out, that were on the front lines of the civil wars. In the spring of 1921, roughly 25% of Russian peasants were already starving from a long winter after the failures from 1920. This would only get worse as the months went on. The spreading curse of malnourishment brought with it a secondary wave of disease and sickness, as typhus and cholera started taking over entire communities severely weakened by hunger. The ultimate death toll of the famine includes those who died from the sicknesses, which were so directly caused by it.

Now, in the big picture, the Soviet leadership knew how bad things were out there. It’s a huge reason Lenin had initiated the New Economic Policy at the 10th party Congress in March, 1921. He recognized how counterproductive war communism had ultimately been, and he was very motivated to reverse course, increase the amount of land under cultivation, revive heavy industry, and fix the railroads. This would put rush on a more productive course that would hopefully allow them to make gains in leaps and bounds once things started clicking. The Bolshevik vision for Russian agriculture was ultimately about large nationalized estates using advanced mechanization and the most advanced tools and theories to create the kind of abundance that would make famine a relic of the old world. They were trying to do all these things, but it was a big turn that would take a long time, and people were starving right now.

General circumstances limited the Soviet government’s initial response. We’ve talked a bunch about how the broad collapse of the Russian economy and its infrastructure was hindering everything. In particular, the roads and rail lines were an absolute shambles. It was dang near impossible to get anything anywhere else. And even if and when the Russian government was able to ship food into a famine zone, they were often taking it not from a zone of abundance and plenty, but a zone that was itself on the knife’s edge of famine. In particular, grain was shipped into the Volga from Ukraine, an area ravaged by five years of chaos that was itself suffering mass food shortages. So you get one of those terrible images of people with empty bellies, watching food get loaded onto trains and shipped away.

Now for a little while the Soviet government did what the tsars had typically done, which was not acknowledge the problem and just clamped down on the press. In particular, using the word famine in a news article was a really good way to have the Cheka come calling on you in the middle of the night. Lenin had been around the revolutionary block a time or two, and he knew famines are radicalizing events that can and will destabilize a regime. I mean, after all, lenin and his generation of revolutionaries had come of age right when the famines of the early 1890s had done so much to smash the first cracks in the foundations of the Romanov dynasty.

But the stories that were coming in over the summer of 1921 could not be repressed on a mass scale, nor could the government continue to deny what was going on. Millions of their citizens were reduced to eating literally anything they could find that might fill their stomachs. People were eating grass, weeds, leaves, tree bark, sawdust, clay, and even manure. They slaughtered every living thing they could find — livestock, horses, rodents, cats, and dogs. Many tried to flee their homes for literally greener pastures, but the government stopped allowing outbound trains to leave these areas to stop the spread of diseases taking over the famished communities, and to stop those empty stomachs from overwhelming other parts of a clearly shaky system. By the summer in 1921, things were so bad, and there were so little they could do about it, that Lenin’s government had to do something drastic. Something, almost unthinkably drastic: appeal to the west. With no other options, they would have to go hat in hand to the people they had spent their lives trying to overthrow with great proclamations about how much better life would be under communism, and now say to those people, we’re starving. Please feed us.

But Lenin, as ever, was a practical guy, and as he had said, during the days of crisis surrounding the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918, “Please add my vote in favor of taking potatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.” Though some pride would obviously have to be swallowed, it was all for the greater glory and survival of the revolution.

The initial call to the west did not come from the government itself, but rather from the internationally renowned writer Maxim Gorky. Gorky and Lenin had been friends for years, though events since 1917 had left Gorky depressed and disillusioned. And it was only thanks to lingering personal sentimental attachment that Lenin allowed Gorky freedom of movement and expression that would have been denied to others. Gorky appealed to Lenin to let him appeal to the world, and Lenin agreed. So in July 1921, Gorky penned a short letter, that soon spread throughout the international press. It’s short, so I can just read from it in full:

The corn-growing steppes are smitten by crop failure caused by the drought. The calamity threatens starvation to millions of Russian people. Think of the Russian people’s exhaustion by the war and revolution, which considerably reduced its resistance to disease and its physical endurance. Gloomy days have come for the country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mussorgskii, Glinka, and other world-prized men and I venture to trust that the cultured European and American people, understanding the tragedy of the Russian people, will immediately succor with bread and medicines.

If humanitarian ideals and feelings faith in whose social import was so shaken by the damnable war and its victors’ vengeance towards the vanquished — if faith in the creative force of these ideas and feelings, I say, must and can be restored, Russia’s misfortune offers humanitarians a splendid opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of humanitarianism. I think particularly warm sympathy and succoring the Russian people must be shown by those who, during the ignominious war, so passionately preached fratricidal hatred, thereby withering the educational efficacy of ideas of all by mankind in the most arduous labors and so lightly killed by stupidity and cupidity. People who understand the words of agonizing pain will forgive the involuntary bitterness of my words.

I ask all honest European and American people for prompt aid to the Russian people. Give bread and medicine.

Maxim Gorky

After this letter was written, Lenin even allowed Gorky to organize a voluntary relief effort among private Russian citizens, a rarity in a time when any public facing institution had to be connected to the Communist Party. On July 21st, they formed the All-Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry. It was a collection of many prominent Russians, including old liberal politicians, popular former SRs like Vera Figner, prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals, and people drawn from the same social ranks that had once populated the zemstvo — doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers, and agronomists. It was, in a certain sense, a revival of the days both of the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, when Russian society begged the tsar to be allowed to organize supplies, aid, and relief when the Russian state couldn’t do it. It was in fact so much of a callback to those days that even old Prince Lvov got involved, Lvov had himself come to prominence as a leader of the zemstvo relief efforts during both the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, and it’s why he had wound up head of the first provisional government after the abdication of the tsar in 1917. Now long since in exile in Paris, he did his best to organize a campaign of relief for the starving Russians from whoever would take his call. He was no fan of the Communist government. He did not sympathize with them. But he did sympathize with the Russian people.

Now out there in the wider world, the first person to jump to respond to Gorky’s letter was not yet US President Herbert Hoover. If you know anything at all about Herbert Hoover, you know that his path to the presidency ran through the international fame he earned organizing relief efforts in Europe both during, and especially after, World War I had blown the whole continent to hell. Hoover had led several different agencies distributing food throughout war-torn Europe since 1914, and in February 1919, the U S Congress created a thing called the American Relief Administration, giving it a budget of over a hundred million dollars in the hopes of moving food from plentiful north America to impoverished Europe. Hoover raise further funds from private donations that doubled his budget, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, the ARA delivered more than 4 million tons of relief supplies to 23 European countries.

When the ARA got going in 1919, Hoover offered aid to Soviet Russia, but this offer was flatly rejected. Even though Russia was in bad shape in 1919, and could have used all the relief it could get, this was the hottest period of the civil war, and as the American Hoover is offering this aid, American expeditionary troops, as well as forces from several other allied countries, were occupying Russian soil. They were actively funding and supplying the White armies trying to topple the Soviet government. So it did not take much to see the ARA as a Trojan horse. Especially as Hoover stipulated the organization must be allowed to deliver food and supplies equally to all who needed it, that the Russian government must not interfere with their activities, and that they be given priority access to the Russian railroads. In 1919, it would have been nearly impossible for Lenin’s government to see this as anything but an attempt to insert a supply chain for the White armies, so Lenin aggressively passed on Hoover’s offer.

But two years later, in the summer of 1921, circumstances had changed. The need for relief was far greater, the threat of being overthrown by western powers much reduced. After all, the British had just signed a trade deal with Russia. So in August 1921, negotiators from the Russian government and the ARA met in Riga to hammer out a deal. The ARA reiterated its demand to work freely and independently inside Russia without interference, and that they must be able to hand out food and supplies on the basis of simple need, without distinction of ethnicity, class, or political affiliation. Further, while the ARA was a venture whose costs were covered by the US government and private donations, the ARA demanded the Russians kick in some of their gold reserves. So it became a joint venture. After a deal was reached, the U S Congress appropriated $20 million under the Russian Famine Relief Act of 1921. The Russian government pledged $18 million of its own, with various other public and private organizations making their own contributions, taking the grand total of the budget up to about $80 million — roughly $1 billion in today’s money.

Now practically the day this agreement was signed, Lenin double crossed all those people who had joined the Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry. And in retrospect, it seems pretty obvious that him allowing this committee to be formed was a PR gesture meant to soften western public opinion. Lenin was very aware an organization composed of people hostile to the Communist Party to drive their relief work in politically seditious ways and he wasn’t going to have it. On August 27th, the Cheka arrested most of the members of the Committee on vague charges of counter-revolutionary activity. Some were exiled abroad, some exiled internally, and some administratively confined to a certain area. Lenin told Gorky that now was probably the right time for him to leave Russia for good if he knew what was good for him. Gorky took the hint, and in September 1921 departed for 10 years of exile, spent mostly in Italy.

None of that upended the deal with the ARA though, and they commenced operations immediately. Within a month, ships loaded with food headed for Russia. The ARA came into Petrograd first, since it’s, y’know, a huge port city close at hand, and that’s where they set up their first kitchen, the place where the food would actually be doled out to the starving people. As is usually the case with these things, the group at the forefront of everyone’s mind was children. Not only children of poor families, but the almost unfathomable number of orphans that had been created since 1914. With their parents either dead or having abandoned them, nearly 7 million orphans now roamed the streets of Russia, completely fending for themselves. The ARA set its initial goal on feeding 1 million children every day for a year.

Although the ARA was the largest foreign relief operation in Russia during the famine, they were not the only ones. A pan-European effort was led by famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen through an organization called the International Committee for Russian Relief. As the combined efforts of these groups spread out, and the scope of the disaster became apparent, everything started ballooning in size. At the height of its operations, the ARA would be feeding 10 million Russians — men, women, and children — at least one meal every day. Their European counterparts fed two million people every day, while another outfit called The International Save the Children Union fed up to 375,000. They all used a steady stream of freighters to bring in literally millions of tons of flour, grain, rice, beans, pork, milk, and sugar. The ARA brought in hundreds of onsite relief managers to oversee a small army of 125,000 Russians tasked with unloading, warehousing, hauling, weighing, cooking, and serving food at the more than 21,000 kitchens that would be established throughout the country over the next two years.

But unfortunately, the winter of 1921 came all too quickly, and the relief efforts could not move fast enough to stave off the horrors of another long hungry winter. Once the ice set in, and anything edible disappeared, people were forced to resort to cannibalism. With people dying left and right, it seemed like an absolute stupid waste of perfectly good flesh to let bodies just be buried in the ground. Especially around the Volga and Ural areas, a thriving underground culture of cannibalism got many people through the winter. When relief workers came around and attempted to properly dispose of corpses, people quietly begged them not to take the meat away. As time went on, grave robbery became a thing, and of course, eventually, there are stories that it wasn’t exactly safe to go out at night. The weak might get jumped, murdered and eaten. Nobody really talked about it openly, nor wanted to talk about it openly, but cannibalism was widespread in many areas, and at least a few more people lived than would have otherwise perished.

Beyond the deaths caused immediately by starvation, relief workers also reported back the appalling material conditions they found in Russia. Even if food was available, there might not be sufficient fuel to cook it, nor sufficient fuel for anyone to stay warm during the long winter. Russian peasants out in the villages and Russian workers in the cities often lived in a single pair of tattered rags. Children in orphanages often had only one garment, and that was often little more than a converted flower sack. Kids out in the rural areas who might’ve been fed at a kitchen had to stay home as they lacked sufficient clothes to safely leave the house. Taking in these distressing reports, the ARA expanded its operations and initiated a plan to collect and send clothing packages to Russia, all of which would be funded by private donations.

In addition to all of this, as I said, beyond the immediate problem of starvation, there was also a huge ongoing medical crisis. Diseases of all kinds ran rampant through the weakened population. Hospitals and clinics were overrun and under supplied. Everything was in shorts supply; beds, blankets, sheets, and most medical tools and medicines. Operations had to be performed in operating rooms without heat and without anesthetic. Wounds would be dressed with rags or just any random bits of paper. The water supply was often polluted and unusable. By the end of 1921 relief efforts expanded beyond just food, and ultimately, they were supplying over 16,000 hospitals and clinics with medicine, blankets, surgical equipments, and clean garments. They also doled out 6 million inoculations and over 1 million vaccinations.

While all these western relief workers ran around Russia, the Soviet government did not exactly stick to their promise not to interfere with them. The Cheka followed workers, searched them, interrogated them. Some were arrested and accused of being spies, saboteurs, and people looking to discredit and overthrow the Soviet regime. The government search convoys and sea supplies and constantly meddled with the relief operations. Now to a certain degree, this is all understandable. Many in the west had made no secret of their hopes of overthrowing the Communists, and many absolutely saw the Russian famine is a great piece of anti-Communist propaganda. And given how much we know about how spy services operate, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of these people did turn out to be spies with ulterior motives, although I haven’t actually read that anywhere.

But also, just as a Red Scare mentality spread throughout the various corridors of western power during this period, a complimentary White Scare mentality had spread through the corridors of the Kremlin. The slightest little spark of suspicion about someone was enough to drive a wild blaze of paranoia. Now perhaps it was justifiable paranoia, but it was paranoia nonetheless.

Officially the Soviets expressed their gratitude, and in May 1922, Kamenev, in his role as president of the Moscow Soviet and deputy chairman of all Russian famine relief committees, wrote a letter to the ARA administrators that said:

The government of the Russian nation will never forget the generous help that was afforded them in the terrible calamity and dangers visited upon them. I wish to express on behalf of the Soviet government my satisfaction and thanks to the American Relief Administration for the substantial support which they are offering to the calamity stricken population of the Volga area.

The famine itself finally started to taper off thanks to much better harvests in 1922, and then again in 1923; harvests that were helped along by the mass importation of seeds from the west. The ARA continued to do work in Russia until 1923, but it all ended when it was reported publicly that the Soviet government was now exporting grain from Ukraine for sale abroad. They did this because they needed money to buy more industrial machinery, both for factories and farming to get their economy back up and running, but it was a death blow to any kind of sympathetic generosity from would-be supporters in the west. People were not interested in paying to feed a country that was now exporting grain it could use to feed itself. So in June 1923, the ARA suspended its operations in Russia and left.

There’s no way to calculate an exact final death toll of the Russian famine of 1921-1922, nor calculate how many lives were saved by the efforts of the foreign relief organizations. But the numbers that I’ve seen comfortably reported put the number of dead around 10 million, and we know that at least as many as that were being fed every day by the ARA and other organizations. Absent their presence, many millions more would have died. Now it all gets dead and buried under years of cold war propaganda and counter-propaganda, but when it comes to the Revolution, the Americans proved to be at least as generous and helpful towards early Soviet Russia as they had been antagonistic and hostile. And on balance, given the paltry numbers of Americans in the expeditionary forces involved in the incursions in the Russian Civil War in 1918 and 1919, perhaps we might be able to say that the scales are tipped quite a bit in the direction of generous and helpful.

I mean, it’s entirely possible that Herbert Hoover, arch capitalist, was the reason Lenin and the Communists held on to power.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.30: The SRs

We spent the last two episodes tracing the unification of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party under the banner of Marxist orthodoxy, and then we left them as they entered their post-unification de-unification phase as they split it into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. This week, we are going to trace a similar line of unification for the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, AKA the SRs.

The SRs were that narodist alternative to the Social Democrats inside the still very fluid revolutionary underground, where different parties representing different ideologies were competing for the hearts and minds of potential young radicals. So the SRs grew up right alongside, and in rivalry with, the Social Democrats that we’ve been talking about the last few weeks, though their post-unification de-unification phase was not as immediate or as abrupt as it was for the Social Democrats,

So, to reorient yourself, it may be helpful to go back and listen to episodes 10.21 and the back half of episode 10.27, because that’s what I’m building off of here today.

But where we basically left off with the SRs is that around 1900, there were a couple of stable narodist organizations floating around in Russia and in the émigré communities of Europe. There was the Northern Union, who most explicitly carry the legacy of People’s Will, believing that an elite vanguard of terrorists must launch a violent political revolution that will free the people of Russia, but that we cannot count on the people of Russia to rise up themselves because they are hopelessly ignorant and backwards.

Then there were the southern groups, who extended across a span from Ukraine to the Volga River. The southern groups now believed that a combination of better rural education, the famine of 1891, and the impact of the Witte System had left the Russian peasantry very receptive to radicalization. They could, in fact, be counted on to rise up, that they had revolutionary potential right now here today.

Now like their northern comrades, the southern group also preached political revolution as being the first necessary step to economic socialization, but they were far more suspicious of the efficacy of terrorism, which they felt was a strategy that had long since been discredited. The original People’s Will had successfully killed the tsar, and the result had been smothering reaction, not liberating revolution. To which their northern comrades could easily reply well, you’re arguing we try going to the people again, which has never worked and will never work.

But though these differences of opinion existed, they all did come out of the same narodist tradition. All of them sought the overthrow of the tsar, and believed that the revolutionary future of Russia was all about agrarian socialism. After all, even with the undeniable impact of the Witte System and the advance of modern industrial progress, Russia was still overwhelmingly rural, and the Russian population still engaged in agricultural activity. But perhaps most importantly, they shared common rivals: they were not liberals, or unionists, or legal Marxists, and they were not, perish the thought, Social Democrats. So the various socialist revolutionary leaders inside Russia agreed that despite their own differences, it would be better to come into alliance with one another than to not. This was both to advance what common agenda they did have, and form a united front to prevent potential recruits from being taken in by the Social Democrats on the one hand, or settling for weak tea liberal reformism as among the other.

So over the winter of 1901-1902, the leaders of the Northern Union and the southern groups came together and formed this new thing they called the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries.

Now joining the new SR party as its third principal pillar was that Worker’s Party for the Political Liberation of Russia that we talked about back in episode 10.21. This was the group founded by Grigory Gershuni and old Breshkovskaya, the babushka of revolution, who did their work among the Jewish laborers. Their focus on the Jewish communities put them in competition with both the Marxist Jewish Labor Bund, and the protos-Zionists, who were pitching a vision of United Jewish nationalism. I mean if you were a Jewish worker in the Russian Empire at this point, there were lots of groups competing for your attention and loyalties. But Gershuni was noted by friends and enemies alike as an incredibly charismatic proselytizer and organizer, while Breshkovskaya’s undeniable revolutionary credentials and her own fiery charisma made them very successful among those they preached to. Now the program of the Workers’ Party was similar to the Northern Union: staging a quick and violent political revolution should be the main work of the party. And wherever Gershuni and Breshkovskaya planted seeds, we will find later hotbeds of SR maximalism.

So with this new nucleus of an SR party having formed inside Russia, they then pursued unification with the larger narodist community in exile; Both old veterans of the 1870s, and younger émigrés who had departed Russia in the 1890s And this was, again, both about improving their ability to actually stage the revolution they all wanted, and to form a united firewall that would stop the expansion of the Social Democrats, who seemed to be insisting among other things that Russia must undergo a period of bourgeois capitalist rule, which seemed crazy and not a little bit counterproductive to the project of revolution.

So the SR leadership inside Russia deputized Gershuni in late 1901 to leave Russia and meet with potential émigré allies to pitch them on the idea of forming one single party to unite them all. But while this was a successful trip, it was not a wholly successful trip. Gershuni did meet enthusiastic supporters of the idea, of including Victor Chernov, who we talked about at the end of episode 10.27, and who is emerging — right now, basically — as the main theoretical architect of SR ideology. Chernov had now settled in as an émigré and was excited by the existence of this new united party inside Russia, so Chernov and his collaborators abroad agreed to help facilitate and edit the publication of a newspaper called Revolutionary Russia, which had been founded by Andre Argunov, one of the main Northern Union leaders, and which would now serve as the single national paper of the SR Party, putting it in direct competition with the orthodox Marxist newspaper Iskra.

But Gershuni found other immigrant groups more circumspect. As you will recall from the end of episode 10.27, most of the old veteran narodist groups had gotten together literally at the grave side of Pyotr Lavrov, and agreed to form a united League of Socialist Revolutionaries. But these older veterans were not as thrilled by the announcement of this new SR Party inside Russia, and they were not thrilled for three detectable reasons: first, they were old. They had seen this all before. They were skeptical that the united party could actually survive under constant police repression inside Russia. Plenty of the league’s members had fled into exile specifically because the police had so effectively crushed People’s Will back in the 1880s, so they were not prepared to commit to what may be just another disappointing flash in the pan.

Second — and we’ll talk more about this in a second — they had theoretical reservations about some of the ideas this new party seemed interested in pursuing. Chernov and the southern groups were clearly looking to revive something like the Going to the People movement, which if they were skeptical about the chances of an SR Party surviving in Russia, they thought going to the people was downright impossible. That was a strategy that had been tried, and was amongst the most embarrassing failures of the whole Russian revolutionary tradition.

But third, you cannot deny the power of personality and ego sensitivity. The old guard émigrés believed they had earned the right to not simply join, participate, or affiliate with the new party, but to lead that new party. Merely joining as the émigré wing of something was not what they had dreamed of for themselves.

But while the league remained aloof, Gershuni did return to Russia bearing the good news that Chernov and some other exiles, whose names I won’t trouble you with, were now on board, and the party inside Russia now had connections to émigré groups abroad. Which meant access to support and financing and resources from across Europe.

But as a new SR central committee came together to try to advance their common interests, they had to grapple with two big differences of opinion about what to do and how to do it. Now one of these issues I have already brought up plenty of times, because it’s an issue that’s just not going to go away: what to do about the peasants? Are we doing this for them, or with them and by them, who do we even mean? When we say “the people” or “the peasants,” are we talking about one undifferentiated mass, or are there in fact important class distinctions inside “the people” that we need to take into account?

But the other big issue was a matter of tactics, specifically the question of terrorism. Do we do terrorism or not? And if we do do it, who do we target, when do we target them, how do we target them, and why do we target them? Opinion inside the SR leadership ranged from terrorism is a counterproductive distraction, to terrorism is our primary purpose. So, they’re going to have to work that out.

First we will turn to the peasants, and for that we will turn to Victor Chernov, who was one of the ones arguing that times had changed, and there was a great deal of revolutionary potential inside the Russian peasantry. Now he was not alone in this opinion of course. Old Breshkovskaya reported after her return to Russia from 20 years in exile that she found the peasants of the 1890s far more advanced than where she had left them in the 1870s. They were better educated, more literate, and best of all, openly dissatisfied with the realities of life in their post-emancipation villages, especially due to the fact that they still had to pay those hated redemption payments. But the population had also been growing rapidly over the past 30 years while the amount of available land had stayed pretty much the same, so many peasants were forced into becoming landless wage laborers, and they found their wages depressed by the glut of available labor.

Now if you will also recall, I briefly mentioned in episode 10.26 that Sergei Witte was hoping to deal with this problem of over-population by enticing people to hop on the Trans-Siberian Railway and resettle in the far east. Chernov and the SRs hoped to deal with the problem by having the people rise up seize all the land that was still being held by the parasitic nobility, and redistributing that land equitably.

But that brings us to this question of what we mean by “the people” and “the peasants.”

Now, back in the 1870s, and the days of People’s Will, it was taken for granted that “the people” whose will they were doing was just one thing. But more sophisticated analysis in the intervening years had revealed that this was not actually the case: the arrival of Marxism in Russia really helped shed a light on this, though I should note for the record that Pyotr Tkachev, doyen of elite vanguard party revolution, had already pointed out to everyone that there was a big difference between rich peasants and poor peasants. But, the realities of post-emancipation landownership and the arrival of Marxist theory combined to make the class distinction out in the rural areas more obvious.

Now the prevailing theory of the Russian Social Democrats — that is, Plekhanov and Lenin and Iskra — was that the peasants were of two types: those who owned land, and those who did not. The former were classified as bourgeois and the latter they classified as a rural proletariat. In this telling, both types of peasants would be united in the first democratic revolution aimed at tearing down the last vestiges of medieval privilege. Rich peasants and poor peasants alike had an interest in throwing off the shackles of the old aristocracy. This would then usher in a period of agrarian capitalism that would see the richer bourgeois peasants expand their private holdings and improve the profitability of their growing commercial estates. And this would at the same time transform the majority of the rural population into landless wage laborers. These landless wage laborers would then either migrate to the factories and swell the ranks of the urban industrial proletariat, or stay behind, and swell the ranks of a new agricultural rural proletariat. Those who stayed behind would then join in the second socialist revolution by attacking the rural bourgeoisie, the rich peasants. They would see as the means of production, which is to say the land and the tools and the farm equipment, and socialize the agricultural sector of the economy. Chernov however disputed this analysis, and instead differentiated three types of peasants: there were the landless wage workers, yes, and the rich peasants who owned a lot of land and hired those landless wage workers and exploited their labor for profit, yes, but at the moment the vast majority of Russians were neither of those things. Most of them were families who worked a small plot of land for themselves. Now sure, thanks to post emancipation economic reforms, they technically owned the property, which according to the orthodox Marxist interpretation meant they owned the means of production and were thus bourgeois, but Chernov said the important thing is that they work these plots for themselves. In Chernov’s view, which was about to become one of the defining points of SR ideology, the key issue was not whether or not you own the land, but whether or not your income was principally drawn from the exploitation of labor, which was not true in the case of this middle rank of small hold independent farmers. Now the Social Democrats said that anybody who owns their own plot of land would be ranked among the reactionary petty bourgeoisie when the revolution came, and Chernov said, no, they are just as downtrodden and exhausted and exploited as the landless agricultural proletariat. They’re living under the tyranny of bankers in the oppressive competition of their wealthy neighbors, and when the revolution comes, they would join the revolution, not the reaction.

But both the SRs and Social Democrats agreed that the richer peasants were a big concern. And though the definition of the word at this point is still vague and unrefined, we call these richer peasants the kulaks. Now eventually the word kulak will come to have a specific administrative definition that had bloody consequences when Stalin implemented de-kulakization in the first Five Year Plan, but for now we can define them as peasant families who had successfully navigated the economics of the post-emancipation world. They had gathered up a little investment capital, speculated in land, successfully expanded commercial operations. They often worked in conjunction with the experts employed by the zemstvos to improve agricultural production. The kulaks employed modern farming techniques, brought in veterinarians to care for their animals, they consulted soil and crop experts, all of which made them rich and successful. Or at least richer and more successful than their neighbors, who were now employed as hired wage workers on kulak lands.

But we shouldn’t go too far yet in talking up kulak wealth and prosperity. They had not grown to the same scale as the old noble estates, whose far greater holdings the kulak families eyed with a mix of envy, resentment, and ambition. And this obvious mix of envy, resentment, and ambition led SRs and Social Democrats alike to assume that the kulaks would be on board with any revolution aimed at overthrowing the feudal lords, because that would open up land to be privately acquired and further developed.

The concern for Chernov though, was that if the kulaks were allowed to take the lead in such a revolution, that they would then turn around and short circuit the socialist revolution. Thus, when he received reports that these more prosperous kulak families were among the most eager audiences for revolutionary literature, he was as vexed at the implications as he was pleased by the fact that he had an audience. The kulaks could not be allowed to bear the standard of socialist revolution because it would never be in good faith.

So who then could they trust to lead the revolution in the rural areas? Now since the villagers were as hostile as ever to urban intellectuals showing up one day preaching revolution, this is when the SRs really landed on the possibility of recruiting inside that rural intelligentsia, and specifically targeting the village teachers, who ever after became a kind of quasi-mythic ideal SR revolutionary. These teachers were educated, connected to the people, and as members of the intelligentsia, were off to one side from the direct class conflict that would be coming with the revolution. So the village teachers were the perfect mediator between the urban intelligentsia who led the SRs, and the rural peasants who they hoped would fill the rank and file of an SR army. It would take time to build these connections and mediate the differences between them, but it could be done. And it should be done.

Now as these theories were being developed, there was this whole other wing of the SRs that believed it was all just a pointless retread of Going to the People, it was doomed to failure. But then proponents of peasant agitation received a startling gift that proved indeed what they had previously only been speculating about in theory.

The harvests of 1901 had been very poor, and in the spring of 1902, famine conditions prevailed across Ukraine and Southern Russia. Now it wasn’t as bad as the Great Famine from ten years earlier, but it still led to angry hostility aimed at local lords, who were assumed to be hoarding food and grain. So in the spring of 1902, peasant mobs spontaneously started ransacking noble estates. Now there was almost no physical violence, these weren’t lynch mobs, but they did seize all food, supplies, grain, and equipment that they could lay their hands on. And then they would burn the manor house down, reasoning that if the hated local lord had no home to live in, that they wouldn’t come back. So all through the spring of 1902, as many as 50,000 peasants total attacked and torched about a hundred different estates. Now this wasn’t 50,000 people in one mass army, mind you, but the combined number of participants in lots of separate local uprisings that stretched from Ukraine to the Volga.

Now the 1902 peasant uprisings ended the way most other peasant uprisings end: the regime scrambled the army and the angry peasants were brutally suppressed. And then the harvest of 1902 was much better than the harvest of 1901, which eliminated the immediate problem of hunger. But still, you could not have asked for better proof that the peasants were, in fact, very pissed off, and it was eminently possible to turn them into a full-blown revolutionary army.

The 1902 the uprisings had three immediate effects on SR theory, practice, and organization. First, they created an official peasant union that would serve as the organizational backbone for what they envisioned to be one day a vast network of revolutionary groups inside every village in Russia ready to lead their friends family and neighbors into revolution when the time came; second, they incorporated a new rural teachers union which had formed independently, and whose task it would be to recruit and train local teachers to be the principal missionaries of revolutionary gospel; and then finally, it was one of the things that finally convinced that émigré League of Socialist Revolutionaries to finally join the SRs, because they said, hey maybe times have changed. And though they maintained the league as a separate entity that was merely federated with the SRs, for all intents and purposes they were part of the SRs. And they now helped form a link of money, resources, publications, and personnel that stretched from Paris all the way to the Ural Mountains.

But now we need to turn to the other big debate inside SR circles that was going on alongside all of this, which was over the tactical question of terrorism.

Terrorism and narodism had always been closely linked, and plenty of SRs believed that it needed to be a central part of their program, that an SR without a bomb was no SR at all. And though there was a lot of sympathy for terrorist activity, many SR leaders did not want the political project caught up with the dirty business of assassinations and bombings, and they didn’t want this for three very good reasons: first, it might turn off potential allies in more moderate circles; second, terrorist activity was bound to invite heavy police pressure that would threaten anyone directly connected to the terrorists; and third, actually participating in murderous conspiracy would weigh too heavily on the consciences of many of the political leaders.

Now some SRs really didn’t want to restart the terrorist campaigns of the past. But a majority of them seemed happy enough to give it their approval, if the three concerns I just mentioned were addressed. Which they were. They concluded that the best approach would be to create a wholly separate compartmentalized and autonomous terrorist group, which would stay at arms length from the political party so as not to create traceable links between the two operations. And thus was born the SR Combat Organization.

The principal leaders of the Combat Organization were Grigory Gershuni, now transitioning from organizing Jewish workers to organizing potential assassins, this other guy named Boris Savinkov, and a third guy who… I will more fully introduce here in a second. The Combat Organization was not interested in ideology, or theory, or what Russia would look like after the revolution. They were there to wage war on the tsarist regime right now, directly, today. Their goal was to keep up a relentless campaign of political assassination that would help destabilize that regime, and if nothing else, keep everyone inside the government in a constant state of stress and panic. Now unlike the old People’s Will, the Combat Organization did not believe that just knocking off a few government ministers would necessarily trigger a revolution all on its own. Instead, they saw themselves acting as the people’s executioners, delivering karmic justice for the evil those ministers had done. And this was not unlike Pancho Villa’s avenging angel routine that we talked all about during the Mexican Revolution.

So in small conspiratorial cells, they planned and carried out assassinations, some of which were successful, many of which were not. And as this campaign of terror unfolded between 1902 and 1905, the Combat Organization became ever more autonomous. Now they were supposed to at least run potential plans by the SR central committee to at least give them a heads up, but after a while the leadership of the Combat Organization stopped doing even that. They were just off on their own, killing people when and where they wanted. Their coming out party was April the second, 1902, when an agent successfully walked up and put two bullets into the minister of the interior. There was then a subsequent plot to execute attendees of the minister’s funeral, the most important of which being old Pobedonostsev, one of the architects of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, but it turned out the combat organization was not composed entirely of hardened killers, because the assassin lost his nerve and couldn’t fire the shot. And indeed a deeper look at how the combat organization actually functioned reveals some charismatic leaders convincing some impressionable and potentially unstable youths to carry out assassinations on behalf of a revolution they didn’t quite fully understand. And indeed, one of the jobs of those charismatic leaders was to ensure that potential assassins didn’t get cold feet at the last minute.

So that brings us to one of the most infamous members of the Combat Organization, that third guy, who I am now more fully introducing right now this second: Yevno Azef. But Azef is not just infamous because he played a leading role in planning and carrying out so many political murders over the next five years, and if you already know who Azef is, please don’t spoil it for the other listeners. So Azef was now in his mid forties. He was born the poor son of a Jewish family in Belarus, and while he was working as a salesman and aspiring journalist in the early 1890s, he got caught up with the radical underground. At one point, the police were onto him, and to avoid arrest he embezzled some money from his employer and fled to Germany in 1892. Once he got there, he linked up with some other socialist exiles, and appeared to continue his revolutionary activity but he struggled to make a living. And then he hit upon a brilliant idea, a way to ensure himself a steady stream of cash, and here now is what makes Azef not just famous, but infamous: he contacted the Okhrana, and offered to become an informant. All he asked for in return was money. And thus began his career not so much as a double agent, but as a straight up police spy working deep inside the revolutionary underground.

Azef then returned to Russia partially bankrolled by Okhrana, and linked up with Andre Argunov, and helped organize the Northern Union. Far from being suspected as a spy, Azef was considered one of the most dependable members of the party, and Argunov, for example, did not know that one of the reasons Azef had been able to successfully set up a printing operation was because the police let him do it. Then, when Azef went abroad again in 1901, and Argunov and many of his closest associates were arrested, right after Azef crossed the border, it never occurred to them that it was Azef who had sold them out.

Now so far, this is all pretty standard police spy stuff. But where it gets interesting is that one of the reasons Azef was never suspected of being a spy was because of his vocal advocacy of direct terrorist action. And when the combat organization was formed, Azef joined as Gershuni’s principal deputy, and he conceived, proposed, and organized some of the most spectacular assassination plots of the whole terrorist campaign. I mean it’s not like the Okhrana would be employing someone they knew to be literally murdering government officials. Except, that’s exactly what they were doing. Azef was too valuable an asset to worry about the individual lives of a few interchangeable ministers. They let these assassinations happen.

In the spring of 1903, Gershuni was arrested thanks to a tip from a different informant, and Azef became the leader of the Combat Organization. And even then nothing changed. So when I said that the Okhrana was more… creative than their secret police predecessors, this is what I’m talking about. They were allowing one of their assets to conduct an assassination campaign, which is certainly a creative way to combat revolutionary terrorism.

Now for his part, Azef seems to have been in it simply for the money. He was an amoral scoundrel, interested mostly in amassing a personal fortune while killing government ministers for the fun and sport of it, all the while selling his comrades to the police whenever it seemed convenient or profitable. But nobody would know anything about this for years to come. Azef would not be exposed until well after the Revolution of 1905 had come and gone.

So where we will leave the SRs today is with the unified party in place and growing. They would double their membership between 1902 and 1904, and though it remained frustratingly slow going, that was okay, because they had time to build up their strength. In the meantime, those who were looking for immediate action could join the combat organization and go throw bombs at people.

But everyone’s calculations were going to change in 1904, because the tsarist regime they were trying to take down was suddenly hit with a massive de-stabilizing blow that was not inflicted by the SRs, or the Social Democrats, or any other domestic revolutionary group, but instead by the Japanese Navy. And next week, we will return to the far east, where the tsar’s imperialist ambitions in Asia were leading not to the expansion of the Russian Empire, but nearly to its ruin.

 

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Episode 10.29: Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

We ended last week with the editorial board of Iskra voting to move their headquarters to Geneva in advance of the Second Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which was now scheduled for July 1903. Though there was tension between the old guard of Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod, and the new guard of Lenin, Martov, and… the other guy, they still formed a united front as leaders of the Iskra faction inside the larger social democratic community. And they were all anticipating that the coming congress would be the moment when their vision for the party became the vision for the party. But right on cue, our old friend the entropy of victory is going to come along and cleave them in twain, resulting in one of the most famous political party splits in history.

The prologue to this historic split came just before Iskra moved to Geneva, and the prologue is called the Bauman Affair. The Bauman of the Bauman Affair was Nikolay Bauman, considered by Lenin to be one of his best and most reliable agents supporting Iskra in Russia. But Bauman came with shameful baggage: while serving a term of exile in 1899, Bauman had carried on an affair with a fellow comrade, who was herself the wife of yet another comrade. Once free, Bauman mocked his former mistress and trashed her reputation. The social democratic community was not large, and this trashing of her reputation was traumatizing and humiliating, and she seemed to receive no defense or support from her fellow comrades. So in response, she wrote a letter to the party defending her honor, and then hanged herself.

Bauman himself carried on like nothing had happened, but in early 1903, the widowed husband showed up in London asking the members of Iskra, as the most central party organization that currently existed, to do something about it. Here you have one of your agents having cruelly driven another comrade to suicide. Now it was obvious to Martov and Zasulich and Axelrod that Bauman should be expelled from the party. His heinous cruelty was an ethical breach too great to overlook. Character counted for something.

But Lenin disagreed. Strongly disagreed. He refused to allow the board to even officially consider the matter. He said, this was all personal business, and outside the party’s jurisdiction. Besides, Bauman was an exceptional agent, and that was all that mattered. Lenin was so stubborn on this point that nothing was ultimately done. The board never officially heard from her husband, Bauman remained in the party, and would remain one of Lenin’s most loyal agents.

By all accounts, the other members of the board were shocked at Lenin’s adamant amorality. One of their comrades had killed herself over Bauman’s behavior, but somehow they were just supposed to act like the only thing that mattered was how good of an agent he was? While she counted for nothing? How can we let a man like Bauman stay in our ranks? I thought we were the good guys.

So the Bauman Affair would linger as a dark cloud over all their relations. And from here on out, for example, Vera Zasulich, couldn’t stand to even be in the same room as Lenin. Now, Lenin and Martov, meanwhile, remain allies for now, but the relationship noticeably cooled, as Martov had now seen a hard part of Lenin’s character that Lenin had either not revealed yet, or that Martov had chosen not to see.

On the other end, the Bauman Affair brought together Lenin and Plekhanov at a very timely moment. Plekhanov supported Lenin’s argument that the revolution is all that mattered, even above personal morality. So this brought together the two alphas, who had been competing with each other for control of the board of Iskra, and it brought them into alignment with each other, just on the eve of the Second Party Congress.

Now, all that said, I don’t want to oversell the impact of the Bauman Affair. They all still went into the Second Party Congress on the same side, aiming for the same thing: the adoption of what you might call the Iskra party platform as the official platform of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The core tenants of this platform was: unite the various local social democratic groups under a single central committee; advance an orthodox Marxist ideology that would be defined and elaborated and distributed by a single party organ, namely Iskra. And thanks to the work Lenin and Krupskaya had done over the past few years building up a network of loyal agents across Russia — including Bauman, who would be a delegate at the congress — Lenin fully expected the Second Party Congress to simply be those agents coming together and voting to enshrine the Iskra platform as the official party platform.

The Second Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party met in Brussels in July 1903. Attending were 57 delegates, of whom 43 had voting rights. The others had merely consultative rights; the ability to speak, but not cast a vote. These delegates did not attend as mere individuals, but as representatives of some officially constituted social democratic group. And in very simple terms, the goal of the congress was to unify all these different autonomous groups into a single party. And one of the most gratifying parts of the congress was that of the 26 different groups represented, all but five of them actually came from inside the Russian Empire. This was not just another assembly of impotent émigrés pretending like they had influence back home. These groups ranged from the Bundists in Lithuania all the way to the far east Siberian Union, represented by their recently escaped golden boy, Trotsky. Lenin was right not to fear any real challenge to the Iskra platform. 44 of the 57 attending delegates were Iskra agents. Those who might be considered the opposition, the Bundists and a few émigré economists, would be faced with a stark choice: submit or leave.

But hardly anything got done in Brussels. The Okhrana knew all about this meeting, even if they couldn’t stop it from happening, so the Russian ambassador appealed to the Belgian government for help, and the Belgian government, themselves not very thrilled at this congress of revolutionaries meeting in their backyard, offered the Russian government assistance. The delegates were kept under tight and not at all hidden surveillance — they often returned to their hotel rooms to find that the police had searched their rooms in their absence. Worried that they might be arrested and deported, they all decided to decamp Brussels and reconvene in London. Lenin scrambled to arrange meeting places and lodges after the surprise move, but on August the 11th, 1903, they all finally reconvened. Able now to get down to business, Lenin expected no challenges. He was thus mighty upset when he faced a challenge from Martov of all people, on the seemingly trivial point of what it meant to be a member of the party.

Now, Lenin and Martov had been on the same side of practically every issue since they had first come together back in 1895, the recent unpleasantness of the Bauman Affair being the first real crack in their alliance. But when the definition of party membership came up for debate on August the 15th, the two old comrades found themselves on opposite sides of a practically invisible line. Lenin suggested formulation for membership is that you needed to support the party program, support the party materially and personally participate in party organizations.

Okay.

Martov’s counter formulation was that you were supposed to support the party program, support the party materially, but merely engage in quote, regular personal assistance under the direction of the party. To illustrate the difference, Martov described a university professor who might wish to be a member of the party, but who could not publicly participate in a party organization for fear of losing his job. There was no reason that the party should reject such a candidate. But hidden in the apparently trivial distinction between personal participation and regular personal assistance was a much larger disagreement about where the party was, and where it was going. Lenin believed that it must remain a closed organization of full-time dedicated revolutionaries, so he wanted a narrower and more restrictive definition. Martov on the other hand was willing to be more open and inclusive. But to be very clear, Lenin was not arguing for some People’s Will style hyper-elite vanguard party, nor was Martov saying that the mere fact of claiming membership would be enough to confirm membership. The difference was smaller than that, but there was a difference.

What this really comes down to is a debate about whether the party was going to continue to operate under a state of siege mentality. Facing the threat of economism and revisionism and legal Marxism, Martov himself had fully supported building up the Iskra group using some pretty sharp elbowed tactics that demanded disciplined agents inside Russia who followed orders and who committed every waking moment to the struggle. This siege mentality had justified strategies and tactics and organizational principles that were necessary to ensure the survival of orthodox Marxism. But they were only ever meant to be temporary emergency expedience. And for Martov, the Second Party Congress was in effect the end of the siege. Not only had they survived the emergency, but they had triumphed. Iskra had won. So it was time now to return to normal order, and return to their larger long-term goals: building up the party rolls and recruiting as many new members as possible, which would naturally require flexibility and a more inclusive definition of party membership.

But for Lenin, the state of seed was nowhere near over. It might even, in fact, be a permanent way of life until the revolution was won. The emergency had not ended. The emergency would not end until the revolution was won. So they still needed a ruthless, centrally directed organization of hyper disciplined full-time agents. Basically, Martov is saying it’s time for us to open our hand, and Lenin is saying, no, we need to remain a strong fist; that only a strong fist is going to smash the tsar.

So the delegates proceeded to debate the two proposals and take a vote, and much to Lenin’s great annoyance, Martov won the point. Martov open hand beat Lenin’s closed fist 28 to 23. Lenin was doubly furious that aside from Plekhanov, the other members of the Iskra board, as well as everyone’s favorite protege, Trotsky, voted against him.

Now, Martov did not realize how pissed Lenin was about losing this vote, because for Lenin, there was no problem: they had had a difference of opinion about a point, both of them held their opinions honestly, there had been a debate, and then a vote, and Martov had won. That was how it was supposed to work. And certainly Martov did not anticipate that this was the beginning of a larger breach, especially because in the next two big showdowns of the congress, Martov remained right by Lenin’s side as they completed the consolidation of the party under the Iskra platform.

And that brings us to the fate of the Bundists, represented at the congress by six delegates led by Martov’s old comrade and mentor Arkadi Kremer. The Bundists put forward a motion to define the Jewish Bund’s relationship with the larger party. Specifically, they asked to be recognized as an autonomous subgroup with their own elected central committee. They also sought recognition as the sole representatives of Jewish workers. And much to Kremer’s dismay, Martov himself led the charge rejecting the Bund’s demands. Martov’s point was that they were founding a single party, that was the point. So, despite their honest intentions and obvious organizational success, the Bund could not maintain themselves as some mere federated part of the whole. They either joined the party and submitted to the central committee, or they did not. And there was a precedent at stake: if the Jews were allowed to have the Bund, then what was to stop the Poles or the Ukrainians or Lutherans or any other subgroup from demanding their own autonomous possession? That would defeat the purpose of unification, and they would be right back to being a mere loose federation rather than a single party.

Martov also rejected the idea that the party should have to go through the Bund as some kind of cultural intermediary if they wanted to appeal to or recruit Jewish workers, who were, after all, according to Marxist orthodoxy, workers who happened to be Jews, rather than Jews who happened to be workers. Joining Martov against the Bund was Trotsky, who leveled his own razor sharp invective in saying that, as a Jew, I reject what the Bund is trying to do. Not for the least reason, that the socialist revolution is meant to erase the cruel and irrational distinctions between Jew and Gentile, so we can’t very well enshrine that distinction inside our socialist revolutionary party.

Unwilling to surrender himself in the Bund to outside control without any autonomous rights, and feeling mighty abused by his former friends, Kremer and the five other Bundist delegates walked out at the Congress. Then, right on the heels of driving out the Bund, Lenin and Martov and their allies moved onto clearing out any lingering vestiges of economism. The Congress voted two measures that were directly aimed at the economists: first they defined Iskra as the sole editorial organ of the party, and second, they voted that there would be one single foreign league for all émigré members of the party. Since there were rival papers and non-Iskra aligned émigré groups who advocated economism, it was not lost on the two economist delegates that these measures were designed to establish unchallenged orthodox supremacy inside the Party. So the two economist delegates follow the Bundists out the door.

And now we come to the real turning point of the Congress. The Bundists and the economists had all voted with Martov on the membership question, and when they walked out the door, they carried Martov’s majority with them. As soon as they were gone, Lenin knew that he now controlled a loyal caucus of voters who would vote with him no matter what. And he was not afraid to immediately take advantage of his new found majority on two key issues: the composition of the three person central committee who would control the party inside Russia, and the composition of the editorial board of Iskra, who would define the ideology and policies of the party. So on the very night after the walkout of the Bundists and the economists, Lenin convened a caucus of his loyal voters where it was agreed that the next day they would elect three loyal comrades to the central committee, and more provocatively, purge Vera Zasulich, Pavel Axelrod, and the other guy from the board of Iskra. Martov caught wind of this caucus and tried to address the group, but he was denied entry. Having been in lock step with Lenin every step of the way, martov was now literally on the outside looking in.

The next day, Lenin went ahead with his plan, the proposal to drop Zasulich, Axelrod, and the other guy from the Iskra board triggered shocked commotion. Now, it was presented as a matter of efficiency and more accurately capturing the working reality of the paper: Zasulich and Axelrod in particular did not contribute much to the process of publishing Iskra — which was true — but unceremoniously dumping them like this seemed heartless and disrespectful. Axelrod and Zasulich had been fighting the revolution since Lenin had been in short pants. They had helped found Russian Marxism, and now they were being treated like dead weight to be simply tossed aside. And given the recent personal divisions on the board, it was not hard to take all of this as a power grab by a vengeful Lenin, looking to consolidate control over the paper and the party, purging those who stood in his way. Equally shocking to Zasulich and Axelrod was that Plekhanov backed Lenin up. The new board would be composed of just Lenin and Martov and Plekhanov. The delegates who were not in on the plan rose in shocked opposition, but no amount of shouting could change the math of the vote. Lenin had the votes, and the final tally in support of his motion was 25 to two, with 17 delegates abstaining in protest.

This marks the real epicenter of the split in the Party. Now Martov still had a place on the Iskra board, but in solidarity with his purged friends, announced that he refused to serve. He could not believe the shameful way this had all unfolded. Others, including Trotsky, agreed with Martov. How could Lenin be so callous towards honored comrades? It was disgusting on a personal level. And on a political level, again, it was not hard to see this as Lenin ruthlessly taking control of the party. It was hard to see his intentions in a benign light, that he just wanted to make Iskra function more efficiently, when the actions themselves seem so overtly malevolent and amoral and vindictive. Especially because at the same time, Lenin’s caucus also selected three comrades, personally loyal to Lenin, to serve on the central committee. After these final votes, the Congress’s official work was done, and they dispersed. And though united on paper, and with an organizational structure and leadership committees in place, in reality, they were now sharply divided. The entropy of Iskra’s victory created two new factions, known forever after has the Bolsheviks, and the Mensheviks.

These famous party labels come to us thanks to Lenin’s adroit understanding of politics. Because Bolshevik basically just means the majority, while Mensheviks means the minority. Lenin took his victories at the end of the congress as an opportunity to label himself and his supporters the Bolsheviks, while labeling Martov and his allies merely the Mensheviks. The great irony, of course, is that Lenin’s Bolshevik “majority” only existed at one very specific moment in time. Setting aside the fact that they only held that majority because the Bundists and the economists had walked out the day before, after reports of the dramatic and acrimonious conclusion to the congress spread back out to the wider social democratic community, most members of the party tended to side with Martov, Axelrod, Zasulich, and Trotsky. The majority of the Party were Mensheviks. And it is one of the great case studies of successful political branding that Lenin managed to get his faction called the Bolsheviks at all, and that Martov and his allies accepted the label Mensheviks is generally taken as proof that they were simply not as politically adept as Lenin, which is probably true.

In the short term, Lenin’s majority was quickly exposed for what it was. The months after the Congress saw the Mensheviks boycotting Iskra and threatening to ignore the central committee of the Party altogether, challenging their legitimacy on the grounds that they had been put in place by something of a coup staged by Lenin and his cronies. In October of 1903, the foreign league of the party held its first meeting as the sole émigré wing of the party, and all the émigré leaders were there. This time, Martov commanded a majority and he received plenty of support for his denunciations of Lenin’s tactics, behavior, and vision for the Party. Plekhanov had come to regret his support for Lenin at the Congress. Now, he had believed supporting Lenin’s hard-line would result in a stronger and more unified party, and instead he had badly divided them all. Lenin was now accused of being a Robespierre leading a Jacobin coup. And in November 1903, Plekhanov told Lenin he was going to publicly invite the purged members back onto the board of Iskra. Lenin could either accept the return to the status quo or resign. Recognizing that the bulk of the party members would support Plekhanov, and that the return of these members to the board meant that his position would be nullified, Lenin resigned from Iskra in December 1903. He had done more than anyone to make Iskra what it was, and now he was out. Just a few months earlier, it seemed like Lenin had completed a personal takeover of the party, and now he had no official position or rank to speak of.

It was now Lenin’s turned to feel angry and aggrieved. He argued, not unjustly, that it was he, not the Mensheviks, who was the victim of a coup. All he had done was propose motions to a duly convened congress of the party, and then won a majority of the votes. He had broken no rules, there had been no tricks, he had observed the rules of order. Everything had been done out in the open and after a free debate. For Martov and the Mensheviks to now insist that all this be undone simply because they didn’t like the outcome was ludicrous. The party can’t operate like that. And Lenin kind of has the point here. They were accusing him of being authoritarian when they were the ones trying to go outside the rules to reverse the majority decision of a party congress. And also, we must note that whatever Lenin’s authoritarian instincts may or may not have been at this point, he did not take the opportunity afforded to him by his brief Bolshevik majority to literally expel the Mensheviks from the party for opposing him.

So Lenin is basically saying, and I’m paraphrasing here: you accuse me of orchestrating an authoritarian purge yet such a purge never actually took place. All I did was drop the least active members from the editorial board of Iskra, and elect comrades in good standing to serve on the central committee. And now you’re freaking out and boycotting the central committee and Iskra, so who is in the wrong here? What exactly is the problem?

But clearly there was a problem. A big problem. And so we’ll wrap up today trying to make some sense of this Bolshevik/Menshevik split. Now lots of people, then and now, look at all this arguing over membership rules and who sat on an editorial board, and concluded that these are just excuses to cover a naked contest for personal power, that the issues and principles didn’t matter, this is just about a fight for who personally controlled what committees. Lenin wanted to be in control. His rivals also wanted to be in control. The exceedingly minor points over which they split prove that this was not about what or why or how, but who. And while this is true, I think it can be taken too far. Because there was a difference in principles: are we inclusive or exclusive? Wide or narrow? Disciplined or flexible? A party of people or an organization of professionals? Do we have an open hand or a closed fist?

In the months that followed, everybody traded essays in the underground press that elaborated some of these divisions, and Axelrod in particular wrote a long essay about the necessity of transitioning from an intelligentsia led organization to a proletariat led party. So there were ideological and organizational principles at stake, at least at the beginning. But the thing is, ideological and organizational principles were not the only principles at play. It seems pretty clear, at least on the Menshevik side, that the thing that really upset them was the moral dimension. Lenin’s unscrupulous ruthlessness offended them. His behavior was callous and churlish, disrespectful, mean, devoid of comradery, loyalty, or generosity. In a word: unprincipled. They associated such cruel and ruthless amorality with the despotic tsar and the exploitive capitalists. It’s why they’re the bad guys. They don’t care about people, but we do. That’s why we’re the good guys. And at a minimum, we have to at least care about each other. Character counts for something. Lenin said, such sentimentality was a sign of weakness? Well, they disagreed. And how can you really trust comrade Lenin, if you know that he’ll chuck you overboard if he thought it would bring the revolution one day closer.

Now of course, we should stop for a moment and ask where Martov’s generosity of spirit and loyal comradery were when he led the charge purging the Bundists and the economists from the party. But the point is, that when they now talked about what had split the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks, these issues of morality and honor and loyalty were front and center. And those too were principles that were at stake.

But there is no denying that in very short order principles gave way to personalities. Like any feud, the original causes were forgotten in a never ending cycle of personal slights and insults and attacks. The grudges became personal and deep and bitter. And when you keep driving to the heart of the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, what it really comes down to is a simple question: how do you feel about Lenin? If you liked him, you were a Bolshevik. If you didn’t like him, you were a Menshevik. And as the insults became personal and petty and vulgar, especially between Lenin and Trotsky, it really didn’t matter what they were fighting for, it only mattered who they were fighting against. Lenin and Martov’s personal friendship was now over. Their political alliance was at an end. And when Lenin now talked about the enemy he meant Martov, not the tsar.

So, what was this all about? Was it about party principles, moral codes, personal grudges, or just a raw contest for power? The answer is yes, yes, yes, and yes. But though these personal conflicts and bitter grudges kept the feud inside the Party permanent, it did not actually break up the Party. Everyone spent all of 1904 enmeshed in mutual insult flinging, but everyone still identified as a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and this is because though their differences loomed large under close magnification, with a wider lens they were all still on the same side, standing oppose to the tsar, of course, but also against liberals, revisionist Marxists, anarchists, and the neo-narodist SRs. And next week we are going to return to those neo-narodist SRs as they organize their own national party to achieve their own ends by their own means, almost none of which aligned with the members of the Russian Social Democratic labor Party. But after this, there won’t be any time left to organize, because in February 1904, the Russo-Japanese War is going to get going, and then after that, suddenly, the revolution they had all been waiting for and planning for and organizing for and preparing for their whole lives was at hand.

 

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Episode 10.28: The Spark

So, welcome back. I hope you’ve had a chance to listen to our Revolutionary podcast update, but if you couldn’t wait to get back into the story, then that update will be waiting for you when you’re done with this episode.

Now we left our story at the dawn of the 20th century with the various factions in the radical Russian underground simultaneously trying to unify their efforts, while also staking out ideological territory to define what the true path to revolution really was, and most importantly, what it was not. Today, we will start grappling with the most historically significant of these efforts, the attempt to unify the recently formed, but still at this point entirely theoretical, Russian social democratic labor party. This attempt was spearheaded by Lenin and his orthodox Marxist comrades.

Now we last left Lenin and Krupskaya and Martov and the other leaders of the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class at the end of Episode 10.24. And they had all been exiled to Siberia. Now, exiles to Siberia came in two broad forms: either hard labor in work camps, or just being ordered to go live in some remote village that you were not allowed to leave. Since the crimes our young radicals stood accused of amounted to merely distributing subversive literature, their sentences were all administrative exile to remote Siberian villages rather than hard labor. But still, not all remote Siberian villages were made equal. Now probably thanks to the Ulyanovs being legal members of the nobility, Lenin wound up assigned to a plum village down in the south, in a region called the Italy of Siberia thanks to its relatively mild climate. So though it was a tiny, dung strewn village in the middle of the steppe, it was hardly unbearable, and to a certain degree, Lenin enjoyed his exile. The mail service was regular, even if it was months behind the times, and he was constantly getting shipments of books and clothes and other material from home. He was able to complete his first major theoretical work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, in between hunting and fishing expeditions.

Meanwhile, you will recall that also at the end of Episode 10.24, Lenin proposed marriage to Comrade Krupskaya, and when she was finally sentenced for her own crimes, she and her mother were both allowed to join Lenin, beginning their three-person cohabitation that would continue for the rest of all their lives. Mother and daughter arrived in Siberia in May 1898, and Nadia and Vladimir were officially married in July. Now their marriage was often described, both then and now, as cynically proposed and politically convenient. But it was not without affection, loyalty, and the regular ups and downs of married life, and they were husband and wife.

Comrade Martov, meanwhile, drew the short straw. He received a much harsher sentence to a tiny village in the northern tundra, just south of the Arctic circle. We’re talking minus 50 degrees in the winter, swarming with mosquitoes in the summer. Martov’s three years in exile were defined by physical discomfort, mental isolation, and poor health. Martov’s village received exactly nine mail deliveries a year, and he was starved for information and any connection to the outside world.

But despite limited contact, Lenin and Martov were able to correspond with each other, and their friendship and partnership grew even as they remained physically separated. They were also both able to use the same old invisible ink and hidden messages and otherwise innocuous books routine to stay informed and even contribute to the political debates among their free comrades back in Russia, which is how both Lenin and Martov followed with increasing distress the rise of revisionism and economism and legal Marxism. Their own letters, both to each other and back home, expressed outrage at the spread of these heresies, and they resolved to do something about it once they were free.

Lenin’s three-year sentence finally ended at the end of January 1900, and though Krupskaya still had another year to go — she had been arrested and sentenced later — there was never any question of Lenin staying in exile while she finished her term; he had work to do. So he left, while she and her mother stayed behind. Martov’s exile, on the other hand, wrapped up at the same time Lenin’s did, and the two comrades, who had hardly spent more than a few days under the same roof together, now rejoined one another and made plans to re-found the Russian social democratic labor party on a firm united footing.

And to this end, Lenin made contact with Pyotr Struve, and attempted to find enough common ground with the legal Marxists to create a national newspaper that could espouse a single unified social democratic message. But the legal Marxist drift towards reformist liberalism was in full effect, and they were no longer able to see eye to eye on fundamental questions; their unification was impossible, and henceforth, they would be rivals for the hearts and minds of the radical intelligentsia.

With the split now permanent, and the authorities keeping a very close eye on him, Lenin concluded he could do more abroad than he could at home. He applied for permission to leave the country and found his passport quickly approved. There was nothing the authorities liked more than energetic radicals going abroad and sinking into the lethargy of an émigré’s life far from St. Petersburg and Moscow. Now, during his exile in Siberia, Lenin had maintained contact with allies in those émigré communities who still believed in holding the orthodox line against revisionist economism, since they had essentially invented and defined that orthodox line. And we’re talking here about the original Emancipation of Labor Group, Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod.

What Lenin now proposed, and what the Emancipation of Labor Group agreed to, was the foundation of a national newspaper that could become a focal point for social democratic organizing, and a way to spread information, ideas and solidarity throughout the Russian Empire. This new national newspaper would combine their forces: the intellectual and moral authority of the old guard with the energy and fighting spirit of the new guard. And together, they would restore sanity to the social democratic underground.

Now, despite Lenin’s misgivings, Martov elected to stay behind in Russia, while Lenin departed for Switzerland and then Germany in July of 1900. But if the proposed newspaper was going to have an audience, it needed points of distribution and allies inside of Russia, and so Martov spent the next year traveling around, making contacts, organizing allies to receive and distribute the newspaper when it started publishing.

By the fall of 1900, the work of organizing, writing, and publishing this new newspaper was underway. And it even now had a name: they called it Iskra, or the Spark, Iskra had multiple functions: first and foremost, it would establish an orthodox Marxist line of attack on the tzar and his regime, and create a national narrative within which local social democratic groups could fit their own local struggles. Second, but equally important was emphasizing that orthodox Marxist line of attack, which meant going after divergent and heretical strains in the radical underground. And this meant not just liberal leaning economism and revisionism inside the Marxist sphere, but also reviving their traditional attacks on the narodist socialist revolutionaries and the anarchists. Because if they were going to take down the tsar and usher in a social revolution, they were going to have to do it with right theory and right action. Third, as we’ll discuss more in a minute, Iskra was also meant to serve as the new foundation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which despite being technically founded in 1898, didn’t really exist yet. Iskra was meant to give form and focus and unity to the kind of national social democratic party that the Iskra leadership deemed essential to the revolution.

That leadership team was a six-person self-appointed editorial board, which is always described as a balance between the old guard and the new guard. The old guard was of course Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod. The new guard was Lenin and Martov and this other guy, Alexander Potresov who was their comrade in the Union of Struggle and had been arrested and exiled and freed alongside Lenin and Martov. And though Potresov is obviously important enough to be on the board of Iskra and would be around all the way through the Revolution of 1917, he positively radiates plus the other guy energy, so let’s just leave him as the other guy and not worry about him.

This six-person editorial board of Iskra represents something of a generational transition inside the movement. Though Plekhanov was still only in his mid-forties, this is the period where he starts to go from father of Russian Marxism to something more like grandfather of Russian Marxism. And though in the early period of the paper, Plekhanov believed he would remain the dominant personality, his younger colleagues were not interested in deferring to Plekhanov’s will and ego the way Zasulich and Axelrod always were. They respected Plekhanov enormously, they honored his life and work, but they would not be his ciphers. And in an important early showdown, the new guard carried a proposal to base Iskra in Munich, Germany, rather than in Switzerland. Now, this was partly to keep the paper in neutral territory: Switzerland was so full of long established acrimonious factions inside the Russian colony that publishing the paper there might inhibit Iskra’s ability to be something new, rather than just the continuation of something old. But publishing the paper in Munich was also a bid by the younger editors to stop it from falling under the domineering thumb of Plekhanov.

So the first issue of Iskra was published in December, 1900, and it would be the first of 51 issues printed over the next three years. By the spring of 1901, Martov and then Krupskaya had both joined Lenin in Munich, and they all devoted all their attention to the paper. Iskra devoted its column inches primarily to three main topics. First, a relentless denunciation of the tsarist regime. Second, relentless attacks on revisionism and economism as false bourgeois traps they must not fall into, and third, sharing news about activities and successes of comrades who were sending in reports from their local areas. Taking its cues from Lenin’s own rhetorical style, Iskra was blunt and sarcastic and satirical. They mercilessly skewered everyone. Axelrod sometimes complained that they needed to be a bit more diplomatic in their approach to potential allies, but in Lenin’s mind, the unification of the social democrats was not about creating a big enough tent for everyone to feel welcome, but to delineate a set of principles and objectives that would bring clarity and purpose to everyone’s activities.

But as I said earlier, the point of Iskra was not simply to be a journalistic and intellectual organ per se. It was meant to be the nucleus of a social democratic political party that did not yet exist. So while half the work was writing and editing, the other half was building up a network to distribute Iskra in Russia and defend its editorial line. And this network was meant to become the organizational skeleton of a fully realized Russian social democratic labor party. And with Lenin as the one most interested in this particular aspect of the paper, and Krupskaya acting as principal secretary, the network of agents and contacts and comrades that they started organizing took orders from and sought advice from Lenin and Krupskaya. And the couple was very successful at both distributing the paper and winning the loyalty of dedicated agents across Russia. And they were encouraged to adopt a with us or against us mentality. And thanks to all of this, its subscription lists grew and spread. At its peak, they were printing 8,000 copies of each new issue. Iskra was unquestionably the single largest and most successful revolutionary newspaper of the time of any of the revolutionary creeds or sects or organizations. And whether you love them or hated them, everyone now had to reckon with this new Iskra party.

Alongside the regular work of putting out the paper, Lenin wrote a condensed summary of all the ideas that were now being espoused piecemeal in Iskra. And he named his manifesto after his own favorite novel, What is to Be Done. Now this short book opens with its most immediate purpose, which is staking out the superiority and necessity of orthodox Marxist revolution, as opposed to revisionist reformers and opportunists in the west, who were now, horror of horrors, joining governmental ministries, as if a real socialist could cohabitate in a government with a bunch of bourgeois liberals. But the later sections of What is to Be Done wound up being more historically important as its outlined Lenin theories and strategies and tactics for organizing a revolutionary party. And it became essentially the practical handbook of bolshevism. And here, lenin himself, revised Marx a little bit, saying that the proletariat was never on their own and spontaneously going to produce the leaders or the revolutionary consciousness necessary for them to play their historical role in overthrowing capitalism. So they needed guidance and leadership.

But Lenin also believed that both sides of this equation, the intelligentsia and the workers, would, if left to their own devices, both drift in their own way, away from revolution. The intelligentsia would sink into their comfortable bourgeois habits and embrace reformist liberalism as was happening with revisionism in the so-called legal Marxists. Meanwhile, the workers would be seduced by the immediate fruits of mere trade unionism. So what was needed to keep everyone on track was a network of professional socialist revolutionaries drawn from the intelligentsia who would not abandon the socialist faith, but who would commit to keeping the workers focused on the real prize: political and social revolution.

And though he was talking about committed, professional, fully dedicated revolutionaries, Lenin opposed the creation of a People’s Will style elite vanguard party who had simply given up on getting the people on board. Lenin’s understanding of historical materialism meant that the revolution would ultimately be a mass movement. The problem was that under the prevailing laws of the Russian Empire, organizing a mass worker party was illegal. So they would have to do the next best thing: create the skeleton of that party, so that when the tsarist regime crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions and incompetence — as it must — the party would be ready to rapidly scale the party up into a mass movement.

The dictatorship of the proletariat was still never meant to be a Jacobin style revolutionary dictatorship. This was all about the people rising up from below, rather than a small group of elite revolutionaries issuing decrees from above. Just as Lenin was finishing What is to Be Done, the heat in Germany got turned up a bit, as the authorities started getting annoyed at reports of their brazen smuggling operations. So the board of Iskra voted to relocate from Munich to the greater freedom of London.

The move to London marked the end of whatever honeymoon period they all enjoyed together. Plekhanov and Axelrod, still living in Switzerland, started to recognize how little influence they had on the daily running of the operation, while Lenin proceeded to take on an even greater role. He and Krupskaya continued to lead the project of organizing and operating agents back in Russia, and more and more everyone came to the realization that by accident or design, Lenin and Iskra were becoming synonymous. But in Lenin’s defense, he was a workaholic who was a hundred percent committed to Iskra in a way that the others just weren’t. Axelrod and his wife were both sick and he lived in Zurich. Plekhanov was always more interested in theory than in practice. Vera Zasulich was an increasingly passive partner, and Martov, though still young and energetic was also more concerned about developing himself as a writer and a theorist, not a publisher and an organizer. Plus, he was personally unhappy in London and spent as much time as possible traveling around to confer with émigré groups in Germany and Switzerland and France to build up support for Iskra among the exiled intelligentsia. So the long hours and necessary work of actually putting the paper to bed fell on Lenin’s indefatigable shoulders. His reward for bearing this burden is that he often called the shots, and one of the shots he called in late 1902 was extending an invitation to an up and coming young writer who had recently escaped from his own Siberian exile to come to London and join the operation. And though this up and coming young writer was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, and had written articles under a variety of pen names, when he showed up on Lenin and Krupskaya’s doorstep in October of 1902, his passport bore the name Trotsky.

Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born October the 26th, 1879, making him about 10 years younger than most of the other people we’ve recently introduced. He was the fifth child of a prosperous Ukrainian Jewish family, though like Martov he grew up without any major attachment to the Jewish faith. His father was not religious at all, and the family spoke Russian and Ukrainian rather than Yiddish. The boy showed enough precocious intellectual promise that when he was eight years old his parents sent him off to live in Odessa with middle-class cousins, where he would receive a better and more worldly education. And they were right about his intellectual abilities, but from time to time regretted the worldly part of his education. Young Bronstein was smart and well-liked, though also willful and egotistical. He had no interest in sports or rough housing, but enjoyed shredding everyone, teachers and students alike, in debates with a self-confident sarcastic wit. He wants got himself kicked out of school for joining in the disrespectful booing of a hated teacher, but was readmitted the next year. His sins at this point were merely behavioral, rather than political or criminal. And at least until he was an older teenager, Bronstein showed no interest in politics, and seemed aimed for the safe intellectual harbors of a university math department.

But this all changed in 1896, when he was sent to do a final year of school in the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv. This was the same year his future comrades were already so deep in radical organizing that they had to follow the great strikes in St. Petersburg from their prison cells. Meanwhile, Bronstein was still just a smart mouth teenager. And his smart mouth was about to get a lot smarter. In Mykolaiv, he fell in with a more non-conformist set that congregated in an orchard rented by an old radical veteran of the 1870s, who hosted all comers for tea and free discussion; free discussion which was never so conspiratorial or actively seditious that the police spies who periodically sat in on their gatherings had any real problem with.

It was in this orchard that Bronstein met a young woman named Aleksandra Sokolovskaya. Sokolovskaya was the one participant in these meetings who openly self-identified as a Marxist. Himself currently falling under the thrall of the romantic narodist ideas about the heroic power of the individual over the march of historical materialism in its seeming erasure of the individual spirit, Bronstein spent most of his time ridiculing her Marxism. But Sokolovskaya’s counter-arguments, and his own further reading, slowly ate at Bronstein’s early intellectual and political assumptions. By the middle of his final year in school, he abruptly switched sides and converted to Marxism. Though he did not know it, he was well on his way to becoming one of its greatest and most influential apostles.

Bronstein’s political bent naturally worried his parents, and they were relieved when he went off to the University of Odessa, and, as I said, the relative safety of the math department. But he did not stay long at university, and soon left for the unsafety of a life in politics. Inspired by the strikes of 1896 and the recent move towards a worker focused agitation method of the Vilna program, Bronstein and his friends, including his former sparring partner turned comrade Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, organized what they called the Southern Russian Workers Union in the spring of 1897, focusing most especially on the 10,000 or so dock workers of Mykolaiv.

To this end, they started up a little newspaper in which Bronstein discovered how great of a writer he actually was. The pamphlets and papers he wrote started to get circulated around, and they did the trick. People started signing up. Membership in the party grew, enough so that the authorities took notice, though it did take them a while to realize that this was really just some independent kids on a DIY project than a group linked to the larger and more established radical networks. But the success of the union proved to be its undoing; it couldn’t be ignored, it had to be dealt with. So in January 1898, a police sweep picked up 200 members, including Bronstein. He was still just 18 years old.

He spent the next two years held in various jails and prisons, uncharged and awaiting arbitrary administrative sentencing. The early part of this incarceration was spent in solitary confinement to break his spirit, but as it turns out, he had a capacity for endurance to go along with his capacity for writing and speaking and organizing. Eventually, Bronstein was transferred up to an overcrowded prison in Moscow, where he met other more established and experienced revolutionaries, who put more radical literature into his hands, oversight in these prisons being lax, thanks to indifference and bribery. And it was here that he first read Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia. He also found in this prison his old sparring partner turned Marxist comrade Aleksandra Sokolovskaya. She too was there awaiting her own administrative sentence. And in the summer of 1899, the two agreed to get married.

Now like the union of Lenin and Krupskaya, the ratio of convenience to affection is hard to pin down. Now, certainly it probably started with a calculation that a marriage would allow them each to have a companion in their expected Siberian exile, but they also wound up having a couple of kids together, so it wasn’t a strictly platonic marriage of convenience. Their sentence was finally handed down in 1900: four years in Siberia. So at pretty much the same moment Lenin and Martov are traveling back home, Bronstein, still just Bronstein, was shipping out to four years in Siberian limbo.

Now during the next few years, Bronstein read everything he could get his hands on, finally reading, for example, Capital by Karl Marx, which he had not yet ever gotten his hands on. He joined in the lively debates among the social democratic exiles that was allowed to proceed more or less undisturbed by the ineffectual authorities. This community was far enough along that there was even a social democratic Siberian union that he joined and wrote pamphlets for. He managed to get his letters and articles and literary criticism and observations printed in various journals under various pseudonyms, and he developed a reputation as one of the best write’s in the whole scene. Meanwhile, he and Sokolovskaya bounced around between different assigned villages, and had two children together. In 1902, a copy of What is to Be Done and a box full of back issues of Iskra arrived. And here, he found ideas expressed that he himself had been groping towards on his own. And only halfway through his term of exile, but four and a half years since he had last tasted freedom, Bronstein along to get back into the action. So when an opportunity arose to smuggle him out of Siberia, he took it. And he apparently took this opportunity to escape alone with the full support and encouragement of Sokolovskaya, now the mother of his two children. The escape would prove to be the amicable dissolution of their brief marriage, though they would remain on friendly and mutually supportive terms for the rest of their lives.

So, leaving his wife and kids in Siberia, Bronstein hid in a hay cart, and then followed a series of contacts west using a fake passport. Needing to slap a name on this document, he wrote down the name of one of his original jailers in Odessa: Trotsky. So it was Bronstein who went to Siberia, but Trotsky who came out. And when he got out, he started traveling around, making new friends and contacts, many of whom knew the reputation of this young writer from Siberia, and they sent back reports to Lenin in London saying, we have this remarkable talent. What should we do with him? And Lenin sent his response: tell him to present himself at the Iskra office in London, there’s work to be done. Not wasting any time, Trotsky crossed the border and headed to Britain in October of 1902, finally showing up unannounced on Lenin and Krupskaya’s doorstep in the wee hours of the morning with not even enough money to pay the cab driver.

Trotsky’s arrival did not really shift the dynamic too much at Iskra, much to Lenin’s chagrin. Trotsky was well-liked by everyone and his talents were undeniable, and after just a few months, Lenin proposed that Trotsky be added to the editorial board, an initiative supported by everyone else. But co-opting a new member onto the board required unanimity, and Plekhanov would not have it. He was still holding tenuously to his status as leader of Russian Marxism, and he did not want to hand Lenin the gift of a loyal and deciding vote in Iskra matters. Not that Trotsky’s vote would have impacted the next really big decision the editorial board voted on anyway. The others were sick of being based in London, and with plans well underway to hold a second party congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party underway, they decided it was better to consolidate their own group. In March 1903, they voted to move their headquarters to Switzerland. Lenin objected and voted no, but he was the only nay. And so, Iskra moved to Switzerland.

And that takes us to the brink of a small gathering at the time that became a huge event in retrospect. Next week, we will discuss the Second Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party — and really the first time anything like a congress was actually held, seeing as how the quote unquote first congress was nine guys in a house who were all soon arrested. Now, you would think as I’ve outlined things here today that the natural battle line would be drawn between the two alphas: Lenin and Plekhanov, the upstart versus the master, the new guard versus the old guard, the student versus the teacher.

But it wouldn’t go down like that.

Lenin and Plekhanov would form an alliance that would define the party. And instead, the major battle line would be drawn between new factions and old friends, factions that would soon be dubbed the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.

 

 

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Episode 10.27: Coming Together, Drifting Apart

I forgot to mention this at the end of last week’s episode, so I must begin today’s episode with a scheduling head’s up: Saturnalia is upon us again, and this year for a variety of reasons, I am scheduled to take a three week break — that again is a three week break — so today’s episode, will be the last new episode until January the 19th, 2020. And when I get back, I will also have some further announcements about what the future holds in store for the Revolutions podcast. But what we’re going to do in this last episode before I go on holiday is carry ourselves forward to the end of the 19th century by rounding up the opposition to the tsarist regime, moderate and radical, reformist and revolutionary, as they start coming together and drifting apart. This process would give more coherent shape to what had been a very fluid and cross pollinated underground during the 1890s. And then, when we get back in January, we are going to take all of this and throw it at 1905 and see what happens.

So on the Marxist side of things, the exile of the leaders of the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class — that is Lenin, Martov, and Krupskaya — had removed some of the most stridently radical voices from the social democratic scene. And their departure in 1897 happened to coincide with the arrival of new interpretations of Marxism that were well less stridently radical. There were now new currents of thought dubbed revisionism, and economism, and legal Marxism, and these new currents gave heartburn to the old guard Emancipation of Labor Group, who considered themselves to be the keepers of the one true faith, and they were annoyed they now had to fend off all these new personalities, promoting new ideas. But not everyone wanted to break with the one true faith, and the Emancipation of Labor Group would find allies in Lenin and Martov and Krupskaya, who though very far away, monitored these debates and contributed to them when they were able to. And when their exile finally ended in 1900, they would come back home, ready to wage a rhetorical war for the future of Russian Marxism against all these heretics.

The first new current we should talk about is economism, which I mentioned briefly in our discussion of the Vilna Program, since economism finds its roots in the same tactical shift towards labor agitation. Now economism was not a doctrine or an ideology so much as a term of abuse used by intra-party opponents to the new program, but for clarity sake, the way I’ll define it for you now is that economism took the move towards focusing on real working class grievances and said, right, this is the thing. The fight for the working classes against the exploitive bourgeois owners is the fight we should be focusing on. But remember this is a departure from the Vilna Program, which argued that agitation among the workers was a strategy to organize, recruit, and practice collective action without ever losing sight of that final goal: the political revolution. All this work must be done with an eye towards heightening the political consciousness of the workers and putting their struggle into a political context. The goal of a strike was not just winning concessions, but building solidarity, confidence, and unity so that the workers would be ready when the time came to overthrow the tsar.

But a new cadre of Russian Marxists saw in this strategy an end unto itself, especially in light of the 1896 St. Petersburg strikes. Class conflict was the thing, worker versus owner, proletariat verses bourgeoisie. To say nothing of the fact that conditions were in fact terrible in these factories, and focusing on real material gains over abstract political theory was a good and just change in focus. People were suffering; the political stuff can come later.

Back up in Switzerland, the Emancipation of Labor Group saw this trend developing and feared for its effect on their doctrine of two revolutions. For Georgi Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod, the lesson of historical materialism was that we must have a democratic bourgeois revolution, and then a proletarian socialist revolution. First one, then the next. And at this point here in the late 1890s, Russia had yet to undergo the necessary transition to democratic capitalism. Axelrod in particular argued that for now the next step for socialist revolutionaries had to be building and joining a broad anti-tsarist democratic alliance. Creating sharp, angry divisions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie now would tend to inhibit the formation of the coalition that would be necessary to carry out the first democratic revolution. So the socialist must expect to fight alongside anyone who took aim at tsarist despotism, including the bourgeois commercial classes, because those bourgeois commercial classes were naturally seeking to end the last vestiges of medieval aristocratic privilege, to end arbitrary and capricious despotism. They would want a constitution and a parliament, which would give them political power commensurate with their growing economic power. And they would demand rights like freedom of speech and freedom of the press and freedom of association, rights that the socialist would need in order to form the coming dictatorship of the proletariat.

So in the eyes of the Emancipation of Labor Group, advocates of economism made one of two fundamental mistakes: they either focused all organizing energy on petty concerns like hours and wages while abandoning the bigger picture, or by prematurely engaging in a war against the bourgeoisie, they undermined the creation of the anti-tsarist coalition. So what the Emancipation of Labor Group really wanted was for working class organizers to emphasize their struggle as a struggle for democracy and democratic rights. First, we fight under the banner of democracy, then we fight under the banner of socialism. Don’t jump the gun!

Now, this is all fine in theory, but it’s a tough thing to tell a worker, hey, capitalism is evil and your boss is exploiting you, but also just be cool and endure it. And actually we might have to help your boss get political power because his time has to come before your time can come.

The other new current that entered the Marxist stream during these years often float in and out of economism. And this was quote unquote revisionism. Now, like the term economism, the term revisionism was mostly a pejorative used by rivals to discredit new theories on how to use and apply Marxian economic social and political theory. Now we are not going to go headlong into this, but the split between orthodox and revisionist Marxism really opened up after the death of Engels in 1895. In some cases, these were just disputes over emphasis and interpretation. But in some cases, the differences were quite large. And in particular, a German Marxist named Eduard Bernstein started making such drastic revisions to traditional interpretation that in the end he was accused of not really even being a Marxist anymore. He went so far as to abandon the Hegelian dialectical framework of Marxism in favor of rooting his approach in neo-Kantian philosophy. But we are not going to get into all of that.

Of more direct importance to our story, Bernstein started arguing that revolution wasn’t even necessary, that per historical materialism, capitalism would come along, do all of the transformative things Marx said capitalism had to do, but then, rather than necessarily leading to a proletarian revolution, that raw industrial capitalism could simply be reformed and improved and softened until voila! After a long and steady period of democratic regulation and reform, that the end state goal of socialism would be achieved — not by the proletariat rising up and violently overthrowing the bourgeois capitalist state, but by simply changing a piece here, and swapping out a piece there, until the mode of production had transformed from capitalist to socialist.

Now like I just said, this was revisionist heresy to the point where other Marxist said Bernstein is not just revisionist, he’s not even a Marxist anymore. But his argument gained a lot of adherents in the 1890s, especially among those creating these new labor political parties that would go out and contest and win elections. They were thinking, well, why not just do that? Go out, win elections, and then reform everything. There’s no need for violent revolution at all.

Now, ironically, these growing divisions were happening at the same time that the Russian Marxists were also trying to form a single unifying umbrella organization to house everybody. One of the main proponents for this push towards unification was the guy that I mentioned in passing an episode 10.23, but who deserves more of an introduction: that is, Arkadi Kremer.

Kremer was the leader of the Social Democrats organizing among the Jewish workers in Vilna, and was one of the principal authors of On Agitation, both the idea itself and the pamphlet that explained it. Kremer came from an observant Jewish family and had been living in Vilna since he was 12 years old. He briefly attended university in St. Petersburg in 1889, before his involvement with student radical groups earned him an expulsion from school and a ban from setting foot in St. Petersburg. So, he went back home to Vilna, where he started up a Marxist social democratic circle. And this is the circle that Martov joined when he arrived in Vilna in 1893 after his own arrest. And they would spend the next two years putting agitation into successful practice. But, while Martov was only passing through, Vilna was Kremer’s home, and after Martov left, he kept building the movement, and in a few years, the Vilna organization was, by number of members, the largest Marxist group in the whole Russian Empire.

Now, of course, the other unique feature about the Vilna in the organization was that it was Jewish. As we’ve discussed, Jews faced unique problems inside the Russian Empire that seemed to demand uniquely Jewish solutions. And Kremer naturally wanted that solution to run through social democratic Marxism, rather than the narodist socialist revolutionaries or the more nationalistic proto-Zionists who were also starting to organize and gain adherents inside of the Jewish working classes at the same time.

In September 1897, Kremer and his comrades got together and founded the general Jewish workers, union known colloquially, and historically, as the Bund — with Bund meaning something less than a rigid party, but more than just a loose group. The plan was for the Bund to become the umbrella group for all Jewish workers and socialists, to always make sure that their particular Jewish character and concerns were highlighted and represented inside of the larger movement. .

Now, a few points: Kremer was himself pretty assimilationist, and though he wanted to organize the Jews as Jews, he differed from a younger comrade named Mikhail Lieber, who was more strident in asserting the Jewishness of the Bund. And the subtle distinction here is between we are social democrats who are also Jews versus we are Jews who are also social democrats. Neither of them though were rigid Jewish nationalists, and they still saw things through Marx’s analysis of economic class conflict. So like, the Jewish bourgeoisie cannot be trusted to be our friends just because they are our fellow Jews.

So Kremer would himself always maintain good working relations with non-Jewish social Democrats. And even though he helped create this autonomous Jewish Bund organization, he did not believe that it could ever accomplish its goals without Gentile comrades. Isolation was death. So Kremer and the early leaders of the Bund were at the forefront of the first attempt to really unify all the Russian Marxist social democratic groups into a single party, which they managed to achieve, however inauspiciously. In March, 1898.

So this brings us to the inauspicious founding of an organization that would go on to become a fairly important entity in world history: the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Now it is entirely possible you’ve never heard of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. But just so you know, it is the precursor — through many twists and turns, changes in personnel, direction, factional splits, rebrandings and re-foundings — of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which you probably have heard of.

After a great deal of correspondence and communication, various Russian Marxist groups — the Jewish Bund, social democratic émigrés, what was left of the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class — organized a congress in Minsk. Now the word congress is a bit of an overstatement, because exactly nine delegates were able to attend. These nine delegates spent March the first through March the third, 1898, together in a house on the outskirts of Minsk discussing how they could all merge under one shared set of principles. They elected a three man executive committee, which included Kremer, as he and the Bund were major sponsors of the initiative. But the reason this is such an inauspicious beginning was that, as usual, their organization was shot through with police spies and informants. The authorities knew that this was happening. They let the delegates come together to more properly identify them, but within a few weeks, most of them had been arrested, including Kremer, who would be thrown in jail and not be released until 1900. So this First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was really hardly anything but a prelude to the much more important Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which was a far more momentous event in the history of the Russian revolution. Though, that Second Congress would have to wait until 1903, since everyone was now in jail or in exile.

Now once the RSDLP — that’s one of the ways it can be abbreviated — was founded, they tasked one of their most committed comrades to draft the parties first manifesto, and that committed comrade was Peter Struve. Now we must talk about Struvea because he represented yet another new, current in Marxism, a current that would soon be flowing over towards liberalism. This current is called legal Marxism.

Struve himself was born in 1870. He arrived in St. Petersburg in 1889, and got into student politics, but still managed to finagle a job as a librarian in the ministry of finance in 1893. But just a few months later, he was arrested for subversive activity, tossed in jail and fired from his job. Now through these early years, he was an excited convert to Marxism, and his first full length book in 1895 was an argument that Marxism was in fact applicable to the Russian situation, despite what the narodists and the anarchists might tell you. During these years, he also married a woman named Nina Gerd, who happened to be a gymnasium classmate of Nadya Krupskaya, in case you were wondering how small these revolutionary social circles are. Despite his Marxism, Struve tended to stay out of illegal radical politics, and so even before legal Marxism became a thing, Struve was was by temperament a legal Marxist. As was his friend and intellectual collaborator, Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, a Ukrainian born political economist who also married one of Krupskaya’s classmates. The line that Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky followed emphasized the positive application of Marxist economic and social analysis to the Russian situation. They welcomed the arrival of modern capitalism as a forward step in the progress of historical materialism, and they argued against the narodists and the anarchists who were trying to stop that progression. But they wanted to do things above ground, not underground, and their arguments in papers and rhetoric were academic enough and tame enough to be legally published in journals that had gotten approval from the censors, which is where we get this term legal Marxism.

One of the places legal Marxism started to get a hearing was in an institution that we mentioned in Episode 10.20: on the Liberal Tradition — that is the Free Economic Society. Now remember, the Free Economics Society was an organization initially founded and patronized by Catherine the Great to import the latest in western economic theory and practice. But it turned into a social club in intellectual society for liberal minded discussion, as long as those discussions stayed away from politics. Well, in 1895, the society came under the direction of a liberal noble named Count Geiden, who wanted to expand the scope of the society to include cultural and political topics rather than narrow technocratic economics.

So in came people arguing, especially in the age of Witte’s industrialization practices, that politics and economics were actually inseparable. Among those who started taking part in these discussions were Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky, floating a Marxist take on Russian current events. And it was in the Free Economics Society that the moderate fringes of Marxism started to mingle with the radical fringes of liberalism.

Now, even the quote, unquote legal Marxism of Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky would eventually be too much for the authorities to take. And while they themselves were not arrested, the Free Economic Society would eventually find its doors shuttered in 1900 for fostering subversive thinking. Now Struve himself would continue to operate on the moderate edge of Marxism for the rest of the 1890s, and he was obviously still trusted enough to compose the official party manifesto for the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1898. But after Lenin returned from his exile in 1900, he and Struve attempted to find common ground between their two factions, but the common ground was getting very thin. And in 1905, we will find Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky not among the Marxist social Democrats, but among the liberal Kadets.

Now in the middle of all these debates about revisionism and orthodoxy, economism and legal Marxism, dropped an article called The Credo, written by a woman named Yekaterina Kuskova. Kuskova had gotten into radical student politics upon her arrival at the University of Moscow in 1890, but first she had fallen in with the narodists. But after her involvement in student politics got her exiled to Nizhny Novgorod, where upon arrival she converted to Marxism, and met her future husband, Sergei Prokopovich. Together, they would become the leaders in the move towards revisionist economism.

After getting married, the couple hung out in Russia until 1897, at which point they decided life would be better, easier, and less dangerous if they just emigrated to Germany. When the RSDLP was formed in 1898, they both joined as émigré members, but were already growing disenchanted with strict Marxist orthodoxy. And they liked the kind of revisionist line Bernstein was taking in Germany. In 1899, Kuskova wrote and published an article called The Credo, which argued in favor of the Social Democrats in Russia adopting revisionist economism. Not that she called it that. She was just arguing that socialism could be achieved by steadily reforming existing capitalism without the need for a catastrophic revolutionary break or a lot of bombings and assassinations. She went so far as to argue that a political party wasn’t even necessary at present, that they all needed to focus on worker organizing activity more in line with traditional labor unions than a labor political party.

The Credo went off like a bomb inside Social Democratic circles, and in particular it had the effect of bringing into closer alliance a group whose alliance would become very important: Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Zasulich in Switzerland; Lenin and Martov in Siberia. Through exchanges of letters in the wake of reading The Credo, they all denounced this revisionist heresy and agreed it was terrible and had to be fought. Kuskova was soon enough expelled from the party for her heresy, and her husband would resign along with her. And they too were now on the same path as Struve and Tugan-Baranovsky away from radical revolutionary Marxism towards liberalism, and they too would wind up among the liberal Kadets come 1905.

Now, so far today, we’ve only covered the Marxists, and the Marxists who were turning into liberals, but the late 1890s also saw important organization among the neo-narodists: the future SRs. They were making a lot of headway recruiting among those who were turned off by what these Marxists were calling for. You want us to embrace all the horrors of industrial capitalism as inevitable and even… good? You want us to rejoice and the destruction of the traditional rural village? Not just be indifferent, but to cheer the resulting dislocation in human suffering? To a lot of people, the whole Marxist program seemed unforgivably long-term, likely condemning two generations or more to urban capitalist hell before they were allowed to finally arrive at the promised land. If nothing else, this was simply morally unacceptable. The future SRs were also aided in their recruitment efforts because while the Marxists tended to put all agency and attention on the urban proletariat, the SRs allowed for different types of people to play real roles in the coming revolution, most especially peasants and the rural intelligentsia who might feel left out of Marx’s theory. The SRs also continued to emphasize their continuity with Russia’s more romantic revolutionary tradition, which celebrated heroism and élan and self-sacrifice and dramatic acts of valor, all of which was not without appeal to the young and the fed up. And it goes without saying that many who were young and fed up found the doctrine of two revolutions to be insane. There’s going to be one revolution, it is going to be a socialist revolutionary revolution, and it is going to be rooted in the traditional Russian village, which was right now today, ready to become the bedrock of Russian socialism. Why wait? We have everything we need.

So I know that I’ve already introduced a bunch of new people and concepts today, but we are going to end with one more guy who is about to emerge as the brain box of the SRs: Viktor Chernov. Now there were a lot of older narodist brain boxes out there, but they had all come of age during the glory days of the 1870s. And just as with the Marxists, a younger generation of narodists were now emerging, and of them, Victor Chernov would turn out to be the most influential. He was born in 1873, so he was a bit on the younger side of this newer generation. He encountered radical narodist ideas as a teenager in the 1880s, and then stayed on that line when he went off to the university in Moscow in 1892. And it was while in these Moscow narodist circles that he encountered Yekaterina Kuskova. But while she was moving from narodism to Marxism to revisionism to liberalism, Chernov stayed in the original narodist tradition. In 1894, he was arrested and spent nine months in prison, before being assigned to a five-year administrative exile in the city of Tambov in central Russia.

While in this exile, he continued his own radical education by reading the old guard narodist theorists, but he also started developing his own new ideas. Despite being under surveillance, he was able to engage in organizing activities, and he focused on the lower class peasant workers. He set up lending libraries and discussion circles, and was pleasantly surprised how eager they seem to be to engage with radical politics. So Chernov was among those major voices inside neo-narodism who found the peasants of the 1890s far more ready for radicalism than those peasants of the Going to the People era of the 1870s. Chernov came away a convinced yes on the controversial matter of whether the peasants had revolutionary potential. Chernov thought that they absolutely had revolutionary potential.

But he also learned quite a bit about how to talk to the peasants, how to go to the people. Much the same way that Kremer and Martov realized the importance of simply speaking Yiddish to Yiddish speaking workers. Chernov observed that the basic worldview of the peasant was shaped by religion and morality, that they encountered a world, not composed of economic classes or political ideologies, but of basic theological morality, right and wrong good and evil just and unjust. So Chernov now believed that the best way to connect with the peasants was to pitch socialism in moral terms. This wasn’t about abstract forces of history, or the necessity of economic transformation, or which constitutional theory of government worked best: it was about what was just and what was unjust, what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was evil. And what are some things that are good? Generosity, sharing, honesty, mutual support. What is evil? Corruption, selfishness, cruelty, exploitation. So frame socialism versus tsardom in those terms, frame socialism versus capitalism in those terms. Chernov argued that his fellow comrades must think of themselves not as professors or political organizers, but as the apostles of a new religion.

After his term in official administrative exile ended in 1899, Chernov went abroad, where he encountered the old guard exiles, whose heads were, as. I said, still mostly in the 1870s, still clinging to a Jacobin-esque dismissal of the peasants as potential fellow comrades. Chernov first spent time in Switzerland, where I should mention he encountered the Marxist Social Democrats, who were embroiled in their own bitter debates about orthodoxy and revisionism and economism, but who all agreed that Chernov and his narodist buddies were trying to resurrect the past, not push forward into the future.

During his stay in Switzerland, Chernov and Plekhanov in particular came to enjoy a deep mutual and personal loathing that went beyond mere ideological disputes. After this, Chernov moved on to Paris, where he met with the most revered veteran narodists in exile who absolutely still considered themselves to be the leaders of this movement. Chernov made a pilgrimage to meet old Lavrov, and Lavrov revealed that his final dream was to unite all the different narodist parties and groups and unions, both inside and outside Russia, into a single party, not unlike what the Social Democrats were attempting with the RSDLP. And in fact, this would be Lavrov’s final contribution to a life of revolutionary theorizing and organizing, because in February 1900, Lavrov died. Since everyone in all walks of narodist life respected, admired, and acknowledged Lavrov’s importance, his funeral brought them all together. And it was literally while standing beside his grave at the funeral, that the leaders of the different émigré narodist groups hashed out the basis of what they came to call the Agrarian Socialist League. The Agrarian Socialist League would be held together by the idea that the peasant commune was still the basis of future Russian socialism. And it would bring together the old veterans of the 1870s and the younger radicals of the 1890s, and this Agrarian Socialist League would soon become the émigré pillar of the SRs when they finally fused with our domestic comrades in 1903.

So by the dawn of the 20th century, we see major differences being highlighted and widened among all of these different radical groups, while at the same time, they were trying to bring themselves together, to broaden their organizing capacity, their reach, their membership and their influence. And despite crackdowns by the authorities, their numbers on all sides only continued to grow. And that growth would be encouraged by the recession that would follow the end of the Witte Boom that had defined the 1890s. And this happened to coincide with the end of the three years exile in Siberia endured by the more radical Marxists who wanted nothing to do with revisionism and economism and legal Marxism, and who came back home in 1900, ready to take back control of the movement, only to find themselves pushed into foreign émigré life themselves. And it was in this new foreign exile that the youngsters like Lenin and Martov fused with the oldsters, Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Zasulich, to found a new newspaper called Iskra, the Spark.

But that spark is going to wait until I returned from my moderately prolonged absence of three weeks. But when we come back, it will be time to finally launch into the account of the revolution of 1905, which, given hindsight, is usually cast as a prologue or a dress rehearsal for 1917, but who everyone at the time, tsarists and Marxists,narodists and liberals, conservatives and radicals, anarchists and nationalists, thought was the revolution they had all been expecting.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.26: The Far East

Last time, we returned to the Romanov household and the elevation of Nicholas and Alexandra to emperor and empress of Russia. We also talked a little bit about the position of the Russian Empire in Europe, specifically with regards to the two rivals whose rivalry would define the next half century or so of European war and diplomacy: France and Germany.

Today, we are going to extend that conversation, but take it to the other side of the world to introduce the origins of a brand new element to our story. The element that will get to go down in history as being one of the principal triggers for the cascading crisis that would become known as the Revolution of 1905, and that’s the Russo-Japanese War.

The Russian Empire had first started pushing east across the Ural Mountains in the later 1500s, and they just kept pushing right across Siberia until they got to the Pacific coast, and once they got to the Pacific coast, they launched seafaring explorations towards the Americas in the early 1700s. Now, they made some stab at setting up colonies in what is today Alaska, but these would never be well-established or profitable, and as every fifth grader who ever did a report on the state of Alaska knows — hi, that’s me — Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. But while they pulled back from the Americas, they had no intention of pulling back from the Pacific. In 1858, and then again in 1860, Russia signed treaties with Qing dynasty China, establishing a new border between China and what was becoming called the Russian far east.

As soon as these treaties were signed, Russia immediately started building their first permanent Pacific port: Vladivostok. Now Vladivostok was fine for the moment, it was a nice toehold, but it was so far north that it was iced over much of the year, so the Russians wanted something more. They wanted a permanent warm water port on the Pacific. And as they watch the failing Qing dynasty buckle under the weight of its own decay, and the battering of European imperial encroachment, policymakers back in St. Petersburg prepared to take advantage of the situation.

The minister who would wind up taking the lead on Russia’s political, economic and diplomatic interest in the far east is conveniently somebody we already know very well: Sergei Witte. The far east was destined to play a major role in Witte’s vision for the future of Russia’s imperial economy. The abundant natural resources of Manchuria, the Chinese territory now bordering the Russian far east, would provide excellent stock for the rest of Witte’s industrialization project. Further Russian encroachment into Manchuria would also likely net them that good stable, warm water port on the Pacific that would in turn plug them into the Asia Pacific trade. The whole region could also then serve as a logical place of resettlement for the increasingly overcrowded parts of core Russia and encouraging migration and resettlement east, which would ease the burdens on the natural resources of central Russia burdens, which became so tragically apparent in the midst of the 1891 famine.

Now the centerpiece of this project, and really the centerpiece of almost everything Witte is up to here in the 1890s, was the Trans-Siberian railway. Construction on the railway began going in both directions in 1891, and remember, Nicholas was on hand to lay the foundation stone of the Terminus station in Vladivostok. Once the western and eastern ends of the empire were linked by this vital artery, the strength of the Russian Empire would increase exponentially. That was the plan.

Now the arrival of Russia in the region introduced them as a new player into what was already an increasingly volatile rivalry between declining China and another power that, much like Russia, was trying to rapidly modernize itself out of an archaic feudal world in the later 19th century: Japan. Now I can’t, like, start from scratch attempting to explain all of Japanese history, but just so you know, there was this thing called the Meiji Restoration, which overthrew the old shogun system in 1868, and then embarked on a radical remaking of Japanese society, its political system, military forces, social structures and its economy. The new leaders of Japan saw how rapidly things were changing in the world and how far behind they were when it came to dealing with western Europe and the United States, who were now forging empires with steel and steam.

So post-Meiji restoration Japan embarked on a program of aggressive modernization and industrialization. The idea was that if they did this hard enough and fast enough that they could join the great imperial games of the late 19th century instead of becoming one of its victims. So they wanted a modern political empire and the economic wealth and social clout that went with it. And they too eyed the declining behemoth of China as a ripe target.

But, first on the agenda: Korea.

Now, Korea at this point was technically an autonomous kingdom operating under the political hegemony of the Qing dynasty. Now the ruling faction at the Korean court was conservative; they were allied with China and trying to maintain their traditional isolationism, but much like the rest of east Asia, they were being pried open by western imperial crowbars. Opposing the traditional monarchy in the 1880s was a group of reformist who wanted to follow Japan’s example towards industrial modernization, and in fact, saw the future of Korea as Japan-facing rather than China-facing.

In 1884, a clique of these reformers, fully backed by the Japanese, attempted a coup, but the Korean royal family called in help from China. The Chinese sent 1500 soldiers, and pretty soon Japanese and Chinese troops were fighting openly in the streets of Seoul, but the Japanese did not yet want an all out war with China, so they withdrew. The end result of all this was a thing called the Convention of Tientsin that required both China and Japan to pull their forces out of Korea, and that in the future, neither could send military forces onto the peninsula without notifying the other. And this was a win for Japan, because Korea was no longer just the preserve of China, it was a co-protectorate with Japan, and this for the Japanese was a step in the right direction.

So fast forward 10 years — 10 years during which China got progressively weaker, and Japan got progressively stronger — and a peasant rebellion erupted in Korea against the corruption in inequality of the old Korean monarchy. The Korean Royal family again appealed to the Chinese, who dispatched about 3000 troops to help quell the revolt. But this was all done without notifying Japan, as per the convention everyone had just signed. Armed with this casus belli, the Japanese invaded in 1894, starting what we now call the first Sino-Japanese War. Japan’s goals for this war were to drive out the Chinese and the rebellion, dislodge the pro-Chinese royal family, and install a pro-Japanese puppet government. Japan stronger in every way on land and at sea made short work of their enemies, and in April, 1895, they forced China to signed the five article Treaty of Shimonoseki.

China renounced its claims to Korea, promised to pay a war indemnity to Japan, as well as make further trade concessions, but most importantly for our story, recognizing new territorial acquisitions that Japan had won during the war. And most importantly-most importantly, for our story, this meant Japan’s occupation of the Liaodong Peninsula, which is that peninsula that juts south into the Yellow Sea between mainland China to the west and the Korean Peninsula to the East.

It is this part of the treaty which brings us back to Russia. Now up until the first Sino-Japanese War, Russia and Japan had never really had any major beefs between them. Sergei Witte certainly had friendly relations with Japanese diplomats, and he looked forward to profitable trade with Japan in the future. But the Russians did not like the idea of Japan occupying the strategically valuable Liaodong Peninsula, because a.) it seemed to be upsetting the existing balance of power in the region, and b.) the Russians themselves were eyeing the Liaodong Peninsula as a place they might like to occupy to get that warm water port on the Pacific they so desired.

So as I said, up until now the Russians had maintained good relations with both China and Japan, but now they had to pick a side. Do we partner with the rising modernizing expansionist Japan, or do we recast ourselves as the protectors of Chinese sovereignty? Since failing China seemed like a better conduit for Russian ambition than rising Japan, Witte threw Russia’s lot in with the Chinese. So within a week of the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Russian diplomats stepped in and said, this treaty is no good, you need to rewrite it. And the change they demanded was straightforward: Japan needed to give the Liaodong Peninsula back to the Chinese. In exchange, China would pay a larger war indemnity than they had originally agreed to.

Now, if it had just been Russia making this demand, Japan might’ve held firm. But Russia was flanked by both France and Germany, which is why this little episode gets dubbed the Triple Intervention. Concluding they could not take all three European powers at once, the Japanese backed down and withdrew from the peninsula by the end of 1895.

So this raises an interesting question. France and Germany are both siding with Russia on this? What’s going on? How is that even possible? I thought the French and Germans were rivals in all things.

Well, from the French perspective, they felt obligated to play along with Russia’s demands in the far east, even if they weren’t thrilled about it. Russian moves around Manchuria had already induced a statement from the French Foreign Office to the effect that their military alliance only covered events in Europe. France was not going to fight a war on Russia’s behalf over Manchuria or Korea. I mean, the French had their own southeast Asian imperial interests in Vietnam to attend to, and didn’t want to get sucked into something that was of no benefit to French national interest.

But there was more to consider, which brings us back to what we talked about a bit last week, and that Germany is now working aggressively to turn the tsar away from the French and towards the Germans. So while the French were reluctant partners in this triple intervention, the Germans were enthusiastic partners: heck yeah, we’ll help. We’d love to help you advance your hegemony in the East, there’s nothing we’d like better. And with Germany showing so much enthusiasm, the French concluded they could either back their new ally Russia, or lose influence to Germany. So, it became the Triple Intervention. And really this is just a love triangle over Russia between her two suitors, France and Germany.

But in reality, German enthusiasm for supporting Russian interests in the far east was not all that it appeared to be. Both Bismarck and the kaiser hoped that getting Russia embroiled in the far east would advanced German interest in Europe. The Russians would wind up committing their resources to the other side of the world, leaving them less able to commit resources in Europe. This meant both on Germany’s eastern flank, as well as in the Balkans, which would make Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary happy. It would also put stress on the new Franco-Russian alliance because the French were very dubious about all of this, and would prefer the Russians stay focused on European affairs, not go gallivanting around Manchuria. And plus, as a final bonus, it would probably bring the Russians into direct conflict with the British. So for Germany, helping Russia get embroiled in the far East was just win, win, win, win, win, win, win.

Now another thing we need to expand on here is something else I mentioned last week, which is the kaiser’s direct written correspondence with dearest Nikki, which constantly urged and encouraged Russian ambitions in the far east. And all of this urging and encouraging was couched in extremely racist terms about the quote unquote yellow peril that was allegedly facing Europe. The kaiser painted a picture — and at times literally sent allegorical paintings to picking this by the way — of Nicholas and the Russians as the great savior of the white race, that they stood between the heathen yellow hordes of Asia and stalwart Christian civilization. The kaiser wondered at the horrors that would come if modernizing Japan were able to see seize control of China, forge a huge conscript army and invade Europe like some new Mongol horde.

Now, this is all delusional and racist, and it’s also a hell of a thing to be pitching this scenario of a Yellow Peril at the precise moment when the western European powers are systematically invading and enveloping most of Asia. But Nicholas himself was just racist and delusional enough to believe it. Remember, we talked about that tour he took through the far East and how he had emerged from it with nothing but dismissive contempt for the people he had met. Both the tsar and kaiser thought that the yellow monkeys of the east — qthat’s how they talked about them — were an inferior race to be controlled and ruled by their white superiors. The kaiser then further embellished these racist fantasies by telling Nicholas that it was Russia’s divine destiny to rule over Manchuria and Korea and most of northern China. In fact, if they did this in full partnership with the German Empire, then together, their united, divinely ordained empires would rule all of Eurasia, and thus become the defacto rulers of the whole world.

Now on slightly firmer, and I suppose more rational, footing, Sergei Witte had made his decision to side Russia with China against Japan. And the first thing Witte did was create a new institution to facilitate loans to China, to help them pay the indemnity that had just been forced on them by a victorious Japan, and raised by the Russians. This is the Russo-Chinese Bank. This bank would float Chinese government bonds to raise money to make the indemnity payments. But let’s recall here that Russia is itself a major international debtor. So Witte turned to the French bankers, who eagerly capitalized this project, seeing easy profits to be made financing China’s war indemnity to Japan.

Then, during the festivities surrounding the tzar’s coronation in May of 1896, Witte and Chinese diplomat Lee Hong Jang worked out terms of a further secret treaty. Witte took full advantage of Chinese weakness to forge what became known as the Li–Lobanov Treaty, so-called because foreign minister Alexey Lobanov-Rostovsky was the official signatory for the Russians. And though the ostensible purpose of the agreement was to enlist Russia in the defense of Chinese sovereignty, the actual result of it was the de facto annexation of Manchuria by the Russians. The terms of this treaty would remain a secret to the rest of the world.

The defacto Russian annexation of Manchuria was carried out in stages and organized around what else? A new railroad. The big thing China agreed to was to give Russia permission to build a Russian railroad directly through Manchuria to Vladivostok. Now up until now, departing Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian railway meant not heading west, but due north about 500 miles before making a sharp left turn to stay inside of Russian territory. With the Chinese now granting a concession to build a railway through Manchuria, the Russians would have a straight shot that cut about a thousand miles off the journey.

As diplomatic cover for all this, Witte established the nominally independent Chinese Eastern Railway, financed by the Russo-Chinese bank. Now on paper, the Chinese joined this new corporation as a full partner, but in reality, they put in no money, made no decisions, and had no control. But it did keep up the fiction that the concessions to build this railroad were not being made directly to the Russian government, but instead to a corporation that China itself appeared to be a part owner of. Work on the project began in July 1897 with Russian administrators and engineers and workers streaming into Manchuria. The official headquarters of the Chinese Eastern Railway were established in the Manchurian center of Harbin, staffed entirely by Russian managers. And of course, it goes without saying that along with all these Russian managers and engineers and workers came Russian soldiers, to protect the work sites and Russian property. the chinese Eastern railway would take six years to complete, and in that time, Manchuria would go from enticing opportunity for colonial advancement to Russian province in all but name.

Meanwhile, the Russians still dreamed of a warm water port on the Pacific, and with the Chinese proving so willing to give the Russians whatever the Russians wanted, the Russians now asked to occupy the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula. This was the very spot the Russians had forced the Japanese to surrender just two years earlier. There they would build up both a commercial port and a naval base — the naval base in particular was known at the time in the west as Port Arthur. Now they were only going to be leasing this territory, this was not an annexation, but the scope of the building project and the nature of the materials the Russians would use to build up fortifications and infrastructure and facilities indicated that they were planning on sticking around for good.

All of this was then formalized in the Russia-Qing Convention of 1898, which confirmed and extended the lease on Port Arthur by the Chinese to the Russians. The Russians were also given permission to build a spur line off the Chinese Eastern Railway that would run due south through the peninsula. When completed, this would create a railroad network that would connect Port Arthur all the way back to Russia via the Trans-Siberian railway. Work began on this spur line later in the year and the pace of construction on the Chinese Eastern Railway accelerated. Now, going along with all this, the Russian Navy requested a nearly four-fold increase in their budget for 1898 to help them rapidly build up a new Pacific fleet.

The Japanese, meanwhile were furious about all this. The port was of enormous strategic value; they had won it fair and square as a spoil of war in 1895, and had been forced to give it up after listening to lectures from Russian diplomats about the need to respect Chinese sovereignty, and here the Russians were now occupying that very spot. Russian duplicity was transparent. The Japanese felt robbed, they felt threatened, and if the Russians weren’t careful, all of this was going to lead to war.

But of more immediate concern to everyone was the Boxer Rebellion, which erupted in November of 1899. Now the Boxer Rebellion is another watershed moment in the development of modern China, it was a popular uprising against the vast array of foreigners carving up their country. In response to this uprising, we get an unprecedented eight nation alliance, which forged an international expeditionary army to go quote unquote, liberate Beijing from the rebels or more specifically, rescue everyone’s respective embassies, which were besieged in the diplomatic district of the Chinese capital. This eight nation alliance was composed of eight nations who never were on the same side of anything: it was the United Kingdom, the German Empire, the French Third Republic, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Kingdom of Italy, the United States, the Empire of Japan, and the Russian Empire. Now most of the time, these nations were rivals with each other, occasionally they were active belligerents with each other, and in short order, they would all be engaged in gigantic world wars with each other. But, at this moment in time, they were united in imperial alliance against any attempt to resurrect the corpse of China that they all hoped to feed off of for the next century. So, they got together, they won, and the rebellion was suppressed by 1901.

Now to stay focused on the Russian angle though, the Russian envelopment of Manchuria was one of the causes of the Boxer Rebellion, and during the fighting, the Chinese Eastern Railway was a prime target. To protect the railroad, and Russia’s clear colonial interest in Manchuria, they flooded 175,000 troops into the region. When the rebellion was over, various terms and conditions and conventions were agreed to, including the withdrawal of all these Russian troops from Manchuria, but then the Russians just kind of didn’t withdraw. They liked Manchuria. They wanted to keep it. So they left about a hundred thousand troops behind, despite signing documents stating that this occupation had only been temporary and would soon be over. Now, back in St. Petersburg, Sergei Witte argued strenuously against this idea; he thought it was unnecessarily provocative, that nobody was really challenging their influence in Manchuria. They had access to the raw materials and natural resources they wanted, they had the shortcut to Vladivostok they wanted. They had this new port, Port Arthur that they wanted. So why stir up a potential international crisis by leaving so many troops behind? But he was overruled. He was standing in the way of Russia’s destiny.

Now the Japanese looked at all of this with more furious frustration, but they were divided about what to do. Some believed that they should launch an attack right now to push the Russians back, while others argued that there was no good military path to preventing the Russians from annexng and occupying Manchuria and that they just needed to focus on Korea. So after the Boxer Rebellion, Japanese diplomats took a two-pronged approach to the Russia question. One prong was work out in accommodation with the Russians to avoid a war. Japan offered to recognize Russian claims in Manchuria if Russia in turn recognized Japanese claims to Korea. Now this accommodation was hoped for enough that the great Japanese statesman Hirobumi Itō made a trip to St. Petersburg in 1901 to talk personally to the tsar. But the tsar and all his ministers thought the Japanese were, like, subhuman, and they were incredibly dismissive and rude, and after keeping Itō waiting under a variety of pretexts, they then refuse to even grant the audience with the tsar. So Itō went home, and the possibility of peaceful accommodation seemed to be ruled out.

The other prong was to ensure that they were never again isolated diplomatically in Europe. And they identified the British in particular as being very nervous about Russian advancement into Manchuria. So the Japanese started working very closely with British diplomats and they did a clever thing where they highlighted the Witte system’s policy of closed national economic integration with its high protective tariff barriers. The Japanese played up the fact that if Russia was allowed to continue its envelopment unchecked, that the markets and resources of the region would be locked up, and the available riches would not be shared with the rest of the world. This too was very troubling for the British.

So with the new century dawning, and the diplomatic landscape, changing all over the world, the British decided to start emerging from the splendid isolation phase of their foreign policy, where they avoided all permanent treaties of alliance, and in 1902, they signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which promised neutrality in the event of either side going to war with just a single other belligerent, but full support if that war expanded to include more than one belligerent. Japan now had a strong European partner.

So to wrap all this up since we’ve now advanced to 1902: where we’re going to leave things is that Russia is pretty much enveloping Manchuria and building up a Pacific fleet at Port Arthur. If they were going to take the next imperial step, it was going to be a step towards Korea. Now there’s still much debate over how committed the Russians were to advancing into Korea. Whether they were gunning for it a hundred percent, whether it would be nice if it happened but not if it costs too much, or whether they were happy to consolidate Manchuria and just call that good. And part of the difficulty in getting to the bottom of this question is that different factions inside the Russian government each took each of the three positions. And in the end, as with all things, the final decision was going to be left to the tsar and he was offering very little in the way of decisive leadership. Sometimes he seemed amenable to a compromise with the Japanese, sometimes he okayed very provocative policies. Now I don’t think the tsar was actively seeking a war with Japan, but Nicholas himself was just racist enough that he figured if and when Russia did get into a shooting war with the Japanese that such a war would be quick and splendid, so they really didn’t have to think too much about what the Japanese thought about anything. So Russian policy in the far east at this point is not some Machiavellian game of 12 dimensional chess. It was absentminded, and lacking clear focus or direction… like pretty much everything else in Tsar Nicholas’s Russian Empire.

Next week, though, we will return to the revolutionary front, as we approach another critical moment in the build-up to the Revolution of 1905. The Witte System had created what some historians refer to as the Witte Boom, with especially railroad construction and especially the Trans-Siberian railway creating huge demand in other major industries: coal, iron, tools, machinery, textiles, everything that went into building and running railroads. That in turn created a huge demand for industrial labor. But after the turn of the century, a lot of the initial buildup was coming to an end. The Trans-Siberian railway was itself essentially finished by 1902. And when it was finished, it’s going to lead to a sharp economic downturn, that was going to hit industrial workers and rural peasants alike…. workers and peasants who had just spent the last few years getting increasingly angry, educated, and organized.

 

 

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~dramatic music swells~

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.

 

 

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.94: The New Policies

In March, 1921, revolutionary Russia stood at a major crossroads. Years of war coupled with a long winter defined by scarcity, hunger, deprivation, misery, and unemployment had produced a volatile situation that looked a lot like the situation in February 1917. Worker strikes, military mutinies, peasant rebellions — all broke out, in the context of a ruined economy, and directed against an increasingly despotic political regime that enforced unpopular policies with guns and bayonets. The Kronstadt Rebellion that we talked about last week was the most famous of these revolts, but it was far from the only one, and the senior leadership of the Communist Party recognized if they were going to stay in power and achieve the great revolutionary goals they had set for themselves, they were going to have to make a few changes.

And I do think it’s fair to say that Lenin was a bit more flexible than Tsar Nicholas. In a contest between reality and ideology, Lenin was always going to lean towards reality. It’s one of the reasons Lenin died in his bed still in power instead of in a basement after having been overthrown.

The origin of what we now recognize as two momentous changes that define the future of revolutionary Russia was the 10th Congress of the Communist Party, which convened close to 700 delegates in Moscow between March 8th and March 16th, 1921. It was by sheer coincidence that this Congress convened right smack dab in the middle of the Kronstadt Rebellion and all the delegates kept hour by hour tabs on the explosive events in Petrograd. But Kronstadt was a mere kitchen grease fire compared to the great wildfires presently sweeping across Russia, and it was those greater fires that Lenin came to the Congress to address, even if the assembled delegates themselves were not aware of what they were about to approve.

The first of these momentous changes was political in nature, and embedded in a seemingly innocuous resolution on the importance of party unity; the other was economic in nature and was an extremely visible retreat from 20 years of Bolshevik ideology. While Lenin kept the economic reforms close to his chest, the delegates came into the Congress aware that they would be dealing with political controversy swirling inside the Party. With so many problems facing Soviet Russia, it was only natural that conflicts would arise inside the ruling party between competing visions of how to respond to these problems. Over the winter, these conflicts had grown into full blown factional disputes that vexed Lenin greatly.

Lenin worried openly to his comrades over the long winter, “We must have the courage to look the bitter truth in the face. The party is sick. The party is shaking with fever.”

Since they all took it for granted that the Communist Party was the only party with the means determination, commitment, and energy to defend the revolution, if this growing sickness of factionalism killed the party, it would by extension kill the revolution. But Lenin was not the only one who was worried about the health of the party. Plenty of Communists came into the 10th Party Congress having diagnosed an acute case of senior leadership disconnected from the masses — senior leadership, turning themselves into a bureaucratic aristocracy that made Communist Russia little different from tsarist Russia. Hence, the rise of the factional disputes in the first place. The problem was not the fact that the factions existed, but that the leadership had gone completely off the rails.

Now, a few episodes back, we introduced the biggest of these growing factions, the Workers’ Opposition. This was a group led by working class leaders like Alexander Shliapnikov, Sergei Medvedev, and Alexandra Kollontai, who believed the Communist Party was fatally morphing into an institution that no longer represented the character, interests, or worldview of the industrial proletariat they claimed to represent. Over the winter of 1920-1921, they raised major objections to Trotsky’s economic policies: the creation of labor armies, the clear push to militarize economic production, and most especially, his push in late 1920 to formally subsume all the various labor unions under state control, making the unions no different from a government department, with union leaders appointed directly by the state. The Workers’ Opposition wanted to recommit to the proletarian character of the revolution. They wanted to keep the unions free and independent from state control. They wanted to return management to the factory, to worker committees, and even replace the economic planning departments with congresses of workers.

The leadership of the Communist Party had been caught flatfooted by the Workers’ Opposition. All through the pre-revolutionary years, Bolshevik leaders knew they were going to have trouble with the peasants, and so they debated at length the peasant question. But they all took it for granted the industrial proletariat would be forever with them body and soul. And for Trotsky, it was actually incoherent nonsense to speak of the workers needing to maintain organizations and power structures independent of a state controlled by the Communist Party. How could the interests of the proletariat and the Communist Party diverge? The Communist Party was the political manifestation of the proletariat. The Communist Party represented the dictatorship of the proletariat. So how on earth could the proletariat need to be protected from their own dictatorship? It didn’t make any sense.

The obvious rejoinder from the Workers’ Opposition was that this is all fine and good in theory, but look around. Listen to the workers, ask them what they want, ask them how they feel about the Communist Party, and they will give you a list of complaints that was as long as any lists that was ever directed at the tsar. They were just as poor, hungry, and mistreated as ever. After a brief flirtation with worker directed factory life, the Communist Party had brought in bourgeois specialist to come in and manage the factories using the same kind of oppressive techniques they had used before 1917. The bosses were there to give orders, the workers were there to follow orders.

Now, Comrade Trotsky proposed that their labor unions — the organizations that were supposed to protect the workers from abuse, give them a voice, and a right to some kind of self determination — was now going to be co-opted by and subordinated to the Communist state, the very thing that they now believed was oppressing them. This would make the unions little different than the old police unions of the tsarist era. Trotsky could argue til he was blue in the face that it was theoretically impossible for the workers to need protection from the Communist Party, but that didn’t mean it was actually impossible. In fact it was happening right now.

The Workers’ Opposition, though, was not the only faction inside the Communist Party. And the other one we need to talk about is the Democratic Centralists, whose arguments dovetailed nicely with the Workers’ Opposition. Because they too claimed that the senior leaders of the Communist Party had become divorced from the people they were meant to be leading. In their view, the same process of co-opting the Soviets and turning them from open forums that expressed the will of the people from below into closed committees that carried out orders from above was now being reflected inside the Communist Party itself. Major decisions were made behind closed doors in the inner sanctums of the Politburo and the Orgbureau, two subcommittees that technically didn’t even have a statutory existence in the official organizational chart of the Communist Party. So instead of local party rank and file members choosing their own leaders, participating in decision making, and enjoying some measure of freedom of action, the upper echelon committees in Moscow now decree all policies, and assigned and reassigned jobs without bothering to consult anyone else. Their complaint, then, was that the entrenching authoritarian tendencies of the Communist Party with regards to Russia was being mirrored by entrenching authoritarian tendencies of the party leadership with regards to its rank and file. What the Democratic Centralists wanted was for party leaders to serve the rank and file of the party, as opposed to what was clearly solidifying: the rank and file of the party serving the party leaders.

Now, just to be very clear, they were the Democratic Centralists. They were not anarchists, arguing for a completely decentralized party and total local autonomy. They believed in the importance of party discipline and submitting to decisions once they were made. They just wanted to ensure that the process of selecting leaders, debating policies, and reaching decisions remained a free and open process, not a closed and conspiratorial process. But despite what I think are valid criticisms from both the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists, Lenin himself was still the major force in the party, both morally and operationally. By habit and disposition, the assembled delegates at the 10th Party Congress took their cues from Lenin above all. And Lenin’s principle preoccupation at the moment was not the specifics of the criticisms, but the way they were voiced. Lenin was in fact volcanic with rage that Communist Party members were out there organizing and building separate political apparatuses inside the Party, with their own committees and newspapers and platforms. He saw here the seeds of the same kind of divisions between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks that had destroyed the unified Social Democratic Labor Party. He wanted to prevent that split at all costs by explicitly banning the right of members to form groups outside the officially sanctioned departments, committees, and subcommittees of the party.

And in many ways, this takes us all the way back to the arguments at the Second Party Congress, particularly with regards to the Bund, who wanted to become kind of a party inside the party, and which Lenin explicitly rejected. Now, he was at pains to insist that criticisms were a vital part of keeping party leadership honest, and he did carry resolutions at the 10th Party Congress that turned away from Trotsky’s more radical economic proposals in order to keep the Workers’ Opposition types mollified. But these critiques had to be made by individual members as individuals. They could never be the collective voice of an organized faction; that could simply not be tolerated.

The result of these controversies was a six point resolution passed by the 10th Party Congress, On Party Unity. The resolution called out the danger of organized opposition factions inside the party, because they would be readily exploited by enemies of the revolution. The statement read:

It is essential that all-class conscious workers clearly realize the harmfulness and inadmissibility of any factionalism whatsoever which inevitably leads, in practice, to less friendly work and to repeated and intensified attempts by enemies of the ruling party who have attached themselves to it under false pretenses, to deepen the divisions and use them for purposes of counter-revolution.

And what this is saying, is that if rival parties like the SRs or the Mensheviks, or God forbid, something more sinister like the Whites caught wind of a dissident faction inside the Communist Party, they might tend to support and encourage that faction not to improve the policies of the Communist Party, but to destroy the party entirely. And since, as I said, it was taken as axiomatic that the Communist Party was synonymous with the revolution, the destruction of the party equaled the destruction of the revolution.

To prevent this kind of opportunistic exploitation and to ensure the permanent unity of the Communist Party, this resolution concluded:

The Congress orders the immediate disillusion, without exception, of all groups that have been formed on the basis of some platform or other, and instructs all organizations to be very strict in ensuring that no manifestations of factionalism of any sort be tolerated. Failure to comply with this resolution of the Congress is to entail unconditional and immediate expulsion from the party.

So this is what we now refer to as the ban on factions.

The ban on factions becomes very important to the future history of Soviet Russia, because there was a secret clause tacked on that laid out how accusations of factionalism would be handled. What activities, conversations, or statements, constituted outlawed factionalism — or more importantly, who decided what constituted outlawed factionalism. This clause read, “In order to ensure strict discipline within the party, and in all Soviet work, and to achieve maximum unity while eliminating all factionalism, the Congress gives the Central Committee full powers to apply all measures of party punishment, up to and including expulsion from the party in cases of violation of discipline or of a revival of toleration of factionalism. And where members of the Central Committee are involved, to go so far as to reduce them to candidate members, and even, as an extreme measure to expel them from the party.”

This becomes the lasting legacy of the resolution on party unity and the ban on factions. It awarded near limitless power to the members of the Central Committee of the Party to decide what counted as heretical factionalism, and who could be expelled from the Party accordingly. And since the Central Committee proper was already taking direction from the much smaller Politburo, composed of just a handful of leaders, from here on out, just three to four people could now dictate who was in and who was out of the party. Who would be promoted and who would be expelled. And if you didn’t like it, or you want it to challenge the decisions of this very small group of leaders, well guess what? You could be accused of factionalism and breaking party unity and immediately expelled with extreme prejudice.

So what is created here in March of 1921 was the mechanism Stalin would use to build his dictatorship, as he was the first to truly understand and skillfully exploit how much power lay in the new mandate to enforce party unity.

If the ban on factions was a time bomb that would not actually go off for several years, the other momentous change that comes out of the 10th Party Congress exploded right then and there. Lenin had taken in everything that we’ve talked about over the past several episodes — the collapse of the Russian economy, the spread of peasant insurrections, and now the Kronstadt rebellion — and he announced that the Communist Party would abandon the policies of war communism that had prevailed since 1918. On the second to last day of the Congress, Lenin unveiled a new economic policy that would be creatively dubbed… the new economic policy.

There were three big issues this new economic policy was designed to address.

First, there was the immediate problem of these peasant insurrections. Nikolai Bukharin had recently returned from the Tambov region and reported to his comrades in the Politburo that it was impossible, impossible, to continue with the forced grain requisitions. The only way to permanently ensure peaceful coexistence with the peasantry was to give up the hated requisitions by the armed food detachments.

This went right alongside the second issue, the total collapse of Russian agricultural production. All that forced requisitioning of surpluses had accomplished was guaranteeing that there would be no surpluses. Famine conditions loomed in the spring of 1921, and the Party had to do whatever it took to immediately boost production.

Third was a more long-term issue: the need to rebuild the Russian economy as a whole, in order to achieve the material conditions necessary to make the transition to communism possible. Lenin’s solution would have been heretical — and probably been punishable by arrest and execution right up until the moment he introduced the idea on March 15th, 1920 — bring back markets.

Now Lenin did not introduce the new economic policy, or as we call it the NEP — as one big coherent package at the 10th Party Congress. It would instead be unveiled over many months by a series of decrees affecting different parts of the economy. But taken in total, the NEP converted Soviet Russia into a mixed economy that combined state ownership and management of large scale industry banking, mining, transportation and foreign trade, with small scale private enterprises, entrepreneurship, and above all the right to profit.

The first major pillar of the NEP introduced here in March 1921 was, obviously, the abandonment of forced grain requisitions and the introduction of a regular tax, a tax that would be calculated as a percentage of the total harvest. The key point is that once the tax was satisfied, the peasants would be allowed to do whatever they wanted with the leftovers They could truck, barter, sell, or trade to their heart’s content and keep the proceeds. The object was to re-incentivize the peasants, to grow as much food as possible by offering them immediate material rewards for their efforts.

Now, this is quite an about face for the Communist Party — I mean encouraging private enterprise and private profit was anathema to Bolshevik ideology. Most party members had in fact been raised to believe that anything resembling private enterprise commercial markets and individual profit was, by definition, counter-revolutionary. Many of them had joined the party because they shared an inbred hostility to private enterprise, commercial markets, and individual profit. If the socialist revolution meant anything, it meant the overthrow of capitalist exploitation and the establishment of a society built on egalitarian solidarity. To just up and abandon that was not going to be an easy pill for them to swallow. But beyond that, many Communists had long defended war communism not just on economic grounds, but political grounds. They believed that allowing private enterprise meant enriching and empowering those who were class enemies of the revolution — industrialists merchants, and above all, the Kulaks, those prosperous peasants who would turn their economic prosperity into political power and no doubt use that political power to overthrow the revolution. These were not inconsiderable objections, and Lenin knew these objections well, because he had made these arguments himself. But reality was reality, and they had to face reality together. The peasants were in revolt, and there was no food to be had.

So later in the year, Lenin delivered a report to the Second All-Russian Congress of political education departments concerning the new economic policy — basically, how the party needed to think about it and explain it. He did not mince words, and right near the very top is a section labeled Our Mistake, which reads:

At the beginning of 1918 we expected a period in which peaceful construction would be possible. When the Brest peace was signed, it seemed that danger had subsided for a time and that it would be possible to start peaceful construction. But we were mistaken, because in 1918, a real military danger overtook us in the shape of the Czechoslovak mutiny and the operate of civil war, which dragged on until 1920. Partly owing to the war problems that overwhelmed us and partly owing to the desperate position in which the Republic found itself when the imperialist war ended — owing to these circumstances and a number of others, we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution. We thought that under the surplus food appropriation system the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution.

Now, though, Lenin admitted this had been a mistake, he reiterated that the turn to markets would be a temporary expedient, and in fact, the section after our mistake is called A Strategic Retreat.

In substance [he said] our New Economic Policy signifies that, having sustained severe defeat on this point, we have started a strategical retreat. We said in effect: “Before we are completely routed, let us retreat and reorganize everything, but on a firmer basis.”

Lenin defended the policy against more ideological doctrinaire members of the party by saying:

if Communists deliberately examine the question of the New Economic Policy there cannot be the slightest doubt in their minds that we have sustained a very severe defeat on the economic front. […] In attempting to go over straight to communism […] we sustained a more serious defeat on the economic front than any defeat inflicted on us by Kolchak, Denikin or Pilsudski. This defeat was much more serious, significant and dangerous.

What Lenin is saying is that if you are defeated in a battle, you retreat and regroup if you plan on ultimately winning the war. Other senior leaders echoed the sentiment of the NEP as a necessary retreat. They quite simply, had they tried to stand their ground, they would have been defeated in the spring of 1921. Bukharin told the Comintern in July 1921, “We are making economic concessions in order to avoid political ones.”

Zinoviev said, “The NEP is only a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat, a clearing of the land for a new and decisive attack of labor against the front of international capitalism.”

But all that said Lenin himself made it clear that this was not going to be a period measured by months. The party had to commit to the NEP quote “seriously, and for a long time. We must definitely get this into our heads and remember it well, because rumors are spreading that this is a policy only in quotes — in other words, a form of political trickery that is only being carried out for the moment. This is not true.” For Lenin, this was not about simply catching their breath and going back on the offensive. This was going to be a long-term retrenchment in order to fight a very long war.

Lenin’s belief that the NEP had to be a long-term project rather than a short-term feint owed to the third big issue it was meant to address. Because aside from the immediate need to end the peasant rebellions and boost food production, there was this long-term need to rebuild the Russian economy. One of the reasons they had rushed into war communism in the first place was the assumption that the international socialist revolution was right around the corner; that the technological material and economic assistance Russia would need to transition from its semi-medieval state into full communism would be provided by their comrades who were surely about to win control of the great industrial economies or the west like France, Germany, and the UK. Russia itself would not need a prolonged period of internal capitalist growth and centralization and accumulation on the long path of historical materialism because everything they needed could be drawn from external sources. When the international socialist revolution failed to materialize, the Russians realized they had to fend for themselves, growing, centralizing and accumulating the material basis of communism slowly from within, not immediately from without. And though it would have been heresy to say all of this just a few months earlier, this did mean allowing markets and private enterprise to grow the Russian economy.

The impact of this economic liberalization was visible right away. After years of deprivation, suddenly retail commerce was back. But there is a point here we can’t miss: the NEP does not so much reintroduce markets into a place where they had ceased to exist as it did permit the black market economy, which had been existing in the shadows this whole time, to emerge into the full light of day. And emerge it did. In the towns and cities across Russia, private businesses came back — not just retail shops, but cafes and restaurants, nightclubs and casinos. Encouraged with the prospect of profit, people started up local cottage industries to manufacture things that people wanted and needed. The old bag men — the small-time traders who had been outlawed back in 1918 — now traveled the railroads of Russia, carrying manufactured commodities from city to country, and agricultural commodities from country to city. Wheeling dealing, buying, and selling exploded.

Emma Goldman said, “Shops and stores sprang up overnight, mysteriously stacked with delicacies Russia had not seen for years. Large quantities of butter, cheese, and meat were displayed for sale. Pastry, rare fruit, and sweets of every variety were to be purchased. Men, women, and children with pinched faces and hungry eyes stood about gazing into the windows and discussing the great miracle. What was but yesterday considered a heinous offense was now flaunted before them in an open and legal manner.”

Some flaunted it more than others, and the most infamous new class to emerge from this period are known to history as the NEPmen — that is, N-E-Pmen. The NEPmen were a loose category of anyone who took advantage of the sudden liberalizations and economic control and the arrival of profit opportunities, whether traders, merchants, small-time manufacturers, entrepreneurs, or business owners. And the NEPmen didn’t just buy and sell wheat and plows. They would often come bearing liquor, tobacco, and drugs like opium, heroin, and cocaine. Some of them made enormous fortunes in a very short amount of time. They bought fancy cars and clothes. They flaunted their wealth in restaurants and theaters and shops. They represented a very conspicuous consumption that Russia had not seen in years. And as all of this is happening in 1921 and 1922 and 1923, the NEPmen are kind of Russia’s contribution to the post-World War I scene of the roaring twenties — though, in Russia’s case, this was not happening at a time of general prosperity. Scarcity and poverty still reigned, which made the NEPmen a kind of of despised group for profiting off of that scarcity and poverty. The handful who made huge fortunes became hated symbols of greedy exploitation, and it should come as no surprise that a lot of that hatred comes with a heavy dose of antisemitism whenever someone with a Jewish surname was identified.

So to tie together the two momentous things that came out of the 10th Party Congress, we can see the economic component working in tandem with the political component. That is, the loosening of economic controls is going to be matched by a nearly equal tightening of political controls. The enrichment or the peasant kulaks or the NEPmen are businessmen leasing government owned factories for private profit would not be allowed to lead to their political empowerment. NEPmen, for example, were heavily taxed and inspected and scrutinized and interrogated all the time to ensure that they kept their ambitions strictly economic. At the same time, the Communists would not allow rival political parties to gain advantages from the newly prosperous parts of society. So the spring of 1921 marks the end of whatever lingering toleration of rival political parties like the SRs and Mensheviks had been tacitly enjoying over the past several years.

Mensheviks and SRs were accused of suborning and leading the peasant rebellions and the Kronstadt Rebellion, and they would be the ones most likely to try to organize the newly prosperous elements of Russian society against the Communist Party. So, the new modes of economic liberalization were matched by new modes of political repression, and the one party Soviet state truly and permanently entrenched itself. And, as we just discussed, with the ban on factions inside the Communist Party, that meant that one party rule was about to become one committee rule, which was about to become one man rule.

Nowhere was the Communist willingness to mix economic concessions with political repression more acutely felt than in the insurrectionary Tambov region, the region whose insurrection probably convinced the Communists to make their economic concessions in the first place. At its peak, over the winter of 1920-1921, there were upwards of 50,000 rebels under arms, peasant guerrillas operating across a huge area under the general direction of the SR leader Alexander Antonov. But after the 10th Party Congress wrapped up its business and went home, and the Kronstadt Rebellion was well and truly crushed, Communist attention turned to the Tambov region in April 1920, whereupon, they would use brutal tactics to suppress the rebellion and break the peasants before inviting them to enjoy the fruits of the NEP.

So in April 1921, the Red Army flooded something like a hundred thousand troops into the region, and they embarked on a grand counter-insurgency campaign, clearing areas with mobile units and then holding them with infantry garrisons. The utter ruthlessness they deployed was not quite on par with the infernal columns deployed by the Jacobins in the Vendee region during the French Revolution, but it wasn’t far off. As any guerrilla army needs a sympathetic civilian population to sustain them, the Communists targeted both rebels and civilians. Red Army companies and Chekha detachments would roll into a village and pay informants to reveal who the rebels were, where they were, and who supported them, and if paying informants didn’t work, they just tortured people into giving up any usable intelligence. They would then go off and attack the guerrillas with armored cars and machine guns and artillery. They used airplanes to do reconnaissance and drop bombs, and they had no compunctions about using chlorine gas to smoke out rebels, hiding in forests. Against the civilians, they would take hostages and threatened to kill them if the rebels did not surrender, which was not an idle threat. If the rebels didn’t surrender, the hostages were executed. This also applied to physical property like houses and barns, workshops and sometimes entire villages to punish the rebels and the locals who supported them. The Communists also built concentration camps and herded the entire population of villages inside of them, declaring those caught outside the camps fair game to be killed. Sometimes entire villages could be punished as a group and forcibly deported to new settlements way up in the Arctic Circle.

Not that it was clear to the rebels that surrendering was even worth it. At one point, the Communists declared a general amnesty, and when 6,000 or so took them up on the offer, nearly all of them were taken into custody and shot. All of this unfolded through April, May and June 1921, with about 15,000 people being shot — both rebels and civilians — and another hundred thousand imprisoned or deported. The result of all this was the total and brutal repression of the Tambov Rebellion by the summer of 1921. Alexander Antonov himself slipped into hiding and continued to lead a small time guerrilla group until the summer of 1922, when the Chekha finally tracked him down and killed him in a firefight.

The residents of the Tambov region were not coaxed from their rebellion by the promises of the NEP, the details of which were barely known to them. They were instead beaten into submission by the kind of brute force the Communist Party continued to be all too willing to use against their own people to ensure their political supremacy. Because after all, they represented the revolution, and any threat to them was not just about securing their own personal power, but the victory of the revolution. This allowed them to justify a lot.

And unfortunately, the worst was not actually over yet, as the NEP came too late to stave off a looming famine that would spread throughout Russia in 1921 and 1922. But we are going to set that aside and come back to it, because next week we are going to talk about how Soviet Russia tightened its political hold not on their own people, but on the peripheral nationalities of the former Russian empire. Here too there would be conflicts both inside and outside the Communist Party about how to proceed as they forged the building blocks of what they would call the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or as it is better known in the English speaking world, the Soviet Union.

 

 

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Episode 10.93: the Kronstadt Rebellion

When the third anniversary of the October Revolution rolled around in November 1920, the Communist regime was simultaneously — and paradoxically — more secure and more insecure than it had ever been. The Red Army had pushed back all the various military threats, so after years of operating under the emergency conditions of wartime, Lenin’s government found itself entering, for the first time, a period of external peace. But as we discussed last week, just as those emergency conditions of wartime evaporated, the justification for the harsh and deeply unpopular policies of war communism evaporated with them. The Communists now faced a new and equally dangerous task: justifying themselves to the people of Russia without being able to point to some outside threat as being even worse. They would now sink or swim on the merit of their own program. But discontentment, disenchantment, and disillusionment with the Communists was bursting forth all across Russia. Workers in the cities, peasants in the countryside, nationalities in the former peripheral parts of the Russian empire, all of them boiled with anger, heated by their own specific list of grievances, and all of them threatened the Communist hold on power.

Then in March, 1921, the Communists faced an unexpected threat from one of their most reliable allies: the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Base.

Now as you will recall from the big run of episodes on the revolutions of 1917, the Kronstadt sailors played a major role in all those events. Heavily influenced by the tenants of anarchism and Bolshevism, they were ever eager to use violent means to push the revolution towards radical ends. And as much as anyone, the sailors truly believed the slogan “all power to the Soviets,” a slogan that had driven the conflicts of 1917 all the way to the climax in October. Along with the machine gunners of the Vyborg district, the Kronstadt sailors were the shock troops of the Bolsheviks. Trotsky called them the pride and glory of the revolution. And for the Kronstadt sailors, the revolution meant the overthrow of all forms of authoritarian, dictatorial, and centralized control. They rooted their revolution in the self-organized Soviets of Workers and Peasants’ Deputies. Their own soviet, which they formed after the February Revolution, turned the island base of Kronstadt into a virtually autonomous self-governing island, resistant to all forms of outside authority. Given their deeply held revolutionary principles, there was never any doubt the sailors would support the Communists against the Whites during the civil war, and when the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet were relocated to Kronstadt after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Communists could count on the fleet resting in extremely reliable hands.

But that said. For the Kronstadt sailors, the Bolshevik declarations of late 1917 and early 1918 — all power to the soviets, worker control of the factories, land to the peasants — were taken both seriously and literally. So they were among those who bore the policy shifts of 1918, 1919, and 1920 to meet the crisis of the Civil War with gritted teeth. They endured the re-professionalization of the military, the return of traditional military discipline, the consolidation of power by the Communist Party and the Communist Party alone, the political commissars appointed by the central government to fan out into all segments of Russian society and call the shots. None of this is what the Kronstadt sailors had anticipated in 1917.

But, there were certainly no major mutinies or rebellions during the civil war, and the sailors fought courageously on the front lines, especially during the crisis year of 1919. So when Petrograd held celebrations on the third anniversary of the revolution in November 1920, the Communist authorities featured the Kronstadt sailors front and center. They were still lauded as the pride and glory of the revolution.

But under the surface all was not well. Most of what had gone on since the heroic days of 1917 contradicted the sailors beliefs about what they were meant to be fighting for. Conflicts between the sailors and the communist commissars grew throughout 1920. For the population around Petrograd — that, is the civilian population, the army garrisons, the Kronstadt sailors — the civil wars were effectively over by the end of 1919, when they successfully pushed back that northwestern White Army that we talked about in episode 10.89. So in their immediate lived experience, the wartime emergency was little in evidence throughout 1920, even as the Polish-Soviet War heated up. So the question looming over the city and over the Kronstadt Naval base is: when are we going to let up on all these authoritarian policies that had only been justified by the wartime emergency?

Now, because the war was pretty much wound down in the northwest by the winter of 1919-1920, the authorities started giving the sailors permission to go unextended furloughs home, to return to their home towns and villages. A large proportion of the Kronstadt sailors were drawn from the Ukrainian peasantry, and the furloughs of 1920 afforded them the opportunity, for the first time, to see the effects of three years of war and revolution. It was the first time they were able to take the temperature of their friends and relatives about the Communist Party and what they were doing. And what they found shocked them. Disruptions to communications combined with outright censorship and propaganda by the government had kept the reality of the economic situation hidden from the sailors on their isolated islands. They discovered the peasants and workers of Russia, their friends and family, held the Communist Party in unconcealed contempt. The principal leader of the Kronstadt Rebellion, a guy called Stepan Petrichenko, who we’ll talk about more here in a second said, “For years the happenings at home while we were at the front or at sea were concealed by the Bolshevik censorship. When we returned home, our parents asked us why we fought for the oppressors. That set us thinking.”

But what took them from thinking to doing were events closer at hand. The conditions in Petrograd over the winter of 1920-1921 were absolutely miserable, as bad, probably, as the infamous winter of 1916-1917 that had set the whole revolution in motion in the first place — although with the critical caveat that the city was by now far less populated than it had been in 1917, and was no longer the political capital of Russia. But in material terms, it reads exactly like what was going on in 1916 and 1917. Food. fuel, and supply shortages became acute, as dwindling supplies could not reach the cities due to heavy snows and the broken train system that we discussed last week. On January 22nd, 1921, the Petrograd officials cut the already meager bread ration by one third for all inhabitants of the city, and by February, two thirds of the factories in Petrograd closed down due to a lack of fuel, leaving people further unemployed and plunging desperately into the abyss of fatal poverty. The working classes were hungry, freezing, and increasingly bitter.

What really infuriated people is that they weren’t allowed to take matters into their own hands. Communist policy banned trade as a feature of capitalist exploitation, so when the starving and freezing people with Petrograd fanned out from the city to scrounge for food and fuel, selling or trading, whatever they could to get it, they had to dodge a network of armed checkpoints set up to stop quote unquote speculators from carrying manufactured goods or other valuables out of the city, or bringing food into it. The upshot of all this being that while the system of rational communist distribution had completely failed, people were being punished for trying to make up the shortfalls on their own initiative. And we’re not talking about frivolous and unnecessary consumer goods here. We’re talking about enough food so your family doesn’t starve, and enough wood or coal so they don’t freeze. It was, frankly, an insanely diabolical situation that the Communist leadership themselves were right in the middle of recognizing as an insanely diabolical situation that needed to change.

But as these things often go, it took direct action to get the government to recognize the insanely diabolical system that needed to change really needed to change. Because it wasn’t just bad for the people, it was bad for the people in charge. In the last week of February 1921, protests, demonstrations, and strikes erupted throughout Petrograd. Workers walked off the job and out into the streets, demanding an end to the policies of war communism. Local party officials, led by Zinoviev, initially brought down the stick. They banned public gatherings, imposed a curfew, closed factories with high concentrations of vocal protestors, and when that didn’t quell the disturbances, they declared martial law and brought in dependable Red Army companies to patrol the streets and impose order. Thousands. Were arrested, including upwards of 500 union leaders, and every known Menshevik, SR, and anarchist they could find, all of whom were trying to exploit the unrest to their own advantage.

When word of all this reached the Kronstadt sailors, they became incensed on behalf of the Petrograd workers. They had always stood together in solidarity, and on February 26, crews of the two most radicalized ships in the Baltic Fleet, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, voted to send investigators into the city and report back on conditions. As with the furloughs back to their home villages, what they found infuriated them. The factories that were open were working under the watchful eye of armed guards. Military patrols roamed the streets to prevent any kind of further agitation. The jails were bursting with prisoners. Petrichenko said of the industrial districts of Petrograd, “One might’ve thought that these were not factories, but the forced labor prisons of tsarist times.”

On February 28th, the investigators reported back to Kronstadt, and their own long simmering anger finally boiled over. The way the Communist leadership so casually exploited the peasants, mistreated the workers, abused rank and file sailors and soldiers, the way they had built a one-party dictatorship that saw Communist Party officials living fat, warm, and happy while everyone else starved and froze. All of this had been justified, ever so barely justified, by the various wars. But those wars were now all in the past. Unless a major change in course was coming, it was impossible not to conclude that the senior leadership of the Communist Party was betraying the revolution for their own self-interest.

The Kronstadt sailors resolve to resume their historical position as defenders of the Revolution and force the Communists into changing course. On the night of February 28th, the committee of sailors drafted a 15 point list of demands, the first of which leveled a broadside at the present regime’s increasingly laughable claim that they represented the people of Russia. It said,

In view of the fact that the present Soviet do not express the will of the workers and peasants, we want to immediately hold new elections by secret ballot, with the election campaign to have full freedom of agitation among the workers and peasants.

The rest of the list is notable for its focus on broad political, legal, and economic reforms: the release of political prisoners from those various other socialist parties, eliminating the system of political commissars, abolishing armed detachments composed exclusively of Communist Party members; they demanded freedom of trade and exchange both for peasants and for workers; and finally, the right of the peasants to freely dispose of their land and the produce of their land.

So the Kronstadt Rebellion was not merely a mutiny of sailors with parochial demands — we want better pay and better rations — they were casting themselves right from the start as the defenders of the people of Russia against the unjust authoritarian conduct of the present Communist regime.

The name that headed the list of signatories to these demands was Stepan Petrichenko, the most charismatic and respected of all the leaders in Kronstadt. Born into a peasant family in Ukraine, Petrichenko only received two years of formal schooling before departing to go out and make his way in the world. He worked as a plumber before joining the Russia Navy in 1912, he served all through World War I without getting blown up, and when the February Revolution hit, he was based on a small Estonian island the Russians had booted the native inhabitants off of and turned into a little navel fortress. Petrichenko himself was influenced by anarchist ideas, and he supported more radical revolutionary ends, and he absolutely welcomed the arrival of the October Revolution. When it did, he and his comrades formed a Soviet Republic of Soldiers and Fortress Builders to take over the little navel fortress they were running. Despite his lack of formal education, Petrichenko was clearly a bright guy who exuded charismatic authority, and so despite being only 25 years old, he was elected chairman of the council.

This island, however, was abandoned by Russia after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Petrichenko was reassigned to Kronstadt, serving on one of those infamously radical ships, the Petropavlovsk, as a senior clerk. He was a leader in calling for the investigation of conditions in Petrograd, and then help draft and sign the 15 point demands that were about to stand as their revolutionary program.

Over the first few days of March, the sailors in Kronstadt held a series of mass meetings at the main public square on the island, drawing about 15 to 20,000 people each. The Petrograd Communist Party sent out representatives to talk the sailors down, but their demeanor read far more as threatening and imperious than understanding and conciliatory. During one of these meetings on March 2nd, 1920, somebody — and we do not know who, and we do not know why — shouted out a warning that the Communists had ordered a large company of armed soldiers to break up the assembly. Now, this was not implausible, and it sent the sailors into a frenzy of activity. They arrested the Communist Party representatives and then promptly elected a provisional revolutionary committee to serve as the Island’s political and military authority. Then, they prepared to defend themselves. Stepan Petrichenko was among the first five elected to the provisional revolutionary committee, and he was then elevated to chairman.

Now, the shouted warning that the Communists were about to attack turned out to be the trigger that moved events from mere protest to armed rebellion. And the funny thing is, it wasn’t true. There was no imminent attack. Now we don’t know if it was a misunderstanding or intentionally made up, and if it was made up, whether it was by a pro-revolt agitator hoping to drive everyone into rebellion, or an anti-revolt agitator, hoping to bring the whole thing crashing down on its own head. All we do know is that it happened. Somebody shouted that the Communists were about to crack down, and whatever their ultimate intentions, the result is that it kick-started the Kronstadt Rebellion.

Now, the other funny thing about all this is that as the sailors are launching their rebellion, the Communists are actually diffusing the situation in Petrograd. Faced with the embarrassing situation of a bunch of workers revolting against the workers’ government — and not actually wanting to preside over there on Bloody Sunday — Zinoviev and the other leaders of the Petrograd Communists announced a number of popular concessions, most especially increased food rations, plus a shuttering of that network of checkpoints around the city, giving permission to the population to go forth and buy, sell, truck, barter, and trade to their heart’s content in the name of securing what they needed to survive. These carrots, plus the ever-present stick of armed soldiers, convinced the workers to abandon their strikes and protests, and so by March 2nd, 1921 — the day that the sailors are going into revolt — the workers of Petrograd were going back to their factories.

But the revolt was now on. On March the third, the now rebels in Kronstadt started publishing a newspaper which would run daily for the length of their rebellion. The first issue concluded an appeal first and foremost to the other residents of the island, which was not an inconsiderable number of people. In total, there were about 25,000 sailors and soldiers, surrounded by about 50,000 civilians serving the various military installations. The editorial said:

Our country is enduring a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, and economic ruin have held us in an iron vise these three years already. The Communist Party, which rules the country, has become separated from the masses and shown itself unable to lead her from her state of general ruin. It has not faced the reality of the disturbances which in recent times have occurred in Petrograd and Moscow.

This unrest shows clearly enough that the party has lost the faith of the working masses. Neither has it recognized the demands presented by the workers. It considers them plots of the counter-revolution. It is deeply mistaken.

This unrest, these demands are the voice of the people in its entirety, of all laborers. All workers, sailors, and soldiers see clearly at the present moment that only through common effort, by the common will of the laborers, is it possible to give the country bread, wood, and coal, to dress the barefoot and naked, and to lead the Republic out of this dead end.

They hoped that this message, which pretty accurately described the situation in early 1921, would hit upon the momentum already building in Petrograd for a general revolt. They did not realize that that moment was already fading. But the anarchist Emma Goldman attended a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet on March the fourth, and she reported that some courageous workers and sailors attempted to sway the Soviet, which had been completely co-opted by the Communist Party, in their favor.

“A working man from the Petrograd Arsenal demanded to be heard,” Goldman later wrote. “… he fearlessly declared that the workers had been driven to strike because of the Government’s indifference to their complaints. The Kronstadt sailors, far from being counter-revolutionists were devoted to the Revolution,” that “… we, the workers and sailors protected you and helped you to power. Now you denounce us and are ready to attack us with arms. Remember, you are playing with fire.”

She went onto report:

Then a sailor spoke. He referred to the glorious revolutionary past of Kronstadt, appealed to the Communists not to engage in fratricide, and read the Kronstadt resolution to prove the peaceful attitude to the sailors. But the voice of these sons of the people fell on deaf ears. The Petrograd Soviet, its passions roused by Bolshevik demagoguery, passed the Zinoviev resolution ordering Kronstadt to surrender on pain of extermination.

The next day, Trotsky rolled into town and made good on this resolution to order Kronstadt, to surrender on pain of extermination. He issued a blunt ultimatum, which read:

The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government has decreed that Kronstadt and the rebellious ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. Therefore, I command all those who have raised their hands against the Socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once. The obdurate will be disarmed and turned over to the Soviet authorities. The arrested Commissars and other representatives of the government must be liberated at once. Only those who surrender unconditionally may count on the mercy of the Soviet Republic.

At the same time, I am issuing orders to prepare to quell the mutiny and subdue the mutineers by force of arms. Responsibility for the harm that may be suffered by the peaceful population will fall entirely on the heads of the counterrevolutionary mutineers.

This warning is final.

So there was no talk of concessions, or compromise, or reaching a mutually satisfactory resolution. Trotsky’s message was simple: submit or be destroyed.

Kronstadt did not respond to this ultimatum, but instead continued to attack the Communist leadership for using their power to enrich themselves at the people’s expense. They said that Zinoviev and Trotsky, “sit in their soft arm chairs in the lighted rooms of tsarist palaces and consider how best to spill the blood of the insurgents.” On March the sixth, a sailor who was still a member of the Communist Party wrote a short statement for the Kronstadt paper that appealed to his fellow Communists to disown their leadership.

“Comrade, rank and file Communists,” he said, “look about, and you will see that we have entered a terrible swamp led by a little bunch of Communist bureaucrats. Under a Communist mask, they have built warm nests for themselves in our Republic. I, as a Communist, call on you to drive from us those false Communists who incite us to fratricide. We rank and file Communists, in no way guilty, suffer the rebukes of our comrade non-party workers and peasants because of them. I look with horror on the situation which has been created.”

The appeal to disown the party resonated, and hundreds of card-carrying Communists in the Baltic Fleet announced their resignations from the Party. Those Communists who refuse to do so, or who did not flee the island, were arrested and held prisoner, although no harm ever came to them. They were all alive and well at the end of the rebellion. This was in contrast to Kronstadt rebels or sympathizers who fell into the hand to the Chekha, who were generally summarily executed.

The sudden revolt of the Kronstadt sailors was as embarrassing to the Communist Party as the workers’ protests, perhaps even more so. The sailors were after all the pride and glory of the Revolution. Aware that it would be kind of absurd to try to paint the sailors as reactionary.

Counter-revolutionaries the leaders of the Communist Party decided to frame the revolt as they had framed the civil war that their opponents were the puppets of foreign enemies in this. There dear comrades, the Kronstadt Naval base we’re being led treacherously astray by a cabal of anticommunist Russian agents who were based in Paris and backed by the Western capitalist who were still looking for any way to overthrow the socialist revolution.

And there was some circumstantial evidence to support this. Specifically, a few stories had been published in the foreign press about a revolting Kronstadt, in mid February back when no revolt had yet. This led Lenin and Trotsky who read all the foreign papers to conclude that Western reporters had picked up on chatter about plans for the revolt and erroneously published them as if they had already taken place.

So when, oh so coincidentally, a revolt and Kronstadt did break out just a few weeks later, it was easy for the senior communist leadership to connect the dots and conclude the rebellion must’ve been cooked up in Paris, not on the decks of the Baltic. But noted anarchist historian. Paul average makes the very convincing case in his book on the Kronstadt rebellion while there was a group of anticommunist Russian emigres organizing in Paris and who had honed in on Kronstadt as a viable beachhead for making a play back into Russia, there was no actual contact between them and the sailors prior to the explosive event of March 1920.

Now they of course cheered on the rebellion, and eagerly made contact with the rebels after it got going, but all evidence suggests that the Kronstadt Rebellion was a genuinely spontaneous and self-directed affair driven by events around Petrograd, not cooked up in the cafes of Paris. And as for the potential machinations of the Allied government, we know for a fact that the British had long since abandoned regime change in Russia as a worthwhile foreign policy objective, and were in fact literally days away from signing a trade pact with Soviet Russia that will normalize economic relations between the two countries — a fact that Lenin and his colleagues were well aware of, even as they portrayed this latest domestic threat as the work of treacherous capitalist imperialists.

But still, Lenin and his colleagues could not afford to recognize the sailors as being justly motivated by their own revolutionary principles. Nor could they make a respected revolutionary the face of the rebellion. Stepan Petrichenko was not somebody they wanted to wage a war against. So instead their propaganda fixated on General Alexander Kozlovsky, a former tsarist officer who had subsequently joined the Red Army and presently commanded Kronstadt’s artillery batteries.

Kozlovsky sided with the rebels and oversaw the technical details of defending the island, but the Communists portrayed him as a White general in the mold of Denikin and Kolchak, manipulating the sailors into doing his counterrevolutionary bidding. Their initial report on what happened pointed to quote, “a group who appeared on the scene, former general Kozlovsky and three officers whose names have not yet been established. Thus the meaning of recent events was fully explained. This time two tsarist generals stood behind SRs.”

In an address to the party in Moscow, Lenin said that behind the uprising in Kronstadt, “looms the familiar figure of the White Guard generals.” This became a key note that they sounded again and again in the propaganda war: that the rebels and Kronstadt were led by Whites, not by Reds.

While they portrayed the nascent Kronstadt rebellion as the work of sinister counter-revolutionary forces, the Communists could not afford to simply argue their way to victory with words. Even if their brother comrades in Kronstadt were being led astray, there was a very short window to talk them down. At the moment, the waters around the base were frozen solid, preventing supplies and reinforcements from reaching the naval base by sea and keeping their powerful warships locked up in the ice. But the spring thaw was fast approaching, and if the Communists did not quell the rebellion quickly and decisively, Kronstadt might really become the anticommunist beachhead the Communist Party was portraying it as. So they concluded that, however much it might pain them, deploying overwhelming force to crush the rebels might be necessary.

It became necessary finally on March 7th. Kronstadt never did respond to Trotsky’s ultimatum even after the Communists extended their deadline for a reply by an extra 24 hours. The Kronstadt rebels were confident they would be able to hold out long enough for revolutionary fire to catch across Russia, and make the naval base itself, the least of Communist worries. But when the second 24 hours expired, the Communists spent all day on March 7th, preparing, and then on the morning of March 8th, they attacked. But they moved too quickly, and with too few soldiers. They only mustered about 20,000 in all for this first attack, and they faced off against a light number of rebels who were defending a heavily armed fortress, to say nothing of the fact that the Red Army soldiers would have to cross a miles wide plane of ice that afforded them no cover whatsoever from bullets or artillery. Then, if and when they did come within shooting distance of the fortress, many of the Red Army soldiers hesitated to fire on people who were in every way just like them, just regular rank and file soldiers and sailors devoted to the revolution.

So the attack on March the eighth was a total failure, leaving hundreds of casualties and a feeling Kronstadt that this was all going to work out, that history was on their side. The same day they routed this first attack, the Kronstadt newspaper published an editorial called What We Are Fighting For, which very helpfully offers an accounting of… what they were fighting for.

“Carrying out the October Revolution,” it read, “the working class hoped to achieve its emancipation. The result, however, was the creation of a still greater enslavement to the human personality. The Communists who brought to the laborers instead of freedom, the fear every minute of falling into the torture chamber of the Chekha. With their horrors, they have many times exceeded the gendarme government to the tsarist regime. The Communist authorities have replaced the hammer and sickle, glorious arms of the laboring state, in fact with bayonets and prison bars. It has become evermore sharply visible, and now is completely apparent, that the Russian Communist Party is not a defender of the laborers. Having achieved power, it fears only to lose it, and for this end all means are allowable: slander, violence, fraud, murder, and revenge on the families of the rebels.”

So this is clearly a revolt driven by disillusionment with the Communist regime. But we do need to pay attention to some subtleties in all of this, because we have seen in the various peasant revolts we’ve talked about, including the ones still ongoing in the Tambov region, the common rallying cry “Soviets without Communists.” this is a slogan that is sometimes taken to be the Kronstadt program, but it’s really not. Their slogan, which they used as a masthead for their newspaper, was “all power to the Soviets, but not the Parties.” They absolutely wanted the establishment of a true soviet republic representing the interests of the workers and peasants who would elect from amongst themselves the delegates who would then rule on their behalf. But their anger with the Communist Party tended to extend to all parties. They wanted to get rid of the influence of political parties entirely. They believed that the problem with the present order was that the Communist Party had co-opted the soviets, and we’re now running it for the benefit of their party, not for the benefit of the people. And it was really that kind of party interest above local worker and peasant interest that really rankled them. And in an editorial, they wrote, “we stand for power to the Soviet, but not the parties. For the freely elected representation of the toilers, the Soviets that have been captured and manipulated by the Communist Party have always been deaf to all our demands and needs. The only reply we have ever received has been shooting.”

So the fact is, the Kronstadt sailors planned to stay aloof from all party influences. They rejected all party apparatuses. And despite many accusations that they were being run by the SRs or the anarchists, the truth is they rejected their party power too, especially as the Kronstadt rebels saw the SRs as fronts for bourgeois democracy, which they also happened to despise. So the ousted SR leader, Victor Chernov, still claiming to be the legitimate chairman of the Constituent Assembly, sent a message to Kronstadt after the rebellion got going. He said:

The Chairman of the Constituent Assembly Victor Chernov sends his fraternal greetings to the heroic comrades-sailors, Red Army men and workers, who for the third time since 1905 are throwing off the yoke of tyranny. He offers to aid with men and to provision Kronstadt through the Russian cooperatives abroad. Inform us what and how much is needed. I am prepared to come in person to give my energies and authority to the service of the people’s revolution. I have faith in the final victory of the laboring masses. Hail to the first to raise the banner of the people’s liberation. Down with despotism from the left and the right!

But the Kronstadt rebels politely declined this offer. They refused all attempts by the SRs to turn the Kronstadt Rebellion into a rebellion in favor of the SR Party program — specifically the SRs trying to get them to demand for the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly. This turns out to be a huge difference between the Kronstadt Rebellion and the rebellions we talked about last week in the Tambov region. Their demands included first and foremost the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly, which the peasant SRs still wanted to revive, and which the sailors in Kronstadt still took pride in having helped disband in 1918.

But the sailors in Kronstadt did hope their revolution would catch on nationwide and be joined by everyone, workers and peasants and sailors and soldiers and toilers everywhere, just not these damned Party men. “Here in Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the third revolution,” they wrote in What We Are Fighting For, “which is breaking the last fetters from the laboring masses. This new revolution stirs the laboring masses of both east and west, being an example of the new socialist construction, opposed to the bureaucratic Communist.” They explicitly called what they were doing the Third Revolution, and absolutely planned for March 1921 to take its place alongside February 1917 and October 1917 as a victorious revolt by the people against a cruel authoritarian elite.

But the Communists were very good at working the levers of the press and propaganda. And despite Kronstadt’s high hopes, the reality was their message was not breaking through. The Communists used their own newspapers and radio broadcasts to continue to pound the message that Kronstadt was a rebellion driven by Whites and foreigners, not genuine Russian revolutionaries. A Moscow radio broadcast which alluded to the plot picked up early in the foreign press said, “…That the mutiny by former General Kozlovsky was prepared by the spies of the Entente, like so many earlier White Guard rebellions, is visible from the report of the bourgeois French newspaper which two weeks before the mutiny printed a telegram from Helsinki.” This telegram allegedly proved the complicity of the Entente powers in the Kronstadt Rebellion.

The Communists also dropped leaflets by plane into the Kronstadt Naval Base to turn those closest to the rebels against them. It read:

To the deceived people have Kronstadt now. Do you see where the scoundrels have led you? You’ve gotten what you asked for. From behind the cover of the SRs and Mensheviks, former tsarist generals have already peered out with barred teeth. Kozlovsky, the tsarist general, and other notorious White Guards control all these Petrichenkos like puppets on a string. They are deceiving you. They have told you that you are struggling for democracy. Not even two days have passed and you see that in fact your struggle is not for democracy, but for tsarist generals. They tell you fairytales, speaking as if Petrograd stood behind you, as if Siberia and the Ukraine supported you. All this is a shameless lie. In Petrograd the last sailor turned from you when it became known that the tsarist General Kozlovsky was running things. Siberia and the Ukraine stand firmly for Soviet power. Red Petrograd laughs at the pathetic labors of a little bunch of SRs and White Guards.

This leaflet concluded ominously: “You are completely surrounded.”

On March the 10th, the Kronstadt rebels responded with an article titled, To the Soldiers Fighting on the Communist Side. It laid out the grim state of Russia in early 1921, saying:

Communist rule has reduced all of Russia to unprecedented poverty, hunger, cold, and other privations. The factories and mills are closed, the railway is on the verge of breakdown. The countryside has been fleeced to the bone. We have no bread, no cattle, no tools to work the land.

We have no clothing, no shoes, no fuel. The workers are hungry and cold. The peasants and townsfolk have lost all hope for an improvement of their lives. Day by day, they come closer to death.

The communist betrayers have reduced you to all of this. In place of the old regime, a new regime of arbitrariness, insolence, favoritism, theft, and speculation has been established, a terrible regime in which one must hold out one’s hand to the authorities for every piece of bread, for every button. A regime in which one does not belong, even to oneself, where one can not dispose of one’s labor, a regime of slavery and degradation. Soviet Russia has become an all-Russian concentration camp.

But as I said, these messages were not breaking through to the mainland. And by the second week of March, 1921 Kronstadt was not the spearpoint of a vast revolution, but an isolated outpost, increasingly doomed to be stormed and captured.

They continued to hold out however, and fended off another attack by the Red Army on March 10th and 11th with very little damage to the base. But they would not be able to hold out much longer, and no one was coming to save them. As Paul Avrich notes in his book on Kronstadt, that they may have made the same fatal error the Paris Commune had made 50 years earlier — and it was almost exactly 50 years earlier. The showdown over the National Guard cannons had happened on the morning of March 18th, 1871. Analysis of the failure of the Paris Commune, including analysis offered by Lenin, had it that the failure of the Communards to go on the offensive at the outset of their revolution, to catch their enemy flat footed and instead sit back defensively was a huge mistake. It allowed Adolphe Thiers to build up forces for an overwhelming attack that ended in Bloody Week. This was a mistake that Kronstadt now apparently repeated. Who knows how differently things would have gone had the sailors marched out into Petrograd on March the third, before the Communist authorities were really prepared to meet them? It’s a question that will never be answered because it is a scenario built for alternate history fan fiction, not historical nonfiction.

Finally, after another week’s standoff, the Communists launch their final assault on Kronstadt on March 17th. This time they prepared fully 50 to 60,000 troops to take back the island. After an intense artillery barrage, they attack from three directions: from the north, from the south and from the east. The rebels, who by now numbered just about 15,000, didn’t have much hope of withstanding anything. The two sides fought each other with heavy casualties on both sides all through March 17th, but on March 18, the Red Army forces had battled their way inside, and they controlled all the major structures on the island. By noon on March 18th, the last rebel surrendered. Which was probably a smart decision, because Trotsky had just approved a plan to use chemical weapons — specifically, dropping gas shells on the base — if the rebels continued to resist.

Aside from this heavy fighting, the last days of the Kronstadt Rebellion were marked by a mass exodus across the ice to Finland. Petrichenko and the other leaders of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee all escaped on the 17th before the naval base fell, and about 800 others followed before the end of the final assault. While the Red Army was mopping up and securing things, they could not contain a further mass exodus of something like 8,000 refugees who crossed the ice over into Finland. Those left behind had been ordered to sabotage everything they could, but when the crews found out that all their leaders had deserted, they disobeyed their final orders and instead arrested their officers and surrendered to the Communists.

It is very difficult to say what the final casualty numbers of all this were. The American consulate estimated that about 10,000 Communist troops were killed, wounded, or missing in their attempts to retake the island. On the rebel side, the most reasonable number is about 5 or 600 dead with about a thousand wounded. The Communists took about 2000 prisoners, with 13 of them singled out and accused of being the ringleaders of the rebellion, even though the real ringleaders of the rebellion, had escaped to Finland. The 13 were summarily executed a few days later. In the ensuing weeks and months, hundreds of other prisoners were summarily executed — they were simply taken out in batches and shot without any trial. The rest of the prisoners who survived were either moved to prison camps in Siberia, or thrown in other prisons where they were mistreated and died of hunger or disease. Those that made it to Finland in their thousands would be given aid by the Red Cross and become something of an international cause célèbre. Petrichenko himself remained in Finland, and even engaged in some plotting with agents representing Pyotr Wrangel to combine their efforts to overthrow the Communists once and for all, but this all came to nothing. He stayed in Finland until World War II, at which point he was repatriated to Russia, promptly arrested, and died in a labor camp two years. Stalin had many defects of character; a short memory was not one of them.

In the final analysis. The Kronstadt Rebellion was a failure in just about every way, but one. The sailors went down as eternal martyrs to the creeping authoritarianism of Communist Russia. As Leninism gave way to Stalinism, critics of the regime increasingly pointed to Kronstadt as a major fork in the revolutionary road, when the idealistic dreams of 1917 gave way to the bitter realities of the 1920s and 1930s. In terms of what they had actually fought for in March of 1921, almost nothing came of their demands. The Communists did not restore autonomy and authority of local soviets, nor did they restore freedom of speech or assembly or the press. They did not free any socialists or anarchist prisoners, and in fact, in political terms, the rebellion led the Communist Party to secure even more dictatorial power for itself. They started working not just on permanently suppressing Mensheviks and anarchists and SRs, but even opposition elements inside the Communist Party.

Then, they set about blotting out the memory of the Kronstadt Rebellion entirely, to make sure that it was memory holed into oblivion and nobody would talk about it. Not without a twisted sense of humor, they rechristened the two battleships that had been hotbeds of the rebellion, the Marat and the Paris Commune, seizing for themselves the historical legacy that the sailors of Kronstadt appeared to be the true embodiment of.

The Kronstadt rebellion did have one immediate impact on the Communist regime, though that impact can be a bit overstated. As the rebellion unfolded, the Communist Party met for its 10th Party Congress in Moscow, and it was at this Congress that Lenin announced the end of some of the most hated parts of war communism. Now, as we will discuss next week, Lenin came into the Congress with plans to do just that, and so while we can’t say that the Kronstadt Rebellion caused the change in policy, it very clearly cemented its necessity. Lenin understood that the Communist Party needed to find a new way forward, or they would be overthrown.

What they needed to secure their political position was a new economic policy….

 

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Episode 10.24: The Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class

Last time we introduced Julius Martov, and a new theory of organizing for the Russian Marxists: agitation, not propaganda, which Martov would then carry with him to St. Petersburg when his two years administrative exile in Vilna finally wrapped up in the autumn of 1895. In today’s episode, he will arrive, bearing this new strategy, and then join with other Marxists in the capital to form a new group who would agitate their way towards the revolution they all dreamed of. Now, one of Martov’s key allies in this project is going to of course be Lenin, and it is in the course of today’s episode that these two future friends turned future rivals will meet for the first time.

So what has Lenin been up to? Well, while Martov was trumpeting the success of the new program of agitation to his comrades in Vilna in May of 1895, Lenin was off on his first trip abroad, on a mission he undertook on behalf of his comrades in St. Petersburg to make contact with the now legendary old guard émigré Marxists of the Emancipation of Labor Group, our old friends Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, and Pablo Axelrod. When Lenin submitted his travel paperwork to the authorities, he claimed that this was a vacation he undertook for his health, which wasn’t totally made up. He had been very sick in April of 1895 and did actually need to recuperate, but the authorities didn’t really care whether it was a lie or not. Lenin was well-known to them, and they happily stamped his papers to get him out of the country, because maybe if they were lucky, he would just decide to never come back, which would be all right with them.

So in the last week of April, 1895, Lenin departed on what would be a four month tour through Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France, his most important object being linking up with the Emancipation of Labor Group. Now we left this group back in episode 10.17, roundabout 1890, and I wrapped up episode 10.17 by saying, and I’m quoting myself now, it’s fair to say that by the dawn of 1890, the Emancipation of Labor Group had zero influence on socialist politics at home or abroad. But much to everyone shock the forces of history turned in their favor, Plekhanov suddenly appeared to be a mad prophet who had predicted a great flood and who everyone had laughed at until the flood suddenly came. End quote.

So having spent the 1880s publishing their interpretations and translation of Marx into the void, the Vitra system had come along and made Marxism suddenly very relevant to this younger generation like Lenin and Krupskaya and Martov. Not that the Emancipation of Labor Group yet had any formal ties to any distributors or allies inside of Russia. Their work was smuggled in and passed around, but it was all very haphazard. Like, the kids who would go on holiday with their families and come home with trunks full of illegal books. These books would then be passed around hand-to-hand inside of reading and discussion circles, but there was no permanent stable distribution link. One of the reasons Lenin was undertaking his mission to find the Emancipation of Labor Group was to forge just such a permanent stable distribution link between Switzerland and Russia.

So even as late as 1895, the Emancipation of Labor Group was still just as small as they had always been. It was still just the three of them: Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod. And this is not to say they could not have built a larger organization inside the émigré community had they wanted to; they just, did not want to. The triumvirate of Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod conceived of the Emancipation of Labor Group as a close knit intellectual brain trust that must remain compact in order to maintain a ideological, coherence and purity. Coherence, and purity as defined mostly by Plekhanov. So they were happy to meet with potential supporters or followers or people who might like to spread their work, but they were never going to offer you membership in the group. And one way to think about this is that they basically conceived of themselves as something like a modern rock band, cranking out albums. If you like a band, you support the band, you go to their concerts, you buy their albums and tell your friends. But just because you like a band doesn’t mean you get to join the band. But young radicals at the time didn’t really have any concept of this. Being invited to join parties and circles and groups was a fairly normal thing. So what often came as a disappointing shock to fans who came around to Plekhanov being like, aw, man, I dig your stuff, where can I sign up? And Plekhanov would say, hey, great, buy some books, spread the word, but no, you don’t get to join the band. And then, they would leave and he would go back to writing.

Now there were pluses and minuses to this approach, but for sure the biggest plus, at least in Plekhanov’s mind, was that he never had to share song writing duties with anyone. Is at time for me to let this metaphor go? Yes, it is time for me to let this metaphor go, you get it. While they were busy not expanding their ranks in the early 1890s, Plekhanov was hard at work on what became one of his most important books: The Development of the Monist View of History, which was meant to be the definitive articulation of historical materialism for a Russian audience. Written under a pseudonym, the title, The Development of the Monist View of History, was intentionally designed to be unwieldy and boring, to hopefully slip it past the censors.

And it worked. Just as they had done with Capital, the bureaucrats and the censor’s office decided the The Development of the Monist View of History was a snooze fest and they let it be published legally in Russia. Once it started making the rounds though, it turned out to be a real hit. The Monist View became the basic textbook explanation for historical materialism, leaving readers with a clear argument why the Marxists were so focused on this growing urban proletariat as the key to the future socialist revolution. And it turned out to be a must read for all budding socialist revolutionaries.

One of those budding socialist revolutionaries was of course Lenin, and a 25-year-old Lenin arrived in Switzerland in May of 1895, moderately intimidated by the prospect of meeting the great Plekhanov, the Moses of Marxism. Plekhanov, for his part, seems to have appreciated Lenin’s appreciation of his work, at least once it became clear that Lenin did not want to, like, join the band. Lenin was instead offering his services as a representative of supporters inside Russia who could help spread the ideas of Plekhanov and the other members of the Emancipation of labor Group. And this was the perfect moment to really flood the intellectual market with Marxism, because the Witte System was in full swing by this point, which really did seem to be proving that Marx and historical materialism were dead right. So Plekhanov and Lenin worked out an arrangement in principle, and Lenin departed with a stack of letters of introduction written by Plekhanov that would open doors for young Lenin throughout Europe. And though in the future, they were almost never in the same place at the same time, Lenin and Plekhanov would spend the next 10 years or so basically on the same side. So this meeting in May of 1895 was the beginning of an effective partnership.

But Plekhanov also recognized in Lenin something that Lenin probably recognized in himself already: a potential rival for the title leader of the Russian Marxists. This concern was deepened a little bit when Lenin moved along to Zurich to stay for a week with Pavel Axelrod, and Axelrod straight up said, I think we found our leader in Russia. So Lenin and Axelrod hung out for about a week and got to know each other, they read and discussed various articles and books and ideas, and Lenin was very pleased when Axelrod commented on a collection of articles Lenin had brought with him, saying that he liked one in particular, which just so happened to be the one written by Lenin under another pen name. They also discussed the role in relationship of those revolutionaries inside Russia to those outside Russia. And they agreed that when the revolution came that the center of leadership had to be inside Russia, that the best way for émigré outfits like the Emancipation of Labor Group to help the revolution would be as Axelrod put it, to act as a fortified redoubt overlooking a great battlefield. They would be able to take in the whole picture, give strategic advice and protect the most precious valuables. Axelrod did not really agree with many of his fellow émigré s, who in their kind of arrogant and insular myopia, believed that the people inside Russia should be the foot soldiers while the émigré s should be the generals. Axelrod, thought this was kind of crazy. If nothing else, it was a supremely inefficient way to run a revolution, which is almost by its very nature a rapid fire event that will require instantaneous decision making on the ground. Lenin agreed wholeheartedly. So, agreed on this point, Lenin departed, and it would come as a bit of a shock to Axelrod to find Lenin making the opposite case just a few years later. Of course, that was after Lenin had been driven into exile himself, which I’m sure had nothing to do with his change of heart.

After his stay in Switzerland, Lenin moved on to Paris, where he met with other émigré radicals, the most important of these audiences being with the legendary Frenchman. Paul Lafargue, the veteran of the Paris commune who had fled to London in the aftermath of the Bloody Week, and who soon thereafter married Karl Marx’s daughter Laura. Sitting there with this communard and the daughter of Marx, Lenin listened to their stories with rapt attention, and the Paris Commune in particular would be a historical event he would often return to in his own writings.

Aside from this meeting, Lenin enjoyed his time in Paris as best he could, though his health did start to deteriorate. He suffered headaches and insomnia, and eventually he had to make his declaration to the Russian authorities that he was traveling abroad for his health true. With an infusion of cash from his always supportive mother, Lenin returned to Switzerland, where he recuperated at a spa before heading back to the battlefield in Russia.

Lenin returned to St. Petersburg in early September, 1895, looking forward to implementing a program he had discussed with the Emancipation of Labor Group: linking together the 20 or so currently separate Marxist reading circles in and around St. Petersburg, and then linking that linked group to the émigré s abroad. It was going to be the beginnings of the beginnings of a social democratic party.

Maybe.

It was in the service of this project that Lenin first met Martov, who returned from his exile in October of 1895 bearing the new gospel of the Vilna program, and eager to make it work in St. Petersburg. Now up until now, Lenin himself had mostly been doing polemical work against the philistine narodists, who could not see that they were the past and Marxism was the future. He had also done some propagandizing among the workers, though he didn’t really enjoy it. He was a writer, a debater, and a leader, not a school teacher. So though he did enjoy the intellectually stimulating life of a salon radical, he saw in the Vilna program a straightforward way to advance the revolutionary character of the working classes. Because in the end, the working classes were going to be expected to do their revolutionary work as a class, as a mass movement. This was not supposed to be about an elite intellectual vanguard. Lenin agreed that focusing on specific factory grievances would help show the workers living examples of the theory of the exploitation of labor outlined by Marx. Lenin also agreed that prodding the workers toward strikes by socialist agitation would give those workers necessary experience, and a fighting spirit that would serve them well in the revolution to come.

So the leaders of the various Marxist discussion groups in St. Petersburg got together and founded this thing called the Union for the Struggle of the Emancipation of the Working Class. The union adopted Martov’s recommended strategy: talk less, listen more. Publish leaflets, not books. Focus on lived reality, not abstract theory. Your audience is the workers, not other coffee house radicals. And the actual membership of this coordinating Union of Struggle was never very big, maybe 20 members in all. Lenin and Martov both sat on the central committee where they implemented Martov’s strategy. Their first task was to go out among the workers and find out what their grievances actually were. So they printed and distributed questionnaires for people to fill out that they hoped would allow them to cobble together a list of complaints that might motivate the workers to go on strike. And this did generate some useful information and the members of the union also attempted to supplement this with direct personal interviews, but as we’ve discussed, many of the members of the Union of Struggle were white collar, middle and upper class intellectuals. They’d come around asking these potentially seditious questions of the workers and be met with understandably tight-lipped suspicion from those workers.

But Krupskaya was assigned to one of the poorest working class districts, and thanks to her years of experience and connections as a night school teacher, she was able to come back with reliably detailed information about pay conditions and hours. And one of the most interesting things to come out of this exercise in gathering information was that the managers had a habit of imposing fines on workers for any number of infractions. So their already pitifully low hourly wages were in reality even lower than that, because their pay was routinely docked. Lenin, with his training as a lawyer, would soon be writing up a 44 page booklet explaining to the workers their rights with regards to these fines.

But that was the last thing he was able to do as a free man, because as he sat down to get started on the first issue of a new newspaper, they hoped to get going, Lenin was arrested.

For as much as our young revolutionaries enjoyed playing cloak and dagger, dodging surveillance and meeting secretly and writing to each other in secret codes with invisible ink and all this stuff you find in a standard issue spy novel, the Okhrana was watching them pretty much the whole time. Lenin was well-known. He had been tracked in and out of Europe. The authorities knew about his false bottom trunk that he used to bring home illegal literature, but as long as Lenin and his comrades posed no immediate threat, it was better to just wait, monitor them, gather more information, more names and more plans. And most especially, wait until they did something you could really nail them to the wall for.

Now the reason the authorities knew so much about them is because they had spies, informants and agents provocateur liberally sprinkled around keeping tabs on everyone. Among the founders of the Union of Struggle was a certain dentist, who was just such a spy. Now the problem of police spies was one of the biggest hurdles that Lenin and his comrades struggled to overcome. It’s one of the biggest problems any revolutionary group struggles to overcome. You can’t trust nobody, because if you trust nobody, then you’re just a paranoid crank, hiding out in a studio apartment, afraid to talk to anybody. You’re not revolutionary of the people. But you also can’t trust everybody, because for sure some of your comrades are police spies. Of course they are.

Now in his novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is a manual for revolution dressed up as a space adventure, Heinlein recommend making friends with a sentient and basically omniscient supercomputer who will be able to identify such police spies, group them together in their own cordoned off revolutionary cells, where you can feed them disinformation. But in the absence of a sentient and basically omniscient supercomputer, spies are going to get in. You just have to trust your instincts, trust evidence that they are spies if and when it does come in, and then go with your guts in these early days, especially Lenin tended to err on the side of being too trusting. So, because they trusted this dentist, everyone wound up arrested before they got a chance to do much of anything in 1895.

Now the authorities finally decided to go from surveillance to arrest in November, 1895, because some factory workers did start a brief strike, and the authorities became concerned that maybe this new Union of Struggle group was having an impact. So the dentists spy tipped off his handlers that the six principle editors of the new underground newspaper would all be in the same place at the same time on December the eighth. The police raided the rooms, and Lenin and five of his comrades were carried away. About a month later, a second sweep picked up Martov and a bunch of others.

Now, not all the members of the Union of Struggle were in custody. Krupskaya kept her name clear, as did some of the younger members, and they tried to carry on with their agitation work. And though it was difficult, it was not impossible to stay in contact with their imprisoned comrades.

As we saw last week, the people running the prisons and detention centers were not exactly committed to their jobs, and for the entirety of 1896, while Lenin and Martov and friends were held in the preliminary detention facility — which is where you were held without trial, until your sentence was handed down — they freely accessed their comrades on the outside without too much difficulty. They use coded language, and invisible ink, and hidden notes smuggled into the binding of books because the inspectors at the detention facility never tried too hard to stop it. And in between this regular correspondence, Lenin, for example, was able to return to more abstract, theoretical ideas, beginning work on his first contribution to Russian Marxism, The Development of Capital in Russia.

Now Lenin’s principal facilitator in all this was Krupskaya, who was still on the outside, and who had taken a job as a copyist in the railroad administration. She happened to have a coworker who was a non-movement family friend of the Ulyanovs, who could somewhat innocuously visit Lenin in prison. So people would send letters to Krupskaya at her office, she would write or encode things into books and letters, hand them off to this family friend who would then take it all into Lenin. And it was in this way that everybody inside prison was able to cheer on the strikes of 1896. These great strikes were of course blamed on the socialist agitators and the socialist agitators were happy to take credit for it, but in fact, the strikes were quite spontaneous and undirected by anyone inside the Union of Struggle.

The 1896 St. Petersburg textile workers strikes were something of a watershed in retrospect. And their importance only grew in time, as it seemed to be proving what Karl Kautsky had said, in which the Vilna program was working towards the merger of the blue collar worker and the white collar socialist into a single movement. The strikes lasted for three weeks in May and June, 1896, and were the largest industrial worker actions in Russian history to date. The strikes specifically hit the textile industries in St. Petersburg, where you found the lowest paid, least educated, and most maltreated workers. These people were doing 12 to 14 hour days in miserably hot conditions doing monotonous activity,

Now it began as a small walkout of just a few workers in one single textile plant, but quickly spread to twenty more factories, and in the end included at a minimum 18,000 workers and at a maximum 30,000, depending on what source you’re looking at. Half of these workers were men and half of these workers were women. And it was a big moment in Russian labor history, and the liberal professor turned liberal politician Pavel Milyukov, who we talked about back in episode 10.20, said that the 1896 strikes were when the Russian masses first stepped on to the revolutionary stage.

The first action started on May the 23rd, 1896 when about a hundred very low grade assistants walked off the job and demanded pay for the recent plant closure that had coincided with the coronation of Tsar Nicholas the Second, who I should mention we will be catching back up with next week. Now, in addition to this recent affront, they were also demanding back pay related to this additional twenty minutes of unpaid labor that employers had started adding to the end of the day back in 1887. This is just 20 minutes that were tacked onto the end of the day that you weren’t paid for. It was as literal and expression of the exploitation of surplus labor as you could get. The next day, these hundred assistants were joined by about a hundred spinners at the plant who further demanded a shorter work day.

Now this first plant would remain shut down until June the fifth. In the meantime, word of this strike spread to other workers as they talk to each other at canteens or in parks or at shared boarding houses, and it became very apparent very quickly that these workers understood the importance of getting as many factories as possible to catch the contagion of strike. Just as a single worker is isolated without his or her coworkers, a single factory is isolated without other factories also joining in. So over the last week of May 1896, the strike spread, to the 600 workers in this factory over here, then the 700 and that factory over there, eventually reaching something like 20 factories in all, and as I said, somewhere between 13 and 30,000 workers.

Now, these strikes were not started by the Union of Struggle, but when they got going, the remaining free members of the union did what they could. And principally, that meant helping spread the word and make sure other people knew what was happening. This turned out to be extremely helpful because previously the authorities had just been able to clamp down on all information about an isolated factory strike to stop the contagion of strike from spreading. But they were unable to do this in 1896, so for three weeks, St. Petersburg had to deal with tens of thousands of workers refusing to work, and the textile industry basically shutting down. Now in the end, no great victory was really won here. Some small concessions were extracted, and the factories restarted. Now, another follow on strike in early 1897 did eventually lead to a maximum hour law being passed by the government later in 1897, but the importance of the 1896 strikes weren’t just about what specific demands they extracted. They were peaceful and disciplined and seem to be both spontaneous and widespread, which indicated prior organization and planning. And given that On Agitation had just come out, it seemed like the merger between the workers and the socialists was in fact taking place. And even if we know in retrospect that that merger was not fully consummated in 1896, it certainly showed that things were heading in that direction, which terrified conservatives, exhilarated radicals, and made cautious liberals wring their hands and beg for reform. And working class demonstration strikes and direct actions would only pick up steam as Russia’s embrace of industrialization continued, and everyone pointed themselves towards the shockingly massive confrontations of 1905.

But 1905 is still a little ways off, though I promise we are moving towards it quicker than you might realize. Certainly quicker than anyone in Russia realized. But before the revolution could come, the members of the Union of Struggle were going to have to become… exiles and émigré s. Krupskaya was finally identified as revolutionary and arrested in August of 1896, and she too got placed in the preliminary detention facility.

Then they all sat in custody until the end of January 1897, when their sentences were handed down. And they all agreed these sentences were surprisingly light, just three years exile in Siberia. They even got three days freedom in St. Petersburg to arrange their affairs and prepare for their trip. And it was over these three days that Lenin and Martov apparently cemented their lasting friendship. In the few months they had worked together at the end of 1895, they hardly knew each other, they were still strangers, and they were kept separate in the preliminary detention facility, but here in these last 72 hours, they bonded. Even if they had been apart, they had gone through something together. Their spirit was unbroken, and both of them were as committed to the cause as ever. So they agreed to ride out their three years in exile without making any attempt to escape, and then they would meet back up and plot their next move.

Among the last minute arrangements Lenin made before he had to depart east was to write a small message in invisible ink to Krupskaya, who being arrested later than the others, was still in prison. The invisible note… was a marriage proposal.

Now Vladimir and Nadya had now known each other and worked together for nearly three years, and they liked each other and respected each other. But most importantly, if she agreed to marry him, then their union would be recognized by the state, and she would be allowed to come join Lenin in Siberia, where they could continue their work, and if nothing else keep each other company. She agreed.

Now the marriage of Lenin and Krupskaya would never be the stuff of romance novels. And down the road, it will become emotionally complicated, but they will remain loyally married until death did them part.

So next week we will ship these revolutionaries off to Siberia, but keep the story in St. Petersburg to pick back up with newlyweds whose marriage, for better or for worse, was more like something out of a romance novel. They really truly loved each other as man and wife. And I am talking here about Nicholas and Alexandra, who were opening their reign as emperor and empress of Russia by telling all those whose hopes for progress, reform, and change — hopes, which had been raised by the elevation of the young tsar — that those hopes were hopeless. No, no, no, you silly heads, there will be no progress, reform, and change. There will be only orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and isn’t that simply marvelous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Episode 10.25: Senseless Dreams

Over the last five episodes, we have introduced some of the revolutionary forces that will eventually combine to tear down the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty. Among them, moderate liberals and zemstvo constitutionalists, neo-narodists, socialist revolutionaries, and the Marxist Social Democrats. This week, we will return to the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty that all those revolutionary groups will be combining to tear down, because there’s a reason they will be able to tear it down. Revolutions are an extremely it takes two to tango affair. You don’t get a revolution without the ruling class making many, many mistakes for many, many consecutive years. And so now we return to Nicholas and Alexandra, who will be the authors of so many, many of those mistakes for so many, many consecutive years.

We left the couple on the day of the death of Tsar Alexander the Third on October the 20th, 1894. They were not even married yet when Nikki suddenly became Tsar Nicholas the Second; they had only even been engaged since April. Now Nicholas wanted to correct this immediately, and have a small private wedding ceremony to marry his beloved fiance and make her empress. But as would happen a lot in the first decade of his reign, his family steamrolled him into backing down. An imperial wedding, especially the wedding of a tsar, was simply too important a state affair to be hidden away in private. This was the considered opinion of Nicholas’s four uncles, Vladimir, Alexis, Sergei, and Paul. They were all confidently overbearing men, who believed it was their duty to tell their weak little nephew Nikki what to do. And so, for this very first decision Nicolas wanted to make as the absolute ruler of Russia — I want to marry my beloved fiance, Alex, right now — he backed down under a heavy salvo of what would become a routine barrage of condescending bullying. The uncles were careful never to do this in public, of course, but behind closed doors, they expected Nicholas to do as he was told, and Nicholas usually did.

So instead of a wedding, the imperial family focused on their dead patriarch, and escorted the body of the late tsar on a funeral train from the Sea of Azov to Moscow. The body lay in state in the Kremlin for an appropriate period, and then the funeral train moved on to St. Petersburg for another lying in state. The courts of Europe sent representative dignitaries for the official funeral, which was held on November the 19th, 1894, but the guest list was not quite as august as the guest list for that famous wedding in Coburg had been just six months earlier. Victoria, for example, did not come; she instead sent her son Berty, Prince of Wales and her grandson, George. Kaiser Wilheim the Second meanwhile sent his brother. Relations had never been great between these monarchs; Queen Victoria thought Alexander the Third disgracefully uncivilized, and could hardly stand talking about him, let alone to him. Meanwhile, as we’ll discuss in a moment, Alexander the Third despised the young Kaiser Wilheim, and treated him with deliberate contempt whenever they met. Willy was on much better terms with Nikki, and was not at all sad to see the mean old Russian bear gone off to heaven.

But though the death of the tsar initiated a period of official morning, this was temporarily suspended a week later for the state wedding of Nicholas and Alexandra. All these various dignitaries from the courts of Europe were already on hand, and so though Nicholas’s uncles wanted to quote unquote, wait, they just meant until we can do it publicly. So on November the 26th, 1894, the couple were married, and Alexandra became empress of Russia. Nicholas was 26. Alexandra was 22.

But though for a day they switched from black to white, they had to switch right back to black again. There would be no honeymoon, there wasn’t even a wedding reception.

For Alexandra, it was the worst possible way she could have become empress. She was a young princess of a minor German duchy. She had been engaged to Nicholas for only a few months. She had only converted to Orthodox Christianity a few weeks earlier. The Russians didn’t know her, and she didn’t know the Russians. Now what should have happened is that she would come to Russia, get married, start a family, make friends, acquire trusted, intimates, learn the language and the customs, be seen by the people at public events, mingle and grow in society. And then, after many years of just being a Russian princess, then step into the much higher and more important role of Russian empress. Her new mother-in-law, Nicholas’s mother and now former Empress Marie, had been just such a princess for seventeen years before she took that final great step.

But there was no prolonged period of preparation for Alexandra, and it would be an awkward fit just jamming her into it like this. She was by nature, shy and uncomfortable around strangers, much preferring the intimacy of close family. She had also been raised with stiff and prudish Victorian manners. And now she was thrust into a very public role of being one of the centers of Russian high society, which was quite a bit looser than the courts that she was used to back in the west. And she wouldn’t fit in with that society, and they wouldn’t fit in with her. And because everything happened so fast, they never got the chance to warm up to each other. So right from the beginning, there would be an estrangement between the empress and her court. It didn’t help that when she converted to Orthodoxy, she dove into it with the fervor of a convert, and would be devoutly and sincerely religious, whereas the rest of the Russian aristocracy treated Orthodox Christianity as a ritual adornment, to be indulged in it at births and weddings and deaths, but it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.

It also didn’t help that she took motherhood seriously and was pregnant and caring for her children a lot through the early years of her reign. And the couple’s first child, Olga, was born in November of 1895. Alexandra would then give birth to three more girls over the next six years, which reduced her ability to be a society hostess. So to society, Alexandra came off as an aloof prude, and to Alexandra, society came off as a bunch of petty and immoral gossip mongers.

Meanwhile, out in the streets, they said that the young empress’s arrival had been marked by bad omens all around. That she had come to them, walking behind a coffin.

Meanwhile, her husband, the one person who she really loved, and who really loved her back, now had a million duties to attend to. And though he initially followed his father’s advice and kept on Sergei Witte, and let him do what he wanted to, since practically the last thing his father had said to him was Witte is the only one who knows what he’s doing, Nicholas followed Witte out of respect for the word of his dead father.

But in his heart, Nicholas mostly listened to the advice of his old tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who as senate [?] of the Orthodox Church during the 1880s, had been the principal architects of the reactionary return to orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality after the great reforms of the tsar liberator had resulted in revolutionaries assassinating him by way of thank you.

Nicholas had been raised with this lesson drilled into him, and he believed it. He believed in his heart and soul that he was God’s chosen ruler of the empire, and that his role as absolute autocrat had been ordained by God and was not answerable to or divisible with other men. This belief would underlie, and ultimately undermine, his entire regime.

Now, one of the other things that informed the governing worldview of the new tsar was that going back to the old westernizer/slavophile debates, Nicholas was a convinced slavophile. I mentioned that, for lack of a better term, his quote unquote ethnic heritage was mostly German and Danish, but he had been born and raised a Russian, and considered himself a Russian. So unlike the rest of the aristocracy, Nicholas actually preferred speaking Russian to speaking French, especially in matters of state. He read Russian books, he listened to Russian music. When it wasn’t a formal occasion, he habitually wore standard issue Russian peasant blouses and pants around. His favorite tsar was tsar. Alexei the Mild, who was the last quote, unquote pure muscovite tsar, and he had little good to say about Alexei’s son, Peter the Great who had done so much to turn Russian attention towards Europe, a mistake in Nicholas’s view. He even preferred the antiquated and technically inaccurate title of tsar to Peter’s title of emperor. Nicolas believed himself operating in the grand tradition of a mystical and divine muscovite tsardom, which was, historically, existing in its own special and unique realm between Europe and Asia. And to the extent that he would have preferred to take Russia anywhere, it would not be forward to the future, but backward to the past.

As often happens with the ascension of a new ruler though, especially a young ruler, hopes are raised and projected onto them. A new day dawning, reform, change, progress. This must be the beginning of a new era. Now for radical socialist revolutionaries, and anarchists, and Marxists, the idea of potential reform was greeted only with derision, and perhaps a moderate dose of fear that such reforms might temper revolutionary ardor. But for the democrats and liberals and zemstvo constitutionalists we talked about in episode 10.20, the ascension of Nicholas the Second was a moment of great hope and promise. The reign of Alexander the Third had been a dark time of reaction for them, and in the last years of Alexander’s reign, he had moved from simply halting the advance of the zemstvo’s role in governing the empire to turning it back. In 1890, he had signed a decree explicitly making centrally appointed governors all powerful in the provinces, as an explicit check against growing zemstvo power at the provincial level. The liberal constitutionalists hoped maybe the son would reassess the policy of the now dead father. And one zemstvo in particular, the one in the city of Tver, was led by some of the most powerful liberal minded members of the nobility. The kind of liberal nobles who would have fit in well with the Decembrists. So when the zemstvo in Tver sent a standard congratulatory address to Nicholas upon his ascension, the address said that they hoped he would take his reign as an opportunity to listen to his people more, and see the empire turn more towards the rule of law, rather than the rule of men.

Now, it was all incredibly mild language, and even that mild language was wrapped in enthralled devotional language, but the hint was there: constitutional government. Nudge, nudge. But Nicholas had no intention of allowing anything that would come between him and his people. So with help from Pobedonostsev, Nicholas drafted a definitive statement that would pour bleach all over the last remnants of the democratic weed that had been allowed to grow up in his pristine autocracy. It famously said that they must give up “senseless dreams of the participation of the zemstvo representatives in the affairs of internal administration. I shall maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as it was preserved by my father.”

This is not what the zemstvo was hoping to hear. And the tsar was only 26. If he held true to his stated principles, then it would be a generation before hopes of constitutional reform could be raised again. This was incredibly worrisome and depressing. Because, look, these guys believed that liberal and constitutional reform was necessary, that the state apparatus for all its vaunted absolute power was actually a rickety and underfunded toothpick house badly managed by corrupt and inefficient bureaucrats and ministers. They believe that their work in the zemstvo was good and healthy and necessary and needed to expand and the tsar was just saying… nah.

Now in his, I don’t know, defense, Nicholas really believed he had been put on earth by God to be the father of his people. And he considered constitutions and parliaments to be literally sacreligious barriers standing between the people and their father, the tsar. But still, by not even pretending to be interested in reform or in asking for help governing the empire, Nicholas turned all those liberals and democrats and constitutionalists away from officially sanctioned channels that supported the regime, and into revolutionary channels that sought to overthrow it.

So, okay. Nicholas sees himself as an autocrat, bearing sole responsibility for the governing of the empire. What did this mean in practice? It meant, as it turned out, that he would spend a lot of time alone in his office, signing pieces of paper on the smallest and most inconsequential of details. He somehow believed that the work of an autocrat was to do all of this paperwork, and do it all himself. He refused to even have a private secretary help him sort through and prioritize things.

Now what his father had done and what frankly, any sane autocrat must do, is focus on big picture policy and long-term strategy while delegating the minutia of imperial administration. And Nicholas did the opposite. To the extent that he even had a vision for his empire, it was orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and a kind of permanent inertia. And then he focused on being a busy little bee, signing paperwork and micromanaging ministerial affairs without really having the relevant experience to be a micromanager, and without ever giving anyone a clear idea of where they were going or why they were going there. So it’s true you can’t really accuse Nicholas of being an absentee ruler. He came into the office early, he stayed late, he was always doing official work. But it was like he was the captain of a ship, standing over midshipman telling them how to properly scrub the deck while paying no attention whatsoever to steering or navigation. And so the ship just kind of drifted along.

And as it turned out, Nicolas wanted to micromanage things while not being a particularly good manager of people. Both he and Alexandra tended to treat government ministers as if they were household staff, and he took his absolute hiring and firing privileges seriously. And he undermined the morale and practically every department by promoting favorites and ignoring things like seniority and talent, which do mean something to the internal functioning of a governmental ministry. The guys running those ministries were proud and they had their own egos, and they did not like the way they were being treated. Now it’s not like Nicholas yelled at them or abused them; he was somehow even worse than that. Nicholas was so personally conflict averse and pathologically nice to people that no one ever knew where they stood. In person, he agreed with everyone about everything. Then a few minutes later, he would agree with the opposite. So you’d leave a meeting thinking you had the tsar’s approval for something only to find out much later that the project had been canceled completely. Or even worse, you’d spend an hour having pleasant tea with the emperor only to find out by letter upon returning to your office that you were actually dismissed from service. Nicholas didn’t like doing things like that in person. He was nice that way.

So everything I’ve just said about Nicholas’s style of governing will hold true as a general rule in the years to come. But to get back to the nuts and bolts of the narrative, Nicholas’s ascension to power and his wedding to Alexandra were overshadowed by the funeral of his father. But society now emerged from its mandated period of mourning, and it was time for Nicholas to have his official coronation, a celebratory moment that the emperor and empress could have all to themselves, all good and all happy. Put the bad omens to rest. The big day was scheduled for May the 14th, 1896, and as I briefly mentioned, a few episodes back, this coronation was accompanied by a grand display of generous benevolence, the kind of generous benevolence that often comes with such high royal occasions, as various sentences to prison and exile were commuted along with various amnesties and pardons. It’s a longstanding tradition, not just in Russia, but in monarchies across the world and throughout history. New king, here he comes, what a great guy, fresh start, and all that. And as I said, when we were talking about the socialist revolutionaries, many of those released really did tip their cap and disappear back into private life. But quite a few came out more determined than ever.

Now, the coordination itself in May of 1896 was meant to be a wonderful celebration of the emperor’s divine ascension to the throne. And it was, but as haunted these last Romanoffs, the day was immediately overshadowed by: tragedy.

A few days after the coronation itself, Nicholas’s Uncle Sergei hosted a public banquet out on the Khodynka Field, a military training ground. It was meant to be a great affair open to the public. Commemorative mugs would be given to everybody, and best of all, there would be… free beer! So people started congregating around dawn on the big day to make sure they were first in line, and I have seen the total numbers who gathered listed at a low of about a 100,000, with a high of 500,000. But for sure, whatever, the actual number was, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people.

When the carts with the barrels of beer showed up, a rumor ripped through the crowd that there wasn’t enough beer for everyone. It would be first come, first serve. And as can happen in times like this, people started pushing forward. And with various trenches and gullies marking the field, people stumbled and they fell, and then other people tripped over them and fell, but people kept pushing. People kept stomping, and then it turned into a tragic stampede as a mixture of fear and panic and desire caused the crowd to surge forward trampling the fallen underfoot. When everyone finally cleared out and the crowds dispersed, the carnage was horrific. The most common number I see cited is 1300 to 1400 dead, and about the same number of wounded.

So this is a horrible tragedy. It is in fact known to history as the Khodynka Tragedy, and Nicholas and Alexandra both wanted to cancel further banquets and balls and parties they were scheduled to attend. But there was one special ball that very night hosted by the French ambassador — and as we’ll discuss here in a minute, France and Russia had recently come into a critical alliance — and so Nicholas’s overbearing uncles insisted he attended the French ambassador’s party. And so he did.

Which turned out to be a big mistake. Because the tsar came off looking extremely callous. The people in the street took it as another bad omen. Educated public opinion was horrified how badly the public relations was mishandled. Partying while people lay dead? What are you doing? Radicals and revolutionaries took it as proof that the new tsar was a cruel and heartless monster. And it was the first origin of his future nickname, Bloody Nicholas.

But look, his first instinct was right. Nicholas didn’t think it was a good idea to go to the party. And he and Alexandra spent the next day touring hospitals and promising to take care of the injured and pay for the funeral arrangements of the dead. But the damage was done. More bad omens, to mark the outset of his ill-fated reign.

Now since Nicholas had just been forced to go to this banquet hosted by the French ambassador because it was so important not to offend the French, this is as good a time as any to talk about the new Franco-Russian alliance, because it’s going to be pretty important. Now I am going to massively oversimplify a very complex series of decisions and diplomatic events in the 1870s and 1880s, but, here we go.

The Franco-Prussian War left two great things in its wake, setting aside the Paris Commune: a humiliated France now taking the form of the Third Republic, and a triumphant and possibly overmighty Germany, now taking the form of the German Empire. And so as they picked themselves up off the mat, one of the foreign policy objectives of the French Third Republic was to make sure they didn’t get knocked down again. And that meant getting the Russians on their side. Germany would be loath to make further moves against France if millions of Russian soldiers were standing poised on Germany’s eastern border. And if the French played their cards right, they might even be able to box the Germans in and avenge the losses in the Franco-Prussian War, which in concrete terms meant getting back the lost territory of Alsace-Lorraine, which was now the physical symbol of Francis’ national humiliation.

Now the Russians, for their part, were none too thrilled about the emergence of a unified German Empire, but really ever since the Crimean War, their foreign policy had been to not get tangled up with the western great powers. Now, on the other side of all this, German foreign policy was also aiming at a Russian alliance, where the Russians would support German claims to Alsace-Lorraine, and in exchange, the Germans would support the Russians if they, for example, wanted to go in the complete other direction and start mucking around in the far east with China and Japan.

But Tsar Alexander the Third had been standoffish towards the Germans, and as I mentioned, he did not like young Kaiser Wilhelm personally. So by the late 1880s, the French and Russians were moving closer together. Now if the French were going to get millions of Russian soldiers poised on Germany’s eastern front, what were the Russians going to get? Well, the Russians were going to get: French loans. Because this moment right here in the late 1880s is the same moment Sergei Witte is being promoted and needs foreign financing for his aggressive state sponsored industrialization policy. So, here comes some French money.

Then in July of 1891, a squadron from the French navy visited Kronstadt and diplomats exchanged some letters of understanding. In April 1892, military conventions were signed, and then over the winter of 1893-1894, in one of the last major projects of his reign before the tsar got sick and died, the Russian Empire signed a formal military alliance with the Republic of France. If either were attacked by Germany, the other would declare war. Underscoring how out of the loop he was as heir to the throne, Nicholas knew none of the details about any of this until he became emperor just a few months later. So, whether he liked it or not, he was now in close alliance with a bunch of French republicans.

So getting back to it, after their coronation, Nicholas and Alexander embarked on a goodwill tour of Europe in the summer of 1896 to visit all their friends and relatives and new partners in alliance. They started in Vienna to visit the now aging Emperor Franz Joseph, who we last saw being installed as a young Franz Joseph back in the heat of the revolutions of 1848. Then they moved on to visit Willie up in Germany, who had never liked how dismissively he had been treated by Nicholas’s father, but now that he was the senior and more experienced monarch compared to Nicholas, he planned to use every form of flattery and cajoling to bring the Russians into alliance with the Germans. He had been horrified that Tsar Alexander the Third had signed a treaty with the blasphemous French republicans and was thrilled by Nicholas’s “senseless dreams” response to the zemstvo. Now in broad terms, the kaiser wanted to see Europe dominated by an alliance of absolutism. In more immediate and specific terms, he wanted to push Nicholas’s attention east towards Asia to ease Russia off Germany’s back.

Now, nothing would happen on this trip, but the kaiser would thereafter open up a non-stop correspondence with his dearest Nikki to bring the tsar over to his side. And he insisted that Nikki had a divine mission to turn back the yellow menace, because both of them were just racist as hell towards asians, we’ll talk about that more next week.

After leaving Germany, Nicholas and Alexandra then went up to Scotland to visit old Queen Victoria who still loved Alyx as one of her favorite granddaughters. While the women played with baby Olga, Nicholas and the men went out hunting in the cold Scottish rain.

Now, this was all family reunion stuff, but the most important leg of this tour was the last stop, and that was Paris. It was Nicholas’s first trip to Paris and was potentially fraught with diplomatic danger. The new Franco-Russian alliance was still very new, and here we have the most autocratic autocrat in Europe being hosted by the most democratic republicans in Europe. The French pulled out all the stops up to and including artificially refashioning fallen sprigs of chestnut blooms to the trees because the trees looked better that way, their own little potemkin villages for the tsar. But Nicholas and Alexandra had a wonderful time. The Parisians cheered the new imperial couple wherever they went, though, it probably helped that the French had police stationed every 20 feet along every route the couple traveled. Nicholas laid the foundation stone of what is now Pont Alexandre III, named for his father, and best known, at least by me, as being the bridge with the cool art nouveau streetlights. Then they went out for a visit to the palace at Versailles and stayed the night, and Alexandra slept in the bedchambers of Marie Antoinette, because why not toss just another bad omen onto the pile?

Now, given that we’ve got Alexandra sleeping in Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber, I thought it might be fun to leave off today comparing and contrasting the two great couples of our two biggest revolutions: Nicholas and Alexandra versus Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette. Because there are similarities and differences between the two that are worth highlighting. Like for example: Nicholas and Louis were both nice and genial in person. They didn’t like confrontation. They were personally generous and pretty laid back. And as I said of Louis back in the French Revolution series, under normal circumstances, he would have been a fine and forgotten king. And Nicholas was kind of the same way. Neither of them were, like, psychotic tyrants. Both of them just faced a similar great crisis that neither of them were really equipped to handle. And even those crises manifested in similar ways, because both Nicholas and Louis sat atop absolutist monarchies breaking down under stress and facing the need to reform; reform that would have to be handled carefully and with a great deal of intelligent savvy; intelligent savvy both Nicholas and Louis lacked. And they both shared that very bad habit of following the advice of the last person to speak.

But there is a little contrast between them that’s worth pointing out: Louis really wanted nothing to do with statecraft. He would have much rather been hunting or tinkering with clocks. Nicholas on the other hand was a busy little bee, he was always working on matters of state. So Louis didn’t like showing up for work; Nicholas thought showing up for work was his duty. But the results were the same: a couple of weak willed, too nice, moderately oblivious monarchs perched atop absolutist regimes at a moment of great political, economic, and social stress. The problem is not that they were bad men, the problem is that they were the wrong men.

Now as for Alexandra and Marie Antoinette, they too had much in common, not the least that they were both young German princesses — or Austrian, in Marie Antoinette’s case — who came to a foreign land and had difficulty fitting in. But where Marie Antoinette was a frivolous party girl, Alexandra was a straightlaced joykill. To put it another way, Marie Antoinette was disdained for self-indulgent vice. Alexandra was disdained for self-indulgent virtue. But both of them wound up estranged from many at court, and both wound up personally hurt by the disdain and the estrangement. Though in Marie Antoinette’s case, it manifested as a kind of bitter disdain of her own, and to the extent that she thought about French peasants at all…

… she didn’t think about French peasants at all.

Meanwhile, Alexandra remained sublimely confident that the people of Russia loved her and her husband, that aristocratic society and liberal public opinion and radical revolutionaries may hate her, but the vast majority of Russia was composed of good, hardy, pious peasants who loved the emperor and empress as their father and mother. She would believe that to the last. And she would believe that to her ruin.

But a further thing that Marie Antoinette and Alexandra had in common is that they were both stronger willed than their husbands, and exerted a great deal of influence over them. And, were pretty equally terrible wielding that influence. Both of them wanted to prop up an uncompromising will that they feared their husbands lacked, and this too was a course followed to ruin.

As for their respective married relationships, that was almost all contrast. Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette were hardly a couple at all, until the final stages of tragedy and confinement brought them together as a shadow of doom spread over their family, Nicholas and Alexandra meanwhile were very much in love from the start, and both very much would have preferred to just be a simple family, husband and wife, father and mother. And if Nicholas had been, like, the fourth son of the tsar, they would have been very happy indeed. But that was not to be.

Next week, the emperor and empress will return home to the east, and then we will keep moving east for another couple of thousand miles, because as the Trans-Siberian Railroad neared its completion, the Russian empire would be put on a collision course with something it really couldn’t handle at this great moment of political, economic, and social stress: a catastrophic military defeat.