6 Poland and Georgia—The Export of Revolution

The political framework of Bolshevism, sketched in the previous chapters, was built within Russia but would soon impact politics on the world stage. This transition was marked by the second (1920), third (1921), and fourth (1922) congresses of the Communist International (Comintern)—congresses that Trotsky, writing in 1933, singled out as occasions on which key issues were subjected to “a principled analysis that has remain unsurpassed until now.”1 Four events were, overtly or covertly, central to these congresses: the 1919 revolution in Hungary, the 1920 Russian war with Poland, the 1921 attempt at a general strike in Germany (what became known as the “March Action”), and the 1921 invasion of Georgia. We know a little bit about the 1921 March Action. There is some research on the 1919 revolution in Hungary. Both will be examined in the next chapter. Both are classic examples of the problem of substitutionism—bypassing the mass self-emancipation of the working class and attempting to substitute for it the actions of a minoritarian “radical” section of the class. This chapter will examine two events about which we know considerably less, the Russian invasion of Poland in 1920 and of Georgia in 1921. Both were extreme cases of substitutionism—the attempt to substitute for the revolutionary class not a minoritarian party, as was the case in Germany and Hungary, but the bayonets of the peasants-in-uniform organized in the Red Army and Red Cavalry.

In his introduction to the proceedings of the third congress, John Riddell relegates this historical episode to a footnote: “In April 1920, Polish troops launched an offensive in soviet Ukraine. The Red Army was able to push them back into Polish territory and then continued its advance towards Warsaw, where it was stopped. Soviet troops were then forced to retreat. An armistice ending the war was signed in October.”2 This is true but incomplete. There is much more to the story.

The war did begin with a Polish invasion of Ukraine. By 6 May 1920, the Bolshevik troops had been expelled from Kyiv, “the eleventh time that Kiev had been occupied since 1917.”3 Kyiv was a city seen by many as the “birthplace of Russian civilization,” and suddenly the Bolsheviks had unfamiliar allies—conservative former monarchists rallying to the defence not of communism but of “Mother Russia.”4 Within weeks, writes Orlando Figes, 14,000 former officers from the tsar’s army “had joined the Red Army to fight the Poles, thousands of civilians had volunteered for war-work, and well over 100,000 deserters had returned to the Red Army.”5 By mid-July, the Russians had driven the Polish army out of the conquered territory. They then stood on the threshold of a momentous decision—whether to move from a defensive war to an offensive one, which meant an invasion of Poland by Russian troops. This was hotly contested in the Bolshevik Party. Lenin and his supporters won the day: the Russian army invaded Poland, came to the gates of Warsaw, and was thrown out of the country in disarray, suffering horrendous casualties.6

“This Should Not Get into the Press”

In the aftermath of the invasion, in a speech to Communist Party members, Lenin explained the thinking of the Central Committee majority, which had thrown its support behind the invasion. As the war against imperialism progressed, he explained, the Central Committee had recognized the existence of “a new, fundamental question”—namely, that of moving from the defensive to the offensive.

And so, in sum … the conviction ripened in us that the military offensive of the Entente against us was over, that the defensive war with imperialism was over, and that we had won. Poland was the stake. And Poland thought that, as a power with imperialist traditions, it was in a position to change the nature of the war. Hence, the assessment was as follows: the period of defensive war was over.

At this point, Lenin interjects a phrase loaded with significance: “I request that you write down less. This should not get into the press.”7 And indeed it did not get into the press, staying in the closed archives until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps Lenin’s reticence to have his views made known was simply because of the scale of the defeat suffered by the Russian army. We, of course, cannot know his motivations, but keeping this text from public view for several generations had the effect of keeping from public view one of the least attractive aspects of Lenin’s epistemology—his belief in the possibility of exporting socialism through military invasion.

We faced a new task. The defensive period of the war with worldwide imperialism was over, and we could and had the obligation to, exploit the military situation to launch an offensive war. We had defeated them when they advanced against us; we would now try to advance against them in order to assist the sovietization of Poland.8

He was not reticent on this point. One of the most horrifying aspects of modern warfare is the use of bayonets in hand-to-hand combat—a barbaric relic reminiscent of the militarism of the middle ages, surviving into modernity. Lenin, however, deploys the image of this awful weapon as part of a thumbnail outline of his political objectives.

We decided to use our military forces to assist the sovietization of Poland. Our subsequent overall policy flowed from this [decision]. We did not formulate it as an official resolution recorded in the minutes of the Central Committee and representing the law for the party and the new congress, but we said among ourselves that we must probe with bayonets [to discover] whether the social revolution of the proletariat in Poland had ripened.9

Tamás Krausz recommends treating this speech with some caution, as it “was not intended for the public, and was never edited in its written form,” but he then proceeds to do the opposite, treating it very incautiously, investing it with the work of laying the foundation for a Marxist understanding of international relations. The speech, he says, “contains, in a nutshell, Lenin’s political and theoretical fundamentals on the links and interconnections between world progress and the international revolutionary transformation.”10 This implies that the interconnections so revealed hold positive lessons. They do not. The “interconnections” revealed here between Russia’s internal politics and the “revolutionary transformation” in Poland are nothing more than the interconnections revealed in standard texts of international relations: the borders and government of one state can be changed by another through the use of physical force. Implicit in Krausz’s positive gloss on Lenin’s speech is that “progressive change” (i.e., socialism) might be the result of such actions. But while it is true that Lenin used the language of revolutionary upheaval to describe his aspirations, the extent to which hopes for socialist transformation were embedded in his speech represented, at best, wishful thinking.

At the level of military strategy, the Russian invasion of Poland resulted in “an enormous defeat,” to use Lenin’s words.11 This defeat should have surprised no one. At the level of geopolitics, the thought that the people of Poland, long oppressed by Russia, would welcome an army from Russia entering its territory was absurd. At the level of political theory, the idea that “revolutionary transformation” could be effected by the bayonets of an invading army runs completely counter to the self-emancipation politics outlined by Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Luxemburg’s close ally and friend, Paul Levi. It was axiomatic to their politics that a country could only be “sovietized” through the self-activity and self-organization of the vast majority of the oppressed and exploited. Luxemburg and Levi were leading figures in the anti-war German left group, the Spartacus League, and would both become founding members and leaders of the German Communist Party (KPD). Luxemburg summarized the core of their politics in 1918: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany.”12 This is the opposite of Lenin’s grotesque “probe with bayonets” approach.

Like the Spartacists, Iulii Martov “completely rejected an aggressive revolutionary war.” On 5 May 1920, he addressed a joint session of the Moscow Soviet and the All-Russian Central Trade Union Council:

After voicing support for all that Soviet power had done to deflect Polish aggression, Martov expressed concern that the conflict might be transformed from an action to defend the RSFSR into an offensive, cautioned against any adventuring eastward (into Turkey and India), and called for the prompt conclusion of the peace treaty that the peoples of Russia needed so badly.

Martov’s, of course, was not a voice to which the Bolsheviks would listen: “There was so much noise in the hall that he could not finish his speech.”13 However, Martov turned out to be correct, and his hecklers wrong. Turning a war to defend Russia against Polish aggression into a Russian offensive war to conquer Poland brought to the fore not the nationalism of an oppressed nation, but rather the ugly patriotism of Great Russian chauvinism. The flood of volunteers who entered the Red Army brought with them traditional Russian patriotism and prejudice. “Many Russians, including former Whites who had fought against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, opposed the reestablishment of Polish independence, and regarded the war as a traditional conflict between two opposing states,” notes Kirsteen Davina Croll. “As a result, numerous former tsarist officers joined the ranks of the Red Army.” One of those officers was A. A. Brusilov, who believed that “agitation of national patriotism” was necessary to an army being “strong and battleworthy.”14

It was one thing to refuse to listen to the voice of the isolated and much abused Martov, but what of the voice of the then-authoritative Leon Trotsky, who was also opposed to invading Poland?15 Of all the Bolshevik leaders, Trotsky was, without question, the one most experienced in these matters. In 1917, he was head of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the St. Petersburg Soviet when they organized the November seizure of power. From 1919 to 1925, he served as People’s Commissar of army and navy affairs and was the pre-eminent political and organizational leader of the Red Army, which would emerge victorious and save Russia from defeat by foreign invasion and internal civil war. Krausz tells us that Trotsky “took a highly skeptical stance regarding a large Soviet military advance on Warsaw.”16 Broué says that Trotsky did not believe “in the export of the revolution at the point of bayonets.”17 But even Trotsky was ignored, and the invasion of Poland proceeded, with little sense of restraint or caution.

The gap between aspirations and reality was starkly revealed during the 1920 Second Congress of the Communist International, which was in session while the invasion was under way.18 The Poland question received barely a mention during the congress. One of the few exceptions was toward the end of the first session, when Paul Levi brought to the floor a resolution appealing to the workers’ movement outside of Russia to block military aid going to the Polish state, a motion that the delegates passed.19 Other than that, it hardly figured into the Congress official discussions. Victor Serge, in his participant’s account of the Second Congress, lists three issues that were central to the congress: “the necessity for compromise and participation in electoral and Parliamentary politics,” “the possibility, and even necessity, of inspiring Soviet-type revolutions in the Asiatic colonial countries,” and the need to “work for splits that would break with the old reformist and Parliamentary leaderships” in Europe.20

However, with an air of mystery, Serge adds that there was a fourth “even more important” issue, which, however, “was not touched upon in open session.” This hidden agenda item was, precisely, the war on Poland—more precisely, the possibility of using the war with Poland to spark revolutions in Western Europe. Serge says that this “fourth problem was not on the agenda and no trace of it will ever be found in the published accounts.”21 In fact, we now know that Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership consciously kept this fourth “even more important” agenda item away from the public eye. Lenin, in his secret speech, is explicit. The Bolshevik leaders “said among themselves” that Poland should be probed with bayonets to see if it was ripe for socialism. However:

Here we raised a practical question which, as it turned out, was not entirely clear in theoretical terms to the best communist elements of the international community, that is the Communist International…. When the Comintern Congress convened in July [1920] in Moscow, we were settling this question in the Central Committee. We could not raise this question at the Comintern congress because that congress had to proceed openly—that was its enormous revolutionary, global political significance, which will become much more evident than has been the case up until now.22

If not discussed publicly, Serge says that the sovietization of Poland through Red Army bayonets was “discussed with considerable heat by Lenin, in a gathering of foreign delegates in a small room,” where “a map of the Polish front was displayed on the wall.” He paints a vivid picture: “Lenin, jacketed, briefcase under arm, delegates and typists all around him, was giving his views on the march of Tukhachevsky’s army on Warsaw. He was in excellent spirits, and confident of victory.”23

Werner Angress describes a similar scene. Lenin gathered Comintern delegates from Germany around a map, asking them where in East Prussia there was likely to be an uprising to greet the victorious Red Army after it had swept through Poland and reached the border with Germany. The Germans, one of whom was Paul Levi, “stared at him in amazement. East Prussia was known as one of the most conservative German regions.”24 Levi, as we saw above, moved the resolution to urge nonintervention in the war with Poland on the part of Western powers. That in no way meant that he expected the residents of traditionally conservative German areas bordering Poland to rise with enthusiasm to greet invading Russian troops.

If it was absurd to expect conservative German peasants to rise up at the sight of Red Army bayonets, it was even more absurd to expect Polish peasants—long the victims of Great Russian chauvinism—to greet a Russian army as their liberators. The Polish nation was just a few months into recovering its independence, after being buried for decades under the oppression of Russian tsars, German kaisers, and Austro-Hungarian emperors. Understandably, Poland rallied to oppose the Russian invasion and defend its newly won independence. Serge points out another reason for Polish workers to oppose the victory of the Red Army. Included on the “Revolutionary Committee that was to govern Poland” was Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared head of the Cheka, “the man of the Terror.”25 Serge, a leading participant in the Second Congress, writes, “I declared that, far from firing the popular enthusiasm, the name of Dzerzhinsky would freeze it altogether. That is just what happened.”26

The Russian general leading the invasion—Mikhail Nikolaievich Tukhachevsky—had achieved extraordinary success in the Civil War. In Russia, Tukhachevsky could march his massive armies through land where the peasants would “provide them with supplies and make good his losses in men.”27 The peasants feared the White, counter-revolutionary armies more than they feared the Red Terror. According to Serge, Tukhachevsky’s opponents in the Civil War—the White officers—had made “two cardinal errors: their failure … to carry out agrarian reform … and their reinstatement everywhere of the ancient trinity of generals, high clergy, and landlords.”28 The effect of both errors was to decrease support for the Whites and increase it for the Reds. But Poland was not Russia, and other factors were at work. The relation of Poland to Russia was analogous to that of Ireland to Great Britain. The Polish people were an oppressed nation within the prison-house of nations that had been tsarist Russia. An army of Russian peasants was not going to be greeted as a liberation army any more than a British army would in Ireland.

And what of the instrument chosen to perform this sovietization? Edgar D’Abernon, a British diplomat present in Poland during the war, kept a diary of events and recorded his impression of Russian prisoners of war interrogated by one of his colleagues. He expressed surprise at their “entire lack of enthusiasm or conviction regarding the Soviet Government.” He concluded that the only force driving them forward was “the terror which the Tcheka and its network of spies and denunciators inspire. It was apparent that this dread institution was greatly feared by all prisoners, who at once lowered their voices when being questioned regarding it.”29

An army driven forward by fear of the Cheka is clearly a problem when that army is presumed to be an agent of progressive social change. This was not the only problem. Much of the territory through which the Russian army was marching had a very large Jewish population—part of the historic Jewish Pale of Settlement, “an area in the western borderlands of the empire to which the residence of the Jewish population was almost exclusively confined.” At the turn of the century, 95 percent of the Russian empire’s Jewish population of roughly five million resided there.30 Tukhachevsky might very well have been a brilliant general. He also had a history, as a young man, of being an antisemite. In 1917, during World War I, he was a prisoner of war in Bavaria, and there made the acquaintance of French journalist Remy Roure, “one of the most prominent journalists and newspapermen in France in his day, a founder of Le Monde and its political editor from 1945 to 1952.”31 In 1928, Roure published, in Paris, a biography of his now famous former cellmate. He records a conversation where Tukhachevsky made vile statements denigrating Jewish people: “The Jews brought us Christianity. That’s reason enough to hate them. But then they are a low race. I don’t even speak of the dangers they create in my country.”32 Just a few months later, Tukhachevsky was back in Russia and a member of the Bolshevik Party.

Antisemitism was an issue not just for ex-aristocrats like Tukhachevsky, but also for the very poor peasant class that formed the core of the Red Army. Three-quarters of the Red Army soldiers were peasants, and, according to Orlando Figes, “its rank-and-file soldiers frequently became involved in violent looting, especially when passing through non-Russian (particularly Jewish) areas.”

The Red Army, it is important to bear in mind, was predominantly Russian in its ethnic composition. Even units conscripted in the Ukraine and other non-Russian regions (for example the Tatar Republic) were largely made up of Russians. Anti-Semitism was a powerful and growing force in the Red Army during the civil war, despite the fact that a Jew, Lev Davidovitch Trotsky (Bronstein), stood at its political head. Trotsky received hundreds of reports about his own soldiers’ violence and looting in Jewish-Ukrainian settlements, some of which he must have known from his youth.33

In 1920, this chronic problem became acute when, after being defeated at the gates of Warsaw, the Red Cavalry began retreating in disarray back to Russia. “The men had begun deserting in large numbers,” writes Adam Zamoyski, “while those who remained took out their disappointment on the inhabitants of the villages and towns they passed through, particularly the Jews.”34 The political commissars attached to this cavalry were horrified. When the retreat took this military force, now reduced to a rabble, into the heavily Jewish city of Zhytomyr (Zhitomir in Russian) in Ukraine, a telegram dripping with urgency was sent to Lenin:

In recent days Zhitomir has faced a new task. A new wave of pogroms has swept over the district. The exact number of those killed cannot be established, and the details cannot be established (because of the lack of communication), but certain facts can be established definitively. Retreating units of the First Cavalry Army (Fourth and Sixth Divisions) have been destroying the Jewish population in their path, looting and murdering…. Emergency aid is vital. A large sum of money and food must be sent.35

The horror of these pogroms was made known to the Russian public through the compelling short stories of Isaac Babel, the famous Jewish-communist writer who accompanied the troops. At the core of the Red Cavalry were the traditionally antisemitic horsemen known as Cossacks. One of the characters in Babel’s “The Red Cavalry Stories” says: “The Red Cavalry is a public conjuring trick pulled off by our Party’s Central Committee. The curve of the Revolution has thrown the Cossack marauders, saddled with all kinds of prejudices, into the forefront.”36 This understanding of the motley character of the Red Cavalry was echoed by others. “These wild sons of the steppes” might have been “excellent fighters,” writes William Chamberlin, but “they included a very small percentage of Communists and listened suspiciously and coldly to the moral lectures of the political workers who were sent into their ranks for purposes of agitation. For many of them booty was a more desirable objective than the triumph of the world revolution.”37 Babel’s stories of the crimes committed by the defeated Red Cavalry made things increasingly difficult for him inside Stalinizing Russia, and he eventually paid with his life for telling these bitter truths. But today, his writings make it clear that these Russian bayonets were not going to lead to liberation in Poland. Using them as a “probe” was not only a mistake, it was a crime.

Trotsky called the invasion of Poland “the catastrophe before Warsaw.” Because of the invasion, he argued, “the development of the Polish revolution received a crushing blow.”38 Lenin said, after the fact, “we have suffered an enormous defeat, a colossal army of a hundred thousand is either prisoner of war, or [interned] in Germany. In a word, a gigantic, unheard-of defeat.”39 Despite these words, Lenin only partially confronted the scale and importance of the defeat in this speech, never mind the reasons for it. He did not, for instance, address the fact that it was a defeat preceded by a completely wrong perception of the likely response of the Polish nation and that it could have been avoided had he heeded the advice of Trotsky and Martov. In addition, Lenin was almost certainly understating Russian losses. Adam Zamoyski, in 2008, estimated Russian losses in excess of 200,000. Tukhachevsky, “like his hero Napoleon in 1812 … had lost an army.” In the days before finally signing a peace treaty, with conditions worse than had been on offer before the Russian invasion, “the road to Smolensk and Moscow lay wide open.”40 The defeat in Poland, then, not only destroyed prospects for revolution in Poland; it severely jeopardized the very existence of Soviet Russia.

A Tactic or a Principle?

In Trotsky’s political biography of Stalin, which I examine in detail in chapters 8 and 9, Trotsky presents a more equivocal position on the Soviet invasion of Poland. Rather than talking of the “catastrophe before Warsaw” or emphasizing the question of Polish national oppression, he makes a much more limited argument, saying that he “was opposed to the march on Warsaw because, considering the weakness of our forces and resources, it could end successfully only on condition of an immediate insurrection in Poland itself, and there was absolutely no assurance of that.”41

In Stalin, Trotsky puts the blame for the defeat in Poland on the shoulders of Stalin, who at the time was in command of the “Western group of the Southern armies” and refused to come to the aid of the army advancing on Warsaw because he “was waging his own war. He wanted at all costs to enter Lvov at the same time that Smilga and Tukhachevsky were to enter Warsaw.”42 But surely this is a side issue. At the time, neither Trotsky nor Karl Radek believed that an invasion could succeed, quite apart from this or that tactical blunder. “Trotsky was convinced,” according to Pierre Broué, “that the entry into Polish territory by a Russian army, even under a red flag, would be felt like an invasion in the manner of Tsarism and would provoke a leap in Polish nationalism.”43 William Chamberlin indicates that this is precisely what happened: “To the average Pole of all classes a Russian Army, no matter what glowing proclamations it might issue, was an army of hereditary enemies and oppressors.”44

There was a strong nationalist feeling among all classes of the people, not excluding the workers. The peasants, the majority of the Polish population, generally followed the leadership of the priests and of the middleclass intellectuals. And when the Red Army troops were actually within sight of the suburbs of Warsaw they were profoundly discouraged to find Polish workers coming out, not with red flags to greet them, but with rifles to fight them.45

Trotsky’s opposition to “the export of the revolution at the point of bayonets,” summarized by Broué, represented a principled opposition to the invasion, rather than the tactical one outlined in Stalin.46 In the immediate aftermath of the defeat in Poland, Karl Radek shared this principled opposition. Tamás Krausz cites a speech by Radek, also delivered at the Ninth All-Russian Conference of the RCP(B), where Radek “underscored that the party and the leadership of the Comintern were vastly over-estimating ‘how ripe for revolution’ Central Europe was.” And he declared: “We must reject the method of ‘probing’ the international situation ‘with bayonets.’”47

Radek’s views on this are not consistent. According to Serge, at the moment Russian troops were at the gates of Warsaw, Radek declared: “We shall be ripping up the Versailles Treaty with our bayonets!”48 But in the wake of defeat, his view of the utility of bayonets had changed. His speech at the Ninth Conference drips with sarcasm in his criticism of the party leadership’s decision to go to war.

Now Comrade Lenin shows a new method of collecting information: not knowing what is being done in a given country he sends an army there. I ask, comrades, do we really have no other methods by which we could get the same results in the sense of becoming familiar with the situation in the country? Vladimir Ilyich argued that we learned about the situation in Germany and England with the help of probing with bayonets. If Vladimir Ilyich had more time to read foreign newspapers, he would have learned without a bayonet…. The bayonet will be fine if we have to assist a specific revolution, but in order to find out the situation in this or that country we have another weapon—Marxism, and for this we don’t need to send Red Army soldiers.49

Much of the discussion at this conference—Lenin’s and Radek’s speeches included—remained secret until the 1990s. As Krausz writes, “Lenin did not desire a public debate of the issue of ‘probing.’ In a two-line note of 6 October regarding a piece of writing by Radek that followed up the conference, Lenin reacted, ‘I oppose a discussion of the (possible) future assistance we may provide the Germans through Poland; it must be struck out.’”50

Surely these are the key issues around which a criticism of the Polish invasion should be debated. In addition to the impossibility of the Russian army being greeted as liberators by the recently independent Poles—an army associated with the long oppression of those very people—in what way can any progress for the Left happen through “probing with bayonets”? Socialism cannot be exported at the point of a gun barrel.

In Stalin, Trotsky does not raise these points in his criticism of the Russian invasion of Poland except in countering accusations made by S. E. Rabinovich in his History of the Civil War (published as a manual for military schools in the Red Army). Trotsky cites Rabinovich, outlining what he saw as “Trotsky’s errors in determining the Polish War, namely that the fundamental political aim of the war on our part was to hasten the revolution in Poland and bring the revolution to Europe from the outside on the bayonets of the Red Army.”51 In response, Trotsky comments:

In this way the old accusation is turned inside out! As late as 1927, it was recognized that I was an opponent of the March on Warsaw and the crime charged against me was my disinclination to introduce Socialism at the point of a bayonet. But in 1938, it was proclaimed that I advocated the March on Warsaw, guided by my determination to bring Socialism into Poland at the point of a bayonet!52

This is a point worth emphasizing. Trotsky names Lenin as “the chief initiator” of the Russian invasion of Poland, or “the Polish adventure,” as Trotsky calls it.53 The invasion led to the “catastrophe before Warsaw.” Trotsky deals with this invasion and its consequences critically but parenthetically, focusing his attention on a side issue (the role of Stalin). This has the effect of downplaying what were certainly the two main issues—the underappreciation of the long shadow of the Russian oppression of Poland and the horrifyingly wrong perspective of exporting socialism by force of arms.

The armed forces, including their use of bayonets, had of course been a central part of the whole revolutionary experience, as we saw in chapter 4. Trotsky reflects back on that experience: “During the first period, when the Revolution was spreading from the industrial centres toward the periphery, armed fighting detachments of workers, sailors and ex-soldiers were organized to establish the Soviet regime in various localities. These detachments frequently had to wage minor wars.” In those circumstances, however, “enjoying as they did the sympathy of the masses, they easily became victorious.”54 Whatever the historical accuracy of this claim, there can be no doubt that in Poland in 1920, the Red Army encountered not the sympathy but the suspicion, distrust, and at times hatred of the Polish masses.

After Poland—Georgia

There was to be a reprise of all these issues in one of the defining moments in the rise of Stalin—the consolidation of Bolshevik rule over his native Georgia. Late in 1922, Lenin became aware of and concerned about a dispute between Stalin and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia. Stalin wanted to incorporate Georgia into a wider, regional republic. The Georgian Communists were opposed. Lenin endorsed the position of the Georgian Communists and condemned both Stalin and Stalin’s key supporters on the question—among them Ordzhonikidze and Dzerzhinskii. As Thomas Twiss notes, Lenin observed that the “centralist and authoritarian actions” of these three men were “typically bureaucratic” and “characteristic of ‘that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant.’” Several days later, Lenin “criticized ‘Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious “nationalist-socialism”’, and he denounced Stalin as a ‘Great-Russian bully.’”55

The words from Lenin quoted by Twiss come from the series of letters he dictated from his sickbed in 1922, letters that collectively have come to be known as his “testament.”56 This testament has become iconic and has spawned much discussion about Lenin charging Stalin with “Great Russian chauvinism.” But despite that spotlight on Lenin being the defender of Georgia against Stalin in 1922, very little attention has been paid to Lenin’s involvement in the far more important Georgia-related events of 1921. In that year, with Lenin’s support, the Russian Red Army invaded Georgia, sending the governing socialists (the Georgian Mensheviks) into exile and reimposing rule from Moscow over a country that had, only three years earlier, emerged from long decades of Russian domination. Lenin’s condemnation, in late 1922, of Great Russian chauvinism contrasts sharply with his complicity in the Great Russian expansionism of 1921.

The invasion of 1921 was almost universally opposed by the people of Georgia, who had little inclination to trust the Russian Bolsheviks and a long history of support for the Mensheviks. The ability of the Mensheviks to build a base in Georgia had both general and specific reasons. Stalin, who was originally from Georgia, would be associated with antisemitism throughout his entire career, despite the fact that, in a way almost unique to the Russian empire, Georgia had experienced a relatively harmonious relationship between the dominant nationality and the minority Jewish population. Edvard Radzinsky goes so far as to say, categorically: “Anti-Semitism is not a Caucasian characteristic. From ancient times innumerable peoples have lived in the Caucasus, side by side.”57 Eric Lee makes the same point, specifically about Georgia: “Georgia, almost alone among European countries, had no history of anti-Semitism and was a country where Jews had lived happily for many centuries.”58 There was, therefore, relatively open terrain in Georgia for a group such as the Mensheviks to sink roots, their party having, as we will see in chapter 11, a higher proportion of Jewish members than the Bolsheviks. Some Mensheviks “were also active in the [General Jewish Labour] Bund.”59

More specifically, Georgia had experienced revolution and local peasant self-rule in the earlier years of the twentieth century, in the little known and little studied Gurian Republic. According to Eric Lee:

During the nearly seven decades that separated the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and the Russian Revolution in 1917, there were only two examples of socialists seizing political power and attempting to realise their vision of a new society. One was the Paris Commune of 1871, which Marx and later Lenin described as a kind of prototype for a future socialist society. The other was the “Gurian Republic” of 1902‒6, widely known at the time but utterly forgotten today.60

Until brutally crushed in January 1906, the peasants in this little southern section of Georgia, after pushing out the tsarist state, ran their own affairs politically and economically. The local Menshevik organization responded effectively to this revolutionary experiment, which allowed them to build a mass base with which the local Bolsheviks could never compete. Lee describes the response of the Social Democrats to the revolution: “A year into the rebellion, in May 1903, the Social Democrats in western Georgia held a conference, and took a stand firmly in support of the peasants.” This stance by Social Democrats—who, just a few weeks later, would overwhelmingly side with the Mensheviks in the bitter split with the Bolsheviks—led to the “transformation of their party from a small, elitist group based on urban workers into a mass party of the people.” Although crushed in January 1906, “unlike the Paris Commune, the Gurian experiment had a second act,” which occurred after the Revolution of 1917.61 The overwhelming strength of the Mensheviks in the region, which was clearly related to their leading role in the Gurian Republic, was revealed in the postwar revolutionary ferment. “By the time the tsarist regime collapsed in March 1917,” writes Lee, “there was practically no Bolshevik organisation left in Georgia. The few Bolsheviks in the country put their factional differences with the Mensheviks behind them, and established a joint party committee with their formal rivals.”62 In Transcaucasia, of which Georgia was a part, in the late 1917 vote for the doomed Constituent Assembly, violently suppressed in 1918, “the Bolsheviks received just 86,935 votes compared to 662,000 votes for the Mensheviks.”63 We return in chapter 9 to the question of Menshevik and Bolshevik fortunes in this little country.

Georgia existed as an independent republic for a few short years after the dust had settled from the revolutionary year 1917, its government controlled by the Mensheviks. But this small country of three million was permanently at risk from its far bigger and more powerful neighbour to the north. In November 1919, the Bolsheviks attempted a coup—essentially a rebellion by pro-Bolshevik soldiers. The coup had little support among either peasants or workers in Georgia, and it failed miserably. On 7 May 1920, Soviet Russia and Menshevik Georgia signed a peace treaty, in which the independence of Georgia was formally recognized. At the time, the Red Army was fully engaged in the war with Poland, but the breathing space for Georgia thus created proved to be brief indeed. The Red Army was defeated in its invasion of Poland, marking the end of the civil wars. Russia could now turn its attention toward Georgia and begin a war that clearly falls into a different category—a war of Russian expansionism. In February 1921, under the pretext of supporting a rebellion against Georgia’s Menshevik government, a Russian army numbering tens of thousands invaded the country. After several weeks of fierce fighting, Georgia was occupied by Red Army troops, its government forced to flee into exile and its independence quashed by the overwhelming power of Russian armed forces. Souvarine’s summation of these events is biting: “What the Red Army could not accomplish in Finland and Poland it did accomplish first in the Ukraine, then in the Caucasus, by methods similar to those adopted by the United States in the annexation of Texas. The Georgian Socialists’ dream of creating a new Switzerland between Europe and Asia was nothing but a dream in the circumstances.”64

While they were militarily victorious, the Bolsheviks were extremely isolated politically. In July 1921, Stalin, on “returning to Tiflis in early July 1921 after many years away from his native Georgia … addressed a crowd of more than 5,000 workers in the Nadzaladevi Theatre.”

He began by congratulating the workers on overthrowing the Menshevik yoke. Audience members began to shout. “Lies! There was no Menshevik yoke here! There was no Communist revolution in Georgia! Your troops have removed our freedom!” A furious Stalin responded by ordering a change in the leadership of the local Bolshevik party—and an increase of the Red Terror. This included the shooting of oppositionists at night in Tiflis’ Vake Park. There was no trial. In 1923, the Cheka secret police executed ninety-two Georgians in retaliation for the murder of three policemen in Guria. Ordzhonikidze threatened to kill 1.5 million Georgians if necessary.65

Despite this repression, organizing against occupation continued, culminating in an uprising in August 1924 that was crushed within three weeks. The uprising was coloured by the shadow of the past: its strongest centre was Guria, the site of the 1902–6 Gurian Republic. It also foreshadowed the terrible years of totalitarianism to come, a key leader of its repression being the “newly appointed deputy head of the republic’s Cheka, Lavrentiy Beria.”66 As Lee tells us, the repression meted out to the rebels was horrifying:

Thousands were killed—according to some estimates, up to 4,000. Many of these were hostages. Some rebels from Imeretia, a province in western Georgia, were stuffed into six railway carriages, taken to a place where graves were dug and there executed, some by Mauser pistols, others by machine guns. Five hundred rebels were shot in Senaki, a town in western Georgia. Nearly 1,000 men, described as “the cream of Georgia’s intelligentsia and nobility,” were shot on 1 September.67

Beria would climb the ranks until, by the 1950s, he was widely seen as Stalin’s successor—a climb that, as we saw earlier, was only terminated with his arrest, trial, and execution after the death of Stalin in 1953.

Stalin’s role in these events is clear: he pushed for and supported the use of Red Army bayonets to crush this last stronghold of Menshevism, thus violating the 1920 recognition of Georgian independence. Lenin’s role is less clear. He seems to have been at least partially out of the loop, not completely aware of the extent of the military action and mass repression that was taking place. Jeremy Smith says that the invasion “was opposed in the Politburo by Karl Radek,” who, along with Trotsky, had also opposed the 1920 invasion of Poland. “The Commissar for War, Trotsky, was absent in the Urals, but was so incensed by the news of the invasion … that on his return to Moscow he demanded, unsuccessfully, the creation of a party commission to investigate the events.”68 If Trotsky had any ambivalence in private about the invasion and repression, he hid it well, defending both of these actions publicly in one of his least impressive texts, Between Red and White, where he actually characterizes this massively unpopular invasion of a long-oppressed former section of the Russian empire as a “Soviet Revolution.”69 Brian Pearce reminds us that the book was “written on party instructions,” and, while it did become “a best-seller in British communist circles in the early twenties,” it is probably best filed under the category of propaganda rather than political analysis.70

In the aftermath of the invasion, both Lenin and Trotsky became very clear about the problems of Soviet rule over Georgia. We saw above that a key issue in Lenin’s late-in-life break with Stalin was what Lenin perceived as the “Great Russian chauvinism” that Stalin was unleashing on the newly occupied Georgia. It was in part over this concern about the repression of Georgia’s national rights that Lenin attempted—again, late in life—to form a bloc with Trotsky against Stalin. Trotsky’s account of this in his autobiography is riveting:

It was the beginning of March 1923. Lenin was lying in his room in the huge building of the courts of justice. The second stroke was near; it was preceded by a series of lesser shocks…. Vladimir Ilyich was very much disturbed by Stalin’s preparations for the coming party congress, especially in connection with his factional machinations in Georgia. “Vladimir Ilyich is preparing a bomb for Stalin at the congress”—that was Fotiyeva’s [Lenin’s secretary] phrase, verbatim. The word “bomb” was Lenin’s not hers. “Vladimir Ilyich asks you to take the Georgian case in your hands; he will then feel confident.” On March 5, Lenin dictated this note to me:

“Dear Comrade Trotsky: I wish very much to ask you to take upon yourself the defense of the Georgian case in the Central Committee of the party. At present, the case is under the ‘persecution’ of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, and I cannot trust their impartiality. Quite the opposite. If you were to agree to undertake the defense, my mind would be at rest.”71

To properly grasp the outlines of Bolshevik policy toward Georgia, it is insufficient to focus solely on these 1922 and 1923 progressive musings by Lenin that challenged Great Russian chauvinism. In these musings, we can perhaps glimpse, in Lenin’s last months, the dawning of consciousness about the problems associated with a politics of violent substitutionism—of attempting to “impose socialism” from above by force. But if in fact there was a dawning of such a consciousness, it was too little and too late. The drift toward totalitarianism was far more powerful than any scruples from one or two individuals—even leading individuals such as Lenin and Trotsky.

Stephen Jones maintains that “the 1920s represent one of the brightest periods in the social and political development of the Soviet national groups.” He bases this claim on some genuinely interesting policies such as “indigenization” (“an attempt to integrate the nationalities into a new multi-national state by accommodating national cultural aspirations”) and “policies of ‘affirmative action’ and wide opportunities for national self-expression,” which “resulted in a new confidence among the native élites.”72 These are very fine and interesting initiatives, but they need to be soberly embedded within the history of recurring attempts to challenge the national rights of historically oppressed nations, such as Georgia and Poland, through the use of Red Army bayonets—actions that were met with mass opposition.

Bayonets and Bolshevism

The different perspectives on the invasion of Poland—best crystallized in the contrast between the vehement opposition to invasion articulated by Trotsky and Radek and the naïve and quite wrong support for the invasion by Tukhachevsky and Lenin—reflect tensions at the very heart of the Bolsheviks’ understanding of the nature of revolution. Tukhachevsky expresses this naïveté most clearly. In a 1920 account of the debacle, he argues that the defeat “was due, not to politics, but to strategy.”73 He goes on to say that “our western and south-western armies were fighting almost at right angles to one another” and that “lack of co-operation by our Fourth Army tore victory from our hands and led to our catastrophe.”74 This parallels Trotsky’s position in Stalin, which similarly identified the actions of the southwestern armies—and Stalin in particular—as the cause of the defeat. Trotsky’s more principled approach summarized by Broué—understanding that bayonets cannot be an instrument for liberation and that the oppressed people of Poland were unlikely to greet their former Russian masters as liberators—exists in an uneasy epistemological tension with his tactical approach in Stalin. No such tension exists in the approach of Tukhachevsky. In fact, he doubles down and draws from his tactical approach a logical, if completely unrealistic, conclusion.

There is not the slightest doubt that, if we had succeeded in breaking the Polish Army of bourgeois and seigneurs, the revolution of the working-class in Poland would have been an accomplished fact. And the tempest would not have stopped at the Polish frontier. Like a furious torrent it would have swept over the whole of Eastern Europe. The Red Army will not forget this attempt to carry the revolution outside our frontiers, and if ever the European bourgeoisie braves us to new fights, the Red Army will crush it and spread revolution throughout Europe.75

The people of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and East Germany, among other countries, learned from bitter experience that a Red Army conquest of Eastern Europe would bring not socialism but the Stasi and Stalinist totalitarianism.76

After the fact, both Trotsky and Radek tried to minimize the extent of the mistake made in invading Poland. In 1921, in a speech in Moscow, Trotsky insisted that the Bolsheviks did not give the Red Army “any independent significance of its own,” but saw it “as an auxiliary force introduced into the struggle of the European forces,” a force that “might bring down the landslide of revolution.”77 The same year, in a speech to the leadership of the German party, Karl Radek made much the same point, insisting that

the aim was not to impose Bolshevism at bayonet point, but only to break through the crust of the military might of the ruling classes…. The Executive believed that in Germany things were already ripening for the seizure of political power. It was believed that if we held Warsaw, there would be no further need to advance all the way to Germany.78

The next chapter’s examination of the March Action will demonstrate that there was no such readiness for revolution in Germany. There was even less readiness in Poland. And the enthusiasm expressed by Tukhachevsky for Napoleon-era military invasions as a vehicle for “revolution” indicates that at least some members of the senior leadership did, in fact, give the Red Army an “independent significance of its own.”

Let us return to the account of the war by D’Abernon, which provides a factual foundation for understanding both the military limitations of the manner in which the 1920 Polish–Soviet war was conducted and the political limitations of Tukhachevsky and Lenin. D’Abernon argues that the fighting in Poland should not be classified with other wars of the early twentieth century or even of the nineteenth century. The Polish–Soviet War of 1920, he argues, “should be classified with a totally different period—probably some 200 years earlier.”79 He says that most of the soldiers “were in the fight either through compulsion and fear of being shot at home, or because there was no other immediately available means of livelihood.” On both sides, when “outnumbered, outmanoeuvred, or outflanked,” the soldiers “either retired or surrendered; authority among their officers was insufficient to induce them to take any other” course. In short, “both the Polish and Soviet Armies were eighteenth century rather than modern in many aspects.”80

If D’Abernon’s analogy with the eighteenth century is correct (and I think it is), then Tukhachevsy and Lenin were operating with a textbook that was two centuries out of date. The great European revolution of the eighteenth century was the French Revolution, and, to some extent, it was able to be exported at the point of a bayonet. Napoleon did leave, in the wake of his invading armies, societies and states more modernized and efficient than they had been, and more capable of developing in a capitalist direction. But the spread of socialism cannot be reduced to these same categories of modernization and efficiency. If socialism is to mean anything at all, its spread has to be both voluntary and associated with the emergence of political organs of mass, democratic self-rule.

Lenin and Trotsky found themselves on opposite sides of the issue of invading Poland. Without question, Trotsky’s position was closer to the correct one, while Lenin’s was completely wrong. This was not the first moment when Trotsky and Lenin found themselves on opposite sides of an issue. Ian Thatcher characterizes the relationship between Trotsky and Lenin during the war years immediately preceding the 1917 revolutions as “a story of almost continuous opposition.”81 This opposition was not softened with anything resembling diplomacy. In 1914, Lenin wrote, “Trotsky has never had any ‘physiognomy’ at all; the only thing he does have is a habit of changing sides, of skipping from the liberals to the Marxists and back again, of mouthing scraps of catchwords and bombastic parrot phrases.”82 The previous year, Trotsky had written about Lenin: “The entire edifice of Leninism at the present time is built on lies and falsification and carries within itself the poisonous inception of its own dissolution.”83 We can reject the simplistic explanation for this history of antagonism offered by Stalinist historians, whose purpose is to portray an unbroken line of Trotskyist “crimes” in order to discredit his political legacy. What this antagonism does represent, I would suggest, are quite different understandings of the key aspects of the class struggle in Russia and Europe on which Trotsky and Lenin built their perspectives.

Trotsky, in the manner of Luxemburg and Gramsci—and the much maligned and neglected Iulii Martov—understood the profoundly democratic, self-emancipatory core of the working-class, urban, European workers’ movement. It was not for nothing that in both 1905 and 1917, Trotsky was elected chair of the soviet in St. Petersburg. On several occasions before 1917, Trotsky expressed the opinion that Lenin did not always clearly grasp the urban, democratic, proletarian core of the coming European revolution. Trotsky, in 1915, said that within Lenin, “revolutionary democratism and socialist dogma live side by side without having been amalgamated into a living Marxist whole.”84 This echoes the young Trotsky, who, in the wake of the famous 1903 split in Russian social democracy, argued that Lenin was too much the Jacobin and not enough a social democrat (which, at the time, meant “revolutionary socialist”).85 Jacobinism was the political form appropriate to modernizing antiautocratic revolutions, such as the French Revolution. The leading section of those revolutions was a relatively small layer of the urban petite bourgeoisie, relying in its revolution on the periodic intervention of the urban masses and, in the countryside, on the periodic mass actions of the rural peasantry. From this layer evolved a highly centralized urban core of the Jacobins, with a strong emphasis on militarization, operating with a certain suspicion of the urban and rural masses. For the Jacobins, it was in particular the mass action in the cities that posed problems, as such action tended to push beyond the bounds of a modernizing antifeudal revolution and into the territory of anticapitalism, something the Jacobins were not prepared to countenance.

The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 involved a combination of this kind of Jacobinism—a modernizing revolution against autocratic, tsarist conditions—and something that was completely new and demanded very different strategies and tactics—a workers’ revolution against capitalism. Neither revolution could win without the victory of the other. Lenin and the Bolsheviks navigated the difficult project of combining both revolutions, and Lenin openly embraced the incorporation of Jacobinism into the workers’ movement. “The Jacobin inseparably connected with the organisation of the proletariat—a proletariat conscious of its class interests—this is the revolutionary Social-Democrat,” he said in 1904.86 This incorporation of Jacobinism into the workers’ movement was, however, full of dangers. The tactics appropriate to the modernizing, anti-autocratic revolution are not easily imported into the proletariat anticapitalist revolution. Within the latter—at its core, urban, working class, and democratic—forward progress is only possible through mass self-activity. Built into this experience is a high degree of democracy, which takes its highest form in institutions such as the soviet.

Upheavals against premodern autocracy were different. They did, of course, involve furious mass action by the rural peasantry, but they also always necessitated a highly centralized, militarized struggle—for instance, the Roundheads of Cromwell’s era and the Jacobins of the French Revolution. The insistence on invading Poland represented a retreat to eighteenth-century tactics in the name of twentieth-century goals. The next chapter will argue that in a parallel sense, the push in Germany for an insurrection during the March Action, even though the KPD represented a small minority of the working class, represented an attempt to sidestep the self-activity of the urban working class. Both the invasion of Poland and the March Action in Germany reflect the extent to which the Bolshevik cadre misunderstood how the European class struggle had evolved from the tactics of an earlier era to those of the mass, democratic self-emancipation appropriate to the class struggle in contemporary capitalism.