Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

On 23 July the Politburo created a Provisional Revolutionary Committee for Poland. Diplomatic duplicity was to be deployed. Britain and France would be assured that the Soviet government was willing to enter peace talks, but this was just a diplomatic manoeuvre to deflect attention from the Red advance on Warsaw. Lithuania was to be told that it had nothing to fear from Russia. 30This too was insincere because the Bolsheviks wanted to Sovietize the entire Baltic region in due course. But they wanted to limit the number of enemies until the Red Army had dealt with the Poles.

Trotsky told his troops that the objective was not to subjugate Poland but to give power to the ‘working Polish people’ in their own land. He denied that Russia had started or even wanted the war. 31The Politburo hoped to attract Polish workers and poor peasants by a series of exemplary measures. Banks and factories would be nationalized in the future area of occupation. A terror would be initiated against landlords, clergy and commanders. Lenin was at his most bloodthirsty when urging Dzerzhinski and the Cheka to send squads into the Polish countryside with a view to seizing and hanging class enemies — the same tactics he had called for in Russia in summer 1918. Communists who had been brought up in Poland were not convinced that the Politburo knew what it was doing; they raised a cry about the strength of Polish national sentiments in all social classes. Stalin added that the Volunteer Army under Pëtr Wrangel in Crimea continued to constitute a serious danger to Soviet rule. But Lenin overrode such pessimism. The opportunity had arisen to spread the revolution westwards and he was going to take it — and Trotsky was only too happy to oblige. The time for ‘revolutionary war’ had arrived.

Poland was not the only prize in the minds of Soviet leaders. Lenin wrote to Stalin: ‘Zinoviev and Bukharin as well as myself think it would be appropriate to stimulate a revolution immediately in Italy. My personal opinion is that this requires the Sovietization of Hungary as well as perhaps Czechia [Czechoslovakia] and Romania.’ 32On 10 August the Politburo approved Trotsky’s proposal for Comintern Congress delegates to go home and prepare for revolution. Confident of success, he asked for a hundred German communists to be assigned to the front line to conduct propaganda — he assumed that they would soon be talking to Germans in Germany. 33

Lenin appreciated that the French and British would not sit on their hands while Berlin ripped up the Versailles treaty. He devised a scheme for a coalition of the far left and the far right in Germany. Although the Freikorps and their sympathizers detested communism and had bloodily crushed the Spartacists, they agreed with Comintern that the Western Allies had reduced their country to slavery. Lenin urged German communist leaders to line up with them to reclaim freedom for their country. 34The alliance would be strictly provisional. He expected that, once Germany regained its full independence, there would be civil war while the communists and the right-wing paramilitaries fought it out for supremacy. 35He predicted that a proletarian dictatorship on the Soviet model would emerge from this. He said nothing in public, but Radek referred to the basic idea in Pravda . Lenin and Radek had no scruples about exploiting the services of anti-communists so long as the ultimate result might be a communist seizure of power. Strategic flexibility was essential. Lenin had to admit that any alliance with the political far right would be an ‘unnatural’ one, and communist leftists in Germany justifiably doubted that he would have accepted such a strategy for Russia in 1917. Having joined the communist movement in their country because they despised the compromises favoured by the other socialists, they shunned Lenin’s advice to negotiate with the butchers of Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

Soviet leaders anyway accepted the likelihood of a second Great War when the Western Allies crossed the German border in full strength to suppress any government that refused to recognize the treaty of Versailles. But Lenin and his comrades felt they simply had to force a breach in Russia’s international quarantine. As the Red Army advanced into Poland there was already a great deal of political unrest in Germany and the government was worried about more than just the German communists. Ministers feared that the Independent Social-Democratic Party might collude in a coup d'état in Berlin, especially after Arthur Crispien — one of the leaders of the Independent Social-Democrats — threatened as much in the Reichstag. 36

Lenin had already discussed with Stalin how best to organize a system of Soviet-style states stretching from the Rhineland to the Pacific. Trotsky stayed out of the debate, having talked throughout the Great War about the achievability of a United States of Europe. But Lenin now wanted a single federation of communist republics linking Europe and Asia. In this way, Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine would join up with Soviet Germany and Soviet Poland. Stalin was sceptical, telling Lenin that the German people were unlikely to want membership of a communist federation founded and led by Russians. Lenin had omitted to take the national factor into consideration. Stalin’s counter-proposal was to establish not one but two federations, the first being based in Moscow and the other in Berlin. Such federations would of course be headed by parties united under the Communist International, and Stalin implicitly proposed that this was a sufficient safeguard against disunity and strife. He offered the idea in good faith only to receive a furious rebuke from Lenin, who accused him of succumbing to nationalism. Stalin was affronted; he wrote back exclaiming that Soviet leaders had to be intelligent about the challenges that they had to surmount if they were to communize central Europe. 37

The dispute soon blew over as Lenin focused his attention on the campaign for Warsaw. He and the Politburo turned down Sergo Ordjonikidze’s plan for ‘a military force to be sent into Persia’ in mid-August. 38Nor did they see any need to recall the Soviet delegation they had sent to London, which from the beginning of August was reinforced by the arrival of Politburo member Kamenev. The idea was that Krasin would continue to lead the talks on trade while Kamenev handled the diplomacy about war and peace in whatever way the changing situation demanded. 39Lenin and Trotsky were keeping their options open; and Trotsky, while directing the Red Army to break through to Germany, asked the Politburo to use diplomatic means to secure a rail route across Poland for the shipment of arms from German businesses — Central Committee member Alexei Rykov was then given the task of buying the weaponry. The Politburo agreed. 40The fight was on for supremacy in central Europe. As the Reds hurtled towards Warsaw, Soviet leaders felt no inhibition about simultaneously planning to crush the German capitalist elites and do big business with them.

The British sought to prevent any such outcome by announcing a diplomatic initiative for peace between Russia and Poland. Kamenev and Krasin called at 10 Downing Street for talks with Lloyd George and the Conservative Party leader Andrew Bonar Law on 4 August; 41but the results were inconclusive, and the next day Kamenev set out Soviet objections in a letter to Lloyd George. 42A further meeting lasting five hours was held on 6 August. This time Churchill was in attendance for a while as Lloyd George and Bonar Law debated with Kamenev and Krasin, and an agreement was reached which was to be relayed to Moscow. Lloyd George hoped to have Lenin’s reply before he met the French Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand in Kent the following day. 43The British government wanted an immediate armistice. To the French, though, this seemed intolerable as it would lend respectability to a bandit regime, and Lloyd George felt compelled to back down; he also felt that the Poles had to some degree brought the Soviet invasion on themselves by their Ukrainian campaign. 44He tried to demonstrate his open-mindedness in foreign policy by receiving a Labour Party delegation and listening to their demands for non-interference in Russia. He replied that he could not forget that the Bolsheviks were undemocratic and adduced the latest statements of Bertrand Russell, who had opposed the Great War but then turned against the Soviet leadership. Trade union leader and Labour Party militant Ernie Bevin urged the Prime Minister to ignore French pressure and threatened trouble if military force or supplies were sent to Pilsudski. 45Lloyd George replied that he had broken with Soviet Russia because Lenin had abandoned the Allies, although he insisted that if Lenin now wanted peace he could have it. 46