Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Hoping to reduce the intensity of all external threats, on 26 February Russia signed a friendship treaty with Persia. The newly appointed Soviet ambassador to Tehran was none other than Theodore Rothstein. Meanwhile Krasin had returned to Moscow to discuss the finalization of the trade agreement with the British. He gave an interview to Louise Bryant, denying that Soviet Russia was in any way a menace to other countries: ‘After all, the talk of the Third International is exaggerated and ridiculous. We haven’t enough people in Russia to meet our needs. We are not fools enough to send our best people abroad when they are needed here to develop Russia. The best means for the world to get rid of this bogy of Bolshevik propaganda is to begin vigorous trade.’ 12In her report, Bryant stressed that a freshly signed treaty with Afghanistan put aside the ‘imperialist’ legacy of old Russia. She predicted an end to the ‘English’ domination of the region and reported that Soviet emissaries in Kabul received an unusual amount of diplomatic freedom. 13Not long afterwards, Chicherin announced that Turkey too was aspiring to better relations with Soviet Russia. 14Step by step, the communist leadership were improving their security. None of the world’s great powers had yet concluded a treaty with Soviet Russia, but the chances were steadily improving.

But more trouble was brewing off the coast of Petrograd. On 28 February the Soviet naval garrison on the nearby island of Kronstadt assembled to demand an end to communist oppression. Mikhail Kalinin and other Bolshevik leaders held a meeting with them the next day. The list of grievances was a long one. The sailors objected to the Bolshevik political monopoly. They demanded free soviet elections and an end to police terror; they denounced the blocking detachments on city outskirts which stopped the ‘sack men’ from bringing food supplies from the countryside for illicit sale. Kalinin failed to calm the situation and soon there was open mutiny in Kronstadt. Trotsky, who had spent the winter months polemicizing about the trade unions, lamented the lack of a proper plan to retake Kronstadt and — on 5 March — co-signed a military order with Commander-in-Chief S. S. Kamenev. If the mutineers refused to heed their warnings, the full force of the Red Army would be deployed against them with air support. 15When Kronstadt held fast to its rebellion, measures were put in hand to suppress it two days later. The symbolism was clear to everyone. The Kronstadters had formed part of the backbone of Bolshevik political and military support in 1917. Now they were turning on Lenin and his party for betraying their hopes. Neither side saw room for compromise.

The Tenth Party Congress opened on 8 March in the shadow of these events. The Politburo by then had clear ideas on the desirable direction of policy and asked Lenin to explain its proposals. The peasantry was to be allowed to sell some of its grain harvest for private profit. The trade unions were to be subjected to greater state control, but not to the degree demanded by Trotsky. Peace was to be ratified with Poland. Foreign concessions were to be encouraged and the draft trade agreement with the United Kingdom confirmed. Lenin stressed the need for the party to deal mercilessly with threats to its power. Peasant revolts and the Kronstadt mutiny alike had to be crushed. Internal party discipline had to be tightened while communists were conducting a retreat from wartime economic policy. Lenin demanded a ban on party factions and denounced the Workers’ Opposition, which called for workers and peasants to have decisive influence on economic decision-making, as a ‘deviation’ from Bolshevik principles. Every single one of these proposals was contentious. But the worse the news about Kronstadt became, the easier it was for Lenin and his group in the leadership to impose their will on the Congress. A consensus developed about the urgent need to fight for the common cause. Even the Workers’ Oppositionists overlooked their verbal mauling by Lenin and volunteered for service in the military operation against Kronstadt. A quarter of the 717 full delegates immediately left the Congress in Moscow and travelled north. 16

Although Trotsky spoke at the Congress at some length about the trade unions and a little about the proposed agrarian reform, 17he stood shoulder to shoulder with Lenin over Kronstadt and handed the military command to Tukhachevski while warning the Politburo that the mutiny should be liquidated before the spring thaw. Once the ice melted, the rebel sailors would again be able to make contact with foreign countries and the trouble could severely worsen. Tambov province was far from the prying eyes of the Allies, but Kronstadt lay in the Gulf of Finland and was easily approachable from abroad by vessels. Trotsky charged the Central Committee with failing to understand the gravity of the situation. 18

The Party Congress ended on 16 March with victory for the ascendant group on nearly every big question of policy even though the debates were sometimes fiery. Communists from Azerbaijan repeated their objections to leasing the Baku oilfields to foreigners. But the tightness of the scheduling at the Congress disabled those wishing to express dissent, and the New Economic Policy was raced through to confirmation almost before anyone had time to read the draft decree. The discussion on Anglo-Soviet trade was left until last, and Kamenev barely had time to introduce it before the entire proceedings were brought to a close and everyone stood to sing the Internationale. Lenin had dominated the proceedings and his friends in the leadership gained an easy majority of seats in the election of the Central Committee. And despite banning internal party factions, Lenin behaved as if he headed one both by reducing the number of Trotsky’s followers and by clearing them out of the Secretariat. Trotsky in Lenin’s opinion needed to suffer for having inflicted an unnecessary dispute about the trade unions on the party. Only then could they again start to work in mutual trust. Lenin regarded this as a priority: the communist leaders faced far too many emergencies for them to fall out.

It was on the very same day in London that the trade talks reached completion with the signing of an agreement by Leonid Krasin and the President of the Board of Trade Robert Horne. While Sovnarkom celebrated, its Russian enemies were justifiably downcast: Lloyd George had rescued the Bolsheviks just at the point when they might have lost everything. 19The Red Army stormed into Kronstadt on 17 March. The Tambov revolt was in full spate. Other provinces in Ukraine, the Volga region and western Siberia were up in arms against the Bolshevik commissars. If the Allies wanted to undermine the Soviet dictatorship, this was a disastrous moment to choose to come to terms with Sovnarkom and prop up its economy. Anti-Bolsheviks looked on in dismay and their misfortunes increased when the Poles signed the treaty of Riga on 18 March. The Politburo had weathered the storm. On 19 March its members examined the latest draft of its decree to abolish grain requisitioning and the next day confirmed the manifesto to be issued to the peasants in pursuit of its support. 20The Bolsheviks had survived a winter of acute emergency by the skin of their teeth — and the British cabinet played not the least part in the denouement.

Lloyd George’s insouciance about Soviet revolutionary pretensions was exposed for what it was a few days later, on 24 March, when the German Communist Party called for a general strike with a view to instigating an insurrection in Berlin. Inspiration for this action came from certain communist leaders in Moscow. Chief among them were Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek. Apparently leaving Lenin and Trotsky in the dark, they dispatched Béla Kun to the German capital as Comintern’s plenipotentiary. Kun was still smarting from the collapse of his revolutionary government in Hungary and ardently desired to assist the Berlin comrades in overthrowing Germany’s social-democratic government. The thoughtful German communist leader Paul Levi tried to argue against this. He remembered all too clearly what had happened in January 1919 when the Spartacists, lacking popular support, had tried to seize power and had been crushed by government, army and Freikorps. Levi was anxious to avoid a repetition of that disaster.