John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Sovnarcom also had to grapple, as had the Provisional Government, with the desire of Imperial Russia’s “territories” for independence. In June 1917 Lenin had condemned the Provisional Government for not carrying out its “elementary democratic duty” and providing for “the autonomy and complete freedom of secession of Ukraine”. 3On 2nd November, 1917 Sovnarcom’s “Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia” established its nationalities policy. Its key principle was “The right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, up to secession and formation of an independent state”. It added, “Concrete decrees stemming herefrom will be worked out immediately after the establishment of the Commission for the Affairs of Nationalities”. It was signed by Lenin and the People’s Commissar for Nationalities Affairs, J.V. Stalin. 4

After the Ukrainian People’s Republic declared independence in January 1918, several political factions fought for control. Following the overthrow of Hetman Skoropadsky and the defeat of Deniken’s White Army–victories won in great part by Makhno’s anarchist army–the People’s Republic of Ukraine was re-established, along with the Free Territories of the Mahknovshchina. But the Bolsheviks had no time for either. With Deniken defeated the Red Army invaded Ukraine in full force. On 21st November, 1919 the Politburo discussed “theses” put to it by Lenin which established policy for the occupation of Ukraine. These mandated that Ukrainian ethnic traditions and language should be respected and that new structures should be created in the country to “intensify work on the class differentiation of the village”.

Lenin had learnt from the first attempt to create Poor Peasants Committees. Accepting that the dubious category of “middle peasants” hardly existed, he stressed that food should be redistributed to poorer peasants only at the expense of the very richest Kulaks, and that fewer surpluses than usual be taken. But the relatively lenient approach to the Ukrainian villages was solely to create a base of peasant support for political action in the towns. Thesis 7 stated, “Treat the Jews and urban inhabitants of the Ukraine with an iron rod, transferring them to the front, not letting them into government agencies” (in the margin, next to “Jews”, Lenin noted “Express it politely–Jewish petty bourgeoisie”). Thesis 8 said, “Place the Teachers Union, the cooperatives, and other such petty bourgeois organisations in the Ukraine under special surveillance, with special measures for their disintegration”. 5

By this process Ukrainian nationalist organisations, especially in Kiev, were “disintegrated” and replaced with specially bribed poor peasants and trained party cadres. The exclusion of Jews from Ukrainian government organs was partly because they were the most likely to play significant roles in nationalist organisations, partly to appease the notorious anti-Semitism of Ukrainian peasants. Even Makhno’s forces, committed to genuine social liberation, were not immune from anti-Semitism, although Makhno took stern measures to eradicate it from the Makhnovischina , which in comparison to the rest of Ukraine was a relative haven for Jews.

He and his Revolutionary Council issued numerous proclamations and orders against anti-Semitism. If soldiers under his command committed anti-Jewish outrages, Makhno had them swiftly arrested and executed no matter their rank or record. There is no truth in later Soviet propaganda about Makhnovist anti-Semitic pogroms, and overwhelming evidence to refute it. Many of Makhno’s leading advisors and publicists, such as Voline and Baron, were themselves Jewish, reflecting his own lack of native prejudice. Unlike Lenin he did not pander to Ukrainian anti-Semitism but confronted it head on, instructing his Cultural-Educational Commission to conduct teaching seminars with peasant supporters to explain the basic principles of internationalism and anarchist humanism. 6

Although the Ukrainian army, aided by Makhno in the south, fought an intermittent war with the Red Army from late 1919 to late 1920, by mid-1921 it had been defeated. In 1922 the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was admitted to the USSR as a “sovereign” state. The level of sovereignty was demonstrated in the 1930s when Stalin’s mass collectivisation policy led to the “Holodomor”, or “Hunger-Extermination”, of between three and seven million Ukrainian peasants, a policy now regarded as a genocide inflicted on Ukraine in order to crush the last vestiges of national independence. Following the Holodomor, many Ukrainian nationalist leaders were executed in the Great Terror of 1936-38.

Poland might have gone the same way, except that in Josef Pilsudski Polish nationalism had a leader as ruthless and determined as Lenin. Since 1895 Pilsudski had been leader of the Polish Socialist Party (PSP). The PSP did not shrink from using paramilitary forces to achieve its goal of national liberation. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Pilsudski took the Polish Legion to fight for Austria and Germany against Russia. In November 1918 he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Polish forces and promptly declared an independent Poland. Although his government introduced progressive social reforms, it was primarily a nationalist coalition and it was as a nationalist force that it fought the Polish-Soviet War. After the fall of Ukraine to the Red Army, Pilsudski formed an alliance with Ukrainian nationalist leader Petliura. In May 1920 Polish-Ukrainian forces under Pilsudski’s command invaded Ukraine and took Kiev. The response inside Soviet Russia was immediate. Many non-political Russian patriots such as General Brusilov joined the Red Army in order to repel Catholic Poland from “Little Russia”, whose capital Kiev was regarded as the cradle of Russian civilisation.

It was the beginning of a new conservative movement labeled “National Bolshevism”, in which Russian patriots, after the undeniable and total defeat of the Whites, rallied behind Sovnarcom and the Red Army as the force most likely to re-establish Great Russia and its Empire. Its two most prominent figures were Brusilov and Nikolai Ustrialov, a Slavophile intellectual who had been a right-wing Kadet fighting for Kolchak before he sensed which way the wind was blowing and defected to the Bolsheviks. In 1920 he wrote, with some prescience, “The Bolsheviks, by the logic of events, will progress from Jacobinism to Napoleanism”. 7

Ustrialov influenced other Slavophiles who saw beyond the surface rhetoric of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to its more enduring features–a professional army, a political police and a strong centralised state. Although Ustrialov himself never achieved the position he sought, his ideas took hold. After Lenin’s death Stalin’s conception of “Socialism in One Country”, with the inevitable national pride that accompanied it, reflected many of the themes of National Bolshevism and secured the support of Ustrialov’s illustrious followers Aleksei Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg.

The Red Army counter-attack ejected the Poles from Kiev and Ukraine, after which Lenin, against the views of both Trotsky and Stalin, ordered a swift advance on Warsaw. He dreamed of the Red Army implanting Soviet socialism in Poland and thereby establishing a bridgehead to Germany. Behind the Red Army stood a “Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee” headed by Head of the Cheka and native Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky. This would be the core of a new Polish government, a Polish Sovnarcom, from which bourgeois nationalists and democratic socialists would be excluded.

But Dzerzhinsky never got the chance to line up his firing squads. Although the Red Army, under its brilliant young commander General Tukhachevsky, advanced quickly into Poland and reached the outskirts of Warsaw, it had over-extended its supply lines. More importantly there was no welcome for them from the Polish working class, who preferred Pilsudski’s socialist nationalism to a Soviet state imposed on them by the Red Army and the Cheka. In an unexpected reverse known to Poles as “the Miracle on the Vistula”, on 16th August, 1920 Pilsudski counter-attacked from the south and defeated the larger Red Army, forcing a rapid retreat.